Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (29 page)

Before Leonard had arrived in the mountains, teams of Artificers fitted for underwater work had laid the
château
’s foundation island on the lake bottom, as well as smaller piles for the five piers that would support the gallery leading to it. Now gray humps of rock—not humped, he saw, but stepped—extended out across the surface of the blue water.

Leonard had needed to do a bit of fore-and-aft redesign with Master Builder to make the original
château
fit the site. The main entrance of the castle in France had crossed a drawbridge connecting it with the north bank of the River Cher and the formal gardens, while the gallery was an afterthought, extending south to the opposite bank. By putting the main building on an island, and using the gallery as the only approach from the shore, they had essentially reversed the building’s polarity. But it was a small change. And it let them use the stage of the drawbridge that now faced the lake as a boat dock.

As he watched, tracked carriers brought the shaped and polished blocks of granite, quartz, and chert from all over the forest down to the shoreline, placed them in exact order on the cleared space that eventually would be the formal gardens, and then retreated again into the trees. Leonard marveled that they had been able to find or make just the right pieces needed for the next level to be added to the stepped piles that were growing out of the lake’s surface. It was not like fitting a three-dimensional puzzle together. It was like knowing what pieces to cut and bring to a place where the puzzle was growing on its own for the first time.

Supported by motorized barges, Artificers selected stones from the beach, rode out to the island, and began climbing over the steps. These single-purpose machines walked back and forth, as if undecided, looking for the right position for the stone they held. Once they made a decision, however, a signal went out—invisible to Leonard, except through Master Builder’s comments—for a Grouter to step forward and prepare a bed of cement. Only when that surface was ready, did the Artificer set the stone down in final position and vibrate it into place. For all his days of watching, Leonard had never seen one of them make a mistake that needed to be broken out and replaced. So the curtain walls rose in blocks of gray granite and white chert.

Leonard, who had always preferred human ingenuity and the work of human hands to anything artificial and mechanical, had an epiphany in that week. He suddenly realized that he was watching a fairytale enacted by these machines. Strange creatures under their own motivation were marching out of the enchanted forest, bearing perfectly shaped stones for building the wizard’s magic castle.

* * *

Antigone Wells had been lying on her back in the pre-op room at the Mission Bay medical center for an hour and twenty minutes by her watch. The watch—an elderly device of gold and crystal with steel gears inside, which did nothing more than tell time—was the only personal item the nurses had let her wear, having ordered her to strip naked and put on one of those ridiculous cotton gowns that tied behind her neck. Then they made her promise to remind them to take the watch before they wheeled her into surgery.

Wells wasn’t cold, because they had laid her on a gurney under a plastic blanket that pumped warm air over her torso and legs. She wasn’t thirsty, because they had put an IV in the back of her hand and started a saline drip. But she was intensely bored.

The anesthetist had come to take some readings and make encouraging sounds. The nurses checked on her every ten minutes or so, to ask if she needed anything—then told her she couldn’t have it when she suggested a cup of coffee or a snack.

Dr. Ming Meirong stopped by to see how she was feeling and to explain the procedure. “But you’re an old hand at this by now, I’ll bet.” And she left.

Ten minutes later Dr. Ming returned, removed the air blanket, and asked Wells to pull up her gown. Only then did the nurse draw the curtain around her gurney. The doctor felt her abdomen, examining the old liver with her fingertips. It still felt … bulgy. Dr. Ming took a felt pen out of her jumper pocket and made black marks on Wells’s skin—apparently guides for her first incisions.

Finally, the anesthetist came back, gave Wells two pills to swallow with a sip of water, and slipped a syringe of clear liquid into the spike in her drip. “In a few minutes,” she said, “you’ll start to feel drowsy. Then we’ll be ready to begin.”

But Wells felt clear headed, sharp even. Not drowsy at all. She waited quietly for the drugs to kick in, but they never did. At some point, one of the nurses quietly unfastened the watch and slipped it into her own pocket. “Never mind,” the woman murmured.

Someone else drew back the curtain, disconnected the air blanket, and started pushing the gurney out of the room. Still clear headed, Wells bumped through a set of double doors, sailed down a corridor different from the one through which she had entered the pre-op room, and passed two more doors. The gurney slowed as it came into an area of cool shade, soft murmurs, and gowned figures.

She saw Dr. Ming standing to one side, fully gowned and masked, recognizable only by her finely slitted eyes. The anesthetist was somewhere behind and above Wells’s head, but she watched gloved hands press a plastic cup down over her nose and mouth. Other hands began untying and lifting her gown, arranging green sheets around her torso, securing them with clear tape that looked silvery in the overhead light, and painting her stomach with a cold fluid.

Wells was still awake, although time was becoming disjointed. She could hear clearly when Dr. Ming turned to an assistant and said, “Let’s hope this is her last outbreak of cysts. The next one won’t be anywhere so easy to fix.” To which the assistant nodded and said, “Yes.”

She wanted to ask what the doctor meant. These were kidney cysts, weren’t they? Little grapes that crowded out the organ. No, wait. … The grapes were in her liver. Her kidneys had grown what? Buckshot. … That had to make a difference, didn’t it? … But where else was Dr. Ming going to look for grapes? Grapes … Shapes … Ming … Mary Ming … Ming Meirong … Ding-dong …

* * *

Jane Jaspersen worked in her Cousin Susannah’s Planning and Procurement Section as an accountant. She had shown an aptitude for handling numbers at the age of sixteen, and from that point forward the Praxis Family Association had shaped her training toward quantitative relationships, higher mathematics, statistics, finance, accounting, and general business practices. She could solve equations in her head and, with the help of her cortical array, talk directly with the intelligences that kept the family books. But it didn’t take prompting from one of the electronic proctors for her to see that something was amiss in the Praxis Forest Development accounts. Jane had been fretting over it for two weeks now.

“Look at this!” she said aloud when she could no longer contain herself. She didn’t actually drop a stack of ledgers on Susannah’s desk, but metaphorically her dataset landed on the forefront of her cousin’s mind with a
thump!

Susannah barely glanced at the headers.
Oh, the castle thing …

But isn’t this extravagant? I mean—!

The Patriarch wants it.
A mental shrug.

Look at all those ’bots that he’s requisitioned—

Made specially for this project,
Susannah sent.

That’s still a lot of steel, resin, and circuitry.

I think we can afford to humor Gee-Daddy.

He’s pulling out good stone, too—stuff we could sell.

Don’t we have enough money? I thought this thing was covered.

“That’s not the point!” Jane wailed aloud.
We have so much else we need to do first,
she went on in mental mode, pulling up charts of examples.
The roads are a mess. We need to prepare for a new energy source. And pretty soon we’ll need to expand the family compound—or start another one—to accommodate the next generation.

Here she ran up a chart of growth projections. Jane and Susannah were not on it themselves, or not yet, but her sisters were both working on their own families—Jennifer’s second child just born, Jessica’s third in gestation. Every year the Association had more little mouths to feed, housing to find, educations to arrange, careers to plan. Not to mention the burden of caring for their army of paid retainers.

We’ll handle it,
Susannah sent back.
We always have.

When they get wind of this palace, people will surely talk.

Well, at least it’s up in the mountains, away from public view.

Do you mean, you really don’t care?
Jane asked incredulously.

No, but you should try going up against Gee-Daddy—or your grandmother.
Her cousin grinned.
See what
that
gets you!

* * *

Against her better judgment, Antigone Wells had accepted John’s invitation for a day’s outing. She was still a little stiff through her midsection from the surgery, but her doctor had approved of her getting out and about. So she took a water taxi halfway across San Francisco Bay to the heliport on Treasure Island and waited on the concrete apron for John to arrive.

At the appointed time one of those ridiculous, insectile contraptions, whose wings turned into rotors, or rotors into wings, came screaming and spinning out of the sky and landed on the painted bull’s-eye. It’s radar-dark hull bore the insignia of the Praxis Family Association. The landing created a wind that nearly lifted the wide-brim hat Wells still wore in public. She had to grab at it, and the funneling of her elbows made its veil whip about her face.

The side door rolled back, and the silent, bronze-haired Pamela, John’s bodyguard, jumped out. He followed a second later, moving as quickly and surely as the younger woman, even though he had to be twice her age or more. He came directly toward Wells, while Pamela hung back, for privacy.

“I’m so glad you could make it, Tig!” he said, all smiles, although she could feel his eyes probing her black veil and the long, dark dress.

It occurred to her that, shrouded in such fashion, she might have been anyone. And someone who knew her and had intercepted his message would now be in the perfect position to assassinate him. Yet he moved so easily, without fear, in these dreadful times.

“You didn’t say where we were going,” she replied. “I didn’t know how to dress.”

“Just a hop across country. There this morning, back this afternoon.”

She nodded, the veil still ruffled by the cold breeze.

He gently took her arm and led her to the machine. Pamela helped Wells up into the fuselage and the forward-facing seat. John followed her, and the bodyguard went around the nose and sat in the front bubble with the auto-intelligence’s sensor clusters. In ten seconds the engines went from mumble to roar, and the flat landscape of the island and the Bay’s water fell away beneath them.

John’s idea of “a hop” seemed to be halfway to the next state. As they crossed the Central Valley, he enthused about how good it was to see her—although so far he had seen nothing of her—and how much he missed the times they had spent together. Wells tried to deflect these sentiments by observing how much their lives had changed, how important he had become, how much responsibility he had, and how different her life was now. Through it all, he regarded her with the hopeful eyes and hesitant smiles of a young dog trying to please a new master. She could almost feel sorry for him.

After three-quarters of an hour in the air, they were flying over dense forest with no landmarks other than glimpses of small lakes here and there, flashes of roads snaking through the trees, and occasional stone outcrops. From their general direction of travel, and John’s obvious interest in what lay below, she guessed they were over the Stanislaus National Forest. Wells was about to ask where they were going, when he suddenly pointed down into a fold between the mountains.

“There it is,” he said.

It was a long narrow lake—Cherry Lake, if she recalled the survey maps correctly. It was an artificial body of water, created by a dam at the southern end of the valley. But something new and just as artificial had been added here in the north. It was a pile of white and gray stone, with a sharply pitched roof of black slate. A long trestle or arcade, made of more of white stone, connected the pile to the shoreline. And then, as the ariflect swung lower and gave her a better angle on the structure, she recognized it.

“Oh, John!” was all she said. What she really meant to say was, “Oh, no!”

* * *

John Praxis knew the site was not quite ready. He had made trips up to the mountains about once a week to view the progress that Leonard and Jeffrey were making, and each time he was more and more pleased. The basic structure, all the stonework, the interior infrastructure of electric power, communications, and plumbing, as well as the building’s weather tightness in terms of caulking and windows, all were now complete. But the interior finishes, like a final polish on the exposed stone surfaces, as well as plaster, woodwork, and paint, were still to be added. And that was the point of this trip.

The AFR-III landed on the primary laydown area along the shore, inside the retaining wall for the sunken garden. The area was still in barren, sandy soil littered with Artificers and other ’bots, along with half a dozen blocks of granite and chert that never did seem to fit the pattern. “We’ll plant this part like in the original
château,
with lawn and shrubs and intersecting walkways,” Praxis explained as Pamela rolled back the craft’s door and helped Antigone down to the ground.

“Or a garden,” Antigone suggested. “If flowers will grow at this elevation.”

“A garden would be very pretty,” he said. “What a wonderful idea!”

On his cue, Pamela disappeared, going off among the machines. Nothing was going to hurt him up here.

Praxis led Antigone up to the round Gate Tower and through it into the Gallery. The place was cold and smelled of fresh cement and broken stone. He wondered if perhaps this trip, at this incomplete stage of construction, might not have been a good idea.