Wilde Stories 2014

by Editred by Steve Berman

  Major Barker had been summoned to the hospital, and I went along. He’d been called from our work in the machinists’ hangar, and that could only mean one thing: a potential for flesh and metal to mate in a bloody marriage.

  Tingles of excitement wanted to tug up the corners of my mouth, but I was adept at keeping my face blank. Even after a year in the army, surgery was still a savory puzzle to me—repair, stitch, restore. Flesh was simply a gorier form of clockworks at such times. But that was only if I managed not to think about the weapons-testing room.

  Don’t think about that.

  Our outpost of Her Majesty’s Service had taken over a small village south of Simferopol. The machinists’ hangar was a giant collapsible tin box assembled on the outskirts of the village and heavily guarded round the clock. The hospital was in the old church. A nurse ushered us to the patient. He was lying on an exam table and the colored light of an Orthodox stained-glass window fell across him, dissecting him with yellow, blue, and purple.

  His skin was white with shock but he was awake. When I saw the horror of his injuries, I wished to God he hadn’t been.

  “Dynamite blast, poor chap,” said the doctor, Major Winslow. “The arms are the worst of it.”

  I stood two steps behind Major Barker, as was my lot, but I assessed the damage as if I were in charge, also my lot. Forearms ended below the elbows, stumps coated in gore, edges raged and torn and partially cauterized. Part of a radius bone jutted an inch from the torn muscle on his right. Tourniquets above the elbows stanched the bleeding, but they could have done nothing for the pain. His pants were stiff with blood.

  And his eyes. My gaze travelled up his chest to the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. The soldier’s face was handsome, even with the damage from the blast—a gash in his cheek that would leave a scar and a mosaic of soot and blood. Pain dug deep into his features, but what struck me the most was the defeated resignation in his eyes. It was an expression you might expect to see on a man’s face seconds from death, as a carriage slides toward him on a slick road.

  Major Barker looked over the stumps with a petulant moue. “Far too damaged,” he pronounced, annoyed at having been disrupted from his work. “There’s nothing to connect to. It can’t be done.”

  Brigadier Warwick, the man in charge of the outpost, happened to be walking by. He stopped and approached us.

  “Most unfortunate,” he grumbled. He gave the soldier a smile that was both falsely sympathetic and told him to buck up. Warwick was a man of the times, not a terrible commander, but at that moment I disliked him intensely. “Well, put him under, for God’s sake, and clean up those stumps.”

  “Wait,” I said, stepping forward.

  Three pairs of eyes gazing at me, four, five. Sweat skittered down my spine. I don’t know what made me do it. Well, that’s not true. His beauty stirred me, even in his bloodied state. But more than that, I could read his future clearly in his eyes. He would be sent home to England with two stumps and no way to fend for himself or make a living. Like so many before him, he would take his own life. It was already there in his eyes.

  “Well? Speak up, Tinker,” Major Barker said impatiently.

  “I can salvage the connections,” I said. “Permission to try, sir.”

  Major Barker glared at me angrily. I had contradicted him in front of the brigadier. That was unforgivable. But I knew my master well. I put an adoring regard on my face.

  “Your marvelous golem, sir,” I purred. “He’ll need hands, and I have so little experience of them. Perhaps I could practice by making hands for this man.”

  “Capital idea!” Brigadier Warwick said. “What do you think, Major Barker? Won’t hurt to give it a go, hey?”

  Barker smiled tightly, but I knew he was still angry and that I would pay for it sooner or later. “I doubt my apprentice will be able to pull it off. The forearms are too damaged. But he does need the surgical practice. If”—Baker picked up the chart—“Captain Davies does not object to being operated on with so little chance of success.”

  Captain Davies. The tattered rags of his uniform came sharply into focus. Officer. Cavalry. He was still clinging to consciousness, his jaw shaking with the pain. He looked at Barker, then at me. I tried to reassure him with my eyes. I can do it.

  He nodded once.

  Barker turned to me. “I can’t have you skimping on your regular work, Lieutenant. It’s far too critical.”

  “I’ll operate tonight. I’ll be back on the job in the morning,” I promised.

  Barker’s eyes narrowed, telling me he’d better not regret it. Then the brigadier started asking questions about the progress on the golem and the two of them strolled away.

  The doctor prepared a needle of morphine and sighed. “I can’t assist you in surgery, Tinker. I have a dozen other patients. If this were a simple amputation, it would take me ten minutes, but this…. I’ve no time for this.”

  “I’ll make do,” I said. I stepped closer to Captain Davies. His gaze never left mine as I gripped his upper arm, offering comfort, I suppose, and a distraction from the injection. Right biceps muscle, diameter of the plunger one centimeter, needle point-three-oh centimeters. Effects in ten, nine, eight….

  “If you can’t—” Davies whispered. He didn’t get to finish before the drug glazed his eyes. Nevertheless, I knew what he wanted—a reprieve I would never have it in me to give.

  Don’t let me awaken.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” the doctor muttered as those green eyes slid closed.

  3.

  Albertus made me a new heart, and he gave me an even more precious gift—knowledge. He taught me everything he knew. Hunger of the mind replaced hunger of the belly. There was always enough food in the genius’s rambling London workshop. And enough food for my mind as well.

  He taught me how to work with fibers as delicate as the hair on a lady’s arm. He showed me the magic of tiny gears that ran in perpetual motion, feeding each other energy like an ouroboros. He built mechanisms as large as an elephant for the queen. Albertus’s creations were unique. He gave them little flaws—a dandy’s shoe with a cracked heel, a horse with a bump on its nose, a shepherdess’s stocking that was falling down. Because reality was never perfect, he said, and it was the imperfections that made his creations feel real.

  But I, I preferred tiny things, miniatures so complex not one more filament could be crammed into their perfection. I made frogs and spiders and glittering eggs that opened a dozen times to reveal smaller and smaller works of art. They sold to the highest bidder. Victoria herself carried one of my mechanical butterflies in her purse. And we made limbs too, when St. Bart’s sent for us. Men often lost parts of themselves in the maw of the Industrial Revolution. Snip snap.

  One day in the operating theater, Albertus suddenly stepped away from the patient with the halting gait of one of his automatons. His scalpel dropped to the floor. He fell and I reached for him, barely catching him before he hit the boards. He looked into my eyes for a second and then he was gone.

  Unlike mine, his heart had given us no warning. He saved me and then died in my arms.

  I was twenty and only a year away from my freedom. Three hundred sixty-three days, twelve hours, ten minutes. But Albertus, the greatest mind of the century, had forgotten to mention me in his will. My contract went to his widow, a woman neither Albertus nor I could abide. She sold me, for a great deal of money, to Major Barker. Barker had been after Albertus to work for the British Army for years. Albertus had refused; I could not.

  Albertus placed his deepest secrets in me, and Major Barker bought them as if they were nothing more than a cheap whore.

  4.

  I operated on Captain Davies from five till four in the morning. Eleven hours, twelve minutes. Major Winslow sent in a nurse to assist me for a short while, but when she had to leave, I didn’t get another. This was a war zone, and the battle that had brought in Captain Davies had brought in other wounded. The hospital staff had
no time for the delicate work required.

  As I worked into the night alone, I was gripped with doubt. Why had I said I could do this? What if I failed? The arms were terribly ravaged. I had to saw off and smooth the edges of the bones and shave the ragged flesh before I could begin to coax the delicate nerve fibers and tendons to the surface. I would need them to connect to the prosthetics. I had to control the bleeding and recirculate the blood. The patient’s sedation with ether had to be constantly monitored and hot cloths applied regularly to keep the tissue pliable.

  By midnight, I knew I would succeed. By four I was finished and dead on my feet.

  I wrapped the prepared stumps and gave Davies more morphine. I wanted to stay with him, be there when he awoke. But Major Barker would expect me in the hangar in an hour to begin a day’s work.

  I bent over his bed. In my exhausted state, and after so long focusing on minutia, his face was blurred and soft in the glow of the lamps. He was a large man, at least six two and fifteen stone. His shoulders were broad and muscled. But in my altered state he looked angelic lying there. His hair was dark blond and clipped short. He wore a slim mustache. He looked young. His lips were full and soft, his jaw square and rough.

  “Don’t die,” I told him. “I’ll make you hands, marvelous hands. You’ll see.”

  5.

  For three days, Major Barker had me working on the golem around the clock. He refused every request I made to go the hospital to check on Captain Davies. Barker said the stumps should not be disturbed for a week so there was no point in checking them. The truth was, he resented any moment I was not slaving on his project. Barker had made big promises to the brigadier, and he knew no one else had the skill to accomplish the thing.

  I often contemplated how to turn his need of me to my advantage. But Barker was hard and ruthless. And while I could see wires and rods in my head as clear as day, people remained a mystery to me. When I tried to insist on seeing my patient, Barker threatened to ban me from the hospital for good. I relented.

  I’d never liked Barker, but in those few days, I learned to hate him. I felt a craving to check on Captain Davies, an obsession of the sort I developed around important projects. Having it thwarted was painful.

  On the fourth day, Major Barker was summoned to the hospital by Brigadier Warwick himself, and he nodded at me tersely to go along. We found the brigadier standing at Captain Davies’s bed. The patient’s color had returned, a rosy glow, and he was sleeping peacefully. He looked much improved.

  Deliberately, I stepped around Major Barker to check the captain’s forehead for fever. There was none.

  “Well?” the brigadier asked. “What’s the prognosis? Can we use Captain Davies to prototype the golem’s hands or not?”

  Major Barker went a little red, having ignored the issue for days. “Unwrap his hands, Tinker,” he ordered. “Show the brigadier how he’s got on.”

  “Yes, sir.” I unwrapped the bandages, anxious to see the stumps for myself.

  As I reached the final layer, I took care, checking his face frequently for pain. But he didn’t awaken. The nurse must have given him something strong. I exposed both stumps. The flesh around the connectors was red but healing nicely. The stitched seams were tight and pale. I touched the connectors one by one with a steel rod I’d brought for the purpose. Each time, the small tube on the end of the rod lit up. The connectors were live.

  Major Barker’s expression cleared and he smiled like the satisfied fox he was. “As you can see, it’s going splendidly. The nerves and tendons are attached to those connectors. The mechanical hands will slot right onto them. And then they’ll be screwed into these divots here and secured to the bones.”

  He went on to point out all my hard work as if it were his own marvelous doing. I was used to it. He always took credit for my skill. I only felt relief that Davies was living, that he was healing, and that the arms were excellent candidates for my prosthetics. I would be able to give him a future in which he was not helpless.

  “But the golem won’t have nerves, will it?” Brigadier Warwick asked.

  “No, the golem will have wires and gears,” Barker said. “And it will be powered by a small engine in the torso. The prosthetic hands will be run by the electrical pulse of Captain Davies’s heart. It’s a technology I myself invented.”

  Albertus had invented it, and I’d refined it, but I wasn’t going to argue.

  Barker continued. “But the basic function of the hands will be the same. They’ll be exceptional weapons.”

  “Crushing, as I recall,” the brigadier said. The golem was an important project and he knew the design well.

  “Yes. The hands will be far stronger than human hands. They’ll be able to crush a throat in seconds. And of course, the grip for climbing will be superb, and the force of a fist blow will shatter bone on contact.”

  I knew all this about the golem. It was, after all, laid out in my own blueprints. But now the words sank into me as if I’d never heard them before. I looked at Captain Davies asleep on the bed and felt a sharp pain of regret and guilt. Suddenly the hands did not seem so much a gift as a curse.

  “I say!” The brigadier was impressed. “But the golem will be controlled with code words. Will we be able to control Davies the same way? Or will he have his own mind? I suppose he must. He’s a man, after all.”

  Major Barker looked at me. He didn’t know the answer, but he was warning me to say what he wanted to hear.

  I swallowed. “He’ll have his own mind, sir. Of course. But the hands could be engineered to override that on a code word. However, it might be best—”

  “Marvelous!” Brigadier Warwick said. “Naturally, one would hardly expect to need such a thing, but do put it in, put it in. I’ll want a list of the code words. I suppose they’ll be a different word for each possible action, hey? ‘Crush,’ for example. Not that we’d call it that! It wouldn’t do to have him killing someone accidently, would it? For example, if you said ‘It’s a crush in here.’ No, that wouldn’t do at all.”

  “The code words will be things unlikely ever to be spoken aloud,” Major Barker assured him.

  The brigadier seemed so cheerful at the prospect. And after all, that was what the HRH Machinist Corps was for, wasn’t it? To invent new weapons, to take life. From the first time a caveman raised a bone and struck a rival over the head, it’s been a race to create the biggest stick. We were the British Empire. It was our right to create deterrents. Our duty, even. That was what they’d told me.

  I’d been so naïve when I first came under Major Barker’s wings. He’d been nice to me then—fatherly, even—and I’d been grieving for Albertus. I bought into every platitude he’d uttered. “For queen and country.” “To end the war and bring our boys home.” I preened under his praise of my skills like a wallflower soaking up compliments from a handsome gentleman. I’d been putty in his hands. Foolish Tinker. Foolish, queer Tinker.

  I knew Albertus had rejected Barker time and again, but I’d always assumed he was too busy making pretty marvels for royalty and couldn’t be bothered. For a short time, I considered myself better than Albertus for using my skills in service of our fighting forces, of England, of peace. I took up the mental challenge to make killing things as if it were a delightful puzzle to be solved.

  It wasn’t until I saw my weapons tested on prisoners of war that I realized the obvious—why Albertus had rejected such work. Blood, brain matter, bones, screams, pleas…. But it was too late. They put my designs into production. There were thousands of them out there. My devices.

  I would never be forgiven—not by God, if there was such, not by the spirit of Albertus, not by my victims, and not by myself.

  "When can a prototype be ready?” the brigadier asked. He and Major Barker strolled away together, chatting enthusiastically.

  Dismissed, I stepped closer to Captain Davies’s bed and looked down at him. He opened his eyes. There was a dull horror in those deep green pools and a grievous cre
ase between his brows. He’d been awake, then, the entire time. He’d heard.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to him. I began to rewrap his stumps. Over, under with the bandages, gentle on the connectors.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me quietly.

  He didn’t sound like he hated me. I looked at his face. We were only a few feet apart, stooped as I was to bandage him. It felt troublingly intimate but I didn’t look away.

  “Lieutenant Gray,” I said.

  “Gray. Like your eyes.” There was nothing in his voice but weariness, but the mere fact that he’d noticed the color of my eyes made me feel a wave of something—simple gratitude perhaps—at being seen for once. More than that—pleasure.

  Gray like my heart, I thought, meaning the steel of it and also the fact that it was no longer pure. But black would have been a truer color. I said nothing.

  “You’re the one who’ll be making the hands?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I’m a machinist.” I went back to bandaging his stumps. I wanted to say I was sorry again, but that was stupidity.

  “Gray…” he murmured, and he fell asleep.

  6.

  Now that the brigadier was excited about the hands, Major Barker allowed me to spend as much time on them as I liked. Two days later, I brought the skeleton of them to Captain Davies to test the couplings. I found him awake and sitting up.

  “The fittings will be painful,” I told him regretfully, “but once the hands are finished, you won’t have to remove them. I can give you some morphine now.”

  “No. No more morphine. Just do what you must.”

  I wanted to argue with him. But his face was determined, his resolve as solid as a barred door.

  “All right, Captain. But I’ll stop the moment you say.”

  I fitted the hands. Gold connectors, pins to pin fittings, snap, secure.

  Even though the connectors themselves had no sensation, just shifting them caused waves of pain to shoot up the living fibers. But Davies never said a word. By the time I was done, he was pale and sweating, his jaw clenched so tight it would surely ache for hours.