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coolzero2a — Djavaloch 01
Published: 2017-08-28 11:45:13 +0000 UTC; Views: 2840; Favourites: 68; Downloads: 491
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Am I the only person getting vibes of the Hungry City Chronicles' Remembering Machines here?
For what seemed a long time they stood there together, barely breathing, staring at the seated shapes that lined the room. Each propped on its own big throne-like chair, and each unmistakably a Stalker, its head an outsize helmet, its face a metal mask, its eyes twin lamps. Most of the lamps were dead and blank, and some of the Stalkers had disintegrated with age into heaps of machinery and a scatter of dead stick-bones, but in the eyes of a few a faint green light still played, like will-o’-the-wisps trapped in the armored heads. From their metal skull-pieces tangles of wire trailed, plugged into sockets on the walls behind.
“I think it is all right,” Fever said, after a little time. “These are not Stalkerish Stalkers. . . .”
If they had been Stalkerish Stalkers, she reasoned, she and Cluny and Marten would already be dead. But the figures all stayed seated, and the hands that clasped the armrests of their chairs were not gauntlets full of knives but more like mummies’ hands, brittle armatures of twigs papered in ancient skin.
Fever went into the room and stopped as one of the Stalkers raised its head to focus on her. She heard the mechanisms inside its eyes creak and grate. Behind the mouth-slit of its mask, dry, yellow teeth moved. A voice like the whisper of air stirring dead leaves in a tomb came out at her. Words poured from it as if it had been interrupted long ago in the middle of a speech, and now that Fever was here it was continuing where it had left off. What was it saying? What language was that, so quick and guttural, so full of hisses and odd, half-familiar sounds?
She looked back at Cluny. “Is it speaking Arkhangelsk? Suomi?” “I think it’s Anglish,” said Marten, listening hard.
It was. Fever was beginning to catch words now herself.
“Remember...War...It was decided...Scrivener Institute...” It was Anglish, but Anglish as it had not been spoken for whole ages of the earth; Anglish as it must have sounded in the Screen Age, on the eve of the Downsizing. Fever went closer, straining her ears, snatching at every word. Now another of the ancient Stalkers had begun to speak, and its voice blended with the first, making it even harder to catch what either of them said.
“Sixty minutes . . . All major cities . . . Survivors . . .” “I remember . . .”
“. . . Then the slow bombs . . .”
“. . . It was decided . . .”
“. . . Revenge weapons of the barefoot states . . .”
“I remember . . .”
“. . . Rushed into production . . .”
“. . . Base pairs . . . Improved resistance . . . Patented sequences . . .” “The Inheritors . . .”
Right up to the top of the world we went; so far north we started going south again. And there, half buried in the snows of a tiny, frozen island, we found a complex built by some forgotten culture that must have flourished in the days before the Nomad Empires. Inside the central pyramid sat a dozen dead men and women on stone thrones. Some had been crushed by roof falls or encased in ice, but there were a few who, when we entered their chamber, began to whisper to us in languages we couldn’t identify. They were Stalkers, of a sort, although they had no armor or weapons, and they’d clearly not been built to fight.”
“Then why?” asked Fishcake’s Stalker.
“I think they were built to remember,” said Popjoy. He rummaged in a drawer for a set of Stalker’s eyes and started wiring them into his patient’s sockets. “I think that when great leaders of that culture died, their scientist-priests would take the body to the pyramid at the top of the world and stick a machine in their head, and there they’d sit, remembering. They’d remember all the things they’d done in life, and pass on those memories to their successors, and tell the stories of the times they lived in so they’d never be forgotten. Except they were forgotten, of course; their culture vanished from the earth, and the Nomad Empires that came after them picked up a crude version of the same technology and used it to build undead warriors like old Mr. Shrike."
“That pyramid was the only relic of the first Stalker builders, and I’m afraid my Green Storm minders dynamited it for fear some other scavenger would stumble on the secret. But in one of the smaller buildings, among a lot of religious paraphernalia and irrelevant old texts, I unearthed an almost complete Stalker brain. I took it back to Rogues’ Roost for study and repairs, connected it to a brain of my own design that controls your motor functions and suchlike, and installed the whole caboodle in the carcass of old Anna Fang."
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