The Book of Fire Read online

  Suddenly, what Paia has accepted as the welcome privileges due her exalted rank take on a more sinister aspect, that of isolating her from the daily life of the Citadel. She has been pampered and revered and protected, but she has also been kept apart, innocent, even ignorant. Perhaps Luco is right to call her spoiled.

  So here’s the question, she decides: of what use is my ignorance to the God? She knows he does nothing without a purpose.

  She’s kept the note in her sweatpants pocket, now folded away with her T-shirt in a bottom drawer where her chambermaid is unlikely to disturb them.

  What price survival? She recognizes the reference to the Temple liturgy, but . . . whose survival does it refer to? Hers?

  Paia feels some sort of response is called for, but she hasn’t a clue what it should be or how to go about making it. Should she just scrawl a reply and leave it on the easel where she found the first? Would the note writer be looking for that? What should she say? “I don’t understand. Please explain further.” This time, her laugh barely gets beyond a chuckle. She needs guidance, but there’s no one to turn to. Certainly not the God, though the God has always been her guide before. Certainly not his loyal servant Luco, though Luco is probably, after the God, the soul she knows best in the entire world.

  She balls up her lace-edged napkin and flings it onto her plate, into the bright juice from the melon, into the melting stain of butter. The chambermaid will be heartbroken. Even so, Paia is tempted to upend the entire mess onto the starched white tablecloth. These are linens from the old days, her father’s days. Then, she was too young to care about what was going on outside the protected world of her nursery or playroom or schoolroom. She overheard bits of it anyway, from her father, from his advisers and staff, from friends who had been invited to take refuge with the family. And from the House Comp, of course, which was always awake in those days, monitoring the increasingly disastrous progress of world events and reporting on it whenever requested, sometimes when not.

  The House Comp.

  Paia gets up from the table and goes to her alcove window. The sun is just up, a squat red oval hovering behind a pall of smoke and dust. The smoke is unusually thick to the south. Often Paia sees smoke plumes rising out of the distant hills and notes that something is burning again. This particular morning, it finally occurs to her to wonder what that something might be.

  The House Comp.

  The central brain of the deactivated House Monitor is still very much alive. Maybe it could tell her. Certainly in her father’s day, it could have. How odd that she has never tried to ask it such things before. But the God must not know. She needs to get up to House’s lair without being seen or followed.

  Paia thinks her way through her Temple calendar for the day. She has a Sanctification of the Lambs at 0900, then a Ritual Bathing in the Sacred Well, then Lunch, then . . . maybe after Lunch, before the evening invocation, she can find a moment to slip away undetected to the Library. She hasn’t been there in a long while, she realizes. A very long while. The God has been keeping her unusually busy.

  She rings for her chambermaid to clear the dishes and help her dress for the Temple. She feels energized and powerful, as if she’s made a momentous decision, and likes the surge of it in her veins. She paces about the room, humming, and allows the chambermaid to choose the most revealing of all her Temple garments, one she has always hated despite the ingenuity and richness of its design. It consists almost entirely of a shimmering body veil of the finest gold mesh. What little is worn underneath is sewn with thousands of gleaming seed pearls. The chambermaid smoothes a reverent hand across its silky transparent glimmer and unsnaps the thin, jeweled collar. A soft, unconscious sigh escapes her lips.

  Paia strips and wraps the studded belt around her hips. The big gold clasp is decorated with the image of the Winged God Rampant. A fringe of strung pearls falls from mid-belly to mid-thigh. The chambermaid fastens the collar at the nape of Paia’s neck. Under the long golden veil, her perfect breasts and buttocks are bare. The chambermaid fusses around her, straightening the clasps, arranging the folds, touching Paia in tiny intimate ways that could be an accident, could be a caress. Paia wonders if she reaches out, lets her fingertips brush and encircle the chambermaid’s nipples the way hers have just been, what will happen then?

  Abruptly sweat drenched, she moves restlessly out of range of the chambermaid’s busy hands. She realizes that it’s happening again, a sudden rising of desire, this time with precious little provocation. Surely the chambermaid has always touched her this way, inevitable during the process of Enrobing. Perhaps the chambermaid thinks she would look better in this very revealing costume if she went to the Temple with her nipples well-formed. Paia is almost tempted to ask her, except of course that the chambermaid has been mute since birth. How convenient for the God, she muses, who otherwise strictly prohibits defectives from serving either the Temple or the Citadel. Not only does the chambermaid have no voice, she has no name, or has never offered one, by whatever means she could. And Paia has never asked. With this realization, desire dies, and her rime of sweat wraps Paia in an actual chill.

  Momentarily, she considers rejecting the chambermaid’s choice of garment. But she can’t stand the idea of going through the whole dressing process over again. She signals curtly for the woman to cease her silent fussing. The Priestess is ready. She assumes her most aloof bearing, nods for the chambermaid to open the door, and sweeps majestically down the hall.

  Later, still damp from her Ritual Bathing, Paia hikes up the thin white Robe of Purity that her priestesses have swathed her in as she stepped naked from the gold-tiled pool beside the Sacred Well. She takes the stone stairs two at a time, exulting in her temporary freedom. She has done something unprecedented. She has ordered the red-veiled Twelve not to attend her on her daily Progress to Lunch. She wishes, she announces to them, to ponder in silence as she walks. This took them completely by surprise. In their confusion, she has managed to evade them by vanishing with an airy wave into a privy, then immediately out the other door and down the hall, several turns to the right and left—she has planned this escape carefully—under an arch and around a hairpin corner that opens onto a hidden inner stair, used in her childhood by servants and now known only to her. And to the God, Paia supposes, for the God knows everything. But he’d be forced to shrink his man-form to an undignified size in order to appear in this rough-hewn passage, and she considers this to be unlikely enough to verge on the “not-on-your-life.” So perhaps this passage has eluded him. It becomes Paia’s favorite for that reason alone.

  The secret stair empties into darkened back corridors where she must feel her way, burrowing deep into the bedrock. The builders of the Citadel wanted their computer facility well protected. No one will think to search for her here. No one but she (and occasionally, the God) ever ventures this far. Eventually, Paia arrives at the massive leather-and-brass doors of the Library. The entrance is never guarded. It’s merely locked, keyed to the palm prints of family members and staff long since dead—except one. A single recessed light glows softly overhead. Neither she nor the God has been able to figure out how to turn that one off, and Paia doesn’t mind this minor squandering of energy. She’s sure the House Comp has chosen to keep it burning, perhaps in an act of defiance for having to deactivate so many of its other Monitor functions. Paia understands such gestures, made to maintain some small sense of personal power in the face of an irresistible and tyrannical force such as the God. Like her own concealment of the note, or this secret visit.

  Paia’s palm print admits her to a part of the Citadel where no one else, other than the God, can go. The God, of course, can merely materialize within. He does that now and again. But once inside, he shows little interest in the banks of screens and keypads and storage racks. He uses Paia’s hands and her experience with the system to keep a particular function running, or to turn one off, but he has never asked her help in accessing the Comp’s less overt functions, its vast da
ta banks or its sophisticated analytical abilities. He once informed her, in his high-handed way, that there was nothing a machine could tell him that he didn’t already know. Paia is willing to believe this, and probably because she doesn’t try to convince him otherwise, he lets her amuse herself now and then in the Library, when he’s feeling particularly magnanimous. But Paia suspects that the God does not really understand the House Comp, or rather, he underestimates it. He treats it like any other of the myriad mechanical devices that make the Citadel run: admirably efficient but without any individual consciousness. At first, this seemed to her a sign of the God’s obvious superiority, of his supernatural strength and wisdom, the House Comp’s odd and indeterminate consciousness being below his godly notice. Now she sees it could be a weakness, the only one he’s shown to her so far.

  And she has never dared to come here without asking him before. Mostly, she comes to call up pictures of her dead parents, or to sift around the data banks in search of her family’s past, very nearly an exercise in the heretical nostalgia. For the childish comfort it offers her, the God allows it. But what about the present? What could the House Comp tell her about that? No one, not the God, not even the gossipy Luco, talks about what goes on outside Citadel and Temple and the small circle of dependent villages that supply them with food and labor. The God does not want his servants distracted from their attendance to his proper worship. But if she should ask the House Comp to look outside the Citadel walls, can it do so? And will the God find out?

  Standing frozen beneath the single hall light, Paia shudders through a flood of second thoughts. He’s irritated with her already. Why risk worse? But her newly defiant momentum has carried her into uncharted territory. She doesn’t want to waste it, as she’s done too often before. She sets her palm to the bronzed glass plate. The leather-bound doors part and breathe open.

  Inside, a row of green-shaded globes awake to faint life. As she moves into the tall, vaulted central aisle and down along the stacks of shelving, the globes brighten ahead of her to light her way, then dim again when she’s passed. To right and left, long darkened alleys are lined with climate-controlled storage: her father’s collection of rare and antique books. Rolling ladders lead to shelves high above hand reach. When the God ordered Paia to disconnect the House Monitor’s HVAC, Paia claimed that the Library’s climate-control was special, like the light outside the door, and could not be disabled. Miraculously, he has not yet discovered that she lied to him, or that the House Comp helped her do it. She’s not even sure why she risked the God’s disfavor in order to protect these essentially useless artifacts. She only knew she must. What else, she wonders now, could she be tampering with?

  The Book Room is cool and very dry, instantly wicking all the moisture from her skin and robe. Paia pads along the axis of the room, her bare feet digging into thick maroon carpet that swallows up even the sound of her breathing. At the far end is an elaborate portal, three stone archways closed by much-worn and battered wooden doors. It was rescued, her father once told her, from an ancient castle in Germany. It has paired marble columns between each doorway, and capitals carved in the image of fantastical creatures that remind Paia of the Winged God himself.

  Paia touches the pale smooth stone reverently, thinking of the men and women, living thirteen hundred years ago, who might have laid their hand just where hers is now. They have nothing to do with her life, yet she feels strengthened by the sense of physical connection through Time. She pushes on the central wooden door, which creaks realistically on its huge iron hinges. And there in the opening, she is halted by a sudden memory of the painting in the tower. The image is so present in her mind’s eye, so vivid, so . . . green. She can almost believe that when she opens this ancient door the rest of the way, she will find that imagined landscape right there, on the other side. Shaken, she hesitates, then laughs at her own foolishness. She swings the big door aside and enters the den of the House Comp.

  Since she was a child, Paia has thought of this quirky and increasingly unpredictable machine as if it was some kind of preternaturally brilliant animal that never leaves its cave. She knows it’s only a machine, like the God says, but she talks to it as if it were alive. For in many things, the House Comp seems to have a mind of its own.

  For instance, it keeps its room as dark as any wild animal’s lair, no matter what Paia might request by way of additional illumination. Dark, and colder even than the rare book stacks in the next room. The chill raises goose bumps beneath Paia’s thin robe. She feels like a white ghost gliding about in the darkness, groping for the back of the padded leather chair tucked in under the main console. She locates it, hauls it out, and sits, pressing her palm to the screen to awaken the system.

  “Hello, House,” she murmurs.

  “Hello, Paia. It’s been a long time.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “No apologies necessary.” The House’s voice is her father’s, a calm, rough-edged baritone that always sparks a bright fire-shower of childhood memories. It was unsettling at first, after she’d lost him, and remains so even now, but she’s glad he preserved at least this little part of himself for her to remember him by. “How can I help you today?”

  “I need some information, House.”

  “Of course. That’s what I’m here for.”

  This is what he always says. In fact, while the House Comp’s vocabulary is limitless, his mode of expressing himself is not. Once he has settled on a clear and efficient way to convey a given meaning, he varies from it only if a better choice appears or is pointed out to him. Paia finds the utter predictability of his rhetoric both amusing and comforting, but a conversation with him is not quite like a conversation with another human.

  Tiny lights flicker like fireflies on the console. “Where would you like to start today?”

  “I’d like to take a look around outside.” She says it without thinking, then wishes she could take the words back. There might be a subtler way to say it, a way that doesn’t sound so much like a direct contradiction of the God’s expressed wishes.

  “Any particular direction?”

  Did she detect a fractional hesitation before he replied? She leans forward over the keypad and whispers, “House, do you understand this might be dangerous for me?”

  Another fractional pause. “Knowledge is power.”

  “I know.”

  “You are safe with me.”

  “You mean, he won’t find out?”

  “You are safe with me.”

  Paia wonders. What power could a machine muster against a God? “Well . . . toward the south, then.”

  “Range and resolution?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure. What’s the biggest? How about . . . well, there was fire out over the hills last night. More than usual.”

  “Working,” says the computer. The huge mirrored black panel above the console glows, then lights up with a grid of images, six rows of ten. A scattering remain black, several are broken up by static. But in the remaining three or four dozen, Paia sees, as she peers more closely, that the images are contiguous, forming one larger image with pieces left out, largely in shades of blue. Toward the left and right, she notes areas of brown and orange, and here and there bits of green strung out like jewels on a necklace. Mostly in the blue screens, but including all the brown and green bits, is a faintly illuminated outline: a squarish shape with odd legs and arms pushing out at the corners.

  “What is this, House?”

  “LEO-view, dynamic image function.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s the whole ball o’ wax.”

  Paia refuses to ask the exact question again. When House starts using obscure and idiomatic turns of phrase, she knows he’s being evasive and will continue to be so until it pleases him to be otherwise. There is some lesson he wishes her to learn. She rephrases her question. “But what am I looking at?”

  “Home. Or what’s left of it.”

  “There’s so muc
h blue.”

  “Water, water, everywhere . . .” House sings. An earthquake of static shivers across the grid, and when the images resettle into clarity, most of the blanks have shifted one screen to the right. “But perhaps you’d hoped for something a bit more . . . intimate.”

  “Okay,” Paia agrees, totally mystified.

  In the upper right-hand corner, one screen fades and refreshes itself immediately. There, Paia sees as the God in flight might see from high above, miles of barren granite hills, scoured valleys with narrow, boulder-strewn flatlands cut by the snake tracings of empty riverbeds.

  “Resolution, one thousand meters.”

  “Closer,” Paia says.

  “Five hundred meters.”

  The image jumps, enlarges, then swallows the grid, swelling and filling the entire bank with a dry contour map of wilderness. A few of the black squares remain black.

  “There are some monitors that need replacing,” the computer notes reproachfully. “Also, there are a few sectors I cannot reach due to satellite failures. Fortunately, ours is not one of them.”

  “Shouldn’t we be grateful there are still this many in working order?”

  “Everyone wanted the satellites to keep working. Up to the end, a lot of money was put into making them self-maintaining and self-repairing.”

  Paia thinks this is a lot of information for the computer to volunteer. “Like you, House?”