“Some respond to light,” Dotty Catty says softly, “others to sound. They are clumsy and simple. But do not imagine they are harmless. They learn. Frankie says it is too much trouble to make them clever, so they start stupid and grow less so, writing their own punchcards. Although I understand they are not actual punchcards. It is all very modern. There is a limit to their understanding, of course, but Frankie has connected them. They appear to be individuals, but they are… like bees. A swarm. Albeit a swarm in which each member hates the others. Frankie says they are useless because their capacity is too small. They learn very little before they are full. But… they can surprise you.”
Righty-ho.
Carefully, Edie picks a path which keeps them all out of range, and steps through the curtain of broken toy soldiers only to find that they are barely the beginning; the cavern is a battlefield of broken mechanical armies, generations of soldiers rolling back in time from the most humanlike to the more crude and finally to helpless, curious boxes with fragile arms, all of them locked to one another, half or completely shattered, reels of paper tape, punchcards and springs trailing from gaping wounds. There’s a word… Yes. Roboti. Metal slaves, mindless clockwork trapped in their own for-ever war.
She can see her team looking at them, and hopes like Hell they aren’t seeing some kind of ghastly reflection of themselves. One of the boxes claws at Flagpole’s leg. He kicks it, then stands on the box and jumps up and down until the metal folds and concertinas and the grasping hand fails.
“Spunky wee bugger,” Flagpole says, half admiring, and then, when the others look at him askance: “What? Am I noo allowed to touch the furniture, ey?”
Edie leads them on into the cavern.
The river must at one stage have thundered through unimpeded, surfacing here and there where the floor has caved in above it, but now it has been yoked by a succession of wheels and turbines, huge screws twisting inside scaffolds and tanks, armatures and driveshafts humming on greased bearings. Coils of copper in huge amount spark and hum behind glass shields which protect them from moisture, and loops of cable and wire like hawsers connect this endless city of capacitance with fizzing globes, crucibles, and other things more strange: wafers of silverish metal, nuggets and pills which hover spinning in the air, and towering black rods topped with shining arcs of electrical power.
Thick cables trail from one bench along the cavern wall to a small cleft, about five foot across at the widest. A strange, flickering light—not blue like the actinic gleam of the throne room but clearer, whiter—emerges in sporadic flashes. And then, a moment later, Edie hears gunfire. Worse yet, she can hear Americans.
She draws close to the wall and steps inside. The corridor widens abruptly, and she can smell jungle and something else: a rich, pungent stink of mammal, hot metal, and straw.
She rounds a corner, and sees a cave opening onto a lush nighttime mountain, and—lined up and gleaming in the light of a cinema screen—row upon row of grey legs and towering flanks and wrinkled, trunked faces, staring with mute intensity at the image of a man firing a revolver desperately into a dark alley.
“Hell, no!” cries the fugitive. “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”
She draws breath to call out, but Dotty Catty draws her back.
“They don’t like it when you interrupt the film,” she says, very quietly.
“They’re elephants,” Edie objects.
“Yes. In my father’s time we put on plays for them, and music. Now they watch films.” Since Dotty Catty thinks this is quite ordinary, Edie doesn’t argue. The old woman sighs. “They’re all I have,” she murmurs, so quietly that the gunfire from the film almost drowns her out. “My fathers’ fathers’ faithful friends. Like children. They trust me. Not him. Only me. And so he will erase them.
“In armour, they cannot be stopped by anything. But the gift of them is that they will not be used wrongly. They are soldiers of the heart, not machines. And that is why he needs this other thing, this Apprehension Engine. Because he cannot command my elephants. Because he is evil.”
Her voice remains quite calm and even, but her cheeks are wet. Edie does not embrace her, because she does not wish the woman of consequence to weep upon her shoulder.
“Frankie’s through here,” Dotty Catty says, a moment later.
Edie follows the Dowager-Khatun into another chamber, where someone is being very French.
A throng of Ruskinites is slaving over what appears to be a fish tank made of brass. It is suspended from a hoist or crane, and a broad-backed monk is hauling hard, in company with two others, while his brethren steady the tank as it comes out of the water. The liquid alone, Edie Banister guesses, must weigh a tonne, and then there’s the metal. Those pulleys are very well calibrated indeed.
In the midst of all this is a small person with a shock of black hair sticking up from her head and an inexpensive ladies’ blouse which has seen better days. She wears a leather apron and a pair of trousers which at some time or another have been either a blackout curtain or a counterpane. Even at this distance, Edie can hear that she is complaining; a sharp, rhythmic patter of what might generously be called “discussion.” The object of her ire is a big Ruskinite wearing a harried expression and forge-master’s gloves.
“Will it… You are an idiot! Yes, Denis, you are. Look! You have disturbed the wave, and now we have it all to do again… Non! Non, the apparatus is perfect. It will preserve… it will! It will because I say it will! The constructive and destructive interference patterns are cancelled by the… oh, nom de Dieu! It is not switched on! Why is it not… Look! Have you even bothered to engage the secondary coils? Mais non, you have not…”
“Oh, dear,” Dotty Catty murmurs. “I hope we haven’t come at a bad time.”
The dark-haired woman—she cuts it herself, Edie guesses, from the strange, uneven fringe and the curious near-baldness on one side—throws her hands in the air.
“We must begin again!” she says. “Entirely! From the start. Immediately! Where is the compressor?” She turns around, and something makes a bonging noise, and then a soft gurgle as it falls into the river. “Connerie de chien de merde! Was that it? Pray to Heaven that was not my compressor?”
“It’s all right,” the burly monk says calmly. “It was the teapot.”
This does not seem to be a huge comfort. The woman pulls a piece of chalk from behind her ear and begins writing on the ground. Then she gets another piece from her pocket and starts writing with her other hand to save time.
“She is ambidextrous,” Dotty Catty whispers, “unless she is thinking very hard, she does different things at the same time. She says it is good for the brain. I tell her to eat fish, but apparently that is not sufficient.”
“I can hear you,” the woman calls, without looking round. “Please do not imagine it is any less distracting to have someone very conspicuously trying to be quiet while I work than it is to have a brass band come wandering through here playing ‘Hope And Glory’ while the Home Fleet fires all its guns at the Guggenheim Glass and China Collection, because that is in no sense the case.”
Denis—the big monk is apparently Denis—sighs into his hands for a moment, then looks up. “You have visitors, Frankie,” he says firmly.