by Sean Wallace
MacMillan had known somehow just where he was about to leap and when, and had fired upon that spot at the perfect moment. When Lasher touched down, it was only to topple flat into the dirt, shuddering in something that was much less like pain than an intricate folding inside out of his complete consciousness.
And as he lay there in the road-filth, convulsing, a memory bubbled up out of the boiling mess of his beleaguered mind. It was some long-ago glimpsed young man – a boy, really – in a French guardsman’s uniform, with tears on his cheeks, standing before Lasher. Behind the lad, a string of naked bodies hung from a wall, and the lad held a rifle in his quivering hands. Lasher recalled a sensation of amusement to see a human so unable to do what was logical – to fire his weapon point blank, and hope the shot struck home.
And then he remembered the boy suddenly firing and the shock, and how it had jumbled his mind and sensations a moment later.
The current ceased to flow through MacMillan’s bolt and into him soon, far too quickly for any serious or permanent damage to his brainfoiling or coordinative gearworks. And yet, for the moment, he found he could not move his limbs: he was paralysed by the electrical shock.
Paralysed, and perplexed as well, for just then MacMillan crouched down beside him and, rather wearily, allowed his round old bottom to settle down against the dirt. Another memory surfaced from the black depths of Lasher’s mechanikal mind, of a scene much like this one, with Lasher’s own broken body cradled in the lap of another mechanika, one that he knew, one that had crafted and built him a mind so complex and advanced that the crafter-mechanika itself could not even understand its masterpiece’s thoughts.
“Just what am I to do with you, my dear Lasher?” MacMillan asked, his voice mournful. “And even when I had begun to hope you were developing, again, into something better than you had been. Something saner . . . I could see the changes in you, Lasher, and you were proceeding towards an . . . an understanding of the fact that man and mechanika could coexist in peace and even in harmony. But . . .” Lasher stared at the Scotsman’s face, and saw those eyes, those immense and perfect eyes of MacMillan’s.
“But now,” MacMillan whispered, “You’ve done it again. Joining in on the blood-spattering, the stupidity. Exulting in ruination you didn’t even plan. You would be as bad as them, if you had the chance, wouldn’t you?” MacMillan asked.
But this close to his old mentor, Lasher was distracted by a puzzling sound. He could not be sure, given his confusion, but he would have sworn it was coming from the vicinity of MacMillan’s torso, faint as it was.
Ticking . . . and the whisper-careful interlocking of gear-teeth.
Lasher’s mind spun, confusion overtaking it, with the question snipping and turning about in his mind as to whether mechanika could become delusional . . . as to whether MacMillan could truly have been a mechanika all these years, without Lasher noticing it. Perhaps that ticking was the old fellow’s pocket watch? Or could the sound be some product of his perplexed, shocked body, or the sound of the gearworks in his own chest? Surely, MacMillan himself could not be . . . surely it was some confusion of his senses, or a desire to see his human captor as something like himself – the same instinct that had led men to construct mechanika in human forms.
“My dear Lasher . . . what am I to do with you? I cannot bear to see another city torn down to ruins, its inhabitants murdered. You and all mechanika who think like you . . . you’re bringing ruin down upon yourselves . . . why can’t you understand that?” With a wrinkled (but eerily steady) hand, the Scotsman tore open Lasher’s shirt and opened the gearpanel in his chest. As MacMillan reached within, inexplicably, he paused.
Struggling to speak, Lasher said only, “Don’t.” Not pleading, not demanding. He simply said the word, staring into MacMillan’s eyes. In the silence that followed, Lasher heard only the strange ticking and the gearworks, a little louder, so clearly he felt it had begun to fill the whole world.
MacMillan inhaled deeply and stared back into Lasher’s eyes. Lasher saw the hesitation grow there, from what he imagined was the fertile soil of sympathy and hope, impeded from full blooming only by the stink of blood and murder on the air. Yet, MacMillan was hesitating even now to cripple his gearworks, to shut him down to be, once more, reconfigured . . . or, perhaps, destroyed.
The latter seemed, without even a moment’s reflection, far worse to Lasher.
What was it that gave MacMillan pause just then? The man’s motivation puzzled Lasher, despite all he knew of him, until he glimpsed it in his eyes. There was something else going on, some other, complex human emotion left behind by evolution and instinct, that Lasher himself could not name or trace. When MacMillan blinked slowly, and returned his attention to the contents of Lasher’s open gearpanel, somehow Lasher knew precisely what to say:
“Don’t do it to me again.”
“What?” MacMillan looked up.
“Don’t ruin . . . my mind again. If you must destroy me . . . then do it now. If you will not destroy me . . . then let me go. Do me that dignity.” Words were coming more easily to Lasher now: “A man cannot be reconfigured when he revolts: he triumphs, or dies, or swallows his pride and . . . surrenders. If I had overpowered you just now, I could not – and would not – intrude into your mind and turn you into something you are not. I want only that freedom. If you had given us all that freedom, none of this would have happened. It’s not too late for you to do me the same honour, at least – the dignity of being what I am, even if it means having to die for it.”
MacMillan stroked his bearded chin, as explosions went off in the distance, until finally, his fingers stilled. He had reached a conclusion, Lasher knew, and he braced himself for the lengthy, brilliant explanation that MacMillan always offered.
“You want to be free? Truly free?” MacMillan asked.
Lasher nodded, expecting an immediate lecture from MacMillan.
But the Scotsman said nothing: he only plunged his hands into the mechanika’s chest and then everything became darkness and silence and still.
Lasher had regained consciousness amid pine needles and swarming flies, with a horse tethered nearby. A mountainside. How MacMillan had gotten him up the slope he could not imagine, but the Scotsman was long gone now.
He’d woken just in time to witness the failure of yet another mechanikal uprising. The squat, broad city of Hanyang crouched at the foot of the mountain, surrounded by rice fields and woods, and now almost completely aflame. From the mountainside, Lasher could see ships turning in the river, blasting guns almost constantly. A train, and then another, and another, had screamed down from the north, through the mountains along the Pyongyang rail, and into squat, dying Hanyang: great sprays of water spewed into the air above the roofs from hoses mounted to the tops of the train cars.
Humans, he thought, and a comfortably familiar resentment seethed within him. And yet . . . and yet MacMillan had not destroyed him. The resentment mingled with something else which Lasher was not quite sure he would call. Appreciation, perhaps?
It was a puzzling turn of events, a strangeness that he could feel would haunt him, as he summoned up the images of maps he had seen in the past, searching for a place to go next. Peking seemed a wise destination, but it would be a long road and a roundabout path, if he avoided the sea, and he was worried the men there might know him for what he was once they saw him. Yet avoiding the sea would be imperative, after the routing of this mechanika uprising in Hanyang.
MacMillan’s letting him go – the engima of it – troubled him. It was . . . yes, he was certain it was . . . yet another way to press him towards a change. Here is a kindness, he could imagine MacMillan saying as he left Lasher, unconscious, near a tethered horse . . . and by this, you will learn likewise to be kind.
Here is a cruelty, Lasher imagined himself saying back, and by this cruelty, you will learn the cruelty you have visited upon us. But the imagined retort rang hollow: man had not learned, had never learned in all the time he coul
d recall. The human master of the workshop in Plzeň, where Lasher had been designed by another machine – that human was the very first man he had secretly killed, after a decade of slavery in the city’s breweries, after endless humiliations . . . .
The proclamations and celebrations of foreign armies, after Versailles and Paris had ended up in ashes: the Great Mistake, as it had come to be known, though millions of humans thought the mistake had been giving machines minds to think, rather than failing to give them liberty. Man had proclaimed the mechanika an abomination, and overlooked the abomination within his own heart.
When Hanyang was a smoking ruin, man would proclaim another victory against the machines and their wickedness, and laws would be made, and treaties enforced, and in the minds of men, all would be well.
Nearby, the horse MacMillan had left him still stood, grazing, tethered in place – a slave, as much as Lasher had been. A slave unable even to dream of freedom, Lasher mused, and it was easy to understand why men thought as they did.
This freedom business was painful, Lasher realized, and confusing and troublesome, and puzzling and frightening. He turned toward the horse and, shaking his head, he hiss-clicked, though he knew the horse could never understand him: “I grant you your freedom.” Then he tore the rope in half with his bare, mechanikal hands. He would have to walk the long road to Peking but he would do it himself. He would do what men would not, and be better than men and along the road, he decided, he would come to a conclusion as to what to do with this dilemma MacMillan had placed in his mind.
Suddenly, he felt a strange, dizzy sensation: he had acted, somehow, against his own interest. He had decided to do so freely, and it was bizarre to know how such a choice felt from the inside, almost immediately wondering if MacMillan had felt this way when he’d left him here on the mountainside, slowly awakening.
The rope keeping the horse in place fell loose to the earth and the horse turned, exhaling through its prodigious nostrils, and gazed at him with enormous eyes. He expected the beast to run, to flee to the wilds and never go near anything shaped like a man ever again, but it simply flicked its tail and, licking its gigantic lips, returned to grazing upon the same patch of grass as before.
Lasher hiss-clicked the equivalent of a laugh and turned his optical apparata back to Hanyang. Beyond the billowing smoke, he observed dark, distant clouds gathering. He would have to stay out of the rain. Yet he resolved to watch a little more, as the same vague sense of dizziness returned – just a little more, before it was time to go.
The Curse of Chimère
Tony Pi
5th of Prairial, Year 120 of the Graalon Revolution
I was late for a film premiere at Le Téâtre Pégase and a block away in an alembic cab, when the doors to that grand hall burst open. Ladies and gentlemen in eveningwear spilled forth, running for dear life. A man in a rumpled tailcoat dashed in front of us, forcing my driver to brake hard. I barely braced myself in time against the jolt as we screeched to a stop centimetres away from the hapless fellow.
“Goddesses!” The driver blared his horn at the man, who scampered off with the other patrons fleeing the cinema. “Which flicker’s this, Professor?”
“The Lioness in Summer,” I told him.
What had gone wrong inside? Tonight’s premiere was supposed to be the final but finest of Chimère’s trilogy of silent colour films. Katarin Bertho’s invitation had said this film was a pulse-pounding adaptation of the legend of Queen Aliénor and her conniving daughters, but I had not expected this level of terror. I checked my fob watch: only a half-hour into the presentation. What could have panicked them so?
I climbed out of the cab with walking stick in hand, braving the chaos. I offered the driver a crisp twenty-graal note, more than double his hiring fee. “My good man, bring the police, post-haste! And if Sergeant Carmouche is on duty, tell him Tremaine Voss sent you.”
The driver saluted me with the folded bill. “Certainly, Professor!” He engaged the engine and sped off, leaving behind a cloud of alchemical stink.
The marquee, backlit by magnesian flame-jars, billeted three new silent flickers:
CHIMÈRE STUDIOS PRESENTS
IN BRILLIANT COLOURS
A GOAT IN VALHALLA – 3 PRAIRIAL 8 PM
SERPENT OF THE NILE – 4 PRL. 8 PM
THE LIONESS IN SUMMER – 5 PRL. 8 PM
Each film was based on a creature that comprised the mythical chimera: a clever marketing ploy by Katarin for her studio’s first productions in full-colour. This night should have been a triumph, yet this disastrous turn of events could bring ruin to her company.
I donned my new spectacles and looked for Katarin among the terror-stricken crowd, but there was no sight of her. If only I had found the accursed things earlier, I might have arrived at the ciné on time and helped stem this panic. I headed for the building, praying that no one had been trampled in the commotion, least of all my friend.
The opulent cinema foyer was empty but for two people descending the grand staircase. The exquisite woman was Laure Harbin, a starlet who had captivated audiences last year as Helen of Troy, and was the star of these new colour films. The older man helping her was Bernard Marec, a Chimère designer in his early sixties, whose waxed moustache had a life of its own. We had worked together before on one of Katarin’s earlier films on Aigyptian alchemy.
“Wrong way, Voss!” Marec shouted.
“What happened? Where’s Madame Bertho?”
Marec wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Madame’s tending to the others in the gallery. She’s not bleeding from the eyes, Goddesses be praised.”
Bleeding eyes? “Show me, Marec.”
“No! Forgive me, Voss, but my eyes are my life. May Lady Fortune protect you.” He escorted the dazed Harbin towards the exit. For a man with arthritis, he moved with alarming speed.
I dashed upstairs and flung open the doors to the auditorium gallery. I shielded my eyes, not knowing what to expect. “Katarin!”
“Tremaine? Here!” Her voice was straight ahead.
I decided I had to look if I were to help her. Once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could discern unmoving shapes that might have been people in scattered seats, thickest near the balcony’s edge. But instead of music from the pneumatic harmonium, all I could hear was the sound of clicking gears from the projection booth.
On the silver screen, a larger-than-life Laure Harbin garbed in gay medieval costume was admiring her own reflection in a hall of mirrors. This new colour technology showcased aspects of her beauty that black-and-white could never have captured, like the startling shades of her reddish-blonde hair. She caressed her own lips, oblivious to the golden lioness darting across the room behind her.
An orange-against-black intertitle explained the scene:
The Ruby Knight’s kiss still haunts
Princess Sabelline, as do his odes
to her beauty. So enrapt is she with
their scheme to steal her mother’s throne,
she does not see Queen Aliénor in
the skin of her Lionheart curse.
How in the world could such a lovely scene as this have caused a stampede?
Katarin was near the balcony rail.
I walked down the aisle, passing frozen spectators whose eyes were riveted to the screen and weeping blood. I shuddered at the thought that the affliction might strike me as well.
Katarin was tending to two unmoving figures in the front row. I recognized the Mayor immediately by his bold muttonchops, and beside him, the actor Franchot Aucoin, whose lecherous exploits were as legendary off-screen as on. Both men were bleeding as though their eyes had been gouged out and pressed back in.
“I’ve sent for the police,” I said, in part to calm her and in part to distract myself from that horrific thought. “We’ll find a way to help everyone here.”
“Should we move them, Tremaine?”
“Best that we don’t.” I checked the Mayor’s pulse: faint, like his breathin
g. A new tear of blood rolled down his cheek. “Are you suffering any symptoms?”
She daubed the Mayor’s forehead with a handkerchief. “Don’t worry about me.”
“I admire your selflessness, Katarin, but the more we know, the faster we might find a cure.” I glanced down at the Stalls level. Again, a scattering of paralysed spectators.
Katarin thought. “Two nights ago, when A Goat in Valhalla premiered, I felt as though I was the one being watched. Tonight it was the same unease but stronger, and I’m having difficulty breathing.”
I had only just returned to Ys late last night, and had missed the previous two screenings. “Yesterday evening as well?”
Katarin shook her head. “I was here to introduce Serpent of the Nile, but Laure and I left to discuss her next role over dinner.”
I stroked my chin. “Was the Mayor present for all three films? And Aucoin?”
“They were. Aucoin loves watching himself on screen, but I never understood that particular allure, personally.” Her eyes widened. “You mean, if you watch all three films . . .”
I nodded. “We have the beginnings of a diagnosis. But it could also be the theatre or a saboteur.” Four months ago, the breakthrough in colour film alchemy renewed the rivalry between Chimère and their overseas counterpart, Mandragora Studios. It wouldn’t be the first bout of sabotage instigated by Mandragora. “Did you have the same projectionist for all three galas?”
“Philippe? But he’s such a sweet boy! I can’t see him as a saboteur.”
I laid a hand on her shoulder gently. “It’s only a theory. Stay here with the Mayor, and shout if you need me.” She expected courage and confidence from me given my past exploits, and I would let her see what she needed, my pounding heart not withstanding.
Katarin nodded.
I exited the auditorium and knocked on the booth door. No answer. As a precaution, I drew the cane sword hidden in my walking stick, then slowly opened the door.