Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  The familiar fog of the city thickened along the river; for now it was a white serpent coiled along the Thames but come morning the snake would have shed its skin all across the city streets reducing visibility down to five or ten feet at best. People would die. It was the one irrefutable truth of the London fogs: death walked within those choking mists. The old, the asthmatic, the emphacymic, anyone with respiratory problems of any sort suffered. There would be a dozen deaths at least, just from people who simply couldn’t breathe. More would die as they staggered, lost, into trouble. Thieves and muggers would be out in force, and shiv men with their wicked knives. It was that kind of weather. Old grudges had a way of getting settled in the fog. The Peeler’s couldn’t hope to keep the peace when they couldn’t see it slipping away for love or money. Come morning he expected to be hearing about corpses in the Serpentine, perhaps some poor sap would be found impaled on the sword of Old Bailey or some unlucky Mudlark would come to a sticky end in the Thames. It always happened.

  It always puzzled him that the great minds of the Mechanicum didn’t look for ways to purge the fogs, a light source capable of cutting clean through it, or at the very least some breathing devices filled with fresher air for the sufferers. Using their genius to save lives seemed to Josiah to be such an obvious thing for the Great Minds to do. Unfortunately such application of the mind necessitated that these people care about something beyond the pursuit of science. They didn’t, as a man drummed out of their hallowed halls Josiah Bloome knew that all too well. Indeed, as a man wont to flutter on the ponies and not averse to a game of cards, he would have rather wagered that the Magisters had in their possession an infernal device that pumped out the pea-soupers that smothered the city. After all, it was the fog that proved once and for all that beauty was an irrelevance, didn’t it? It was almost as though Nature herself had weighed in to settle their dispute: if it couldn’t be seen how could its’ physical form be of any value?

  “Oh yea of little faith,” Josiah Bloome muttered, giving up on the glass house. He would come back in the morning, fighting his way through the smog to witness the great reveal. His curiosity was piqued by—of all things—the lack of any tangible science on display. He almost expected to return to a Medway filled with freaks and sideshow barkers enticing the gullible to come see the bearded lady and the world’s strongest man, but that wasn’t the way of the Mechanicum.

  Josiah was lost; not in the traditional sense. He knew where he was in space and time, his disorientation was spiritual. Since he had met Fabian Stark and been introduced to the Club on Old Grey’s Lane, everything he believed in had been brought into question. His world was one of science and reason, not one of the supernatural and the outré. He believed only in the quantifiable and the qualifiable. His was a world of rational thought not populated by ghoulies and ghosties and all of those imaginative constructs that went bump in the night.

  And yet he had seen things his science was at a loss to explain.

  Six years was a long time to miss someone, to yearn for them. Annabel Leigh had been the light of his life. Cholera was such a cruel disease and an utterly horrible way to die. Worse though by far was his sense of guilt at not having been there to see to, to tend to her as she failed. That was what it meant to be a husband; that had been core to his vows, instead he had been with Pulleine and Durnford and the dying men in Isandlwana. He had fought the good fight for Queen and Country against the might of the Zulu nation, and his reward? To return home to an empty house and be told Annabel Leigh had died while he was over there, clinging to the thoughts of her to see him through. The war was terminal in every way, a bleak reflection of the darkness within. He knew no language to express the sadism, the barbary, the brutality of the human spirit. He had lived through such horrors, and even now, six years on, he could not bear to imagine it. Josiah Bloome had survived Eshowe and Tinta’s Kraal and the Hell of the Inyezane River; he had taken a tribal spear in the shoulder and another in the gut, and come through, but he had crumbled then. Not slowly but rather like a great building with its foundations undermined by gunpowder plots.

  A man is the sum of his memories, he had argued with McCreedy only the night before, that is the notion of the soul, not some spiritual thing but rather a construction of memories absorbed to create something new and unique. But what was a man who could not bear his own memories? Was he some soulless cage of flesh?

  That was how he had felt for the longest time now.

  He kicked at stones as he walked. Nothing around him felt real anymore. It was fitting then that this beautiful construction called itself an illusion.

  He had read all of the new literature, seeing the same need in it as the writers like Stephenson and Shelley sought to remove the Divine from the world. Science had effectively killed the God he had grown up worshipping, reason had undone the rest of the miracles He had supposedly wrought. All that remained, the last power man had not usurped was that of creation. Life. Shelley sought to claim that through electricity and butchery for her vile Doctor Frankenstein, Stephenson dared suggest that an elixir could find a second soul within the mortal cage. These Aesthetics sought to complete the robbery of Eternity by effectively emasculating the Lord and denying Heaven. He did not know what to think of that—it excited the scientist in him, the possibilities of it, but it devastated the man who had lost love. The thought of Annabel Leigh in some sheltered heaven, sat upon clouds with the angels was all that he had clung to during the deepest depressions her death had wrought. The scientist and the believer warred within him.

  More than ever, he needed to believe in this other world the Greyfriar’s Gentlemen opened up to him.

  Of course, in turn he had shown Stark and McCreedy and the others things they would never have countenanced in their own peculiar philosophies. He took one such miracle from his pocket, a small brass arachnoid. It wasn’t a spider per se, and most assuredly didn’t live or breathe, but it was no less marvellous than any of God’s creatures. Bloome set it down upon the ground. The bug was of his own design, with small barbs set into the spindly legs that allowed it to scale almost sheer surfaces. Being the size of a halfpenny the mechanism only allowed for a few hours life even when fully wound, but for as long as it crept along the arachnoid would digest all that it saw and heard, allowing him to listen to it later. The brass spider scuttled toward the glass house. Bloome watched it go. If anything of interest happened between now and the grand unveiling he would know about it. For a few moments at least, he was a life giver.

  In his world, secrets had a way of coming out no matter how much fog tried to obfuscate them.

  He walked back through the city at night, looking at the young girls lined up in the doorways of Piccadilly and at their mothers lurking behind them in the shadows. That mothers would sell their own daughters for a few coins disgusted him, it was exploitation at its very worst. Yet for every too-pretty girl there was a greedy mother hiding in the doorway behind her. It was an ugly interpretation of the ‘behind every great man’ notion. How great were these women?

  Saddened by the depths humanity had sunk to, Josiah Bloome retired to his chambers in Pimlico, took a snifter of brandy and smoked a pipe of dry tobacco while puzzling over the glass house.

  Come dawn he was no closer to unravelling the mystery, if indeed there was any mystery to be unravelled. He finished his morning ablutions and walked out into a city of smells. The street market was in full flow with fat-bellied merchants hawking their wares, most culled from Billingsgate or Spittlefields the day before and resold now with a penny tacked on to the price for their efforts. Had it been a hot summer day the street would have reeked of fish and pickles before noon, mercifully the low-lying fog had the effect of turning the cobbles into something approaching an ice house, preserving the catch of yesterday for a few hours longer.

  He was a lonely man walking lonely streets.

  He watched a bump and run, not remotely interested in bringing attention to the young pickpocket. The fat
old stallholder would learn of his loss soon enough and finish the day tacking on two or three pennies to make up for it. Josiah was one of that breed of bleeding hearts who believed theft was driven by necessity. He wandered down toward the river, and then hailed a hansom cab to take him the rest of the way to Greenwich. He would be early but that didn’t matter. It would give him time to study the arachnoid. The ride was unpleasant, the iron-rimmed wheels seeming to hit every crater in the road as they clattered toward the glass house of the Mechanicum.

  Josiah lay back in the leather banquette, folding his arms behind his head. The driver lashed the horse on with cries of “Hie!” and slowed her with an occasional “Whoa, girl!”

  Josiah listened to the steady clip-clop of the hooves on the cobbles, letting the sound lull him. He spent the short ride thinking through what he knew: the Mechanicum, scholars of machine, cog and motor, were promising to show their ultimate creation to the world, but had chosen not to do it amid the fife and drum of the World Fair where so many other grand creations were being unveiled. Why? What could be their motivation? No doubt it bore some relationship to the long running argument with the Aesthetics.

  He took out his time piece; all would be revealed in little over four hours.

  Crowds were already in place, he saw, clambering out of the cab. He paid the driver, tipping him well in return for the promise to return to collect him after all of the pomp and circumstance was over. The driver, a hunch-backed, thin-faced, pock-marked man tipped the brim of his cap and assured Josiah he would meet him in the alleyway behind the observatory in six hours.

  Josiah saw a few familiar faces in the crowd, Dorian Carruthers stood beside his latest fling, wrapped up against the elements and flapping his arms to keep the blood circulating. The woman on his arm was some elfin-faced doyen of the theatre world Bloome half-recognised. No doubt she was treading the West End boards in some production or other; unlike some, he didn’t keep up with the comings and goings in The Stage. He tried not to stare, but she was beautiful, and the way she met his gaze suggested she rather enjoyed the attention of his eyes.

  “Fancy seeing you here, old man,” Carruthers said, stepping away from the actress to pump his hand.

  “Seems like a whole lot of fuss for nothing,” Bloome said, looking beyond him at the glass construction: the Palace of Illusion.

  “But isn’t that always the way? Still, one can’t help but wonder what the mad scientists have up their sleeve,” he cocked an eyebrow toward the building behind him. In daylight it was a spectacular thing to be sure, but after the mystery of the night, seeing it so bold and lit up seemed almost to diminish it. Beyond the throng Josiah saw a number of men identically costumed in immaculately tailored Savile Row suits, great coats and top hats, he counted thirteen in all: the gentlemen of the Mechanicum. It was no surprise that they would choose to match the precision of their machines with their dress. They were identical down to the smallest detail, taking the similarity to the extremes with the neat trim of their facial hair. He recognised a few of them from back in the day when they had called him brother, but others were new. Bloome wanted to laugh at the preposterousness of it all, but there was something almost fascistic about the regimented appearance that placed a chill in his heart. It was decidedly fascistic, in truth. There was no individuality or uniqueness to it, as though the scientists were saying look at us, we are all the same, built from the same building blocks.

  A hush fell over the throng as one of the Magisters raised his hands. Behind him the Palace of Illusion opened. The London fog supplemented the magic perfectly, reinforcing Josiah’s notion that the Mechanicum had somehow conjured it for their own nefarious purposes.

  “Welcome to our little show,” the man said, his voice carrying easily across the heads of the crowd. “Consider this a glimpse of the world to come. Please, enter two by two, side by side, so to speak, and gaze upon the wonders wrought by man’s hand alone. Beyond the glass door there is no God, there is only science!”

  A quiet hubbub rippled through the crowd, the buzz infectious as it passed from one person to the next.

  Josiah Bloome found himself pushing through the press of bodies toward the front, eager to see for himself the wonders the Magister promised. He saw them watching him and wondered if it was self-pity he saw reflected in their eyes, or self-loathing.

  He took his turn in the queue, fearing they would not let him in as he was alone. The grim-faced Magister of the Mechanicum nodded and held out his hand to give him something as he stepped past him beneath the glass arch; the arachnoid. Its mechanisms had been unwound, whatever secrets it had learned erased as the components were undone. “Yours, I believe, Josiah?” He nodded, taking it and slipping the dead brass spider into his pocket. “All you had to do was ask if you wanted to know our secrets, brother. You know that we would hide nothing from you. We still grieve with you over sweet Annabel Leigh, and hold out the hope that your mind will heal enough for you to return to us. Six years is a long time to be in exile.”

  “Thank you, Balthazar,” Josiah said, surprising himself because he found he actually meant it. It wasn’t some mindless platitude mouthed to move him beyond an awkward situation. Had the Magister forgotten that he had been cast out upon his return from war and his breakdown? Or had Josiah himself twisted the truth in his grief? Or was it all merely the first illusion of the glass house?

  “I think you will find today’s unveiling most interesting,” the man said, and then moved on to greet the next soul in line.

  He walked into the narrow crystal passage; it was lit though he could not see any light source, and curiously he could not see out. Some sort of translucent skin most likely coated the glass. It was a clever trick, nothing more. The corridor was lined with curious little display cabinets, in one, he saw a mechanical bird, its wings flapping with a crudely mechanical motion, in another there was an elaborate construction of the world and the planets rotating to their orbits on a vast clockwork driven frame. Nothing was overly impressive or worthy of the genius of the Mechanicum, though.

  He studied the bird for a while, watching it pimp and preen. It was constructed from thousands of small brass cogs and gears, each interacting to produce the illusion of life. It moved awkwardly, the false motion of machine one of fits and starts as the bird hopped about. He watched as it flapped its wings once, twice, three times as though trying to take flight. The brass bird barely made it an inch off the ground before it tumbled rather ungraciously back down to its wooden perch. The bird was essentially nothing more than a larger version of the spider in his pocket but he heard the awe in the hushed voices of the people as they filed past him on to the next exhibit. The world was more impressive, but again it was less science than it was trickery. Indeed, under closer examination it was little more than an advanced orrery, not so different to the ones built seventy years before, by Pearson. Indeed it bore a striking resemblance to the Mechanism of Hipparchus of Nicaea, the pre-eminent astronomer so ruthlessly plagiarised by Newton. Though, of course, the stone mechanism of the astronomer itself was long since lost to antiquity, the Gentlemen did possess precise renditions of it in their vault, penned by none other than Plutarch. It was over two thousand years old. This considerably more modern version of the orrery rotated on a mechanism that mirrored the orbit of the earth around the sun, where other devices made the sun revolve around the earth. There were tiny mechanisms each individually responsible for the orbits of the sun and the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the other planets. For all the geegaws of science built into it, it was nothing more than a refinement of Galileo’s universe.

  Or so it seemed at first glance. Closer up, he saw that in fact a huge amount of detail had been added to create some kind of troposphere around the earth. He craned his neck to the side, trying to see behind to the gears and guts of the world itself to see how the Mechanicum had contrived to emulate the workings of the world. For a moment he fancied that if he stared intensely enough, closely enough, he migh
t fall into it, down and down until he found a miniature replicant of himself staring into a globe, ad infinitum. It was a peculiar notion but it rather delighted him. For a moment he felt less like himself and more like a god.

  After the corridor, he followed the line into a central auditorium. Wooden benches had been lined up in banked tiers around a raised dais. He took his place, finding a seat near the front. He wanted to be able to see whatever it was. He saw Carruthers and the actress take a place a few rows behind him and off to the left. The woman offered him a rueful smile when she saw him looking her way. Bloome nodded his head politely and looked away. The thirteen men of the Mechanicum filed in and took their places around the dais, and then, inconceivably the same thirteen men came into the room to stand behind them. This unexpected twist moved Josiah Bloome to the edge of his seat. He noticed a peculiar aroma in the air. It took him a moment to place it; some sort of pungent grease, like the sort used on axels and gears to keep them lubricated. Considering the clockwork bird and the map of the universe perhaps it wasn’t so out of place after all.

  For a full minute neither Magister nor doppelganger moved.

  Then, as one, the second set of men, the ones he had taken to be the duplicates, leaned forward and tore the faces from their counterparts. It was a moment of shocking brutality that had the women gathered in the crowd screaming and the men on their feet until they saw the bright shining mechanisms beneath, rotating and revolving and rocking on pivots and gear wheels. These men were not men at all, but perfect clockwork specimens. Quickly the Magisters undressed them, working in silence until thirteen men stood beside thirteen glittering mechanisms on the platform. It was something to see. The fear subsided, replaced by murmurs of curiosity and the occasional self-conscious giggle from the men in their top hats and tails, too proud to admit the sudden shedding of skin had put the fear of God into them.