Fever Crumb Part 9

"Did you think I wouldn't find out about your little romance?" asked G.o.dshawk.

"No, sir," said Gideon. "I thought ...

"Thought what? That I'd approve? Great Scrivener, women of childbearing age are in short enough supply among my people as it is, without I go marrying one off to you."

"But --"

"You wretch, Crumb! if I weren't kinder than most of my breed you'd be dead by now, or on your way to meet the death machines at Pickled Eel Circus! As it is, I want you gone. What, do you think I won't be able to find another little scribbler like you to aid me in my work? You're nothing. If you come near Nonesuch House again I'll set the dogs on you. Now go."

Gideon looked again at Wavey, but Wavey was still not looking at him. She seemed bored.

The next thing he remembered was the huge front door of Nonesuch House slamming shut behind him, leaving him alone on the drive in the pounding rain. Twilight was coming on. He was already soaked. He looked at the windows above him, hoping to see Wavey look out. G.o.dshawk would have ordered her not to, but she would take no notice of G.o.dshawk, would she?

He waited while rain trickled down the back of his neck and crept in through the seams of his sleeves and plastered his wet hair across his face and filled up his boots. But he never saw her again.

Six months later he would stand once more in G.o.dshawk's garden. It was a few weeks after the Skinners' Riots, and a story had been doing the rounds about how a band of Scriven had been found holed up at Nonesuch House, and how the Skinners had gone there and slaughtered them.

Gideon had not let himself think about Wavey G.o.dshawk since he returned to London the previous summer. He had gone back to the Engineerium, and Dr. Stayling had allowed him to pick up his studies. When thoughts of Wavey came into his mind he forced them away, and made himself concentrate on his work instead. He had worked hard all winter at forgetting her, and he had grown good at it. But when the riots started, he could think of nothing but Wavey.

On the evening when it began he was outside the Engineerium, a.s.saying circuit boards for a digger in Womblesden. Hurrying home, he stopped to watch the Skinners running down Cripplegate in the summer twilight. The smack of their shoes on the cobbles sounded like applause. Some stopped just long enough to hurl burning brands in through the windows of shops and banking houses. They carried things he thought were banners, until one pa.s.sed close by and he saw that it was the flayed skin of a Scriven. From Ludgate Hill came the crackling, brush-fire sound of muskets.

In some ways it was almost a relief. The anger of London had been building for so long, it had been like living on the flanks of a volcano. Now that the eruption had finally come, there was no time to worry about it, no time to think. Crumb hid among some bins near the tram Terminus to avoid another gang of Skinners, and was then almost shot down as a Skinner himself when he rounded a corner near the Engineerium and came upon a battalion of the Scriven's mercenaries, their crisp white uniforms smudged with soot and powder. Luckily the Scriven officer in charge of them recognized him from his Nonesuch House days and ordered them not to shoot.

"What is happening?" Gideon asked him, as he was bundled through the lines. "Where is G.o.dshawk?"

"Safe in the Barbican, Doctor, waiting for us to finish off this London rabble."

"What about his daughter?"

"Scrivener alone knows! These mobs are everywhere! Get back to your Engineerium, man; you'll be safe there...."

But next morning the mobs broke into the Engineerium itself, smas.h.i.+ng and looting, shouting that the Engineers were Scriven lackeys and no better than their masters. The frightened and bewildered Engineers were herded out into the courtyard, and there they might all have been killed, except that a second, larger band of Skinners happened by. They were led by a man named Creech, who scrambled up on an overturned sedan chair and fired his spring gun in the air to call for quiet. He wore a leather ap.r.o.n smeared with brown and crimson stains, and stuck through his belt was a long curved blade like a shard of the moon. But it turned out that, in this mob, he was the voice of reason.

"These men are our kind," he shouted, pointing at the captive Engineers. "We got no argument with them. This place of theirs will make good homes for human widows and human orphlings.

You want to do some killing, you better come with me; G.o.dshawk himself is still holding out in the Barbican!"

The Skinners went roaring off, leaving the Engineers to pick up the pieces of their smashed experiments and try to salvage their scattered and damaged books. Pickled Eel Circus was blazing like a colossal brazier, sending thick swathes of smoke across the Engineerium compound. More rioters pa.s.sed, and this time many of them wore once-white uniforms; the Scriven's mercenary soldiers had decided that the fight could not be won, and were changing sides. A few hours later the Engineers heard the cheering spread from the Barbican all through the city as word came that Auric G.o.dshawk had been killed.

But surely Wavey's blank, unspeckled skin would have saved her? Gideon kept thinking about her all through the confused days which followed the riots, while he helped the Order to move to their new home in the abandoned head of G.o.dshawk's giant statue. As he wheeled the Engineer's belongings on handcarts down the Westerway he was watched by severed Scriven heads, which the Skinners had stuck on the railings outside the houses there. None of them was Wavey's. But how could he know that hers was not among the flayed bodies that lay in the gutters, attracting the attentions of rats and ravens and stray dogs? Oh , surely, he thought, when she heard the rioters coming, she would have had the sense to wipe her false markings off and mingle with the mobs?

But Wavey wasn't logical; she had her p.r.i.c.kly Scriven pride, and he could well imagine her stencilling darker markings on just to taunt the Skinners....

When he neared Nonesuch Hill that morning he saw that the house he had known so well was scorched and tumbled. Charred gra.s.s crumbled into ash as he climbed the terraces. A film of soot lay on the surface of the pools. The blackened roof beams ticked softly, embers glowing red as the breeze fanned them. Metal had melted and flowed in silvery puddles and lacings over the blackened tiles underfoot.

"Wavey?" called Gideon, over the cawing of the carrion birds.

He started looking for her among the crumpled outbuildings, hoping that she might have hidden somehow, but all he found were the dead. Whether Wavey was among them or not, it was impossible to know; they all looked like heather roots scorched by a brush fire.

It was on his way back to London that day that Gideon decided to turn off his feelings. He had seen for himself now how dangerous emotions were. Tenderness and anger, love and hate, they all led to nothing but trouble; he blamed them for his own broken heart, as well as the feverish violence of the Skinners' Guilds. He was not an animal. From now on, he decided, he would live without feelings.

Looking carefully at himself in the speckled mirror which hung from a nail on his works.p.a.ce wall, Gideon shaved his head, and gathered up the pile of chestnut curls, and carried them to the stove, and threw them in and watched them burn.

It was a few weeks later that a note arrived in the careful, childish writing of Chigley Unthank, asking him to come and a.s.sess a new dig far out on the marshes. Dr. Crumb remembered Unthank, an archaeologist who had worked for G.o.dshawk and been a frequent visitor to Nonesuch House. Now he was an outcast, scratching a living for himself and his daughter in the Brick Marsh. His note claimed he had unearthed the fragments of an Ancient computer brain, but when Gideon reached the place, Unthank could only show him a few sc.r.a.ps of ruined circuit board lashed together with wire and strung with animal bones -- a common tribal totem from the time of the Downsizing. When Dr. Crumb explained patiently that such things could be dug up almost anywhere, and were of no use except as an ill.u.s.tration of how far mankind had sunk into savagery and superst.i.tion after the fall of the Ancient world, Master Unthank had grown embarra.s.sed, and even Gideon could tell that the tale of the computer brain had been just a ruse to bring him there.

Nervously, almost shyly, Unthank beckoned him into the miserable little smoke-filled, sc.r.a.p-plastic hut that was his home. His daughter, Katie, a scruffy-looking teenager, was scrubbing circuit shards in a tub of muddy water. Beside the fire a basket lay, and in the basket was a child, kicking its legs, jerking its tiny fists about. It stared up at Gideon with odd-colored eyes.

"Woman brought it here soon after the riots," said Unthank, from the doorway. "She kept her face hid, wouldn't give her name. Said she had to go on a journey, and couldn't take the kid. Said I was to send word for you."

"Why me?" asked Gideon.

Unthank did not reply. His daughter had stopped scrubbing and was watching Gideon curiously, as if waiting to see what he would do. Gingerly he reached into the basket and lifted the luggage label that was tied around the child's wrist.

He knew the handwriting at once. Wavey G.o.dshawk had been her father's a.s.sistant for a long time; each drawer and library shelf at Nonesuch House had been labelled in the same careful script that he saw on that brown paper tag, in the smoky light of Unthank's hut. There were just five words.

Her name is Fever Crumb.

Chapter 23 Under Siege.

Then you are my father?" asked Fever, when he had told her everything. She was shocked, of course; terribly shocked and disappointed that Dr. Crumb had ever given in to such fervid and unreasonable emotions. (And there was another feeling in her, too, a quivering, fluttering feeling that arose at the thought that he really was her father. But feelings did not matter, they were a distraction; all that mattered now was finding out the truth.) "That's what she meant, isn't it? Her name is Fever Crumb . Wavey G.o.dshawk was my mother, and she was saying that you were my father."

Dr. Crumb looked away, toward the rain-wet windows and the city outside them. He set down the cup he had been holding, and the sound made Fever start. "You are her child, of that I'm sure. It has always been thought that h.o.m.o sapiens and h.o.m.o superior could not have children together...."

"But perhaps Wavey was not like other Scriven," suggested Fever. "She had hardly any markings. Or perhaps G.o.dshawk was telling you the truth, and there was never as much difference between us and them as they liked to claim...."

"Both those things are possible," admitted Dr. Crumb. "But we have no evidence. All I know is that the label was in Wavey's handwriting, and that it said Her name is Fever Crumb. At the time I thought she had just written that to make me think that you were mine, hoping that would make me take care of you. I didn't mind. I would have taken care of you anyway. It was the only reasonable thing to do. But later, as you grew, you seemed so like me in so many ways that I began to wonder if you might be mine after all."

Fever went to the mirror on the wall, which she had stood before so often to shave her head. She could see herself reflected there, and Dr. Crumb behind her. She saw now that they had the same narrow faces, the same sticky-out ears. But she hadn't inherited his small mouth or long nose. Her mouth and nose were echoes of another face -- the face of Wavey G.o.dshawk.

"Didn't you try to find her?" she asked. "After you'd found me, I mean. After you knew she must still be alive?"

Dr. Crumb shook his head. "It was impossible, Fever. I had no way of knowing which way she had fled. North, south, east, or west? I had no contacts outside London whom I could ask about a fugitive Scriven. And if I did ask, and they had seen her, I might only have caused her to be recognized, and killed. For all I know she died in the Marshes somewhere, after she left you at Unthank's hut. The Skinners still had patrols and watchers out there. She vanished, Fever. She was swallowed up by history, and we shall probably never know what became of her. I am just glad that at least I have you."

"The other Engineers? Dr. Stayling? Do they know all this?"

Dr. Crumb shook his head. "I have always told them what I told you. That I found you in a basket on the marsh ...

Fever kept looking at herself. Half-Scriven, she thought. Wavey's daughter . G.o.dshawk's granddaughter. She said, 'There's more. I remember things. Things that happened before I was born; things that only G.o.dshawk could have seen ..."

Dr. Crumb frowned. "Some sort of inherited memory? It does not sound likely...."

Something slammed against G.o.dshawk's Head with a sound like a huge bell ringing.

Dr. Crumb went to the window. 'There is a mob out there!" he said.

Fever joined him, looking down. The rain had slackened, but an ominous, end-of-the-world gloom still hung Over the abandoned factories. A tide of people was flooding onto the wasteland that surrounded G.o.dshawk's Head. Sedan chairs bobbed upon it, and burning torches made bright points of saffron light behind the rain. Those at the front of the crowd were throwing things, and a few of them threw hard enough to hit the Head. Tiles and half bricks clanged and sang against the metal, and from some neighboring room came the clash of a smashed window.

Fever and Dr. Crumb ran from his quarters and down the stairs. Down on the library level they met Dr. Stayling and some others coming up. "The commons have surrounded us," said Stayling. "It is like the Skinners' Riots come again. But there is no call for alarm, gentlemen, or, ah, Fever. I have switched on the intrud-o-cutor; that should hold the troublemakers at bay."

From outside came cries and curses, accompanied by flutterings of hard, blue light. The Engineers had not forgotten the attack on their old premises, and they had taken measures to defend their new home. The high fence which ringed the Head was wired to a 'lectric pile in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and at the first sign of the rioters attacking, Dr. Stayling had turned it on. Once a few of the roughs outside had been blasted by the powerful current the rest drew back, scared of the Order's magic and content to hurl stones and insults up at G.o.dshawk's impa.s.sive face.

"Scriven lovers!"

"Send out the Patchskin maid!"

'Throw her out, or we'll climb up and get her!"

Their words came thinly into the Head. Fever listened, and tried not to tremble. "I should go out there," she said. 'That would be the most logical thing, if I give myself up, they might leave the Head alone. The survival of the Order is more important than the survival of... of me."

"Nonsense!" said Master Isbister hotly.

"Give you up to those unreasoning brutes?" said Dr. Stayling. "Never!"

A movement on the stairs behind her made Fever start and turn, but it was only Kit Solent, still pale and weak looking, with Dr. Pither hurrying behind him saying, "You should not try to move, Solent. You will open the wound again. You should rest until we can find you a physician...."

Kit waved him away. "Fever...You're all right?"

Fever nodded, but could not take her eyes off his bloodstained coat.

"Don't worry about me," he told her. "I can look after myself. I'm going to try and get back to Ludgate Hill...."

"Impossible," said Dr. Stayling. "The Head is surrounded, and if we switch off the intrud-o-cutor that rabble will be over it in a jiffy"

"But, Doctor, I must try! My son and daughter ..."

"Oh, be reasonable, man! You will be no use to your children dead. Even if you did get out, that rabble would tear you to pieces. They've seen you with Fever, remember, or their leaders have. You would never make it to Ludgate Hill."

A fresh surge of shouting and cheering came from outside. A barrage of stones rattled like hail against G.o.dshawk's face. Even if Kit had tried to argue with the old Engineer, he would never have made himself heard. Dr. Stayling waited patiently for the din to subside, then went on.

"There is only one thing to do. We must get you and Fever to safety. Once they see that you are gone, the mob will lose interest in this place. There is little loot in it apart from books, and they do not look like bookish types. I shall send someone to fetch those children of yours, Solent, and you can return as soon as these riots are over."

"But when will that be?" demanded Kit. "And where shall we hide in the meantime?"

"I believe Dr. Collihole's balloon is airworthy," said Stayling. "The wind is from the southwest today. It will carry you north, where help will be waiting for you."

"What help?" asked Dr. Crumb.

"The Movement," said Dr. Stayling, glancing about fiercely to quell the startled murmuring of his Engineers. "Yes, gentlemen, I have been in contact with agents of the Movement."

"You're in league with those nomadic ruffians?" cried Griffin Whyre, aghast.

"I have talked with their agents," said Stayling calmly. "And I do not believe they are ruffians. They respect knowledge far more than most Londoners; their entire society is based upon the application of technology. I have received overtures of friends.h.i.+p from their leader, Land Admiral Quercus, who has given me to understand that once he controls London we Engineers shall be given the status of a Guild. We shall be consulted by our new rulers, and allowed a seat on council alongside the Guilds of Surgeons and Wig Makers and Perfumiers...."

The Engineers started to brighten at that, but the boom of some heavy object cras.h.i.+ng against the outside of the Head reminded them of their predicament.

"How long before these friends of yours arrive?" asked Kit Solent.

Dr. Stayling shook his head thoughtfully. "They are coming to London because of the technology we possess. They have been waiting beyond the Moatway while their agents make contact with various important persons such as myself in the hope that they might achieve a peaceful takeover. But their patience has its limits, and once they learn that riots have broken out, I should imagine they will move fast to secure the city. I would expect them in a day or so, no more. Until then, you and Fever will be safe in their convoy. They will have surgeons there who can attend to your injury."

"And the children?" asked Kit.

"I shall send Dr. Crumb to make sure that they are safe," the Chief Engineer promised.

"Why me?" asked Dr. Crumb.

"You are our childcare expert, Crumb."

"But I must go with Fever ..."

"Impossible!" cried Dr. Collihole, who had been fluttering nervously behind Dr. Stayling all through his talk. "My balloon will not lift more than two persons. Indeed, we do not know for certain that it will lift anyone at all. I had planned to make the first ascent myself; I would not feel easy in myself entrusting the lives of Fever and Master Solent to such an untested device...."

"It seems we have no choice, Doctor," said Kit Solent, smiling weakly at him. "I do not think that your 'lectrified fence will hold off that mob outside for long. Those people out there don't think like Engineers. They are barely thinking at all. Once they've worked themselves up into enough of a rage they'll find a way in here, even if they have to bridge the fence with their own dead. I don't like Dr. Stayling's plan much, but I can't think of another."

Dr. Stayling nodded, pleased that Kit had given in to reason. "As soon as this mob disperses," he promised, "I shall go straight to the Movement's chief agent, a woman named Madame Lakshmi who has a tower in the Astrologer's Quarter. She is in possession of a remarkable piece of old technology that enables her to communicate with our friends in the north. I shall ask her to warn them that you are on your way. Well, gentlemen?"

The Engineers stood gazing at him. They were men of thought, not action.

"Come on!" urged Dr. Stayling, starting to lead them up the stairs. "Come on! We have a balloon to fill!"

They started after him, up toward Collihole's attic. Soon Fever and Dr. Crumb were left alone, except for Dr. Isbister, who had never placed any credence in either the intrud-o-cutor or old Collihole's dreams of flight, and intended to stand guard over his precious library.

Fever knew she should be concerned at Dr. Stayling's scheme -- she could already see a dozen flaws in it -- but her mind was too numb. She had come through so much madness that day that a little more seemed to make no difference. Why not take Dr. Collihole's air balloon, if that was the only way to leave? Why not seek shelter with the Movement, if there was none to be found in London? But there were things she needed to do before she left. She pointed toward the library doors.

"Dr. Isbister, don't we have some of G.o.dshawk's notebooks in the collection?"

"We do," admitted the librarian, "but this seems hardly the moment ..."

Fever turned to Dr. Crumb. "Perhaps one of them contains something about what he did to me...."

"But Fever," he said, "we have so little time!"