by Felix Gilman
* * *
*Worse things have been said. —EMC
When I returned to the Ormolu Amaryllis was in something of a panic, having convinced herself that I had decamped for a rival theater, like the Hamilton or the Horizon or &c. I assured her of my loyalty. She fussed over my head-wound and I told her I had fallen over. I told her I had met the famous Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson of the Evening Post and sung her praises to him and he had promised to write her up in his column, and though she did not believe me she seemed flattered that I had taken the trouble to lie to her.
In the morning I set to work in earnest. For a few days I was busy cleaning and polishing and running errands and learning all the tricks and implements of the magic business. Stage-magic is a science as complex as the study of electricity or light or anything else. Sometimes I thought it would be easier to learn the genuine article. Most of the Great Rotollo’s most treasured implements had been lost when the Damaris went down, and the truth is Amaryllis was at that date entertaining crowds mostly through sheer grit, and the novelty of her sex.
I set to work reconstructing those lost devices, scavenging parts from scrapyards and the sweepings of blacksmiths all over Hoo Lai. I learned through experimentation about clockwork and the confinement of pigeons and— but I could waste words on this forever, and it would do nobody any good. I gutted one of the Ormolu’s broken-down old pianos, one which I thought Mr. Quantrill would not notice the absence of, and harvested wire. Slowly and cautiously I began to acquire the parts for the reconstruction of the Apparatus— I was developing a great many ideas about stage-lighting and illusion, and if I did not yet have the parts I could talk about them so well that Amaryllis almost believed they were real and even Mr. Quantrill was curious.
I pushed my plans to settle accounts with Baxter to the back of my mind— I was too busy to think of loitering outside his offices or pestering him with lawsuits or attempting an assassination. The newspapers reported that two men who’d claimed for the benefit of autograph-hunters to be Harry Ransom and John Creedmoor had opened fire with handguns on the Dryden Engine near the borders of the Territory, and been annihilated— I hardly noticed.
Two weeks after I arrived in Jasper I was the subject of one of Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson’s famous newspaper pen-portraits—you may read it for yourself, if any copies survived the Battle of Jasper. He portrayed a series of amiably eccentric inventors, including the usual cast of rain-makers and virility-enhancers and lead-to-gold types and lastly a Mr. Rawlins of the Ormolu Theater, self-proclaimed survivor of the Damaris, and his wonderful— though, Mr. Carson implied, most likely imaginary— automated self-playing piano.
Despite my best efforts, and despite my promises to her, the Amazing Amaryllis was not mentioned by name. That caused her to sink into a mild depression. She had never believed me when I said that I had met Mr. Carson but as soon as she saw the column she became convinced that her hopes and dreams had depended on it ever since arriving in Jasper City. That night her performance was off— in fact she fouled the Gibson City Gaffle so badly there was jeering from the audience.
She was still in a state of mild depression some days later, when a member of the audience forced her way backstage through the curtain after her performance.
I thought this uninvited intruder meant to complain— it had been another bad show— and I attempted to intercept her.
I said, “Now, miss, if you have anything to say, it’s—”
She said, “Are you Hal Rawlins?”
I acknowledged that I was.
“Ah-hah! So there you are.”
She was young, and short. She had black curling hair and brown eyes. She spoke in the slow and musical accent of the Deltas. She looked ragged and hungry and sleepless. I cannot say that I noticed immediately that she was pretty, maybe on account of the way she was glaring at me.
“How dare you— how dare you, sir, how— I am Adela Iermo, Adela Kotan Iermo. You know that name, sir, yes I can see that you do!”
I knew part of it. Kotan was the word etched into the uppermost winding-mechanism of the self-playing piano. Was this its first owner? Could this be its creator? If so, how many hours had I spent admiring the genius of this young woman!
“Did you think you would never face me?”
“I confess I never did— why, ma’am, I dreamed of—”
“The Damaris— the self-playing piano— that is my work, sir. Did you think I would not find out— did you think you could boast and lie and claim it as your own and I would let the matter be— I am looking you in the face, sir, do you still claim it as your own?”
Amaryllis and a pair of stagehands watched us.
“Listen,” I said. “We should be friends, Miss Kotan, you see I—”
I extended a hand toward her, in what I reckoned was a friendly way. She slapped it aside. I soon learned that this was a gesture recognized in the Code of Dueling of the nobility of the Deltas, but at first I took it as mere rudeness, and was nonplussed.
CHAPTER 19
THE DUEL
“A duel,” Amaryllis said. She swayed like she was about to swoon, but since nobody moved to catch her, she decided not to.
“A duel,” Mr. Quantrill said. One of the stagehands had summoned him, or perhaps he had been alerted by Adela’s shouting. In any case he stood stock-still with his arms folded, attempting to intimidate.
“Not in my theater,” Mr. Quantrill said. “This isn’t the Rim or the— what are you, Miss Kotan or Iermo what ever it is, you sound like you’re from down in the Deltas, I know things are done differently there but this is Jasper City, you know? The duel has been banned for thirty years or more.”
“It’s a question of honor,” Adela said.
“It’s a question of aiding and abetting plain murder,” Mr. Quantrill said.
She seemed to give this serious consideration. They say in story-books that her brow furrowed. Well, that is what happened.
“My quarrel is with Mr. Rawlins here. I don’t—”
“Listen,” I said. “You and me should talk, Miss Kotan— Adela—I mean—”
“Enough lies,” she said.
Mr. Quantrill had been signaling with his eyebrows to the stagehands for some time, and they had been pretending not to understand for as long as they plausibly could, but now they sighed and stood and stepped toward Adela, meaning to subdue her. She drew a gun from beneath her coat and they sat down again at once.
Her coat was so battered and road-worn I could not to this day say what it was made of. It was a dusty rose-red. It had no buttons and loose threads. She wore a white shirt and stiff trousers and no jewelry. Despite the poverty and disarray of her clothing— I shall not mention the condition of her hair— there was something unmistakably aristocratic about her. Above all her accent, which was that of the landowning classes of the Delta territories, as Mr. Quantrill had observed— but also the way she stood, and the way she held her pistol, firmly but carelessly, like it was meant for art or sport and not for killing. I guessed that she was newly arrived in town.
Amaryllis said, “Hal, what’s going on— who is this?”
“A good question,” Mr. Quantrill said. “Mr. Rawlins?”
Before I could say anything Adela interrupted. “Mr. Rawlins is a thief— the worst kind of thief, the thief of another’s hard work and genius and good name. The self-playing piano is mine. You cannot imagine the work that went into it. You cannot imagine what I sacrificed to be capable of it. I made it two years ago in Gibson City. I have no papers, only my word— which should be good enough for you people. I— I pawned it.”
She said that like she was confessing something awful.
“I had no choice,” she said. “And then after what happened in Gibson I thought I should never see it again— well, I came to this city thinking to begin again, and what do I find as soon as I arrive but that this man is boasting that he created the piano himself and—
Her eyes suddenly widened still further.
“O
h—are you all in on it?”
“Well now,” Mr. Quantrill said, raising his hands. “Well now. This is between you and Mr. Rawlins, I think.”
Adela turned to me. “Where is it?”
“It sank,” I explained.
She laughed scornfully. Few people can accomplish this trick. I guess it is one of the things they teach young ladies of the Deltas, along with comportment and poise and table-manners.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Do you see it here, ma’am? I tried to save it, but it went down with the boat. There was an incident involving an Engine.”
“How can I believe a word you say?”
“It isn’t what you think it is,” I said. “You’re seeing wickedness where there’s only the usual run of accidents and bad luck and confusion. Listen—”
“I’ve heard enough.”
Well, this all went on for some time. I tried to explain. Adela accused and demanded that honor be satisfied. I want to say that I made a decent effort to talk her out of that course of action. I said that we should resolve our dispute through words. She accused me of cowardice. I said that I did not know how things were done down in the Deltas but out on the Rim young women did not duel— well, of course that was not the right thing to say— my excuse is that her gun was still menacing me and I could not think straight. I was in fact starting to get angry myself. I offered to write a letter to Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson at the Evening Post correcting his misunderstandings and giving credit where credit was due. She said that made no difference— the insult was already given— she was not here to haggle or litigate, but to resolve things with honor. Besides, she would not believe that the piano was lost, but maintained that I had hidden it somewhere or dismantled it for parts.
I was not sure whether she was very brave or whether she was a young woman in a kind of panic— it seemed likely to me that she had not eaten right or slept in a safe place in many days, and I knew what it was like to have one’s one and only scrap of pride and hope in the whole big hostile world snatched away. I did not want to be shot and I did not want to shoot her, because first I am not a violent man, and second she was a woman, and third I recognized her predicament and understood that my careless boasting was partly to blame, and above all fourth because the mind that built the self-playing piano was too precious and beautiful to waste.
On the other hand I am only human and you can call me a thief and a liar and a coward only so many times before I get mad.
I said “All right, damn it— you’ll have your duel.”
She instantly calmed. It was as if I had promised her something of great importance. She lowered her gun and said, “Thank you, Mr. Rawlins.”
“I don’t know how they do it down in the Deltas, ma’am. I’m no aristocrat. I was raised without land or any particular kind of honor and while you were probably learning deportment or how to hunt with hounds or something I was selling Encyclopedias. But I’ve been out on the Rim for long enough to know a thing or two about honor and about guns. You should know that this won’t be my first duel.”
In my time I had done a lot of stupid things for reasons of pride, but I had only fought one previous duel. That was also over a question of pride of authorship— that time it was over who had first invented the Ransom Free-Energy process. Right was on my side and fortune favored me. My opponent had stumbled drunk into a tree and passed out. That was the way things were done on the Western Rim. I was kind of hoping that something similar might happen here.
“Not in my theater,” Mr. Quantrill said.
“Of course,” I said. “We’ll need to find some suitable location.”
“Of course,” she agreed.
“Good—well, what’s more, ma’am, out on the Rim when we do this we do it at dawn. Only murderers shoot each other by night— it wouldn’t be honorable.”
She pushed back her hair and scratched her head. It was obvious that she had not thought very hard or very carefully about her plan. That is often what happens when people get their heads all filled with honor, I have noticed.
“That’s true,” she said. “I believe you’re right.”
It was a little after midnight, and mid-summer—dawn was several hours away. I thought this might give her time to change her mind.
“Besides,” I said, “I don’t have a gun. You’re new in town, right, ma’am?— well not everyone here carries a gun all the time, you’ll find. I assume you don’t mean to shoot an unarmed man. I don’t know much about how things are done in the Deltas but—”
One of the stagehands interrupted to observe that Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko, Wizard of the Western Rim, used two guns in his act, one of which was fake but one of which was real, and that Mr. Bosko surely would not mind if I borrowed it.
“Thank you,” Adela said.
“Yes,” I sighed. “Thank you very much.”
A small party emerged from the back of the Ormolu Theater into the warm summer night. Adela and I led the pack. Mr. Quantrill walked behind us. I think he was mostly concerned to ensure that we did not simply shoot each other on his premises and cause him trouble with the police. The Amazing Amaryllis walked beside him, sometimes leaning on his arm, wearing his coat over her frilled and sequined stage-clothes. She said that she was concerned for my safety and I think that she was, but that also she was worried about her investment, and the plans we had made and what I had promised her, the very latest science &c.
The two stagehands brought up the rear. I guess they had nothing better to do. They tried to make a wager, whispering, but I think they could not come to terms on odds. They made ungentlemanly remarks about Adela and unflattering remarks about me. They had a bottle of wine each, which they shared with the Amazing Amaryllis and Mr. Quantrill.
The sky over Swing Street was a cloak of black velvet, sequined with stars. I remarked on its beauty to Adela, thinking I might distract her from her plans.
“You talk too much, Mr. Rawlins.”
“One of these days I guess I’ll get myself into trouble.” She didn’t find that funny.
“We need someplace quiet,” she said.
“This is Swing Street,” Mr. Quantrill said. “It doesn’t get quiet.”
“The bars never close,” I agreed, “and there isn’t a single alley that doesn’t contain at least one drunk. We’ll need to head east.”
Mr. Quantrill wanted us away from his theater, and I wanted to postpone the moment as long as possible, in hopes that I might talk some sense into her. She did not strike me as naturally the killing type and I wondered what had happened to her to make her that way.
I suggested that we head toward Reynald Park. That was an expanse of unkempt lawn with some scraggly trees and per sis tent tent habitations on the eastern edge of Hoo Lai. Well, when we got there, there were policemen. I had guessed that there would be— I often go walking at night when I am thinking and I cannot sleep, and I had noticed that there was a police-station next to the park and a bar where the policemen drank. So we turned back.
We walked down streets of houses, lit or unlit windows, the occasional gas lamp illuminating stone steps and narrow gardens and addresses.
“You can’t duel on somebody’s doorstep,” I said. “Not without an invitation. That would be vulgar.”
Next we found ourselves near an expanse of ware houses and workhouses with the banners of the Baxter Trust on their square ugly roofs, and though the streets were empty dogs behind fences set up a racket, and the lights of nightwatchmen drifted toward us, and we drifted away.
“The cemetery,” Mr. Quantrill said, “Up on Wyte Hill— it’s a long walk but—”
“You can’t duel in a cemetery,” Adela said. “The Code forbids it.”
“Besides,” I said, “it would be bad for morale.”
You may duel in the vacant yard of a Smiler meeting-house, or so Adela said, the Code of the Deltas cares nothing for the Brothers of the New Thought, but there were policemen around in the street outside the mee
ting-house.
The policemen were going door to door down the street, waking men in nightshirts and women holding babies and asking questions. I do not know what they were looking for but they stopped and questioned us too. We said we were theater-types and that seemed sufficient to explain what we were doing wandering about aimlessly in the small hours of the morning— by that stage the sky was beginning just subtly to lighten in the west.
I was scared— I do not mean to deny that I was scared both of being shot and of shooting someone. But nor did I want to be a coward in anyone’s eyes, least of all my own. I asked Amaryllis if she would take word, if I was shot, to my sisters, and she asked what sisters, and I had to say, well, forget it, and that it did not matter.
We headed toward the river. There were more policemen in the streets. It seemed there were more than was usual. I did not know what to expect in the way of policing from a town like Jasper, but Mr. Quantrill did and he also seemed discomforted. He wondered whether maybe another Senator had been assassinated, or an Agent spotted in town.
The omnipresence of policemen began to frustrate me and unnerve me, so that I almost forgot that the policemen were the only thing between me and the duel. Amaryllis speculated jokingly that maybe the notorious John Creedmoor or Harry Ransom themselves had been spotted in Jasper City. Amaryllis had been drinking, too. One of the stagehands suggested that maybe they were experimenting with their secret weapon in a basement somewhere and were about to blow up the whole damn city if the cops didn’t catch them in time. The other stagehand said that wasn’t funny.
When I say policemen, I mean that some of them were policemen, and some I think were members of the Jasper City militia, you could tell because they wore different uniforms, and carried rifles not handguns, and had a different kind of dully gleaming copper badge. Some of them wore no uniform at all, or no uniform any of us could recognize.
I guess you could call this a portrait of Adela. It’s what she told me about herself, anyhow.