“I’m sorry about the pain,” I said. I seemed to do nothing but apologize to him, like a toy drummer that could only beat one note. I wet a cloth in a nearby basin and wiped his brow, waiting for the pain to fade. The mechanical hands lay on the bed like dead things attached below his elbows.
“What these hands will do…. I deserve to feel every bit of the pain of attaching them,” he managed when he could finally speak. He sounded bitter.
I didn’t know why he felt he owed me an explanation for his behavior, or why he would be so honest. I was no one. I didn’t know how to respond. But I couldn’t seem to stop wiping his brow and face. The nurses shaved the men when they could stand it, but it had been at least a day for him. The stubble on his jaw tugged at the cloth. I found it fascinating.
“Where are you from?” I asked, to change the subject.
“North Hampshire. My father was a small landholder. Fifty acres. We raised sheep and we had horses.”
I smiled tentatively, but I was surprised. He had a sort of noble bearing I would not have expected from a sheep farmer, though, at fifty acres, his family were not paupers.
“We used to slaughter the sheep, you see. So I was a perfect candidate for the army.” He attempted to make a joke of it, but there was no humor in his voice. I rewet the cloth and began to wipe down his upper arms.
“I always hated it,” he said.
“Farming?” I met his eyes.
“Killing,” he answered. I didn’t know if he was talking about the sheep anymore.
“You made captain. You must be a good cavalryman.”
“Effective at least,” he said flatly.
I should have moved on with my work then, but he was still pale, though his trembling had lessened. I told myself I should give it a few more minutes for the pain to fade before I made him move the hands. I rewet the cloth.
I continued to wipe down his left arm, holding it gently at the elbow—and I became mesmerized at the sight and feel of his muscle and skin. I lost myself for a moment, then realized I’d become aroused. I was aroused by touching him, a patient, and I was touching him all wrong. The slow drag of the cloth against his skin could not be mistaken for clinical duty.
Shame and fear flooded me. I felt my face burn. I turned, put the cloth back in the basin, and breathed deeply, schooling myself. Pulse 130, 120, 110. When I had myself under control I turned, my face deliberately blank. He was watching me, but he looked thoughtful, not angry. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my uniform jacket. Thankfully, it covered up my sins.
“Where are you from, Gray?” he asked.
“No one calls me Gray.”
“What, then?”
“Tinker.”
“Is that your Christian name?”
I smiled. “Yes. It’s a family name. My mother’s ancestors made clocks.” I had never told anyone that. No one had ever asked.
“Tinker,” he said as if testing the word. “And you must call me Colin.”
I started to protest, but it would just sound like another apology. I shut my mouth. I could not seem to look away from him.
The way he studied my face, so openly, stole my breath. I’d never had anyone look at me like that. Albertus was usually distracted by his work, and when he did look at me it was either with a paternal fondness or annoyance, depending on what I’d done. Major Barker treated me like a tool he could manipulate as he liked. I was small and mostly I was ignored. No one saw me the way Captain Davies—Colin—was seeing me now, like a person, an interesting one, one worth studying and puzzling over. It made me shiver with alternating twinges of hot and cold. It made me want to excuse myself and escape, and at the same time it made me ache for more, for my allotment of human contact.
I told myself it was just his way. There was nothing in Colin’s face that indicated more than curiosity, nothing to suggest his interest in me was carnal. But my body reacted to the weight of his gaze as if it was a physical touch. And oh, I craved that touch.
“You don’t like being a solider,” I said, forcing my eyes to look away from his.
“It’s my job. It’s what I signed up for,” he said with no emotion.
“If you weren’t a soldier, what would you be?” My eyes shifted back to him of their own accord.
He looked surprised at the question. “I…write music. In my head.” He started to gesture toward his head and his right hand obeyed, fingers flowing. He stared at them for a moment, swallowed audibly, then carefully let the hand rest back on the bed.
“You’re a composer?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing so grand. Never been published. Never even heard my music played other than in my head. I’ve written reams of it, though. Foolish. Helps me cope, I suppose.”
“Not foolish,” I said. “Do you write it down?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Why?”
Green eyes. Very frank green eyes. Should I not have said that? Be quiet, Tinker. Know your place. Hands, mechanics, work. Do your job.
“Is the pain bearable now?” I asked hastily. “I need to test the hands.”
“It’s bearable.”
I held out my palm, waist high. “Place your hand on mine, very gently.”
His left hand moved and slowly raised to mine. It rested there.
“Excellent. Can you turn it over so that your palm faces the ceiling?”
He did.
“Now wiggle your fingers.”
The tapered steel fingers moved up and down.
“Make a loose fist. Good.”
We repeated the test with his right hand. I had him grasp a pencil.
“I’ll be able to eat by myself? To write?” he asked.
“Of course.”
He looked relieved. I wondered if he was thinking about writing his compositions. Or perhaps he had a girl back home whom he wrote to. Of course he must.
I tested each finger in turn. Though the hands worked, the pinkie was slow to move on the left and the thumb almost immobile on the right. I would have to make adjustments.
“There will be at least one more fitting,” I told him as I removed the hands. “And then… we’ll have to test the full range of features for the brigadier.”
He looked down at his chest, his brow furrowing. He knew exactly what I meant.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. It was such a weak thing to say. I had to stop saying it. But I could hear his voice in my head.
I always hated it. The killing.
He raised his eyes to meet mine. “Thank you, Tinker,” he said, absolving me in a way I didn’t deserve. He turned his back to me and pretended to go to sleep.
7.
When Albertus gave me a new heart, he gave me other things as well.
A love of walking, which I had never been able to do as a child without getting winded. I roamed all over London when I had the chance. I particularly adored Highgate Wood and Queens Wood. My mind would slide over problems during such walks, as if the faster-pumping blood and fresher air were feeding my brain. I would return to the workshop eager to test new ideas.
The heart also gave me a less useful thing—crushing sexual desire. Perhaps I was not unlike any other fifteen-year-old boy, but it didn’t seem that way. Once I was healthy, I was always randy. Even when my mind was deeply engaged in my work, there was a tingling little itch in my groin that begged for attention. And when I was not working, it became a need that was impossible to ignore.
At the slightest provocation, I would harden. My baggy trousers and long waistcoats were my greatest allies. It didn’t take me long to discern that, while the barmaid’s breasts did little for me, my prick would stiffen at the merest glimpse of broad shoulders in a fitted jacket, the muscled thighs of a man on horseback, or glossy black hair curved near a masculine jaw. I never spoke of these things to anyone, but I listened to others talk. I came to understand the condition I had and its relative rarity. It was a crime under English law.
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I’d never been what you might call normal, so my irregularity in this regard did not distress me. I felt no shame. But it did convince me that my life would be one of work and invention, not love and family. I was unlikely to find many willing partners, nor was I prepared to take on the wife society would expect of me. I would be alone.
We often had great lords and ladies visit the London workshop. Lord Winthrope was fascinated with mechanisms and he came often. Sometimes his son, Rupert, would accompany him. While Lord Winthrope and Albertus discussed projects out in the shop front, Rupert would wander back to my workbench, a place well tucked away from patrons’ eyes.
Rupert was a pompous ass, so I would work on, ignoring him as best I could. But he loved to tease me just to see the blush that stained my cheeks. One day he leaned over my back, placing his chin on my shoulder as I worked. I should have shaken him off, but the warmth of his chest pressed against me, his breath in my ear…. It felt good. I must have groaned or sighed, for he guessed my predicament. His hand stole over my thigh to my groin. He purred in my ear at what he found there.
“Ooh…you have a big tool for such a little lad, Tinker.”
His tongue flicked my ear. My hands stopped moving but I kept my tools clenched in my fingers, my breathing harsh. He rubbed me through my trousers. I felt his answering hardness thrust against my rump and lower back as I sat on the stool.
I knew we could be caught at any moment, but I couldn’t make him stop. It felt so delicious to have someone else’s hand on me, to feel a stiff prick against my back. I floated in delight for an endless few minutes.
Stroke, once per second, twice per second, applied pressure thirty psi. Harder, oh God, harder. Please.
With a small whimper, I spent in my trousers. I felt him tense up and spasm too.
He left without another word and never came back with his father again. I was only a mechanic’s apprentice, after all. I did not miss him.
It was the only sexual experience I’d ever had with another person. I knew where the johnny boys worked, and I always had a few bits in my pocket. I daydreamed about sneaking out to see them, just to feel another’s hand, mouth, on me. But the threat of disease, and the fear of getting caught and shaming Albertus, kept me from acting on the fantasy.
I made do with my own clever hands and the boundless plains of my imagination.
8.
Major Barker was most particular about the killing features of the hands. I programmed them and tested them in the lab while he watched, running them through an engine that would eventually empower the golem. Either hand could crush a brick to dust in seconds. They responded to spoken command. Barker was pleased.
On the next fitting, I had no choice but to explain the features to Colin.
“Only think what you want the hands to do, and they will do it,” I told him. “But you’ll have to strongly will it. Don’t worry about doing something accidently.”
I placed a towel over his lap and gave him a brick. “Squeeze it as hard as you can.”
He looked down at the hand.
Thought impulse sent to receptors, receptors filter out minor impulses, strong impulse drives the hands. Three thousand psi. There.
The brick disintegrated. Colin huffed something that was part laugh, part sob.
“You’ll be able to climb anything,” I assured him.
“And to punch hard enough to shatter bone,” he said flatly. He had been listening that day when he’d pretended sleep.
“Yes. Maybe the hands will save your life one day.”
“But I won’t always control the hands, will I? The brigadier said…they’ll respond to spoken commands too. From someone else.”
There was a catch in his voice, and I knew the idea truly frightened him. I focused on the hands, adjusting a screw that didn’t need adjusting. “Yes. But hardly anyone will know those commands.”
He sighed as if defeated. “It’s all right, Tinker. The army doesn’t build hands like these without asking for their pound of flesh. I know I should be grateful. Without them….”
He lay back on the pillow, and I cleared away the brick dust and towel. I cleaned the hand of tiny red particles. I liked holding the hand while he was wearing it. Just the simple act of attaching it to his connections, slotting it to the end of his arm, made it alive to me, made it his hand in a way that was completely illogical. By now, the skeleton was sheathed and there were enough feedback sensors in the fingers that I knew he could feel me as I stroked them clean. It gave me a strange thrill.
He didn’t pull away. I could feel the gaze on my face as I worked. Maybe it was the intimacy, but he began to speak haltingly. “I was in the expeditionary force that landed at Eupatoria. I fought with the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Almost half our men were killed or wounded in that battle. But I wasn’t. I mowed down everything in my path. Do you know why? Because I was terrified, you see. I killed so I wouldn’t be killed, like a sick dog lashing out. And the Russians, by God, they were so young and inexperienced. It was like scything down tender grass. I still see their faces when I close my eyes. Since then, there’ve been too many battles and too many faces.”
“I have killed too,” I said before realizing I was going to say it.
He looked at me in surprise and I could see the question in his eyes. At twenty-two I was still small and ever would be. My hair had been cut short when I joined the army but as a machinist it was not tended to with much frequency. It lay against my nape and, unruly and thick, stuck up on the top of my head. My face was thin and pale, the face of a scholar. To put it bluntly, I probably looked as dangerous to him as a plate of peas.
“Weapons,” I said with a tight smile. “I design weapons.”
“Like what?” he asked, curious now.
“The dervish,” I admitted. It was a device shaped like an orange. But when it was activated, slicing blades emerged and spun. They acted like wings, allowing the device to fly. A mercury core steered its course to the nearest warm body. Its navigational system was calibrated to move forward for a dozen yards, and from thence in a widening cone seeking a target. This would presumably ensure that the sender, and his fellow countrymen, would be safe. And yet I could not pretend the thing had not killed the innocent or even a horse or dog unlucky enough to get in its path. I had nightmares about it chasing me.
His eyes widened. “That was yours?”
I nodded. “And the stinger.” The dart was a better design; it carried death a little less randomly. It had to be aimed at a specific target and engaged. Then it would fly to that target with the speed of an arrow. Point-one milliliters of poison injected into the flesh, a killing dose.
He was staring at me in shock. I felt a debilitating pain of the heart. He saw it now: I was a monster. I looked at the floor, blinking back the unfathomable threat of tears.
His left hand closed over mine and tugged me closer. If I’d been less embarrassed, I might have felt a creator’s pride at the tenderness with which he could grasp my fingers.
“You’re brilliant, then, Tinker,” he said quietly. “A genius.”
I gave a bitter laugh. “Only a trained mind, one in the service of the devil.”
“No,” he said firmly. “We need all the help you can give us out there. But—I do understand.”
I looked up and saw regret and sympathy on his face. I swallowed a lump and nodded.
“Liberty and ease for those at home—it has a high price,” he parroted.
Did he still believe those words? That the scrabble for bits of the Ottoman Empire really affected the lives of people back in England? If he could believe it, I was glad for him.
I suddenly realized how close we were. I was pressed against the side of the bed. My left hand rested in his mechanical fingers and my right, somehow, had moved onto his chest, which was covered only by a thin hospital johnny. We were staring deeply into each other’s eyes. It was rather a shock to realize how we were arranged, as if I’d woken from a dream with no ide
a how I’d gotten there. I almost pulled away, but I stopped.
If this was being offered to me, why shouldn’t I take it?
It was a moment of vulnerability, a moment of understanding, of humanity, a moment of something else too—lust, not to put too fine a point on it. He was strong, rugged, and handsome, the stuff of my erotic dreams. And what I saw in his eyes was no less longing than my own. I didn’t understand how it could be there, not for me, for small, unimportant Tinker, but I drank it in greedily. Heat rushed through my body.
In my mind, I drew back, knowing this was dangerous ground. But my body didn’t obey. My hand remained heavy on his chest, my fingers barely stroking. I was painfully aroused where I pressed against the bed, but thankfully, my white coat covered my folly. If only I could as easily hide what must be written all over my face.
“Tinker,” he said, questioning.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“Could I ask you something terribly personal?”
I nodded again.
He blushed. “I—” He tried again. “I know the hands must be set to kill. I know this. But….”
“Yes?”
“Can you make them do other things as well?” He looked down where his hand held mine, frowning at it as if he didn’t trust its current gentleness.
“Anything.”
“Can you make the hands…caress?” His blush deepened and he couldn’t meet my eyes. “No one will want a mechanical man, you see, to be touched by things like these.” He held the hands up to look at them. I missed the weight of his hand on mine immediately.
“That’s not true. Many men have prosthetics. And you’re a handsome man.”
He looked at me sharply but without much hope. “You’re used to mechanisms. But for most people…. They’ll frighten away any lover.”
I noted that he did not say the word woman. I swallowed.
“And if the hands don’t keep them away, the blood on them will,” he said roughly. “I’m already a killer. But with these…. If I ever see England again, I’ll be soaked in blood.”
I couldn’t argue with him. I knew what duty he and his hands were bound for. But my fingers rubbed his chest to offer comfort, as if they had a will of their own.
Wilde Stories 2014 Page 5