27.

8^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

VLADIVOSTOY, VRASKA

Bathed in the dim glow of lamp-film projectors, Deliverance Tegura looked faintly sepulchral. Her scowl only added to the effect.

“This,” she declared, “makes not a whit of sense.”

She was speaking more to the room at large than any specific other person, but everyone in the laboratory straightened as if she had denounced them personally. Livvy Tegura had that effect on people, second only to Bishop Meteron himself. Everyone knew that when His Grace was absent and his second, Deacon Fredericks, was off seeing to business for him, the Reverend Doctor Deliverance Tegura was the nearest thing to a direct line to Meteron’s mind anyone was likely to get.

A rather queasy-looking seminary student, eyes smeary from lack of sleep and perhaps a little nearer tears than was altogether seemly for a functional adult, cleared her throat bravely. Tegura turned her eyes on the girl.

The student quailed, but the Deacon standing at her back had the sense to speak up in her stead. “If you take a look at this reading here,” he began, lifting up a spool of printed paper crazed with graphing lines, “the data might be clearer to you, Doctor.”

Tegura’s head tilted, like a bird of prey realizing whatever stirred in the bush was nothing worth swooping down upon. “You misunderstand me, Master . . . what was your name again, sir?”

“Savery.”

“And what is your particular duty, in this research group?”

“I primarily maintain the clockworks and steam power, Doctor.”

“Primarily.” Her voice had the heat of the desert in it. It could bake you down to bone, if you stayed under it overlong.

“. . . Primarily. Yes. And you said I . . . misunderstood you?”

“Quite. The readings are quite clear to me. This does not prevent them from being utterly nonsensical.”

“We checked the figures three times,” the young seminary student blurted. Again, Deliverance examined her. This time, to her credit, the girl remained her own master. “I agree they’re very odd, Doctor, but odd findings aren’t necessarily impossible.”

Tegura felt a tug at her lips that threatened to become a smile. She smoothed it down and stepped closer to the panel of tiny pins dotting the wall before her.

It was very much like looking at the inside of a wool-pulling brush. An endless-seeming array of thin spikes, each pointing out, but instead of being arrayed in a tiny, even mat, these shifted up and down like the surface of a topographical map transmuted into reality. The tips of many pins glowed—a single, bright filament of tungsten flaring at a perfectly controlled temperature. Raised and lowered into peaks and valleys the length of Deliverance’s arm, the landscape puncturing the wall looked like nothing so much as a deserted mountain range left to burnish in the sun.

That description was not so far from the truth. There were doubtless whole tracks of Clara Downshire’s brain more barren than any desert.

“The brightest zones experience the most frequent, or at least the most erratic, activity,” the seminary student continued. “Then there are the medium and cool zones, which have either very little activity, or prolonged activity of low intensity followed by long periods of inactivity. This gives us a very accurate projection of how the subject’s brain works.”

“So it does. It also suggests that her cerebral cortex is the least active part of her brain overall, which is entirely inconsistent with what we know of any human brain outside of a coma patient.”

“That’s true, Doctor,” Deacon Savery agreed. The seminary student eyed him warily as he slid into the conversation’s narrow gap. How often has he ridden over her like this? Tegura wondered. “But Mrs. Downshire is far from either state,” he continued, “at least in the broader biological sense.”

“Also true. Now, how do you mean to explain this anomaly?”

It was the young woman who burst in. “She experiences time-states not as a process of ordered events, but as a simultaneity.”

Deliverance Tegura stared at her, then smiled her slow serpent’s grin. “Please. Continue.”

“We know less about the brain than we would like,” the woman began. She drew closer to the wall, gesturing at the smoldering pins demonstratively. “But we know enough to say that the medulla controls much of our basic neurological functions related to respiration, motor activity, and so forth, which is why it’s also closely connected to adrenaline and emotional registers. The frontal and prefrontal zones handle most memory function, but also put our sense of the world around us into reference with memory, giving us a conceptual sense of what past, present, and future are.”

“Her turnkey from Oldtemple seemed to think she had inexplicable knowledge. Does that come from what she isn’t processing? Her lack of time-order?”

“It’s . . . complicated.” The young woman’s brow creased in concentration. “Her brain doesn’t divide time into different states. All time is just all time, to her.”

“We’ve informed the Bishop already,” Deacon Savery added.

Tegura frowned. “And his response?”

“He went to his offices,” the student said. “To work.”

Tegura nodded, brushing past Savery. He extended his hand, perhaps to detain her—she didn’t know or care. Instead, she touched the student on the shoulder as she passed toward the door.

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t get your name.”

“Ana Cortes.”

“We are always looking for permanent staff. You’ve done excellent work here. When you’ve completed your exams at seminary, please contact my offices. The Bishop’s secretary, Deacon Fredericks, can give you my details.”

Ana Cortes’s eyes opened wide as portholes. That she saw a whole new future through them now, Deliverance had no doubt.

“Yes, Doctor.”

Deliverance never quite made out what Deacon Savery sputtered in protest as she left the room. She was far too busy sorting the questions she would have to ask her mentor.

Bishop Professor Allister Meteron’s study was pitch black, as it always was after sunset. Deliverance was more than accustomed to this peculiarity. She was grateful, at least, that he was equally habitual in the placement of all his furniture and his belongings. She had navigated the room when daylight poured through the windows. The superfluous dark held no hazard for her long legs. A hand out to feel for the edges of tables and chairs where she expected them—where they would always, reliably, be found—and that was all.

“Ana Cortes,” she announced to the general darkness, “is a brilliant analyst who could do her job a deal better without that sponge Savery leeching at her least word, Your Grace.”

His voice rattled out a chuckle, some yards away. “You’ve invited her onto your staff, I should hope?”

“Just now.”

“Wisely done. I’ve an opening coming in mine and had meant to fill it with her, betimes.”

Deliverance could hear the smile warming his voice—the slightly reedy tenor of a man long past his prime. It came from her left, where his favorite chair sat angled before an unlit hearth.

“And who will be losing their post under you, Your Grace?”

“Savery, of course. There are technicians who can mind the clockworks just as well as he, and they have much more . . . agreeable habits.” There was a pause and a rustling as the old man resettled himself, drawing forward in his chair. Deliverance lowered herself into the seat across from his, two paces back. Just like always. “So,” he sighed, “Miss Cortes has shown you her chart on Mrs. Downshire. And you’ve come with an entire ledger of questions based on her files at the Mercy Commission Home you’d like properly accounted.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“It might be better to do this as the old philosophers did. Let me question you, my dear. The chart. Miss Cortes’s theory, and its similarities to Doctor Wyndham’s notes. What does it suggest to you?”

“As a set of data alone, it would suggest there is no way Mrs. Down-shire should be able to function properly in daily life. And yet, she manages well enough, apart from certain bursts of . . . eccentricity.”

“And how do you account for that discrepancy?”

“In all probability, her head injury led to this unusual state of being. That injury is better than thirteen years old now. She has had time to adapt to its impact on her perceptions—to learn how to manage her behaviors in a more acceptable manner, and draw less specific attention to comments or observations that regard her knowledge of time.”

“Ahh.” The sound came from someplace deep in the old man’s thin frame, both musing and amused. “You said ‘knowledge’ of time rather than ‘experience’ or ‘perception.’ Why is that?”

“Because,” Deliverance answered, hearing a strange flutter in her own voice. She took a steadying breath. “It’s true. She knows things. And you know it’s true, or you would not have sent me to collect her.”

“You’ll want to review my notes before we meet again tomorrow.” She felt a packet of papers pass into her hands and almost fumbled them. She unwound the twine that looped the thick envelope shut, and grazed a hand over the first page of the ream held within it. A series of bumps and divots, smooth planes and clusters of pinprick-fine impressions, greeted her fingertips.

“I hope it is not a problem that I’ve used my usual format?”

“I’ve kept in practice reading it, Your Grace. I am always at your disposal.”

“Good. After you’ve read the model, come see me over breakfast. Fredericks has some information for you.”

Deliverance opened her mouth to ask, but the darkness and the silence were filled by his answer:

“Names. Locations. We’re not far from one of them. I’ll need you to hunt very quickly, Livvy. Mrs. Downshire’s state of mind is very fragile. It demands a guiding hand. Something more particular than we can furnish ourselves. Some recent correspondence from Nippon suggests we may soon enjoy a solution to that problem.”

“Will I know the people connected with these names?”

“Personally? No. But I do. I know them very, very well.” Deliverance folded her hands, knotting her fingers together. She had learned to school her tongue against sharing the first fruits of her imagination. This time, though, not speaking her fear seemed more unwise than keeping it close.

“Your Grace, if this is in regards to your son or his partner, the Alche-mist—”

She paused. At times like these, the darkness of the Bishop’s chambers worried her. Her imagination was too distracted by the effort of inventing his invisible expression. She read into the silence whole volumes of condemnation.

“Continue, Livvy,” he said. His voice was so gentle, he might have been someone’s grandfather nursing a skinned knee.

“I’m concerned about the personal toll this operation is likely to take on you, Your Grace.”

“ Tch. You are a fine scholar and a good woman. I am very fortunate to have you taking care of me.” Deliverance felt him pat the bundle of papers in her lap. “See to the plan here. Contact the Grand Library. Put a spark out to my solicitors and bank-men in Corma, and wire them the necessary details. If you can see to these matters, I will manage the business of my own heart.”

Very few would have heard the rebuke in that cozening croon, but Deliverance Tegura did. She rose, cursing herself. She ought to have known better than to doubt her mentor. In close to thirty years’ time, he had done little to settle accounts against the son and son-in-law who had so long ago humiliated him. But that didn’t mean he had let the matter go.

He was a master of statistics and data, after all. Playing the long game was in his nature.

“Of course, Your Grace. I will see it done.”

“Thank you, Livvy. Is Mrs. Downshire settling comfortably?”

“Yes. Shall I send for her?”

The smile crackled at the edges of his words. “When you have a moment. It is well past time for a proper introduction. I owe her an explanation of what is at stake.”