Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  “Don’t see you sending yourself out,” Rothermere said, unthinkingly, and the mood froze; but Arjun was on his way out of the room anyway.

  Holbach observed that the coffeepot was empty, and rang the bell to summon his housekeeper. He filled the pause, as he often did, with praise for Arjun’s efforts. It was his instinct, Arjun thought, to ingratiate. “Again, I’m amazed by your facility, the mastery you display of this really rather alien culture. Remarkable progress. I think we’ve learned a lot of good stuff.”

  “If it comes naturally, it’s because I sympathize with their search for the Bull. They are not so alien to me.”

  “Oh? How goes your own search? Are you still searching?”

  “I don’t know. My…experience with the Typhon wounded me. I don’t know. I am wary of throwing myself back into my search. Of being possessed again. But I can’t forget the Voice. I want to find It, to hear It, to know what It is. Does that make sense?”

  “By the standards of the things people say about their gods, yes. I promised I would help you, didn’t I? Of course I did. And I will, as soon as this”—he waved a hand to indicate the piles of paper and the scholarly occupation of his house—“is done with again for a time. Gods, and this!” He strode to the window and took a pile of broadsheets off the sill; he clutched them to his head in a pantomime of horror. “She demands I do something about this. Reports of some flying child breaking open gaols and workhouses, all over the city. Yes, flying.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Does it sound probable?”

  “A great many things in this city strike me as improbable.”

  “Well, I haven’t looked into it yet. I’m sure it’s nonsense. Certainly there’ve been riots, escapes, as there always are, but the more colorful details: no. The papers are always full of that sort of nonsense. Well, no, no”—he rolled a paper thoughtfully into a cone as he spoke—“I shouldn’t say nonsense. It’s an expression of the city’s deep feelings. This stuff rises up. Childlike dreams of freedom, of insurrection. Notice that they cast this ridiculous winged savior as a child?”

  He slumped in the green leather of his chair. “And gods know that I sympathize. If you knew how caged one feels as a scholar in this city, Arjun. How many lords and ladies and jumped-up little councils breathe down your neck, checking your every word for heresy or dissent, itching to give you a spell in the Rose, or to clip your ears or clap you in the stocks. We have too many gods, too many lords; more laws than people. If you stay here, Arjun, as a young man of some promise, you too may find your head high enough one day to fear for your neck. Sometimes one just wants to, oh, knock it all down.”

  He swung a thick arm across the table for emphasis, and visited catastrophe upon a parish of the book-city. He cleared the rubble sheepishly, with Arjun’s help.

  E very so often, Arjun reminded Holbach of his promise. Arjun’s wounds were healing. He had not forgotten the Voice; he could not. The man he was, was made of its echoes. The bitterness and doubt the Typhon had inflicted on him, down in the tunnels, were still there, discords that might never be resolved, but it made no difference. If he gave up the search, he would be nothing; there would be nothing to fill him. Still, for the time being, he was content to help Holbach, occasionally reminding the Professor that he would one day have to help Arjun in return. He didn’t delude himself: he was stalling, treading water, afraid to begin again, to fail again. But it was not unpleasant, in the meantime.

  H aycock vanished one day. Arjun didn’t notice until Olympia mentioned it, as they sat outside a café, enjoying the shaft of cool sunlight that came through the trees. “He came to the mansion a few days ago. I tried to give him Holbach’s orders for the month, and he made some remarkably improper suggestions. Apparently half the people in his lodgings are dead of the lung-rot, and he’s going to go to ground somewhere in the north.”

  Lung-rot, again. Arjun hadn’t known; he hadn’t been back to the Cypress in weeks. He went there that afternoon, to find the place almost empty. Defour remained in her place; he understood now that it would insult her to ask why. Heady had gone, too, she said, and the lodger who had taken Arjun’s room had died.

  “Haycock left this for you,” Defour said, removing a heavy old book from the desk drawer in her office. “Excuse me, young man! I didn’t hold this for you for free, you know.”

  They haggled. Eventually, grudgingly, she let go.

  Arjun spent the afternoon visiting graves all around the outer precincts of the Cere House. Having made the observance for Norris, he felt he had to do it for them all; he had a fine sense of justice.

  Shutlow felt dark and close. Winter would not let it go. He remembered how, in the hills, they had feared the wolves in winter; there was that sense of something prowling, hungry and mad, around the edge of sight; a sense of time held back, of violence deferred. People looked tense and wary. He pulled his collar up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and got out.

  T he book Haycock had left behind was called Thinkers of Our Age: Thirty-Five Collected Profiles in Invention. What Age, exactly? It was hard to say. The date of publication was not in any form Arjun recognized, which generally meant—he had learned—that the book was either exceedingly old or from very far away. It was made of a finely cut glossy paper, and was so unblemished it might have been printed yesterday. Back in his flat, Arjun flicked quickly through it, and recognized none of the names of people or places anywhere in its pages. He began to think that Defour had made a mistake, had given him the wrong book, until he came to the splendid full-page picture—it seemed too clear, too precise, too sharply colorful to be an ordinary illustration—of The Enigmatic Mr. Cuttle, Welcoming Us to His Laboratory.

  The man in the picture, wearing a smart grey suit, smiling wryly, gesturing with a many-ringed hand at a shadowy background of cages and contraptions and clockfaces and greasy lights, was—unquestionably—Shay.

  The text accompanying the picture was both nonsensical and deeply disturbing. It was made even more confusing by the fact that someone—Haycock?—had neatly sliced out a half-dozen pages.

  Arjun ran down to the street and took the first carriage he could find back to the Cypress. He caught Defour on her way out the door, dressed in her finest shawl, attempting to carry a folding chair under one arm and an umbrella under the other.

  “Where did he go? Where did Haycock go?”

  “Young man,” she snapped, “am I not already quite late enough?”

  “Please. Anything. I must find him.”

  “Hmm. Come with me and I’ll see what I remember. You can carry the chair. Yes, and the umbrella.”

  They walked together down Moore Street, down Millward, down Stevenson, and came to a grassy hill overlooking the River. A shabby little patch of slum huddled on the banks below.

  It was late in the evening, and there was already a crowd spread out waiting on the grass of the hill.

  Defour said, “You made us late!” Then she retrieved and unfolded her chair. “All the good spots are gone.” She made Arjun erect the umbrella over her chair: “They say there’s going to be ash and bits blowing.” Finally she admitted, grudgingly, that she did not in fact have the faintest idea where Haycock was.

  Arjun waited anyway, and watched, with the crowd, as the Thunderer appeared from behind the tall blocks across the River, and came to hang over the ugly little sprawl on the riverbanks. “Black Lung,” Defour explained. “Another outbreak in the Bargeman’s Mission down there. About time they did something about it. Burn it out. Oh, the new ideas people have these days! It’s not all bad, is it?”

  Down at the foot of the hill, another crowd, a small sad little group, stood in the shadow of the condemned buildings and waved tiny illegible signs.

  Apparently the Thunderer had arrived earlier than the appointed hour. There was some confusing delay as it lowered itself with weightless ease to the roof of the tallest building, then rose again, up and up, until it was well clear; and then it rained d
own fire. There was a tremendous crash and roar as one by one the buildings collapsed into the haze of smoke and flame. Red light shimmered out over the water. The crowd on the hill clapped and cheered and stamped their feet, and Arjun cheered, too: Take that, monster! He went downhill caught up in the embrace of the crowd, and it seemed there was nothing at all frightening or mysterious in the busy spring night.

  AT HOME WITH THE ENIGMATIC MR. CUTTLE

  In the old days we called them Gods—and if your grandparents are like mine, then I suppose we all know someone who still does. (I kid, I kid, Granddad!) And yet today we hardly think about them, do we? I know I never did until I met the famous—some might say notorious!—Mr. Cuttle, who is surely one of the most intriguing figures to be profiled here.

  I went to see him in his laboratory, on a sunny day in Slinndo Hill. The flowers were in heat and the air was warm and thick with spores. He says he doesn’t mind them, and he laughed openly at my mask—if you ask him to explain things like that, he’ll just say, “You should see some of the places I’ve been! Some of the things I’ve had to breathe! It toughens the lungs.” Or something similarly enigmatic. But I get ahead of myself!

  Perhaps you wouldn’t imagine him working in Slinndo Hill—too everyday, too pretty-pretty, simply too middle-management, my dear! But the man himself is just as you might expect. He’s small, but seems, whenever he speaks, to fill the room. His movements are sharp and precise. There is always a smile on his face, as if he’s already had this conversation, and it amuses him that you’re too slow to think of anything new to say.

  He ushered me into his shadowy chambers with a click of his fingers. In all the years I’ve been profiling for the Times, I don’t think I’ve been greeted in that way, and I don’t think I would stand for it from any politician, or actor, or any ordinary businessman. (So be warned!)

  But of course the usual rules hardly apply to Mr. Cuttle—as he took every opportunity to remind me. Is there a richer man in the city today? If there is, I don’t know who it is! Is there anything in Ararat that hasn’t been transformed—for better or worse—since that day he turned up, briefcase in hand, a total stranger, in the lobby of the Bishop Hotel and presented himself to Lord Monboddo?

  “Was it difficult,” I ask him, “doing business with Lord Monboddo? Was it frightening?” His only answer is a barking laugh—one might almost think it contemptuous. And that sets all the birds and rats and monkeys in all of the cages barking, and howling, and laughing, and muttering the little scraps of nonsense that are all the words, Mr. Cuttle says, that they know.

  “They’re not finished yet,” he explains.

  And the noise sets the fields of those unique and subtle energies, the energies that have transformed our city, into shimmering and swaying, waxing and waning, flickering and sparking.

  Can I describe the sensation—the cavalcade of sensations—that this awakes? I don’t know that I can, honestly.

  And Mr. Cuttle grins, with the light playing over his glasses and his white hair, and he says, “So let’s talk about them, then. You people used to call them Gods.”

  Mr. Cuttle’s laboratory is a hard thing to describe. The clutter, the strangeness—the sense that the whole thing is a display, like a storefront, and the real secrets are hidden. There’s a kind of showmanship even in the cages themselves, which are…

  …truly learned anything? It’s hard to say. Mr. Cuttle is a baffling and extraordinary subject to interview. In a way his origins and methods seem more mysterious now than they did before; certainly, as I write this, I don’t seem to have a single straight answer in the notes before me. As we talked, messengers came from Lord Monboddo; from ministers and magnates of all kinds, and he said yes and no to them as if he owned this city. And perhaps he does! As I walked down Slinndo Hill, it wasn’t only the flowers that made my head reel. His plans, his ambitions, beggar belief—if anyone else spoke of the Mountain that way, I’d say they were mad. So have we made the right deal? We’ll see. These are interesting times!

  Editors’ note: The preceding Profile was, of course, conducted prior to the recent Cuttle Scandal, which exploded shortly before this book went to press. After much discussion it was decided that the Profile should remain, if only as a historical curiosity. We do not, of course, condone Mr. Cuttle’s abominable actions, and we apologize to anyone for whom this Profile may be a painful reminder of that dreadful incident.

  T he Thunderer came in low over the River, in the late evening, approaching a huddle of buildings by the banks east of Shutlow. The Bargeman’s Mission was there, and a few other buildings, including two warehouses that had belonged to the Gerent, and were now no longer needed. Whatever else was there hardly mattered. Arlandes had his orders. If there were residents in the buildings, they had been given fair warning to depart. It would all burn.

  The matter had been decided. The Countess had spoken to her advisors. Some friend of Holbach’s had advanced notions regarding the control of disease through fire and quarantine. Other advisors told the Countess it was blasphemy to interrupt the natural order of the city, and that the disease would spread according to the gods’ designs. A man from the transportation concerns complained that the sickness was bad, it was bad every winter but this winter it had been worse, and now it was dragging on into spring and eating into profits. Captain Arlandes sat in stony indifferent silence through the whole debate, and spoke only when Holbach’s friend asked: Will you do it, Captain? Arlandes had grunted in surprise. Of course.

  There was a new kind of weapon. There had been a general feeling that the proceedings at Stross End had been messy, had been unclean. Over Holbach’s objections, the thin and eager Professor Bradbury had offered his plans for a new flaming liquid, suitable for delivery by cast-iron shell, and capable, Bradbury promised, of rivaling the Fire itself for the ruthlessness with which it would burn and burn.

  One of the Countess’s elderly cousins, Sir Brice—under whom Arlandes had served on his first ship—had observed that there were conventions in close-packed Ararat against the use of arson as a weapon of princes. “But this is not war,” the Countess had explained. “This is cleansing. This is a public service. This is modernity.” Sir Brice had looked pleadingly at Arlandes, and Arlandes was not sure what Brice wanted him to say, so he said nothing. “Then the matter is decided,” the Countess said.

  But Arlandes had no particular taste for watching the thing be done. He dined alone in his quarters, and when Lieutenant Duncan knocked on his door to say “We’re there, sir,” Arlandes didn’t look up.

  “Then you know what to do, Mr. Duncan.”

  “Yes, sir. Sir, there appears to be a crowd watching. An audience, sir, on Hailie Hill. They should be at a safe distance.”

  “Disgusting. Continue.”

  “There’s a group down by the banks. They have signs, sir, and they appear to be residents of the condemned area, and aggrieved, sir. Someone tried to fire on us, sir, with a rifle, but of course we were unharmed. Ah—they may not be at a safe distance, sir.”

  “They were warned, weren’t they? Go and do your job, Mr. Duncan.”

  A short while later Duncan returned.

  “Ah—Captain? There’s a man on the roof of the Mission.”

  “More fool him.”

  “He’s waving a white dress, sir.”

  “…Let me see this, Mr. Duncan.”

  T he process by which one descended from the Thunderer was a cumbersome one, involving ropes, shouting, the nervous shifting motion of the kite-boats as they came down among the chimneys and water towers, and a final hard jump onto the rooftops. Mr. Lemuel—the man in the brown suit on the roof of the old Mission building, holding the white dress, was most certainly Lemuel—watched the process with obvious amusement.

  When Arlandes was finally down, and approaching rapidly and angrily across the rooftop, Lemuel shouted, “Good evening, Captain!”

  “What are you doing with that dress, Lemuel?”

  “This
old thing? Rummaging. Downstairs. Captain, it’s amazing what people leave behind when they’re in a hurry. Do you want it?”

  Lemuel held the dress up by the shoulders. It was clearly not Lucia’s dress; it was faded, and worn, and in a fussy style that had not been in fashion for several generations.

  Arlandes snarled and turned back to the waiting kite-boat, signaling his men to let down the ladder for him.

  Lemuel called, “Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?”

  Arlandes turned again, and approached Lemuel, with his hand on his saber. “Why are you here?”

  “Professional curiosity! I had to see this for myself. By the way, if you put that thing down, we can talk more easily.”

  Arlandes was holding a red camphor-fragranced handkerchief to his mouth.

  “It’s not here anymore, Captain. You don’t have to worry. It’s moved on. Trust me, Captain, do you see me looking worried?”

  Arlandes slowly lowered the handkerchief.

  “Someone’s made a right fucking mess,” Lemuel said. “Shocking. Irresponsible. Playing with dangerous forces. How’s your ship going these days, Captain?”

  “What are you talking about, Lemuel?”

  “I came here to make some observations, and I made them. I’ve been taking soundings. Sniffing the air. You won’t understand my instruments or my methods. I can tell you a few interesting things, Captain, if you still want to do business.”

  “I told you I do not want to do business with you, Lemuel.”

  “But here you are talking to me. Are you happy here, Captain?”

  “What?”

  “Are you happy here? You don’t look happy. Have you ever considered taking that big ship and going, oh, let’s say, west? To the walls, and the outside? Or let’s say going north, and in, and to the Mountain. Maybe there’s a better life for you there. Have you never thought about it? You see, Captain, I’m interested in your ship. It’s no skin off my nose if you want to come along. In fact I could use a man like you. I keep thinking, you’re a difficult man, but there must be a deal to be made here. There just has to be.”