Spoole stood alone in the command room gazing up at it, wondering.
‘He’ll be coming back soon,’ said Gearheart.
‘Oh, be quiet, Gearheart.’
‘No, I won’t be quiet. This is your fault, Spoole, my being crippled. I was made to be your companion, that was twisted into my mind. You knew that, so you should have protected me. You shouldn’t have let that assassin get so close to me.’
Spoole didn’t reply. What she was saying was all too true.
‘Did you protect your child, Spoole? Is it still alive now, I wonder?’
‘Oh yes, the child is still alive. I’m sure of that.’
Gearheart gazed at him. ‘I wonder what it’s doing now? Artemis or Turing City? I suppose it doesn’t matter. But I wonder which way she twisted the mind?’
‘I think I know,’ said Spoole.
Spoole and Liza
‘Hello, Karel,’ murmured Liza. She looked down at the dead body of her husband. ‘Here he is, Kurtz. We did it. Here’s our little boy.’
Carefully she placed the mind inside the tiny body.
‘All finished,’ she told Spoole.
Spoole looked from her to the child. ‘Did you really do it?’ he asked.
‘I’m not telling you,’ replied Liza.
Spoole called her bluff. ‘Then I shall say goodbye, Tokvah.’
‘Then shoot me. But you’ll never know.’
Spoole stared at her, red eyes glowing. Did he care, how she had twisted the child’s mind? What difference did it make, really?
But he wanted to know.
Spoole was miles from where he should be. What difference would a couple of extra hours make? He had to know.
He came and stood in front of the woman.
‘There is a way to find out,’ he said.
Spoole
‘Even back then, you were a traitor,’ said Gearheart. ‘That child was just a bundle of twisted metal. You should have lifted it up and smashed it to the ground. You treated it like it was something special.’
‘It might have been an Artemisian.’
‘Should that have made a difference?’
‘No! But, Gearheart, you’ve got to understand it was different back then. Artemis was a lot less powerful. We didn’t really believe we could take on Turing City. Zuse, even a few weeks ago we weren’t really sure we could do it!’
Spoole looked down at her, with her twisted, crippled shell of a body.
‘Surely you must understand, Gearheart, you of all people? Take a look at yourself! Surely you can’t believe that a mind is nothing more than twisted metal!’
Gearheart spat static at him, white noise hissing.
‘And she was taunting me, Gearheart. Even though I held a gun to her head, Liza was taunting me. I was made to lead, yet even that Tokvah woman doubted my authority. And so I wanted to know. I wanted to know what she had done, what she believed – when I felt that I didn’t believe anything myself.’
‘So what did you do? How did you find out?’
‘I gave her Nyro’s choice. I set her to work making a second child. Making a child with my metal. I told her she had better twist it the same as the first, exactly the same, because at the end I would take one child for myself. I would place it in the nurseries at Artemis and see for myself whether it thrived or not.’
‘And did it thrive?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Spoole. ‘Oh yes.’
Eleanor
The ground shuddered, and a small avalanche slumped over the feet of a nearby troop of infantryrobots, much to Eleanor’s amusement.
‘Second bomb,’ she counted. ‘Next one in fifteen seconds.’
Kavan looked down at the ground, lost in his own thoughts. Eleanor wanted to say something to him, but already the alert was travelling down the lines of the assembled troops. Ears down, eyes averted. The third bomb exploded, sending a hammer blow into the earth.
‘The path through the maze should be wide enough now,’ said Wolfgang.
There was a weird sort of light to this place, thought Eleanor. It was dimmer this far north anyway, the sunlight not as strong. But there was something about the falling snow, the dull white clouds. It lit up the valley in an eerie electric glow.
‘We hold position until the fifth bomb explodes,’ said Kavan.
‘Shouldn’t we send in the new conscripts first?’ asked Wolfgang. ‘We don’t want to expose regular troops to radiation.’
‘Why?’ replied Kavan. ‘Aren’t we all Artemisian?’
The call was travelling down the lines again.
‘Five seconds,’ said Eleanor. Four, three, two, one… Nothing happened.
She looked at Kavan. He remained staring at the ground, snowflakes settling on his painted shell. What was he thinking? It struck her then. Banjo Macrodocious’s first warning: First their artefacts will fail…
‘They found the bombs, that’s all,’ said Kavan, reading her thoughts. ‘So we adapt our plans.’
He gazed at Eleanor.
‘Begin the attack.’
Spoole
‘But I don’t understand,’ said Gearheart. ‘Why two children? Why make her weave the second? Why not just keep the first for your own?’
‘She didn’t understand either, Gearheart. I wonder if a woman ever could.’
‘You wonder if a woman can understand? What are you talking about?’
‘About twisting wire. A mind is formed just by the way in which a woman twists wire! Does the man play no part at all?’
‘A man’s wire provides the lifeforce. You know that!’
‘I know that, but I don’t understand it. But women do! They understand the patterns that they weave. This woman, this Liza, had woven a mind that expressed the battle that was raging at the time! And there I stood, so impotent…’
‘So you made her weave a second mind. You raped her?’
‘Yes.’
‘It would make no difference, you know. Any woman could have told you that. It’s all about the way that the metal is twisted. There is nothing else. There’s nothing special about the metal.’
‘I know that now.’
‘But you made her submit. You found your answer.’
‘Not exactly. The gar still managed to trick me, right at the end.’
Nettie went on with her lecture.
Susan placed her hand on her own thigh, stroked the current in the electromuscle there, just like Karel used to do to her. She thought about how she would gently twist his joints and parts back into true, smartening him up, making him run so much more smoothly. These were the reciprocal things that lovers did for one another.
Susan loved Karel. She had known him since childhood: back when he was the child that other children were kept away from. The suspicion about the way his mind was twisted had been there from the start, the way he’d grown up in such a strange way: always building his body efficiently, but with the simplest of materials and a minimum of ornamentation. Even as a child he’d stood out amongst the ostentation of the other Turing Citizens.
She thought of Karel as he used to be, seventeen years ago: a small child, dressed in iron, with such a quick temper. No wonder the parents used to talk. They had seen it, noticed it, even if she hadn’t.
Why hadn’t she seen it? Because her mother had woven her not to?
But surely that wasn’t why she loved him? Could no one else see that other side to him? That depth, that inner belief? That seriousness that was so unusual in a child, it had attracted her even then.
Did it matter? She had been happy – happy at least until Artemis had invaded. But why?
Absently she drew a circle on her thigh, a smaller circle at the top. That was enough to unlock the memory.
Liza
‘I don’t know if I did the right thing, Echecs.’
The memory was so vivid. Susan was there: she was Echecs, taking Liza’s hand. The child – Karel, her husband – was sleeping in the corner of the room…
‘You made a mind, Liza,’ said Echecs. ‘There is no right or wrong, just a child to take care of.’
Liza looked up at Echecs, and Susan was struck by just how yellow her eyes were – the same shade as Karel’s.