by Sean Wallace
Chabane followed the Guards through the 60th Street entrance and into the Columbian Exhibition itself. With only two weeks to go before the grand opening, it was clear there was still a significant amount of work to be done. The grounds were covered with litter and debris, with deep ruts cut across the greens. Lumber was piled haphazardly at the intersections of pathways, and empty crates and the discarded remains of workers’ lunches were strewn everywhere.
The Guards continued east, past the Children’s Building and the north end of the Horticultural Exhibition, before turning right and heading south along the western shores of the Lagoon. Chabane trailed behind, and when he rounded the corner of the Horticultural building, he could see the gentle rise of the Wooded Island in the middle of the Lagoon. Since he’d last come this way, they’d finished work on the fanciful reconstruction of the “Antediluvian” temple at the southern tip of the island. Supposedly based on archeological findings in Antarctica, it looked more like something out of Mezian’s story-papers. Also new since he’d last seen the Lagoon were the miniature submersibles bobbling along on the water’s surface, waiting for patrons to rent them for brief excursions to the bottom of the Lagoon once the Exhibition opened.
Chabane couldn’t help wondering what Captain Nemo would have made of that.
For that matter, what might Verne himself have made of the airship now drifting at anchor atop the mast just visible on the far side of the Lagoon, past the Manufactures building, on the pier out over Lake Michigan. It was a prometheic airship, its envelope buoyed by the red vapor produced by the reaction of prometheum and charcoal.
Prometheum was such a simple substance. It looked like water and flowed like mercury. Add it to water, and it would set the water to boil. Add it to charcoal, and it turned the charcoal into still more prometheum. Put it in a vacuum and shake it, and it glowed bright white.
Now that the sun had slipped below the buildings to the west, the park’s lamplighters had set to work, cranking the clockwork mechanisms at the base of each lamppost that set the cut-glass globes at the top of the posts to vibrating, agitating the prometheum within. Chabane had a pendant on his lapel, a little crystal flask, stopped with silver. If he were to shake it now, the clear, viscous liquid within would glow soft white, and not dim until almost sunrise.
Chabane watched as the Guards continued past the Transportation building, then turned left into the so-called Court of Honor, with the golden dome of the Administration building at its center. Chabane hurried his pace, so as not to lose sight of which building they entered.
As he rounded the corner of the Automata Exhibition, Chabane watched as the three Guards hurried through the massive doors of the Machinery Exhibition across the way. He followed behind at a somewhat more leisurely pace.
To Chabane’s left, opposite the massive Machinery hall, were the twin Automata and Prometheum buildings. Between them stood the fifteen-foot tall statue of Cadwalader Ringgold, in one hand a sextant, in the other a model of the crab-like Antediluvian automaton he’d brought back from the South Pole.
Of course, Ringgold hadn’t been the first to return with one of the automata, the first proof of the existence of the “Antediluvians”. That honor had fallen to James Clark Ross, who had brought back the broken husk of a mechanism with articulated limbs from the island that now bears his name in 1843, the year after Ringgold and the rest of the Wilkes Expedition had returned from the south seas. This had set off a race to the Pole, to find other examples of this strange, unknown technology. The Ringgold Expedition had won the golden ring when they returned with another, more intact automaton from deep within an icy mountain crevasse, in whose tiny engine there still rested a few precious drops of prometheum. A few drops were enough to change history, though, since added to charcoal it quickly produced more. And in short order, the automaton itself had been reverse-engineered.
The debate still raged about just who the Antediluvians had been. Had they been some forgotten race of man? Or visitors from another world or plane of existence? Some wild-eyed savants even suggested that the Antediluvians were actually the originals of the Atlantis myth, their existence remembered only in legend. All that was known for certain was that they had left behind a scant few examples of a technology that far outstripped that of modern man in the 1850s.
It had not taken modern man long to catch up, Chabane mused, as he passed through the entrance into the Machinery Exhibition.
The interior of the building was massive, looking like three railroad train-houses side by side. And though many of the stalls and booths were already installed, there was still considerable work to be done before the park opened, and the massive steam-powered cranes mounted overhead still hurried from one end of the building to the other and back again, time and again, moving the heavy machinery into place.
At the far left of the building, the west end of the hall, were installations from other countries – Canada, Great Britain, Austria, Germany, France – with the rest being American products. Behind the far wall, on the southern face of the building, was the boiler-house, where tanks of lake water were impregnated with small amounts of prometheum, which set them to boil almost immediately, transforming hundreds of gallons into steam in a matter of moments.
Nearly all of the exhibits drew their power from the steam-powered line shafts spinning at between 250 and 300 revolutions a minute, running from one end of the hall to the other at fourteen feet above the ground. Pulleys were strung from the drive shafts down to the exhibit stalls, strung tight as guitar strings, powering more kinds of machines than Chabane had known existed: water pumps, bottling mechanisms, refrigerating apparatus, trip-hammers, sawmill blades, printing presses, stone-saws, refinery mechanisms, and others whose uses he could scarcely guess. All powered by prometheic steam and, according to the banners and typewritten signs hung on each installation, all of them profitable, the marvels of the age.
In the south-east corner of the building, though, where Chabane could see the Columbian Guards congregating, could be found less marvelous, less profitable exhibits. And it was around the smallest of these that the Guards were now milling.
There wasn’t much to the exhibit, just a shack, a banner proclaiming The Latter-Day Lazarus, a podium, a few pedestals, and a table designed to lever up on one end. The only machinery in evidence appeared to be some sort of motor, attached by a pulley to the drive shaft overhead. But the motor wasn’t attached to anything but a pair of long, thick cables, one of which snaked towards the shack, the other towards the levered table. It took Chabane a moment to recognize it as the same sort of device he’d seen displayed in London, years before. It was a machine for generating electricity.
Outside of Mezian’s dime novel, Chabane had heard precious little about electricity in years. It had been something of a novelty a few years back, and marketed as a new brand of patent medicine before the danger of electrocution had driven it from catalog pages all together, but aside from its use in telegraphy it was now all but abandoned. What was the product or device promoted by this “Lazarus” exhibit, and why the unnecessary risk of electricity?
The Columbian Guards he’d trailed had joined with the others already on hand, inspecting the area. Most of them were already inside the shack, which appeared to be the scene of the crime. Intent on their work, none seemed to pay any notice to Chabane. It wasn’t surprising. Like many of the Americans he’d encountered since the last summer, the Guards seemed to look upon men and women with dark complexions as nothing more than menials – janitors, gardeners, busboys, maids – and so Chabane had found it possible to slip in and out of groups of them all but unnoticed, effectively invisible.
With his eyes down and an unthreatening expression on his face, Chabane slipped into the shack. He had expected to see a body, perhaps some blood or signs of violence. What he found, instead, was like something from a Grand Guignol.
On the dusty floor, covered by a sheet, was a still human form, presumably the body of the dead man. Ove
rhead, wire cages hung empty from the tarpapered ceiling, the floor of each caked in excrement.
The center of the shack was dominated by a bed-sized bench, with casters on the legs, and straps at either end and in the middle. Affixed to the top of the bench was a boxy metal frame, from one corner of which a thick cable snaked down and under the shack’s thin wooden wall. The ground around the bench was strewn with jagged bits of glass that crunched underfoot.
Beside the bench was a low table, on which were piled strange implements, saws, pliers and clamps, along with what appeared to be various automata components. And what Chabane at first took to be strips of meat were scattered on the table and the surrounding ground, and pools of dark liquid congealing scab-like.
An abattoir stench hung thick in the air, and as Chabane stepped over to the nearest of the three barrels at the rear of the shack, he found the source of the smell. In the barrel was heaped viscera, blood, flesh and bones. Chabane started, covering his mouth and gagging, then recognized the tiny child-like limbs as those of a monkey. Beside the limbs he saw the remains of a monkey skull, cut in half like a grapefruit, the brain scooped out. He remembered the animals missing from the Street in Cairo concession, and suppressed a shudder.
“What in God’s name is this?” came a blustering voice from the shack’s open door.
Chabane turned to see the chief of the Columbian Guard, Colonel Edmund Rice, shouldering into the shack, behind him another man with thinning hair and a prominent mustache.
“There’s been a murder,” one of the Guards explained, unnecessarily.
Rice shot the man a bewildered look, then shook his head, muttering something about the quality of officers he had at his disposal, comparing them unflatteringly to the 14th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.
Chabane had accompanied Sol Bloom to a few meetings with Colonel Rice, but doubted the man had ever noticed he was there. Certainly, Rice hardly seemed to notice him now.
“Well, Robinson?” Rice turned to the mustached man behind him, who Chabane now recognized as L. W. Robinson, chief of the Columbian Exhibition’s Machinery department. The Colonel reached down and flicked the blanket off the body on the floor. “Do you know this man?”
Robinson peered down at the burnt and bludgeoned man on the floor, and with a queasy expression quickly nodded. “Yes, I know him.” He straightened up and looked away. “That’s Tom Edison.”
Rice narrowed his eyes in concentration, and looked from Robinson to the dead man. “I know the name, but can’t place it.”
Robinson nodded again. “Was a bit famous for a time. He invented the phonograph, you may recall?” The Colonel shook his head. “In any event, I only spoke with him briefly when he secured his spot in the hall, but it appeared that he’d sunk his fortunes into electricity years ago, and simply couldn’t see a way out.”
“Electricity?” the colonel repeated, disbelievingly. “Whyever for?”
Robinson shrugged. “Who can say? I tried to explain to him that there simply wasn’t any call for such things, not with prometheic steam engines and lights and automation and such, that he might as well try selling butter churns. But Edison was not to be deterred. He had that wild-eyed look you see in religious zealots, you know the type? He was determined to find a way to make his . . . now what did he call them? Oh yes, his dynamos profitable.”
“That’s a ‘dynamo’ out front, I take it?” Rice asked.
The Machinery chief nodded. “Sad, isn’t it? Still, Edison wasn’t the only one. I’ve heard of a number of inventors and investors who’d hung all their hopes on electricity, in the years before prometheum really took hold. Most ended up going off into industries or trades, sooner or later. I even heard of one, a Serbian I believe, who became a writer of cheap fictions.” He looked back to the dead man on the ground, grimacing at the gruesome sight. “Clearly, though, Edison hadn’t been able to adapt. And it got him in the end. Unless I’m mistaken, he shows every sign of being electrocuted.”
One of the Guards stepped forward, and Chabane recognized him as the one from the Midway who was so quick with the racial epithets. “What do these dyna—dynami— dyna—” He shook his head. “What do these things have to do with this ‘Latter-Day Lazarus’ business? Was your man here intending to raise the dead with this electric thing?”
“If he was,” another Guard called from the rear of the shack, “I think he was doing it one piece at a time.” The Guard held aloft a severed arm, far too large to have come off any monkey.
“Jesus wept!” Rice spat, rearing back.
The Guards began muttering to one another, and Chabane distinctly heard several mentions of “grave-robbing” and “workmen’s bodies”.
“What?” Chabane said, stepping forward, for the first time making his presence known. “What did you say about the workmen’s graves?”
The others turned to him, most of them seeming to notice him for the first time.
“You’re that Jew’s Arab, aren’t you?” the Colonel said, narrowing his gaze.
Chabane drew himself up straighter, and in perfect Queen’s English replied, “I am Kabyle, sir, and not of Arab descent, but I am presently in the employ of Mr Bloom, if that is what you mean.” His hands at his sides tightened into fists, but he managed to maintain a calm exterior. “What was the mention of grave-robbing and the remains of the workmen?”
Rice glanced to Robinson, who looked as confused as Chabane, and then back. “It’s not public knowledge, and if the papers get word of it I’ll know where from. But some of the graves to the south have been disturbed, and the bodies laid to rest there have gone missing.”
“Would that include the Algerian who drowned in the lake?” Chabane asked.
Rice shrugged. “Only the Christian graves are marked, as I understand it.”
Chabane ignored Rice, and looked back to the barrels, from which the Guards were still pulling cadaver parts. There were severed hands and feet, a leg, two arms, bits of skulls, even a complete torso. He barred his teeth in a snarl, and turned to look down on the dead man on the floor. “My grandmothers always said that no one is to be lamented who dies during Ramadan, during which the gates of hell are closed and those of heaven always open. It doesn’t seem quite right that a man such as this should get into the gates of heaven uncontested, even if he was murdered.”
“Now hold on,” Rice objected, holding up his hands. “No one said anything about murder.”
“They didn’t?” Robinson asked, eyebrows raised.
Rice turned to the chief of Machinery, fixing him with a hard glare. “You yourself said this was an electrocution, right? An accidental electrocution?”
Robinson’s hands fluttered like caged birds. “I suppose it could have been,” he allowed. “But what about —” he waved at the broken glass, the scattered tools, the splattered blood and viscera “—all of this?”
“This,” Rice said evenly, “could well be simple vandalism. And vandalism is an entirely different order of magnitude to murder. Murder will get plastered over every paper in the country, and run the risk of turning paying customers away, if they think the killer is at large. One more accidental death and a spot of vandalism, that we can handle.”
“You’re joking, of course,” Chabane objected. “Have you no interest in seeing justice done?”
Rice glared at him. “There must be some jobs down south the automata won’t do, boy. Why don’t you get down there with the rest of the darkies and make yourself useful?”
Chabane bristled. There were still a few slaves in the southern United States, not yet supplanted by cheap automata. That this man could so casually dismiss their continued suffering in an offhand slight brought Chabane’s blood to boil. For an instant, he almost forgot the welfare of the troupe to whom he’d pledged himself, or the stranger who had stumbled beneath the shelter of Chabane’s protection. If he’d been on his own, not responsible for anyone but himself, Chabane would have wished for nothing more than a flyssa saber in one
hand and a Webley pistol in the other, and he would show these pale-skinned buffoons his worth. But he wasn’t on his own, and he was responsible for many more souls than just his own.
Marshaling his last reserves of restraint, Chabane strode to the door, and left the shack of horrors behind.
As he made his way back to the Midway, the stars had come out in the darkened skies overhead, and the prometheic lamps were now bathing the park in the soft white glow that had given the exhibition its unofficial name, the White City. But as clean as the white-clad buildings looked in the pure prometheic light, Chabane knew that they were only plaster and boards, hiding the rot and void beneath.
Of course Rice and the rest of his tin soldiers were more concerned with pay checks than with justice, happy to paint a murder as an accident if it suited the Board of Directors, whitewashing away any chance of bad publicity. Still, Chabane wasn’t sure that justice hadn’t been done, anyway. He remembered another Kabyle superstition his grandmothers had taught him, that there are never any demons abroad during Ramadan, because God compels them to remain in hell throughout the sacred month. Having seen the gruesome work of the dead man, Chabane doubted any demon ever did worse.
Passing the Terminal Station, he exited the park grounds through the 64th Street entrance, heading north up Island Avenue. Just before reaching the Midway, something bright caught his eye, a splash of color on the pavement reflecting back the prometheic light from above. It was Mezian’s dime novel. Picking it up, Chabane flipped through the pages as he continued on towards the Algerian concession.
The prose was lurid, the action improbable, but there was something about the image of this future of electricity and equality presented by the author, that resonated with Chabane. This Nikola Tesla was no Jules Verne, but still Chabane was reminded of the sense of boundless potential he used to feel when reading the Extraordinary Voyages story-papers.
Before turning onto the Midway, Chabane saw a handbill posted to a lamppost, advertising the impending Opening Day celebrations for the Columbian Exhibition. In addition to the last living relative of Christopher Columbus, the Duke of Veragua, the most honored guest at the ceremony would be the octogenarian Abraham Lincoln, former President of the United States, who would be on hand to cut the ribbon on the Exhibition.