Positive Liberty

The Great Age of Machines was over. Circuit boards filled the junkyards of Lower Thelma.

We Lower Thelmans had always suspected that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. But even in our deepest fantasies we had never guessed how right we were, until technology advanced so far that real magic itself returned. Even the wisest among us were unable to tell the difference.

The new magic came first in disguise, but soon it wore its true face for all to see. The witches finally removed the vestigial wires from their crystal balls and stopped welding jetpacks onto their broomsticks. In the end, practically every street-corner coven drew down the moon at least once or twice a month, causing no end of frustration to those whose sleep is easily disturbed. It was a new dawn–in more ways than one. The Second Age of Magic was upon us.

In those days, Thomas Frage was a subversion architect; quite possibly he was the best that ever lived. Frage’s work cropped up anonymously, uninvited, all over the duchy. Usually no one noticed until it was entirely too late.

Thomas Frage began as an ordinary designer. For years he busied himself with doorknobs, bookshelves, ornamental gardens, and even once the decor of a very successful brewpub. He had studied both magic and the outmoded forms of technology–and had mastered them both. His constructs did new things, strange and wondrous, that none had ever seen before. His designs were the envy of the civilized world.

One morning the Lady Mary Vernon Artemisia opened the window of her elegant boudoir overlooking the Square of All True Thelmans. It was a rich neighborhood, and she could not have been prouder of her apartment, its decor, and its location. Why, just the other day Thomas Frage had installed a giant mechanical clock in the center of the square. It commemorated Theophile the Great, Thelma’s most celebrated musician. The clock chimed the hours while mechanized figurines played out Theophile’s life story, divided into twelve acts from one o’clock to midnight.

As every true Thelman knew, the whole world had recognized Theophile’s genius from his birth. The fact that he happened to have been a troll was never, ever taken into account by the Thelmans, who have not once in their long history tolerated any sort of racism.

And he played so well for a troll, thought Lady Artemisia. Who would have thought that something so big and so clumsy could possibly make such beautiful music? Best of all, she thought, he’d even brought a lasting peace between trolls and humans! He must have been a very special troll indeed. Why can’t more trolls be like him? she wondered idly.

Everyone was thrilled by the commemorative clock, especially the Lady Mary Vernon Artemisia, whose view of it was particularly excellent. Frage’s figurines clicked and whirred, rotated and chimed on the hour, climbing the stage with guitars in hand. From somewhere within the machine, an ethereal melody was heard.

Lady Artemisia contemplated the clock through her opera glass. She gasped, then fell silent, then started to giggle. She just barely managed to close the shutters before breaking into peals of unladylike laughter.

The figurines on the fountain weren’t keeping time anymore. They weren’t even playing music. They were running about, and hiding, and beating one another with sticks. And the story they were telling–Well, everyone knew that story, but no one liked to admit it.

As the trolls of Lower Thelma knew all too well, Theophile had had to fight for his success. And the humans had resisted every step of the way. They’d hunted him with dogs, forced him to live in the sewers, and even flogged him for breaking the laws that forbade music. Humans usually skip over this part of the story, but Thomas Frage’s clock did not.

Clearly, such a divisive statement could not be tolerated in the tolerant Duchy of Lower Thelma. An investigation followed, but Frage had wisely gone into hiding. Like Theophile before him, Frage had escaped into Lower Thelma’s labyrinthine sewer system, from which few return except the deserving. The continued search for him began to look undignified, and the talking heads in the crystal balls of Lower Thelma eventually changed the subject.

Six weeks later, the magistrates were preparing to dedicate a new courthouse. On the night before the ceremony, it was noticed that one of the lacquered panels in the grand chamber was imperfect and needed replacement. The workmen pulled away the panel and found that the stone wall beneath it had been painted with a large, enigmatic design that could not be discerned without removing still more of the panels. One by one, the workmen pried away the others to reveal a hidden mural beneath, one which depicted all manner of judicial abuses: There, in figures twelve feet high, were lawyers who trampled the constitution, police who imprisoned unjustly, guards who tortured in secret–and even magistrates who went on holiday with defendants.

The workmen were shocked, and they did the only patriotic thing they could.

They smashed the lacquered panels to tiny bits and left the mural in plain sight, telling no one what they had done. At dawn the judges were in a quandary. They hastily covered the offending mural with an unsightly piece of canvas whose only effect was to convince the onlookers that something still more awful lay beneath. They would not have been far from wrong.

The next day, a corps of experienced builders made their way to Thomas Frage’s hiding place and offered him their services. They supplied him with plans of all the major public works and government installations of Lower Thelma, including those still under construction. Together, they set about the grand work of the Subversion Architects.

They built a legislative hall that began immediately to sink into the earth for want of a foundation.

They built a Ministry of Agriculture whose very bricks sprouted noxious weeds when it rained.

They built a Defense Department with so many entrances that it was impossible ever to defend.

And they built a glorious anti-panopticon for the unjustly imprisoned. Its elaborate two-way mirrors and cleverly refracted light meant that the jailers were altogether visible to everyone, while the prisoners remained in the comfortable dark–quite the reverse of the usual prison procedure.

Then came their most striking feat, their crowning glory, which Frage had helped into being with just a touch of the magical arts: At the first snowfall, the 10-foot-thick walls of the Grand Duke’s palace became perfectly transparent, magnifying for the passersby the bodies of the fat and idle courtiers within.

Now the courtiers believed that they could manage public opinion far better than the magistrates, and thus they dared not cover their idleness with sheets of canvas. Instead, they declared the transparent palace miracle, a sign from the heavens that the government of Lower Thelma had always been perfectly honest with everyone. The site was declared a national monument, and the entire court took the opportunity to move to a remote and inaccessible location. Some people were fooled; others were not. A crew of surprisingly eager workmen helped to erect the new palace.

Now the public was of two minds on Frage. Some declared that his buildings were full of lies and distortions. They proclaimed him little more than a hooligan and demanded his arrest. Darkly they whispered that Thomas Frage must be an Asan heretic, a claim that is almost impossible to prove. Yet Frage was the most elusive person in all of Lower Thelma, reducing all questions of his religion to mere speculation. It didn’t matter; half of the people wanted his blood anyway.

Others were more favorable to the man, and declared that Frage was the last of the great Thelman patriots. They proclaimed themselves eager to live the rest of their days in any house that he might design–and unwilling even to set foot in a building that he had not. These people chafed at the idea that Frage might be a heretic.

“As if,” they said, “someone so honest could possibly be a heretic.” Often they added, almost spitefully, “So what if he is? It’s none of our business anyway.”

On the morning of May 2, Irma, Duchess of Lower Thelma, awoke to find that someone was clutching her right hand.

Now this was nothing unusual. For most monarchs, it would have been a hopeless breach of decorum and an even greater breach of security, but Irma had always pressed into service one of her female courtiers to hold her hand as she went to sleep. Since early childhood, Irma proclaimed herself quite unable to doze off otherwise, and in this way she had slept for the better part of her forty-seven years. The unfortunate women who held her hand usually spent the whole night entirely awake, carefully adjusting themselves to all of Irma’s movements, for whenever the poor courtier did let go of her hand, it was said that Irma would spring to full wakefulness immediately, and the courtier would be ejected from the fine new palace that had been completed in record time. Hand-holding, then, was not unusual.

But today was different, because the hand she was holding was rough, and calloused, and male.

Thomas Frage smiled. Irma gasped.

“Are you–?”

“You could say that. But I’m not here to hurt you.”

“But how–?”

“Hey, I built this place. Did you really think I wouldn’t leave a way back in?”

“Why are you here? And what have you done with Clarisse?”

“I’m here… just to prove it could be done. And Clarisse is fine. She crept back to her room when sunstone was showing 2:00 AM. She’s done it every night for the past week, you know, and she’s always back sharply at seven.”

The sunstone cast an iridescent shadow on the wall: 6:56:01

“I’ll call the guards.”

“By all means, my lady.”

“Guards! Help! Help!”

Frage flipped up a large round tile from the marble floor and ducked into a drainage shaft beneath it. The tile slid easily into place behind him.

When the guards arrived, they were completely unable to move the tile. Instead they smashed it, prying the pieces out bit by bit. By the time they had finished, Thomas Frage could have been anywhere within the sewers of the palace.

He could have been anywhere, that is, except in the space directly beneath the tile, which no longer contained a drainage shaft.

Frage and his men lived in the palace for many years, spiriting out sensitive information and meting out the occasional well-deserved punishment upon some of the inhabitants. Periodic efforts were made to hunt them out, but the Architects had designed the palace themselves, and everything about it was bent to serve their needs. None could discover the secrets that allowed them to meet every challenge as it arose, but clearly those secrets allowed the Subversion Architects not merely to survive but to live in grand style at the very heart of the Duchy. Casks of wine would turn up missing, as would entire roast oxen, and it was clear that the Subversion Architects had become parasites upon the public weal.

One day the Architects found that the antique closed-circuit television system was a surprisingly good target for necromantic magic. Soon, scenes of macabre horror started periodically breaking in on the afternoon soap operas in the palace. The denizens did their best to shrug it off, because everyone knows that what you see on television isn’t really real. But the worrisome disappearance of incriminating documents was harder to ignore, in particular when they reappeared the next day on the ouija boards of every diviner in town.

Hardly a single decree could be issued, or a single action taken, without the Architects somehow imprinting upon it their peculiar designs, and these were seldom what the nobility of Lower Thelma would have wished. Thus when the Duke erected a great equestrian statue of Ingbert II, the Architects had so carefully arranged the statue and pedestal that whenever the wind blew, the great statue would gently twirl in place.

The effect was so ridiculous that we have come to use the word “spin” to denote the pranks of the Subversion Architects.

The palace servants brought gifts to the Architects in their secret hideaways, and in return they had the satisfaction of witnessing firsthand the ingenious pranks played upon the most disagreeable courtiers. An entire genre of breathless new journalism sprung up to report, minute by minute, the latest of their exploits. As time went on, people grew used to the Subversion Architects. They came to expect that their ouija boards would give them useful information every morning, and even while it might be unpatriotic to question the government, well…

The Subversion Architects might have been a menace to society, but everyone in Lower Thelma loved them anyway.