by Sean Wallace
Moment 9097372: Lady Sybil is speaking. The winter has withered her even more. She is frail and fragile as a songbird.
“You see, I don’t think it’s enough to march any more,” she says. “There has to be some good coming from you. In this brave new age, there are villains aplenty. I’ll set you after them. You have been my legs, my dear. My mechanical Athena. For so very long. And now you will be my fists.”
Moment 9156658: She has the dark-skinned, well-dressed man by the collar, pulling his limp form after her into the offices of Scotland Yard. She drops him in the doorway of Todd Chrisman, the detective who, she knows, has been working on the case.
“This is the Maharishi of Terjab,” she says.
His eyes are amazed. “Yes, I can see that.”
“He is responsible for the Soho white slave ring. You will find the evidence in his basement.”
He stammers out something, moves forward to look down at the Maharishi. “What are you?” he says.
“Lady Fortinbras’s mechanical Athena,” she says. “My directive is to fight evildoers.”
Behind him in the office, someone laughs, only to be hissed into silence by a fellow. All of these men are watching her.
Moment 9230101: “This is the Dog Collar Killer,” she says to Chrisman.
The man at her feet groans, recovering himself. He fought hard.
“He’s a clergyman,” Chrisman says, astonishment coloring his voice.
Pallid and rabbity, the man wears his robes like a squatter moved into a strange new place. He blinks, the bruises along his face coloring like dark water, and one eye weeps bloody tears.
“I am Father Jeremiah, and this is an outrage,” he says, pulling himself upward despite the restraining hand on his arm.
“Marilyn Bellcastle,” she says. “Lucy Stipe. Annabel Jones. He killed them all.”
He explodes in spittle and anger at the sound of her voice. “Whores!” he snarls. “Jezebels! They deserved no better!”
Moment 9618905: “What have you brought us now, lass?” Chrisman asks. She gives him the papers she has compiled, the blueprints for the bomb to be placed beneath the Houses of Parliament and he thanks her, riffling through the rustling papers one by one, studying them. There are new decorations on his uniform; her aid has brought him a promotion.
Moment 9713637: Lady Sybil’s father paces up and down the study, talking to himself. His cooling breakfast, the opened letter beside it, sits on the table. He wheels on her.
“Died in prison, by God!” he shouts. “Her and that Pankhust woman, thinking hunger strikes would change the jailers’ minds. What good is it dying for a stupid, frippery cause, just another chance to dress up?”
She believes this is a rhetorical question; she makes no reply. She would have been with them, but Lady Sybil felt chasing the Ghost of Belfast was more important. Chrisman should have been pleased when she brought the villain in, but he was subdued, told her simply to go home.
“I’ll have every man in that prison to court,” Lord Fortinbras says. He looks at her, the way he has always looked at her. Half repulsed and half proud at his clever daughter’s creation.
“And you, mechanical Athena,” he says. “What’s to become of you now?”
There are tears on his face.
* * *
Moment 25055955: The crack of the gavel resounds through the crowded room as the auctioneer bangs the sale closed. “And sold to the foreign gentleman!”
Some of Lady Sybil’s friends are there, but none of them have bid on her. She is led away to the waiting crate. She feels nothing.
Moment 49189954: Professor Delta is speaking.
“The university bought you as a historical feminist treasure,” she says. “Built by an English suffragette and scientist. The once-owned-by-Hitler stuff, that was just icing on the cake, a little thrill value. But now . . . nowadays people are more concerned with the rights of mechanicals than they were when you were sold.”
There is a gleam in her eye that is reminiscent of the Pankhursts.
“Do you really want to be on your own?” Delta says, leaning forward. She is a short, wiry woman, her hair cropped close, no make-up on her face. “What would you do?”
“Fight crime,” she says.
Delta leans back, her hand flickering in a dismissive gesture. “A superhero? Let the papers call you something like Ticktock Girl? How . . . trivial. It would be a terrible waste.”
She could go back in the crate. But Lady Sybil built her to move. To act. To be her hands, even now.
Moment 57343680: She faces Father Jeremiah in the closed room, cinderblock walls, the smell of disinfectant harsh and immediate. Somewhere in the distance, water drips.
She’s not sure how he can be alive, unchanged, a century later. But here he is.
“The Lord has preserved me! I am his Hand!” he shouts at her. She calculates the distance from her fist to his jaw, the amount of impact necessary to render him unconscious.
He draws himself up and smiles. “But you can’t. I’m legit now.”
The word is unfamiliar.
He splits it into syllables for her, serves it up like little rabbit pellets of words. “Le-gi-ti-mate. Everything I do is inside the law.”
“You tell people to kill other people and they do it.”
“All I do is provide information on where they are: the abortionists, the sodomites, the women who whore themselves out. My followers decide what to do with the knowledge.”
Seeing her pause, he laughs. “Welcome to the brave new world, Ticktock, mechanical clock,” he half sings. “Can’t touch this, can’t touch me now.”
Moment 9097375: Sickness has eaten away at Lady Sybil’s face, reducing it to paper over bone. But her voice is strong as ever.
“There is right and there is wrong,” she says. “You, my mechanical Athena, are always on the side of right.” A trembling hand strokes along the bright metal of her face. “The side of justice.”
Moment 57343681 seems to blend together with so many others, so many long circles of the wheels in her brain. And in that confluence, she knows that sometimes the argument of brick and fist are the only way. Chrisman would not approve, she thinks as she snaps Jeremiah’s neck. But Lady Sybil would.
La Valse
K. W. Jeter
“The problem,” said Herr Doktor Pavel, “is that we gained our Empire when we were young. And now we are old.” With a great iron spanner in his hands, he turned to his assistant and smiled. “What could be worse than that?”
“I don’t know.” Anton felt himself to be a child, when hearing of such things. “I’m not as old as you. At all.”
Around them, in the Apollosaal’s basements, the machinery wept. Even though they had both spent the better part of a week down there, in preparation for this evening’s grand events, still the miasmatic hiss and soft, plodding leaks prevailed over their efforts. The tun-shaped boilers, vast enough to engulf carriages and peasants’ huts, shuddered with the scalding forces pent inside them. Their rivets seeped rust. In the far-off corners where the theatrical scenery was kept and more often forgotten, pasteboard castles sagged beneath the threadbare fronds of a humid jungle of faux palm trees.
“Age, like wealth, is but a mental abstraction, my boy.” The doctor peered at a creaking armature above his head, adjusting some aspect of it with a miniature screwdriver, skill as precise and surgical as though his title were that of a physician rather than an engineer. “And nothing more. People fancy that God loves them – and consider themselves and their kind exceptional as a result.” He wiped his pale, egg-like brow with the grease-smeared lace of his shirt cuff. “If such fancies were gears and dreams cogs, I would wind this world’s mainspring tight enough to hum.”
He didn’t know what that meant. The doctor was of an obscure and poetic persuasion. He took the screwdriver from the hand held toward him, replacing the tool in its exact slot with the greater and smaller ones on either side.
“Wi
ll everything be ready? By tonight?” He thought that was more important to know. If the ballroom’s mechanisms were not completely functional and satisfactory when the guests arrived, then the doctor and he would not be paid, resulting in a cold and hungry New Year’s Eve for them.
“Not to worry.” The doctor picked up his tool bag and moved on. He tapped a lean forefinger on a set of calliope-like pipes, each in turn, flakes of rust drifting onto his vest as he bent his ear toward them. Just as a physician counterpart might thump the chest of a tubercular patient, to assess how long he had to live. “No one’s merriment will be impaired by the likes of us.”
In winters such as these – were there any other kind, any more? – Anton limited his hopes to that much. If one managed to get to the first muddy, thawing days before actual spring, then there was a chance at least. Of something other than this. Something other than the dank, hissing basements under the ballrooms and palaces of that finer, fragile world above. Far from the sharp-toothed gears and interlocking wheels, the pistons gleaming in their oily sheaths, the ticking escapements wide as cartwheels, the mainsprings uncoiling like nests of razor-thin serpents. He could take Gisel out beyond the apple orchards, their branches still black and leafless, no matter that it would cost him a day’s wages and her a scolding from the head housekeeper. What would it matter if both of them would go supperless that night, bellies empty as their aching arms? Lying on straw-filled pallets far from each other, gazing out cobwebbed attic windows at an envious moon. Remembering how the ice at the roots of the sodden grass creaked beneath the back of her chambermaid’s blouse, his face buried in the gathered folds of her apron. Smelling of honey and lye, her hand stroking his close-cropped head as she turned her face away and wept at how happy she was. If only for a moment.
“What are you dreaming about?” The doctor’s voice broke into his warming reveries. “Come over here and help me open up these stopcocks.”
He did as he was ordered, letting all the girl’s smiles flutter away, like ashes up a chimney flue. Straining at the stubborn valves, he let one other hope step inside his heart. That none of their work here, readying for the gala ball, would require going down into the sub-basements below these, where the great roaring furnaces and boilers resided. He hated having to go down there, hated seeing the stokers chained between the fiery iron doors and heaps of coal, the shimmering heat revealing the stripes across their naked backs. Their eyes would turn toward him as they crouched over their black shovels. Their eyes would tell him, As you are, once were we. Steal but the slightest crust or bauble, and join us here . . .
Their extinguished voices would follow him as he fled up the spiral of clanging metal stairs, the errand accomplished on which Herr Doktor Pavel had sent him. He could hear them now, whispering far beneath his sodden clogs, as he gritted his teeth and strained to turn the most ancient of the spoked wheels another quarter-turn.
“That’s good.” The doctor stepped back, wiping his hands across his vest. “Anton, my coat, if you please.”
He fetched the swallow-tailed garment, lifting it from the hook by the stone arch of the cellar door. The horsehair-padded shoulders itched his own palms as he helped the doctor slide into its heavy woolen arms.
“There.” An old man’s vanity – he tugged at the lapels, gazing fondly at his reflection in one of the floor’s puddles. “When everyday gentlemen dressed as elegant as this, the Empire was feared by Cossack and Hun alike.”
“If you say so.” He had no memory of such things. The doctor might have been imagining such faded glories, for all he knew.
“We’ll discuss it another time.” The sad state of his assistant’s learning was a topic frequently evoked, if never acted upon. “Let’s fire ’er up, lad. A job well done’s the best payment.”
Anton watched as the doctor pushed one lever after another. Constellations of gears engaged about them, all enveloped in sweating vapor. Ratchet and piston moved through their limited courses, the clatter of brass and iron loud as church bells on a tone-deaf Easter morning.
“Splendid!” The doctor bent his head back, gazing up enraptured at the chamber’s damp ceiling. “Do you hear it? Do you?”
He knew what those sounds were, barely audible through the commotion of the machinery driving them. He’d heard them before, every year’s end, from when he’d first apprenticed to the dancing engineer’s trade. To now, this last calendar page, so much dragglier and tattered than the ones from all the years before.
He pulled his own thin coat away from one of the jointed arms thrusting up through the ceiling’s apertures, careful not to be snagged by its pump-like motions. All through the basement, more such churned away, up and down and at various angles, pivoting upon the hinges that he and the doctor had so carefully greased. Like a mechanical forest brought to clanking animation, white gouts billowing from every quivering pipe . . .
There they go, thought Anton as he looked up at where the doctor gazed. He could see them, without going up the stairs to the grand ballroom. The empty metal frameworks, like iron scarecrows, would be bowing to one another, then embracing. The smaller with the larger, just as if already filled by the evening’s elegant guests. Already, the mechanical violins were scraping their bows across the rosined strings.
Closing his eyes, he watched from inside his head as each skeletal apparatus – jointed struts and trusses, cages shaped into men and women – took another by a creaking hand. Then swirled across the acres of polished floor, just as though it were the music that impelled them, rather than clockwork and steam.
She breathed into her cupped hands, warming the strands of pearls she held.
There might come a day when she was old enough, with years of servile experience ingrained through every memory, that she would be entrusted to help dress their dowager employer. For now, Gisel watched as the senior maids, some of them older than the bent and wrinkled figure upon whom they waited, busied themselves with the intricate laces and stays.
“Ah! You’re too cruel to me.” Vanity and girlish affectations tinged the dowager’s simpered, murmured words. “You’ll break something one of these days – I know you will.” She brought her hawk-etched, deep-seamed visage over the lace at her shoulder and smiled the yellow of old parchment at her attendants. “But not tonight. Be so sweet as to spare me just one more night of pleasure.”
The maids said nothing, but obliged with nods and their own little smiles. Gisel had heard the old woman say the same thing the year before and the year before that. She had still been working in the scullery three winters ago, scrubbing the stone floors with a wet rag, but the oldest of the chambermaids had told her that the dowager had spoken the same words every New Year’s Eve for decades now. None of them were quite sure that the dowager could say anything else, at least not while getting dressed for the ball.
She watched as the others stepped back, the gown assembled into place at last, as though a seamstress had wrapped lengths of ancient silk around a bone dummy. The dowager admired herself in a triptych of full-length mirrors, as though the grey film at the center of her eyes somehow filtered out the overlapping scales of time, letting through only the image of the lithe girl she still believed herself to be.
Now the pearls were as warm as Gisel’s blood. They could have been a kitten sheltered between one palm and the other, if only they had breathed and had a fluttering pulse inside soft fur. She stepped forward with them, holding them up as though they were some sort of offering.
“No, not now.” The dowager surprised them all by something different. That she had never said before. She waved a wrinkled, impatient hand at Gisel. “They caught last time. In the framework.” Her scarleted nails clawed at the tendons that ridged her neck harp-like. “How they tormented me! The whole beautiful night, dancing and dancing, and the whole time I felt as though I were being garroted. I could have burst into tears from the pain, if I’d let myself.”
Gisel dared to speak, though she received a warning glance from th
e oldest chambermaid. “You don’t want to wear them?”
“Silly girl, of course I do. They were my mother’s, and her mother took communion from the hand of a pope with them around her throat. How could I not wear them on a festive occasion such as this? I wear them every New Year’s ball.”
“I’m sorry . . .”
“Don’t fret about it, dear.” The dowager smiled even wider and scarier as she let one of the other maids settle a wrap about her shoulders. “Let us go to the Apollosaal – you and I, just the two of us. Won’t that be fun? And you can put the pearls upon me there. So you can make certain they don’t pinch and bind. I believe that’s the smartest thing to do, don’t you? I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
The notion terrified Gisel. Her heart pounded at the base of her own throat, as she felt all the other maids turning their silent, premonitory gaze upon her. What would she do without the others, the older ones, to tell her what to do?
“But . . . I don’t know . . .”
“No one will mind, I’m sure. Once the music starts, I’m sure there will be some little corner where you can crouch and hide. Perhaps in the back, from where the waiters bring the champagne and the marzipan cakes. No one will even see you.” The dowager’s eyes were like ivory knife-points set in crêpe paper, as she went on smiling.
She knows I’m scared, thought Gisel, holding the bundled pearls closer to herself. That’s why she wants me to go with her. If only she hadn’t let the dowager see that in her, she might have had a chance. To escape.
But now there wasn’t any. She nodded dumbly and followed the other woman, out of the dressing room and toward the curving sweep of stairs that led down to the carriage outside the door, and all the wintry city streets beyond.
As the guests assembled, he saw her. Anton’s heart raced – it always did, as though some internal furnace of his emotions had been stoked higher.
Assembled, it seemed almost literally to him. This was the part of his apprenticeship to the doctor that he disliked the most. Some tasks were worse than others. He thanked God, the one cloaked in the tattered remnants of his faith, that this one came about only once a year. And at the end of it, so that even in the bleakest December there would likely be no further discouragements.