Sounds came from the house—people conversing over dinner. Even the downstairs windows were open. Jane considered climbing through one of those at the back of the house—the room was dark—but decided to stay with her first plan.
Climbing the tree reminded her of childhood, though that brought evil memories as well as good ones. She climbed out the bough that led to the window, which was indeed open, but filled by a metal meshwork screen meant to keep out insects. Jane soon dislodged this device with her knife, and slid into the room. She saw no one as she stepped out onto the upper landing.
From downstairs she heard the sound of people retiring from the dining room to a sitting room. “Please bring in the coffee,” a woman’s voice said.
Jane moved quietly down the stairs, testing each riser for creaks before stepping. As she reached the foot of the stairs, she heard a sound, and flattened herself against a wall as a maid came by carrying a silver tray arranged with coffee pot and cups. The woman did not see her.
Jane walked behind the maid, moving in concert with her steps so that she made no sound. The maid entered the sitting room. Jane waited by the door, and then, as she heard the maid begin to hand round the coffee, burst into the room, brandishing Frayle’s gun.
“Ah, here is Miss Freemantle at last,” said the same voice Jane had heard ask for coffee. “Please join us.”
Jane had prepared herself for a myriad of responses, from an immediate battle to a chase across the city, but she had not even considered the possibility of a polite welcome. She gripped her gun more tightly and moved completely into the room.
A woman in her early forties sat in an overstuffed armchair, coffee cup in hand. To her right, in a companion chair, sat a man perhaps a few years older. His hair was blond, though lightened with streaks of silver, and his eyes were grey. He gave her a gentle smile.
Jane looked around, but saw no one else in the room. The Prometheus must be hidden away somewhere, perhaps in a bedroom or in the servants’ quarters beyond the kitchen. Of course it would not take after dinner coffee in the drawing room with civilized people.
“Where is the Prometheus?” she asked.
“I believe it is I you seek,” the man said.
The observation startled Jane, but she kept her face impassive. This was no monster, but an ordinary man, one who still retained some of the beauty of his youth. The Prometheus was supposed to have been created out of corpses, and dreadfully altered in the process, so that he was much larger than the normal man. Surely the man was having fun at her expense.
“And you did not need to bring along Mr. Frayle’s fabulous creation to kill me; an ordinary weapon would suffice. In fact, it might be more efficacious, since I think you will find that the angle of distance between the barrels does not correspond to my own proportions.”
“You are trying to deceive me,” Jane said. “You are a man; you cannot be the abnormal creature made so many years ago.”
“Mary, my dear, here is yet more evidence that your fiction has misled even the smartest leaders among those who seek to destroy me. If even Elizabeth Freemantle and her highly competent ward are searching for a hideous monster, we may be safer than we thought.”
Jane did not intend to be deterred by frivolous conversation. “Where is the Prometheus?”
The woman spoke. “Miss Freemantle, please sit down and join us for coffee.” The words were polite, but the tone of voice brooked no argument.
Jane surprised herself by complying, though she kept a firm grip on her gun and did not take any coffee. “I presume you are Mrs. Shelley.”
“I write my stories under that name, yes, but in my private life I am now known as Mary Dessins. My husband, Immanuel.”
Jane recognized the name and could not keep a look of surprise off her face.
The man nodded politely. “We have corresponded, I believe. I much appreciated your kind letter complimenting my essay on new theories of disease.”
Jane started to reply in kind—the essay had been most intriguing—but remembered her purpose. “Then the Prometheus must be somewhere on the premises,” Jane said. “Please be so kind as to take me to it at once.”
“Miss Freemantle. We have brought you here to tell you the truth—the whole truth—but we shall do it on our terms. Please be good enough to listen.”
Most people were likely cowed by the steel in Mary’s voice, but Jane, after years of living with Elizabeth, was not easily intimidated by women of strength and purpose. “You did not bring me here.”
Immanuel said, “Oh surely you were not completely taken in by our ambassador in the churchyard, a young woman as intelligent as you? You must have had some reservations about whether he spoke truly.”
Jane gave a hesitant nod.
“We brought you here,” Mary said, “to kill the Prometheus. Not to actually commit a murder, because the monster of popular imagination does not exist, but rather so that you can say the creature is dead and stop this endless wasteful effort to hunt it down.”
“Why did you choose me?”
“Because you were most likely to find us on your own. The blithering idiots of the Anti-Prometheus League are unlikely to do more than make it impossible to address the real concern, the possibility that someone may once again find a way to create life artificially. We are on the same side, Miss Freemantle.”
“But you ran away, taking the creature with you. It is hard to believe that you oppose the artificial creation of life.”
“Have you read my novel, Miss Freemantle? I would have thought no one could read those words and not grasp the danger in what John Polidori wanted to do.”
“The monster captured the popular imagination, my dear,” Immanuel said.
“Polidori?” Jane said.
“The true man behind the Dr. Frankenstein of my story. He had developed a process by which he could transfer the mind and soul of one person into the body of another recently deceased. The process was used only once: by myself, to save the life of Immanuel, who was dying of a hideous disease.”
“And perhaps it should not have been used even that one time,” Immanuel said. “Morally...”
“Undoubtedly there is a great ethical debate that could be had,” Mary said, “but I would still do the same thing again. Saving you was right and just; you have done much good in the world.”
“After saving me,” Immanuel said, “Mary destroyed the machine and all of Polidori’s notes about the process. He was never able to reconstruct it, and he died a few years later, a broken man.”
“They are all dead now, the ones that Polidori sought to save, to make immortal. Lord Byron. My...husband, Percy. That is why I destroyed it all, you see. John Polidori planned to make those he chose immortal; once their bodies began to fail, he would move their essential selves into new ones. Of course, only the select few would live forever by this process.
“Death is a necessary part of life, Miss Freemantle.” Mary leaned forward in her chair and looked intently into Jane’s eyes. “Advances in medical science can, and should, prevent untimely death, but immortality is for gods and mythology, not for humans.”
Jane turned to look at Immanuel and saw no monster, but a gentle man. “You will not live forever?”
He shook his head. “My life is as finite as yours.”
“And there truly is no immortal monster?” She phrased it as a question, but realized that she had come to accept it. The story of Mary and Immanuel Dessins made much more sense than all the preposterous theories she had heard. And a woman might well cross an ethical boundary for someone she had come to love.
Mary nodded.
Jane laid her weapon on the floor. “What do you want me to do?”
Jane sat on the deck of the Mermaid, sipping tea and staring at the vast expanse of ocean. Packed carefully in her trunk was an image of the “dead” Prometheus, created by the new photographic process. While the photographic exposure had taken an hour, creating a monster who resembled the Prometheus of everyone’s fancy had
required a week of careful construction. Frayle’s gun had provided the crowning touch of vast holes in the creature’s head and heart.
Jane wondered whether she should tell Elizabeth the truth. The truth was more simple, more elegant—like a mathematical proof—but Elizabeth had developed an obsession. Steering her talents into a more constructive campaign might require deceit.
For there were others working to create a race of immortals, of that she had no doubt. They would not simply save a life from an untimely end, as Mary had. No, they would go on to build monsters. Very few people had the strength of character required to keep one from going too far.
She would decide what to tell Elizabeth when she arrived home. Now, though, Jane thought of Immanuel, who, even more than she, was other. The only one of his kind. A kindred spirit, in a way.
And a man whose medical research would save lives. A singular man, doing good in the world.
Jane resolved to follow his example.
It’s no accident that Nancy Jane Moore’s collection from PS Publishing is called Conscientious Inconsistencies: She refuses to stick to one genre or even one style of writing. Her other book, Changeling, from Aqueduct Press, is a novella, and despite the name it’s not about fairies. Nancy Jane’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Treachery and Treason, Imaginings, and Polyphony 5, as well as in magazines ranging from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine to the National Law Journal. Her initial project for Book View Café was a series of flash fictions—very short stories of multiple genres—but she’ll be doing something different in 2010. Nancy Jane is a member of SFWA and Broad Universe, and holds a fourth-degree black belt in Aikido. After many years in Washington, D.C., she now lives in Austin, Texas.
The Water Weapon
… by Brenda Clough
“In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case.”
—Ada King, Countess Lovelace
from: Note A to “The Sketch of the Analytic Engine”
The arching glass roof of the Crystal Palace was wonderfully high. But it was not high enough for the Chinese dragon, which had to be housed outside the Great Exposition of 1851. Throngs of English and foreign visitors crowded close to gape, even daring to extend a hand to feel the steam-hot wood. Its sinuous neck, cunningly jointed and riveted, flexed with a creak of bamboo against bamboo. When steam shot from the red-painted nostrils the mob gasped with amazement.
“Oh, my stars!” Mrs. Grace Stulting held her bonnet onto her head and leaned back to look as the carven head swayed above.
“Purely mechanical.” Mr. Bucket laid a fat forefinger to his ear. “You can hear the metal gears, moving the neck. And the stokers for the steam.”
“Still, it’s a marvel,” Grace sighed.
Mr. Bucket drew her gloved hand through his arm. His tweed coat was too warm for the London summer and shiny at the elbows. His grey curly sidewhiskers were enormous, and in conjunction with his baldness formed the strange impression that, unequal to the struggle against gravity, his hair had parted company at the top and slid helplessly down each cheek to be halted by his high white collar. He looked like the elderly uncle taking a country cousin to see the Prince Albert’s Great Exposition.
“Let’s pay attention to the job here,” he said quietly. “That monster’s just a show—a fancy steam engine. Scotland Yard’s got a tip about some bigger magic here. So now we’re going to edge in closer, Mrs. S, and you keep your ears sharp. Those Chinese, they won’t be expecting a young white lady to understand their lingo. They might let fall something we need to hear.”
In her happy excitement, Grace hardly listened. She had been recruited into this jaunt merely because the preferred candidate, her husband, was busy addressing the Anglo-American Mission to the Orient Society. But Hermanus would have dismissed the Great Exposition as frivolous time-wasting, unlikely to further the spread of the Gospel. Now, on a legitimate patriotic mission with no less than the famous Inspector Bucket paying the late-season one-shilling entrance fee, Grace intended to enjoy herself.
“Oh, look! Souvenirs!” Exotically dressed Chinese attendants were coming forward with wide baskets. Eager hands reached for the gifts.
“For free? Huh.” Mr. Bucket snagged one for his companion. “A paper toy. What’s that in aid of, I wonder—they could easily charge halfpence.”
“It’s cute! Look, the little stick makes it stand up!” A bamboo skewer served as a handle, to support a red and black paper copy of the steam-powered giant dragon.
“Come along then, let’s get closer.” They edged forward through the crowd. Bucket had brought a pair of gilt opera glasses, through which he pretended to examine the gears and wooden joints of the construction towering above him. The wooden neck alone was as thick as a man’s body, and the bamboo torso the size of a railway car. Overlapping slabs of bamboo plated the neck which tapered away into yards of sinuous wooden tail. “Now, Mrs. S., ears sharp. What’s that johnny saying? He’s no coolie. From his robe, he’s a magician, right?”
“Yes, that’s what the tassels on his cap mean. Three gold ones mean he’s a wizard at the Imperial Court.” Grace gazed fixedly at the Chinese stokers shovelling coal into the furnace that heated the dragon’s boiler. “He says English people are very quiet. So true! In Nanjing the cacophony would be immense.”
“Don’t waste energy on commentary, Mrs. S.,” Mr. Bucket reproved her. “Quick–-what’s his pal saying?”
Ruffled, Grace said, “He’s agreeing, that’s all. Says Englishmen are like zombies.”
The glasses slipped from Bucket’s plump upraised hand, rescued from disaster only by the cord around his wrist. “You’re sure of that?”
“My Mandarin is excellent, Inspector.”
“Now don’t you take my manner wrong, Mrs. S.,” Mr. Bucket said. “You’re doing the British Empire a vital service here...Is that the Princess?”
“Lady Mei,” Grace corrected him. “She’s not really a princess. She’s the grand-daughter of the last Emperor and a concubine.” Along with everyone else they gaped at the splendid figure clad in green silk within the gold sedan chair. Carried in full panoply through the Exposition, the exotic lady drew even more crowds to view the dragon. Half the rag-tag and bobtail of London seemed to be following her, all the poorer people who had bought the cheap end-of-season tickets into the Exposition. The servants filtered through the press, distributing paper dragons hand over fist.
The foreman in charge of the stokers shouted in Chinese, “Back, all of you! He’s going to go!”
Suddenly the Chinese were in retreat, scurrying past them. Grace grabbed Mr. Bucket’s tweed arm. “Inspector, let us step back. I think there are problems with the boiler.”
“The way they were stoking it, the pressure must be terrible. Look nonchalant, now. Talk to me about your husband’s mission work.”
“Our plan is to start a school in Nanjing—” Grace felt the tug on her skirt instantly. A lady has to be aware of her surroundings—in addition to pickpockets and purse-snatchers there were always unsavoury men who tried to get too close to women in public. And then even a street-length skirt was always getting caught in things or picking up dirt. Pulling surreptitiously with one hand had no effect. She shot a quick glance back. “Oh, sweet Jesus!”
An enormous brass-tipped claw had speared down, pinning the flounce of her skirt to the earth. Hot humid steam puffed around her, and a huge hissing voice huffed in Chinese, “Little foreign-devil lady. You understand me. Do you not?”
Grace gaped up at the tremendous bamboo head, big as her own body, swaying above her. The red eyes, which she had taken for panes of tinted mica, were lit not with flame but with life. White steam shot from the carven nostrils. “You’re alive!” she blurted in Mandarin.
“Behold
me, the new Prometheus,” the dragon hissed, low. “It’s a poor magic that can only reanimate dead flesh, eh?”
“By Jove, the clockwork’s amazing clever.” Mr. Bucket, trapped in monolingual ignorance, let go her arm and stepped back to stare upward.
With another huge hiss of steam the dragon lumbered forward. Suddenly Grace was divided from the Inspector and the rest of the crowd by the coil of an enormous hot bamboo tail. It occurred to her that if the dragon encircled her completely, she would boil like a Christmas pudding. “Inspector!” she called in English, before he was shoved out of hearing. “It talks!”
Mr. Bucket cast a sharp glance up at the dragon, which winked a glowing red orb at him. As he vanished from view Grace saw Bucket’s eyes bug out with astonishment.
The bearers set the sedan chair down and the lady within took effortless charge. “You say she speaks properly, Lung? In this barbarous land—amazing! Who are you, woman? What do you seek here? Let her go, Lung.”
Slowly the enormous claw pulled up and away, and the hot humid bamboo coil widened its compass. Drawing a grateful breath of cooler air, Grace no longer felt like a dumpling in a bamboo steamer. “Thank you,” she said in Mandarin, and twitched her skirt free. A good Christian woman told the truth—Mr. Bucket surely knew she could not lie. “My parents are Presbyterian missionaries, and I have lived fifteen years in Nanjing. There were rumours of Chinese magic at the Exposition, and I see they are fully true!”
“They do not believe, these English,” the Chinese wizard said to his mistress. “Their own New Prometheus was hushed up, and there are no magicians among their common folk. Either the peasantry here are lazy, or fools. It’s taking them too long. We should have concentrated our efforts in India.”
Surely this beast was what Scotland Yard had sent Grace to find. “You need not think that Britain is going to stand by while magically animated monsters invade!”
Lady Mei giggled, and Grace saw that under the brocade and headdress she was very young, perhaps sixteen years old. From the height her chair lent her Lady Mei reached over and patted the hot bamboo neck with a tiny pale hand. “Lung here? He’s nothing but a worm-boy, my favourite bug.”
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