“Reasonable. When you figure it out, maybe you could make me some.” It held up hands; they looked like drills. “I was made to dig holes in mountains,” it said.
“You’re Preacher,” Jasmine said. She set the staff down, though left it in reach.
It nodded. “It would be nice to have hands with fingers.”
Bess had said Preacher was crazy, but it seemed kind, almost gentle despite its size. Its maker had given it a face, with a mouth that moved and eyes that stared at her so intently she was sure it could see. But how? Jasmine’s metalmen could sense things around them, but they did it by picking up waves. She hadn’t given them eyes; for all that she felt they were more than machines, she balked at the idea of making them look like people.
But looking at Preacher, she began to think she was wrong. Maybe she should make eyes and mouths for them. Maybe if she looked at Preacher carefully, she could figure out how to make such things work. If it would let her.
“I’ll make you some hands with fingers, if the ones I’m making for this new one work out.”
“And will you give that one eyes to see, ears to hear, and a mouth to speak? I would love it if I could listen to another of my kind.”
“I will, if you will help me figure out how your eyes and ears and mouth work. I’ve never done that. The ones I make can take in instruction and sense things around them, but it’s not real hearing or vision.”
“The old woman was right. We can help each other, you and I.”
She wanted to ask him about the souls, but she hesitated. Something told her it wasn’t time yet.
Without any discussion, Preacher took up residence in her workshop. A few days later, it accompanied her through a driving rain to the tower and watched as she hooked up the one with fingers and several others to the lightning rod. The thunder boomed outside, but both of them still jumped when the lightning flashed down the rod and into the waiting metalmen. As she removed the fingered one from the device—quickly, before another strike—she watched it curl the fingers. They worked.
Preacher sat down on a box. Jasmine thought that if it could have cried, it would have. “Make me some real hands like that one’s, and I will help you build the rest of your metalmen.”
It took her less time to make the fingered hands this time. But when the time came for her to remove Preacher’s drills to replace them, both of them were frightened. “I’ve always been this way,” Preacher said, explaining its fear.
“I don’t want to harm you,” she said, explaining hers. But she had learned the right way to do it on the first creature, and setting up Preacher’s working hands went smoothly.
By the time Calvert returned from his mysterious errand in Washington City—an unsuccessful venture, according to the slaves who had accompanied him—Preacher was working alongside her in the workshop. It wore a cover over its eyes and did not speak in the presence of anyone else.
“The fingers worked out so well that I made two metalmen who can make others,” she told Calvert. “That way I will be sure to get the work done quickly.” He took her at her word and indeed, it was almost true. She had made Preacher’s hands.
The trust between Jasmine and Preacher grew, but she still did not mention ensoulment. Late at night, when no one else was around, she and Preacher worked to give the other fingered metalman, whom she had taken to calling Maker, the ability to see, speak, and hear. On the night when Maker croaked out its first sound—unintelligible, but a definite attempt to communicate—Preacher sat down heavily on a chair. Its face could not change expression, but Jasmine could tell how moved it was.
Preacher sat talking with Maker all night and by morning the new creation was speaking in sentences. It understood far more than it could say, but it was learning rapidly.
“With hands and voices, nothing can hold us back from our destiny,” Preacher said. “You must give all these metalmen those things.”
“I cannot,” Jasmine said. “We must keep your abilities a secret, at least for now. Calvert would have you and all the rest destroyed, if he found out what you can do.”
“And he wouldn’t free you. Which is the most important thing to you, isn’t it?” Preacher’s voice was angry, for the first time. “You are just making more of us to buy your freedom, aren’t you?”
She had grown so accustomed to him that she had forgotten how frightening he could be, forgotten that Bess had warned her about him. He stood next to her, a huge, menacing figure.
But she got her fear under control. “Yes, I want my freedom, but I also want to ensure that these metalmen have theirs as well. That is why I reached out to you. I heard you could give these creations souls.”
“Souls. Bah. Do you think they need them? Does Maker need one? You can hear it speak, know it needs nothing more to be as good as a human. Or better.” Preacher moved toward her.
It was Maker that stopped it, Maker that put a hand—a fingered hand—on Preacher’s arm. It croaked, “Hear her out.”
Preacher stopped. “Well?”
“The white people, those with the power, will only recognize metalmen as living beings if they have souls. Didn’t Bess tell you that, when she told you to find me?”
“That crazy old woman doesn’t talk to me like people. I’ve never met her. She sent me a vision of you and I came. What is this about the power people recognizing us?”
“They’ve already done it in the states in the rebellion. They are freeing the human slaves and the metalmen with souls. Both free and slave here believe that the law will apply to us, once the war ends. That’s why Calvert wants me to make as many metalmen as I can, so he can keep them as slaves once he has to free us.
“I was told—Bess told me—you could give them souls. That would protect them. Can you do that?”
Preacher sat down. “Did she tell you how I can do that?”
Jasmine shook her head.
“I killed my maker,” Preacher said. “The bastard made me to blast through mountains, but for fun he made it possible for me to see and hear and talk. I might have killed him anyway. Even those of us who cannot speak can think and feel, though we are seen as machines. There was such mockery in my ability to see how I differed from humans even when I could outthink them. So I stuck my drill into him, and as I did, I could feel his soul leaving his body. And I just grabbed it, felt it move through my body.
“It didn’t like being there, held by his murderer, but I liked having it. I still have it. I keep it shut down, most of the time, but every once in a while I let it see what I do. It hates me. I don’t need it for anything. I keep it for revenge.” Preacher stood back up.
Maker again put its hand on Preacher’s arm, but Jasmine knew there was no threat now. “You are telling me that we will be treated as people if we have souls.”
“I am telling you that metalmen with souls will not be held as property, once people like me are not. I don’t know that it means either of us will be treated like people. That’s why I was told not to put souls in these metalmen. I would never have thought about it otherwise. I know that metalmen are more than machines, that they don’t need human souls.” She looked at Preacher. “You put a soul in yourself. Can you put one in Maker? Can you put them in the others?”
Preacher opened its mouth in what might have been a smile. “Oh, yes. I’ve put them in others, in my fellow beings that I’ve rescued from misery. I’ve given them their own souls to torment as they see fit, the souls of those who tormented them. I can give one to Maker. Perhaps I should give it the soul of your owner.”
“No,” she said. “Give it a stranger’s soul. Let Calvert live so that when the day comes that all must be freed, he will know what has happened to him.”
“Ah. You, too, understand revenge. But why not give all of these ones you are making the ability to communicate and make for themselves?”
“It’s too risky. They must seem to be soulless machines until such time as they can be free. After that happens, I will fix them, fix them
all, so that they can do many things, not just work in fields. I swear that, by my daughter.”
“I will trust you.” Preacher turned to Maker, laid hands on its shoulders. “Here is the soul of a woman I found as she died. It’s a gentle soul. Perhaps you and it can coexist.”
Maker shook as the change came over it. Jasmine could see something shift in its presence. “Will the soul be obvious to all?”
“Only those who know where to look,” Preacher said, showing her a mark that had appeared on Maker’s chest, near where its heart would be, if it had one. “Since Maker can speak, it can also let its soul tell others that it is present.”
“I will not, until it is time,” Maker said.
“I do not have enough souls stored within me for all the metalmen you are making. I will share the few I have and then go out and harvest some more for the rest.”
“Where do you get them?”
“There’s a war raging out there. Souls can be found everywhere on a battlefield.”
Jasmine finished the metalmen on schedule and Calvert kept his word, giving her both a paper verifying that she and her daughter were free and a small sum of money. She and Alexandra moved into Washington City, where she rented a house and workshop near the center of town and set up a business doing machine repairs. Some people objected to a woman—and one of color at that—doing such work, but the war had taken away many skilled men and her services were needed. It was only when her first customer—an old delivery driver who’d needed repairs to a wheel on his wagon—pronounced himself satisfied with her work and handed her a few coins that she realized how much her life had changed.
That autumn, the white men of Maryland began to discuss whether to free their slaves, as Davy had predicted. He and others began to make plans. Jasmine helped by finding places people could live and work once they were free. The debate over freedom dragged on, which gave them time to find more opportunities, but also increased suffering.
Benjamin died during this time. Jasmine did not hear the news in time to travel to his funeral, a fact she sore regretted. She cursed those who continued to ignore the inevitable end of slavery. Benjamin had deserved to live out his days in freedom; she had planned to give him a home.
In the last quarter of 1864—a time when it had become obvious that the Union would eventually prevail in the war—a bare majority of the white men of Maryland voted to outlaw slavery. Emancipation was set for November 1.
Olivia and several others arrived at Jasmine’s house on November 5, having taken a circuitous route to avoid those who still opposed emancipation. The trip was made more complicated by boisterous rallies around the pending presidential election.
Jasmine had found them homes with people in her neighborhood. Others had gone to Baltimore City and Annapolis, and a few were traveling to the mountains of western Maryland, where some earlier freedmen had set up a farm. Thanks to their planning, all the former slaves on the Calvert place had someplace to go.
But they brought no reports of what had become of the metalmen. Jasmine wondered and worried. Would Calvert come after her when he discovered his metalmen had souls? It was possible. She had built extra fortifications into her doors and windows, and had procured a gun, but she knew those things might offer little protection from a powerful white man.
Five nights later, an hour after midnight, she heard a light knock at the front. Peering out through the view panel she’d put in, she caught a glint of metal by the light of the almost-full moon. She opened the door to Maker.
“I’m here to let you know what has happened,” it said. It sat on a chair, as if it were human. Jasmine felt the urge to offer it a cup of tea.
“Preacher?” she asked.
“Dead,” it told her.
The word startled her. Decommissioned. That’s what people usually said about metalmen when they no longer functioned. “Did you bring it with you? Perhaps I can fix it.”
“No. Preacher cannot be fixed. The spark is gone and everything that made it whole is gone. If you put the parts together again, you would get someone else. We buried it out on Somervelt’s Island, when I took the rest of the people out there. It’s safe there for us, at least for now.”
“How did it happen?”
“Preacher had brought us a boat, so that we could leave on the morning of freedom. Your people were already gone when we gathered in the dawn to go ourselves. Calvert came rushing down to the dock, with his two sons and foreman, demanding to know what was going on.
“Preacher spoke. It was the first time Calvert had heard one of us speak, and it startled him, for he stepped back. ‘We are leaving,’ Preacher said. ‘We have souls and you have no right to us.’ And he showed him the mark.
“Calvert said, ‘Like Hell you are.’ He told his men, ‘Grab them,’ and reached out himself to pick up one of the smaller ones among us. Preacher said, ‘Let go,’ but Calvert drew out a pistol. He must have thought the threat would stop Preacher, because he didn’t even aim it. Preacher grabbed him then, and throttled him.”
Maker paused. “I think it had wanted to do that for a long time. It wanted to kill all those who denied us our freedom. The three other men fired their rifles at Preacher, hitting it in the head where all the wires come together, but Calvert was long dead before Preacher, too, let go of life. The others of my kind advanced on the men before they could reload their rifles. I might have been able to stop them. I did not try. I do not like killing, but I loved Preacher”
Calvert was her father and two of those men were her half-brothers, and they had died horrifically. Jasmine tried to grieve for them, but found she cared more about the loss of Preacher. Her friendship with it had fulfilled her in a way that mocked the mere biological tie to men who had never acknowledged her as a human being, much less as a relative.
“In any case, I have come to tell you that you need fear nothing from those people. The men are dead, and the women have gone to the wife’s family, or so I have heard. Only ghosts are left.”
Jasmine sat there, relieved, sad, unsure of what might happen next. “I promised Preacher that I would fix the others when the time came, would give them fingers and eyes and voices. Shall I come with you to Somervelt’s Island, or will you bring them here in ones and twos?”
“You are not needed,” Maker said. “You gave me those things and I can now do them for others. I only came to tell you what happened. Now I must go back to take care of my people.”
“There are others of your kind, still enslaved. Will you go out and ensoul them so that they can be free?”
“I cannot. Only Preacher had that ability, and even it did not know where it came from. It died with it.” It paused. “We did what we could, you and I and Preacher. Take heart from that.”
Some saved, but not all, not nearly all. Jasmine had family to care for in an uncertain future world, responsibilities to her own she could not forsake. But she was tied to the metalmen, just as she was tied to family. It wasn’t enough, that she had helped some.
For now she would bide her time and raise her daughter. But she would do more, when she could. “I won’t forget,” she told Maker.
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PART II: THE MACHINES
Mr. Lincoln’s Elephant
Brenda W. Clough
Towards the middle of February in 1865 Lieutenant Sam McAvers clattered into Alexandria, Virginia, as the dawn was coming up lurid and gray in the east. He threw the reins of his horse to a sleepy cadet in a blue uniform and ran into the garrison headquarters. “Where is she?”
Sergeant Fanning was leaning back in his chair, and when he started awake the front legs came down to earth with a thump. “Damn. Are you from Col. Jeremiah Inglis? Thank the Lord! Come an’ identify her.”
McAvers followed him into what, when this house had been a rich man’s dwelling, used to be the grand front hall. Alexandria being a sullen and occupied town, the Union guards were awake at this hour and even sober, if you didn’t sniff t
oo closely at their breath. Sergeant Fanning said, “She asked for tea. Then a wash basin and water. Hot water, not cold, no sir. And a washcloth, but neither the first nor the second nor the third we found were clean enough for her. Had to go out and buy a new one at the drygoods store, and that’s three cents I’ll never see again. She wouldn’t eat hard tack. Nor corn pone made with bacon fat, fitten for a king. She turned up her nose at the very salt pork we was having for our own dinner, can you believe it? And Jesus! The things she says Col. Inglis’ll do to us—ladies ain’t supposed to know about castrating shoats, they just ain’t. She says he’s got an ivory-handled cut-throat razor imported from Paris. In France, you know? Well-stropped, it’s sharp enough to bleed the wind. You don’t even feel the cut. You’re singin’ soprano and you didn’t even feel the nuptials waving goodbye to your trousers as—”
“Will you hush up and make haste?” the lieutenant cried. “Mrs. Inglis is in distress, and I have been charged with her rescue!”
“You ain’t rescuing her,” the sergeant grumbled. “You’re a-rescuin’ us.”
McAvers was grateful to see that they were not descending to the cellars. So close beside the Potomac River, any room below ground was dangerously damp, no place for a gentle lady. Instead the sergeant conducted him up a cramped wooden stair, its wainscoting scarred by five years of careless spurs and rifle butts, and up yet again to the attic level. On the topmost landing Private Buck sat on a stool with his revolver on his knee. “’S quiet in there,” he reported, holding out the large iron key. “Maybe she’s asleep?”
“And the ice skating’s mighty prime today in hell.” The sergeant turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. “Aah! God damn it! Run like clappers, Buck, and get ’em out into the alley in back! She’s got a rope!”
“The colonel will gut me,” McAvers cried. The slant-ceilinged attic room was very small and entirely empty. At the end of the room the window sash was up. A frail rope twisted from torn petticoats was tied to the single wooden chair, which had been set crossways in the meanly-proportioned window opening. The way it hung in mid-air, tightly pressed against the frame, showed that a weight was hanging outside. When he united his strength to the sergeant’s they were able to haul the chair carefully down from the opening, slowly, and without any abrupt jerk that might dislodge the escaping prisoner dangling below. “You’re heavier ’n me,” McAvers panted. “Sit yourself in that chair and hold it down! I’ll try and haul her up.”
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