Page 22 of Engines of Reason

Sara, speaking back. And they would not have it. Whatever she was telling them, it was anathema to them. The thing that moved the monsters was hurling them, not just at the humans in the tower, but at Lyn’s daughter, desperate to silence her.

She caught up Sara and hauled her back, and the monster thundered through the wall entire, tearing its own wings off in its desperation to get inside. Dust flooded the air, lining every throat with grit. Lyn fell back, sending a furious volley of instructions and forbiddances to hold the others at the door, trying to locate the monster right before her in the conflicting tempest of signals that filled the room, as blind to its electromagnetic presence as she was to its physical one. In her arms, Sara fought her as though desperate to throw herself into the monster’s maw.

Those spinning teeth lunged. Lyn turned her back to it, cradling Sara against her, for all the good it would do.

She felt a new barrier cast up before it, like a wall of iron its teeth couldn’t bite. She opened her eyes against the grit, craned backwards to see what it was.

Sendroth Sorcerer, standing between her and the robot in the clearing air, hands out as though he had suddenly come into his true power. Nyr had opened the things to all commands, and apparently that meant the brigand’s gauntlets as well. And he was Ilmoth’s ally; perhaps that meant they’d be slower to harm him than Lyn.

She put a hand to his shoulder, so he’d know she was there.

“I am trying to hold them,” he got out, between clenched teeth. And of course he had never studied Nyr’s language or his science. To Sendroth, sorcery was all it was. He had magic gloves to command monsters and he was using them as best he could. It would work until Ilmoth—or the thing that was her ally—found a way around the logic of it. Yet it seemed to bind them even more than the logic chains she’d been using, the science of it. As though the robots themselves believed in magic.

“Just talk to me,” Sara shouted. “I can help you!” Speaking to that thing only she could hear.

From behind the barrier Sendra’s gloves created in the minds of the monsters, she set to dismantling their will, setting them against one another, flying them off on impossible, endless quests. Hearing Sara talking to herself, to the little voice. To the echo that inhabited the witch.

Nearby, Nyr cried out in despair, and she felt the end of an age break around them.

Nyr

THROUGH ALL THIS THUNDER and wrack I am engaged in psychotherapy with extreme prejudice. I am talking to Ilmoth. To whatever it is, that is Ilmoth Elder.

I am also talking to Lyn. I am talking to my tower, and trying to speak to the satellite above. To tell it, For the world’s sake no! But it tells me, with clipped politeness, that I am dead, and therefore have no access privileges. Whereas Ilmoth has convinced it of … I don’t know what? Some mad story just like everything she has is a mad story. A sequence of identifiers and codes and provenances, woven from whole cloth, that somehow inform the satellite that she is an Elder—I mean, a latercomer, one of my idiot genius people. Someone the satellite should listen to. Someone with the sort of executive privileges that I never had, because there’s no way the wretched orbital would discharge the big guns just on my whim, but apparently Ilmoth has persuaded it that she’s entitled to give the order.

And it’s taken the satellite many years of recharging after I tricked it into disintegrating the demon, or the demon’s access point into this world. But it has been years. Years of living amongst these maddeningly fascinating people, growing incrementally older, making mistakes and watching the world grow worse. Up there, silent and watching, my old familiar spirit has regained its terrible power, and now it won’t heed me when I tell it, No.

The air is a chaos of electronic speech, like an arguing crowd. My commands, Lyn’s, those gloves the brigand has. And, interweaving through it, Ilmoth. Her commands—I catch them being born within her. I see them flower within the systems of the robots and the tower. The clash of static and countersignal is nothing to her. Her commands simply manifest where she needs them to be. And I hear the other speak back, each time those holes in the world open. Speak back, but not to Ilmoth. A hundred fragments of conversation, like trying to debate a shattered mirror. But someone is debating it, and it isn’t the witch and it isn’t me. Sara, it is. The child, putting the murderous puzzle together without understanding that she’s assembling a bomb. I try to tell her No, but right now nobody wants to listen to the wizard.

The witch is all I can grapple with, so I speak to Ilmoth. I force her to see her own blood data, her genetic plot. She is just one of these people, that I have given up immortality and the detachment of my people to live amongst. Is that not enough? Who is she and what happened to her?

“I am Ilmoth Elder,” she says. And, in the electric space between us, lightning dances and she writes the story of her life for me, and thus does not unleash the satellite on the world.

Born on Earth, sleeping out the light years, come to Sophos IV to take possession of it. To come into her inheritance, as the witch-scientist of the unseen and buried things. Her right, to choose a champion to sit upon the throne of the planet, emperor of all the nations of the world. Looking down on poor Nyr Illim Tevitch, the blinkered academic in his ivory tower, that she has now taken possession of. She, the ancient, the eldritch, the Elder.

And none of that is true, and I tear it down, go through it with my red pen like a curmudgeonly teacher. I mark her as failed and tell her to try again.

“I am of the ancients who brought people to this world,” she tells me, and this does not unleash the satellite on the world, and if I can just keep her occupied long enough …

Born on Earth, a thousand years before my time. Sleeping out the light years, come to the world that her folk had their own name for, with a cargo of cold sleepers and embryos. Reshaping what they found on the planet, with an arrogance my own folk would echo, so that it was fit for human habitation. And then, her people an ebbing tide, remaining on, immortal, all-knowing. One of the Ancient Folk passing into myth, their tools and toys become the degrading playthings of those who would come later and call themselves sorcerers. Acting now because I, the intruder, the impostor, dared call myself “Elder.”

And none of that is true, either. I tear up her fiction of what the original colonisers were, that is closer to the myths Lyn espoused than any evidenced truth. All this time the malign star of the satellite is approaching the House of Lannesite like a piece of genocidal astrology.

“I am,” she says, over and over, and I say, “No,” and show her, with my science and my reason, why each story cannot be. She is not lying to me. She believes each contradictory account, even those whose internal lack of logic should sink them before they’re ever submitted for my disapproval. But she clings to each in turn like the survivor of a wreck seeking anything to save her from sinking. Simultaneously the destroying angel and the desperate drowning woman.

Born here, as her heredity shows. No star-travel, no immortality, no magic. A woman—born where? What kin? What life? All stripped from her until she found herself lost, alone, starving, dying.

And I cannot mark this as true or false. We have fallen below the great cosmic truths I can arbitrate on. It might be true. A hundred such stories occur every day. Does that make them any less real or important to those who suffer them? I cannot say “Yes” or “No” to this account because it is hollowed out, cored of information. A mere shell.

In a buried place, fallen. Amongst dead monsters. Still. Dead. A corpse in the moment of transition from the last dregs of a living human being. Something came to her. A voice. Something clutched at her. A hand. A thing like a hand. A terrible bargain. But she reached out into the dark and there was nothing else to clasp to.

It strikes me that all these accounts of hers, of who she is, come to me from outside her. A story of Ilmoth Elder told by another. They are not her stories. They are the stories that are built around her like the casing about the caddis. Built out of the cultural references of this time and place, and then out of the data leached from my tower. Artificial and false and protective, because inside is …

In the eye of the storm, as the tower cracks around us and the monsters assault its walls, I ask her, “Who are you, Ilmoth?” and she doesn’t know. I ask her, “What has come to live inside you?” and show her what I mean. The creatures that move under her skin and burst from her flesh. I show her recordings from the tower’s own systems, that she has access to but has prevented herself seeing. Because she does not want to know what she is. Any of her stories is better than that self-knowledge. And I feel that. I am a man who seldom enjoys being himself. I would have been happier just calling myself wizard and to hell with it. Better than facing up to Anthropologist Second Class (failed). Better for Ilmoth than understanding that she …

Was dying. Three breaths away from being a corpse amongst the monsters. Where it/they found her. The things like hands and spiders, like flesh and machine, like and unlike the demon. The things that are telling these stories about her, because she so desperately needs a story. That began her anew, severed from her own past, because they so desperately needed …

Ilmoth has no stories left, now. A void where a woman should be. She has the personality, the awareness, the self of her, but no memories, no past. It gave her life and strength, but it could not give her the woman she had been. Maybe that was a kindness, given where that woman’s path had led her.