by Felix Gilman
I should say that the Damaris had a bar on the upper deck, full of shadows and faded finery and suggestive paintings and a faint sweetish smell of rotten wood. There was also a piano, and we were standing next to it.
“Well,” I said. “The piano? That’s not what I imagined but I reckon I could learn to play.”
“It’s not what it looks like, Mr. Rawlins.”
What it was, was something I had never heard of. It was a new thing in the world and there were no real names for it yet. John Southern called it a motor piano or a self-player piano or that damn thing. Its inventor had called it a music box.
It looked like a large upright piano. It was made of wood, and in keeping with the rest of the Damaris it was painted red and black and gold, and somewhat over-ornamented, and covered in dust and grime. There were two wide rows of black and white keys, that were like a kind of terrifying message in a code I could not read. Above the keys there was a window in the piano’s frame, exposing bright metallic workings that bore no resemblance to any musical instrument I had ever seen before, or for that matter any machine. A wild profusion of wires hooked into each other at every possible angle and I could see that the apparatus almost hummed with counter-posed tensions. If it resembled anything at all, it resembled an illustration of the Brain and Nervous System that was one of the main attractions of the Encyclopedias I used to sell back in East Conlan— except that that was the lurid pink and vein-blue of human flesh, while the piano was all golden-glittering and immaculate. Immediately my curiosity got the better of me and I reached in and touched a wire, and there was a shivering sound and deep inside something turned over and the wires began to work against each other and the keys depressed as if a ghost was sitting at the bench and the piano played a few notes of very beautiful music, which turned into a few bars of utter cacophony, then silence.
“Useless damn thing,” Southern said.
I fell in love with the machine at once.
There was another window you could open in the frame. There were
a lot of secret parts, like in a haunted house in a book— I doubt I ever found them all. Behind that window were levers, switches, and several cylinders of hard molded wax, wrapped in stiff yellow paper punched with holes. I did not get where I am today without being a quick study and it did not take me long to understand that the cylinders could control the piano, the molding being a form of secret language that the mechanism could speak, not unlike telegraph-signals.
Someone had scratched kotan into the brass, with a flourish, on the topmost winding-mechanism. Beneath kotan were the words gibson city, 1889.
“I guess that’s the fellow who made it,” Southern said. “Kotan. We got it for next to nothin’ in Gibson City last year. A theater didn’t want it anymore, they said it made their actors nervous. I reckon maybe they just couldn’t get it to work.”
“A great year for inventions,” I said. I could not stop running my hands over the frame. “A great year for the future.”
“We had a piano player,” Southern said, “but he was a drunk. I won’t tell you what the one before ’im did or I’ll get mad. I’ve had my damn fill of piano-players. I thought, guess we should get someone to fix this damn thing. Least it can’t get drunk. You’re not a drunk, are you, Rawlins? Can you fix it?”
“No,” I said. “Yes.”
Fixing the thing was easy enough. A few wires had snapped, a few more had been loosened by the rolling of the boat, some springs had sprung and some mice had made a nest in an unwise location, from which I had no choice but to round up and relocate them. Just replacing the wires and getting rid of the mice was enough to improve its operations greatly— Mr. Southern could have done it himself if not for what I think was a superstitious fear of the machine. By the time I had done that, we were a day further down the river, and I was hired on as a member of the crew, responsible mostly for the care and maintenance of the piano, and for pretending to play it in the evenings.
The performance was mostly a matter of smiling and patter and leaving the machine to do its own work. I could guide it but not control it. I could stop it and start it and gently coax it, through arrangement of the cylinders and wires, in certain directions, but that was all— it would play what it would play. In fact do not think I ever understood a quarter of the machine’s secrets.
I stayed with the Damaris until it was summer, until we had left the Western Rim far behind and the Ire had become the Jass and we neared the border of the Tri-City Territory. Our progress eastward was constant but irregular. We stopped in every town, and we followed what seemed like every last tributary of the Ire or the Jass, and we changed direction frequently, according to Mr. Southern’s whims, or the cross-currents of business, or because of rumors and warnings about which towns or stretches of river ahead of us or behind us were dangerous due to the fighting. I didn’t complain. Mr. Southern provided me with a russet suit, and though it was old and faded and too big and not nearly so fine as my old white suit from my days on the road it was handsome enough in the half-light of the bar. Every night I sat behind the piano as it worked itself, and mimed the action of playing, and smiled at everyone.
The passengers of the Damaris were farmers and business-travelers and the occasional adventurous young man or woman who was traveling for no clear purpose that even they understood. There were a few rough hunting-trapping types returning from the West with spoils. There was the regular cast of wild-eyed speculators. There were handsome young private secretaries delivering important correspondence or financial documents, and doing their best to look inconspicuous. There were wealthy men and women from Greenbank or Melville who had been displaced when the Line destroyed their towns, and now had nothing to do but drift and drink until their money ran out. There were some missionaries and a journalist or two. There were some bad men and some gun-for-hire types and my guess is some of the striking and menacing men who came and went and commanded a space of shadow around themselves were Agents of the Gun. Sometimes when I played I wore a hat low on my head for fear somebody would recognize me.
We had traveling entertainers, including two consecutive magicians. We had pickpockets, some of whom operated with John Southern’s sanction and some of whom soon wished they did. From time to time there was a girl who stood beside me and danced, listlessly or with naïve enthusiasm. They were paid poorly and they usually left at the soonest opportunity. One or two of them were pretty, I guess. I only had eyes for the machine. Most nights I slept beside it, on a red couch at the back of the bar.
The piano was powered by a hand-crank that wound and tightened coiled springs. An hour’s work in the afternoon would provide those springs with enough stored energy to last for the night. I sweated over the crank the way Carver had sweated over the pedals of the Apparatus.
The music of the piano was not always beautiful. Truth is it varied widely in quality. Initially it depended on the arrangement of the wax cylinders and the rings upon them and certain levers and switches— which on my first night on the Damaris I calculated had one hundred and eight possible permutations or states of ordering, and then on the second night I understood that I failed to account for the function of certain pedals and frets, and that there in fact were somewhat more than eleven thousand such permutations— and then on the fourth night with the piano I understood with a delight I cannot describe that the true number was much, much higher, as big as music or language or the world. Well anyhow however I arranged matters the piano quickly slipped my control. The patterns became unpredictable. Fugues emerged and subsided. Sometimes the piano produced tones and rhythms that no human person would think to produce or enjoy, as if it was amusing itself. It seemed to have moods. Sometimes the noises it produced were like one imagines the music of the Future will be. When it was bad I laughed a lot and told jokes and nobody seemed to care too much. Once or twice a glass was thrown at my head but without particular malice, and I have quick reflexes. Nobody cared much when it was good, either. Southern continu
ed to refer to the machine as that damn thing, though he was happy not to have to pay a pianist. Nobody saw what I saw in it. The mind that had built the machine was a subtle and lovely one and I knew that it was a mind that would understand the Light of the Apparatus. It was a mind that recognized nothing as impossible. Kotan. I did not know if it was a man or a woman, old or young, rich or poor— there seemed no likelihood that we would ever meet. I did not know if it was a place or a time or a factory, for that matter.
Anyhow this whole period was a pleasant interlude in my life. I collected tips and I saved a little money and I did not mind so much that nobody knew my name. The passengers brought stories of the fighting creeping further and further east, as if it was following us— stories of Line forces commandeering towns, of Agents of the Gun swaggering openly into saloons and murdering as they pleased— stories of Heavier-Than-Air Vessels and Gas and Ironclads and witchcraft and uprisings of the free Folk and of strange new weapons and the Miracle at White Rock. “Not here,” I said. “Not to night. We left the War behind on land.” And I smiled and coaxed the piano into something to put them at ease.
The one part of the job I disliked was when somebody would request a particular piece of music. I did not have that kind of control over what the piano would do. Its internal mathematics carried their own implications and it worked them out, like it or not. You could not easily explain that to a drunk. Instead you had to convince them that they wanted what they were going to get anyhow— and so the principal skill the job required was fast-talking and a convincing smile.
The worst of all songs was “The Ballad of John Creedmoor,” which appeared at the beginning of spring. The drunks sung it often. They asked for accompaniment and I said no. They asked me why not, was I a loyalist of the Line or something, and sometimes they got belligerent. They sang it anyhow.
John Creedmoor was a thief and a wicked, wicked man
He fought and he killed in the War
Till he looked at the blood that stained his hands
And it made him cry out, “No more!”
Now Liv was a lady of elegant birth
A beauty, a kind heart for sure
And she came and she saw all this suffering earth
And it made her cry out “No More!”
And together they went way out to the West
Where the land and the sky are as one
Where the wild Folk dwell and each morning is blessed
And they said, “Let the fighting be done.”
And so on. There were a number of different versions of this song, and some of them went on longer than others, but however long it lasted the damn thing never got any less bad than it started out. I shall not inflict on posterity the verses that mentioned myself, Professor Harry Ransom, the “coal-black wonder-worker,” nor the verses about the Miracle of White Rock and the death of the ten-foot monster Knoll.
Now who can say where they are on this day
If we knew we never would say
But one day they will come to the place that they seek
And one day this land shall know peace.
“No,” I said, when I was asked to play the melody. “We are on the water, gentlemen. We drift downriver. Like I said: we have already escaped the War. Why dwell on it?”
CHAPTER 13
MAGIC
In a town called Holland, not far west of the Three Cities and about two weeks west of Jasper, we picked up a magician by the name of the Great Rotollo and his wife. For three nights Rotollo and his wife performed their tricks while I played, or rather while Kotan’s piano played itself and I mimed. It would be misleading to say that there was a crowd but there were people sitting here and there who could be coaxed into half-hearted applause.
A Portrait of the Great Rotollo and the Amazing Amaryllis
The Great Rotollo did card tricks and he plucked costume jewelry from the ears of business-travelers. He divined the names and dispositions of dead relatives, and he guessed what the speculators were looking for in a way that seemed to encourage them. He did not levitate, he did not cut himself or anyone else in half, he did not disappear or reappear. What he did was simple but he did it well. That is a respectable way to be.
His wife flirted outrageously and danced, in a way that was suggestive, though a little stiff. She was not young anymore. Her stage name was Amaryllis and she had a long neck and a tall beehive of red hair, gray at the roots. She was loud and always smiling. Rotollo, on the other hand, affected a severe and mystical demeanor. His head was shaved but he had a long and sharply trimmed black beard. He wore a top hat and a moth-eaten blazer of red velvet, and he carried two knives, curving in the Dhravian style. One of them was a collapsible trick knife and one of them was not, and I suspected that one day he would get them confused and that would be the end of his wife, and no court would ever be able to prove whether it was murder or not. Rotollo and Amaryllis hated one another in a way that at first I thought was part of their performance, and only reluctantly accepted was real.
Amaryllis wore frills. Her plunging décolletage was strung about with fake pearls like dull lamps. Rotollo wore various rings and amulets, ornamented with stones that he said bore sigils of the Folk, though I had seen the sigils of the Folk and the scratchings he displayed had none of their stark and unworldly beauty. He introduced every trick by saying that he learned it from his visitations among the wild Folk in the farthest western wilderness. I think this impressed some of the more naïve members of our audience, for whom the wild Folk were a source of great fascination, though they showed no interest in the Folk below driving the wheel.
At the end of each night Rotollo would announce that he wished to perform a feat of wonder in honor of John Creedmoor and the beautiful Miss Liv. He was not, he said, a partisan of any side in the War or an enemy of any person. He was a partisan of magic, and of the world to come. And he would remove his hat and his wife Amaryllis would show it around and collect what he somehow managed to imply were donations for the cause of Peace. Then he would retrieve his hat and make some passes over it and release from it a kind of battered-looking dove. The mechanism of the hat was designed to project the bird into the air, gently but forcefully, in case it was reluctant to perform. The first night it fluttered in a panic from side to side of the bar and was hell to recapture. The second night it circled then settled nervously on top of the piano. The third night the mechanism broke and a snarl of wires strangled the poor creature, while the spring launched bloody feathers into the faces of our audience, a half-a-dozen shady-looking business-travelers, who laughed and applauded. Amaryllis screamed and swooned into the lap of a fat businessman. Some of the dove’s feathers got into the mechanism of the piano and interrupted its cogitations and it became cacophonous. Rotollo cursed at his wife, like it was her fault somehow, and threw the hat on the floor in a rage. It seemed like the fat businessman was taking more liberties than necessary as he comforted Amaryllis, which further angered Rotollo. I smiled and tried to pass the whole thing off as a joke. When I saw Rotollo’s hand twitch toward his knives I got up and went to put my arm around him, making him take a bow and then leading him to the bar. Meanwhile the piano played itself, rising to a crescendo then stopping.
Later the Great Rotollo and I stood together on the deck, and he drank with one hand and smoked with the other, while I watched the dark massive treetops slide by under the stars.
“Do you know how much that damned thing cost?” he said.
“I can’t say I do.” I assumed he was speaking of the hat. “Say, what you said about the Folk, is that true?”
“What did I say about the Folk now? I don’t listen to myself much these days. No, wait, I know what you mean— did I really learn card tricks from some stone-casting shaman of the damn Folk? Well, what do you think? You think my name’s really Rotollo?”
“I guess not. You may not think it to look at me but I’ve traveled widely, Mr. Rotollo, before I ended up on the river.”
“It�
��s Joe. And that’s all talk, it’s all superstition for hicks. Like that horse shit about John Creedmoor and that woman. You know what, you know what, Amaryllis eats that stuff up, I swear she’s soft in the head, it’s worse than when she decided she was a Smiler. Peace! No such thing. Would be bad for business anyway. Happy people don’t need—”
There was a thump in the distance, then a flash of what looked like distant lightning. Rotollo said “huh,” then drank.
“If there is some new weapon in the world, it’ll be in the hands of the Line or the Gun. It’ll only make things worse.”
“I guess so,” I said. “I try not to get involved in matters of politics. It does nobody any good and it only makes people crazy.”
“True enough. But what can you do? Can’t hide on this damn boat forever. Got to go places, got to get things done.”
“I guess so. Can I see your hat?”
It sat crumpled at his feet. He picked it up and handed it to me, flicking some of the remaining gore off its mechanism with a look of disgust.
“I deserve better than this,” he said. “These lousy damn boats, these lousy people, my lousy wife. Wait till we get to Jasper City. Then you’ll see.”
I studied the hat’s mechanism, while the Great Rotollo proceeded to tell me all his hopes and dreams. He was working his way to Jasper City, he said, where word was that the city was booming. Alfred Baxter’s factories were the biggest and richest and smokiest outside of Line territories. Jasper’s senate was hiring soldiers and engineers. Jasper’s already crowded streets were crowded still further by people fleeing the war-torn west in their thousands, all of them hungry for entertainment and diversion, and the theaters and music-halls of Swing Street were like gold mines. He started talking about the Ormolu Theater and the