by Felix Gilman
A Portrait of Adela
“It’s an extraordinary creation,” I said. “The piano, I mean. How did you come to—?”
She shook her head. “It’s a toy.”
“You’d shoot a man over a toy?”
“It’s a question of principle, Mr. Rawlins. It’s the last thing I have left.”
“I know that feeling, Miss Adela, I know that feeling well. I am a kind of entrepreneur and inventor and traveler myself, and I know what it’s like to be down. I’m from a town called Hamlin. You sound like you’re up from the Deltas.”
“You know that’s true, Mr. Rawlins. Why do you care to ask? What business is it of yours to interrogate—?”
“I’d like to know where the piano came from. It was just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen— maybe the second after some work of my own— and I don’t get many chances to talk to anybody who understands about that kind of work. Anyhow I’d like to know who’s about to shoot who.”
“My name is Adela Kotan Iermo. I am the third daughter and the fifth child of the sixth Baron of Iermo. I was taught to shoot by one of my father’s retainers. He did not want to teach a girl to shoot but my money was good. Have no doubt about who will be shooting whom, Mr. Rawlins. Because you apologized I will aim for the leg— the Code permits that mercy.”
“Well that’s a fine offer— I’ll try to do likewise but I make no promises. Put a gun in my hand and just about anything might happen. Nobody ever taught me to shoot unless you count my sister Jess and that was only throwing stones at cats. My father had no retainers nor money. What’s Iermo like? I’ve never been to the Deltas.”
“It’s the seventh or the eighth wealthiest of the Baronies. It produces sugar and rice; my father or my brothers could tell you the tonnage, the revenues, the number of retainers and field-hands and men-at-arms—I don’t know— I have been away for a long time, Mr. Rawlins, and things change fast these days. Do you want to hear about the sunsets or the dances or the rainy season or the sounds and smells of the jungle?”
“Oh,” Amaryllis interrupted, “The jungles— is it true that—?”
Adela ignored her.
I said, “What does Kotan mean? It sounds like a Folk word.” She shrugged. “It’s a name. I have others— Adela Kotan Mor Chatillon Iermo and so on— each one a family of some small note and wealth in the Deltas— Kotan is named for some ruins. Now let me ask you a question, Mr. Rawlins— why did you lie about the piano? Was it pride? You had to have something to boast about and you did not care if it was yours or not— I’ve known many men like that.”
“It was a misunderstanding. My own accomplishments are plenty noteworthy, ma’am, as a matter of fact. I have lived by my wits since I was a child. I built my own electrical engine at the age of fourteen—”
“Well so did I, Mr. Rawlins.”
We traded boasts like that for a while, as we walked down toward the river. Some of the stink of the yards was in the air. I learned about her youthful investigations into electricity, magnetism, musicology, and logic. I told her about some of my own exploits, suitably disguised. I learned about the peculiar arrangement that governed her peculiar childhood, which was this. As is the custom among the land-owning classes of the Deltas, her father settled a trust upon her and each of her siblings. In the case of Adela Kotan Iermo the family’s lawyer— having recently contracted one of those brain-eating poxes that are fashionable in the hot & wet climate of the Deltas— committed an unpardonable drafting error, on account of which the young Adela acquired control of her fortune at the age of twelve, not twenty-one.
She was future-minded. She hired tutors, some from as far afield as Gibson City or Jasper. She learned mathematics, logic, music— of these only music was a fitting activity for a princess of the Deltas. When she began to learn mechanics and electrical engineering her father threatened to disown her. She caused a new house to be constructed for herself down beyond the fields at the edge of the floodplain— she was fifteen years old. She hired servants. Her father ranted and raved. Her eccentricities embarrassed the family. Her brothers tried to seize her— she hired guards. She joined the Liberationists and she purchased and freed Folk in order to spite her father, and she attempted to learn their language because it could not be done. She conducted a precocious correspondence with the professors in Jasper City and Gibson, and unlike when I wrote to them she got a reply. She conducted experiments with magnetism and electricity. All of this sounded like just the life of freedom and greatness I had dreamed of back in East Conlan but Adela was unhappy about it, and I thought as I guess everybody sometimes does about how big and strange the world is. I told her about my vision of Light and she told me about her vision of the coming century, which was Automation. She said that in the century to come there would be no fields of toiling laborers— there would be leisure for all— there would be steam-power and clockwork. That tiny woman had row upon row of big mechanical men constructed, all stooping and cutting in unison. She made a kind of life. Nature does this sort of thing so easily the world is over-supplied with bugs and beetles that do just about nothing but move mindlessly and she did not see why human ingenuity should not do at least as well. Rust, balance, weeds, all gave her trouble. I imagine the mud-plain outside her house filling up with ranks of half-finished metal men who when the plain flooded looked like the victims of the kind of disaster that gets written about in the newspapers as far away as Jasper. It is possible in this way to burn through most of the fortune of a princess of the Deltas in less than ten years.
By the time she was nineteen years old she’d abandoned these clumsy early experiments, and was deeply engaged in the study of Mind. She fell in and out of love with one or more of the tutors. She developed a kind of analytical engine and a kind of complex abacus that played chess, though not well. She was accused of various kinds of witchcraft and of digging up the lost arts of the Folk. Somebody shot out one of her windows and somebody threw flaming torches at her door. Her father went to court to have her declared mad as a matter of law. I said that her father sounded like a terrible old monster and she took offense, informing me that her father was a brave man who had fought and won a half-dozen duels before he was twenty-two.
By the time she was twenty years old nearly all of the money was gone. The tutors had all gone back north, including the one she had thought she was in love with. She confessed to me that she did not understand love as well as she understood machines and I said that most people understood neither, so she had nothing to be ashamed of. She developed theories of pure mathematics regarding the operation of the Mind and its relationship to language and to music, and regarding the relationship between language and perception and naming and the creation of the world and the unmaking of the world that was here before and why things change as you press further west into what we sometimes in our arrogance call the unmade lands. All of this was intriguing to me but she could not explain it very clearly because we were interrupted firstly by policemen, and secondly by the Amazing Amaryllis, who wanted to know if Adela could build automata for her that would dance and sing and do coin-tricks, and thirdly by the increasingly urgent need to find a quiet and unobserved place in which to shoot each other. It was nearly dawn.
With the last of the money she bought a ticket north out of the Deltas on a riverboat called the Swan of Guthrie. The ticket took her to the Three Cities. After that she did not know where to go or what to do with herself. The food in the north was too bland for her taste and the sky too pale and cold and the people too rude. She was too proud to throw herself on the charity of the tutors who for years had consumed her fortune. She considered suicide. She lived for the better part of a year in Gibson City where she learned that being a princess of the Deltas meant nothing outside of the Deltas. She went hungry. She got into business with some people who cheated her. They did not believe she could do what she said she could do, so she made the piano for them to prove herself. They cheated her out of the last of her money b
ut they could not figure out how to make a profit from the piano and so they did not bother to steal it. She pawned it and that is how I guess it came to pass into the hands of John Southern of the Damaris. Adela would have retrieved it but before she could scrape together the money Gibson City had fallen to the Line and Adela herself was under arrest.
Mr. Quantrill interrupted. “What do you mean? The Line? Gibson City’s neutral— same as Jasper— the Tri-City Territory, all three first among equals, you know . . .”
“The Line, Mr.— I apologize, sir, I forget your name, it’s been a long strange night— the Line sir and ma’am has held Gibson City for six months or more. Nobody admits it but it’s true. Their Senators still walk and talk like it’s still their city but I have seen the soldiers in the street and the Heavier-Than-Air Vessels overhead and the Senators know who their masters are if no one else does. The Line came in six months ago and nobody dared say no. There’s a silence about it. Nobody writes it in their letters or in the newspapers but they know. People here in Jasper are pretending not to know— or do you really not know yet?”
One of the stagehands cursed. Amaryllis drew Mr. Quantrill’s coat tighter around herself and shivered.
“They were looking for someone. They came up into Gibson because they were hunting and nobody knew who or why. Then we started hearing rumors about that turncoat Agent Creedmoor and the woman what ever her name is and that bloody Ransom charlatan— and the rumors said they were coming east, past Gibson— well, I don’t know. The Line’s mad with fear. The Engines jump at shadows. I know because I spent three months under interrogation. The things they asked me were mad.”
As she said this Adela was walking ahead down the stone steps at the east end of a street so remote from the city’s heart that it had no name but only a number, and that number was preposterously high, two or three hundred or more. The steps were slippery with muck and night mists and Amaryllis in her high-heeled shoes nearly fell. The steps led down to an isolated stretch of riverbank, where nobody lived or did business.
“The old century was theirs, and three or four before that. Who knows what the next will bring. No wonder they’re afraid.”
“Word got out that I was a Scientist— like this Professor Ransom, if indeed he exists. A garbled account of the piano got to the ears of the mob— you know the mania that has got into the masses for secret weapons, magic machines to win the war. I didn’t think the authorities of the Line would be equally credulous but they were. First a lawyer told me that the Baxter Trust had brought suit against me and when I told them to go to hell they arrested me and handed me over to the Line, to be questioned and questioned over and over. They wanted to know all about the principles of automation and how I came by my learning, I said that’s all I will tell you, my family name and my given name and my genius. Well, they did not like to hear that. Are you in league with Professor Ransom, they said. As if there is some world-wide bloody brotherhood of tinkerers. Had I ever been west or east or just about anywhere. Ridiculous things— what did I know about the Folk. What did I know about the Red Valley Republic. Once they start questioning you they can’t stop. I was moved and moved again and questioned— they make you, they make you nothing but questions— they make you nothing— they had machines for questioning— until you’re released without any kind of reason or warning and the world is . . .”
She looked up and down the length of the river. We were alone, unwatched, unpoliced. There was mud leading down to rushes and then wide black water. There were some empty shacks with caved-in tin roofs and a disused jetty. There was a bad smell— it can best be described as a sad and frightening smell— which I guess was because on the other side of the river were the Yards, the pens and slaughter houses and wire-fence mazes and red pinpricks of fire all dimly visible like the camp of a vast besieging army. This figure of speech did not occur to me until later.
We were quiet for a while, thinking that it was now or never. I was thinking that I was sorry I had caused Adela to be arrested— though it was hardly my intention— and I wondered what the Line had done to her to put that desperate look in her eye. I still believed that the mind that had made the self-playing piano was a beautiful one but I was afraid it had been damaged. I thought about the machines the Line might use for questioning, and I recalled the flash of light with which they had shocked me back into life, so long ago back in East Conlan, and I shivered at the thought of what such a device might do if used as a weapon.
By rights she should be the hero of this story not me, but right has nothing to do with anything.
“Well,” I said, and drew my gun and pretended to clean it with my sleeve. It was a stage-gun, like I said. Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko, Wizard of the Western Rim, had two of them, one real and one fake. He used the real one to put a hole in a plank of wood, to demonstrate its deadliness, then secretly switched it for its double, which flashed and made a noise but did nothing else. Both guns were big and ornate, with fake-gold inlays and embellishments that were intended to be visible even from the cheap seats. I had checked and re-checked it but was still not entirely convinced that I had the real gun and not its double.
“Well,” Adela agreed.
I didn’t know what she was thinking. Later she would confess to me that she did not think that she was thinking at all, just listening to the sound of her awful father and her brothers laughing in her head, to the sound of Linesmen interrogating her over and over.
Anyhow I said, “Let’s be done with it, shall we?”
Mr. Quantrill took Adela’s coat and Amaryllis took mine. Amaryllis dabbed a handkerchief at her own tearful eyes, and also at a mark on my face. The stagehands offered around cigarettes, which both duelists declined. All this seemed to take a very long time. Adela saluted and I mirrored her gesture. We turned back to back. I walked slowly down-river, one pace, two paces, three, four . . .
Adela said, “What’s that?”
I turned. I did not mean to shoot but my fingers had a mind of their own and pulled the trigger.
v
Well. The gun was the real article and it fired all right, but the shot went nowhere near Adela. One of the stagehands threw himself facedown in the mud and Mr. Quantrill stepped bravely in front of Amaryllis, but both these gestures were unnecessary— the bullet went no place in particular, out over the river. There was a theatrical flash and a cloud of smoke. The gun made a deafening noise, which was not swallowed by the night as we’d hoped but instead echoed in it, so that we all instantly understood that every policeman for a mile up and down the river would have heard us. Three geese launched themselves skyward out of the rushes. The stagehand who had not thrown himself down in the mud broke into a run without a single word or a glance back. Mr. Quantrill raised a finger like he was about to start yelling at somebody for incompetence and irresponsibility but didn’t know who to blame. Adela stood where she was, her back to me still.
What Adela had seen as she looked up-river—as she paced her ten paces— as she studied every rush and reed and ripple of black water with that precise awareness that comes to a person in the face of death, or after committing an enormous irreversible blunder— what she saw was one of the Line’s Combustion-Powered Submersible Vessels rising from the river.
The C.S.V. is unique among the vehicles of the Line in that it makes very little noise— they are infrequently deployed, but the Line makes use of them for missions of reconnaissance, sabotage, and clandestine transport— and preoccupied as we were we had not noticed this Vessel approaching or surfacing.
The C.S.V. is long and black and glistening and bullet-shaped, except for two turrets and one steam-vent. It is unnerving to see it rise from the water in the same way that it is unnerving to see the Heavier-Than-Air Vessels rise up into the air— it speaks of the Line’s terrible indifference to human limitations and boundaries— it suggests that no place is safe.
This particular C.S.V. operated under the orders of the Archway Engine, and carried between ten
and sixteen soldiers of the Line in conditions of hideous discomfort, and was engaged in the covert delivery into Jasper of communications equipment, weaponry, and personnel. I learned all this later, of course, from a memorandum that happened to cross my desk, after the Battle. At the time all that was apparent was that the river was no longer empty, but that it had suddenly spawned this nightmarish metal behemoth.
What’s more, a hatch in the side of the thing had opened. The face of an Officer of the Line peered out from its reeking red-lit innards. No doubt he’d expected to see a quiet stretch of undesired riverfront, empty of witnesses. Instead he saw Miss Adela Kotan Iermo &c with her weapon cocked and lifted, and me behind her with a theatrical cloud of black smoke still wafting from my ridiculous ornate gold-inlaid pistol. The way I remember it I saw his eyes widen and then his eyebrows lift, first one then the other.
“Run,” I said.
Adela did not run. Amaryllis, hiking up her skirt and kicking off her shoes, did. The stagehand who lay in the mud crawled on his knees and elbows into the rushes to hide. To this day I do not know how Mr. Quantrill escaped.
I stood beside Adela, and together we stood there pistols drawn long enough to permit Amaryllis and the stagehand and Mr. Quantrill to escape, although I will be damned if they ever thanked us.
The Officer of the Line had ducked back inside the C.S.V. so quickly that his hat fell off. There was a minute of silence then his men came tumbling out through the hatch, all of them crouching low to the ground and all of them holding weapons of their own.
Adela and me, we fled too.
I guess this surprised the Linesmen, who had no doubt assumed they were being ambushed by bloodthirsty battle-hardened Agents of their adversary. They did not immediately pursue us. We made it to the stone steps before they gave chase, where Adela slipped and I steadied her, or maybe she steadied me.
Anyhow in the face of a common enemy we had utterly forgotten about our duel. I do not pretend to understand the intricacies of the Code of Dueling but it seemed that honor had been satisfied. We were shot at— maybe that was all that the Code required. Three or four bullets whirred and cracked at the stone wall beside us as we made it to the top of the steps and ran down the street. Adela shot back wildly, not meaning to kill but only to scare— I did likewise. Someone shouted and then they stopped shooting at us— maybe so as not to alert the police or maybe because they hoped to capture us alive. After that they just ran after us, not quickly but tirelessly, heads down, ten or more men in ranks. The sun rose. We did not appreciate the beauty of the morning mist or the lively street-scenes of bakers and butchers and newspapermen opening their businesses and starting their days— we just ran, Adela and me dodging around bakers &c and the Linesmen behind us bowling them over and trampling them. I will not say that I was not terrified. The Linesmen seemed as implacable as Engines. I had visions of the stamping of their boots on my face and Adela’s. Adela and I led each other this way and that, with a hand on the arm or a nod of the head. The Linesmen kept coming. The sun was like an electric lamp had been switched on in the sky. It was instantly hot and bright and the buildings and the lampposts and Kotan and me and all the scattering pedestrians and the Linesmen behind us cast very sharp shadows that lengthened and receded and chased us when we turned street-corners. I sweated and so did Miss Adela Kotan &c &c Iermo— I cannot speak for the Linesmen. I recall the sounds of panting, street-muck splashing underfoot, Adela gasping with laughter, and how at that sudden unexpected sound I started laughing as well, until the pain in my sides and my shortness of breath made me stop. I recall a big handsome woman who wobbled between me and Adela like a bowling-pin as we ran past her on either side shrieking as she fell on the street and then the different sound of her shrieking again as the Linesmen trampled her, I guess— I did not look back. I had already looked back at the Linesmen a number of times and every time I looked I saw all of them staring at me, in a way that gave me a chill, a row of gray eyes in red sweating angry faces, and I found their expressions strange until I realized that each of them was trying to fix my own face in his memory so that he could make a full report. After that I kept my head forward, glancing only to the side to see that Adela was still with me.