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Making History

Page 32

by Rick Wilber


  Brushing his hands together as if to remove invisible soil from his fingers, Driessen released his hold, and Travert deserted his lectern for a new post directly before the cage. He addressed its occupant. “Fifine? You are prepared for a demonstration?”

  Leopold was taken aback to hear a reply in French. “How can you ask such a stupid question?” He looked to make sure: yes, it was the nigger herself who answered! “The harm you have caused me with your Condenser has no cure. Haven’t I told you? Yet you persist in destroying all that remains to me of those I love.”

  Travert’s cheeks reddened again. “Fifine! Must I gag you? I haven’t touched a hair upon your head! What will his majesty think?” He turned an embarrassed countenance to the king.

  “I think that you had better get on with things.”

  The scientist returned hurriedly to the lectern, ignoring the nigger woman’s yammering - as he ought to have done from the first. A red lever was moved to a position paralleling the blue and yellow. Clouds of fog descended from the cage’s ceiling, grey and black. The terrible odor increased, forcing Leopold to retreat to lean upon a bench a few feet back. There was naught to see nearer anyway: coiling smoke filled the cage and obscured its contents.

  For long moments nothing more happened. Then the laboring noise of the Condenser’s growling motors ground slowly down to silence.

  Gradually the clouds within the cage cleared, disclosing the slumped form of the black on its still-murky bottom. And - other forms? Smaller shapes were scattered around the large one. Did they stir? Yes! Leopold drew closer. A quiet chirping rewarded him. Ghostly birds hopped and fluttered through the dissipating mist. Like dusty sparrows on some plebian roadway, they pecked at their fellow prisoner, soon rousing her.

  An odd expression came over the woman’s face. On a white, Leopold would have taken it for a compound of regret and delight. Of course, the lower orders were incapable of such complicated mixtures of emotions. If he hadn’t known this for a fact, however, he would have been hard pressed not to attribute such feelings to her as she petted the hopping, shadow-tinted birds with the most delicate of touches. Under the machine’s noise and the twittering the bird things emitted, he caught her whispered murmurs and cooed nonsense.

  Travert approached him. “The flock has thinned considerably since our first experiment.”

  “Indeed?” Leopold imagined the cage busy with the dull-plumed little birds. “What became of them?”

  A pursing of his lips made obvious the scientist’s Oriental ancestry. “They furnished us with material for several informative experiments. But have you comprehended the procedure so far? The carbon and other additives being linked to the interacting surface of the manifestations and showing us thereby their outlines-”

  Would the man never cease droning on? Stifling his exasperation Leopold glanced significantly toward Driessen, who stepped forward and placed a silencing finger on the Jew’s thick lips. “Enough!”

  A moment Travert’s jaw dropped and hung open; a moment his ungloved hands twitched in the barely breathable air. But then, not being mad, he composed himself and motioned the nigger’s escorts to come with him to open up the cage.

  Reluctant as she had appeared to enter the brass and crystal enclosure, “Fifine” made yet more difficulty about leaving it. One of the doctor’s assistants gripped her wooly head, even bringing himself to insert his fingers in her gaping nostrils; the other secured her kicking feet. But they had to call for a third man to grasp her wildly flailing arms before they managed to eject her from the room.

  Leopold’s eyes followed the disturbance toward the door, but came to rest on his queen. The sight of her, almost as green and pale as the walls against which she sought refuge, moved him to hold out a welcoming hand. She ran quickly to catch it up. “I’m so sorry you’ve been put through such an ordeal, Marie,” he apologized. “You need not remain longer if it pains you.”

  “I could not desert you!” Her refusal to leave gratified the king. He caressed her plump wrist, intending to raise it to his lips.

  THWACK!

  Leopold jumped involuntarily. The doctor reacted to his stare with a guilty shift of his eyes, hefting up the meter stick he carried. “My apologies. I missed my mark,” said Travert. “For your convenience, it will naturally be best to clear the Condenser’s apparatus immediately, and as we’ve conducted plenty of trials already with this sort of specimen-” He gave a Levantine hunch of his shoulders and returned to clubbing down the dingy birds shut with him inside the cage. Only four remained active, but they gave the Jew an inordinate amount of trouble, their cries loud and frantic as they flew erratically about. The flat crack of the stick meeting bare metal sounded again and again.

  Travert’s three assistants reappeared and soon dispatched the last of the vermin in a flurry of high-pitched little shrieks. The Jew then had them shovel out the corpse - like refuse.

  At last, Travert indicated with a bow that the Condenser’s cage was ready for Leopold to enter. Driessen walked in before him, examining the situation. “His majesty will require a chair,” the royal physician declared.

  Seated upon a velvet-covered, spindle-legged stool, Leopold found the unpleasant odor increased. The cage’s door shut, and the heliotrope in which he’d drenched his handkerchief barely compensated for the intensified smell, which filled the surroundings like a half-live thing. After an interval of building noise above his head, he heard a subtle hiss and looked up to see the dark, descending smoke.

  Would it affect him, a European, as it had the quasi-animal “Fifine”?

  Rotting grayness clogged his eyes, his nose, and when he tried breathing through it, his mouth. Stoic determination fled. The king gagged and fainted.

  ***

  A cool breeze woke him. Refreshed, he opened his stinging eyes to gaze upon a little garden planted with tropical trees, bushes, and flowers - doubtless the produce of his Congolese holdings. He had designed several such gardens to fill the museum’s courtyards. One of Gagnon’s men must have carried him here so he’d more easily revive. Certainly the fresh air was an improvement, and the scene that met his eyes far more pleasing than that of the stuffy cellar: Fat stems held nodding blooms of cinnabar, violet, and gold, and broad leaves, some veined in white or pink, quivered softly on all sides.

  It was proper that the guard, having brought him here, had departed, but where were Driessen and the queen? Was he actually alone? How odd. No - through the foliage Leopold glimpsed a young girl approaching him. Comely enough, though her final steps showed her to be clad in a boy’s shirt and trousers.

  “Hello. I’m Lily.” A frank, open expression sat with habitual ease upon her healthful features.

  Meaning to announce his royal status in a charming yet authoritative manner, Leopold was suddenly rendered voiceless: the girl’s left leg had that second become a pulpy mess of gore and bone. His throat filled with vomit. He choked it down.

  “Ah. My injury disturbs you. You haven’t yet had time to get used to it as I have.” The girl gazed ruefully down at her shattered limb. “Your soldiers shot me last October, during our rescue of King Mwenda, and I died that very night. Nearly six months now, isn’t it?”

  Leopold gaped at her. He must have looked exceedingly foolish. Chief Mwenda had led a rebellion against the king’s Public Forces. “You are a-a gh-gh-ghost?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” She flicked a careless hand at the red ruin on which she stood. Impossibly.

  A ghost, then. But she was not black - an English Miss, to judge by her accent. A white girl - though perhaps not of Europe? Of Everfair, then, the Fabians’ damned infestation of a colony wreaked on lands they’d bought of him? Yes! Had not Minister Vandelaar told him recently of an attempt by those traitors to aid that black brute’s escape? Though temporarily successful, it had, so the Intelligence Minister said, cost the rebels of Everfair an important casualty.

  Which would be this Lily. Lily Albin, as he recalled now. Daughter of the r
abble’s leader, a hoyden suffragette.

  Was this to be his sole manifestation?

  Where were the sooty multitudes who had haunted him all this while, whose silent groans had pestered him so, bidding fair to drive him mad? As he understood Travert’s method, if the nigger ghosts could not be Condensed, they could not be got rid of.

  The girl answered as if he’d asked his questions aloud. “Do you think you have any control of who you see?” Her eyes whitened like a blind woman’s. “Or how? Or what?”

  Rising from beneath the thin scent of the garden’s flowers, the mephitic cleaning compound’s fumes assaulted him anew. They couldn’t have traveled here from the cellar - he must still be inside it! In the Condenser’s cage! How could he have forgotten? The stool he sat on was the same. The rest of what he experienced, the vegetation and the building heat, might be nothing more than a hypnotic nightmare induced by that quack Travert.

  He swung his head from side to side, peering around the foliage, looking for the Jew or one of his assistants. Shouldn’t they be waiting nearby?

  The girl Lily laughed. The ivory hollow beneath her neck flexed like the foaming pool below a waterfall. “You thought the Condenser would cure you?” She subsided to a low chortle. “Of course you did. Why else submit? But whatever gave you the idea?”

  He should humor her. He wiped away a trickle of sweat. His attendants must return soon - or, no, he was asleep and would soon wake. How long had the nigger “Fifine” lain prostrate? Despite his more sensitive and highly evolved nervous system he surely ought to begin to recover momentarily. He stood up from the stool and thrust aside some obscuring boughs to get a better look around. His entourage remained absent, but a flickering motion just out of sight impelled him forward. A man-like shape, glistening in the patchy sunlight as if made of ebony. He walked swiftly toward it for several meters.

  Then he stopped.

  The garden was not small. The museum’s walls did not enclose it. Nothing did. It was a jungle, not a garden.

  Why should this frighten him? Dreams could not hurt or kill him. He would not die.

  He reversed his path. Now that he was thinking clearly he realized how stupid he’d been to leave the spot where he first found himself. But when he returned it was to see his seat occupied by the dead girl. “I hope you don’t mind? Easier for me than standing.” With smiling casualness she gestured again at her mangled leg.

  Ever the gentleman, Leopold refrained from pressing the claim of his superior birth, though the oppressive warmth and the burgeoning smell of the cleaning compound threatened to overwhelm his senses. He put a hand out to halt the world’s swaying and flinched back from the pricking thorns of the branch he’d grasped. He stared in pain and surprise at the blood welling quickly out of many little wounds - his sacred essence! Wrapping his handkerchief around the cuts seemed to do no good; if anything they bled more fiercely than before, specks of scarlet growing wider, wetter, joining to make of it one sopping, crimson banner.

  His Russian cousins could perish as a result of such small injuries. And he?

  “Oh, I don’t believe you’re done for just yet.” The ghost Lily gazed up at him with blank eyes. “Though with so much blood you’ll be creating many more _____, of greater power. As you will come to find.”

  He didn’t understand the word she had used. “I beg your pardon? More - more - what do you say?”

  “_____!” Again she gave her chilling laugh. “The ones you expected to find here instead of me.”

  The nigger spirits, she meant. He thought she nodded. “Those spawned so far wait with your retinue for you to waken.”

  The stink and heat and dizzying sway worsened. He fell to his knees. He felt the hot blood soak through his trousers where they sank into its spreading pool. He must rouse himself out of this trance now, and then let the Jew’s assistants deal with executing whatever this abominable treatment had brought forth. Leopold strove with all his might to wake.

  “But no one will be able to do anything to your _____, to even touch them. Except for you.”

  He was lying on his side. He tried to sit up. What did she mean? “Fifine’s” dirty-looking little birds had been easily dispatched.

  “Ah, but have you the sort of close and respectful relationship with your dead that she does?” The ghost girl seemed to have lain down next to him, for her face was but centimeters away. “No. You do not.”

  With those words, her white face sprang suddenly nearer - or did it swell with decay? Tightening like a mask, it slipped rapidly to one side and receded on a tide of blackness. Then that tide, too, receded.

  ***

  His eyes were open. Grey clouds parted to reveal the cage’s tarnished ceiling. Leopold lay now on his back, looking heavenward. He lifted his wounded hand: no sign of injury remained.

  “Your majesty!” The Jew rushed to his side, Gagnon and Marie Henriette right behind him. The dream was over.

  Or was it. A haze of darkness formed above them. Gradually it lowered and interposed itself between the king and his attendants, forming at last into the likeness of a group of soot-skinned savages. Which, as before, no one else appeared to see. Which, it seemed obvious now, no one else ever would.

  There were three of them: a handless young buck; a withered old granny with her head staved in; a child with no feet at the ends of her legs. They closed around him, clumsily lifting him from the cage’s floor. Leopold’s scalp crept as he felt the soft resilience of their nonexistent flesh. He retched convulsively and shoved away the tiny hands, the yielding arms. These newly palpable horrors.

  All his life, Leopold had known himself to be as brave and strong as he was good and handsome. All his life till now.

  “Sire!” The oily voice of Travert intruded itself into the king’s thoughts.

  “My dearest!” The queen, too, sought his attention.

  Leopold opened eyes he hadn’t realized he’d shut. The ghosts were defiantly visible. But still, always, only to him. Ignoring the phantoms’ reproachful gazes, he leaned on the arms his supporters offered, letting them lead him out of the Condenser. As if the weeping niggers reaching to interrupt his passage with their weak and truncated limbs weren’t present. As if they made no actual contact. As if the king didn’t understand himself doomed till death to feel, over and over, the hideous warmth of their touch.

  Walter Jon Williams has published several dozen novels and another dozen short stories in a wide variety of genres. His work is often nominated for major awards, and he has won two Nebula Awards for his short fiction. He created and still runs the famous Taos Toolbox workshops for early career writers and the equally famous Rio Hondo workshop for more established writers. He was Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, Finland, in 2017. This story, “Foreign Devils,” won the 1994 Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History–Short Form. The story offers a deep look at the political intrigue of China as it deals with a “War of the Worlds” invasion from Mars.

  There is no longer anyone alive who knows her name.

  She has always been known by her titles, titles related to the role she was expected to play. When she was sixteen and had been chosen as a minor concubine for the Son of Heaven, she had been called Lady Yehenara, because she was born in the Yehe tribe of the Nara clan of the great Manchu race. After she had given birth to an imperial heir, she had been called I Kuei-fei - Concubine of Feminine Virtue. Later, after her husband died and she assumed the regency for their son, she was given the title Tzu Hsi, Empress of the West, because she once lived in a pavilion on the western side of the Forbidden City.

  But no one alive knows her real name, the milk-name her mother had given her almost sixty-five years ago, the name she had answered to when she was young and happy and free from care. Her real name is unimportant.

  Only her position matters, and it is a lonely one.

  She lives in a world of imperial yellow. The wall hangings are yellow, the carpets are yellow, and she wears a
gown of crackling yellow brocade. She sleeps on yellow brocade sheets, and rests her head on pillows of yellow silk beneath embroidered yellow bed curtains.

  Now Peking is on fire, and the hangings of yellow silk are stained with the red of burning.

  She rises from her bed in the Hour of the Rat, a little after midnight. Her working day, and that of the Emperor, begins early.

  A eunuch braids her hair while her ladies - all of them young, and all of them in gowns of blue - help her to dress. She wears a yellow satin gown embroidered with pink flowers, and a cape ornamented with four thousand pearls. The eunuch expertly twists her braided hair into a topknot, and fits over it a headdress made of jade adorned on either side with fresh flowers. Gold sheaths protect the two long fingernails of her right hand, and jade sheaths protect the two long fingernails of her left. Her prize black lion dogs frolic around her feet.

  The smell of burning floats into the room, detectable above the scent of her favorite Nine-Buddha Incense. The burning scent imparts a certain urgency to the proceedings, but her toilette cannot be completed in haste.

  At last she is ready. She calls for her sedan chair and retinue - Li Lien- Ying, the Chief Eunuch, the Second Chief Eunuch, four Eunuchs of the Fifth Rank, twelve Eunuchs of the Sixth Rank, plus eight more eunuchs to carry the chair.

  “Take me to the Emperor’s apartments,” she says.

  The sedan chair swoops gently upward as the eunuchs lift it to their shoulders. As she leaves her pavilion, she hears the sound of the sentries saluting her as she passes.

  They are not her sentries. These elite troops of the Tiger-Hunt Marksmen are not here to keep anyone out. They are in the employ of ambitious men, and the guards serve only to keep her a prisoner in her own palace.

  Despite her titles, despite the blue-clad ladies and the eunuchs and the privileges, despite the silk and brocade and pearls, the Empress of the West is a captive. She can think of no way that she can escape.

  The litter’s yellow brocade curtains part for a moment, and the empress catches a brief glimpse of the sky. There is Mars, glowing high in the sky like a red lantern, and below it streaks a falling star, a beautiful ribbon of imperial yellow against the velvet night. It streaks east to west, and then is gone.

 

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