by Sean Wallace
With her gloved hands she scooped them up and stabbed, shoving the blades down into the body of the mobile inferno once named Ted. She withdrew the blades and shoved them down again because the clockwork boy still kicked, and the third time she jammed the scissors into the little body she jerked Ted down off the ledge and flung it to the floor.
The sound of breaking gears and splitting seams joined the popping gasp of the fire as it ate the books and gnawed at the ends of the tables.
“A blanket!” Madeline yelled. “Bring me a blanket!”
Reluctantly, Edwin uncovered the shrouded doctor and wadded the blanket between his hands. He threw the blanket to Madeline.
She caught it, and unwrapped it enough to flap it down atop the hissing machine, and she beat it again and again, smothering the fire as she struck the mechanical boy. Something broke beneath the sheet, and the chewing tongues of flame devoured the cloth that covered Tanglefoot’s joints, leaving only a tragic frame beneath the smoldering covers.
Suddenly and harshly, a bucket of water doused Madeline from behind.
Seconds later she was seized.
Edwin tried to intervene. He divided his attention between the doctor, who cowered against the wall, and the madwoman with the bleeding feet and hair that reeked like cooking trash.
He held up his hands and said, “Don’t! No, you can’t! No, she was only trying to help!” And he tripped over his own feet, and the pile of steaming clockwork parts on the floor. “No,” he cried, because he couldn’t speak without choking. “No, you can’t take her away. Don’t hurt her, please. It’s my fault.”
Dr Williams was there, and Edwin didn’t know when he’d arrived. The smoke was stinging his eyes and the whimpers of Dr Smeeks were distracting his ears, but there was Dr Williams, preparing to administer a washcloth soaked in ether to Madeline’s face.
Dr Williams said to his colleague, a burly man who held Madeline’s arms behind her back, “I don’t know how she escaped this time.”
Edwin insisted, “I did it!”
But Madeline gave him a glare and said, “The boy’s as daft as his mother. The clockwork boy, it called me, and I destroyed it. I let myself out, like the witch I am and the fiend you think I must be—”
And she might’ve said more, but the drug slipped up her nostrils and down her chest, and she sagged as she was dragged away.
“No,” Edwin gulped. “It isn’t fair. Don’t hurt her.”
No one was listening to him. Not Dr Smeeks, huddled in a corner. Not Madeline, unconscious and leaving. And not the bundle of burned and smashed parts in a pile beneath the book ledge, under a woolen covering. Edwin tried to lift the burned-up blanket but pieces of Ted came with it, fused to the charred fabric.
Nothing moved, and nothing grumbled with malice in the disassembled stack of ash-smeared plates, gears and screws.
Edwin returned to the doctor and climbed up against him, shuddering and moaning until Dr Smeeks wrapped his arms around the boy to say, “There, there. Parker, it’s only a little fire. I must’ve let the crucible heat too long, but look. They’re putting it out now. We’ll be fine.”
The boy’s chest seized up tight, and he bit his lips, and he sobbed.
Benedice Te
Jay Lake
Galvezton, Texian Republic, 10 May 1961
Algernon Black-Smith glanced back at the hissing scream of a pressure relief valve to see a great steam ram out of control. Eighteen feet high, twelve feet wide, with burnished copper eagles in relief across the steel airstreamed prow, the vehicle smashed across the electro-guide barrier in the center of the street and rolled toward him with the inevitability of Manifest Destiny.
Scattering wogs like ninepins, Algernon dashed for an open door. He looked behind him as he ran to see the steering bogies of the steam ram twist toward him – someone was trying to kill him! – but the mechanism’s momentum was too great. Spewing sparks off the cobbles of Mechanic Street, the ram toppled onto its right side as it swung in his direction, accompanied by the screams of terrified pedestrians and the stench of burning brakes. Algernon stopped in the doorway, horrified yet fascinated, as the huge machine surrendered to Sir Isaac’s immutable laws and rolled over the Galvezton foot traffic. Two Papist nuns were caught for a moment, their red faces shrieking within their white wimples, before the careening ram ground them to sludge between the cobbles.
The ram continued to roll, its back end describing an arc with a radius equivalent to the engine’s forty or so feet. Horses, mules, men and women: all fell before the mighty wall of metal. White gas lamps lining the electro-way exploded as the sliding ram snapped their poles and gutted their plumbing. It came to rest, frame out, against the block of buildings in which Algernon sheltered. A cloud of damp, heavy dust settled over the entire scene.
Appalled at the carnage, and what was intended to be his starring role therein, Algernon reached up to touch the fresnel lens of the steam ram’s vast headlamp, a cyclopean orb vacant of reason.
The warm glass stung his fingertips, bringing Algernon back to himself. Simple prudence and good tradecraft alike dictated a swift retreat from a damaged boiler of that size. As Algernon pushed his way through screaming wogs toward the back of a ragged, stinking little chop house, he wondered which of his friends or enemies wanted to kill him in such a messy, public way. Behind him, escaping steam screeched in a steadily rising wail.
“Mr Black-Smith, the Consul-General will see you now.” The butler, an Iberian almost as well comported as an honest Englishman, bowed. The fellow smelled of barley water.
Algernon followed him along marble-tiled halls to a large set of doors, gilded with an inlaid hagiography of precious gems. Her Imperial Majesty’s Consulate-General in Galvezton was located in the Bishop’s Palace, that worthy having been summarily invited some years earlier by the Royal Marines to remove himself to other quarters. The business was a continuing minor scandal in Mexico City and Rome, but the dignity of the British Empire had been at stake, Galvezton being the largest port in the eastern Americas. It apparently pleased the current Consul-General to retain much of the Papist decor of the place. The hushed quiet and elaborate artwork were a startling contrast to the chaos of yesterday’s events.
The butler swung open one door and announced Algernon. “Mr Algernon Black-Smith, British subject, gentleman, bachelor of arts of Balliol College, Oxford, master of laws of the Sorbonne, in Her Imperial Majesty’s service without portfolio, paying a courtesy call.”
“Eh,” grunted the Consul-General. “Come in.”
Algernon stepped into the office. The sun glowed through tall stained glass windows in all the colors Spanish art could produce. The thick walls of the Bishop’s Palace showed in the depth of the window wells. The room had that strangely gentle scent of paper rot that one found in old mansions.
The Consul-General, Lord Quinnipiac, was a rough-featured man with blue marbled eyes set in a classically aristocratic horsey face. The man possessed every advantage of breeding and position Algernon so painfully lacked, and so Algernon regarded him with an automatic resentment.
Quinnipiac sat at a scarred worktable, a small mechanism spread before him in pieces. “Ironman,” the Consul-General said, renewing his examination of the pieces on the tabletop. Algernon hated that nickname with a passion, but it had followed him from Public School through university and into the Queen’s service.
“Sir, the world is broad and wide.” It was the opening line of the most ordinary secret recognition phrase used by his branch of Her Imperial Majesty’s service.
“One should have stout men by one’s side,” replied Lord Quinnipiac. That was the most common response. He looked back up from his mechanology project with a toothy smile. “Welcome to my humble abode here in the cloaca of the Texian Republic.”
“Sir.” Algernon stood at respectful attention. He was newly assigned to Galvezton as Facilitator-in-place for the Confidential Office. The Consul-General was not within Algernon’s chain of
command, but in every other way that counted, the man stood above Algernon in Her Imperial Majesty’s service, and probably always would. If nothing else, he had a claim on Algernon’s time and attention by virtue of his office.
Lord Quinnipiac waved the valve cap of a hydraulic pressure line at a copy of the Galvezton Daily News resting on one end of his worktable. “Some damned fool has destroyed a valuable steam ram downtown yesterday. Fenian scum, I’ll wager, stirring up trouble for the old sod once again. No respect for property. Fecking white wogs, those Irish.”
“What sort of ram?” asked Algernon, avoiding the Irish question. What was Lord Quinnipiac telling him, summoning him to the Bishop’s Palace just to bring this up? In Algernon’s imagination burnished copper eagles screamed with the sound of escaping steam.
Lord Quinnipiac put down the pressure line and picked up the newspaper, shaking it out to study the article. “Ah. No great loss. Colonial make. Olds-Edison Carg-O-Master VI, it would seem.” He laughed. “Our Texian friends never seem to tire of buying inferior mechanology for political reasons. If I ruled only three hundred sea miles from the homeport of the French Caribbean Fleet, I would damned well ensure I had the best British manufacture in every essential application.”
Algernon wanted to leave the subject of the steam ram, but his attempted murder had the fascination of an old bruise. Why the deuce was Quinnipiac going on about it? “How was the engine destroyed? Surely not by happenstance.”
Without referring to the paper, Quinnipiac looked Algernon in the eye. “The ram jumped the electro-guide, rolled over and slid across Mechanic Street. Shoved up against a building, then the main boiler blew.”
He does know, thought Algernon. He had something to do with it, somehow. But why? “Anyone hurt?”
“No sign of the engineer. Some wogs died, but no one of significance.”
So we are pretending it wasn’t about me. “I presume the newspaper gives a cause for this accident.”
The Consul-General’s marbled blue eyes peered out of his long, wind-reddened face as he studied Algernon. “No, Mr BlackSmith, it offers no explanation. Do you have a theory?”
“No, sir.” He didn’t dare express his personal interest in the problem. Let Quinnipiac think him a fool.
“Very well then.” Lord Quinnipiac shrugged, tossing the paper to the floor. “As it happens, I would have you travel to San Antonio de Bexar.”
San Antonio de Bexar was the capital of the Texian Republic and seat of the Roman Catholic Church in the Americas. An uneasy relationship at best, Algernon knew. And perfectly well staffed with his colleagues from the Confidential Office. “Sir?”
“The Archbishop and the Mexican throne have conspired to steal certain of Her Imperial Majesty’s privy secrets. They have concealed their ill-gotten booty in Texian territory in hopes of throwing us off the scent. This is being handled through my office for reasons of, ah . . . confidentiality.” Quinnipiac actually winked at him.
Algernon nodded slowly. The Consul-General was playing an odd game, verbal orders outside the chain of command, no briefing books, no bona fides from Algernon’s own superiors in the Confidential Office. This stank of high politics.
Quinnipiac continued. “The problems in Boston and London have been dealt with, and we are looking into diplomatic leaks in Her Imperial Majesty’s High Commission in San Antonio de Bexar, but I need someone trustworthy to recover what he can of the documentation.”
“I see,” said Algernon, who didn’t. The steam ram’s “accident” had to be connected with this affair. The Consul-General didn’t have the right to order Algernon on this wild goose chase, but the other man certainly had the right to ask him to pursue it. And it would give Algernon a chance to find out why he’d been so publicly attacked. “I shall depart forthwith, sir.”
“Very well. I will send a pneumat-o-graph informing your superiors that you have graciously taken the assignment at my request. You may draw whatever funds you require from my bursar.”
The Consul-General returned his attention to the project on the table. Algernon watched him slide cylinders and valves together for a few moments before speaking again. “Sir?”
Lord Quinnipiac looked up, annoyance flashing in his marbled eyes. “You have your orders.”
“What have they stolen? For what am I looking?”
“That’s an Official Secret, my boy. Afraid I can’t tell you. But you’ll know it when you see it. There can’t be too many of Her Imperial Majesty’s Crown Privy Report binders laying about in San Antonio de Bexar.”
“Thank you, sir.” Algernon bowed, turned to leave. As he approached the double doors, there was a sharp crackle from behind him, then a whoosh as something whined past his shoulder to shatter against the upper panel of the left-hand door. Chips of wood and shards of gem inlay burst into the air. Algernon momentarily shielded his eyes with a forearm, then turned back to the Consul-General.
Lord Quinnipiac held the smallest pistol Algernon had ever seen, the hydraulic pressure line clipped to the butt of its grip. The room reeked of machine oil. “Watch yourself, boy.” The Consul-General’s expression was flat, devoid of the humor in his voice. “Texas is a dangerous place.”
The express train from Galvezton to San Antonio de Bexar passed without stopping through a few small towns, some Anglo-Texian, some Mexican wog, some native wog. Mostly it passed through countless miles of Texas coastal swamp that eventually transitioned to blackland prairie. To Algernon’s eye, the landscape had merely exchanged one sullen, grassy aspect for another.
The Texians had not yet constructed the latest generation of ordinator-controlled pneumatic-vacuum underground railroads now common in Europe, so the express only went about eighty miles per hour on surface rails. A zeppelin would have been far more comfortable, but the schedule was inconvenient. Algernon used the hours in his private compartment to wonder who had tried to kill him, and what role Quinnipiac might have held in the affair. By God, thought Algernon, nobody would play him the patsy.
The crime must be connected with the missing Crown Privy Report binder in San Antonio de Bexar. Even if Quinnipiac wasn’t playing him straight, it was unlikely the Consul-General would have directly arranged such a public death for one of Her Imperial Majesty’s civil servants. Algernon wondered how accidental Quinnipiac’s hydraulic pistol discharge had been. A warning, certainly, not an attempt on his life.
He would never be free of high-born idiots like Quinnipiac interfering with his career. Algernon had been born to a bourgeois family in Baltimore, that self-contradictory capital-in-exile of British Papism. His parents’ aspirations had sent him to Public School in New England and on to Oxford, while sending them – eventually – to the poorhouse, much to his great disgrace. Algernon would never live down his middle birth no matter how far he moved up along the fringes of power.
And move up he had. His first mission as one of Her Imperial Majesty’s Confidential Office Facilitators had been a virtual death sentence, but Algernon had succeeded against long odds. On his own in the protectorate Buddhist Kingdom of Mongolia he had recovered the Crown of the Bogd Khan from Chinese-backed Kazakh insurgents and single-handedly negotiated the capitulation of Urga to the besieging Royal Marines.
That early and spectacular success had only led him to equally daunting assignments, first in Russian Aleskaya, then in German East Africa, until some higher-up in the Confidential Office realized he was doing too well too soon in his career for one of his undistinguished birth. Since the fall of ’59, Algernon had been shunted aside from serious work, relegated to messaging diplomatic bags via steam packet or zeppelin to obscure ports such as Windhoek, Goa and Vancouver. Being sent to Galvezton as Facilitator-in-place had, relatively speaking, seemed a plum job.
However shaky its legitimacy, this new assignment to San Antonio de Bexar would enable Algernon to create a success that could not be ignored. He could put paid to his anonymous enemy and count coup against the nobly titled twits who ran his life.
Smiling, Algernon leaned his head against the window glass to feel the vibration of the train in the bones of his skull. The endless South Texas prairie outside his window offered no further counsel.
San Antonio de Bexar, Texian Republic, 13 May 1961
The Texian capital straddled the San Antonio River. On the north bank stretched the vast complex of the Alamo, old ramified adobe parapets surrounded by soaring glass edifices. The Alamo complex held both the seat of Papist authority in the Western Hemisphere as well as the government of the secular Republic, an uneasy mixed use. The south bank was the secular city, great merchant banks and insurance companies, their twenty-storey granite skytowers connected by a Swiss funicular, the very latest in transportation mechanology. The Mexican High Commission dominated the south bank, facing off the Alamo with a frighteningly misplaced gothic architecture in an echo of old conflicts, complete with an heroic statue of Santa Anna cast from the bronze of captured Texian cannons. Connecting pneumatic and funicular lines raveled all the buildings, as they did in many frontier cities. London at least had the grace to conceal hers beneath the street.
Passing through the city center, the Galvezton Express rolled into the enclosed Estación de Alamo with a scream of brakes and shrieking steam. Algernon disembarked into the close, musky air of the platform, amid wogs shouting at one another in Spanish, French, Indio tongues and some few in English. Texian, Mexican and Church couriers stood by the sealed cars at the back of the train, dashing away one after another with their black-and-red confidential bags. Nowhere amid the chaos did Algernon see anyone from Her Imperial Majesty’s government. Unsurprising, if Lord Quinnipiac truly feared leaks in the High Commission here. The Consul-General would scarcely have notified anyone of Algernon’s arrival. The implication was clear: Algernon should not try to contact the local facilitator from the Confidential Office, not until he had learned more.
Which was fine. Algernon had always preferred to work on his own, without close supervision. Furthermore, in this case, he had a personal concern – finding his would-be murderer – that was better kept to himself.