Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘A rock in the stream while the water passes,’ said Billy.

‘And you have been fashioned to survive. You are capable of violence.’

‘Most of pacifism is social conditioning and meditation, only a very small part of Camlantean society was based on blood engineering.’

‘Still …’ said Quest.

‘I was created to be capable of accessing a part of the brain the race of man have long suppressed — the snake part, the ancient lizard that lurks in all of us; the devil hiding in our soul that urges violence and murder and rape and hate. But unlike your kind, I get to turn it on and off at will. In a little twist of irony, we obtained the blood marker for the genetic switch from one of the greatest psychopaths or our age, the Diesela-Khan. A hair sample obtained by one of our heralds.’

‘Just a barbarian warlord,’ said Quest. ‘You really should have been able to stop him.’

‘The Camlantean tools of mass psychological manipulation had one fatal weakness: they worked a lot better when the tribes were unaware of the techniques we were using. The end came very quickly after the Diesela-Khan captured one of our expert passive-defence groups and began running counter-cultural interference through the horde’s druids. Our allies and the buffer states collapsed one by one until only we were left.’

‘How ironic,’ said Quest. ‘If I could go back in time and change things, I would. A single airship like this and a couple of companies of redcoats and I could rout the Black-oil Horde.’

‘What is gone is gone,’ said Billy. ‘All things come to an end.’

‘Including the age of darkness we’ve been suffering since the fall of Camlantis?’

‘You know the price for ending that …’

‘I do,’ admitted Quest.

‘Then you are not fit to possess it.’

Quest paced the corridor. ‘At least some of your people had a different idea. Perhaps even the majority of them. One side of a civil war is always branded the rebel side — and I’m guessing your creators were the minority that rose up. You were on the rebel side … the winning side.’

‘Nobody ever truly wins a war, Jackelian,’ said Billy. ‘There are only degrees of loss, and there was none greater than that of the Camlanteans.’

Quest smiled. ‘But you got to write the history of the winners, didn’t you? I can see traces of your hand all over that. The noble people of Camlantis — the great pacifist race that committed mass suicide so that their legacy would not be corrupted.’

‘The story is true enough. In a manner of speaking,’ said Billy.

‘A very loose manner, I think. I’ve seen your crystal-books, old man. Your own side’s and theirs .’

‘Bloody things,’ swore Billy. ‘I’ve hidden away more of them than I care to remember. Of all the books you had to find, why couldn’t it have been the poem-recordings of some self-absorbed child finishing their schooling?’

‘One last chance,’ said Quest. ‘Will you help me decode the key to enter Camlantis?’

‘No.’

Quest shrugged and looked down the corridor. It was time for him to go. ‘I’ll unlock it without you. Your people buried the key deep in encryption, but codes were meant to be cracked.’

‘You’re a clever man, I can see that.’

‘Clever enough for this task.’ Quest started to walk away. ‘Even though you’re blinded, I can see you have Pairdan’s eyes.’

‘Children were not left to chance in the old days,’ said Billy. ‘We took a little from all of our parents. Grown in bottles, the way science intended. I believe around thirty percent of my body’s pattern was inherited from Pairdan.’

‘I believe that makes you a bastard,’ noted Quest.

‘Yes,’ said Billy, ‘we share that in common. Except that you’re a self-made man.’

Quest shook his head in sadness at Billy’s decision to hold onto Camlantis’s secrets and disappeared.

‘You’re an interesting fellow,’ said Damson Beeton when she was alone again with Billy Snow. ‘There’s more to you than meets the eye.’

‘I don’t suppose the Court of the Air has any more agents left on Quest’s airship fleet?’

‘No,’ said the old woman, ‘I think he’s rolled us all up.’

‘Then we’re done for,’ said Billy. ‘We are all royally done for.’

In the transaction-engine rooms on the Leviathan , the cardsharp nervously lifted his pile of blank punch cards, dropping them into the inscription position in his typewriter-like machine before brushing the keys for luck. This last instruction set would either validate the previous day’s work and move them forward (perhaps even to the end; but don’t even dare think that), or knock them right back to the start.

‘We’re overheating,’ called a voice from above. It was one of the grease monkeys, the uplander lad hanging from the gantry lines. ‘The drums are running fit to burst.’

‘We need to hold the revolutions steady,’ said the cardsharp. ‘We’re close. I can feel it.’

‘You’ve been saying that all afternoon,’ complained the grease monkey. ‘We’re burning up in there.’

‘Vent in more cold air from outside,’ said the cardsharp. ‘Use the next grade of oil. Just keep the drums turning.’

‘We’re running on special oil right now,’ said the grease monkey. ‘The transaction engines cannot take it any more.’

It was true. There was a smell of burning beer in the chamber. The engine men cut the oil with the good stuff from Jackals’ drinking houses, swearing it got them better performance from an engine running seriously overclocked.

‘Just a little bit longer,’ muttered the cardsharp. His fingers flickered over the keyboard, translating the genius maths sent down from the master’s quarters upstairs, symbol keys jouncing with a satisfying resistance, the tattoo of holes in the punch card getting ever more complex. Even though this wasn’t his program design, even though he was acting as a proxy to the genius of the great Abraham Quest on this project, there was still art in what he was doing. His fingers were on fire. His translation of the maths would make the difference between failure and success. The whine from the engines below acted like adrenalin, supplying the urgency, feeding him with the pressure he needed to produce his best work.

One of the chief engine men climbed out of the pit of machines to repeat the grease monkey’s concerns, but seeing the cardsharp at work he held his tongue. He was senior. He had some understanding of the art that was going on up here — unlike the young upland turnip swinging from his girdle, dripping oil onto the floor from the cans dangling from his belt.

With a final bash of the keyboard, the punch card lifted out of its cradle, held by an automatic arm. ‘There,’ spat the cardsharp. ‘Inject that into the system.’

One of his runners snatched the card and sprinted away.

‘Carefully, lad,’ called the senior engine man. ‘Gutta-percha tears if you push it in too fast. More haste, less speed.’

The cardsharp looked over the paper imprint that had been left behind on the punch-card writer. It was too late now if there were errors in the code, but he checked his work anyway. He should have had a partner logic-checking his efforts, but there were few in the House of Quest that could follow the master’s work. In the cardsharping game, it was often said the difference between the fourth and fifth best coder in the business was that the fifth best could look at the fourth’s work and not understand a line of what had been written. You flew lonely when you flew so high.

From the depths of the pit, the transaction engines changed their pitch, the thunder of the rumbling drums absorbing the new instruction set. Few laymen could tell the difference, but to everyone in this chamber it was as if a completely new hymn was being sung down below. The cardsharp tapped his desk nervously, not daring to rise. There were so many possibilities for error. All the raw data from the crown’s crystal that composed the key had been laboriously copied and transferred. What effect would too high an error rate in that data have on their attempt to crack it? Nothing good. Nothing productive, that much was certain.