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The working out of consequences had never been Vasily’s forte. Nor, really, even giving them overmuch thought.
He awoke to a brilliant morning and a dead-quiet house. Which was strange, since there should be activity in the kitchen. He rose, pulled on a silken robe, and padded down the hall. Nothing. Mother’s door was closed. No Portia. No day-servant. First shift should be beginning down at the Works. He went into the living room and squinted in the bright sun as he looked down. Persons in low-level managerial and supervisory garb huddled in small groups around carts, conferring and gesticulating. The occasional arm pointed towards the residence tower. A lone tram car was stilled on its lev-track.
Vasily stretched and cracked some joints. A loud knock came at the door. Vasily started. It had been a long time since he had heard that sound, a manual knock on the private residence. In fact, he wasn’t sure he had ever heard it.
He went to the door and tapped the sensor.
“Oh, right,” he said. “Wait a moment. I have to do it manually. Who is it?”
“It’s Mr. Inchrises, Mr. Alexseyev,” said the supervisor’s muffled voice.
“Okay. Let me see . . .”
Finally managing to get the door open, Vasily beheld the haggard, heavily-breathing employee.
“Oh, you must have used the stairs,” Vasily said.
“Is Mrs. Vasylvia here with you? Is all safe?”
“Yes of course. Why wouldn’t they be?”
Inchrises looked at Vasily incredulously. “A score workers died. Twice that many injured. The infirmary went down with everything else — there’s a battery, but no node connection for the medic. We been hauling the hurt off to the district health committee’s hospital. I had to guarantee that the Works would pay. People are milling around beyond the perimeter wall, including spies and press. The word is out: the Works are down. I’ve gotten everyone out of the work areas and warehouses, and most have gone home. I ordered the middle managers to stay. I’m scared to let them out now anyway, in case a crowd tries to rush the door. The district constable is gonna stick her nose in if it comes to all that, since they got jurisdiction on the roads and egresses. Mr. Vas . . . Alexseyev, what are you going to do?”
Vasily looked back into the residence flat, towards his mother’s room. He fidgeted uncomfortably for a moment.
“Wait,” he finally said.
“You wish me to wait? Shouldn’t I go back down . . . ?”
“No. I mean, we shall wait it out. For the system to come back up. Which it will. It only looks dead because running the algorithm is taking up all the multicore processing.”
Inchrises appeared doubtful but withheld commentary. “How long, Mr. Alexseyev?”
“If I knew that, I’d have more processing power than the multicore, which is of course a laugh. That algorithm does strange things past ten-to-the-twenty-third iterations. Wondrous things. It’s the most beautiful output I have ever encountered. Pure art.”
Inchrises stared dumbly at this oration.
“So, just tell them all to wait, Inchrises. It’s very simple.”
“Is Mrs. Alexseyev . . . ?”
“Sleeping, I think.”
“Oh. And you’ll . . . wake her?”
“Of course. Was there anything else, Inchrises?”
The lights flashed for an instant, and the first milliseconds of a chime sounded before rudely cutting out again. Inchrises looked around fearfully.
“Mr. Vasily,” he said, slipping into the old form of address. “I don’t think you . . . we’ve addressed all the consequences. The workers, the managers, they don’t know what to do, or even where to go. It’s all just off.”
Vasily stood in the doorway, having given Inchrises no encouragement to enter the residence apartment. Inchrises had accepted this. Vasily now thrust his chin out proudly and put his hands in his robe pockets.
“I want everyone out. Everyone. Except you, Inchrises. Have whatever security people are left protect them at the gate as they go. You handle the gate yourself. Hole up in your office or the breakroom. I’ll come down to see you.”
“You want the security people to go?”
“Why not? There’s nothing for them to protect that the wall and all the dead doors and dark halls can’t deal with, for now. No one’s going to haul off the machines — not in their hands, anyway. Plus, it might be days, or even a fortnight, before we’re back up to speed here . . .”
Inchrises started at these words.
“So,” Vasily continued, “unless someone is gunning for me — and why would they, since no one knows yet what I’ve done except for you? And Mother, of course, but she’s not telling. Not likely to, either. She’s upset right now because she doesn’t understand. But she’ll come around. Anyhow, when we’re up and running, and the tongues start wagging, we’ll double-up on security. That’s when those fools out there will come after me. When they know what we’ve done here. When they figure out where all this is going. In the meantime, act quickly. Clear the Works. And wait.”
Inchrises looked at his master forlornly. “I shall be in my office, Mr. Vasily. After . . . after I close the gate.”
Vasily gave a superior nod dismissing Inchrises then closed the door. He fell back upon it, staring ahead. The sun had risen to eye level and cast shadows of room furnishings across the floor. He rubbed his temples. Suddenly, a look of relief — even a faint smile — showed on his face. Understanding came in a flash:
“Goodbye Ms. Chernow.” He nodded graciously. “I hereby release you from your obligation.”
After savoring his regained freedom for a moment, he headed for the kitchen. Seeing nothing set out, he recalled Portia leaving last night before the lights went out.
“Portia?” he called out.
No answer. Maybe she had returned and was attending to Mrs. Alexseyev in her bedchamber. Vasily went down the hall and rapped lightly on the door.
“Mother?”
No answer there. Something occurred to him, and he got a worried frown.
“Mother?” he called more loudly. He rapped hard on the door.
Hearing nothing, he hit the sensor. The door remained closed.
“Bother.”
He reached around the top of the door frame for the barrel-key with the star-shaped bit. He released the door mechanism and slid the door to. Mrs. Alexseyev lay on her bed, still in her clothes from the day before and staring at the ceiling.
Vasily stepped in warily.
“Mother?”
Mrs. Alexseyev didn’t answer because she was nuchrome-cold dead, her lips stiff and parted slightly. Her hands, folded across her chest, held fast one of those old-fashioned live-inks of Arseny Alexseyev. It showed a youngish Arseny smiling and waving as he stood on a scaffold overseeing construction somewhere down in the subterranean portions of the manufactory, huge worklights flooding the scene. Figures in hard-hats were tying and securing re-fiber around forms.
Vasily pulled the rigid one-way device free of his mother’s grasp (with some difficulty) and looked more closely. Nearby, behind and to one side of where the workers hived, stood carefully-stacked off-world crates stamped with the logos and insignia of far-distant device manufacturers, companies Vasily had never heard of. Medical devices. Linnet had never made those — had always imported them.
It was the infirmary while still under construction just beyond the multicore dome. Vasily hadn’t known that his father had built it, but he should have guessed: it was wildly overbuilt, sophisticated beyond the regular medics’ ability to fully use. It housed exotic, sophisticated equipment that sat at idle, humming softly, for want of anyone who understood what it all did. Even the local physicians could only marvel at “Arseny’s bio-gizmos.” Vasily had always assumed, regarding the infirmary, that his father had simply added a bit here and there to what came before. But no, Arseny himself had built it. That was his stamp on the physical layout of the Works, if necessarily concealed from casual view by a
thousand thousand tons of heavy earth and fiber-reinforced plascrete, plus the long, wide access tunnel with the shiny, light-duty lev-tram that led to the main shop floor (where most injuries occurred).
Vasily spoke to the looping image before him: “It can’t bring you back. All your fancy equipment and processing power didn’t save you. You’ll still always be dead.”