The Steampunk Megapack

by Jay Lake

  Before he began work, Sir Julian whispered in his ear: “I have your money in my pocket, Mathieu. I’ll get you more—as much as you need. We’ll begin again, when this setback is behind us. We’ll set everything to rights. This won’t stop us.” The baronet’s voice was quivering with desperation, eager for reassurance.

  Mathieu refrained from telling his patron, bluntly, that it wasn’t as simple as that. It might be best, he thought if Sir Julian continued to believe, for as long as possible, that he could be restored to his present condition once this little “setback” had been put behind them.

  Before he began his general explanation, though, Mathieu instructed Michael MacBride to make a large pot of tea, and asked Sean Driscoll to send Padraig Reilly out to the night-stalls in Goldhawk Road, in search of bread, meat pies and oil for the lamps.

  Thomas Dean had set his ugly sister down on a kitchen chair, positioned so that she could see every detail of what happened to Sir Julian Templeforth.

  The baronet groaned as the needles were inserted into his veins, and his eyes bulged with unsuppressable horror as he watched the blood begin to flow through the filtration apparatus.

  “The filter,” Mathieu said, calmly, to his uninvited guests, “is the key to the whole process. That was the one stroke of luck I had that might have been unrepeatable by another researcher. The removal of blood from the body, the prevention of its clotting and its reintroduction may seem bizarre to you, but they’ll very soon be routine procedures in medical practice. In the twentieth century, there will be nothing in the least unusual in people selling their blood for the use of others, probably for less than the guinea Miss Dean was paid. The filter, on the other hand, is truly remarkable. At first, I hoped to make use of the orthodox filters used in chemical analysis, but I soon realized that the biological agents I was trying to sieve out are extraordinarily delicate, and very easily destroyed. Some of them, it seems, can only survive in contact with living tissue. I began experimenting with filters comprised of networks of fungal hyphae, and was fortunate enough to find one that not only trapped but preserved the agent that became the focal point of my future research.

  “The whole raison d’être of the Institut Pasteur is to substitute a new scientific medicine for the alchemical medicine of old, and to replace the occult version of the human microcosm with an image based on the findings of microscopy and organic chemistry. We knew at the outset, of course, that the microcosm in question would not be simple, but we had no conception of the awesome extent of the complexity that we would discover—although discover may be too strong a word, given that we have barely begun the process of exploration. John Donne once proclaimed that no man is an island, and he was correct—for every man is, in fact, not merely an island but a universe, entire and unique, which plays host to all manner of microbiological life-forms, and other agents whose nature seems to be ambiguously suspended between life and inertia. You might have heard talk of bacilli and protozoans, but we shall require a terminology far more elaborate than that to get to grips with the complexity of the multitudinous entities that dwell within a human body, the vast majority of which remain invisible to the most powerful microscopes.”

  Mathieu broke off his discourse because Reilly returned with the goods he had been sent to buy. While the others set about making a frugal meal, Mathieu refilled the lamp that had gone out and lit it, bringing the room some way back from the dismal gloom that had set in. He topped up the other lamp, and turned up its flame, but the illumination the lamps provided, even at their maximum effect, had an ochreous tinge that did not make the assembled apparatus seem any less sinister.

  “Thanks to Professor Pasteur,” he continued, “we now know that many, if not all, diseases are caused by micro-organisms of one sort or another. Thanks to Edward Jenner, we have begun to find ways of countering the pathological activity of those invaders, sometimes by means of other micro-organisms. The vast majority of the entities that live within us are, however, benign. It is quite possible that we could not exist without them—that the life we think of as our own is actually a collaborative enterprise, and that the processes of progressive evolution that the Chevalier de Lamarck and Charles Darwin have identified and explained are collaborative too. At any rate, our internal populations are as subject to the principle of natural selection as we are, and far more intensely, by virtue of the brief life-spans of the individuals comprising them.

  “When I was at the Sorbonne I agreed with my colleagues in thinking of aging and death in terms of disease. Like them, I entertained the hope that we might one day find ways to combat the disease of aging, perhaps to find a medical elixir of life. That was why I went to the Institut. Once there, though, I began to think in somewhat different terms, wondering whether it was really accurate to imagine youth and health in terms of the mere absence of, or resistance to, agents of decay. I began to wonder whether good health and the common attributes of youthfulness might more accurately be considered as positive results of the tireless endeavor of active agents, while old age and death are merely the consequences of the eventual fatigue and failure of those collaborative indwellers.

  “There was nothing unreasonable about that kind of eventual failure, I realized, in terms of the logic of Darwin’s theory. Like all living organisms, the primary imperative of our indwelling multitudes is to reproduce themselves, not merely within the context of a particular human microcosm but in terms of the further reproduction of the microcosm entire. Natural selection exerts strong pressure on our indwelling micro-organisms—especially those which, unlike disease-causing bacilli, cannot easily transmit themselves from one microcosm to another by infection or contagion—to do whatever they can to further the cause of human reproduction. Once the reproductive phase of human life is over, however, such micro-organisms would no longer be subject to pressure maintaining that aspect of their activity.”

  “Is what you’re saying, sir,” Sean Driscoll put in, struggling to understand in spite of his evident incredulity, “that human youthfulness and virility are actually the product of germs resident within us?”

  “No,” Mathieu said bluntly. “What I’m saying is that it is to the advantage of some of our indwelling micro-organisms to enhance or augment those aspects of youth and virility that facilitate human reproduction. I don’t claim that any of these attributes is the creation of the passengers within our personal universes, but I do claim that there are biological agents dwelling within us which assist in the amplification of our reproductive capacities. To be specific, I claim that there are separable agents dwelling within us that make a measurable, even substantial, contribution to our sexual attractiveness.”

  “A bacillus of beauty!” Driscoll said, catching a glimpse of enlightenment.

  “Not a bacillus, exactly, and there may be more or less at stake in physiological terms than our ready-made concept of beauty usually embraces—but yes, in simple terms, I’m referring a biological agent that promotes good looks. What I took from Miss Dean and gave to Sir Julian is not youth, per se, but the means of attractive appearance. As you observed before, I have contrived to turn an exceptionally plain man into an exceptionally handsome man.”

  At that point in the argument, Mathieu thought, every eye in the room should have turned to Sir Julian, who was still outrageously handsome in spite of his pallor and the fact that he was slumped in his chair, exhausted by the extended circulation of his blood. In fact, his uninvited guests looked in another direction entirely: at Caroline Dean. Instead of wanting to appreciate the glory of his achievement, they were intent on examining its cost.

  So far as Mathieu could remember, Caroline Dean had not been an exceptionally good-looking girl—certainly not as ethereally beautiful as Judy, although he seemed to remember now that she had been somewhat healthier. Cormack had obviously found the Bethnal Green flesh-market a trifle understocked that day. She had been pretty enough, in her own fashion, though. She had had something to contribute to his mission—and, in
consequence, something to lose. Her face was not quite the Medusal mask that her brother had appeared to perceive, even now, but she was definitely ugly. Her cheeks and chin were slack and dull; her complexion was terrible; her hair was thin and lusterless; her lips were thin and pale; her teeth were bad. Even her eyes, which still held a certain desperate gleam, were watery and colorless. Hers was not the face of a leper or a victim of vitriolization, by any means, but it was a face that she had obviously been ashamed to show to anyone who had formerly known and loved her.

  That was what the Irishmen and Thomas Dean chose to look at, now that he had confirmed and explained what they had already seen for themselves. Instead of admiring the magnificent work of scientific art that was Sir Julian Templeforth, they preferred to horrify themselves by staring at the girl—one of the many girls—who had chosen freely to trade their beauty away, at a fair market price, in order to further the cause of progress.

  In time, as he had insisted so frequently to Sir Julian and all his other patients, Mathieu would be able to pay them all back—if they could only survive the ravages of disease and deprivation long enough. Once he had discovered a means of reproducing the agent in vitro, he would be in a position to banish ugliness from the world once and for all: to make every human being alive, and all those yet to be born, as beautiful as it was possible for them to be. What a gift to humankind that would be! Was there any gift more desperately desired, more desperately needed? All that he required was time….

  Except, of course, that—as he had also scrupulously pointed out—the matter was not quite as simple as that.

  6.

  Driscoll had untied the cords binding Sir Julian Templeforth to the chair that was set beside the filtration apparatus, and had cut the string that secured his arms and legs. He was free to get up and move away, had he so wished, but he remained where he was, utterly dispirited, while Mathieu got on with his work with all due expedition.

  The representatives of Sir Julian’s tenants’ association might have entered into negotiations then, while they had him at something of a disadvantage, but Driscoll made no attempt to do so. It was presumably not his sense of fairness that prevented him, but his sense of now being involved in something of an altogether different order of importance. There would, Mathieu presumed, be abundant opportunity for the other kind of business later—at least, he hoped so.

  Thomas Dean was now the man who felt most urgency to talk, perhaps because the revolver had begun to weight very heavily upon his hand and he had become fearful of the possibility that he might eventually be led to fire it.

  “Why him?” he said, to Mathieu, waving the weapon’s barrel vaguely in Sir Julian’s direction.

  “We met, quite by chance, in Paris,” Mathieu told him. “He was there pursuing an amour—a genuine affection, not some whoring expedition. He was in love, but his feelings were not reciprocated. He had felt the burden of his plain looks for a long time, for he had a secret image of himself as a dashing cavalier, which his swordsmanship supported well enough but his face could not. He was referred to me by a mutual acquaintance who knew of my work at the Institut, with no more initial ambition than the hope that I might cure his pustulent complexion. He was a very willing subject for experimentation, and was very enthusiastic at that time to pledge his entire fortune to anyone who could make him into the kind of man he longed to be. Since he became that kind of man, alas, his attitude to his fortune and its conservation has changed somewhat.”

  Mathieu observed Sean Driscoll nodding sagely, although Sir Julian was scowling.

  “It seems to me,” Michael MacBride observed, “that you might have found a female employer far more generous and far more grateful. There’s no shortage of tales of women eager to bathe in the blood of virgins to renew their beauty”

  “Indeed,” croaked Sir Julian. “Had he stayed in Paris, Sarah Bernhardt might have been only too pleased to employ him, even though he could do naught about her wooden leg—but you could not stay there, could you, my friend? And your career in London has not been so spotless that you could present yourself at the palace, pleading for an interview with the queen.”

  “I am no murderer,” Mathieu retorted, quietly. “Those who died were victims of misfortune, and their own innate infections.”

  Caroline Dean looked up at that, and stared at him as if he had leveled some terrible insult against her, but she said nothing.

  “And it does not trouble you,” her brother said, in her stead, “to leech the beauty from little maids to feed some petty Anglo-Irish aristocrat with the appetites and delusions of a French dandy?”

  Mathieu ignored the insult to his nationality, and thought it imprudent to point out the flagrant inaccuracy of the term “maid” in this context. “One must go to the best available source,” he said, grimly. “My hope and intention has always been to increase the natural supply a thousand- or a million-fold, and eventually to render it irrelevant, so that anyone and everyone might benefit from the knowledge and the artifice. Sir Julian was as much a means to that end as your sister was.”

  “Well now,” Sean Driscoll put in, “it seems to me, on that reckoning, that Mr. Dean might be doing you a favor just now, by increasing the range of your experiments. I’m right in thinking, am I not, that the likely result of what you’ve already done is that Sir Julian will revert to his natural appearance in the course of the next few days?”

  Mathieu, thinking that it was necessary to play for time as well as to be hopeful, said: “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “And when you finally stop messing about with your flasks and potions, and return what you’ve stolen to my sister’s veins,” Thomas Dean added, “she’ll recover the looks she had before the Hallowmas left Tilbury last year?”

  “It may not be as simple as that,” Mathieu admitted, grudgingly, “but Mr. Driscoll is correct—it’s an experiment I haven’t yet attempted.” Again, that was a lie.

  “I need to go outside,” Sir Julian stated, presumably meaning that he needed to visit the privy in the back yard. He was not asking for permission—merely explaining what he intended, in case Driscoll’s men moved to stop him. No one did—but when the baronet had gone through the door Driscoll nodded to MacBride, instructing him to follow and keep Sir Julian in sight. Mathieu heard his patron go out, and then come back in a few minutes later. He judged by the consequent pattern of noises that Sir Julian had gone to the kitchen sink to wash his hands.

  There was, he knew, a shaving-mirror on the kitchen wall, next to the sink. What Sir Julian would see therein in, with terror-inspired vision, Mathieu could not guess, but he felt the pressure of time upon his weary shoulders. The clock in the hall chimed twelve, each chime seeming to add a further blow to his exhaustion. He pricked up his ears, half-expecting to hear the rumble of carriage-wheels drawing up in the street outside, but there was no such noise to be heard at present. Cormack was not as strict in his punctuality when his master was not with him.

  “You may sit in the chair now, Caroline,” Mathieu said, with scrupulous politeness. “I’m ready to begin the infusion.”

  The girl was obviously frightened, but she was also hopeful. She had, after all, returned to the scene of his crime in the desperate hope that he might be willing and able to help her. She took her position while he intensified the flame of the Bunsen burner and carefully passed a hollow needle back and forth through the hottest part of the flame. He did not turn the burner down again, but removed it from beneath the lukewarm bath of water in which he had placed the blood-extract, setting the flame to heat up another bath of water, which would eventually serve to sterilize the more substantial items of his equipment.

  He rubbed the girl’s forearm with alcohol and inserted the needle. Then he drew off a liter of blood into a flask, which he took to the bench in order that he might process it and add the filtrate from Sir Julian blood. Silence descended on the company while he worked, uninterrupted by Sir Julian’s return from the kitchen. When he set about
returning the blood to Caroline Dean’s veins, every eye was upon him; he felt as if he were under inspection by a flock of vultures.

  “Do not expect too much too soon,” Mathieu said, turning to look at Thomas Dean. “The extraction process is by no means one hundred per cent efficient. The gain is never entirely consistent with the loss. You may take her home now, though, and put her to bed. Given that he has that cut on his cheek, it will probably be best if Sir Julian stays here rather than returning to Holland Park, in order that I can keep him under observation. I have only the one bed, but you’re welcome to share my vigil if you wish, Mr. Driscoll.”

  “Vigil be damned,” Sir Julian said, less hotly than he would probably have liked. “I’m going home—and you’re coming with me, Galmier. You’ve got what you wanted, Mr. Dean, and I’ll thank you to hand my revolver back now, if you don’t mind.”

  Sir Julian stuck out his hand, as if he had every expectation of receiving the weapon—but Thomas Dean did not surrender it.

  It was during this moment of hesitation that Mathieu heard the belated sound of Sir Julian’s carriage arriving to collect him. Cormack would be in the box, he knew, and there would likely be a footman behind as well as a driver. If it came to a fight now, the odds would have shifted significantly—and Sean Driscoll’s expression showed that he understood that.

  Mathieu saw Sir Julian take courage from that realization, and the baronet drew himself up to his full height as he turned away from the recalcitrant Dean to meet his tenant’s eyes. The baronet opened his mouth, presumably to tell Driscoll and his companions that he would not meet with them, and that they must return to Ireland to air their grievances to his steward.