Some kind of apparatus sat on the platform, a contraption of mirrors and lenses whose function was at first unclear.
Lune paid it little heed beyond that first glance. Paris was full of strange things that no longer worked properly. What had her attention were the clocks.
There were hundreds of them, all manner of clocks filling the walls, crowding in on the window-slits. A relentless ticking filled Lune’s hearing, summed from innumerable tiny pendulums and cogs. Across a wide table, clocks lay in various stages of disrepair.
“You’ll realise why I’ve brought you here,” Arquelle said, “Once you’ve met him.”
“Met who?”
It was only when the figure made the tiniest of movements that Lune registered that they were not alone in the room. The gowned and hooded form sat, or rather slumped, at a worktable, leaning so far forward and with its head so low that it was at first almost hidden by the larger clocks. The figure might have been presumed to be unconscious, or even dead, except that the black gloved fingers of its right hand were moving, poking slender instruments into the open gearwork of a clock while the left hand supported the instrument’s square-framed chassis a few inches off the table.
She understood now the purpose of the mirrors and lenses situated on the high platform. Between one moment and the next the Sun must have pushed a splinter of light above the horizon. The apparatus gathered that sunlight, concentrated it, and marshalled it into a bright spot where it was most needed. The open clock was transfixed in a golden beam of intense brilliance, beautified like a saint in one of the time-faded paintings Madame Bezile kept in the Château’s long corridors.
From the clock issued delicate picking and scratching sounds. The figure was silent, giving no indication that it was aware of Lune’s presence. Of its face she could see nothing, but from the hood of the gown protruded a dozen or so brassy tubes, all pointing in the same direction. As she stared one of the tubes clicked and retracted, as if in response to some hidden stimulus. Another whirred out to replace it, thicker this time. The fingers continued their work.
“I have her,” Arquelle said, raising his voice as if to address a crowd. “And I have the egg.”
“A moment.” The reply was impossibly hoarse, barely a voice at all. “I’ve waited hours for the light, Arquelle. Let me make the most of it.”
Lune stood still. “Who is it?” she asked.
“My master,” Arquelle answered in a low tone. “I mentioned him already. Captain Pallas. Does that mean anything to you?”
“I’ve never heard of this man before tonight.”
“Bezile wouldn’t have seen any need to educate you. That doesn’t mean she isn’t aware of the Captain. They’re in approximately the same line of work, after all. The acquisition and exploitation of eggs, for the betterment of Free France and whatever humanity lies beyond it. Isn’t that what she tells you?”
The hooded form made an irritated grunt and lowered the clock to the table, withdrawing its tools. “You know I need absolute concentration, Arquelle.”
“You also wished to be informed the moment she was in our custody,” Arquelle pointed out. There was just enough insolence in his reply to suggest that he had little fear of reprimand or dismissal. “Or did I misunderstand that bit?”
“No,” the hooded man said, his rasp of voice managing to soften itself. “You did not, of course. Well, I suppose I should see her, and the prize. It is the one we hoped for, isn’t it?”
“It’s real enough.”
“You know this?”
“Damn right I know it. She tried using it against me.”
“Resourceful, then.”
Arquelle shrugged. “Or cavalier.”
The seated man raised his slumped form slightly and reached up with his gloved hands to push back the hood. He had on a kind of mask, strapped around what appeared to be a bald, skull-shaped head. The mask was made of metal and leather, and covered most of the front of his face, except for his chin, mouth, and the very tip of his nose. The skin that she could see was old: raw and leathery in places, sagging and wrinkly in others, veined through like marble, dotted here and there with scars, colourless lesions and bubbling growths. A fuzz of beard around the chin was pure white. Of his eyes, nothing showed. The metal front of the mask was as complicated as any of the gutted clocks on the table. The brass tubes were lenses, set into swivelling mechanisms. Fine tubes, black and flexible, ran from the base of each lens around the back of his head, where they braided together into a single bunch and vanished into the hood and down the back of his neck.
“What do you want with me, Captain Pallas?” Lune asked. “Because if it’s nothing important, I’ve work to be doing.”
“You have spirit, girl, I’ll give you that. But do you have enough? That’s the question.” Slowly, Captain Pallas reached up and began to undo the leather fastenings of his mask.
“What do you want with all these clocks?” Lune asked, not sure if she wanted to see what was behind that mask.
“It’s about being prepared,” Captain Pallas said, undoing the last of the straps. “A back-up policy. We live in a world where things work a little less well each year. One day, sooner than we realise, there won’t be power to run the argosies and icebreakers, or light our buildings, or keep us warm as the ice closes in.” Slowly, he pulled the mask away from his face, before pushing it back over his scalp, where he allowed it to rest, with the lenses pointed at the ceiling. “Then, we’ll be back to fire and wood and metal. Things that work by muscle and wind and water, like clocks. I have no illusions that I will play any role in that world—I am old enough now, older than you probably realise—but I cannot turn my back on the changes that are coming. When the last egg has given up its fire, perhaps one of these clocks will serve some useful function, somewhere in the city. I’m hoping for something better than that, you understand. But it pays to take precautions.”
Lune was looking at a blind man. His face wasn’t as bad as she’d feared—there was no hideous disfigurement there, nothing that moved her to pity or revulsion. You saw worse every day, in the lines of beggars on the approach to the Quai. But it was certainly the face of a very old man. And his eyes were a sightless milky white, staring at her and yet not at her, as if they only remembered where she had been standing.
“What happened?” Lune asked, sensing that there was more to it than just age.
“An egg burned my vision away. I caught a glimpse of the holy fire, and this is the price I paid. The strange thing is that even now, I cannot say that it wasn’t worth it.”
“But you must see, to be able to repair the clocks.”
“In a manner of speaking.” He touched a glove to the lenses on his scalp. “Machines. Camera eyes, of varying focal depth. Recovered from the close-prox hull sensors on my ship, after I crashed near Anvers. You’ll have noted how the outputs converge and run together, down my back. A good neurosurgeon could have wired them straight into my skull, but where do you find a good neurosurgeon these days? Rhetorical question, of course.”
“So how do you see?”
“Beneath my clothing, strapped to my back, is an array of actuators. Again, it was recovered from my ship: Its original function lay in the active cushioning mechanism of an acceleration couch. With some assistance, it was adapted to enable me to see. When the cameras transmit a picture, it is converted into a pattern of stimuli across my back. My skin receptors detect the pattern and transmit nervous impulses to my brain. It took some while before I was able to perceive those impulses in terms of a coherent image, but eventually the necessary adjustments took place. Having no input from my eyes, my brain craved visual stimulus. It soon latched onto the nearest substitute.” Captain Pallas gave a ghastly, skull-like smile, his lips parting to reveal a grim assortment of ancient, yellowing teeth. “The peculiar thing is that it still feels like vision. The image is crude, but because the sensation of seeing is synthesized in the visual processing centre of my brain, it feels perfectly normal, as if my eyes are still working.” He paused, not smiling now. “Alas, the lenses do not all function as well as they used to, and the actuators are losing their potency. Pixel by pixel, line by line, I am becoming blind again. But while I have something, while I can still see enough to work, I let no moment go to waste.”