An Academy? That's Insane — 12
The next day.
Victoria still couldn't get up when morning came, so I woke her, washed her, dressed her, and stood her at the entrance. When Morris left for work, he took her with him.
The sky was still the blue of early dawn. A truck sat parked beside the mansion. I already knew as much, but a truck looks much the same in any world: wheels, a broad bed for cargo, and just enough space to sit and drive.
There was room up front for both children, but I gave Victoria the passenger seat and climbed into the back. No one stopped me, which suggested there was no law against carrying people back there. Not enough of them had died of it yet, I supposed.
The truck pulled away, and I rode along behind. We headed for the heart of Berne City. It was still nearly dawn, and if there was any mercy in the hour, it was that the roads were not crowded. We didn't have to sit up there for long. The ride to our destination was perfectly comfortable.
Taxis and cars passed along the street, and office workers and laborers trudged to work with exhausted faces. The laborers, of course, were not on the main road. They kept to the alleys set back from it, divided off as if they were creatures who were not permitted to come out into the open. In other words, there was discrimination.
I rather liked that. It meant that if I simply built a harvester, it would kill people all on its own.
Hehe.
I watched the city's light and its dark go by, and before long we arrived. Stepping down, I found a vast company that required a pass merely to enter. A sign hung over the doors.
A firm with the technology to do something by means of magic, perhaps? The company written on the documents Beatrice had been filling out did not bear that name. So the two of them worked at different places. Well. One doesn't necessarily marry the person sitting right beside them.
Morris spoke with the guard, brought something out from inside, and hung visitor badges on Victoria and me. Then he drove the truck deep into the grounds. Behind the tall building stood something like a factory. He parked where there was no lot at all, and led Victoria and me in.
"Whoa."
Victoria let out a cry of pure wonder, then rattled off the names and uses of the machines before her eyes. From the sound of it, they were equipment that was difficult to obtain.
Morris looked once around the place, still empty of people, and took us to where he worked. It was not a room so much as a section walled off by partitions, with all manner of devices set out inside. A notice hung in one corner.
His station sat far from the equipment in the center, so he likely met very few people. He picked up a device he had made and explained it eagerly to his daughter: how it worked, technically; what he had built it to do; how it was inefficient now, but would become something extraordinary with a few improvements. The usual sort of thing worth boasting about.
Honestly, I have no interest in technology. For the record, the technology itself was impressive in its own way. Especially that shining memory. Dagon, that is. Well.
If people come cheap, one can build highly efficient equipment. In practice, it was only a matter of combining the machines already here. In that sense, Morris truly was a gifted man. The trouble was that no trace of a corpse could be seen anywhere around him, which meant this technology was never going to be recognized.
The method was simple. Shift the order slightly from the blueprint Morris insisted upon, and drive the component that absorbed mana not into the open air, but into a person. A person is a filter and a catalyst. Something like that. The memory glinted. But did these people need it?
I was thinking that, watching father and daughter talk, when the workday seemed to begin and people arrived one by one. Surprisingly, there was no inequality of sex inside; those clocking in were about half men and half women. The species were every kind as well. Some had horns, some had long ears, and some were thick with fur, with the ears and tails of beasts of prey.
But there was one problem. The looks they turned this way were very bad — sneering, looking down on him, wondering why he still had not cleared out. The moment they saw me they tried to hide their expressions, but hiding an expression from me is impossible. And among them I caught someone heading off with open hostility plain on their face.
A sensible person would have tried to take Victoria and leave. I had no such intention. If it could be managed, I wanted Victoria to do what she wanted to do. Feeling misfortune begin to draw in like a tide, I waited for the person who would set it loose. This was a fine moment for such a person to appear.
A little later, a bleak-looking middle-aged man and a severe-looking young woman came toward us together. She followed a step behind him, which made her the secretarial sort. In other words, the man was someone of high rank. He walked straight past me and made for Morris.
"Brought a child into the institute on your own authority, did you. Morris."
"Director!"
Morris hurried out and bowed his head. Anyone with a sense of propriety would not have hurled abuse at a father in front of his child.
"How long has it been since you started living off research funds without properly making a single thing? I told you to be prepared if there were no results by the end of this week, didn't I? And now you've broken company rules on top of it. Did you forget this is a restricted zone. Morris."
But people without propriety are never in short supply. Morris kept bowing and saying he was sorry, while Victoria, behind him, stared at him with a devastated face.
The humidity in the factory was falling. Power is a thing of impulse.
Plenty of people wanted a place in the institute. Even if it meant working without sleep, people desperate for the work were everywhere — and what did Morris think he was doing? The director spat it out in curses. Very foul ones.
No one around was openly watching. I knew their ears were pricked all the same. Several of them met my eyes sidelong: some merely curious, some wearing the look of people glad to see him get what was coming, some worried the arrows might fly their way. There were those who worried for Morris, of course, but their fear of the man who held the directorship was greater. Companies are all like that.
The director was only doing what he was meant to do, and he was entitled to tell a man with no results to get out. By any common sense, the one at fault was the person who had brought a child into a place where security surely mattered. A very good situation. It was fine if Victoria crossed the line. It was fine if Morris sold her off.
A human life changes with remarkable ease. One only has to step off the path a single time. A very small theft. A very trivial lie. The very simple choice of a different victim. They will insist on living as they please, and live instead a life in which they cannot.
Smack.
The man called the director, still shouting at Morris, could not master the anger his own words had stirred, and struck Morris across the head with the folder in his hand.
"You— to my dad—"
"Victoria!"
Before the water could cinch around the director's throat, Morris shouted.
"I'm sorry, Director. Victoria, it doesn't look as though I can show you where I work today. I'll see you as far as the entrance. Director, I'll take the children outside, and I'll accept whatever comes after."
He said it while wiping the blood running down his face. And between the crying, the lament, and the grief, a resolve wavered.
Well, now. Was this what it meant to be a father, whatever else one might say? Or did it mean his insides had not rotted any further yet? If he rotted just a little more and lightly did something he ought not to do, I rather thought a situation would arise in which warmth could gather…….
But instead of making the choice that would have won him the company's recognition, Morris took his daughter's hand and went outside. He did commit the small mistake of forgetting me on the way out, but he was surely beside himself, so I would let it pass.
"Kid."
"What is it?"
I was following the two who had gone ahead when the man called the director spoke to me. I turned. He stared at me, then took a step back, and went on staring as if he had forgotten what he meant to say.
"Director?"
At his secretary's question, he stretched out a hand and pointed to the exit.
"Tell Morris Bat to write up his resignation and bring it in."
"All right."
A tool with many possibilities — but for it to vanish like this was fate as well. By Dagon's measure it was a very early technology, and also a beginning technology, the sort that leads on to others. Efficient in its own time; once technology advances, too middling, and discarded. Using living bodies for fuel is far more effective if one uses the soul as well.
I went outside. I found the two of them the moment I left the building. Beyond the door, Victoria clung to Morris and sobbed, and Morris stroked his daughter's head.
"I'm sorry the two of you had to see me like that."
When I came closer, Morris gave me a bitter smile.
"The director says to write your resignation and bring it in."
Morris nodded, resigned. Watching him, I grew curious all at once.
"1473256?"
If he didn't know, then he didn't know — or else it might kindle a glint edged with malice. On that chance, I spoke the most efficient form of the technology he had shown me. The order of the equipment from before: from the left, one, two, three, and the far right had been seven. I had changed the sequence.
His expression hardened. Ah. That was the face of someone who knew.
"Even if you know, treat it as if it does not exist. That is a technology that must not come out."
"Everything developed at this company will belong to the company."
"I know. But who would bother digging through the work of a man like me? And when I leave, I'll destroy as much as I can of whatever won't get me into legal trouble."
Victoria had no idea what we were talking about, and looked back and forth between Morris and me. Morris caught her and pulled her into his arms, as if to shield her from me.
"You are a far more frightening person than I thought."
"A monster."
I corrected him, and stepped up in front of him. If someone could have left the path with ease and still chose to do good, they ought to be praised. Most people cannot make that choice. They are busy mocking the good deeds of others, aren't they?
"You managed to protect your daughter. I'll praise you for it."
So the monster does it in their place. From the other side, because I know better than anyone the worth of what he has done. And because I also know that such worth collapses in an instant.
At my words Morris laughed, awkward, and touched his head where the blood had run and then crusted. He took his wallet from his pocket and pressed money into my hand.
"I'm asking you to comfort my daughter."
Then he embraced her once more and went back inside.
Watching him go, a fact occurred to me all at once. A man who loved his daughter this much. If she had never come back, what choice would he have made…….
I gazed for a moment at another reality, one in which Enchant Company was drenched in blood, and then I erased it. I took the hand of Victoria, still sniffling and sobbing, and left the company behind.
Let us go and see the city.