“Item: Nevertheless, Old Turd-Gargler here was used to sending you poor kiddees out to beg with your wounds all on display, to bring him whatever coppers you could coax from the drunkards of Muddy York with which to feather his pretty little nest yonder. Correct?” We nodded again. “Right.
“Item: We are all of us the crippled children of Muddy York’s great information-processing factories. We are artificers, machinists, engineers, cunning shapers and makers, every one, for that is how we came to be injured. Correct? Right.
“Item: It is a murdersome pity that such as we should be turned out to beg when we have so much skill at our disposal. Between us, we could make anything, do anything, but our departed tormentor lacked the native wit to see this, correct? Right.
“Item: the sisters of the simpering order of St. Agatha’s Weeping Sores have all the cleverness of a turnip. This I saw for myself during my tenure in their hospital. Fooling them would be easier than fooling an idiot child. Correct? Right.”
He levered himself out of the chair and began to stalk the dining-room, stumping up and down. “Someone tell me, how often do the good sisters pay us a visit?”
“Sundays,” I said. “When they take us all to church.”
He nodded. “And does that spoiled meat there accompany us to church?”
“No,” I said. “No, he stays here. He says he ‘worships in his own way.’” Truth was he was invariably too hung-over to rise on a Sunday.
He nodded again. “And today is Tuesday. Which means that we have five days to do our work.”
“What work, Monty?”
“Why, we are going to build a clockwork automaton based on that evil tyrant what I slew this very morning. We will build a device of surpassing and fiendish cleverness, such as will fool the nuns and the world at large into thinking that we are still being ground up like mincemeat, while we lead a life of leisure, fun, and invention, such as befits children of our mental stature and good character.”
Here’s the oath we swore to Monty before we went to work on the automaton:
“I, (state your full name), do hereby give my most solemn oath that I will never, ever betray the secrets of St. Agatha’s. I bind myself to the good fortune of my fellow inmates at this institution and vow to honour them as though they were my brothers and sisters, and not to fight with them, nor spite them, nor do them down or dirty. I make this oath freely and gladly, and should I betray it, I wish that old Satan himself would rise up from the pit and tear out my treacherous guts and use them for bootlaces, that his devils would tear my betrayer’s tongue from my mouth and use it to wipe their private parts, that my lying body would be fed, inch-by-inch, to the hungry and terrible basilisks of the Pit. So I swear, and so mote be it!”
There were two children who’d worked for a tanner in the house, older children. Matthew was shy all the fingers on his left hand. Becka was missing an eye and her nose, which she joked was a mercy, for there is no smell more terrible than the charnel reek of the tanning works. But between them, they were quite certain that they could carefully remove, stuff, and remount Grinder’s head, careful to leave the jaw in place.
As the oldest machinist at St. Aggie’s, I was conscripted to work on the torso and armature mechanisms. I played chief engineer, bossing a gang of six boys and four girls who had experience with mechanisms. We cannibalized St. Aggie’s old mechanical wash-wringer, with its spindly arms and many fingers; and I was sent out several times to pawn Grinder’s fine crystal and pocket-watch to raise money for parts.
Monty oversaw all, but he took personal charge of Grinder’s voicebox, through which he would imitate old Grinder’s voice when the sisters came by on Sunday. St. Aggie’s was fronted with a Dutch door, and Grinder habitually only opened the top half to jaw with the sisters. Monty said that we could prop the partial torso on a low table, to hide the fact that no legs depended
from it.
“We’ll tie a sick-kerchief around his face and give out that he’s got ’flu, and that it’s spread through the whole house. That’ll get us all out of church, which is a tidy little jackpot in and of itself. The kerchief will disguise the fact that his lips ain’t moving in time with his talking.”
I shook my head at this idea. The nuns were hardly geniuses, but how long could this hold out for?
“It won’t have to last more than a week—by next week, we’ll have something better to show ’em.”
Here’s a thing: it all worked like a fine-tuned machine.
The kerchief made it look like a bank-robber, and Monty painted its face to make him seem more lively, for the tanning had dried him out some (he also doused the horrible thing with liberal lashings of bay rum and greased its hair with a heavy pomade, for the tanning process had left him with a smell like an outhouse on a hot day). Monty had affixed an armature to the thing’s bottom jaw—we’d had to break it to get it to open, prying it roughly with a screwdriver, cracking a tooth or two in the process, and I have nightmares to this day about the sound it made when it finally yawed open.
A child—little legless Dora, whose begging pitch included a sad little puppetry show—could work this armature by means of a squeeze-bulb taken from the siphon-starter on Grinder’s cider brewing tub, and so make the jaw go up and down in time with speech.
The speech itself was accomplished by means of the horsegut voicebox from Grinder’s music-box. Monty surehandedly affixed a long, smooth glass tube—part of the cracking apparatus that I had been sent to market to buy—to the music-box’s resonator. This, he ran up behind our automatic Grinder. Then, crouched on the floor before the voicebox, stationed next to Dora on her wheeled plank, he was able to whisper across the horsegut strings and have them buzz out a credible version of Grinder’s whiskey-roughened growl. And once he’d tuned the horsegut just so, the vocal resemblance was even more remarkable. Combined with Dora’s skillful puppetry, the effect was galvanizing. It took a conscious effort to remember that this was a puppet talking to you, not a man.
The sisters turned up at the appointed hour on Sunday, only to be greeted by our clockwork Grinder, stood in the half-door, face swathed in a ’flu mask. We’d hung quarantine bunting from the windows, crisscrossing the front of St. Aggie’s with it for good measure, and a goodly number of us kiddees were watching from the upstairs windows with our best drawn and sickly looks on our faces.
So the sisters hung back practically at the pavement and shouted, “Mr. Grindersworth!” in alarmed tones, staring with horror at the apparition in the doorway.
“Sisters, good day to you,” Monty said into his horsegut, while Dora worked her squeeze-bulb, and the jaw went up and down behind its white cloth, and the muffled simulation of Grinder’s voice emanated from the top of the glass tube, hidden behind the automaton’s head, so that it seemed to come from the right place. “Though not such a good day for us, I fear.”
“The children are ill?”
Monty gave out a fine sham of Grinder’s laugh, the one he used when dealing with proper people, with the cruelty barely plastered-over. “Oh, not all of them. But we have a dozen cases. Thankfully, I appear to be immune, and oh my, but you wouldn’t believe the help these tots are in the practical nursing department. Fine kiddees, my charges, yes indeed. But still, best to keep them away from the general public for the nonce, hey? I’m quite sure we’ll have them up on their feet by next Sunday, and they’ll be glad indeed of the chance to get down on their knees and thank the beneficent Lord for their good health.” Monty was laying it on thick, but then, so had Grinder, when it came to the sisters.
“We shall send over some help after the services,” the head sister said, hands at her breast, a tear glistening in her eye at the thought of our bravery. I thought the jig was up. Of course the order would have some sisters who’d had the ’flu and gotten over it, rendering them immune. But Monty never worried.
“No, no,” he said, smoothly. I had the presence of mind to take up the cranks that operated the “arms” we’d co
nstructed for him, waving them about in a negating way—this effect rather spoiled by my nervousness, so that they seemed more octopus tentacle than arm. But the sisters didn’t appear to notice. “As I say, I have plenty of help here with my good children.”
“A basket, then,” the sister said. “Some nourishing food and fizzy drinks for the children.”
Crouching low in the anteroom, we crippled children traded disbelieving looks with one another. Not only had Monty gotten rid of Grinder and gotten us out of going to church, he’d also set things up so that the sisters of St. Aggie’s were going to bring us their best grub, for free, because we were all so poorly and ailing! It was all we could do not to cheer.
And cheer we did, later, when the sisters set ten huge hampers down on our doorstep, whence we retrieved them, finding in them a feast fit for princes: cold meat pies glistening with aspic, marrow bones still warm from the oven, suet pudding and jugs of custard with skin on top of them, huge bottles of fizzy lemonade and small beer. By the time we’d laid it out in the dining room, it seemed like we’d never be able to eat it all.
But we et every last morsel, and four of us carried Monty about on our shoulders—two carrying, two steadying the carriers—and someone found a concertina, and someone found some combs and waxed paper, and we sang until the walls shook: The Mechanic’s Folly, A Combinatorial Explosion at the Computer-Works, and then endless rounds of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.
Monty had promised improvements on the clockwork Grinder by the following Sunday, and he made good on it. Since we no longer had to beg all day long, we children of St. Aggie’s had time in plenty, and Monty had no shortage of skilled volunteers who wanted to work with him on Grinder II, as he called it. Grinder II sported a rather handsome and large, droopy mustache, which hid the action of its lips. This mustache was glued onto the head-assembly one hair at a time, a painstaking job that denuded every horsehair brush in the house, but the effect was impressive.
More impressive was the leg-assembly I bossed into existence, a pair of clockwork pins that could lever Grinder from a seated position into full upright, balancing him by means of three gyros we hid in his chest cavity. Once these were wound and spun, Grinder could stand up in a very natural fashion. Once we’d rearranged the furniture to hide Dora and Monty behind a large armchair, you could stand right in the parlour and “converse” with him, and unless you were looking very hard, you’d never know but what you were talking with a mortal man, and not an automaton made of tanned flesh, steel, springs, and clay (we used rather a lot of custom-made porcelain from the prosthetic works to get his legs right—the children who were shy a leg or two knew which leg-makers in town had the best wares).
And so when the sisters arrived the following Sunday, they were led right into the parlour, whose net curtains kept the room in a semi-dark state, and there, they parlayed with Grinder, who came to his feet when they entered and left. One of the girls was in charge of his arms, and she had practised with them so well that she was able to move them in a very convincing fashion. Convincing enough, anyroad: the sisters left Grinder with a bag of clothes, a bag of oranges that had come off a ship that had sailed from Spanish Florida right up the St. Lawrence to the port of Montreal, and thereafter traversed by rail-car to Muddy York. They made a parcel gift of these succulent treasures to Grinder, to “help the kiddees keep away the scurvy,” but Grinder always kept them for himself or flogged them to his pals for a neat penny. We wolfed the oranges right after services, and then took our Sabbath free with games and more brandy from Grinder’s sideboard.
And so we went, week on week, with small but impressive updates to our clockwork man: hands that could grasp and smoke a pipe; a clever mechanism that let him throw back his head and laugh, fingers that could drum on the table beside him, eyes that could follow you around a room and eyelids that could blink, albeit slowly.
But Monty had much bigger plans.
“I want to bring in another 56 bits,” he said, gesturing at the computing panel in Grinder’s parlour, a paltry eight-bit works. That meant that there were eight switches with eight matching levers, connected to eight brass rods that ran down to the public computing works that ran beneath the streets of Muddy York. Grinder had used his eight bits to keep St. Aggie’s books—both the set he showed to the sisters and the one where he kept track of what he was trousering for himself—and he’d let one “lucky” child work the great, stiff return-arm that sent the instructions set on the switches back to the Hall of Computing for queuing and processing on the great frames that had cost me my good right arm. An instant later, the processed answer would be returned to the levers above the switches, and to whatever interpretive mechanism you had yoked up to them (Grinder used a telegraph machine that printed the answers upon a long, thin sheet of paper).
“56 bits!” I boggled at Monty. A 64-bit rig wasn’t unheard of, if you were a mighty shipping company or insurer. But in a private home—well, the racket of the switches would shake the foundations! Remember, dear reader, that each additional bit doubled the calculating faculty of the home panel. Monty was proposing to increase St. Aggie’s computational capacity by a factor more than a quadrillionfold! (We computermen are accustomed to dealing in these rarified numbers, but they may boggle you. Have no fear—a quadrillion is a number of such surpassing monstrosity that you must have the knack of figuring to even approach it properly).
“Monty,” I gasped, “are you planning to open a firm of accountants at St. Aggie’s?”
He laid a finger alongside of his nose. “Not at all, my old darling. I have a thought that perhaps we could build a tiny figuring engine into our Grinder’s chest cavity, one that could take programs punched off of a sufficiently powerful computing frame, and that these might enable him to walk about on his own, as natural as you please, and even carry on conversations as though he were a living man. Such a creation would afford us even more freedom and security, as you must be able to see.”
“But it will cost the bloody world!” I said.
“Oh, I didn’t think we’d pay for it,” he said. Once again, he laid his finger alongside his nose.
And that is how I came to find myself down our local sewer, in the dead of night, a seventeen-year-old brassjacker, bossing a gang of eight kids with 10 arms, 7 noses, 9 hands and 11 legs between them, working furiously and racing the dawn to fit thousands of precision brass push-rods with lightly balanced joints from the local multifarious amalgamation and amplification switch-house to St. Aggie’s utility cellar. It didn’t work, of course. Not that night. But at least we didn’t break anything and alert the Upper Canadian Computing Authority to our mischief. Three nights later, after much fine-tuning, oiling, and desperate prayer, the panel at St. Aggie’s boasted 64 shining brass bits, the very height of modernity and engineering.
Monty and the children all stood before the panel, which had been burnished to a mirror shine by No-Nose Timmy, who’d done finishing work before a careless master had stumbled over him, pushing him face-first into a spinning grinding wheel. In the gaslight, we appeared to be staring at a group of mighty heroes, and when Monty turned to regard us, he had bright tears in his eyes.
“Sisters and brothers, we have done ourselves proud. A new day has dawned for St. Aggie’s and for our lives. Thank you. You have done me proud.”
We shared out the last of Grinder’s brandy, a thimbleful each, even for the smallest kiddees, and drank a toast to the brave and clever children of St. Aggie’s and to Montreal Monty, our saviour and the founder of our feast.
Let me tell you some about life at St. Aggie’s in that golden age. Whereas before, we’d rise at 7AM for a mean breakfast—prepared by unfavoured children whom Grinder punished by putting them into the kitchen at 4:30 to prepare the meal—followed by a brief “sermon” roared out by Grinder; now we rose at a very civilized 10AM to eat a leisurely breakfast over the daily papers that Grinder had subscribed to. The breakfasts—all the meals and chores—were done on a rota
ting basis, with exemptions for children whose infirmity made performing some tasks harder than others. Though all worked—even the blind children sorted weevils and stones from the rice and beans by touch.
Whereas Grinder had sent us out to beg every day—excepting Sundays—debasing ourselves and putting our injuries on display for the purposes of sympathy; now we were free to laze around the house all day, or work at our own fancies, painting or reading or just playing like the cherished children of rich families who didn’t need to send their young ones to the city to work for the family fortune.
But most of us quickly bored of the life of Riley, and for us, there was plenty to do. The clockwork Grinder was always a distraction, especially after Monty started work on the mechanism that would accept punched-tape instructions from the computing panel.
When we weren’t working on Grinder, there was other work. We former apprentices went back to our old masters—men and women who were guilty but glad enough to see us, in the main—and told them that the skilled children of St. Aggie’s were looking for piecework as part of our rehabilitation, at a competitive price.
It was hardly a lie, either: as broken tools and mechanisms came in for mending, the boys and girls taught one another their crafts and trade, and it wasn’t long before a steady flow of cash came into St. Aggie’s, paying for better food, better clothes, and, soon enough, the very best artificial arms, legs, hands and feet, the best glass eyes, the best wigs. When Gertie Shine-Pate was fitted for her first wig and saw herself in the great looking-glass in Grinder’s study, she burst into tears and hugged all and sundry, and thereafter, St. Aggie’s bought her three more wigs to wear as the mood struck her. She took to styling these wigs with combs and scissors, and before long she was cutting hair for all of us at St. Aggie’s. We never looked so good.
That gilded time from the end of my boyhood is like a sweet dream to me now. A sweet, lost dream.
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 17