Clarkesworld: Year Three
Page 28
Achitophel Bates was frowning, but it seemed more concentration than anger. “Well, I can’t argue a creature has free will and then argue it can’t choose for itself. As long as you’re sure what you’re doing is going to do what it wants.”
“As sure as I can be,” I said.
He looked at me searchingly, but seemed to accept that I was telling the truth. “All right,” he said and stepped aside.
I picked up the de Winter and closed it to create a door in the circle and said in Latin, “Step inside.”
White Charles did not hesitate. Its groaning, grinding body shambled past me to stand over the book in the center of the circle. I stepped into the circle myself, then opened the de Winter again and put it back in its place. I knelt in front of White Charles and opened the Albinus at random. It fell open, as books will, to a page that had been often consulted, adorned in this instance with a Vermeulen woodcut of a grave-robber—not inappropriate in a ghoulish Sortes Vergilianae fashion. I reminded myself not to wonder how the antiquarian had come by his materials.
I looked up at White Charles. It was still horrific in aspect, a crude approximation of the human form built by something that did not wish to be human, but I was no longer frightened of it. Achitophel Bates was right. When given the chance, it did not choose evil.
The longest part of my preprations had been working out the Latin; while awkwardness did not matter, imprecision might matter a great deal, and the consequences of using the wrong word could be rather worse than fatal. My words were inelegant, but I knew their meaning was correct.
“You were called from this book,” I said in simple, careful Latin, “and now I call you back to it. Relinquish this unnatural existence. Rest.” And, although even now I cringed from touching the creature, I reached out and guided one of its screwdriver-fingers to touch the page.
Around the circle, one by one, the books snapped shut.
The edifice that was White Charles was perfectly still for a moment; I saw—or thought I saw—something depart from it, and it went from being a constructed body to being simply an amalgamation of metal and wood. It swayed and sagged, and at the same time I realized what was going to happen, the entire thing came down on my head.
I regained consciousness on the sofa in the Curators’ Lounge with the doubled bulldog visages of Hobden and Fiske staring down at me.
“You all right there, Mr. Booth?” said one. And I still could not tell one from the other.
“I, er . . . did it work?”
“As best any of us can tell,” said the other.
Everything hurt. My right wrist was made of broken glass. My head was pounding; I felt that if I could observe it from the outside, I would see my temples pulsing like the gills of a fish. “Oh God, the books!”
I started to get up, but sagged and failed halfway.
“D’you reckon you ought to have a doctor, Mr. Booth? You’ve got a lump on your forehead like a goose-egg, and you’re not a good color.”
“I’m never a good color,” I said. “But we can’t leave the books in the rotunda—not to mention the, er, the tools and whatnot. It must be nearly dawn.”
“Just past it,” said one of them. “But don’t worry. We took care of that part. Although Bates said he’d have a word with you later about his tools.”
“I put the books back where you found them,” said the other, who therefore had to be Fiske. “Including the fancy one in His Nibs’ office. I may have got some of the others wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I could not bear it any longer; I reached out with my left hand, caught the material of his sleeve. “Are you Fiske?”
“Yessir,” he said, though he and Hobden exchanged alarmed glances.
I squinted to focus, first on his face, then on Hobden’s. They were not identical lead soldiers, after all; they were men. And when finally, reluctantly, I met their eyes, first one and then the other, both frowning and worried, at last I saw. Fiske’s eyes were brown. Hobden’s eyes were blue. And around those eyes, dark and pale, their faces resolved. Nothing changed, for indeed there was nothing in them that needed changing, but I saw them.
But I looked away quickly, before they could see me in return.
About the Author
Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 105-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, one grand piano, and one husband. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. She has published more than forty short stories and has two short story collections out: The Bone Key and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves. She has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace.
On the Lot and In the Air
Lisa L Hannett
The crow’s talons gouged new gashes into Jupiter’s enamel as the orrery revolved a clockwork orbit beneath him. Gaslights incandesced from the base of the carnival booth, projecting the solar system’s rotations onto the canvas dome above the crow’s head. Light strobed into his eyes each time Jupiter completed a rotation, which did nothing to improve the crow’s temper. He lifted an articulated wing to shade his eyes; when he dropped it a moment later, he saw a gawking crowd congregating on the midway, its collective attention captivated by the golden gear held steady in his beak.
The midway’s makeshift stalls had sprouted like rank weeds, hell-bent on doing damage before they were uprooted. As evening slid into pungent night, the carnival had colonized the city’s neglected streets, transforming them with its garish gaslights and flea-bitten draperies. Tents had whorishly spread themselves along all surfaces, like the cheap skin show dames who plumped and corseted their wares in the fair’s liminal spaces.
Now the thoroughfare teemed with noxious odors, secreted by a horde of notorious bodies, all crammed into collapsible houses of ill-repute. The buildings supporting the carnival’s crooked pavilions dripped constantly, as if a giant pig was spitted in the sky, its juices left to fall like fatty rain onto the scene below. By morning, discarded candy wrappers and flocks of shredded ticket stubs would papier-maché every tent, signpost, and tree, leaving archaeological layers of rubbish to congeal in the city’s slime.
This whole place reeks, thought the crow.
“Forget cheap arcades with rubber-limbed benders! Forget dime museums, string-shows and flea powders! What y’all need is to let off some STEAM! Step right up and have a FREE shot at this Foul Fowl! Sock him in the block and win a plethora of prizes!”
The crow snorted as the sprocketed showman jangled out from behind a threadbare curtain. His stovepipe hat belched steam as he clanked over to the bally platform, which was girded in dusty organza. The showman’s pliable tin shanks were clad in darted velor leggings; aluminum tails grafted onto his torso lent his outfit a certain panache, as far as tarnished suits go. Small beads of humidity or grease drip-dropped down his pockmarked cheeks and neck, watermarking the collar of his ruffled shirt with grey splashes. Leaning on a bamboo walking stick atop the dais, he surveyed his flock for a heartbeat. On the second beat, he raised a gloved hand to his breast and bowed like a courtly gentleman.
“Robin Marx, at your service,” he said to rapt listeners, “on behalf of the Outdoor Amusement Business Association. That’s right, folks—you’ve heard the rumors, and I’m here to prove ‘em true—Robin Marx always gives the first shot for free! Win on that shot and the prize is yours! It’s no sin to be a winner, my friends; so come and collect an easy dinner.”
Revellers were drawn to Marx’s stall faster than you could say shine on spit. He had greased more than a few palms to score such a choice locale; his bird-show was the first thing people’d see when they came in, set up as he was on the right-hand side of the midway, only two paces away from the carnival’s main entrance. The showman smiled, and blessed the corr
uptible lot man as he surveyed his coffer-filling patch of turf.
It was proving to be the prime location for shooting marks.
Ladies and gents disembarked from a motley collection of dirigibles—steam-powered and boiler-driven, with leather balloons or finest silk, depending on the owner’s station—directly outside Sideshow Alley’s hastily erected plyboard fences. Two guineas were extracted from each heavy purse by way of an entrance fee; once inside, the gullible masses would sure as sugar leave a goodly portion of their remaining shillings to Robin Marx, proprietor and entrepreneur extraordinaire.
Pockets jingling, Marx wove through the crowd as if he were the Lord Mayor hisself; winking at the ugly girls and pinching the cute ones’ bottoms; shaking hands with the gents and slapping sharpies on the back as he progressed. In the midst of his campaigning, Marx made his way over to the crow’s slowly orbiting perch.
Night clung to the bird’s mangy figure; his wings hung sodden tissue-like by his sides. The crow felt like a feathered showcase for their racket, a curio cabinet with an aching beak and flea-bitten wings. A cabinet that would do anything for a day off. He sighed, making sure not to knock the gear out of his beak as he did, and listened to the sideshow dames singing to their Johnnies:
“ —one fire burns out another’s burning,
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish;
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish . . . ”
“Why don’t you ever sing like that, bird?” Marx bent over and turned the ornate key jutting out of the orrery’s bulbous base, and forced the slowing planets to rev into dazzling motion once more. The crow flapped his discontent. He growled down at the showman’s oxidized head, much to the crowd’s insipid delight. A mechanical band organ began to caterwaul across the thoroughfare, drowning out the crow’s curses.
“Ah,” said Marx, pausing before giving the key a final firm twist, ‘the only sound more haunting than the calliope is the music of money changing hands, my friend.’ And with a pseudo-sincere wink to his partner, he turned on his heel and directed his attention to the burgeoning audience.
Robin Marx hoisted his walking stick, jabbed it skyward to reinforce his ballyhoo. ‘The winner of the day will get the key to the midway, straight from my two hands!’ He flashed a large bank roll—a carny roll, thought the crow, or I’ll be buggered—and made sure to expose the cash reward for only the briefest second before squirreling it away in his waistcoat pocket.
“Get the bird to release his bootlegged prize! Five pence a shot,” the showman cried.
The crow made sure to tilt his head as Marx worked the bally; the golden gear winked in the gaslight, catching more than one poor sap’s eye. As his roost lifted him skyward, he scanned the faces milling in the throng below him. Tried to guess which unfortunate sucker would reveal hisself—for it always was a bloke—to be Marx’s front-worker.
Could be him, the crow thought, as a stocky gentleman in a bowler hat disembarked from a locomotive rickshaw and stepped onto the midway. But he changed his bet as the skin show dames peeled away from the shadows, snagging the bowler hat and its owner with their lurid insinuations. [“Me they shall feel, while I am able to stand: and ’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh,” sang the dames down the way.] He’ll be there for hours, the crow realized, or until his pockets (and other things) are sucked dry.
Jupiter convulsed on its brass frame, lurching further upward. The crow over-compensated for this movement and pitched forward at a precarious angle. His tomfoolery earned a round of raucous laughter from the carnival anemones swaying on the polluted floor beneath him. As he regained his balance, he saw a frogman wobble his way out of the ale den four stalls down, ribbetting up his dinner and the keg of piss-weak beer he’d consumed on a dare. Next door, a seedy-looking weasel in patched plus-fours emerged from the sky-grifter’s tent. He slid across the frogman’s spew, leaving a trail of putrid footsteps as he zigzagged his way up the noisy thoroughfare toward Robin Marx’s stall.
The weasel’s shifty eyes didn’t blink twice to see the team of spontaneously combusting phoenixes bouncing on rickety trampolines in the center of the midway. His listless mouth didn’t so much as twitch toward a smile, even when a row of constructs whirled a metallic dervish for his pleasure and coin. No, the weasel had the expression of a man on a mission. He had a job that wanted doing, just as sure as Old Cranker’s sausages weren’t stuffed with bona fide cud-chewer.
That’s him all right, the crow thought. That’s the shill.
He watched the weasel’s stilted progress, humming a fiddley snippet one of the lads from Labrador had played while the caravan steam-rolled its way across barren plains the previous night. The crow tried to ignore the ornamental gear whose jagged spokes were doing their utmost to bash his beak into a less functional shape. Agonising moments passed; the crow’s eyes began to water; his ears felt downright clogged with the midway’s hubbub. Finally, the weasel stepped up and placed his grimy paws on the footprints Marx had painted on the cobblestones, no more than spitting distance away from the crow’s orrery.
“Al-a-ga-zam, capper. Give the crowd a wave, and tell us your name,” said Marx in a voice as slick as the carnival’s boulevards.
“Trouper,” said the weasel.
“Well, Trouper, as I’ve just been telling these here folk, this bird’s a scoundrel of the nineteenth degree. That’s right: this rotten crow is flaunting stolen merchandise in his good-for-nothing beak. He pinched that gear right out of my pappy’s precious time-keeper”—he withdrew an unremarkable watch from his breast pocket and dangled it mid-air, just as he’d seen hypnotists do— “and now it’s ticked its last tock. Irreplaceable, that’s what this piece is. You’ve got to help me, Trouper! Help me get it back from that vicious crow so I can get my pappy’s ticker started again!”
The crow pretended to bow his head in shame at hearing Marx’s accusations. He swept his wings up before him in a gesture of mock supplication—his least favorite part of the act—and in so doing deftly swapped the golden gear for a confectioner’s imitation while Marx explained the rules of the game.
“The first shot’s always free, folks. Trouper, give it your best go. If you’re a real lucky son-of-a-gun, you’ll be the one to empty my purse after one sweet shot.” As if of its own volition, Marx’s hand stroked his waistcoat pocket while he spoke; and with each tender caress, the counterfeit bankroll bulged for all to see.
The crow gripped Jupiter more tightly as the weasel drew a jacked-up slingshot out of his leather satchel. Trouper braced hisself. He cranked the miniature catapult until its arm was fully cocked and in assault position. He took aim, his furry finger extending toward the trigger on the slingshot’s wooden handle, and fired. Across the midway, a group of girls squealed as their teetering seats topped the Ferris wheel’s luminous peak; the crowd at Marx’s stall gasped as the slingshot snapped into action with an ear-splitting crack of released carbon dioxide.
The crow mimed he’d been hit. He creaked his sooty wings around in comical circles, then swallowed the confectioner’s gear with a tinny gulp. The orrery shuddered to a halt. From beneath cracked eyelids, he watched his performance drain dollar signs away from the sea of greedy faces beneath him. He chuckled as he righted hisself on his now-stalled perch.
“Take that, you old shit,” he squawked at Marx, ruffling his oil-slick plumage. “Try and get your precious gear now.”
“You see, folks? You see what pain he gives me? Please—someone—anyone—step right up! Help me shut that miserable trap of his for good!” Right on cue, the bird started wheezing, hacking and choking, reeling the crowd in with faux suffering. He covered his beak with a wing—as all polite crows should do when they cough—and replaced the dissolved candy gear with its golden counterpart. Beams of golden light twinkled out of the crow’s mouth as the clean gear was reinstated, wedged between the upper and lower sections of his beak.
Venus chose that moment to add insult to the audience’s injury. The rose-colored globe, two prongs away from the crow’s own Jupiter, flared on the orrery with a sudden brightness that blinded the already mute crowd, throwing the midway into unflattering relief. Yet when the yellow-blue afterimages faded from the spectators’ eyes, their hands sprang together with gleeful applause. Tiny wind-up fireflies had escaped their Venusian cage: on Marx’s command, they buzzed into formation, their minute bodies spelling out ‘Golden Guinea’ in a bewitching message of fortune.
“Never fear, my friends. What did I tell you? Everyone’s a winner at Robin Marx’s.” The showman beamed with feigned magnanimity from his position on the stall’s counter. He released the hidden lever that had unleashed the automatic fireflies, and blew contented smoke rings from his hat as he coddled the ersatz pocket watch. “Yes, the crow’s still a crook, but good Trouper here shook him up a good one, didn’t he?” Catcalls and wolf whistles punctuated general expressions of good humor in response.
“And as the Lady Venus wills, the Gentleman shall receive,” Marx said. A newly-struck gold coin instantly appeared in Marx’s hand, and disappeared just as quickly in Trouper’s. The weasel snatched the throwaway as if it were the first and last coin he’d ever see, then forced a retreat through the jostling herd now vying to knock the crow senseless.
Mark after mark placed feet on painted footprints, squared their shoulders and threw—but none seemed blessed with Trouper’s luck. Children began throwing tantrums instead of projectiles. One sniveling whelp kicked up such a stink that Marx gave both boy and mother a few ducats to go and see the Marx Brothers’ Rocket-Powered Penny Farthings. This one tactical freebie was all it took; a deluge of 5p’s avalanched across the countertop, and into Marx’s purse.