“Not entirely,” said Berenice. “But there’s a common theme. There’s this subject of mass—and the device is trying to figure out where this mass should be, and how big the mass is.”
“So?” said Sancia. “What’s that got to do with floating and flying?”
“Well,” said Berenice. “I’m not sure if I’m right here…But every scriver before us has assumed that gravity only worked one way—down, and to the earth. But Estelle’s designs seem to suggest that…that everything has gravity. Everything pulls everything else to it. It’s just that some things have a strong pull, and others have a weak pull.”
“What!” said Giovanni. “What rot!”
“It sounds mad, but that’s how this rig works. Estelle’s designs don’t defy gravity—the rig convinces what it’s touching that, say, there’s a whole scrumming world just above it with a gravity equal to the Earth’s, so the Earth’s gravity is canceled out, and the thing just…floats. The designs just…reorient gravity, counterbalance it—almost perfectly.”
“Is that possible?” said Claudia.
“The hell with what’s possible!” said Orso. “Can you figure out what’s missing? Can you fabricate the definitions to get the damned thing working, Berenice?”
“I could probably do it all, if I had a month,” she said. “But I don’t think we need it all. We don’t need all the crucial calibrations or control strings.”
“We don’t?” said Sancia nervously.
“No.” She looked at her. “Not if you can just talk to the damned thing. All I need to fabricate is some definitions that can give the rig some impression of the location and density of this mass. And it would have to match these sigils etched on the rig, of course.”
Orso licked his lips. “How many definitions?”
Berenice did some calculations on the corner of her paper. “I think…four should do.”
He stared. “You think you can fabricate four definitions? In a handful of hours? Most fabricators can barely manage one in a week!”
“I’ve been neck-deep in Candiano shit for the past days,” said Berenice. “I’ve been looking at all their strings, their designs, their methodology. I…I think I can make it work. But there’s another problem—we’ll still need to put these definitions in a lexicon to actually make them effectual. We can’t just walk into one of the Dandolo foundries and slip these in there—the guards wouldn’t even let you do that, sir.”
“Could they work in a combat lexicon?” asked Claudia. “Like the portable ones they use in the wars?”
“Those are pretty limited to powering weaponry,” said Berenice. “And they’re hard to get ahold of, as anything having to do with the wars often is.”
“And the test lexicon back at my workshop can’t cast far enough,” said Orso. “It only extends a mile and a half or so—not nearly enough to fly Sancia to the Mountain.”
“We can’t take it with us, either,” said Berenice. “Not only is it stuck on tracks in the workshop, but it weighs close to a thousand pounds itself.”
“Right,” said Orso. “Shit!” He fell into silence, glowering into the wall.
“So…are we scrummed here?” said Sancia.
“Sounds like we’re scrummed,” said Gio.
“No!” Orso held up a finger. A wild, mad gleam crept into his eye. He looked at Claudia and Giovanni, and the two Scrappers recoiled slightly. “You two—you do much work with twinning?”
Claudia shrugged. “Uh…as much as any scriver worth their salt does?”
“That’ll do,” said Orso. “All of you—get up. We’re going to my workshops. Berenice is going to need a lot of space and the proper tools to do her bit. And that’s where we’ll get to work as well,” he said, nodding at Claudia and Gio.
“On what?” said Claudia.
“I’ll figure it out along the way!” he snapped.
They trooped out of the drainage tunnel into the Gulf, then started up the hill. They moved quickly, filing through the Commons with the air of refugees or fugitives. Orso seemed filled with a mad energy, muttering to himself excitedly, but it wasn’t until they approached the Dandolo walls that Sancia glanced at him, and saw his cheeks were wet with tears.
“Orso?” she said quietly. “Uh—you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said. He wiped his eyes. “I’m fine. Just…God, what a waste!”
“A waste?”
“Estelle,” he said. “The girl figured out how goddamn gravity works. She figured out how to make a listening rig. All while being trapped in some hole in the Mountain!” He paused for a moment, and seemed too stricken for words. “Imagine what wonders she could have made for us all, if she’d only had a chance! And now she’s become too dangerous to be free. What a waste. What a scrumming waste!”
* * *
When they got to the workshops, Sancia sat at a table with her hands on the plates while Berenice set up scriving blocks, parchment papers, and, of course, dozens of definition plates and molten bronze and styli to do the actual fabrication. Orso brought Claudia and Giovanni to the back of the workshop, where his test lexicon sat on rails that slid back into an ovenlike chamber in the wall, with a thick iron door.
“God,” said Gio, looking at it. “How I’d love to get my hands on one of these…Something that could actually, genuinely allow you to toy around with definitions!”
Claudia examined the iron door and the chamber. “Pretty massive heat resistance commands in this,” she said. “It’s a tiny lexicon, relatively speaking, but it still throws out a huge amount of temperature. If your idea is for us to build a test lexicon to carry around, that’s a giant task.”
“I don’t want you to build a lexicon,” said Orso. “I just want you to build a box. Specifically, a box shaped like that.” He pointed at the chamber.
“Huh?” said Claudia. “You just want us to build a heat chamber?”
“Yes. I want you to duplicate the one in the wall, and twin them—but we’ll need a switch to activate and deactivate the twinning designs. Get me?”
The Scrappers exchanged a glance. “I guess?” said Claudia.
“Good,” said Orso. “Then do it.”
This was a familiar job for the Scrappers, who Orso knew were a deft hand at construction, and his workshops offered far finer tools than what they’d used in the crypt. Within less than three hours they had the basic raw structure ready, and they started scriving the twinning sigils on its frame.
Claudia looked at Orso, who had half his body stuck in the chamber in the wall as he did his own delicate work. “What’s going in this box, exactly?” she asked him.
“Technically?” said Orso. “Nothing.”
“Why are we building a box that’ll hold nothing?” said Gio.
“Because,” said Orso, “it’s what the box will think it holds that matters.”
“Since we’ve got a serious scrumming deadline here,” said Claudia, “can you cut to the point?”
“I had the idea when we talked to Sancia’s key—Clef, or whatever,” said Orso. He popped out of the chamber, dashed to a blackboard covered in sigils, and made a few adjustments. “He talked about how impressive twinning was, and later I realized—Tribuno Candiano had developed a way to scrive reality. I mean, the Mountain is basically a big box that’s sensitive to all the changes that take place inside it! It’s aware of its contents, in other words. It’s something Tribuno and I toyed with back in the day, but it required too much effort to manage. But…what if you could build a box that was somewhat aware of its contents, and then twin the box? Then if you put something into one box, the other box thinks it holds that exact same thing as well!”
Claudia stared at him, her mouth open as she understood. “So…so your idea is to duplicate the heat chamber here in your workshops, twin it…and we’ll take the empty double into the Candiano campo.”
“Right,” said Orso cheerfully.
“And because the first chamber will know it holds a test lexicon, then the double will also think it holds a test lexicon…so the empty one will project the necessary definitions far enough for Sancia’s rig to work? Is that it?”
“That’s the theory!” said Orso. He grinned wide enough that they saw all of his teeth. “We’re essentially twinning a chunk of reality! Only, this particular chunk happens to hold a small lexicon loaded with the definitions we need to do the shit we need to do! Make sense?”
“This…this is tying my brain in knots,” said Gio faintly. “You’re scriving something to believe it’s scrived, in other words?”
“In essence,” said Orso. “But that’s what scriving is. Reality doesn’t matter. If you can change something’s mind enough, it’ll believe whatever reality you choose.”
“How are we supposed to do this, exactly?” said Claudia.
“Well, you two aren’t doing shit, really,” snapped Orso. “I’m doing the hard bit, where I make the heat chamber in the wall aware of what it holds! Then you’re just doing your basic twinning designs. So could we stop talking, and let me get back to goddamn work?”