Between Friends: A City Between Compliation, page 18
That was understandable. Now that it was his estate, the entire place would begin to mould itself to his wishes and ways of life; sometimes that would involve obscuring his whereabouts from the other occupants of the manor, and sometimes it would involve making life more uncomfortable for everyone who wasn’t him.
“You’ll have to take it up with the house if you don’t approve of it,” Zero said, testing the edge of the latest blade with his thumb. “It’s an ancestral home, and it’s been like this for centuries.”
“I’ve never approved of that sort of thing,” Palomena said, unexpectedly. “Especially for certain people and certain estates.”
Zero put his knife down deliberately, taking his time to do it, and let down his end of the strop before he turned his entire attention on her. “You mean particularly me,” he said. “Why?”
“Look at it this way, sir,” she said. “If your niece were to try the kind of things she does so successfully in her own house here, would they work?”
“I would have stopped it years ago if I could do this sort of thing anywhere else,” Zero said flatly. “I would have had her confined to her room where she couldn’t get into trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” said Palomena, in the way one says, “That’s exactly what I meant.”
“You think it was better for her to have her arm taken off piece by piece? You think it’s better that she married a vampire and is now—”
“I think,” Palomena said smoothly, “that your niece took down an entire world order while also fighting you tooth and nail to make sure that she could do what she thought was right, even if it cost her everything. I think her arm was her own to give, and not yours to keep. The kind of assistance that estates give to overbearing owners is exactly the reason that you left in your younger years, I believe.”
Instead of answering that, Zero asked, “You think it encourages the heads of the family to exert control they shouldn’t exert?”
“Of course it does. Why try to convince your progeny of anything when you can control and frighten them into doing what you want them to do instead? When they’re aware that every part of their life is surrounded by and controlled by you, they either fall into line or into danger. A well-run estate is a weapon on the inside as much as it’s a weapon on the outside.”
Zero, who knew the truth of this experientially, but who was stubborn enough to think that if he had the running of things, he would run them differently—more kindly, thanks to what he had learned while dealing with his niece, albeit with a sufficiently strong hand—persisted.
“You can’t think that a good master running an estate is the same as a bad one.”
“There’s only a few years and a few disagreements between a good master and a bad master when it comes to an estate being run on the wishes and desires of a single person without regard to the rest of the household.”
“You think power always corrupts, then?”
“If you’re uncomfortable with that, say that it encourages selfishness,” Palomena said. “After all, if you’re the master of the house, you have the right to have everything running as you want it. And if anyone pushes back, you have the power to make life very uncomfortable for them, even when you’re not doing it consciously—the whole system works for you without you having to think about it. And after a while, it’s offensive when people don’t acknowledge your power, so you make sure they have to. Then you’re grasping for that acknowledgement over smaller and smaller things.”
“It’s not about controlling things,” Zero said, picking up a blade at random. He found that he had already sharpened it and put it down with some bemusement. It never had been about controlling things. It had always been about keeping things safe. Particularly little soft things that didn’t seem to be able to keep themselves safe. “It’s about serving the denizens of the estate and having the power to keep them safe.”
“If it was about service, estate owners would be happy to serve without it,” Palomena said. “Instead of trying to insist on acknowledgement. Did you know that estates where everyone is given a share of the estate and place in it are known to—”
“Estates have to be run by one person if they aren’t to fall apart,” Zero said. He said it with a kind of finality that he unconsciously expected to put an end to the conversation with its authority.
“I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on that,” said Palomena, and there was a very large silence at the end of her sentence that Zero took far too long to fill with the thing that should have been in that space.
“You forgot to say sir,” he said. He thought about it and added, “You’ve forgotten it for the last ten minutes, actually.”
“My apologies, sir,” she said.
Zero had a moment of deep disappointment. He wasn’t sure what he had expected her to say, but it hadn’t been that. He picked up the free end of the strop and began setting the final edge on another pre-sharpened blade, annoyed with himself for being surprised and disappointed, and still disappointed beneath that.
Clamping down on that disappointment and trying by sheer force of will to turn it into disinterest—and achieving a gloominess that was nevertheless close enough to serve as the same—Zero proffered his own apology. “I’m sorry to have made it hard for you to find me,” he said.
That would give her a chance to say that it was nothing, or not at all, sir, and Zero found that he very much wanted to hear something of the kind from Palomena at this very moment.
Instead, she started that prickling feeling up again by asking unexpectedly, “Are you all right, sir?”
“Of course,” he said—a stock reply to help hide the fact that he didn’t know how to reply to enquiries of this sort. The blade, now motionless in his hand, felt awkward. “I’m always well.”
“Yes, sir,” said Palomena. “I suppose that’s why you’re working your way through the armoury, one blunt edge at a time.”
Zero would have liked to have said, coldly, that he was working through the armoury because it had been kept in bad repair while he’d been gone, but Old Leonard was standing within earshot again and didn’t deserve to be thrown to the wolves.
He also didn’t put it past the old fellow to give him the sort of reproachful look he was least proof against—especially when Old Leonard must have been as well aware as Zero was, that he had done his lord a service.
Instead, he asked, “What do you want?”
“It’s not so much what I want as what the Enforcers want,” Palomena said, uncrushed.
She always was uncrushed, unlike the Pet, who had always been dampened by his cursory replies to tentative forays of—affection? Care?
Was Palomena being caring toward him?
Zero, insensibly, began to sharpen the blade again. “What do the Enforcers want?”
“There’s a problem with one of the computers, sir, and someone told the higher ups that you’ve had experience with things like that.”
“I beg your—computer? We have computers? I know nothing about them—I was sent via email once when we first met…a certain acquaintance—and I have no other experience with them.”
That wasn’t quite true, but the small amount of further experience he had had with computers hadn’t given him any further knowledge of them.
“I daresay you don’t, sir, but you absolutely know more than anyone else in the enforcers, and I’ve been sent to bring you along so that we can figure out exactly what’s going on. They suspect that someone has put some sort of magic virus in it to spy on the command centre it’s in.”
“They’d be better off throwing it out,” Zero said dourly. “I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Perhaps not, but they want you to look at it regardless.”
“It’ll only end in me throwing it out the window,” he warned.
Palomena seemed indifferent to the idea of computers being thrown out windows. “I’m sure they’ll trust your judgement, no matter what you do with it. I have a feeling that the older ones think of it as an eldritch abomination and the younger ones think of it as…well, they seem to think of it as an eldritch abomination as well, but they’re a lot more excited about it. Why don’t you consider it a useful distraction?”
“A distraction from what?” Zero asked, at last looking up again—daring her to answer.
“I’m sure you know best about that, sir.”
He made an impatient movement, then thrust the nearly-ready blades back onto the bench in front of him and stood. “We might as well get it over with,” he said. “Where is it?”
“It’s the Cygnet office,” Palomena said. More helpfully, she added, “It’s the one where the town is all on the same street and there are five bakeries.”
“Are the bakeries involved in the problem?”
“Not that I know of, sir.”
Zero hazarded, “Are the patrons in danger?”
“No, sir,” said Palomena. He wasn’t sure if she was amused or confused.
He said suspiciously, “You said there were bakeries. I expected that it was pertinent information. Don’t give me information that isn’t pertinent.”
“Yes, sir,” said Palomena. “Only I thought that we might be able to get a few things on the way home, thus making it extremely pertinent. There’s a Polish bakery that has several different kinds of pastry that are all very good and—”
Zero stared at her. “You want to stop for pastries on the way home?”
“It might make the trip out worthwhile, sir,” she suggested.
* * *
Zero wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but somehow or other, not even half an hour later, he was striding along the main—and only—street that made up the bulk of the town of Cygnet. The glimmer of Between still clung to his boots and flickered in the reflected strands of his hair as he passed windows; it also made small, moonlit gleams in Palomena’s tightly braided hair in the flickering reflections. Too many of the buildings along the street were older, grand places with ties to older Tasmania, and the shifting Between world they had moved through—deeper and more dangerous than the human world that skimmed above them—had ties to those bricks and stones and beams.
“Bit sticky here, sir,” Palomena said, brushing down the front of her uniform almost instinctively and stopping to scuff her boots slightly. “The office isn’t far.”
That was another reason for the way the other world still tried to cling: a Behindkind office sitting in an older street tended to draw all the Between threads toward itself and make a miasma of reality that was too fuzzy around the edges for safety.
At the centre of that fuzziness was a brick and wood building with maroon accents that looked as though it had been built in the 1920s; it was currently a restaurant, but Palomena ignored the open door in the vestibule that led toward a dining area, and went on toward the carpeted stairs instead.
Zero, following her, found himself treading over moss and flowers instead of carpet within a few steps, and felt a cool breeze that might have been air-conditioning if it hadn’t been for the scent of hyacinths that floated along with it. At the landing, he stepped into a room that wasn’t quite a room but wasn’t quite not a room, either.
There were windows, and they did show a comprehensive view of the street when he looked out of them, but the walls didn’t seem quite sure about being walls instead of hedges, and the carpeted floor hadn’t yet made up its mind about being carpet or moss. The few desks that existed weren’t as structured or canonically desk-like as they might have been.
“You can’t come in here,” said the pooch-bellied satyr at one of the desks. He leaned back in his chair despite the words, and Zero didn’t get the impression that the satyr had any intention of trying to stop anyone coming in.
“We were sent by head office,” Palomena told him. “They said you have a computer problem.”
“It’s no problem to me,” the satyr said. “It sits over there and does its work, and I sit over here and do mine. If the lot of you stopped fussing around it and let it be, we’d all have a few less problems.”
Palomena’s eyes met Zero’s briefly before she turned back to the satyr. “Someone said it was spying on the office?”
“What if it is? We don’t do anything here. Let it spy.”
Zero said briefly, “I’ll take a look at it,” and left Palomena with the satyr. He didn’t want to be investigating a computer, but he wanted even less to be arguing with a satyr about whether or not anything done in a Behindkind office was worth spying on.
As he approached the computer, several heads popped up and around dividers, hedges, and the edges of desks that weren’t quite where they ought to be.
“Finally!” someone muttered. “Maybe we can all get back to work again once it’s fixed!”
Someone else said audibly, “What work? The only time I hear your little faun feet tip-tapping around is when the boss comes up here.”
Zero focused on one of the faces—the small, round one that looked most serious—and said, “Come around here.”
The head bowed briefly, then twitched back behind its hedge so that a small, furry centaur could trot into view, her horsey hind-quarters as close-clipped and neat as her hair. Her sleeveless business shirt was tied neatly at the bottom in lieu of a belt.
He asked her briefly, “What’s been happening?”
“We’re losing chunks of the day,” she said. “Ever since Between grew all over the computer cords and the flowers came out, we’ve been missing pieces of time—or running them all over again—and we’re getting informational displays we shouldn’t be able to access. It also seems to be sending information it shouldn’t be sending.”
“What sort of information?”
“Yesterday, it told head office that Doris has been taking two-hour lunches instead of one-hour lunches.”
“It’s not true!” called someone from behind a hedge. Doris, most likely.
“Is it sending anything more dangerous?”
“Not so far, no,” the centaur said. “But it shouldn’t be sending anything at all. It’s not connected to the human internet, and our systems don’t connect to human systems.”
“Yes,” said Zero, as if he understood what that meant. He did, vaguely. He said, “I’ll take a look.”
“It usually only repeats lunch hour,” called out the satyr. “And that’s the opposite of a problem.”
Zero ignored that and stared at the computer as Palomena came to stand beside him.
The computer was…a computer. He gazed at it for some time, trying to remember everything he knew about computers. The thin, box-like piece at the top was the monitor, and displayed whatever was needed. The box below the desk was the brain to the machine. The cords that ran to and from both of those pieces were to be expected, but…
“Do you think there should be flowers growing from the power cord, sir?” asked Palomena.
Zero doubted it. He also didn’t think there should be moss creeping along the top of the monitor, or fungi blooming between the keys of the keyboard, either. Despite each of those things, however, the screen of the computer was lit, the keyboard was also functional, and a steady, comfortable whirrrr proceeded from the lower part of the machine.
In fact, that comfortable whirrrr was very nearly a purr, and if Zero had found it wise to attribute living characteristics to a machine, he would have said that the machine was pleased—perhaps even smug.
As his eyes ranged over the machine, looking for anything and everything that could be considered out of the ordinary, that steady whirrrr sped up and became eager, purposeful. Fungi puffed itself through the keyboard in its zest for life, and a sprinkling of bluebells sprang up along the connecting cord from monitor to CPU.
“Do we think it should be doing that, then, sir?” asked Palomena, watching the blossoming of new life with a fascinated eye.
“Unplug it!” said a shrill voice that Zero recognised as the previously-mentioned Doris. “If I have to do the same work over again once more, I’m going to write a strongly-worded letter to head office!”
“It might be a good idea, sir,” murmured Palomena, her eyes flicking over the swiftly spreading flora.
Zero, who could feel the movement of something deeper and more insidious deep in the moss beneath his feet, said, “Everybody out!”
Nobody needed to be told twice: everyone except the satyr variously cantered, ran, bowled, barged, and flew toward the door, then milled up against it like water as it resisted their every effort to leave the room.
Zero and Palomena, bringing up the rear, exchanged looks; Zero shouldered his way through the small but frantic crowd, and found that there was no longer an opening where there had once been one that led to the landing. Instead, a cobwebby something that was neither cobweb nor quite something wove away the reality that had been a door and made it blank, unapproachable, and unable to be passed through.
“Unplug it!” said the same shrill voice, and this time, Zero could see that the voice belonged to a grey, wizened creature that was probably a gargoyle. Doris, the aforementioned gargoyle, looked as though she could do with a few solid meals of stone to help with the wizened look, but there was nothing wavering about the scowl she had turned on him. “We should have unplugged it from the start and thrown it out the window! No good comes of meddling with human wares!”
Zero’s eyes met Palomena’s once again. One of his shoulders lifted slightly and he opened his mouth to say, “We might as well try it,” when Palomena said, “I do hope you aren’t going to say I told you so, sir.”
He held her eyes just a moment longer, aware that there was amusement in his own. “We might as well try unplugging it, at least,” he said.
“Wouldn’t bother,” the satyr said. He was the only one who hadn’t left his desk, and now one of his hooves rested on that desk as he flipped through a magazine. “It’ll stop again when it’s done.”
“It hasn’t locked the doors before,” pointed out the miniature centaur. “Or closed us off from the restaurant.”
“It doesn’t matter what it does when we’re in here; the thing is that it always stops again after a couple of hours.”
