Текст книги "Our Lady of the Ice"
Автор книги: Cassandra Clarke
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SOFIA
Sofia waited on the dock, the wind cold against her bare arms. More parts had arrived, although still not all of them. Sofia cursed the incompetence of humans.
A low dark car crawled over the damp asphalt, white steam pouring out of its exhaust pipe and curling over the choppy water slapping up against the pier. Sofia watched it, waiting. It stopped. She couldn’t see through the glass in the windows, but she knew who was inside. She hated that she had to be here alone, after the encounter with the record player, but Inéz was gone, and Luciano had refused to accompany her, for reasons he wouldn’t reveal. And she did not have the equipment to reactivate any of the broken androids locked away in the park. Yet.
The back door of the car opened and Cabrera stepped out, dressed in a long dark trench coat. Sebastian followed, a gun shining in one hand. She waited for Diego, but he never emerged.
“Sofia,” Cabrera said. “Why would you want to meet out here? It’s so much warmer in my office.”
“I don’t care about warmth.” Sofia walked toward him, her senses alert.
“I can see that.” Cabrera nodded at her bare arms, her bare legs. “This isn’t about our little lesson last time?”
“Lesson?” Sofia stopped. “That wasn’t a lesson.”
“Music, my dear. I was trying to teach you about music—”
“I know what you were trying to do. Don’t pretend with me.”
Cabrera’s mocking smile faded away. “You think you’re such a clever robot.”
Sofia began to walk again, heading toward the trunk of the car. But when she passed Cabrera, he grabbed her by the arm. She stopped and glared at him.
“My payment,” she said. “I want to see it.”
“You will.” Something in his expression unsettled her.
“What is it?” She yanked her arm away. “You’re that upset that you couldn’t force me to dance again?”
“I’ll force you to dance when I want to.”
Sofia felt hollow. She didn’t dare take her eyes off Cabrera. “Excuse me?”
Cabrera smiled at her again, a lazy serpentine smile that activated the programming in charge of self-preservation. Sofia took a step back.
“What are you going to do?” Sofia kept her voice hard. Steely. Cabrera seemed unaffected.
“You’ll notice that one of our usual number is missing this evening.” Cabrera gestured at Sebastian, who shifted his gaze off to the side but didn’t react otherwise. “Mr. Amitrano has elected to stay home.”
“Did you kill him?”
Cabrera tilted his head. “I don’t kill people, Sofia.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I hire others to do it for me. But no, Diego is not dead. He’s injured.”
Antarctic wind swirled over the water. Sofia could taste the ice on it, like shards of broken glass. Cabrera seemed to be waiting for her to respond. She would not play into his game. She said nothing.
Cabrera shifted his weight. “Injured,” he said, “but not by my hand.”
Sofia blinked at him. Her programming whirred behind her eyes, sifting through the fighting programs Araceli had uploaded, the protocols about when to stay and when to run. She thought about her equipment, her payment, waiting in the trunk of that car.
“Don’t you want to hear the story?” Cabrera said.
“What does this have to do with me?” She spoke more sharply than she’d intended, and her question rang out in the cold air. Cabrera stared at her like he’d just uncovered something.
“My God,” he said. “You don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” She did not like this. Sebastian had his gun out—he never kept his gun out. It had been Sofia’s suggestion to meet on the docks, so she could avoid the record player, but it occurred to her that Cabrera had agreed to the change of terms too quickly. “Just tell me, Mr. Cabrera.”
“Your man shot Diego.”
“My man?”
“Your assistant. Luciano.”
Sofia’s programming did not know how to deal with this new information. Luciano, the butler Luciano—he’d shot someone? Shot Diego?
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “When would he have even seen Diego?”
“A week ago,” Cabrera said. “At Marianella Luna’s house.”
Sofia locked on to the mention of Marianella’s name. Was she in danger, Marianella? Had Cabrera learned of her survival yet?
Sofia would kill him if she had to.
“I dispatched Lady Luna last week,” Cabrera said, in the patient, even tones of a schoolteacher. “I sent Diego to her home the night after to search for some documents she’s rumored to have.”
Anger flared in Sofia’s system, but she didn’t allow her body to react. Diego did not have the documents, she knew that. They were tucked safely away in the bowels of the amusement park, guarded by maintenance drones she had programmed herself.
“While Diego was there, your man arrived, with a maintenance robot. He shot at Diego, and Diego fled. Survived, of course, but I’m curious why a robot that I’ve been working with, who has reportedly helped you aboard my icebreakers, would shoot a human he’d seen on more than one occasion. Why? Why would that happen?”
Luciano had shot Diego. No wonder he had refused to come to the meeting. His programming shouldn’t have allowed that. He was designed to serve, to heal, to protect, not to injure.
And he hadn’t mentioned any of this to Sofia. The memory of that night, a week ago, ran uninterrupted in her thoughts. Luciano had returned three hours after leaving the amusement park, with a suitcase full of clean clothes and beauty supplies and Marianella’s documents and the envelope of bills she kept hidden away in her kitchen. He had delivered the suitcase to Marianella’s room in the Ice Palace, and then he’d found Sofia in the operations room and he had not said a word about any of this.
He’d lied to her. He’d potentially ruined everything. And why? For the cheap thrill of firing off a gun at a human being? Why had he even taken a gun with him? He must have found it in the security closet in operations, but what had possessed him to think it was necessary?
Sofia’s mind worked quickly, formulating a lie.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sofia said, using the sweet, apologetic voice that had worked so often on clients. “Those of us from the amusement park often scavenge the houses of the dead, looking for supplies.” She smiled at Cabrera. “There was a report on Lady Luna’s disappearance on the wireless the other day. We intercepted it.”
Cabrera watched her, listening.
“Luciano didn’t tell me he would be going to her house, but that’s no matter. He doesn’t tell me everything. It’s dangerous work, scavenging. Dangerous for us to leave the park, even robots like Luciano who so closely resemble humans.”
It was impossible to tell if Cabrera believed the story. She couldn’t read him as she could other humans.
“I’ve gone on such trips myself,” Sofia added. “I doubt Luciano saw Diego, or understood that it was him. Most likely he thought it was someone from the city, looking to cull him. Do you know what it is to be culled, Mr. Cabrera?”
“I’ve done it myself,” Cabrera said. “You know that.”
“But you don’t live with the threat of having it happen to you, as I do, as Luciano does. We often take guns to protect ourselves on scavenges. Luciano wasn’t originally designed for espionage. We’re limited by our programming, Mr. Cabrera. And Luciano was never programmed to steal. Or to shoot.” She paused. “He isn’t good at it.”
Cabrera stared at her. Sofia didn’t move; she was lucky, in that her position at the amusement park had required her to lie. Not to obfuscate, of course, but to flatter and cajole. Still, the programming was in place, and she’d just made good use of it.
Sofia knew Cabrera wasn’t like other humans. He could see through deception, being so skilled at it himself. But after a moment’s pause, he nodded, seeming satisfied.
“Isn’t that a shame,” he said, a cold grin playing at the corner of his mouth. “Technological marvels reduced to scavengers.”
Sofia smiled back politely.
“I’m glad to have helped you rise above all that,” he said.
Sofia rankled at the idea that he had helped her. Even though he had. She didn’t want to think that she owed her success to any human.
“Still, I don’t want to see Luciano again.” His face went cold. “If I do, I’ll dismantle him myself. Find someone else if you need assistance.”
Sofia nodded, grateful that she had convinced Cabrera the gunshot was an accident. Luciano might not have been programmed to fire weapons, but that didn’t mean he would make a mistake if he ever did.
“Understandable,” she said.
“You agree?”
“Yes.”
They stood in the cold wind. Cabrera studied her for a second longer, and Sofia was afraid he would change his mind, or that his offer of peace had been some elaborate ruse.
He snapped his fingers and said, “Sebastian. Open the trunk.”
Sofia tensed, no longer convinced the trunk contained her supplies. Sebastian pulled out a banker’s box and set it down at Sofia’s feet. He pulled off the lid.
Inside were the micro-engines, wrapped in cloudy plastic, and a box of vacuum tubes.
“The programming key isn’t here,” Sofia said.
“I’m working on it. You asked for some unusual things.”
Sofia put on her amusement park mask. “They aren’t so unusual to me.” She looked over at Cabrera. “Thank you, sir,” she added. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me.”
“It’s my pleasure, Sofia.” He didn’t sound like it was his pleasure; his voice was cold, hard, like the wind. “But I don’t like to be double-crossed.”
“No one does.” She picked up one of the tubes and held it up to the golden lamplight. It gleamed against the darkness.
“I’m glad you understand that. I take it you don’t need a car to drive you home?”
Sofia replaced the tube and picked up the box. “No. I don’t mind walking.”
“Not many ladies would care to drag a box through the city streets at night.” Another cold smile. Was he threatening her?
“I’m not a lady,” she told him, and then she said good night and went on her way.
* * * *
Sofia was walking back to the amusement park when all the lights on the street guttered like candles.
She frowned. She still didn’t know why this was happening, even if it didn’t affect her plans. The park was on its own generators, something she had made sure of. The maintenance drones claimed they weren’t responsible, but she suspected some of them had developed their own sentience and were trying out the concept of lying.
It made her nervous, this idea of the maintenance drones acting of their own accord. She didn’t like feeling powerless.
When she returned to the amusement park, Sofia carried the box of supplies to Araceli’s cottage. Araceli was asleep, the cottage shut up tight for the night, but Sofia could unlock the door with a burst of energy from her palm. She left the supplies sitting in the foyer and then went to find Luciano.
Finding a robot in the amusement park was simple, assuming you had access to the control center, as Sofia did. When the park first closed and the cullings began, all those years ago, the city men would go straight to the operations room and locate the robot types they wished to capture. In those early days, so many had been lost, and it was Sofia who had realized that if they barred the city men’s entrance to operations, then the cullings would be much less effective. Luciano had been the first robot to help her, and she’d always assumed it was due to his programming, his inbuilt need to serve. But learning that he’d shot Diego Amitrano suggested to her that maybe something else was at work, a transformation she hadn’t quite let herself see.
Sofia laid her hand against the operations room’s lock and kept it there until the latch clicked open. She stepped inside. She used to spend all her time here, but ever since Marianella had come to stay, she found herself spending more and more time upstairs, in the Ice Palace proper. Operations was a comfort because it was a relic of control, filled with ancient computers instead of ancient murals—but Marianella was upstairs.
No. Sofia would not think about Marianella. Not right now.
She sat down at the computer and entered in Luciano’s identification number. It didn’t take long; there were so few functional robots left. She hoped to change that, of course, when her plan was fully implemented. She would resurrect the shattered androids currently locked away in storage. Victims of the cullings that she had managed to save—to salvage would perhaps be the better word, as they were dysfunctional, certain key parts missing from their bodies. But unlike with Inéz, none of those key parts was the ancient wires that made them run. Inéz had been severed in totality; that was why Sofia had buried her instead of cutting her up for parts. She had died a true death, and so she deserved to be honored, and not picked apart as if she’d been dragged away by the city.
But Inéz’s death would not be in vain. Antarctica would be home to all robots, not just those repaired park androids. When the time was right, Sofia would call robots from all over the world to live here, in a place free of humans. No one would ever die as Inéz had. It would be beautiful.
Luciano was by the Antarctic Mountain, the roller coaster that had, during the park’s heyday, branded itself the first roller coaster in Antarctica. As if any other roller coasters had been built on the continent.
Sofia left operations and walked across the park. She wasn’t angry, exactly, but she was confused as to why Luciano thought shooting Diego had been a wise decision.
The Antarctic Mountain rose up like a leviathan in the darkness, twisting and curving over the rest of the amusement park. She found Luciano sitting on a bench beside its entrance, reading a book. Reading was not in his programming, but Sofia knew what it was to be bored.
“Hello,” she said, her voice loud in the silence.
Luciano set his book down and looked up at her. A pale line cut across his face, old skin meeting new. “How was your meeting? I’m sorry I couldn’t accompany you.”
Sofia looked at him for a moment, thinking on what Cabrera had told her. “Some of my supplies were ready.” She sat on the bench beside him. Then she folded her hands in her lap, crossed her legs at the ankles, and stared out at the empty pavilion where children and families used to wait in winding lines to ride the roller coaster. “He told me something interesting.”
Luciano didn’t answer.
“He told me you shot Diego Amitrano at Marianella’s house.”
Silence. This time, Sofia waited. They were robots, and both of them could wait forever, but she knew—she thought she knew—that Luciano would answer eventually.
In this case, she was right.
“Yes, I did. I purposefully missed him.”
“Why, Luciano? He recognized you.”
Luciano hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wanted to. I wanted to shoot him. I didn’t want to kill him, but I wanted to see him bleed.”
“Because he’s human?”
Luciano stared into the darkness, holding the book in his lap. A Prayer Book of Catholic Devotions. He must have gotten it at Marianella’s house.
“Yes,” he said. “No. Not exactly.” Luciano’s features twisted. Like all robots, he was uncomfortable with in-betweens. He preferred things black-and-white. Binary. Sofia knew the world was easier to read that way.
“You can tell me.”
“It’s frightening.” Luciano glanced at her and smiled. “But I don’t think it’ll frighten you.”
“Just tell me, Luciano.”
“My programming tells me to help humans.”
“I know.”
“It tells me to help you, because you seem human. More human than the other robots, even what I remember of the other androids. I always do as my programming asks—how can I not? You know what it’s like.”
Sofia thought about the parts sitting in Araceli’s foyer, the keys to her freedom. Some of them.
“I never questioned my programming until recently. Working for Mr. Cabrera—it feels the way it did before, when the amusement park was open, when I was installed at the penthouse suite of the Iceside Hotel. Like I don’t have control over my life anymore.”
Sofia nodded. “I know what you mean. But it won’t be like that for long. We have to make sacrifices before we can—”
“I know.” Luciano smiled. “I don’t mind. But I was growing impatient. Isn’t that funny? I was never impatient at the Iceside.”
Sofia studied him in the silvery darkness. They had all evolved in the years since the park had shut down, the androids most of all, even before they had begun breaking down and had to be placed in storage to await repairs, when the time was right. Their isolation, the fear of the cullings, the city growing like a cancer around them—this had jump-started their civilization. What would become their civilization.
“You’re growing up,” she finally said, although that wasn’t quite the right phrase.
Luciano lifted his face to her, his eyes clear and guileless. “I shot Mr. Amitrano because I wanted to see what it was like to hurt a human, instead of help one. I’d never hurt a human before, and I was afraid he was there for Marianella’s documents, and I was armed.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to kill him.”
“You didn’t.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
They fell silent. Sofia was surprised to hear all this from Luciano, surprised to hear that he was rebelling, in his small ways, against his own programming.
It brightened her spirits.
“I told Cabrera that you were scavenging the houses of the dead, and you took the gun to protect yourself, and you aren’t good at shooting it.” She glanced at him. “He believed me.”
Luciano didn’t react, only stared off in the darkness.
“I don’t think it will be a problem for us.”
“I hope it isn’t.”
Sofia nodded. She sat for a moment longer, and then she stood up and left Luciano to his reading. As she walked away, she heard the soft sigh as the book fell open on his lap, as he turned through the pages.
* * * *
The Ice Palace echoed with Sofia’s footsteps. Fake moonlight glowed in the glass of the windows, although the bulbs had started to die recently. One window at the end of the hallway flickered, on and off and on and off.
Sofia went down to operations. It was cool there from the fans set into the wall. Most of the computers were as defunct as the park rides, although Sofia had saved a handful, forbidding Araceli from ever breaking them open for parts. She hooked up to one of those computers now, connecting with the thick, old-fashioned cables she had been so familiar with forty years ago. Her programming came up on the dusty, mechanical rotary display. The lines of code clicked into place one after another. Sofia scrolled through them, reading each one in turn. Her programming was a strange thing. She was aware of it, inside herself, without ever thinking on it. Only when she hooked into a computer did she understand her programming entirely.
She was vaguely aware that she wasn’t supposed to, that some earlier programming had been left in to keep her from exploring her own existence. In fact, the first time she ever looked at her programming was only twenty-two years ago, after eighteen years of living in the empty park. Reading through it had been a revelation. She had experimented, trying to change things, but doing so had made her dizzy and nauseated, the way humans got when they were ill. Later, after Araceli had joined them, she had explained to Sofia that it was a fail-safe, designed to keep robots from rebelling against humans.
“I can change things for you,” Araceli had said. “Certain things. Small things.”
It had been summer, the floodlights bright for the season. Araceli had been living at the park for a few months at that point, repairing what broken robots she could and trying to find her old happiness from the days when the park had been open, before she’d been forced to adhere to the city’s dictates. Sofia had not been sure about Araceli’s presence in the park until that moment. The next day, Araceli slivered away the basic programs put in place to ensure Sofia wanted to please humans. Araceli made a hmmn sound as she worked, and Sofia, awake with her insides glittering beneath the lights, said, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think anything’s wrong.” Araceli squinted at the computer monitor. “Only that the programming isn’t what I expected. I’ve worked on your model before and you’re—different.”
That had been the first sign that the robots were changing. Araceli had tried to place when it had begun, but it was impossible, since none of the robots had had any inclination to check their own programming until recently, not even the strange-minded maintenance drones. The city gathered robots only when they needed them, and so the robots had had to survive, instead of serve. And that had changed them.
Ever since that day, Sofia checked her programming regularly, looking for transformations in the code. They were always small, subtle. “Evolution usually is,” Araceli had told her, and Sofia had latched on to that “usually.” She wanted to change completely, suddenly, violently. The new parts would allow her to do that, with Araceli’s help. With the parts, Araceli could customize her, shape her into whomever Sofia wanted to be.
The code whirred through the display, stirring up a thin cloud of dust. Sofia didn’t bother to wipe it away, because it wasn’t so thick that she couldn’t see.
There—her vision had changed slightly, become sharper. That was an evolution she had been tracking for some time. When the park had been open, her vision hadn’t been particularly important. She’d only needed to see well enough to identify clients and keep track of what she was doing. But the cullings had clarified her eyesight.
Sofia made a note of the change.
She continued to read through her programming, not noticing anything of interest. She was about three quarters of the way through when the door to the operations room clanked open. Sofia stopped the computer. She didn’t have to look to know who it was; she could smell the scent of her skin, human and atomic at once.
“What are you doing?” Marianella slid the door shut.
“I was looking at my code.” Sofia pulled out the wire and dropped it onto the table. Marianella stood beside her. She wore the nightdress Luciano’d brought back from her house, a flower-printed silk kimono over that. Her hair was mussed from sleep.
Even in the harsh fluorescent lights of operations she looked beautiful.
“Didn’t want me to see?” Her voice was light and teasing. She pulled a plastic chair up beside Sofia and sat down, tucking her ankles up against one of the chair legs and folding her hands in her lap. She stared at the rotary display, her head tilted, as if she could read the ghost of Sofia’s programming that way.
“Do you want to see it?”
Marianella shrugged. “I’ve seen it before. I just couldn’t sleep.” She sighed, and Sofia smiled to herself—it was endearing, how Marianella pretended to need sleep.
“Where were you?” Marianella asked suddenly. “Just now? I came down earlier, but Araceli said you were gone.” She paused “Were you doing something dangerous?”
Sofia hesitated. “No, not exactly.”
Marianella’s fingers tensed, as if they wanted to curl around Sofia’s hand but Marianella wouldn’t let them. Another familiar gesture.
“I tried to get Araceli to tell me,” she said. “But she didn’t.”
“Araceli knows how to keep secrets.”
“So do I.” Marianella’s expression was unreadable.
“Of course you do.” Sofia reached over and took Marianella’s hand, wanting to comfort her, wanting to pull her close the way she had over ten years ago, a few months after Marianella had first arrived in Hope City, a lovely mainland girl who’d come to the park after she’d been damaged in a fall at her house.
“So tell me where you went.” Marianella pulled her hand away and stared down at it, frowning. Her other hand hovered at her throat, at that cross necklace she always wore. “I’m worried about you, Sofia. I don’t want anything to happen—” She looked up. Her eyes glinted. She knew something. Sofia could tell. Something that made her angry.
“You spoke to Luciano, didn’t you?” Sofia looked away. “What did he say?”
“Something he wasn’t supposed to.” A pause. “He mentioned Ignacio Cabrera.”
Sofia closed her eyes.
“What are you doing with him, Sofia?” Marianella’s hand was on Sofia’s upper arm, her touch as soft as cotton. She leaned in close, her breath warm on Sofia’s skin. That little reminder of Marianella’s humanity. The humanity she was always trying to cling to, the way she clung to the Church. “He tried to kill me, don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember!” Sofia jerked away. “I’m not working with him because I think he’s such an upstanding citizen.”
Marianella leaned back, stone-faced but red-cheeked, her arms crossed over her chest.
“He can give me the equipment I need,” Sofia said in a flat voice. “The old vacuum tubes and the Teixeira micro-engines and the programming key. He’s gotten me most of what I need already. It’s an arrangement that I set up for that one purpose, to bring in old parts from the Teixeira building in Brazil. That’s all.”
She watched Marianella’s face carefully as she spoke, studying her, the way she would a human. Marianella had enough humanity that this trick worked most of the time. It worked today. Marianella’s expression softened, just enough that Sofia could sense her sympathy.
“I want to be free,” Sofia said. “This is the only way.”
Marianella didn’t answer. She toyed with the cross at the end of her necklace, twisting the chain around her fingers. Sofia wondered if she was praying.
“I could have helped you get the equipment,” she finally said. “I have the money—”
“Yes, but you don’t have the connections.” Sofia kept her voice firm. “Cabrera can get anything from the mainland, if he likes you well enough. I had to ensure that he liked me. Once I have the rest of the parts and Araceli’s able to complete the procedure, I’ll be rid of him.”
Marianella’s shoulders hitched. “Rid of him,” she whispered. “You don’t mean—”
Sofia smoothed a loose strand of hair away from her face. “It would solve your problem, wouldn’t it?”
Marianella went silent. She understood the desire for freedom, Sofia knew that, but she was a pacifist through and through, and just as she thought she could achieve freedom with agricultural domes and fund-raisers, she’d rather mollify Cabrera with monthly checks from her account for the rest of her life.
Marianella stood up, dropping her hand to her side. The necklace settled back into place, gleaming at the base of her throat. She and Sofia stared at each other, intensity crackling between them. It always did.
Marianella reached out and ran one hand down Sofia’s hair. Her fingers trembled. She seemed afraid.
“Don’t become a monster like him,” she said.
Sofia caught her hand and kissed its palm. Marianella sucked in her breath and looked off to the side, her face blank with guilt, but she didn’t take her hand away.
“I won’t,” Sofia said.
