Sessine took the lead when the clan Genetics' Beyer-Garratt burst a series of tyres and skidded off into the outer parapet in a great long articulated explosion of steam, metal and stone (and Sessine thought coldly, Well, that's old Werrieth out of the party tonight, and him onto his last life); debris spattered across the roadway in front of the Mallet but Sessine took the three hundred tonnes of car within metres of the flimsy inside wall, and missed the wreckage entirely.
He was in front! He screamed with delight, and was grateful that the noise was inaudible within the staggering racket of the racing car; the wide roadway spread out in a gentle curve before him, empty and welcoming and sublime. The marshals' airship would be well behind the Mallet and the cloud of camera platforms just level with him. There were cameras and spectators on each of the towers, too, and more people — castlians and Xtremadurians — gathered in clumps on the outer walls, but they were blurs, irrelevant. He was alone; exulting and alone and free!
…He recognised the point, and was able to leave then, and so left his old self to drive, and slipped out of the seat, like a ghost, down through the hatch into the bellowing heart of the quivering machine where valves chattered and gases hissed and water gurgled and sweat popped from the skin in the oven-heat of the shrieking, vibrating engine.
And as he walked through the hammering din of the motor, he started to remember a little of what he had left here.
In a cramped corridor, on an open-work metal floor between great rods and levers darting back and forward like vast metallic tendons, he found his old first self, dressed in engineer's overalls and squatting hunched over a small table on which sat a chess board set in mid-game.
He squatted down too. His younger self did not look up. He was staring at the white pieces, the tip of one thumb in his mouth.
'Silician defence,' the young man said after a while, nodding at the board.
Sessine nodded, outwardly calm but thinking furiously. He knew he was faced with some sort of test but he had no predetermined code to cover this meeting, only the fact that, once, he and this young man had been the same person.
Silician? Not Sicilian?
Silician; Silicia; Cilicia. It meant something. Somebody he'd heard of had been Silician. An ancient.
He searched his memories, willing some connection. Tarzan? Tarsus? Then he remembered some lines from an ancient poem:
Me Tarsan, you Jesus.
And the Silician never really changed.
Ah, yes.
'Professor Sauli played it often,' he said. 'While working on the exclusion principle.'
The young man looked up and smiled briefly. He rose and put out his hand. Sessine shook it.
'Good to meet you, Alandre,' the young man said.
'And you,' Sessine said, hesitating. '… Alandre?'
'Oh, call me Alan,' his younger self said. 'I'm only an abbreviated version of who you are now, though I've developed on my own in here.'
'Having recently been abbreviated myself, I sympathise, Alan.'
'Hmm,' the other man said. 'Well, the first thing to do is to get you out of where you are now. Let's see…' He looked down at the chess board and turned both the white castles upside down.
The board blossomed with a semi-transparent holo of Serehfa. Alan studied it for a moment, then reached into and beneath it — and Sessine saw the projection of the castle's fabric bulge and swell around the young man's hand as with an infinitesimal articulation of his fingers he plucked something out of the bowels of the model fastness — Sessine experienced a fleeting sense of vertigo — and deposited it at the side of the chequered surface. Then Alan folded up the chess board and the castle projection vanished.
'Was that me?' Sessine asked casually, leaning to glance at the board.
'It was.'
'So where am I now?'
'Your construct now inhabits hardware situated within the curtain-walls.'
'Is that good?'
Alan shrugged. 'It's safer.'
'Well, thank you.'
'You're welcome,' his younger self said. 'So.' He clapped his hands on his knees. 'You're my last incarnation.'
Sessine looked into his eyes. It was true; as the self aged, and grew to awareness, filtered and downloaded into a new version of the old body, a meta-aging took place over the lives: a serial, cumulative maturing that was visible in the face unless you strove by further tampering to eradicate it. How fresh and innocent this earlier face of his appeared, and yet this seeming youth had been forty years old when he'd recorded this construct and left it free — almost forgotten and just-short-of-unreachable — to flit between the interstices of his personal lives and his clan's concerns: monitoring, collating, reviewing and evaluating.
'Yes, I'm the very last,' Sessine agreed. 'And you are the ghost in the machine.'
He smiled, and wondered as he did so what possible point there was in the gesture. 'So. What do you have to tell me?'
'Well, for one thing, Count,' Alan said, 'I know who is trying to kill you.'
4
Av got a very good view ov thi fass-towr from heer. Am ½ lying & ½ sittin craidled by thi babil branchis & am lookin up fru a gap in thi foleyidje @ thi dirti grate hoojness ov thi cassils centril towr.
U forget thi towrs thare a lot ov thi time coz (a) itz usyuly bhind u if yoor lookin out thi way from thi cassil & (b) iss obskyurd by cloud moar than ½ thi time nway.
According 2 Mr Zoliparia thi fass-towr is whare thi spays elivaitr woz ankird 2 Erf.
Thass y iss cald a fassness, Mr Zoliparia sez; in Inglish fassness means a stronghold, & also bcoz when rings r tied hard agenst eech othir they r sed 2 b tyed fast 2 eech othir like thi spays elivaitr woz tyed fast 2 Erf, & in a sens tyed 2 thi Erfs surfis & spays togethir, 2 (I sed; + thi spays elivaitr woz a way ov gettin in2 spaice fast; but Mr Z sed no actuly it woz slower than a rokit or whotevir but mutch moar efishint). Mr Zoliparia thot thi spayce elivaitr woz a grate idear & it woz a shame weed got rid ov it & if we hadnt then we wooden b in thi pickl we r, i e about 2 get clobberd by thi enkroachment.
But I thot spaice woz juss ful ov nufink I sed 2 Mr Zoliparia. Whats thi point ov goan thare?
Bascule, he sed, u r so fik sumtimes.
He tole me thi fass towr led 2 thi planetz & thi starz; 1nce u were in spaice u had limitles enirgy & raw mateeryls & after that branepowir took u wharevir u wantid but weed throne ol that away.
Mr Zoliparia sez thi fass towr reprisentz sumfin ov a nigma, on account that we doan striktly speekin no whot's actuly in thi top ov it; iss bin xploard up 2 about thi 10th or 11th levils but aftir that u cant get no hyer, so they say. Blokd on thi inside & nuthin 2 hold on2 on thi outside & 2 hi up 4 a balune or a aircraft 2 go. Thi nolidje ov whot's up thare's bin loss long ago in thi kaos ov thi kript, sez Mr Z.
U heer roomers that ther r peeple up thare in thi top ov thi towr but thas got 2 b nonsins; howd they breev?
Mr Zoliparia iznt thi onli persin 2 ½ feeries concernin thi big towr; Ergates thi ant told me ther used 2 b 3 spaice elevaitrs; 1 heer, 1 in Afrika neer a place calld Kilomenjaro & 1 in Kalimantan. According 2 hir, thayve ol been dismantled long sinse ov coarse but weev got thi biggist stump on acount ov hooever disined thi American Kontinent spays elivaitr had thi wizird idear ov makin thi terminus particularly spektaklier & so desined it 2 luke like a hooj cassil, viz thi vastniss ov thi fastniss (which she claymd used 2 b calld Acsets, which wos anuthir ov them nacronyms, aparrintly).