, she thought.
What else am I going to do tonight? Sit in my bedroom and brood?
'We already shared a meal, anyway,' she called after him. 'Back when you weren't being so rude.'
He stopped, the hem of his greatcoat swinging around his legs.
'I said I'm sorry.'
'Among icarii,' she said, to his back, 'when two friends fight, one of them buys the other a drink to make up.'
He stared straight ahead, into the darkness.
'What kind of drink?'
'A cold beer to wash down a spicy Cabisi stew would be perfect.' She folded her arms over her chest. 'I told you I'm starving.'
He turned.
'Then I'll buy your dinner, too,' he said, his grave tone leavened by the profound relief in his face.
Chapter Eleven
Taya's favorite Cabisi restaurant was close to the University campus, where it served foreign students and the occasional adventurous Ondinium like her. Cristof stuck to his decision to fast, only nibbling on shreds of the flatbread served with the meal. They discussed what they knew so far. It wasn't much, but it was safe territory. Taya didn't know what to think about Cristof envying Alister. She didn't know what to think about Cristof, period.
It was easier not to.
When she'd finished eating, they walked the four blocks to the University, heading back down to the basement of the Science and Technology building. The familiar sound of an argument greeted them, but Taya didn't hear the clatter of the analytical engine or the chugging of the steam engines.
'Hello,' she sang out, as they entered the room. The argument stopped as the programmers looked up. Palms hit foreheads and heads bobbed when they saw Cristof.
'This isn't a good time for a visit,' Kyle cautioned them. A large schematic was spread on the table in front of him. 'A bug cropped up this morning and we've been trying to hunt it down all day.'
'Did something go wrong with one of your programs?' Taya looked at the huge analytical engine that stood motionless across half the room. The thick cables that led down to the steam engines in the basement were disconnected.
'No, it's mechanical, we think.' Lars was inspecting a gear assembly. Cristof crossed the room to join him. 'Some torsion in the spindles, maybe some gear drift….'
'What happened?'
'We came in this morning—'
'Afternoon,' Victor corrected. He was sitting next to a box of punch cards, glancing at each and then setting it to one side. 'We were hung over this morning.'
'This afternoon, early, and we found the engine running on its own.'
'Is that bad?' Taya pulled around a chair and sat in it backward, her wings rising behind her.
'It can't be very good for the mechanism,' Cristof murmured, squinting as he examined the gears. 'This is a precision machine, like a clock. Does it lose accuracy with metal wear?'
'Absolutely.' Lars rubbed oil off a spindle.
'Lars thinks the mechanical problems might have affected Heart's results,' Emelie said, smirking.
'That, or Alister had a serious glitch in his program,' Lars growled. 'Anyway, it's not just the fact that the engine ran all night. Its encryption keys were overridden, too, so anyone could have gotten in and used it while we were gone.'
'Did they?' Cristof asked, suddenly intent.
'Not that we can tell, but…. 'Isobel shrugged. 'The place was a mess when we left. We couldn't tell if anything had been moved when we got in this morning.'
'Afternoon.' Victor tapped a card on the table and then put it back into his stack.
'Whenever.'
'So, what went wrong with the Clockwork Heart program?' Taya inquired.
'It told us that Lars and Kyle had the best chance of a successful marriage,' Emelie replied, grinning.
'The deal was, if any of us scored well together, we'd go on a date and see if the program was right.' Kyle glanced up and smiled impishly. 'But Lars has cold feet.'
'I'd rather be ground through the Great Engine's gears,' Lars grumbled.
'We all agreed to it,' Kyle pointed out. 'Don't worry. I'll take you someplace nice.'
Taya laughed. 'Isn't there some kind of — I don't know, some kind of program rule about couples being men and women?'
'That's what Victor's looking for.' Kyle was still smiling to himself as he glanced down at the schematic again. 'Either another function overrode it, or Alister was more of a free thinker than we thought.'
'Good for Alister,' Isobel said, unscrewing a metal panel.
Taya glanced at Cristof, wondering what he thought, but he was crouching and regarding the analytical engine with a furrowed brow.
'You'd think he'd put sex selection on top of the deck,' Victor griped, 'but it's not there. And some of these cards are ridiculous. He's got registers in here that don't make any sense at all.'
'Did he write the whole program himself?' Cristof asked.
'Pretty much. It was his project.' Victor scowled, putting another card into the stack. 'I would have written this routine with much more elegance. It's as though he didn't care how much slagging computational power or time his program would take.'
'Well, he was going to run it on the Great Engine, wasn't he?' Taya asked. 'I mean, that's pretty powerful, right?'
'Aesthetics are essential. Programs should be as clean as possible. Alister was usually very efficient, but this mess is positively baroque.'
'That's not the Great Engine's version of the program, is it?' Cristof asked. 'The cards are too small.'
'This was his test version, the one he ran here. Nobody tests a program on the Great Engine. It costs too much, and you wouldn't want to cause a crash,' Kyle said.
'What would happen if the Great Engine crashed?' Taya cocked her head, imagining huge gears tumbling down against each other. 'Is it something the Torn Cards might try? You said running a partial program like the one Cristof had last night could shut down an engine.'
'It wouldn't be the end of the world,' Lars said, handing Cristof a clean gear. The exalted began piecing the cleaned assembly back together again, looking as engrossed as he'd been while dismantling the eyrie clock. 'But you'd panic a lot of engineers. An abrupt stop would throw gears and spindles out of alignment, and it might ruin a storage drum if the data were being written. Everything would have to be recalibrated before the Engine was started up again. That would take a few days. The program schedule would fall behind, you might lose some data, and Ondinium could get stuck with a surplus of widgets or something. Nothing serious.'
'You keep saying that the Great Engine isn't very important, but I thought it was the main reason Ondinium's so powerful.'
'Don't listen to the Organicists or the Social Engineers,' Kyle advised, glancing up from the schematic. 'They both credit the Engine with far too much power. It's just a fancy calculating machine. People decide what to do with the data it provides. If you looked at your watch and it said five o'clock, but you knew it was the middle of the night, would you believe your watch or your senses? Same with the Great Engine. If it gives the Council obviously inaccurate data, the Council will notice and make corrections.'
