Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

There was a silence as everyone thought about this.

Berenice sat forward. “But…but we don’t have to remake all of it,” she said.

“We don’t?” said Sancia.

“No! Estelle’s probably just deactivated a few critical scrivings — but the rest still work. If you’ve got a hole in a wall, you don’t tear it down and make a whole new wall — you just cut a piece of stone to fit the hole.”

“Wait,” said Orso. “Are…are you saying we should fabricate the missing definitions ourselves ?”

“Not we,” said Berenice. “Me. I’m faster than you, sir.”

Orso blinked, taken aback. Then he gathered himself. “Fine. But your metaphor is shit! This isn’t just filling in a goddamn hole in a wall! This is some complicated scrumming scriving, girl!”

“Good thing we’ve got someone who can talk to rigs, then,” said Berenice. She slid into a seat across from Sancia and pulled out a sheet of paper and a quill. “Go on. Tell me everything the plates are saying.”

“But it’s gibberish!” protested Sancia.

“Then tell me all the damned gibberish, then!”

She started talking.

She described how the plate plaintively asked for the location of this “mass,” begging for someone to tell it where the mass was, and the density of this mass, and so on and so on. She kept hoping Berenice would tell her to stop, but she didn’t. She just kept writing down everything Sancia said — until, finally, she held up a finger.

Berenice slowly sat back in her chair, staring at the sheet of paper before her. Half of it looked to be notes. The other half was covered in sigils and strings of symbols. She turned to look at Orso. “I…I am starting to believe everyone’s been trying to scrive gravity wrong, sir. And only Estelle Candiano has ever really figured it out.”

Orso leaned forward and examined what she’d written. “It’s mad…but I think you’re right. Keep talking.”

“You all could make sense of that?” said Claudia.

“Not entirely,” said Berenice. “But there’s a common theme. There’s this subject of mass — and the device is trying to figure out where this mass should be, and how big the mass is.”

“So?” said Sancia. “What’s that got to do with floating and flying?”

“Well,” said Berenice. “I’m not sure if I’m right here…But every scriver before us has assumed that gravity only worked one way — down, and to the earth. But Estelle’s designs seem to suggest that…that everything has gravity. Everything pulls everything else to it. It’s just that some things have a strong pull, and others have a weak pull.”

“What!” said Giovanni. “What rot!”

“It sounds mad, but that’s how this rig works. Estelle’s designs don’t defy gravity — the rig convinces what it’s touching that, say, there’s a whole scrumming world just above it with a gravity equal to the Earth’s, so the Earth’s gravity is canceled out, and the thing just…floats. The designs just…reorient gravity, counterbalance it — almost perfectly .”

“Is that possible?” said Claudia.

“The hell with what’s possible!” said Orso. “Can you figure out what’s missing? Can you fabricate the definitions to get the damned thing working, Berenice?”

“I could probably do it all, if I had a month,” she said. “But I don’t think we need it all. We don’t need all the crucial calibrations or control strings.”

“We don’t?” said Sancia nervously.

“No.” She looked at her. “Not if you can just talk to the damned thing. All I need to fabricate is some definitions that can give the rig some impression of the location and density of this mass. And it would have to match these sigils etched on the rig, of course.”

Orso licked his lips. “How many definitions?”

Berenice did some calculations on the corner of her paper. “I think…four should do.”

He stared. “You think you can fabricate four definitions? In a handful of hours ? Most fabricators can barely manage one in a week!”

“I’ve been neck-deep in Candiano shit for the past days,” said Berenice. “I’ve been looking at all their strings, their designs, their methodology. I…I think I can make it work. But there’s another problem — we’ll still need to put these definitions in a lexicon to actually make them effectual. We can’t just walk into one of the Dandolo foundries and slip these in there — the guards wouldn’t even let you do that, sir.”

“Could they work in a combat lexicon?” asked Claudia. “Like the portable ones they use in the wars?”

“Those are pretty limited to powering weaponry,” said Berenice. “And they’re hard to get ahold of, as anything having to do with the wars often is.”

“And the test lexicon back at my workshop can’t cast far enough,” said Orso. “It only extends a mile and a half or so — not nearly enough to fly Sancia to the Mountain.”

“We can’t take it with us, either,” said Berenice. “Not only is it stuck on tracks in the workshop, but it weighs close to a thousand pounds itself.”

“Right,” said Orso. “Shit!” He fell into silence, glowering into the wall.

“So…are we scrummed here?” said Sancia.

“Sounds like we’re scrummed,” said Gio.

“No!” Orso held up a finger. A wild, mad gleam crept into his eye. He looked at Claudia and Giovanni, and the two Scrappers recoiled slightly. “You two — you do much work with twinning?”

Claudia shrugged. “Uh…as much as any scriver worth their salt does?”

“That’ll do,” said Orso. “All of you — get up. We’re going to my workshops. Berenice is going to need a lot of space and the proper tools to do her bit. And that’s where we’ll get to work as well,” he said, nodding at Claudia and Gio.

“On what?” said Claudia.

“I’ll figure it out along the way!” he snapped.

They trooped out of the drainage tunnel into the Gulf, then started up the hill. They moved quickly, filing through the Commons with the air of refugees or fugitives. Orso seemed filled with a mad energy, muttering to himself excitedly, but it wasn’t until they approached the Dandolo walls that Sancia glanced at him, and saw his cheeks were wet with tears.

“Orso?” she said quietly. “Uh — you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He wiped his eyes. “I’m fine. Just…God, what a waste!”

“A waste?”

“Estelle,” he said. “The girl figured out how goddamn gravity works. She figured out how to make a listening rig. All while being trapped in some hole in the Mountain!” He paused for a moment, and seemed too stricken for words. “Imagine what wonders she could have made for us all, if she’d only had a chance! And now she’s become too dangerous to be free. What a waste. What a scrumming waste !”

When they got to the workshops, Sancia sat at a table with her hands on the plates while Berenice set up scriving blocks, parchment papers, and, of course, dozens of definition plates and molten bronze and styli to do the actual fabrication. Orso brought Claudia and Giovanni to the back of the workshop, where his test lexicon sat on rails that slid back into an ovenlike chamber in the wall, with a thick iron door.