Mad Science Cafe

by Ross, Deborah J.

  “Mmm. Could you rub my feet?”

  “Excellent! And that’s two more points to Cosmo. Their experts said you’d go from back to feet.”

  “Slower.”

  “Slower it is.”

  “Oo, baby, beat me with your T-square. Do I get to adjust proximity too, or do I just lie here?”

  “Uh, I think for now Chewy had better let the moon rover come to him. Her. We don’t want the test blowing up in our faces.”

  “Man, you are in trouble. I’m gonna want a foot rub every night.”

  “That’s doable. So are we ready to reposition and triangulate?”

  “You have great hands.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Take your clothes off, Gerald.”

  “Uh, I did say the moon rover’s a little fragile on the controls.”

  “It’ll turn me on.”

  “Really?”

  “Hey, I like to look at skin.”

  “Maybe you should keep lying on your stomach.”

  “Maybe I should slap you behind the ear.”

  “Uh-oh. Variable P—”

  “For pissed off. Get naked, Gerald. Okay. Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Cosmo said irritation is a sign of sexual frustration.”

  “I haven’t bought Cosmo in two years.”

  “I’m—nervous. You don’t look at me naked a lot.”

  “Because you get naked, I get naked, and two nanoseconds later you jump me.”

  “I’m taking this as a positive development.”

  “I think you can do that. Did I say I like you naked?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, Gerald. I love you naked.”

  “Okay. Good. New information. Good to know.”

  “You’re babbling. Where are we at, vis-a-vis fixed value for O?”

  “See, I’ve been thinking about that too. What are you doing?”

  “Touching your skin.”

  “My knees?”

  “You have better knees than I do, Gerald. Fixed value for O?”

  “Um, yeah. It occurred to me that since all the action takes place in determining primary F’s current distance from O, and then the tricky bit, microadjusting elastic proximity between primary F and primary M on what I think we can now safely describe as a predictable velocity of changing values for optimal proximity—well, semipredictable—Schatzi, what are you doing?!”

  “Demonstrating. I read the dirty parts of your magazines too.”

  “Demonstrating?”

  “I told you it’s hard for me to talk. Call it show-and-tell.”

  “Holy kookamunga. Uh. Can you breathe?”

  “Fut up. An’ cake nofe.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “And did I tell you to keep talking math?”

  “Keep—um—oh. Okay.”

  “Aggaboy.”

  “Well. Take notes, uh. Christ, Schatzi, you’re killing me. Ow! Right. So, so the thing is, what I’m trying to say, I wonder maybe if it’s not getting to that fixed value for O that we should—should focus on but m-maybe instead pay more attention to the t-travel, triangulating across different axes on, on, on optimal proximity for a given value, call it X, and then plotting the travel toward O with as many microadjustments as sah-seem necessary for that instance. By the time we—can you jus—oh boy—Schatzi!”

  “Heh. Didja like that?”

  “I am so sorry. I warned you the moon rover was liable to blow a—”

  “Dummy, that was a demonstration. It’s your turn now.”

  “Muh-my turn?”

  “You did say you were willing to triangulate across different axes.”

  “I did. Yes. I said that. Boy, what if I screw up?”

  “Reposition and microadjust proximity as necessary. I can be patient. In the interests of science.”

  “Wow. Okay. Lessee, optimal proximity should be—”

  “Chewy says, less talk and more demonstration. I’ll tell you how you’re doing.”

  “Okay. M. How gis?”

  “Get squishy. And more lateral movement. Uh-huh. Gerald!”

  “Whah?”

  “That was a good ‘Gerald.’ Don’t stop.”

  “M-kay.”

  “You know how the—oo—faster—not so fast—perfect—current position of primary F relative to O is always—hoo—oh. No, don’t change a thing. Position of, of primary F keeps changing on you? Go, baby! Oo! Chewy getting excited there. So yeah. Can you dial up the velocity a bit? Yeah! So what I’ve been afraid to say. About the current position. Well, this is more about biology than mathematics. Can you—like—oh—picture a—well, a cross b—between Chewbacca and a moo—mooo—too fast—no, that’s perfect—mooooonnnn—yes—Yes—YES! YES YES YES! OH my GOD! Oh, GERALD! Oh, my oh, my omi-omi-omigod.”

  “You okay?”

  “You did it, Gerald. You attained fixed value of O!”

  “We did it.”

  “Oh God, we did, we did. Wow.”

  “Cross between Chewy and the moon rover? That could be a bit of a borg, couldn’t it? Pfft. Hair in my teeth.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “It was worth it.”

  “No, I mean about the…the borg.”

  “The hypothetical borg?”

  “Nno, it’s more of a real-time actual borg.”

  “Really? Yours and mine?”

  “You hate it. Oh, God.”

  “Nah. I think we’re gonna make beautiful borgs together.”

  The Peculiar Case of Sir Willoughby Smythe

  Judith Tarr

  And all should cry: “Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle ’round him thrice,

  And close your eyes in holy dread:

  For he on honeydew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise!”

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  “Kubla Khan”

  Lady Albemarle’s maid was the latest fashion in automata: sleek, French, and indescribably chic. It glided into the Book View Café on that drowsy summer afternoon, so lifelike and yet so unmistakably mechanical that it evoked a frisson in even the conscientiously imperturbable Miss Emma Rigby.

  Emma did not indulge in either boredom or tears, but she was oh, so very weary of this safe, secure, and utterly undramatic life. Certainly she had not expected it to be any of those things when she left her previous employer in Paris with much affection and little regret, and travelled to London with Lady Ada Lovelace and Mr. Charles Babbage and the estimable Madame Magdala.

  There, instead of danger, adventure, and a life of mystery and intrigue, Emma had found herself employed in the Café, serving tiny china cups of exquisitely brewed coffee to well-to-do patrons, and learning the ways of the mighty mechanical Catalogue that delivered the books of the Café into the hands of those who desired them. It was not that Emma had any objection to menial duties—they provided a useful disguise in certain situations—but she had hoped to advance beyond them.

  And yet, fully a year after her arrival, here she still was. Other recruits had come through the Café, received such training or instruction as Madame Magdala deemed suitable, then been sent on to far and exotic destinations. That most of those hopefuls were male, Emma had not failed to notice, but not all of them had been.

  The country curate’s daughter with her big, dreaming eyes and her consumptive cough, sent off to Brussels only last month on a mission of hushed and high importance—Charlotte, that was her name: she had some claim to literary accomplishment, so Emma had gathered, but none whatever in the physical realm. What would she do if she faced imminent threat to life or limb, but faint dead away?

  Whereas Emma, who could with equal ease impersonate an instructor of English in a school for genteel young ladies and hold her own in a match with either epée or sabre, was left in London to face the truly death-defying choices: Coffee or chocolate? One lump or two?

  Her only diversion had been to in
dulge herself in the occasional, casual but useful investigation of small mysteries that vexed the Café’s clientèle. A purloined letter, a misplaced fan, Lady Albemarle’s lost spaniel—Emma had solved them all. But she would much rather have been searching for a communiqué from Her Majesty’s Admiralty to the Sublime Porte regarding the capture of a shipload of pirates, than an unfortunate billet-doux addressed by a silly fool of a girl to a hopelessly unsuitable swain.

  “Miss Rigby?”

  The voice was soft, cultured, and fashionably French. It was also, however lifelike, discernibly inhuman. Emma stared at the automaton’s finely moulded face as if she had never seen its like before. “Yes?” she responded, automatically.

  The automaton was not designed to show expression, but its words managed to convey a sense of urgency. “Lady Albemarle, miss, begs your indulgence and entreats your aid on behalf of her dear friend, Lady Jocasta Merriwell. If you would be so kind…?”

  “I would be most pleased to be of assistance,” said Emma with no attempt to conceal either her pleasure or her relief. She put off her ruffled apron and her irritating little cap in favour of a sturdy and practical bonnet and wrap, smiled brilliantly at the gentleman who was just opening his mouth to order—coffee or chocolate? Coffee, she would surmise, not that it mattered at all—and strode off in the wake of Lady Albemarle’s maid.

  o0o

  Lady Jocasta Merriwell was a stout and comfortable lady of early middle years, dressed well but not in the height of fashion, with a clear eye and a brisk, unsentimental voice. “My brother, Sir Willoughby Smythe, is missing,” she said. “He is a lecturer in the physical sciences at Queens’—Cambridge, not Oxford, if you please—pursuing an obscure and arcane speciality which I will not pretend to understand. He was to present a paper at the Royal Society yesterday evening, for which he neither appeared nor sent his apologies.

  “Now mind you,” Lady Jocasta said, “Willoughby is as otherworldly as you might expect of his occupation, and has been known to so lose himself in his work that he vanishes for weeks at a time. But he would never, whatever the distraction, fail of his courtesy not only to the Royal Society but to me. He was to spend the night in this house after he had presented his paper; he did not do so. Nor has he been seen in his lodgings in Cambridge or in his laboratories at Queens’. He is nowhere to be found.”

  Emma inclined her head in respect. “It seems, my lady, that you have investigated the matter quite thoroughly.”

  “That I have,” said Lady Jocasta. Her lips set; her brows drew together. “Nevertheless, Miss Rigby, my skills are merely those of the dedicated amateur, and my position prevents me from pursuing all possibilities.”

  “There are agencies devoted to such troubles as yours,” Emma pointed out as tactfully as she could manage. “Perhaps the police might wish to celebrate the founding of their Detective Branch with an investigation into a case of such clearly aristocratic interest?”

  “The police,” Lady Jocasta said, “have offered me the comfort due my rank and station: namely, a pat on the hand, a nod of commiseration, and the sage observation that ‘The good Professor is famously absent-minded and has been known, as you yourself noted, dear lady, to embark on a lengthy walking tour of the more rural parts of England at this very time of year. We shall put out the word in his favoured haunts among the Lakes and in Yorkshire, but indeed, dear lady, we believe you have no cause for distress. He will be found, and soon; and all will be well.’

  “In a word,” said Lady Jocasta, “they dismiss me as a mere and hysterical female, distraught over a man who has only been missing, if at all, since the day before yesterday, when he was last seen leaving his laboratory. I am not a lady of delicate sensibilities, Miss Rigby, and I make no claim to such flights of intuition as are so often attributed to our sex, but I know my brother. I am indeed, though not quite as the good Inspector may imagine, distressed.”

  So she was, although she bore it admirably. Emma would have taken the case out of simple curiosity; for Lady Jocasta’s sake, she determined that she would solve it, and swiftly. “Tell me all that you know of your brother and his work,” she said, “and any other facts or suspicions that may occur to you. Anything, my lady, can be a clew, however trivial or irrelevant it may seem.”

  “So it can,” said Lady Jocasta.

  This was a woman after Emma’s own heart. She nodded briskly. “Tell me, then, my lady.”

  Emma had an excellent memory. She forgot nothing; whatever she observed, her mind retained. It served her well as Lady Jocasta drew a portrait in words of her missing brother.

  She produced a painted portrait as well, a miniature that she wore on her breast in a golden locket. The face depicted there bore little resemblance to Lady Jocasta’s plump fair cheeks and forthright chin. The young man—a decade the younger, indeed—was a lean and aquiline creature, with a shock of dark hair that yielded only reluctantly to restraint. Even through the clouded lens of conventional portraiture, Emma detected the signs of a not at all conventional mind.

  To his sister he was the beloved younger brother, the collector of frogs and snails and infant hedgehogs, who set all the clocks in the family manse to chime in symphony, and who tried to construct a new body for the dying hound that had been his closest companion.

  At that, Emma’s attention sharpened. “Did he succeed?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” said Lady Jocasta. “The device had a most doglike appearance and manner, but it was merely a machine. Willoughby kept it for a while to remind himself of the creature that was gone, but when at length it broke, he made no effort to repair it. By then he had gone on to new enthusiasms: worms, as I recall, and salamanders. Disgusting things, but he found them fascinating.”

  “Did he ever say why?”

  “‘The secret of all life is in them,’ he said. I could never understand his explanations, save that, in some strange way, he had found his life’s work.”

  Emma raised a brow. “I had thought his work was in the design of automata?”

  “So I have been given to understand,” said Lady Jocasta. She rang the bell that reposed on the table beside her. “I place my trusted servant at your disposal. His name is Ratisbon. You may call on him for any assistance you require, and any funds that may be necessary.”

  As lordly dismissals went, it was only slightly abrupt. It was, like the rest of the case, intriguing. Emma bowed and permitted herself to be ushered out of the lady’s presence.

  o0o

  The servant was waiting with a carriage: a phaeton, fast and light. Its driver was built on much the same lines. Emma had expected to find an automaton, but he was as human as she.

  His features were those of the Igbo of western Africa, but the accent with which he greeted her had not the slightest hint of that continent. In its cultured tones she heard a distinct echo of Lady Jocasta, with beneath it a suggestion of the West Indies. “Madam,” he said, “you will begin your investigation in Cambridge. I’ve undertaken to provide certain essentials for the journey, and for your sojourn there.”

  “Thank you,” Emma said, “but I shall begin in London. The Royal Society, please.”

  Ratisbon’s face remained as bland as ever, but a spark had kindled in his eye. “As to that, madam, the title of the young master’s paper was to be, ‘Notes on the Phyla of Planariidae.’”

  “Indeed?” said Emma. “Not the order of Caudata?”

  “That had been the subject of his last three papers for the Society, madam. This was to reveal a new facet of his work—very important, he said; he hoped to demonstrate an altogether novel ramification thereof.”

  As Ratisbon spoke, he urged the team of glossy but sturdy and practical bays into a brisk trot. His hands on the reins, Emma noted, were adept at their task.

  She had seldom encountered a set of wits as quick as her own. It was a heady if somewhat disconcerting sensation. “He confided in you,” she said.

  “Say rather, madam, that I have served at time
s as a convenient audience.”

  “And occasional critic?”

  He shrugged slightly: a lift of the shoulder, an ironic glint of the eye.

  “Suppose,” said Emma, “that you tell me what you know of Sir Willoughby. If, of course, you will.”

  He did not respond at once, but there was cause: they had emerged from the quiet of Lady Jocasta’s elegant avenue into the hurly-burly of greater London. In that confusion of crowds and noise and vehicles, he needed all of his substantial wits to keep the horses steady.

  It was the better part of an hour before he spoke. When he did, it was as if there had been no interruption in their conversation. “I shall tell you, madam, as we go, but it all comes to these three things: Sir Willoughby is a gentleman of the old school and a scientist of the new; he performs no experiment on any living creature that he will not perform upon himself; and the heart of his work is a great and terrible thing: to give life and living soul to that which is not, of its nature, ensouled.”

  Emma had some little knowledge of that herself, but now was not the time to speak of it. “And his studies of worms and salamanders? What bearing did they have on that work?”

  “That, madam, I can only guess,” said Ratisbon. “In his laboratory at Queens’, his studies have tended towards the mechanical: building ever more refined automata in hopes of creating one so like to life that only a highly educated eye may distinguish it from a living creature. But in his own house, his experiments have taken a different direction. He was fascinated by the capacity of the salamander to regrow a lost limb.”

  “And the planarian,” Emma mused, “when divided in two, can live on as two separate creatures.”

  Ratisbon nodded.

  “Did you ever know him to partake of the trade in human corpses?”

  His glance was keen, his headshake firm. “He did not. That I know.”

  Emma frowned. She had been evolving a theory, but Ratisbon’s response rendered it much less likely. Then again…”Perhaps he concealed it,” she said.

  “I think not,” said Ratisbon.

  Emma was disinclined to argue. After a moment of barbed silence, she said mildly as she had to Lady Jocasta, “Tell me what you know of him.”