by Lev AC Rosen
Nervous, Ernest clenched and unclenched his hand, then climbed the stairs. The tune the violin and piano played was one he recognized, an old tune from his father’s childhood that he would often hum while walking about Illyria. At the top of the stairs, beyond the landing and marble columns, was his father’s lab. Ernest knew it instantly. It was giant, a tower that plunged upward with a huge circular staircase in the center and windows all along the sides, many of them stained glass. Scientific accoutrements—beakers, bottles, gears, electrical engines, bones—were scattered around the open floors of all the stories but the ground story, which was covered in dust. A large banner hung from one wall bearing a version of the Illyrian seal—a shield against a red background with a gear inside it. Normally, the gear bore the symbol of one of the five sciences Illyria taught and it was worn on the jackets of graduates to show mastery in their scientific form. But this version of the seal showed a globe, seeming to suggest mastery of the earth itself. And the motto, written on the image of the gear, had been changed to ARTIFICES DOMINATORES HOMINI SUNT—“Inventors Are the Greatest of Men.” No … not quite greatest. More like rulers. Ernest clenched his jaw and frowned. This banner felt like a mockery of everything he loved about Illyria.
Under this banner was a stand, and on that, an open book. Ernest approached the book, blew the film of dust off it, and read the top page—a list of signatures:
Algernon Illyria
Pierre Frett
Gremio Walle
John Snow
Jan Weever
Tarquin Whittaker
Alfred Kingsberry
Adam Volio
Beau Dogberry
Henry Voukil
Orlando Canterville
Uriel Barbicane
Marcus Pluris
Marcellus Knox
Walford Cowper-Cowper
Arnost Bonne
Randall Grey
Kingston Pontefract
Langston Verges
Franz Umney
Howard March
Abelard Alroy
Quimby Rastail
Daniel Ghatan
Ernest recognized some of the names: his father’s, a few of the professors who had taught at Illyria years before. Many of the names he knew belonged to men who were dead now. After the top page was a manifest of sorts, saying that the group had been formed to rule the world, to impose their superior intellect on humanity for its own good. In many places, various hands had gone back, crossed things out, and written more in between the lines. The manifesto had clearly been changed over the years. After that, there were monthly meeting minutes, each in a different hand. There were notes on the progress of various members’ experiments, notes on arguments among members of the group, notes on ways to overthrow the Queen, and the best way to conquer Ireland. The minutes were all dated, but ended a year or so before his father’s death. It seemed that by that point, the group had fallen into disarray. Members stopped coming to meetings, some were kicked out, and several had mysteriously vanished, probably the victims of other members’ machinations. Then, the book went blank.
Done with the book, Ernest climbed the central spiraling staircase. Each level was open to the floors below it and hugged the walls, more like a very wide balcony than like an actual floor. One floor was a library, and another was a place for storing supplies like bottles of chemicals and eyes floating in jars—human eyes. On another floor was a huge slab with arm restraints and various wires hooked up to it, and a single human bone lying still on the surface. Another floor was covered in gears and metal parts and had a huge forge. And another floor had a small analytical engine, and another, half taken apart, or only half put together. On the very top floor were the violin and piano, both being played by mechanical hands, and both sadly out of tune. Ernest looked out one of the windows of the top floor. It had a crack in it, and a strong draft came through, blowing his hair back. He was in a tower in the middle of the countryside, but where, or which countryside, he could not tell. It was all green, with nothing but woods and plains in every direction. He could see no sign of other people, except for a wandering cow, which he supposed might have escaped from a nearby farm.
He spent a day thoroughly exploring the tower. His father had left notebooks everywhere—piles and piles of them, all meticulous, far more detailed than Ernest’s own notes. Ernest read them all in a huge dusty armchair on the top floor, and when he finished, he knew something new: His father was not the genius Ernest had thought. He had been a genius, certainly, but what Ernest had thought had set him apart—his ability to pull his inventions seemingly from the air already perfected, as though he had just thought of the idea and then calculated how it would best work—did not exist. His father had worked at least as long and hard as Ernest did before he even announced an invention. Keeping his workings secret had been intentional, to enhance the appearance of his genius, as well as his mystique.
Ernest found philosophical notes written in the margins of the notebooks, as though, when his mind couldn’t stand scientific computations any longer, he would step back to muse on science in a more general sense. “Always keep your working secret,” his father had written. “No one wants to see science made. It makes people think they can do it themselves, that it is just a matter of hard work and trying over and over until they get it right. It is not. Some men are born with the genius for science. Some are not. Therefore, a society in which those born with that genius rule over those born without it, or at least those born with some genius rule over those without any, would be for the betterment of mankind.” Ernest did not agree with his father on any of these points, but he felt satisfied to be delving into his psyche.
In other notebooks, he found more scribblings, such as “The stupid should be sent to Australia and kept in cages” and “Ideally, the Queen would cede power to us willingly, but if taking it is what we must do, it shouldn’t be difficult. And once we have control of England, the continent shan’t be far off.”
In the final notebook, the one dated a few months before his father’s death, Ernest found a note in the margin about him. “Ernest—should I let him into the Society? There is so much infighting. They would eat him. Better to let him live happily, making his little toy rabbits. He does not have the spine for real science.” Ernest bit his lower lip when he read it and, for a moment, swelled with rage, but then it subsided. He knew what the Society was now, knew his father’s dark secrets, his philosophy and goal of world domination, and Ernest knew that even had his father offered this legacy to him proudly, he would have wanted no part of it.
Most satisfying, though, were the places in his father’s notes where Ernest could see his father struggling to understand something Ernest grasped easily. Of course, in many instances, it was due to the progression of the sciences since his father had written the notes, but there were many principles that Ernest knew innately which his father seemingly had to discover. Ernest wouldn’t venture to say he was smarter than his father, but knowing his father was only human made Ernest gasp deeply, as though suddenly rising off the ground. He started to laugh, loudly and for a long while, drowning out the playing of the disharmonic instruments.
His father had also left many experiments unfinished, such as a new analytical engine that did not just predict numerical equations, but also retained information from previous equations, and built on them, interacting with the user to figure out a problem. He had attempted many experiments on human resurrection, which Ernest found distasteful and only glanced at; and many chemical experiments attempting to find a cure for, as well as a replication of, what he called “Curio’s Condition.”
After finishing his inspection of the lab and reading many of the notebooks, Ernest returned to the banner and the list of names. This had to be the “Society” to which many of his father’s notes referred. The Society was long gone now, and held no more threat to England, or anywhere else, than a bunch of disgruntled old men, working away in their labs and mumbling about how th
ey had almost ruled the world.
It took him another day to look at everything, but when he was done, Ernest felt completely changed, as though he had somehow dissolved a layer of himself in acid and emerged fresh and stronger, uninhibited by whatever had been clinging to him. He began thinking of new things he could do with Illyria, things he wouldn’t have tried before, because his father would have disapproved. His father was dead now, and Illyria belonged to Ernest. Changes could and should be made.
As he rode the train back and walked through the college, he was lost in his plans, unaware of the dreary silence of the place until he walked into the dining hall, and saw everyone staring at him, and then felt Cecily squeezing him with joy. He felt happiest at that moment, and wished only that Violet could be there as well, to make it perfect. And somehow, he thought, he felt she was there. He would write to her immediately, to tell her of his plans for Illyria. There were so many changes to be made, and he knew she would bring out the best ideas in him, if she didn’t come up with them herself.
XXXIX.
THE one person who was not pleased by the duke’s resurrection was Malcolm Volio, because it confirmed what he had feared: that his automaton, his final project for the faire, had fallen into the Thames. When he heard Ernest had jumped, he should have been joyful, because it meant that Cecily was free to give herself to him—for though she was quite willing to marry him, she was a dutiful girl, and would never do anything to displease her cousin and guardian. But he refrained from rejoicing, suspecting the drowned man was not actually the duke.
A few nights ago, Volio had taken his automaton out for a test run through the basement, but when the clock started chiming, his machine ran off suddenly, and Volio had been unable to find it, though he had searched until dawn. And the next morning, it had thrown itself off the roof. Volio couldn’t figure out how his creation had gotten to the roof, but it was well designed enough to be capable of anything. Including, it seemed, suicide. He had worked so hard on it, crafted it perfectly in the image of the duke, dressed it in the finest clothes, even given it glass eyes. He was sure it would have won the duke’s approval, and with that, Cecily’s hand in marriage. It was his last honorable attempt at winning approval to marry Cecily, which would have been so much faster than waiting until the Society had taken over.
But instead the worst-case scenario had come to pass. As the rest of the students crowded around the duke to win his approval by telling him how sad they were at his apparent death, Volio stalked out of the dining hall and down to the cellar, making sure no one was watching him. Losing his project was a setback, but not a major one. He had more automata, just as carefully built as the one modeled on the duke, but without all the superficial detail. They would still be impressed with his accomplishments at the faire; he was sure of that.
He crept through the cellar without a light, knowing the way by heart, and came to the door—if it could be called that. Really, it was a sheet of metal with a small depression in the center. Volio turned the knob on the ring on his finger, thrust it violently into the depression and then pulled it out again after he felt it tremble under his hand. The door slid open into the wall, and Volio stepped through quickly, so that it didn’t close on him when it slammed back into place a moment later.
The room, his brother had explained to him when he had given him the ring, was once a holding area used by the late duke, who kept various supplies here before shipping them off to his private lab via the train that was down the hall. Volio’s brother had tried to operate the train once, but couldn’t decipher it, and didn’t really need to. The former holding bay was huge, and still had many supplies in it when Volio’s brother first invaded it. It hadn’t taken much work to turn it into a huge and well-equipped lab.
Volio had been worried that the current duke would discover him, but his brother had assured him that only members of the Society even knew about the room, much less how to open it, and the duke had never been initiated into the group. But then, neither had Malcolm. His brother had been, and his father was a founding member, but Malcolm wasn’t good enough yet—he had to prove himself, they told him, prove that he had the scientific abilities to create something worthy of their Society, and the passion to use it for the good of mankind.
Volio agreed with their philosophies, of course: The intelligent should rule the stupid, the strong should rule the weak; it would make things run more smoothly. But Volio also felt that any supposed geniuses who didn’t agree with this philosophy—like, he suspected, most of his fellow students—were not bright enough to be good rulers. They would have to be ruled, along with those of simply common intelligence.
Volio surveyed his automata. There were nearly eighty of them now, all laid out on their own slabs. These did not look like the duke, more like metal skeletons, but they had also been perfected, and wouldn’t run off as his duke-automaton had done. What was brilliant about them was their ability to take orders, like soldiers. Normally, an automaton had just one function, or had to be manually reset if it were to be switched between two functions. Even his brother’s army of automata had been capable of little besides rushing forward and shooting. But Volio’s could take orders at the ring of a bell. The sound of each bell produced vibrations, and those vibrations resonated within his automaton, which activated a gear, and so on. Ring this bell and they walked forward; ring that one, they turned left; ring another, they began to run; ring yet another and their clawed hands reached out and began slashing. Perfect soldiers. Unfortunately, with the duke-automaton, which he had given more commands and functions, trying to make it look human, Volio had been having trouble making sure that the vibrations produced by the bells were not produced by anything else, like a grandfather clock. That was what had cost him his gift to the duke: It was confused by those ringing clocks, those clicking gears, the two grand clocks atop the astronomy tower—so many sounds that the automaton had taken on a life of its own and apparently leapt to its death.
Volio’s lab was the one place in all of Illyria where you couldn’t hear the gears, and Volio loved it. The constant clatter of them sometimes made him feel insane, but until his testing of the duke-automaton, he hadn’t thought they would affect his science. As a controlling device, Volio had been using a xylophone, which hung by a strap around his neck and which he played carefully, as each note gave a new order. He needed to adjust his automata, make them hear notes that nothing else produced, possibly ones too high for the human ear. It would have to be a small xylophone indeed, it seemed. But making musical instruments was easy. It was the adjustment of all the automata that would take time. He couldn’t wait to see all their faces at the faire when an army of automata, gleaming and skeletal, marched into the Crystal Palace, ready to obey his every command.
For the rest of the day, while the other students rejoiced at the duke’s return, and cake was served, Volio worked on his army, pausing only occasionally to reread his latest letter from Cecily. He was sorry to have caused her sadness with the false death of her cousin. She was a gentle girl, and he appreciated that. He wanted to explain and apologize in a letter, but he did not know how to phrase it. So he focused instead on his bronze soldiers, for matters of metal were easier for him to navigate than matters of the heart.
It was three weeks later when he saw his chance to apologize. He had not written to her, unsure of what to say. He was returning home on a Sunday from lunch with his father and brother, who had ignored him. They had spoken only of their weapons research for the Queen, and how she did not appreciate it, and how they should just turn the weapons on the Queen. Then they both laughed the low chuckle that they shared, making their twin mustaches bob. Malcolm had inherited his mother’s appearance: frail, with pale skin and dark hair. His father and brother were of heartier stock, balding, but with fine thick reddish hair where they weren’t. They often pushed him out of the way, and when he tried to speak of problems with the automata, they would say, “You’ll figure it out, old boy; now let’s talk of
the more important work, shall we?”
He descended from the coach that had brought him back to Illyria, and had intended to go right inside to the comfort of his laboratory, but he spotted Cecily in the garden alone. As no one else was around, he thought it would be a good chance to speak with her. She was in a beautiful white dress, holding a matching white lace umbrella over her to shade her from the late afternoon sun. It was early June by now and the weather had turned warm, but the breeze off the Thames was a comfort. She stared out at the river, idly stroking Shakespeare, who sat in her lap.
“Cecily,” Volio said, sitting down next to her.
Cecily frowned. She didn’t think it was proper for him to be addressing her by her Christian name. “Yes, Mr. Volio?” she said.
“You must call me Malcolm,” Volio said. She did not reply, or even look at him. Maybe she knew what he was about to say already, he thought, or was just upset that he hadn’t written to her lately. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Well, I haven’t written you in three weeks, but besides that—”
“Written to me?” Cecily said, turning to look at him, confused. “When have you ever written to me?”
“Cecily,” Volio said, putting up a hand to interrupt her, “there is no one around. We may speak freely.”