Spellcrash (21 page)

The spinnerette on my shoulder said, “*** ** ***** **** ***** * ******?” but I quieted it with a warning finger—I needed to keep my mind still and out of its own way.

Time passed. I began to get a gestalt sense of the rhythms of the system. I still had no idea what was being calculated or how to read the programming language implicit in the system, but I started to anticipate the movements of the beads on the macro level. Major shifts would become clear to me a few seconds before they actually happened—providing a sort of echo-in-time effect. I also began to see the paths data took through the system as the sum of a set of calculations from one abacus propagated outward, triggering something in one or more other devices.

“Boss”—Melchior abruptly tugged at the leg of my pants—“I hate to interrupt, but Fenris says the hunt has lost interest in him and may be headed back this way.” I nodded absently. “I’ve almost got a handle on this thing, Mel. Give me a shout-out in ten minutes or if somebody comes through the door before then.”

“Will do.”

I watched another series of calculations move through the system and mentally mapped their path and pace. The speed of information transfer was too slow for any kind of electronic hookup that I knew of, so it had to be magical or mechanical, probably the latter, as a primarily magical system would have been upgraded long ago. More calculations rippled from one machine to another. It all seemed to be moving about the same speed as the beads themselves . . .

I lowered myself to the floor and pressed an ear to the stone beside the base of the nearest abacus when I spotted an approaching wave of data. It arrived on the wings of the Doppler effect—the sound of beads moving rapidly toward me.

Bingo! There was another set of abacus wires in tunnels beneath the floor. Now I just had to find the outlet.

My sense of the data flow suggested a point off to my left, and I began to work my way in that direction, stopping to put an ear to the stone every twenty feet or so as a check. As I got closer to my imagined transfer point, the underfloor noises got steadily stronger, maxing out as I passed the last row of abacuses. A whole bunch of beads were moving back and forth between there and an unmarked point on the near wall.

I crossed over and pressed my ear to the stone. After a minute or two, I began to make out mechanical noises, clear but so faint I’d have thought I was imagining what I wanted to hear if not for the fact that they made sense.

“Got it, Mel! The network node is just on the other side of this wall.” I quickly explained what I’d found.

Mel put his own much more sensitive ear to the wall and nodded. “That’s great, Boss. But how do we get from here to there? I’m not seeing much in the way of doors. Not even a cable-chase.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I said with a laugh, because the answer had come to me in the same instant he’d asked.

“If it is, I can’t see it,” said Mel.

“That’s because you’re not looking with the eyes of a Fury.” I pictured my ex-grandmother, Lachesis, and let my anger at her draw my sword into existence. “See?” I drew Occam’s tip along the stone, imagining as I did so a gate that opened from there into a point three feet beyond. It worked, though I hadn’t been sure it would beforehand since I lacked true knowledge of the destination. Apparently, solid coordinates in physical space were good enough for short hops. We stepped through and found ourselves in a round room perhaps thirty feet across. It had no human-scaled doors or windows, but it did have a long, open trench running from the wall to the center of the room and back again in a big “U” shape, and a thigh-thick conduit end sticking out of the ceiling at the midpoint.

Between the two was a rather Rube Goldbergian device for converting the mechanical information flow into a digital electrical signal. Abacus data came in through the trench via a couple of dozen bead-hung bronze rods that looped back to the main room. It left via the copper trunk cable that filled the conduit. Between the two was the computer equivalent of sausage making.

I squatted and looked into the trench. The beads were much bigger and thicker than those on the abacuses, which explained the choice of rods instead of wires. The initial conversion seemed to happen as the beads passed along the rods and through Bakelite loops surrounded by many windings of bare copper wire—probably some sort of inductance-coil device.

“Thomas Edison could have put this together,” said Melchior, sounding more than a little horrified. “Why hasn’t it been upgraded to something civilized?” From each of the coils a stiff, paper-wrapped wire led to a copper screw clamp on the back of what looked like an old-fashioned phone-switching panel—the kind that required an operator. I stepped around to the far side and found a manual switching setup that had been converted to something more modern by the simple expedient of cross-connecting every single plug to a much newer automatic switch.

That, in turn, had been plugged into the newest piece of equipment in the room, a mainframe that would have looked perfectly in place in a seventies-era human data center. Its amber-scale monitor showed a steady right-to-left scroll of incomprehensible numbers—I still had no idea what the programming language might be. Beside it, an equally ancient punch-card machine provided a primitive option for acquiring hard-copy output.

“I don’t suppose you want to plug in and see where that goes?” I pointed toward the conduit.

“How?” Melchior tapped the side of the mainframe. “I mean, we
could
rig a hookup for me, but if that hunk of junk isn’t running flat out, I’m no judge of processor loads. There’s isn’t going to be enough free memory to run anything you or I would call a real program . . . Probably wouldn’t be even if it were sitting idle.”

I sighed. “You’ve got a point.”

“Damn right I do,” said Melchior. “Pantheonic information technology is what, forty-plus years ahead of human? That puts this rig at the equivalent of seventy-five years before I was first booted. You and I come from a place so far up the Moore’s Law slope for exponential growth in processing power and memory from this thing that it’s not even funny. And that’s without factoring in the nonlinear time-slip effect my quantum-computing upgrade has on the relationship. Sure, it and I are both computers, but that’s like saying you and a planarian flatworm are both members of the kingdom Animalia—true but pointless in the present context.”

“Okay, okay, you’ve made your point. What would
you
recommend for finding out what’s at the other end of that cable?” I pointed to the conduit again. “Because that’s where the modern Necessity probably starts.”

He looked at the spinnerette on my shoulder and smiled. “Do you remember the story of Minos’s hunt for Daedalus?”

I grinned. I did indeed. Daedalus—a distant cousin of mine—had created the original Labyrinth to house and hide Minos’s shame, his Minotaur stepson. To keep Daedalus from revealing the secrets of the Labyrinth, Minos had locked the artificer in a tower. Daedalus had escaped by making wings for himself and his son Icarus—which hadn’t ended well for Icarus, but Greek MythOS history is like that.

After the escape, Minos hunted Daedalus all through the royal courts of Greece. He’d been clever about it, bringing a spiral seashell from palace to palace and offering a great reward to anyone who could run a string through the shell. Minos knew that only Daedalus was simultaneously clever enough to find a way to solve the problem and foolish enough not to see the hook hidden in the bait.

Hm, maybe he was a closer cousin than I thought.

King Cocalus, who was hiding Daedalus, coveted the reward. So he took the shell to Daedalus and asked him to run the string through it without telling him about Minos. Daedalus attached a thread to the back of an ant and coaxed it to drag the thread through the spiral by putting a drop of honey at the end. He then used the thread as a guideline for the string. But this clever bit of problem-solving revealed his presence to Minos, who promptly demanded his head.

Fortunately for Daedalus, Cocalus didn’t want to part with his artificer and made other arrangements. He tricked Minos into taking a bath where—in the classic bloody style of so many of my family’s stories—he was murdered by the daughters of Cocalus.

“What do you think?” I asked, lifting the spinnerette up to look at the conduit.

“*** ** **** *** **** **** ****?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Of course, the technology had come a long way since Daedalus’s time. Instead of a thread, we rigged the spinnerette with a tiny wireless webcam and a pseudo-GPS device, but the principle was the same.

“****** ****,” said the spinnerette as it climbed into the conduit.

We used the pix and coordinates it sent back to cut ourselves a Fury-style hole from here to there. The other end of the conduit turned out to be a much more conventional and modern server farm—basically a repeat of the room where we’d met Alecto a few days before. Thousands of shiny black multiprocessor servers with bright purple LEDs hung on rows of perfectly aligned, brushed-aluminum racks.

The only big difference was that this computer room held obvious signs of repeated upgrades.

Old filled-in holes in the stone floor and ceiling showed where earlier generations of computers had been bolted in place. Exit conduits that had once held thousands of strands of twisted-pair copper wiring had something of an oversized clown-shoe look when compared to the thin fiber-optic lines that ran through them now. Legacy hardware dotted the room as well, some in kludged-together workstations, some simply in discard piles no one had ever bothered to haul away.

“Now,
this
I can work with.” Mel hopped up onto a workbench and flickered into laptop shape.

Plug me in,
wrote itself on his screen.

I fished a networking cable out of the big pocket in the back of my leather jacket and connected Mel to the nearest server. Data started blasting across his screen at an insane pace, far too fast for me to read or really comprehend, though I kept an eye on it. I was watching for broader patterns in the flow because that’s what I do, but I wasn’t seeing many. In addition to stunning volume, the data seemed to be moving in seriously turbulent ways. While I was doing that, the spinnerette hopped down and wandered off across the room.

Melchior had been at it about ten minutes—just long enough for me to start to get bored and lose my lock on the proceedings—when he suddenly let out a high-pitched electronic cheep and snapped back into goblin shape. Before I could move or otherwise react, he ripped the cable free of his left nostril and dropped it on the floor, where it burst into flame.

“I
hate
it when that happens.” Melchior’s voice sounded calm, but his hands shook, and he didn’t seem to be able to look away from the cable as it slagged itself with frightening intensity.

“Are you all right?” I demanded.

“I’m fine,” he assured me. “Though I’m damn glad the quantum version of my transformation is slightly faster than instantaneous—nothing like being two things at one and the same time to make the emphasis on either one happen faster. That’s why the results are so much better than last time.”

“Last time? You lost me there.”

“Don’t you recognize the effect? Necessity happened. She has to have the nastiest security I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh shit, the black box.” Now that I’d remembered, I had trouble believing I could ever have forgotten.

It was back in the early stages of the Persephone mess. We’d been trying to find out what had happened to Shara’s soul after Persephone’s virus e-mailed it directly to Necessity. The black box had been a codespace manifestation of the gateway to Necessity’s world. When we’d tried to crack into it, the thing had countered with some sort of nuclear-grade magical cybersecurity designed to literally fry my brains. Mel had managed to keep that from happening, but only at the cost of some pretty nasty burns on his face and hands.

“What happened this time?” I asked.

“Easier to show you, though we’ll have to find a fresh cable. The old one is looking kind of limp.” He glanced at the floor, where the burning cable had left a thin line of molten copper.

“Security damn near cooked you last time, and now you want to go back?”

“Pretty much.” He shrugged. “You’ll see when you get there.” As I was rigging up the new cable, I noted that the old one had neatly severed itself about an inch below the place where the connector met the server, which protected the machine from any effects of the fire. Nice spellcoding there.

“You’re sure this is a good idea?” I said as I took my place in a chair beside Melchior’s table and began working myself into the right mental state for jacking in.

“You can be
such
a big wuss.”

“Said the guy who doesn’t need to give himself a new piercing every time he goes into the net.” I glanced down at the athame point I held lightly above the palm of my left hand. The slender, cross-hilted dagger with the network port in the pommel couldn’t have been much bigger across than a ballpoint, was almost as thin as a sheet of paper, and maybe five inches long. I’d done this hundreds of times, it should have been easy, and yet every time I prepared to drive that blade through the center of my palm, I found myself fidgeting and delaying the process. Now I lightly traced and retraced the tip back and forth across my skin, scraping in a very faint “X.” Once.

Twice. Now!

With a sharp expulsion of breath, I shoved the athame home, driving the narrow spike of steel deep into my flesh. I didn’t stop until the guard lay flat against my palm and the point stood out a good four inches from the back of my hand. Before I could fully register the pain, my soul slipped out of my body and along the cable that connected the blade to Melchior.

As usual, Melchior had configured his inner cyberspace in the manner of an extremely expensive lawyer’s office, with indigo pebbled-leather walls and barrister’s book-cases. A brass spiral staircase led upward to the places where Melchior kept his inner self, while a large irregular gateway opened onto the broader world of the net.