The Archive Undying, page 4
For now, he shoulders his ruck, grits his teeth, and leads the way down into the valley.
* * *
They duck between the rotting detritus of the refugee camps that surrounded Chom Dan before its corruption. These went unburned, as Register Parse’s infrastructure didn’t extend to them. But when the city that sustained them went up in flames, they might as well have gone with it.
The boundaries of the city proper are marked by singed walls on warehouses and the like. On the outskirts, anything that might have been part of Register Parse has long since been stolen. Intermittent flat chunks of flagstone have been carved from the ground, the gouged edges scorched. Only once they get far enough into the city that the buildings vary into residences do they see the first remaining fragment of the corrupted network. They’ve ducked inside a caved-in café to lie in wait while the crystalline frag lumbers past. A section of interior wall behind the counter is half slagged, all black. The etching across it is illegible, ruined by fire. These now-dark lines of once-light would have channeled Register Parse’s power to the rusting appliances.
They find more and more inscribed stone murals as they venture across streets ruptured by burst pipes, through buildings reduced to charred frames, over clay rubble and crunching glass. The maze of masonry that was the network is more evident farther in, especially in the temples, from which scavengers are often too superstitious to harvest.
Their first temple lies on the eastern fringe of the city. It’s lucky that the carved stone face is in the first antechamber, as the back hall has largely collapsed. It stands as tall as Jin, who gangles, its goat eyes flared, cheeks high and feathered, snake fangs bared in a scowl.
“The Emanation of God Constipated,” says Jin.
“The Emanation of God Edging,” says Sunai.
“The Emanation of God Petty as Hell—watch it,” says Veyadi.
It’s actually the Emanation of God Vehement, and Sunai never cared for it.
Veyadi joins the game as they find the next temples—to God Aghast and God Rapt—proving himself more competitive than religious. Dzira shies from contributing, but laughs all the same. It keeps Sunai’s charges in good spirits whenever the crystalline frag lumbers down an avenue and they have to gin up the courage to sneak back out into its rumbling wake.
They avoid the frag fairly well as they tour the temples at the border. As the sun passes its zenith, and they draw closer to the heart of Chom Dan, they’ve hit some forty of the eighty sites. Then they get unlucky. The closer they get to the city center, the more agitated the frag becomes. It begins combing the streets by the valley mouth, advancing toward them in a tightening circle, boxing them in.
“Better off holing up than trying to make it back to the Scrap,” Sunai advises Veyadi in the grungy, gilt-flaked lobby of the university administration building where they’ve taken shelter.
Veyadi fiddles with the notebook in which he marks down every temple they visit. “Where do we go?”
“The shrine. Frags hate shrines.”
Veyadi adopts the pained scowl of God Vehement. Then he sighs and pushes his palm to the temple of his visor. “Fine. Sorry. I trust your judgment. It’s just strange, being back.”
This admission is a gift. Sunai loiters on the idiot edge of asking for more—when Veyadi was last in Chom Dan, and why. He tears himself away to convey the plan to the others.
The shrine’s not far. Just across the square, at the juncture of mountain and valley. Carved into the cliff face, the sole shrine of Register Parse rises in nine blue-gray stories. Intricate engraved tapestries bathe the stone, depicting divine beasts, Emanations of God, and scenes from the Lay, breaking for three arched floor-to-ceiling windows on each floor. Twenty-seven dark mouths, each more than tall enough to swallow a devotee whole. Five years ago, each etched line shone with careful light, always sure, never blinding, and gentle to behold. Now the shrine and its innards amount to a very large rock, and Sunai suspects they’ll need their flashlights to see the interior.
First, they’ll have to get past the frag. It wanders, skittering from one side of the square to the other and sending tremors through bedrock with each stumble. They huddle in the lobby for at least a half hour before they get their chance.
Jin tosses a pebble at Sunai’s and Veyadi’s booted toes, the signal they’ve been waiting for. They have time to run and nothing else.
They scramble to grab their rucks. Dzira leads, Jin takes the rear, and they’re off. Their footsteps crack against the rubbled square as they go and go, four humans interloping in a city no longer theirs.
Veyadi curses abruptly and turns as he slows—his hands wide and empty. Sunai follows his attention to the building they just fled. Veyadi says, “My book—”
A dreadful crash drowns out the rest. The luminous head of the crystalline fragtech rises high over the caverned buildings they left behind. They’ve been seen.
“Sorry, Boss.” Dzira grabs Veyadi by the arm and hauls.
Later, Sunai won’t claim that he was thinking. He just acts. Exchanges a nod with Jin—Jin grabs Veyadi’s other arm—and bolts back toward the administrative lobby.
He hears yelling behind him. Ahead, the looming thunder of the frag. Sunai’s vision narrows and his ankle throbs as he throws himself forward, forward, forward, until he vaults over the open frames of cracked glass doors and back into the lobby.
The dire sound of the returning fragtech keeps time with his search, shaking dust from the creaking ceiling. Sunai skids over pebble-strewn marble to the copse of rotted couches where they earlier took refuge. Veyadi’s notebook lies exactly where he sat not minutes ago. Sunai snatches it up and scrambles back out the door.
His ankle buckles angrily as he breaks into sunshine. It hurts, because it always hurts, and he’s afraid, because he’s always afraid, but pain is fleeting, and the frag is coming.
Sunai pelts across the square, chased by the roar of the frag bulling through the collapsing building. He is so, so close to the shrine—close enough to see human movement in its dark mouth—when the tremor of the flagstones underfoot makes him stumble and the watery shadow of the frag catches up to him.
An electronic wail cuts through the cloud of Sunai’s panic. Two decoy drones hurtle out of the shrine and sail up past his head, and for a heady moment the thunder stops.
Sunai sprint-stagger-stumbles the final stretch into the shrine, where he’s caught around the arms and pretty much carried into the black.
Through the open archway, Sunai sees the frag lurch in one direction, then the next, as the drones lead it back the way it came.
“Lucky it’s slow, huh?” he says, though it sounds less like a joke than a long, ululating wheeze.
The hold on his arms tightens, hard on the bone, and he winces. It’s too dark for Veyadi to see that it hurts. It is Veyadi, he’s pretty sure, though having careened through all that sun, Sunai is rendered a white-splotched blind. He doesn’t need to see Veyadi’s face to recognize the voice behind the spitting anger. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Veyadi’s fury snaps into bright focus as Jin pins him with a flashlight. “Lay off, Doc. Sunai went back for your dumb book. You wanna crawl up someone’s ass, try your own.”
“Jin. It’s fine.” Sunai’s tone is even, lightened by an embedded instinct that moves his free hand to Veyadi’s elbow. The doctor vibrates under his palm, even through the layers of winter gear. “Hey. We made it. We’re here. We’re okay. Do you want my hand? You’re good.”
The light of Jin’s flashlight wavers over Veyadi’s tight-lined face, his mouth opening in an abbreviated gasp. His panic must appall him; he does like to provide care, and he’s yet to show Sunai any sign that he knows how to receive it. Jin stops being a jerk long enough for Sunai to say the series of small, short, regular nothings that bring Veyadi back from adrenaline and terror.
Veyadi releases Sunai’s hands before he should. When Sunai offers the notebook, Veyadi takes it and mumbles apology. Sunai tells him it’s fine. It is. Taking the time to tend to Veyadi gave Sunai’s ankle room to recover from the damage he did to it. When he joins Jin and Dzira in the center of the main floor, his limp isn’t any worse than usual.
Dzira shoots a brief, awkward look at Sunai, and a longer one at Veyadi, but he does his damnedest to pretend he didn’t notice his employer’s brush with an anxiety attack; Jin continues to simmer. Sunai has them point out what they’ve found, wanting principally to know how their group is going to get up to the next floor.
The inside of the shrine is largely more blackened nothing—an impressive expanse of it, too. Their lights find no gleam in the walls, only the gaping circle in the ceiling that leads up into another hole, and another, and another, one for every floor up to the ninth. The seat in the middle of this vast lack, where a massive pillar carved with light once shot up through all nine holes, is black and empty also. No trace of the archival body of Register Parse remains.
Jin locates the winding stairs to the upper floors. These take them up to the fourth floor but no higher; the fifth is partially caved in. They pick their way past the lightless hole at the center as they explore their options. Veyadi and Sunai pause independently on opposite sides of it. From the rim of the gap, one can see all the way down to the bottom, where Register Parse’s archive isn’t.
“Could scale the outer wall.” Veyadi tears his eyes away. “Plenty of footholds in the network.”
“Yeah, and get swatted,” says Jin. “Frag’s still out there, Doc.” What they mutter after is unclear, but Sunai hears “liability.”
He pats Jin’s shoulder. “It’s a grave. He’s allowed to be upset.”
“Oh, please forgive me,” Jin simpers, “it pains me to know that the archivist is sad.”
Veyadi stops in his tracks, hands gripping the straps of his ruck.
“Come on. Some Mohani hermit crawls out of the woodwork with credit and an education, and you think we don’t know exactly what you are?” Jin’s lip curls. “You sell Register Parse to the Harbor too?”
“There was nothing left,” Veyadi snarls.
“Bullshit. There’s always something—”
Sunai’s hand slips over Jin’s mouth. They cough and jerk back, spitting out the hard candy Sunai snuck past their teeth. “Suck on that and calm down.” Sunai points a warning finger at Veyadi: You too, or you’re next. Then he beckons them both close, and Dzira, who sweats with the fretful look of a man who doesn’t like watching cats fight either.
“We’re hungry,” says Sunai when they’re all close enough to hear his whisper, “and we’re tired, and we’re hiking up a tomb. I’m making lunch.”
He sends Jin to find a way up—to at least the seventh floor, if possible. Veyadi he directs to the vaulted windows, to keep an eye out for the frag. Dzira he tasks with getting in touch with the Scrap and confirming their condition, which keeps him close; Sunai suspects he’s a bit freaked out.
As the rice boils, Sunai laughs and says, “See, this is why I go it alone. No temper tantrums to deal with but mine.”
Dzira, radio module in his lap, remains uneasy. “Don’t get me wrong. The boss, he’s been good to us. Maybe it’s that we didn’t get this close to the city last time…”
“Last time? You’ve been out this way before?”
Dzira rubs the back of his neck, bashful to be contemplating anything more complicated than a carabiner. “Not here-here. Around, you know? But that job got, I dunno. And now this one…” He struggles to link his thoughts. Sunai waits; something in Dzira’s hesitation unsettles him. “I guess, it’s just, is there something I should know about archivists?”
Dzira uses the Imperial Standard word for “archivist”—the one with connotations of libraries and record-keeping. The word in Mohani is a synonym for “vital organs.”
Sunai rubs his fingers against the cold. He needs them occupied. “What do you know already?”
A noncommittal shrug. Sunai can guess. When Mohani archivists feature in dramas, they’re typecast as haunted, strange, and dangerous as the AI who chose them. Real archivists don’t tend to consort with the likes of Dzira.
“I forget the rest of you didn’t have them,” says Sunai; it sounds like a lie because it is. Of course he remembers. But for the most part, people don’t like hearing just how unconventional Iterate Fractal’s archivists were. “They were teachers and mediators.”
Everyone has those.
“Priests, sort of. They had to know the Lay.”
And everyone has priests.
“Archivists were Iterate Fractal’s fingers. Every compound had one. If you had a problem, you went to an archivist first.”
That’s not especially unusual either. AIs play house with government officials all the time.
Dzira frowns; he’s heard the stories. “But didn’t they…”
“Maintain Iterate Fractal’s archives? Some of them.”
Dzira’s frown contorts as if he’s been unwillingly shown pornography. No other AI would let its citizens plunge elbow-deep into its archival heart. Iterate Fractal wasn’t great with boundaries.
“It’s not that unusual,” Sunai says, more to soothe Dzira’s nerves. “Anybody could learn to do what they did. Neurotransitive architecture, psychological frameworks, all that. Most salvage-rats know as much.”
“I guess that’s not what I mean. Why…” Dzira glances upward, in the direction Jin stormed off.
Sunai smiles to let the bitterness show. “The usual. When your AI corrupts, you either stay or you run, and a lot of the people who can run, they run as far as they can. That’s what the archivists did. Most of them, anyway. The Harbor killed the ones who didn’t. AI collaborators, you know? But if an archivist made it to the mainland, they were set. Not every day an AI finds someone well-trained in wrangling citizens and maintaining NT networks.”
Dzira’s gaze drifts toward the windows and the long stretch of refugee camps surrounding Chom Dan. So many refugees left out in the cold. So few allowed within. Archivists cut to the front of the line. Cushy deal, until you consider how any archivists who lived inside Chom Dan would have been hanging out with Register Parse at the moment of its corruption. Presumably they got as scorched as the rest of its shrine. Except, perhaps, for one.
Dzira’s nose wrinkles. “All right, but … Boss can’t wrangle folks for shit.”
Sunai can see why Dzira assumes that, but Veyadi is good enough to convince a crew to follow him without pressing for answers they really should know. Good enough to tell an ENGINE, “Thank you, we don’t want any, run the fuck along now.” Good enough to have Sunai hanging on his every word despite his remaining survival instinct.
Granted, Sunai has a weakness, the kind of bad habit that kills better men. He misses archivists because he craves the way they make divinity feel possible. It’s spiteful to want to rely on this one, given the likelihood that it will get said better man killed.
For Dzira’s benefit, Sunai shrugs. The rice is ready, and he scoops it into the mugs he brought for the purpose. He sends Dzira to Jin with their share and brings Veyadi’s himself. He needs to get the hell away from his ruck.
Veyadi crouches in the shadow of the far-right window. It gives him a good view of the crystalline frag, which lurks in front of one of the ruined temples—Emanation of God Mordant or God Disconsolate, Sunai can’t remember which. Veyadi’s rescued notebook lies open at his feet. The pages are blank but for a scrawled, upset doodle. He doesn’t move until Sunai replaces the book with the rice mug, which he picks up with testing care.
“It was just gone,” Veyadi says at last, dull and defensive. “Register Parse’s archive. Every last trace. I didn’t—we didn’t … It was dead. Just dead.”
“I’m sorry,” says Sunai.
“It’s not why we’re here.”
“It can be. Part of it, I mean.” Sunai intends to leave it at that, but he’s holding too much in his mouth to keep it all in. “I was here too, you know. For a while. Out there on the fringe, by the temple of God Adamant. It was nice. Nice as it could be, anyway. You could tell Register Parse was trying. Never sent anyone to clear out the camps, always had the temples on food duty. It didn’t have enough jobs, and the people kept coming, but it never drove them off.”
Veyadi clutches the mug like a lifeline and keeps failing to interrupt. He resists sadness with a hard jawline. “I told you,” he says, “I’m not here for Register Parse. I—”
Sunlight flashes across the city as the crystal frag lunges down an avenue. They hold their breath, watching for its next move. Sunai is at once irritated—he was about to hear something important—and grateful (he was about to hear something important).
The frag settles.
“I remember,” says Sunai. “We’re playing pilgrim. But really, Adi, you couldn’t bring a map? Even an old tourist brochure would do.”
“We have to do it right. We have to find it ourselves.” Veyadi sips congee to hide the face he makes. “Just trust me.”
Sunai shrugs, nods, and pushes up his work goggles to start drafting a map in the notebook. Veyadi eats and simmers. He expects Sunai to fight, perhaps to call him crazy, and when Sunai does neither, the tension builds. If they were alone, Sunai might convince Veyadi to pin him down and work out some feelings. He worries that would be unkind. He also worries that he doesn’t want to be unkind to Veyadi.
He gets it, is the thing. Veyadi wants to be right about his aims—he wants to be proven right—and it galls him to sound like a mystic. But Sunai trusts mystics more than he trusts most people, and he fears that he wants to be there when Veyadi finds what he’s looking for.
The profound absence of Register Parse is a hole in him too.
5
During the night, the frag’s behavioral loop overtakes its impulse to make human meat-paste. Around moonset, it totters away from Register Parse’s shrine and into Chom Dan’s thicket of ruins. By sunrise, its body can be seen flashing amid the refugee camps as it exits the valley.
