by Rick Wilber
She stood and looked around the vast manufactory. Homunculi sat at their work tables, stamping out hot iron with their hands and then pushing the newly formed metal off into the baskets below. Their copper and brass torsos were fused to the benches beneath them, and hoses snaked down from the benches into the basement. Troughs moved above them along overhead tracks and poured the metal into molds on the tables, and other scrap boys scurried around the room, carrying off baskets, checking valves and gauges, pumping water, darting out of the way of escaping steam.
One of the homunculi had filled its basket with iron parts. Tip took the basket and set a new one in its place, then carried the heavy filled basket off to the side of the manufactory. The beat of the homunculi as they worked in concert sounded from every part of the room; she could even feel it pounding through the floor.
She stopped suddenly. Now that was odd. One of the homunculi had made a move that was slightly off, a beat before or after its fellows. She hurried toward it and bent to look at the dial on its bench.
What she saw made her turn cold suddenly, even in the heat of the manufactory. The arrow was swinging back and forth across the dial, from the low numbers to high ones and back again, something she had never seen before.
She looked back up at the bench. The homunculus she had noticed earlier was reaching up for one of the troughs overhead.
She gripped the hose going to the basement and pulled as hard as she could, but it was clamped too tight for her to move it. She tugged again. “Help me!” she called out.
“You there!” a muffled voice said. She looked around. It was the foreman, up in his office overlooking the manufactory floor, calling down on his speaking tube. “What are you doing? Get away from that hose!”
The hose came free finally and the homunculus stopped, its arms still lifted over its head. She looked around frantically. Other homunculi were reaching for troughs now and pulling them down, then rearing back to fling molten iron across the floor. One of them threw a trough at a scrap boy; it hit him in the stomach and spilled hot metal down his legs, and he screamed in pain.
She couldn’t possibly pull out all the copper hoses in time. The other scrap boys were running for the door, and she hurried after them.
Outside they all milled around nervously. Tip looked through the door and saw the foreman still talking through the speaking tube; she hoped he was calling the men in the basement, telling them to shut down the engines.
Slowly, very slowly, the homunculi came to a halt. They sat frozen, one with its arm raised over its head, another holding a trough awkwardly with hands that had been made for stamping metal. As Tip watched the trough slipped from its hands and landed with a crash on the floor.
A few of the scrap boys ventured back into the manufactory, picked up the wounded boy, and carried him outside. He looked very pale; Tip thought he had fainted. Others boys called their farewells and left for home.
She thought about heading home too, about a day without having to work, but she needed the money. Maybe the foreman would have something for them to do. And there was another reason she decided to stay: she wanted to know what had happened. She had never seen the homunculi rebel against their tasks like that.
Men began coming up from the basement, their clothes and hands and faces covered with the coal they had been shoveling into the engines. Then, a long time later, the foreman left his office and reappeared on the manufactory floor.
He hurried through the rows of stilled homunculi. One of them seemed to stare at him, its brass eyes open wide. “You there,” the foreman said, seeing Tip at the door. “How did you know what was going to happen?”
Too late she realized she had broken her first rule: never let anyone in authority notice you. She turned and ran. The foreman hurried after her, cursing.
“What did you do?” he called. “Did you have anything to do with–with what happened back there?”
She rushed on ahead, dodging people, dogs, a horse pulling a cart. Another homunculus, heading toward a job somewhere, came slowly toward her, its arms and legs clanking. She scurried around it, then jumped over a sewer running down the middle of the street.
She could not stop, could not let the foreman catch her. Girls were not allowed to work at the manufactory, and she had had to disguise herself to get a job there.
She was breathing hard, though. Her legs were far shorter than the foreman’s, and her breasts were starting to chafe against the band she used to flatten them.
She turned and saw the foreman put on a burst of speed. He reached out and grabbed her by the ear. “Why did you run?” he asked. “What have you been up to?”
“Nothing. Ow.”
“Nothing? Innocent boys don’t run. What were you doing with that hose?”
“You saw. They was moving. I was trying to stop them, that’s all.”
“They hadn’t started moving yet, not when you were pulling on that hose. How did you know? Did you have something to do with”–he gestured back toward the manufactory–”with all of that, back there?”
“No, ‘course not.”
“Why were you running, then?”
“I thought you was angry with me.”
“Well, you were right about that. You’re coming with me–we’re going to the Watch.”
The foreman turned and headed back. Tip tried to pull away one last time, but it was mostly for form’s sake; she knew she couldn’t outrun him.
All of the scrap boys were gone by the time they reached the manufactory. “What happened to that boy?” she asked.
“What boy?” Lawton said.
“The one that was burnt. Did they take him away?”
Lawton shrugged. A man streaked with coal dust came out of the manufactory and headed toward them, one of the basement workers.
“A call came through the speaking tube while you were gone, Master Lawton,” the man said. “From Whitehall.”
“A–a call?” Lawton said.
“From Whitehall.”
“Whitehall? Do you mean Queen Elizabeth?”
“One of her clerks, somebody like that. She wants to see you.” His voice lowered, and he said reverently, “She’s sending a steam-car.”
Lawton muttered something under his breath. It sounded like a curse, and Tip remembered other times when the foreman had grumbled at something the queen had done. She wondered why he disliked her.
“You,” Lawton said to Tip. “Don’t you go anywhere. I need you to explain all of this to the queen.”
Tip felt a sudden joy. She had never known anyone who had been inside a steam-car, let alone traveled in one. She knew better than to let Lawton see her happiness, though. He was yet another adult with power over her, someone who could change her life with just a few words.
The steam-car came toward them, wobbling on its four wheels like a newborn calf. A man wearing goggles sat high up at the front; as they watched he pulled on a lever and the car jerked to a halt. The man jumped down and opened a door.
Lawton pushed Tip into the car and followed her inside, and they sat together on a bench of soft dark-red velvet. Two gas-lamps lit the interior, one on either side, their bases fashioned into flowers. Tip reached up to finger the controls. “Don’t touch that,” Lawton said, and she dropped her hand quickly.
The driver closed the door and the car clattered off down the street. The foreman turned away to look out of the window. Tip had never spent so much time with him before, and she saw now that he was older than she had thought, maybe even forty. His eyes and hair were dark, and his face was narrow and set in a scowl, as though he was being forced to miss something important.
She glanced beyond him, to her reflection in the window. She looked much younger than her real age of fourteen, she knew, with a wide face, brown eyes, and brown hair she had cut clumsily with a knife.
The car clanged down into a pothole, and they could hear the engine grinding, working the car up out of the hole. Finally it pulled free and they continued
on.
She knelt on the bench and looked at the streets passing beyond her window. It was still morning; the homunculi had rebelled almost immediately after they had started work that day. People were walking to work or to schoolrooms, and beggars had taken at their places and were calling out to passersby, more of them every day as the homunculi took their jobs. Dark steam poured from a row of chimneys in the distance.
They came to the warren of streets where she lived, and people turned to stare as they drove by. She nearly grinned to think that her landlady might see her riding high in a steam-car. Agnes might not recognize her, though. Every day as she walked to work Tip would hide in an alleyway to change her clothes and bind her breasts, and when she left the alley, transformed into a boy, her walk would change, and her way of speaking. Even her thoughts seemed different.
She tried not to remember that time, three years ago, when her parents had died, when Agnes, who had once seemed so kind, had threatened to evict her if she couldn’t pay her rent. Tip had spent weeks applying at manufactories in London, but she heard the same story from every foreman she talked to: the manufactories were dangerous, they were no place for a young girl. Finally she had hit on the idea of disguising herself as a boy, and had been hired at the first place she tried.
The engines had fascinated her from the beginning. When a man had arrived from Al-Andalus to install some new homunculi she had attached herself to him like a shadow, much to his displeasure. Still, she had managed to learn the Arabs’ numbers from him, so different from the numbers she was used to, and so much easier to use.
She had not been able to learn much else, though. Every device that came from Al-Andalus had been welded shut, and whenever someone at the manufactory tried to open one the works inside were nearly destroyed.
The car turned, shook loudly as if it was about to come apart, then drove on another few yards and stopped. The door opened. “We’re here, sir,” the driver said to Lawton.
The walls of the palace loomed up above them, five or six stories tall. The driver led them to one of the doors and ushered them inside, then handed them over to a man dressed in livery.
They followed the man down a hallway with chessboard marble floors and a high vaulted ceiling, past long halls hung with portraits and tapestries, through rooms with stained-glass windows and elaborate wooden roof-beams, curved and re-curved, so delicate they seemed barely able to hold up the ceiling. Wheels and chandeliers of gas-lamps shone down from the ceilings.
Tip looked around her, entranced. Lawton, though, kept his expression closed, either unimpressed with what he saw or trying to seem so.
Finally they came to a room with a closed door. A homunculus stood on either side, holding a raised crescent sword. The man in livery spoke a password, and the homunculi lowered their swords and flung the door open.
“Her Gracious Majesty Elizabeth, by the grace of God queen of England and Ireland,” one of the homunculi said in a loud flat voice.
They went inside. Queen Elizabeth sat at the head of a long table, her hands resting on the arms of a high carved chair. She wore a raised starched collar, and a black skirt and bodice with puffed sleeves, heavy with gold buttons and great square rubies and emeralds. Rows of black pearls hung from her neck. Two more homunculi with swords stood at her side; they looked fiercer than the ones at the manufactory, their mouths sneering, nostrils flaring, heavy eyebrows lowered in a frown.
A group of men sat around the table. Lawton bowed to the queen, and Tip imitated him quickly. “Well,” Elizabeth said. “You’re Henry Lawton, or so the man I talked to told me. But who’s this urchin with you? And what’s been happening at my manufactory?”
Elizabeth looked at Tip, and she saw that the queen was terribly old, ancient beyond almost anyone Tip knew. Her face was heavily powdered, with thick drifts of powder in her lines and wrinkles. Her hair was a bright unnatural red, and her teeth were nearly black with decay.
Lawton cleared his throat. “The homunculi–they stopped working all at once, they pulled down the troughs and threw hot metal across the room . . . . And this boy here, he seemed to know it would happen, even before it started –”
Elizabeth turned to her. “What’s your name, child?” she asked.
“Tip.”
“And Master Lawton here says you knew the homunculi were about to rebel. How did you know? Did you have anything to do with it?”
“No! No, I would never do nothing like that. One of them monkeys–a homunculus, I mean–it moved in a funny way, quicker than the others, so I looked at the dials. They was–well, usually the dials stay around fifty or sixty, and when they get up to eighty or ninety, that’s when we pour in the water, to cool them. But these dials was –”
“Wait a minute,” Lawton said. “What do you mean, fifty or sixty? Those dials don’t have numbers. When the dial points to the red, that’s when you’re supposed to pour in the water.”
“They do, though. Someone showed me once. Not our numbers, the numbers on clocks and things, Roman numbers he said they was. They have their own –”
“He’s talking about Arabic numerals,” someone at the table said.
“That’s right, the Arabs’ numbers. Well, the numbers was jumping all over the place, fifty, then ninety, then fifty or sixty again. So I watched them monkeys carefully, and that’s when one of them reached up –”
“Do you have any idea why they would have done that?” Elizabeth asked.
“No,” Tip said.
“It’s those Arab wizards, my lady,” an old man at the table said. “We should never have let the infidels sell us those devices.”
“Nonsense,” Elizabeth said. “To begin with, they’re not wizards–they’re natural philosophers. And we need natural philosophy too, if we’re to keep England strong.”
“How is what they do different from sorcery? Lifeless men who walk and talk–how are they not demons?”
“Because I say they’re not, Burghley,” Elizabeth said. “Because I’ve told you countless times –”
“Because we know how they work,” Tip said, interrupting her. Lawton flinched as if he thought the queen would become angry, but Elizabeth said nothing. Tip spoke faster, anxious to make them understand. “And they work the same way, every time. We know that if you heat water you get steam, and that you can use the steam to turn wheels, or move pistons, or–or anything you want.”
“But they’re not working the same way now, are they?” the man at the table–Burghley–said. “You say you know how they work–well, why are they rebelling?”
“I–I don’t know,” Tip said. “It could be–well, someone could have made them rebel, done something to them wheels and cogs and things to change them.”
“There, you see,” Burghley said. “It’s the Saracens, just as I said. Who else would know enough to tamper with the homunculi? They did something to them, and now they don’t want to work, is that it?”
“It ain’t that they don’t want to.” Tip’s words fell over each other as she hurried to explain. “They can’t want anything. They’re made to do what we tell them.”
“That’s right,” Elizabeth said. “They don’t have free will.”
What did that mean, free will? No one stopped to explain it to her, though. “But they seem to have free will now, or something like it,” someone at the table said, a young man with a hunch to his back.
“Never mind all of that,” Burghley said. “The question is, can we fix them?”
“Somebody can, I bet,” Tip said. “Not me, though. I don’t know enough.”
“The ambassador from Al-Andalus should know,” Burghley said. “What was his name?”
“Bashir ibn Tariq al-Qurtubi,” Elizabeth said. She turned to one of the homunculi standing at her side. “Go fetch the ambassador from Al-Andalus.”
The homunculus left the room, its feet clanging loudly against the marble floor. No one spoke, waiting for its return. Elizabeth sat straighter, drumming her fingers on the
arms of her carved chair.
Finally the homunculus came back. “Bashir ibn Tariq al-Qurtubi!” it said in a flat voice.
A dark man followed him into the room. Tip stared at him. A man from Al-Andalus. She did not believe in wizards like that superstitious man Burghley, but if she did she thought that this was what one would look like, with his long beard, his striped robe, his turban.
The queen invited the ambassador to sit, and quickly told him what had happened at the manufactory. “Please accept my humblest apologies, Your Majesty,” he said. He had a trace of an accent, a smooth liquid sound to his words. “I don’t understand what happened. I’ve never seen them do that, nor heard of anything like it.”
“Your apology is not nearly enough, Master Ibn Tariq,” Elizabeth said. “Do your people want to destroy our manufactories?”
“No. No, of course not.”
“Then what happened? We’ve paid for your devices, we brought them to our country in good faith . . . . Surely these are not the actions of an ally.”
“I’ll talk to Al-Andalus right away, my lady. Someone there will have an explanation.”
“I have a better idea. I’ll send some of my men to Al-Andalus, to have a look at these devices. And your men there will explain exactly how they work, and how this could have happened.”
“I–I’ll have to ask the caliph about that, Your Majesty,” Ibn Tariq said.
“Go, then,” Elizabeth said. “And hurry.”
He bowed and left. So no one in England knew how the homunculi worked, Tip thought. She had always wondered about that. And she saw immediately what Elizabeth was doing, that she was blackmailing the Arabs, making them share their precious knowledge to keep news of the homunculi’s rebellion from spreading to other countries. Many people had called Elizabeth a clever queen in Tip’s hearing, or a cunning one if they disliked women, but Tip had never understood why before.