Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016

by Charlie Jane Anders

  The big man lifted a restraining hand. “One moment, if you please.” He raised his voice slightly. “Reasoning Machine, engage.”

  The automaton beside the mantelpiece turned its head and stepped forward.

  Never had Tacy seen—or even imagined—a machine so very nearly natural in its gait and movements as Mr. Holmes’s Reasoning Machine. Its face was a fine-drawn version of his own countenance—the nose a shade more aquiline, the cheeks narrower, the jaw more sharply cut, the dark hair more abundant. It was almost as tall as the inventor, but much thinner, and its eyes were the same silvery grey. It almost might have been Mr. Holmes’s younger brother.

  “Exquisite!” Sir Arthur breathed. Angharad reached over and squeezed Tacy’s hand painfully.

  Mr. Holmes steepled his fingers before his chest. “Order,” he said. “Interrogate. Subject: Robbery.”

  Lowering itself into a wing chair, the Reasoning Machine assumed an attitude the exact mirror of its creator’s. “What exactly has been stolen?” The resonant voice was neither metallic nor artificially musical; it would have sounded perfectly natural had it not been so utterly devoid of expression. Tacy shivered.

  Sir Arthur leaned forwards, blue eyes intent behind his silver spectacles. “My latest invention, the Illogic Engine.”

  “What is an Illogic Engine?”

  “Ah. Well.” Sir Arthur sat back, ready to lecture. “Simply stated, the Illogic Engine is a variation on the Logic Engine that drives intellects such as your own. It is designed to endow mechanicals with those aspects of human intelligence that exist independent of reason.”

  The Reasoning Machine’s fine brows lifted in a parody of surprise. “Engines are, by definition, logical. An Illogic Engine, therefore, cannot exist.”

  “It does, then,” Tacy snapped before she could stop herself. “And functions very well, look you, for a prototype.”

  After the mechanical’s even bass, her voice sounded high and shrill. She fell silent, blushing uncomfortably, though no one seemed to have noticed her outburst.

  “Where were you when the theft occurred?” the flat voice went on.

  “At a concert. Lord Wolford organized the party. Miss Gof and Mistress Cwmlech accompanied me—and our footman, James, of course. Mistress Cwmlech is unable to climb steps or walk far without assistance.”

  “And the other servants?”

  Sir Arthur glanced at Tacy, who answered in a self-conscious murmur. “The butler, the cook, the kitchen-maid, and the parlor-maid were all in the house.” She hesitated. “Also three guard mechanicals in the garden and one in the mews.”

  “Did any of these persons raise an alarm?”

  Persons. Tacy wondered if the Reasoning Machine had meant to include the guard mechanicals in the term. “The servants heard nothing,” she said. “The mechanicals were … incapacitated.”

  And not only the guard mechanicals, she reflected. Every piece of clockwork in the house had been frozen solid as a pond in January, from the hall clock to the toasting machine to the little cleaning mechanicals she had made to polish the workshop windows. It was all very disturbing, particularly as the nature of the sabotage made it unlikely that any common criminal could have been involved. It had to have been a mechanic, working with an inventor—or perhaps an inventor himself.

  But who? The inventors of England were a contentious lot: suspicious, secretive, jealous, liable to accusations and lawsuits and plagiarism. From jealousy to theft was not so great a step, if one were unscrupulous as well. The question was, which one of them could it have been?

  Tacy returned her attention to the interrogation, which was proceeding with logical precision.

  Had there been signs of forced entry? There had not, neither to the house nor the workshop. Who knew about the Illogic Engine? Miss Gof, of course, and Mistress Cwmlech. Miss Gof’s father and one Mr. Stanton, who had been his tutor. And Lord Wolford, and perhaps one or two other members of the Royal Society, whose advice Sir Arthur had solicited on one subject or another. “Including,” Sir Arthur said, with a bow to Mr. Holmes, “your distinguished creator’s.”

  The inventor, who had been sitting with his eyes closed, as if half-asleep, opened them again. “I was happy to be of assistance,” he said graciously. “Well, we have enough to be going on with, I think. Order: Theorize.”

  The mechanical went very still. Tacy glanced at Sir Arthur, who gazed at it with the air of a dog expecting a treat. He clearly believed Mr. Holmes’s mechanical detective capable of pulling the missing Engine from the narrative, like a rabbit from a hat. Somewhat to her own surprise, Tacy shared neither Sir Arthur’s optimism nor his admiration of the big man’s creation. Accustomed to mechanicals from the cradle as she was, she found herself regarding the Reasoning Machine with a discomfort that surprised as much as it distressed her.

  The thing is so very nearly human, she thought, and yet it remained a thing, while Angharad, with her obviously mechanical voice, grinding joints, and immovable features, seemed fully human to her. Was it her friendship with Angharad that made the difference?

  The Machine’s flat voice recalled Tacy’s wandering thoughts. “Current data suggest two possibilities. One: A rival inventor or a hireling of such an inventor. Suspects: Lord Wolford, Mr. Jeremiah Stanton, Mr. Arthur Fairleigh, Mr. Mycroft Holmes.”

  Sir Arthur bridled. “That is impossible! Lord Wolford is a most honorable gentleman. Mr. Holmes is—well—Mr. Holmes, you know! And I would trust both Mr. Fairleigh and Mr. Stanton with anything you care to name. They would never—”

  The big man held up a restraining hand. “Lord Wolford is an inventor,” he said. “As are Mr. Stanton and Mr. Fairleigh—as am I, come to that. We all stand to gain by stealing your Engine. And Lord Wolford’s invitation did take you from home last night.”

  “He was my father’s friend,” Sir Arthur said stubbornly. “I will not believe it.”

  Tacy restrained herself from pointing out that this said more about Sir Arthur’s character than Lord Wolford’s.

  Mr. Holmes shook his head. He seemed about to remonstrate with Sir Arthur when Angharad chimed in, “Order: State second possibility.”

  After a pause, which Tacy could not help perceiving as startled, the Reasoning Machine said, “Two: A personal enemy. Suspect: Mr. Amos Gotobed.”

  “Impossible!” Sir Arthur said, and this time, Tacy agreed.

  “But he is in prison,” she exclaimed. “Thirty years in Dartmoor, the sentence was.”

  Mr. Holmes shrugged. “Order,” he said. “Search newspaper files. Subject: Amos Gotobed.”

  “Amos Gotobed. Remitted to Dartmoor Prison, August 1875. Escaped from Dartmoor Prison, February 24, 1880.”

  Escaped! Tacy grew cold. A hand took hers—a mechanical hand, hard and chill under its kidskin covering, but the hand of a friend, and she clutched it desperately. Angharad understood. She had been present in her ghostly form the night Gotobed and his thugs had overturned Sir Arthur’s workshop at Cwmlech Manor. With true Cwmlech recklessness, she had leapt into an expensive French automaton Sir Arthur had purchased to study and attacked Gotobed with a hammer. Even though the adventure had ended with the criminal safely locked up in prison, Tacy still woke in the night from dreams of a hulking Gotobed smashing machines and mechanicals and delicate tools as he laughed like the fiend he was.

  Oblivious to Tacy’s distress, the Reasoning Machine went on, “Scotland Yard have received reports from Newcastle, Maidenhead, and Aberdeen. It is thought that he—”

  “Order: Stop,” Mr. Holmes said, and the Machine fell silent.

  Sir Arthur looked stricken. “I borrowed money from Gotobed, you know, after my father died, leaving me without a feather to fly with. I regretted it almost immediately. It seems I am still to regret it.” He lifted his head. “Will you take the case, Mr. Holmes?”

  “My dear fellow,” the big man said. “Of course we will. We should be at your disposal by this evening—tomorrow forenoon at the latest. In the meant
ime, I suggest you report the robbery to the police. Inspector Gregson is the man to ask for. He has called us in several times to consult on one affair or another, and understands our methods. You may use my name.”

  The interview was over.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Tacy and Angharad sat in the drawing room, waiting for Sir Arthur to return from Scotland Yard. Angharad turned over the cards of a game of patience while Tacy stared blankly at a monograph she’d been meaning to read by one Peter Cantrip, Esq., DSc(Oxon). It concerned the effects of certain sound waves on metal, a subject of deep interest to her, but try as she might, she could not progress past the first paragraph, or say what had been in it.

  Tacy laid the monograph aside, collected her wooden whistle from the mantel, and raised it to her lips. There was a whistle in the library, too, and a clarinet in the workshop, for Tacy found music a great aid to thought, as well as a balm to a troubled spirit. She had tootled her way through one Welsh hymn and was beginning another when Angharad said, “Your clarinet I can bear, but ‘Llef’ upon a pennywhistle is beyond human endurance. Give over, Tacy, my little one, and come watch my play.”

  Reluctantly, Tacy set down the whistle and sat at the table where Angharad was shuffling for another game. The mechanical fingers creaked like an ancient beldam’s as she tapped the cards even. Tacy regretted, not for the first time, that the automaton Angharad haunted was only a rich man’s toy, its joints and gears not designed for hard use. The legs had weakened first, then the finger and jaw hinges, so that the rosy mouth always hung slightly ajar.

  As Tacy watched, Angharad fumbled the shuffle, spraying the cards broadcast. She cursed blisteringly in Welsh. “Oh, why cannot I have a body like the mechanical detective’s, with its joints like oil and its mouth that could smile did the creature only know how?”

  “Perhaps Mr. Holmes will make you one,” Tacy said.

  “More important things to do, he has—playing God on the sixth day, for one. In any case, I do not know how a transfer from one body to another might affect me. I did but jest.”

  “I know. But perhaps you might let him replace your joints with something better. A pulley more or less cannot make a difference.”

  Angharad raised a warning hand. “Enough. If I will not suffer you—whom I love and trust as a sister—to lay hands upon this mechanical body, why would I suffer Mr. Mycroft Holmes, who is entirely unknown to me? I haunted Cwmlech Manor for upwards of two hundred years while it crumbled around me. At least in this new ruin I can be seen and heard and go about the world a little.”

  And that was her last word on the subject. Defeated, Tacy gathered up the cards, shuffled them, and returned them to Angharad, who laid out another hand. As they contemplated the new spread, Sir Arthur burst into the sitting room, accompanied by an acrid whiff of fog and a tall, tow-haired man in a checked coat.

  “This is Inspector Gregson of the Metropolitan Police,” Sir Arthur said. “Inspector, this is the lady I was telling you of, Miss Tacy Gof.”

  Inspector Gregson linked his hands behind his back. “Yes. Your assistant, I believe you said?”

  Something in his voice made Tacy lift her chin. “Sir Arthur is too kind. His apprentice, I am, articled before the Guild of Mechanics.”

  “I felicitate you,” Gregson said. This time the sneer was clearly audible. He turned his deep-set eyes to Angharad. “And this is the famous Ghost in the Machine.”

  Angharad placed a card with mechanical precision.

  “I thought it would move more natural-like,” Gregson remarked. “Does it talk?”

  “Of course I talk,” Angharad said without lifting her head. “Though not, I think, to you.”

  Sir Arthur’s thumb stole to his mouth and he nibbled at it uneasily. Tacy pressed her lips hard to keep from smiling. Gregson flushed brick red, but before he could gather his wits to speak, Sir Arthur’s butler appeared with the tea tray.

  Swindon had come into Sir Arthur’s service from the household of the Marquess of Nether Covington. He was a stately man who, Tacy suspected, felt as if he’d come down in the world. Today, in the wake of a theft, and with police in the house, he had something of the air of an early Christian martyr surrounded by lions. He accepted Gregson’s order to gather the servants for questioning with awful courtesy and bowed himself out.

  Tacy asked the inspector if he would like tea.

  Gregson eyed her with disdain. “This is an investigation, miss, not a tea party. Sir Arthur, if you will show me the workshop, I can get on with my job.”

  As the door closed behind Sir Arthur and the inspector, Angharad launched into a thoroughly seventeenth-century rodomontade on the subject of the encroaching ways of the lower classes when given the least measure of power.

  Tacy let her rant for a while, then said, mildly, “A member of the lower classes I am myself, look you. There’s nothing he said that has not been said to you before, by gentlemen of learning. You had your revenge on him. Now let it go.”

  Angharad lapsed into a sulky silence and Tacy addressed herself to Mrs. Swindon’s excellent salmon sandwiches and Mr. Cantrip’s monograph. She was lost in the effects of sonic wave-length on various metal alloys when Sir Arthur entered, looking worn.

  Angharad lifted her head with a click. “I suppose that fool Gregson has clapped Swindon in prison?”

  Sir Arthur sank into a chair and thrust his hands through his hair—not for the first time that day, judging from its wild tangle. “He has not. He has, however, driven both Mrs. Swindon and the parlor-maid into hysterical fits.”

  “Oh, dear.” Tacy handed him a cup of tea. “Did he discover anything of interest?”

  “He did. It seems Swindon is in the habit of playing darts at the Running Footman with a man called Albert Norris.” He sipped. “Tacy, this tea is cold!”

  “Drink it anyway.” With an effort, Tacy banished the image of the dignified Swindon at play. “Who is Albert Norris?”

  “A coachman, Swindon said. Swindon asked him to supper in the servant’s hall, where, as I understand, he was the life and soul of the party. Ethel was quite taken with him.”

  This meant nothing; the maid Ethel was taken with anything in trousers. “A handsome brute, no doubt.”

  Sir Arthur set down his cup. “Swindon described him as being of a fleshy habit, tall as a giant and red-faced. Mrs. Swindon mentioned fish eyes and a mouth like a letter-box, but that may be hindsight.”

  “Gotobed!” Angharad and Tacy exclaimed in chorus.

  Sir Arthur shrugged. “That is certainly what Gregson thinks. It seems this Norris appeared at the Running Footman not long after Gotobed’s escape from Dartmoor.”

  It all lined up like ducklings on a pond. After all, Gotobed was a convicted thief. Furthermore, he hated Sir Arthur and would be glad to do him a mischief. Even now, Tacy remembered how the scoundrel had scowled at her and Angharad throughout the trial and how he’d laughed when the judge sentenced him, saying he was sorry that convicts were no longer transported to Australia, as he’d always fancied foreign travel. A pity for Sir Arthur Cwmlech, too, he’d added, and smiled meaningfully.

  It was not a comfortable memory.

  “If it is Gotobed,” Sir Arthur said, “he might have been employed by someone else. Swindon mentioned Norris being in the service of one Mr. Peter Cantrip, whoever he may be. Though,” he added hopelessly, “I suppose the scoundrel must have been lying.”

  “Peter Cantrip! I was just reading—” Tacy handed the monograph to Sir Arthur, who glanced at it without much attention.

  “Very interesting. I shall certainly show it to Mr. Holmes when he comes. If he comes.” He let the pamphlet drop and buried his face in his hands.

  Tacy grasped his wrist and shook it gently. “Take heart, my dear. It’s tired you are, and no wonder, dealing with mechanicals and police and domestic upheaval, all on top of losing the Engine. We must trust in Mr. Holmes and his mechanical detective, and if they fail us, in our own ingenuity.�
�

  * * *

  Tacy woke the next morning to a brisk wind, a clear sky, and a smell of boiling linen rising from the yard where Mrs. Swindon was washing sheets. She dressed quickly and came down to the morning room. After days of fog and rain, it was good to see the sunlight playing over the breakfast table, illuminating the London Times Angharad had spread out before her and flashing from the letter knife Sir Arthur plied on the morning’s post.

  He did not look as though he had slept well.

  A glance at the toast rack established that Mrs. Swindon had burnt the toast quite black. Tacy understood this as a sign that the coddled eggs were likely to be hard as rocks, but took one anyway, piled marmalade on the toast to counteract the taste of carbon, and poured herself a cup of lukewarm tea.

  “Nothing from Mr. Holmes, I fear,” said Sir Arthur, “A letter from Mr. Slovinsky in Budapest, asking if his remarks on escapement pins were useful. I must have forgotten to write and thank him.”

  Angharad gave a discordant chime. “There’s dull you are, Arthur, with your endless mechanics! Can we not speak of something else? The agony column of the Times is full of interest this morning.” She leaned over the paper. “A gentleman has lost his mechanical dog in the fog, and a lady left her market basket on the Clapham bus. Full of eels it was, all alive-o—at least when she left them. Ah! Here’s a wonder: a medical doctor, lately returned from Afghanistan. Any decent employment considered, it says. A story there is in that, sure as eggs. Medical men do not easily abandon their Hippocratic oaths.”

  Sir Arthur, who had been surreptitiously reading his mail, gave a strangled cry and held up a sheet of heavy cream notepaper, his face alight. “From Mr. William Spottiswoode—the president of the Royal Society, you know—an invitation to luncheon! Perhaps he wishes me to speak at the symposium on artificial humanity.” He read further, his brow creasing. “This is odd. He most particularly asks me to bring Angharad with me.”

  Angharad turned her doll-face upon him. “Does he? Well, you may write your Mr. President Spottiswoode and tell him the Ghost in the Machine declines to be questioned and poked at and taken to bits, like as not.”