A Darkling Plain (24 page)

Something sparked, down inside the Stalker's head; the flash lit up the inside of her mouth, which had fallen open.

She jerked again and said, "No tricks, Popjoy."

"What, you think I'd sabotage my finest work?" cried Popjoy hurt. "I am just making a few minor adjustments."

"You have found the Error? The memories? Remove them!"

"Great Quirke, certainly not!"

"Remove them!"

"But Excellency, they are what distinguish you from the mindless Stalkers, the battle models.... They are what make you the finest Stalker of the age; the pinnacle of Resurrection technology...."

Either Popjoy's words or the pleading tone that had crept into his voice caught the Stalker's attention. She nodded cautiously, prepared at least to hear him out.

"Those memories have always been there, submerged beneath the surface," the Engineer explained. "They give you levels of experience and emotion that no other Stalker of mine can draw on. Recently, thanks to the damage Mr. Grike inflicted, they have become intense, overwhelming your conscious mind. But we should soon be able to strike a healthy balance."

"What are they?" insisted the Stalker. "Where have they come from? Why do I remember being Anna?"

"I'm really not sure," admitted Popjoy, groping for a tiny pair of pliers and setting to work. "The fact is, the brain I fitted you with isn't quite like anything else I've ever seen. Certainly not one of those clunky modern models we London Engineers built, and not like old Mr. Grike's, either. It's much older, and much stranger.

"You see, when your friend Sathya first took me to

Rogue's Roost all those years ago and ordered me to bring Anna Fang back to life, I panicked a bit. I knew it was impossible. So to buy myself some time, I set up an expedition and took a Green Storm airship out into the Ice Wastes, hunting for an Old Tech site that I'd heard rumors of ever since I was an apprentice in dear old London. The Engineers had looked for it but never found it. I had better luck. Right up to the top of the world we went; so far north we started going south again. And there, half buried in the snows of a tiny, frozen island, we found a complex built by some forgotten culture that must have flourished in the days before the Nomad Empires. Inside the central pyramid sat a dozen dead men and women on stone thrones. Some had been crushed by roof falls or encased in ice, but there were a few who, when we entered their chamber, began to whisper to us in languages we couldn't identify. They were Stalkers, of a sort, although they had no armor or weapons, and they'd clearly not been built to fight."

"Then why?" asked Fishcake's Stalker.

"I think they were built to remember," said Popjoy. He rummaged in a drawer for a set of Stalker's eyes and started wiring them into his patient's sockets. "I think that when great leaders of that culture died, their scientist-priests would take the body to the pyramid at the top of the world and stick a machine in their head, and there they'd sit,
remembering.
They'd remember all the things they'd done in life, and pass on those memories to their successors, and tell the stories of the times they lived in so they'd never be forgotten. Except they
were
forgotten, of course; their culture vanished from the earth, and the Nomad Empires that came after

them picked up a crude version of the same technology and used it to build undead warriors like old Mr. Grike.

"That pyramid was the only relic of the first Stalker builders, and I'm afraid my Green Storm minders dynamited it for fear some other scavenger would stumble on the secret. But in one of the smaller buildings, among a lot of religious paraphernalia and irrelevant old texts, I unearthed an almost complete Stalker brain. I took it back to Rogues' Roost for study and repairs, connected it to a brain of my own design that controls your motor functions and suchlike, and installed the whole caboodle in the carcass of old Anna Fang."

The Stalker tilted her head on one side. "So
am
I Anna Fang?" she asked.

"No, Excellency," said Popjoy. "You are a machine that can access some of the memories of Anna Fang. And they give you strength." He replaced her mask and skullpiece, fastening them into place with neat new bolts. "You want to make the world green again; you yearn for it. That's not because you have been set to obey Green Storm instructions, like some brainless battle-Stalker, but because you can subconsciously remember how much Anna Fang wanted it; you can remember what the townies did to her, and to her family, and how it felt when those things happened. Her memories, those feelings, are what drive you."

"I remember dying," said the Stalker, not in the hesitant voice of Anna but in her own harsh hiss. "I remember that night at Batmunkh Gompa. The sword in my heart, so cold and sudden, and then that sweet boy kneeling over me, saying my name, and I couldn't answer him.... I remember it all."

She unplugged her cable from the severed Stalker head and slung it aside. When she reinserted the cable into her own skull, her new eyes filled slowly with green light. "Now it is time for us to go."

She stood and turned, and Popjoy's smile faded. "Excellency, you can't leave now! I need to make further tests and observations! With your help I might be able to make more like you! I've spent so many years trying to repeat my success with you, and all I've been able to turn out are tin soldiers and silly curiosities."

"You have an airship?"

"Yes. A yacht, in the hangar behind the house. Why?"

"I am not Anna Fang," said the Stalker thoughtfully. "But I am here to do what she would have wanted. I shall take your ship and fly to Erdene Tezh. There I shall speak with ODIN."

"No!" said Popjoy. "No!"

"You have heard of ODIN, I see."

"My old Guild ... But even they ... It was impossible, the codes are lost--"

"The codes are found," the Stalker said. "They were recorded in the Tin Book of Anchorage. I saw them on Cloud 9. I have carried them safe in my head ever since."

"It's madness! I mean, ODIN ... Don't you understand the power of it?"

"Of course. It is the power to make the world green again. Where the Storm has failed, ODIN will succeed."

Popjoy clenched his plump hands into fists, as if he were about to attack her. "But Excellency, what if it goes wrong? We barely understand these Ancient devices. Remember

MEDUSA! ODIN would be incomparably more dangerous than MEDUSA...."

The Stalker's claws slid from her finger ends. "Your opinion is irrelevant, Doctor. You are no longer needed."

"But--but you
do
need me! Your memory problems ... with the right trigger, they could flare up again.... No!"

The Stalker Fang caught him as he tried to dodge past her to the door. "Thank you for your assistance, Doctor," she whispered.

Fishcake shut his eyes tight and covered his ears, but he could not quite block out the crunch and spatter of Popjoy's dying. When he looked again, his Stalker was helping herself to things from the shelves: fragments of circuitry, wires and ducts, the brains of lesser Stalkers. The walls of the workshop had been redecorated with eye-catching slashes of red.

"Find food and water for yourself, boy," she whispered. "I shall need your help when we reach Erdene Tezh."

***

***

I'll try to start at the beginning. After our meeting with the lord mayor, Mr. Garamond and some of his young warriors took Dad back to where we'd left the
Jenny Haniver
and made him move her round into the same secret hangar where the
Archaeopteryx
is kept. They say she will be safer there, and won't be seen by the Green Storm spy birds that cruise over from time to time. But I think it's also so they can keep an eye on her; they keep saying we're not prisoners, but they obviously don't want us sneaking off. They seem terrified that we'll tell some other city that they're here, which seems a bit pathetic--I mean, what do they have that another city would want to cross hundreds of miles of Storm Country to eat?

Later, after an evening meal in the communal canteen, we were all three of us brought to this house, which is to be our home while we're in London. I say house, but it's really just a sort of hut; a lot of sheets of old metal bolted and welded together at the base of one of the old brake blocks that support Crouch End's roof. There are wire grilles over the window holes, but I don't know if they've been put there to keep us from escaping or just because there's no glass in London. Inside there are three rooms, linked by a lot of winding passages, the floors dug down into the ground so that we can stand upright inside. It's a little damp, but homey enough, and close enough to the edge of Crouch End that the sun shines in for a half hour or so in the evenings, which is nice. Dad has the biggest room, Wolf is next to him, and I have chosen for myself a little semicircular chamber at the back; one wall is made from an old tin advertising sign (
stick-phast paste--accept no imitations), and I have a window that lets in a little sunlight, and the light of the moon at night.

***

I thought that Wolf would try to escape or something, but he seems quite content at the moment, very interested in this little world the Londoners have made for themselves. He's a strange person. It's hard to tell what he is thinking.

Dad is just glad to be home, of course. I was half hoping he'd find True Love with Clytie Potts, but it turns out she's married (to an Engineer called Lurpak Flint, who flies her airship for her, so she's not just Clytie Potts and Cruwys Morchard but Clytie Flint as well--I've never known a woman with quite so many names).

29th May

I think I like London. It's funny--I've come so far, and I've ended up in a place that's very like Anchorage-in-Vineland. It's secret, and hidden, and so small that everyone knows everyone else, which is both good and bad. Sometimes I think I can't wait to get back on the bird roads, but at other times I wish I was a Londoner myself. And it's beautiful. You wouldn't think there would be beauty in a great smashed-up heap of rubbish, but there is. In all the clefts and stretches of open earth, trees and ferns grow, and in every soil-filled nook among the debris too. Birds sing here; insects buzz about. Angie says that in another month the scrap-heaps above Crouch End will be pink with foxgloves.

Angie is my best friend here. (Her name is short for Ford Anglia--her dad, Len Peabody, named all his children after Old Tech ground cars.) She's sensible and funny, which is a good combination, and she reminds me of a badger or a mole or something; small and stocky and slightly furry, always busy with something. She's been all over the debris fields, because she goes

on patrol with Garamond's militia, keeping an eye out for intruders and the Green Storm. All the young Londoners are always going off on patrol, or hunting, or scouring about for salvage in the farthest corners of the wreck. I suppose the Emergency Committee think it's a way of using up all that teenage energy. I'd like to go with them, and use up some of mine, but Garamond says I can't, because he still doesn't trust me. What a fusspot that man is! He says that me and Wolf (Wolf and I?) have to spend our days helping the old folk dig over the vegetable plots, or listening to Dad talk History with Mr. Pomeroy.

2nd June

For all their kindness I am starting to feel sure the Londoners are hiding something from us. Wolf has said this from the first, but I thought he was wrong. Now I'm starting to believe him. It's just little things, like the way people look at us, and the way Dr. Childermass kept shushing Len Peabody that first morning-- what was she afraid he'd tell us? Sometimes, when Dad and Wolf and I go into the communal canteen in the middle of Crouch End where everybody eats, people who are deep in conversation about something suddenly stop and start talking about the weather instead. And when Dad asked Clytie Potts why she had been collecting Kliest Coils and other bits of Electric Empire technology, she went all red and changed the subject.

Last night I heard voices outside again while I was trying to get to sleep, so I went to my window and pulled the curtain aside (it's just a bit of old sack, really) and what do you think I saw? Engineers! Lavinia Childermass and half a dozen others! They were leaving Crouch End and walking off up a track that leads

eastward over a steep ridge of debris. Where were they going? It looked a lot more purposeful than just a moonlit stroll. Do they do this every night? Maybe that's why I hardly ever see any of the Engineers around in the daytime--they must be catching up on their sleep!

Well, I always dreamed of being a daring schoolgirl detective, like Milly Crisp in those books I used to read when I was little. So this afternoon I wandered off on my own up that track that I saw the Engineers taking last night. From the top of the ridge you can see it winding on across the debris fields for about half a mile, toward a really big, wedge-shaped chunk of wreckage that looks as if it must have been a section of London's Gut.

Nobody about, but something flashed in one of the holes or window openings in the side of that big old chunk. Then, all of a sudden, I heard footsteps behind me, and there was Mr. Garamond with a couple of his favorite young warriors, Angie's brother Saab and a girl called Cat Luperini. "What are you doing here?" he shouted, all purple with rage, nearly as cross and ugly as Mum. I tried to explain that I'd just felt like stretching my legs, but he wouldn't have any of it. "You're on the edge of a hot zone!" he shouted, and Cat got hold of me and started steering me back toward Crouch End. Saab leaned over and said, "You mustn't go wandering off like this, Wren. That's a dangerous part of the fields. We don't want you to get crisped by a sprite."