Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick

by Unknown Author

  "And me? How will you repay me?"

  Gretchen's eyes flooded with tears, and she took a step toward Faust. He turned angrily away. "You are more precious to me than all the world. But I have parents, and I am their only child. Had I brothers or even a sister, it might be different. But without me, what do they have? What would their lives be like after I fled? It would kill them."

  Faust said nothing.

  Wycliffe, however, could not help but wonder if it wasn't the surrender of her power and position that would grieve Margarete Reinhardt most. He had known women of authority, and none of them ever surrendered it willingly. She now ran—and ably—industries worth more than many a city. That would exert a more seductive hold on her than she would care to admit aloud.

  "Oh, my beloved, I would do anything for you, save what would destroy your love for me. So noble a spirit could never love me were I guilty of such crimes, were I a murderess, had I my parents' blood upon—" She drew in a long, shuddering breath. "I—I hardly know what I'm saying. Go, and take with you all my love and happiness. I shall always be yours."

  There was very little a man could do that Wycliffe did not or could not understand. Yet Faust's actions now surpassed all his comprehension. Staring into an empty portion of the room, as if addressing someone there, the great engineer said, "What should I say? Give me the words that will bring her with me."

  Nobody spoke.

  A strange look came over Faust's face then. It was such an expression as Wycliffe had seen only once before. That was when, using double agents, he had exposed a Jesuit plot of treason and assassination aimed at the Throne itself, and involving a lord so highly placed in the government that even in disgrace he had been able to see Wycliffe exiled to the far reaches of the Holy Roman Empire. The nobleman had assumed exactly such a look when a man he believed his perfect and abject servant had slapped him in the face and demanded his sword.

  Mephistopheles, visible to Faust and to Faust alone, had embodied himself in the form of Brother Josaphat. Laughing, he lifted his cassock to expose his sexual apparatus and squeezed the stones so tightly his fist turned white. Then he winked and with his free hand cocked a finger at Faust.

  (Gotcha!) he said.

  The parade was, everyone agreed, an enormous success. The Dominicans returned to their monastery, where a brace of oxen had been slowly roasting since dawn. One was sent with compliments to the Clares, and the other served up at their own feast that night. Cardinal Verrone was called upon to offer a blessing and on his own cognizance granted the monks a dispensation from fasting and abstinence for the remainder of the week. Then he retired to the quarters provided him, where he had a frugal meal without wine and went to bed to dream of his Lucia.

  Much to the ultimate displeasure of the Bishop of Mainz, from whose zoo the ape had been borrowed, it finished the procession as a corpse.

  * * *

  THE GERMAN MASTER

  The most hated man in London stood by the window of his office, hands behind back, scowling at the street below. Heads down, bundled against the cold, the people hurried purposefully by, leaking white mist from their mouths and nostrils, like so many steam robots. "How I despise them," Faust said.

  "Sir?" Wagner asked.

  "Never mind." He turned back to the office. "Where were we?"

  " 'Dearest, most gracious love, I applaud—' "

  "—applaud your decision to consolidate your holdings, which have grown too sprawling, too diverse for you to retain a close control over. Your underlings would soon have taken advantage of your myriad responsibilities to deceive and defraud you. You would never have known which of them to trust.

  "Dearest, most gracious love, rid yourself of the wire-works. You'll get a good price for it and for anything even remotely connected with weaponry; your Bavarian investors understand armaments, if nothing else. There's money to be made in optics and radio, but you'll go 'mad trying to keep on top of everything. Let others grow rich there! Keep the chemical concerns. They are seriously undervalued—save for the dye-works, nobody but you understands their potential. But that potential is tremendous. The seeds and botanicals you must of course keep, as well as all the pharmaceuticals. People will pay anything for health. Once the new medications prove themselves, you can charge whatever prices you wish. Attached is a formulation for a simple and safe analgesic I call aspirin." Pitching his voice differently, so Wagner would not include his instruction in the letter, he said, "Be sure to have it attached."

  "Yes, Magister."

  "Dearest, most gracious love, the chemist P. A. Paracelsus will apply to you soon for a position; hire him—no amount of money is too great for his services. Let him put his tincture of laudanum into production, and then have him investigate the properties of other opiates, sedatives, painkillers, and so forth." He yawned. "When I have time, I shall draw up protocols for the artificial synthesis of several new classes of drugs, which he should find of interest.

  "Dearest, most gracious love, new clippings should arrive soon from Jacob Fugger's American agents. See to it that the appropriate list is appended."

  "Yes, Magister."

  The shift-whistle blew. Faust continued his dictation unheeding. The cold winter afternoon droned on. Eventually, the week's letter was complete, and he dismissed Wagner.

  Then he settled down with paper of his own to write words too personal to share with his secretary. Wycliffe would have the main letter opened and copied for the technical data it contained. But he had promised the courier would leave an insert untouched, provided he had Faust's word it contained only private sentiments. For the spy-master was an honorable man and regarded Faust as the same.

  As he was sanding his signature, Mephistopheles shambled through the wall.

  The demon's face was grey and bloodless, slack-mouthed, with lusterless eyes. He wore the mangled body of a workman who had died in an industrial accident three days before.

  "This only makes me loathe you the more," Faust said.

  "Such emotion! What have I ever done to you?"

  "You destroyed my name, exiled me, separated me from—"

  "Oh, yes." The corpse smirked loutishly. "That was rather a neat bit of work on my part, wasn't it? Well, then send me away! Exile me! What better vengeance could you have? Dismiss me from your mind forever!"

  "You know I cannot."

  "No." Mephistopheles sat down on the edge of Faust's desk and made a seeming of opening his humidor and extracting a choice cigar. "All your enterprises float upon great bubbles of speculation, reinvestment, and greed. It takes an unending flow of successes to keep them from collapsing altogether. If I were not here to tell you that a petcock on Gasometer 22 must be replaced by Thursday to prevent a catastrophic explosion, or that one James Southerley in your ballistics laboratory is a Catholic saboteur in the pay of the King of Spain, or that an obscure hydraulics engineer with the improbable name of Lancelot Endymion Fitch has the innate talents needed to oversee the steamship project, but also enemies who will do their best to keep him from you ... well, what would you do?" He struck a match. The stench of sulfur mingled with that of dried dung.

  "I would—Enough. Why do you come unsummoned?"

  "To alert you that Lord Howard is on his way here to see you."

  "Shit!" Faust returned to the window. Here to the east of London, all was raw and new. The factories were sharp-edged, their bricks as rough as wood-rasps. The trees had been chopped down to clear the broad expanses of frozen mud (they hardly deserved to be called streets) separating the unornamented and boxlike buildings. He looked out upon the collieries, pits, gas-works, forges, brickyards—every industry spawning a dozen more in its wake—and then up over the rooftops and between the smokestacks, to where the trestle bridge stretched uncompleted out over the Thames. Ragged strings of small black specks, like ants, were workmen treading their slow ways home across the ice. Doubtless they were grateful to be spared the penny toll for a ferry. "Tell me what you know of him."


  "He's an idiot."

  "That I already knew. Tell me something I can use."

  "There is nothing you can use, for there is nothing that will shame him. He is fickle, imaginative, undisciplined, given to enthusiasms, ignorant as a pig, and as sure of himself as, well, a lord. He is also well connected, a particular pet of the Duke of Norfolk, an able horseman, and one who shows a good leg in silk hose. The people love him for these reasons, and because he is the single most effective orator in Parliament. Where you speak with—forgive me—the plodding Teutonic heaviness of a dyspeptic elephant, without subtlety and in a freakishly ludicrous accent, his English is as strong and clear as gin, his rhetoric as sweetly Italianate as vermouth, and his diction tart as a lemon peel, the whole delivered with the dry, ironic sting of the very finest martini."

  "Yes, I heard what he had to say about airships," Faust growled. "He knows how I feel about him. Why has he come?"

  "He is at your door. Why not ask him yourself?"

  The offices were half-empty. This late in the evening only the ambitious and those hoping to catch Faust's eye remained. Wagner had gone to the whores on the uncompleted trestle bridge; he loved them best this time of year, winter-pale and cool to the touch. But John Shetterly, the receptionist, remained to defend Faust from intruders. He looked up with a beleaguered expression. A tall figure turned, straightening, from his desk.

  "My dear Foster!"

  Lord Howard rushed forward, arms extended. His clothes were severe, laceless, black. The slashed doublets, long sleeves, and bright colors of yore, which showed grease and were too easily caught in machinery, had given way to more practical fashions. Industrialism was the engine that drove the times, and nobody wanted it thought they were not important enough to be involved. All the best people in England these days went about as solemnly dressed as mourners.

  "My esteemed Lord Howard!" Faust grasped the ambitious coxcomb's hands with loathing and a smile. "Whatever brings you so far from court?"

  "The ice-carnival, in point of fact. And since you were on my way, and there is an empty seat in my sledge, I thought you might condescend to visit it with me."

  "Nothing could delight me more."

  * * *

  That winter was the harshest in living memory. It was so cold that the Thames froze solid and a carnival was built out upon its surface. As a demonstration project, trenches had been chopped in the ice into which gas-pipes had been laid and then water poured to freeze solid again. The ice itself was black from the discharge of the new factories, and at night when the torches and gas flambeaux were lit, it shone like polished obsidian.

  Lord Howard's coachman drove the sledge across the ice, cracking his whip warningly whenever workmen got in his way. Mephistopheles's cadaverous form sat beside him. "You and I, Foster/' said Lord Howard, "are the only two men in the realm who comprehend the power inherent in this new Age of Mechanization."

  "Indeed."

  "The others do not understand, as we do, the dreadful forces involved, the fear and superstitious terror your destructive engines inspire."

  "So long as people show the machines a proper respect," Faust said testily, "they have nothing to fear."

  "You misunderstand me, Foster. I believe this fear can be a useful thing. Did you receive the drawings I had made up for you?"

  "For the, ah, Basilisk, you mean?" Faust had seen them: exquisitely drafted steelpoint fantasies of a machine as large as a city. It rode on a hundred wheels of various sizes and was fronted by a black goggle-eyed visage that was a cross between a lion's face and that of a cock. He had dispatched the pictures to his chief engineers with a bawdy note attached, esteeming them good for a laugh and no more.

  "Yes!" Lord Howard leaned forward excitedly. "I want you to imagine an army in full array. The cavalry drawn up in regular lines, the infantry and artillery deployed with care, and every man-jack of them ready—eager!—for the coming clash.

  "But then, from over the hills comes a roar, the clashing of great gears, a bellowing inconceivable to the ear. The gathered princes start, turn wonderingly to look at one another. Suddenly, with a scream and the crashing thunder of steel jaws, the Basilisk tops the hill! Down it rushes upon the army, snapping trees, crushing all that stands before it. The horses rear and bolt; they cannot be controlled. The infantry panic, break, and run. The gunners desert their fieldpieces. It is a rout! Puffs of smoke appear from the Basilisk's sides. The cannons—"

  "Cannons?"

  "From the side-ports. Didn't you study the renderings? Oh, I don't pretend that the final war machine will look much like what I have had pictured. But the idea is there, and the idea is what matters."

  (The idea is to endow this folly with enough men and materials) Mephistopheles said over his shoulder (to give it the mass necessary by the laws of physics, economics, and political science to swallow up the galaxy of your accomplishments into the black hole of its failure.)

  "It is an interesting notion," Faust said carefully. "Let me offer one in my turn. I recently submitted to the Royal Commission for New Technology, upon which you sit, a proposal for funding which .. ."

  "Oh, not your aeroplanes again!" Lord Howard said. "Men buzzing and flitting about like flies." He flicked his fingers dismissively. "Can such weak and improbable constructions be of use against the armed might of a foreign tyrant? No, no, dear fellow. Patently not."

  "But consider. All I ask for is funding to build a single craft whose utility I could then demonstrate by publicly dropping an incendiary device on a hulk anchored in the harbor for that purpose. In exchange I would gladly have my best engineers perform a feasibility study of your Basilisk, and issue a detailed report on their findings."

  "Feasibility study? What nonsense. I—ah! Here we are!"

  The flares that had from a distance seemed a single blaze of light, an earthly vision of the Celestial City, now separated and opened up before them. One instant they were surrounded by open ice, and the next they were among the huts and tents of the carnival. The smells of spun sugar, roasting boar, and bread frying in fat, the sounds of crank-organs, gamblers cursing, and booth-merchants crying their wares closed about them.

  The sledge could go no further. They dismounted.

  Faust understood the chaotic forces involved, but still he hated the sprawl and disorder of the carnival. He much preferred the austere beauty and rigid control implicit in the grid. Lord Howard, predictably, found it charming.

  "Come, my dear friend! Let us taste all that this marvelous encampment has to offer!" In his enthusiasm the young lord seemed scarce more than a boy. The grey-fleshed demon clapped hands merrily and leered. (Yes, sweet child, and hurry! Your heart's desire lies hidden within this festive labyrinth, and we must help you find it.)

  Mephistopheles led them both deeper into the carnival, a jolly dancing corpse.

  * * *

  It was a terrible thing for Faust how crowded the carnival was. Pasty faces thronged about him, laughing, and in their joyous abandon he felt his isolation magnified. Lord Howard took his arm and, chatting, walked him past the high fence of a bear rink where for a fee a strong man could be humiliated by a defanged and declawed antiquity. Past booths selling coffee, chocolate, winter ale, absinthe, tea. Past a tent that throbbed with horn and fiddle and drum, with a wooden floor that magnified the stomp!-stomp!-stomp! of giddy dancers. Through a hissing gateway topped with naked flame where their narrow lane opened up into a midway bright with gas-lanterns and garish canvas signs.

  "Look here!" Lord Howard's grip tightened on Faust's arm. He was staring at a gently billowing cartoon of a mechanical man, all spikes and steel teeth, with the legend slay the man-mangler. In the tent beneath was a stamping-machine that had maimed three men and killed another, pilfered from the scrap-heap and artfully daubed with hog's blood. By it was a rack of mauls. For a penny a man could smash the device three times.

  The tent was crowded with the same ragged men who worked in Faust's factories and complained about t
he wages, who were constantly calling for strikes and shorter hours, who wanted to be paid even when they were sick, who expected Sundays off, protective goggles, safety inspections, ventilation hoods, and for all he knew to be tucked into bed at night by a solicitous management. Lord Howard, however, smiled broadly, as if these were the best lads in the world, and threw the operator a coin. Seizing a hammer, he whirled it thrice around his head and brought it down upon the machine with such force that it rang. Again. His final blow broke away a bit of flanging that flew with a ping across the tent. The onlookers cheered lustily.

  Bowing, he threw the maul aside. Outside, he said, "Did you see? That was exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. They hate these machines with a passion. This is a force that can be harnessed and put to good use."

  (It is not the machine they hate but that society has itself become a machine by which the needs of production regulate the conditions of life. But they do not understand this and so they lash out at this weak symbol instead. Pathetic, really.)

  Faust shook his head, said nothing. They continued down the midway, past movie tents showing one-reelers—The Kiss, The Fight, The Train Wreck, Our Glorious Sovereign in Procession, The Fuck—and photogravure booths where washer-women lined up to have their hideous features preserved for posterity. Bitterly, he reflected on the high expectations he had had for films; how they would educate the illiterate, teach trades, and promote public hygiene. Everywhere he looked, he saw his inventions perverted and turned to unintended uses.

  So too his dealings with the government. Everything must be made a weapon. If he drew up plans for an omnibus, Parliament wanted to know how many troops it would carry; if an improved boiler, how many men it would kill if exploded. There was nothing he could make that this ingenious and pernicious race would not turn to armament.

  A dead hand clasped his shoulder.

  (Take him in there) said Mephistopheles. He put his face alongside Faust's own, so that the rotting-sweet smell of his breath was overwhelming. Maggots dropped from his mouth onto Faust's greatcoat. (Show him the freaks.)