The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Again Kharon nodded sharply, either unwilling or unable to see the trap being laid. “So her body is all she has to offer.”

  “But again,” offered Athena, quite reasonably, “it is not hers to give. She lives in the home of her parents, and until they give her hand in marriage or dismiss her from their protection, she may not offer her own life.”

  Now the demigod growled, and all the souls on the boat cringed in fear. That bugged me. He shouldn’t terrify the souls. He was just supposed to ferry them.

  Interesting you should say that. I heard the voice, but nobody else seemed to. Was she talking into my mind? I stared up and could have sworn I saw her wink.

  “Right now, in this culture, she is without responsibility—excepting the job she has been assigned here. She is on…what is it called? Summer vacation?”

  I nodded, still not seeing where this was going. “Yes. That’s right. I’m on summer break from school.”

  She beamed a smile, and it lit up the darkness of the cave. The souls reached for the light, not even realizing it was just a smile.

  Or maybe they did know.

  “Your time is your own, which is how you took this job. It belongs to you and cannot be taken away except with your permission. Therefore, it is the decree of Olympus that the price of this soul is your summer, Lia Thantos. The soul is free to cross the river. Kharon, you will be granted the first vacation in your existence. I will place you with Dionysus, who will teach you the necessary tools to…relax. And Lia will live up to her birthright. She will be the bringer of truth, and death—an intern demigod ferrywoman of the underground for the next three months. I’m sure we will manage a workable solution that incorporates your status as a child on earth.”

  The screaming stopped, and the man who had been trapped in the body floated peacefully down the hill to take his place alongside the other souls on the boat. The eyes of the dead looked to me, and hope and joy radiated outward, filled me.

  It felt oddly…right. A boat, a river, and souls at peace. No doubt there’d be danger and weird things everywhere. But that would be part of the fun.

  My sister’s eyes were wide with shock, and I had no doubt her reaction would pale in comparison to how Mom and Dad were going to react.

  But for myself, I could only think again…this summer was going to seriously rock!

  Acquired and edited for Tor.com by Melissa Ann Singer.

  Books by Cathy Clamp and C.T. Adams

  TALES OF THE SAZI

  Hunter’s Moon

  Moon’s Web

  Captive Moon

  Howling Moon

  Moon’s Fury

  Timeless Moon

  Cold Moon Rising

  Serpent Moon

  THE THRALL SERIES

  Touch of Evil

  Touch of Madness

  Touch of Darkness

  As Cat Adams

  Magic’s Design

  THE BLOOD SINGER SERIES

  Blood Song

  Siren Song

  Demon Song

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  “Nothing that calls itself a Governess,” said Little Darcy. Darcy was still missing teeth, and spoke strangely around the stiff collar points he’d been affecting of late. “They are dependably wicked.”

  “And nothing clockwork,” added his sister, Wild Charlotte. She wore a headdress of bright, unnatural feathers and had red stripes painted along her cheeks. “None of that in our home.”

  Adelaide stared down at them, exasperated. She hated nothing more than when the twins ganged up on her like this, with their nonsensical demands.

  “What about Nurse? You love it at Sebastian’s house.” Nurse was a tick-tock thing that had served her dearest friend’s household as long as they’d lived. Charlotte had always been fond of the old girl, but now, she shook her curls. “Clockworks are fine for the Rocqueforts, but not for us. It’s enough that you’ll explode us one day with your experiments. I won’t have it.”

  “No homely ladies!” shouted Darcy. “No giant bustles or fussy hats. I won’t have anyone treating me as though I am her grandson or a slow nephew. I get too much of that as it is. No pinching cheeks. Nor uproarious laughter. Nothing is that humorous.”

  Charlotte nodded in agreement. “And no eyeglasses. If she wears spectacles, I shall hate her.”

  Adelaide threw up her hands, shouting past the pencil between her teeth. “Charlotte, what on earth?”

  “You can never tell what will happen, Ada. We might be transported to a heathen land, and must survive only by our wits and abilities. I could become a child bride for savages within minutes. Without a dependable Nanny, I’d be forced to come to terms with my lot.”

  “I highly doubt that, Charlotte. Speak sense.”

  “I assure you, Sister, I am deadly serious. You must carry water from the river, and feed their horses, and darn their leather stockings. They see you not as a capable individual with thoughts and an independent spirituality, but as merely a woman. A clockwork factory for little savages, nursemaid to the prairie entire. That is not the life for me. No, Sister: No asthmatics, no lameness, no clubfoot, no sugar disease. Nothing that would slow us down.”

  “And I don’t want a young thing, either,” Darcy piped up, not to be outdone. “She’ll end up burning down the attic and trying to marry Papa. Too scandalous.”

  Adelaide shrugged and put down her pencil. The twins looked at each other gleefully at having once again won out. “So, to review: You want a nanny, but not a governess; not made of clockwork; neither old nor young; neither infirm nor healthy.”

  They nodded. Charlotte’s headdress slipped a bit, and she propped it up with her tiny tomahawk. A sweet dropped from Darcy’s hand and stuck to his frock coat. He gasped, staring down at it.

  Adelaide sent them away for lessons, then, but she could have gathered them both to her at that moment, eyes tearing as she looked at them: So young, yet so wise, so delightfully bizarre in their changing fashions.

  Of late, Little Darcy Babbage had—and Adelaide knew this was Sebastian’s influence—taken to wearing Edwardian collars, buttoning his waistcoats ridiculously high, and turning up his cuffs. At his best, he looked like a daguerreotype of their father’s hunting friends as youths. The general effect, however, was so dingy and creased as to better resemble their father’s friends now, after a long night in Papa’s downstairs lair.

  Messes troubled Little Darcy no end, but as he diligently brought his things to the washerwoman each morning, and was well behaved and quiet otherwise, and seemed to want for little in the way of toys or treats, the family conceded.

  Wild Charlotte Babbage, on the other hand, was becoming more and more unruly with each passing second. She’d gotten hold of some penny dreadfuls detailing life in the New World—also, of course, thanks to Sebastian, whose pretenses at sophistication were undercut at every turn by his weakness for such childish enticements—and had promised herself to become some sort of vengeful Savage Princess by Michaelmas.

  Never mind that history had already moved on from the days of Wild America; Charlotte wouldn’t hear of it. She refused, childlike, to believe that they lived on the eastern coast of those selfsame Americas, in the sixth Borough of Lytton, and that the ugly days of Cowboys and Indians were hundreds of years past. To her, America was something entirely different. Something fascinating and far-off, whose dangerous delights were
every bit as remote and foreign as the other five Boroughs. She refused to call the City anything but New Amsterdam, as though, by sheer force of will, she could hold off the turning of time that threatened to turn her, one day soon, into a woman. The thing she hated most.

  And then there was Lady Adelaide Babbage, Woman of Science, as their father called her, a spinster with two young charges and no fashion of her own. It was the o’erweening tragedy of Sebastian Rocquefort’s life that Ada just couldn’t seem to wear clothing in a manner that suggested any clear—or even beneficent—intent.

  “You look like a sack of something wearing several sacks. I don’t understand it. You have a lovely figure, trim in the right places, a face…. And yet. And yet. Is it your posture? Put this book on your head.”

  Of course, Sebastian could have worn several sacks and still looked like a Renaissance masterpiece, but that didn’t make it any less unfair. Ada wanted to look nice—she knew that it mattered more than anything—but somehow when she touched clothing it wilted, as if she were some lesser Midas.

  But then, in another sense, she couldn’t care less. Perhaps this was the problem. Perhaps if she needed to be looked at as desperately as Sebastian did, the clothes would behave themselves.

  “We’ll stick a hat on it, and I suppose some sort of sash, and we’ll…see what happens.”

  Sebastian always discussed fashion as though it were a war, between oneself and everyone else. Perhaps it was. Their friend Antony Tilewood always called Sebastian her Fairy Godfather, but he was more like Alexander the Great when it came to social occasions. A typical rant went, “Strike hard, arrive late, leave early. Never complain, never explain. You catch more flies with silence than with heaving emotion. Make boys feel terrible about themselves, and they’ll follow you anywhere.”

  Adelaide could never master the Compartmental Arts, as Sebastian called them: The gift of lying so well that you believed your own lie. If the situation called for you to take offense, you whipped up a reason to storm out. If a person were behaving atrociously, but it was not meet to react, you pretended they were endlessly charming. None of the rules made sense, and none of them could she follow.

  At least, not in the moment. Descending the stair after a dance or fête, she’d hear his voice echoing in her head, ticking off all the sweetly devastating things she could have said, all the smiles or gasps she should have kept to herself. Every night was a chance to rewrite her character, to give herself the retreating, vague air that Sebastian said boys liked best. But, caught up in the moment, nothing could be more difficult, and she knew if she tried she’d be caught out, and accused of dissembling, and…

  Something dreadful, she was sure. Ada couldn’t quite imagine what, but something very bad would occur as a result, and she’d be a permanent social disaster, and never wed, and Lord Babbage would die of shame, and she would end up selling matches or cosmetics on the High Street, and Charlotte would put her cutpurse and pickpocket skills to use at last—glorying in it, no doubt, little heathen she was—and Little Darcy would end up singing on street corners in a sweep’s rags, and apprenticing to a butcher or something equally terrible, and, finally toothless at a criminally young but vastly overexperienced age, write a tell-all memoir about his descent into madness, blaming her on each and every sticky page.

  To be perfectly honest, which Adelaide often was, she did not wish to marry. She loved men, the roughness and the strength of them, the way they needed so desperately to be appreciated, but she had no desire to negotiate herself permanently into such an arrangement. Like the twins’ toys, or her own scientific tools, she liked boys best when they could be put away in their places at the end of the night. Adelaide Babbage liked things tidy.

  That was why she loved the Commonplace Book more than anything. More than time in the gardens with the wonderful twins; more than dinners with her dear overworked Papa; more than lying about on divans with Sebastian, composing airy poems and discussing the depravities of Barbar Street or Gerald and Rupert Munro, she loved working on Commonplace.

  Many of the elder children on their street had steam-brains, after a rash of futuristic enthusiasm some years ago, but only a few among them kept at them now, and among those few, only Adelaide’s was truly a wonder. Commonplace was not, of course, a true steam-driven computational engine, as in the olden days—one might as well ask Nurse the time merely because she was clockwork. And although it was operated with punch cards, this was only as a conceit: Behind its steely skin lay labyrinthine fiber optics and a quantum engine she’d built from a kit.

  Originally, Commonplace had contained simple card mechanics, and—inspired by her own mother’s common-place, in which she’d kept recipes, and letters to her future children, and the miniatures she painted and drew, and everything she loved that could be pressed between its pages—Adelaide had simply fed it all the information at her fingertips. Books from their library, father’s playbills, Sebastian’s magazines, accounts of anything she thought or read or saw.

  But then came the quantum engine. Smaller than a child’s portion of dinner roast, the crystalline mind sat just behind a silver-glass window, humming and quirking and occasionally sparking as she worked. She fed it punch cards of greater and greater complexity until its computational powers surpassed even Adelaide’s ability to follow, and on into—possibly, she hoped and prayed—chaos computation itself.

  The first time Commonplace gave Adelaide an answer she didn’t understand, she become very afraid, believing that she’d broken it, then elated, thinking she’d managed to create a true chaos engine. Of course, neither of these things were true. It was simply thinking faster than she could follow; until a simple logic map helped her to measure this speed in the abstract. But that day, caught between crisis and chaos, Adelaide devoted herself, body and soul, to making that momentary dream come true. To reaching beyond mere collection and collation of history and words into something new. To see her little protégé make art, or something finer, and break that crystalline barrier between man and machine whose existence the scholars had batted among themselves like frantic kittens for five years now.

  “If anyone can do it,” Lord Babbage often said, “It’s my Ada.”

  He was very proud of her, despite having no real understanding of the work she was doing. Lord Babbage was a theatre owner in the High Street, whose stages were once known Lytton-wide as the only true dramatic strongholds left to society, and whose magic lantern projection screens had tripled his business in less than a year.

  “We’re becoming vulgar,” he’d say. “All of us. It comes for all of us.”

  He didn’t think the magic lantern shows would last, and feared the day when Lytton’s eyes turned themselves once again to the stage, only to find it neglected and in disrepair. He could find no actors—beyond the few grizzled retirees he employed for each summer’s tableaux and winter’s Dickens—who loved the stage as he still did.

  Of course, he had reason to worry. It was only in Adelaide’s own lifetime that the stage had become an entertainment for anyone but the commoners and the demimonde. He was Adelaide’s age when he’d come upon his own dream: To revive the spectacle and wonder of the theatre, and rescue it from its own vulgarity and ill repute. And that he had done.

  And then came the magic lanterns. What might come next, he was terrified to contemplate. Some sort of carpetbagger, Ada had overheard her father saying, was down in the south of Lytton promising to make the magic lanterns talk. But she knew her father’s cast of mind was even darker, as he looked into the future: Live executions, performances of a marital nature, the invocation of demons live and onstage…all of which, they were told, could be found in the City, outside Lytton. In Queens and Staten Island, it was said in delighted whispers, they’d load the poor and indebted into wood chippers and dance in the renderings, like the coriandoli of a depraved Devil’s parade.

  Lord Babbage, she knew, was counting on his daughter to save their family one way or another: Either by develo
ping a new kind of science, or by marrying well. She knew which she’d prefer, but she also knew that she might need to do both to secure her family’s fortunes. And as matters of the heart were a language she could barely understand, a code she feared she’d never break, that meant her work with Commonplace was of the utmost importance.

  Her guilt, such as it was, came from the fact that she enjoyed her work so greatly. Surely it couldn’t be work when it so consumed her. When she’d rather be there than anywhere else. Surely there was a price. Time seemed to be moving faster all around them, and all of them pulling back on the reins as hard as they could, in their own ways.

  Now Ada placed a new card into her old black typewriter, which she’d modified thusly to generate punch cards: When typing her words into the typewriter, a subregime in its works reassembled them into Commonplace’s logic, so she could say whatever she wanted without having to anguish over card syntax. It was one of her favorite accomplishments, but it was also the least demanding: Taking one language in substitution for another was all she knew how to do.

  Adelaide absentmindedly began to peck at the keys. COMMONPLACE, she typed with a smile, WHAT SHALL I DO FOR A SUITABLE NANNY?

  The silvery mind within the machine turned and glinted silently.

  PARAMETERS FOR TIME, came the response. She shook her head.

  NOT A GOVERNESS

  NEITHER YOUNG NOR OLD

  GOOD AGAINST IMAGINARY INDIANS

  CAN PLAY THE DRUMS, she added on a whim, before inserting the card. She couldn’t remember if she’d taught it that word yet.

  The machine whirred, as though laughing at her for wasting the card. PARAMETERS FOR TIME, it said again.

  She sighed, then turned the old thing off. The children would be home from the neighbors’ soon, and she’d have to get their dinner ready, and clean up before Papa came home. No time for games now.