The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (10 page)

Dana studied the part on the wyvern’s shoulders he seemed to be indicating. “What if it hurts it?”

“I shouldn’t expect it will. I think we’ve already established it’s made from polymer alloy, and so far as I’m aware, no polymer alloy has ever been engineered to have nerve fibres in it, not even by Blake herself. Besides, I’m sure it will make you aware. All you need to do is keep it from interfering with me.”

Dana put her hand back on the wyvern’s neck and fought down the unease she was feeling, trying to think positive reassuring thoughts instead. Osric turned the four screws holding the plate in position and pried it up. Dana had to stand on her toes to see inside: pipes and metal valves wrapped around slimy biological lumps, and veins and arteries mingled with the plastic-clad wiring running from the metal plates covering the body to the flesh-like material inside. Close to the back of the opening something dark fluttered violently beneath a wrapping of what looked like translucent plastic.

“It’s living tissue grafted into a biomechanical shell.” As he spoke, Osric’s face became distorted, with anger or disgust or something of that sort. “This here is a trachea — a trachea from exactly what I’ve no idea. And yet it’s connected to this.” He indicated the system of metal valves. “It looks like the controls on a trumpet, an artificial larynx of sorts. The lungs and the trachea seem to have come from the same animal, but these look like more lungs, and…” His voice tailed off as he glanced upon a plastic cylinder, a foot or so long, clamped firmly in the centre of the wyvern’s back. Chemical symbols were printed on its surface. “This is helium. Connected directly to a second pair of lungs, so far as I can ascertain.”

A memory of a Physics lesson leapt to Dana’s mind. “It’s like bubblewrap!”

Osric glared at her. “What?”

“They make envelopes out of bubblewrap, because it’s light because it’s full of air. Helium is lighter than air, so if they put helium in the wyvern, it would make it lighter and it would be easier for it to fly.”

“It doesn’t work like that. The helium inside the cylinder is compressed so much it will be heavier than air. And even if the lungs were full of helium, it would be like you holding a single balloon. The difference would be negligible. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost like this… machine… was built by an extremely skilled person, to a design by a fool. Either that or it is some kind of prototype that has been expanded upon from an early model. And yet…” Osric raised his hand to his face and rubbed his chin. “Normally, bone marrow manufactures white blood cells. But there don’t appear to be any bones, so where in this case does the immune system originate?”

Dana stared into the inside of the wyvern while Osric went to the bench. When he came back, he had a syringe fitted with a needle.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to take a blood sample. To see what’s going on.”

He pushed the point of the needle into one of the pipe-like large blood vessels running down the wyvern’s back. When he pulled back the plunger, the liquid that spilled into the plastic tube was not red, but black. He withdrew the syringe and turned back to the table, where he shifted some stuff to find a microscope. After applying a small dot of the black fluid to a glass rectangle on the microscope’s plate, he looked through the eyepieces and adjusted the focus wheels for a few seconds.

“Jananin Blake’s synapse,” he said, straightening and looking to Dana. “And definitely not for a purpose she has authorised. “See for yourself.”

Dana stepped around the wyvern and up to the microscope. When she peered into the drop of blood, she saw a coiled worm-like shape, lying inert.

“Is that’s what’s inside me, connecting my brain to the chip?”

“Yes. Blake decided to program a self-replication ability into the DNA of her synapses, so they could repair themselves if they were damaged. The alternative would mean the synapse would need to be replenished every year or so, as they tend to disconnect from neurons and denature eventually. It means that in any living system the synapse is grafted to will shed residual amounts of unattached synapse in the dormant state. It also makes it extremely easy to steal the synapse and graft it into something else.”

Dana looked back into the microscope, and started as something dark scuttled across the screen, like a pond skater. “There’s something alive in there.”

She got out the way to let Osric look. After a moment, it seemed he’d found it. “Looks like some kind of nanomachine. Possibly it’s the immune system, although I’ve never heard of it before and I’ve no idea where it might come from.”

He stood up straight and stared at his bench, passing a hand over his bottom jaw. “Appalling. This has Ivor Pilgrennon’s handwriting all over it.”

His words sent a sharp thrill of anticipation up into Dana’s chest, and at the same time brought to mind a strange image of Ivor bending over the wyvern and signing his name on it, his signature so familiar although she’d only ever seen him write it once. She turned away from Osric, her heart pounding. Almost without thinking, she put her hand into her pocket to touch Ivor’s watch, her fingertip sensing the crack where the face had fractured, its mechanism seizing up in Cape Wrath the last time she had seen Ivor. She had hardly dared to hope, but now Osric had admitted something that seemed to imply Ivor just might still live.

Osric was standing over by the sink now. He had a brown glass jar upside down in one hand and a syringe stuck through the rubber lid in the other hand. He set the bottle down on the bench beside the sink: on the label there was some kind of corporate logo and the words
Sodium pentobarbital 390 mg/ml sodium phenytoin 50 mg/ml
.

But if Ivor was alive, how had he survived Cape Wrath, and why had the wyvern attacked her, if he had made it?

Osric was walking back to the wyvern now, and he paused to squeeze the plunger into the syringe. A plume of fluid streamed vertically from the needle’s tip, dispersing into a fine spray at the summit of its arc, in such a way that it appeared to vanish into the air before it could fall back down to the ground. The image stirred an uneasy
déjà vu
in Dana. Something here was wrong, although she couldn’t grasp the memory or make sense of what instinct was telling her.

She felt again for the laboratory’s wLAN. It didn’t take long for her to break through the security and access the Internet.
Sodium pentobarbital
:

…
rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anaesthetic
…

…
commercial animal euthanasia injectable solutions
…

Euthanasia: from Greek, meaning ‘good death’
…

Osric was bending over the open panel in the wyvern’s shoulders, and the needle was pointing to the exposed blood vessels within …

“
No
!” Dana lunged for Osric’s arm. She grabbed the sleeve of his labcoat and wrenched the syringe away from the wyvern. In the same instant, the wyvern whirled its head about to strike Osric in the side.
Eric come quickly, something bad is happening
, Dana transmitted to the phone in her pocket as Osric blundered into her. She lost her footing and fell, still gripping Osric’s sleeve, and he went down on top of her. The impact between the floor and the full weight of the man’s body forced all the air out of her lungs, and black spots erupted into her vision. Osric rolled off and thudded to the floor behind her. Despite the pain, disorientation, and a desperate need for air, Dana managed to keep her grip on his arm.

“Get off of me!” Osric shouted.

Dana wrapped both her arms around his, pinning him down, and jacked her knee up into his chest. A discordant trumpet screech penetrated the throb of her own heart in her eardrums. She opened her eyes to see the wyvern’s head rearing above her on its segmented metal neck. It was reacting to her; she must have broadcast panic in the instant she’d realised what Osric was doing, transmitted her own fear to it.

She looked back at Osric’s arm. He still clutched the syringe in his hand, point down, and as he fought her his arm slipped and the needle grazed the skin on the inside of Dana’s wrist.

Dana screamed. Osric immediately realised what had happened and the anger dissipated from his face. He dropped the syringe and staggered backwards, crashing in to some kind of industrial oven that rattled like breaking glass, and heaving in great gulps of air. The wyvern stepped over Dana to straddle her and let out a hollow, metallic hiss, like someone playing a flute wrong.

Heart racing and gasping for breath, Dana tried to send calming thoughts to the wyvern. She rolled over onto her hands and knees and found the syringe Osric had dropped on the floor. The ground felt both sticky and gritty as she stumbled to the sink on her knees and free hand, and pressed the plunger down to discharge the syringe’s poisonous load into the plughole.

“You can’t… kill it,” she forced out between breaths.

Osric’s back was pressed flat against the oven. The wyvern watched him. “It’s the most humane decision!” he countered. “This is utterly unethical! Whoever did this is wrong! It’s like the atrocities during the Cold War. Dogs with extra heads grafted on. Monkeys’ brains taken out and kept alive. Experiments like this have been illegal for decades!”

It took a few seconds for Dana to muster the lung capacity to shout her reply: “But it chooses life!”

The force of her outcry for a moment struck fear into his face. He recovered himself. “It’s an animal. It doesn’t understand...”

“You don’t know that it’s an animal!”

“It’s
not
a human. There’d be more understanding, more of an attempt at communication. It’s an intelligent animal all right, perhaps a primate, but it’s not human.” Osric shook his head emphatically. “
Look
what’s been done to it. It’s kinder to put it out of its misery.”

“What if it’s a human who… who doesn’t think to communicate in the same way you and I do?” Dana thought of Cale, how he considered communicating with his voice to be largely irrelevant to him, and how he thought calculating Pi was more important. “What if it’s someone before they’re old enough to know how to communicate properly?”

Osric opened his mouth and closed it again.

“It still counts as a human.” Dana pulled information off the Internet to support her position as she spoke. “It’s illegal to euthanise a human unless the human is definitely sane and asks for it and makes a recording of their consent. If you kill it and it’s human, you’ll go to jail for murder.”

“I doubt it,” said Osric, but his demeanour had changed, and something was there in him that had not been there before. Perhaps it was doubt.

Dana breathed and put her hand out to touch the wyvern’s cold metal carapace.
How can I leave you in this place now?
She glanced around the clutter in the lab, at the bits of apparatus and glass and plastic where she assumed Osric must work, and her eyes fell upon the one personal thing that was there: a picture frame containing a simple, stylistic rendering of an owl sitting in the fork of a flowering tree.

“That’s Jananin’s sigil. It means you’re loyal to her, doesn’t it?”

Osric looked at the picture uncomfortably.

“I want you to swear on it, that you won’t do anything to the wyvern until Jananin has seen it.”

“And if she should tell me to destroy it?”

Dana glared up at Osric. “I suppose if she decides that, you’ll have to do it. But make sure you tell her what I said properly, and don’t just say it’s a thing that attacked me. It can think for itself, and when it came it was being controlled by something else. By a collar.” She should have brought the collar, but she’d forgotten about it. It was likely still on the floor in the physics store room, although she doubted anyone would notice as it wouldn’t look out of place there.

Osric made a disgusted expression.

“Come here and put your hand on it and swear! Or I won’t let the wyvern stay here. It broke into a school to get me. It can break out of this lab if it wants to and I tell it to.”

Still looking disgusted, Osric edged past the wyvern and put his hand on the top of the picture frame. “I swear on Jananin’s drawing…”

“Swear it
properly
. I mean sincerely and everything.”

“…not to harm or willingly allow to be harmed this… thing.”

“Good,” said Dana. “Now, where can you hide it where it’ll be safe?”

Osric considered for a moment. “There’s a coldroom that’s broken down in the lower ground floor. It’s not scheduled to be fixed until next week. Probably no-one will use it in the meantime. Jananin Blake will have to arrange for it to be collected before then. You had better explain to it that it will have to be quiet.”

Osric fixed the loose panel on the wyvern back in place. He led the way and Dana coaxed the wyvern back into the lift. He showed them to a thick door with a strong metal handle. The room behind it was windowless and heavily insulated. The wyvern probably wouldn’t be noticed here, so long as it didn’t make loud noises and nobody came in.

While Osric fetched a bowl of water, Dana made use of her moment alone with the wyvern. She brought to mind Jananin’s image and tried to impress upon it a feeling that this person was safe and was going to help, and must not be attacked. She thought about staying here, staying still, and being quiet, and about tolerating Osric, to which she felt a degree of resistance.

Lastly, she put her hand to the wyvern’s neck and leaned against its shoulder, closed her eyes, and concentrated.

She pictured Ivor as best as she remembered him, with his spectacles halfway down his nose and a bit lopsided, a few weatherbeaten lines apparent on his forehead from the winds that tore over the Flannan Isles. She remembered his curly, light-brown hair that looked untidy naturally, and that he used to control by parting at the centre and wetting it and combing it flat.

Often these days, she could no longer remember what his voice used to sound like. It was only in her dreams, or in that place between sleeping and waking that isn’t quite reality and where cause and effect no longer connect, that he truly felt real to her any more.