“Stolen it?” St. Ives was gripped by vertigo just then. His memory shifted. He fought to hold on to it, afraid to let pieces of it go completely. “Of course,” he said. “It’s a mystery to me, too, but there it sits.” He gestured out the window, where the machine glinted in the sunlight.
Narbondo had taken it! That was funny, hilarious. Now St. Ives had reappeared with it, and that meant that Narbondo’s copy was in the process of disappearing, out from under his nose, and stranding him, St. Ives hoped, in some distant land. Either that or the villain was gone somewhere in time, and would someday perhaps return, and then St. Ives’s machine would disappear. Time and chance, he reminded himself.
And then new memories, like wraiths, drifted into his mind, shifting old memories aside. “Alice!” he cried. “Is she here then?”
“She’s still in the parlor, sir,” Hasbro said, looking skeptical again. “Where you left her moments ago. I really must advise you against that suit, by the way. The tailor is certifiable. Perhaps if I laid something else out...”
“Yes,” St. Ives said, hurrying through the door. “Lay something out.”
He was dizzy, foggy with memories, drunk on them. And as if he were literally drunk, he felt free of the depressing guilt and worry that had plagued him... for how long? And why? He couldn’t entirely remember. It seemed so long ago. His mind was a confusion of images now, stolen from the man whose ghost was where? Blowing away on the wind, across the meadow? Would he remain to haunt the manor, exercising a ghostly grudge against his other-time self for having returned to supplant him?
Mrs. Langley loomed out of the kitchen, her hands white with baking flour.
“I’ve taken your advice, Mrs. Langley,” he said.
“Beg pardon, sir? What advice?”
“I...” What advice, indeed? He didn’t know. He pulled at the collar of his shirt, which was too tight for him. “Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. I was thinking out loud.” She nodded, baffled, and he forced himself along, walking toward the parlor. Steady on, he told himself. Keep your mouth closed. There’s too much you don’t know yet, and too much of what you do know is nonsense.
And then there sat Alice, reading a book. He was astonished by the sight of her. She hasn’t aged a day, he thought joyfully, and then he wondered why on earth he thought any such thing, and a garden of memories, like someone else’s anecdotes, sprung fully bloomed in his mind. His head swam, and he sat down hard on a chair. Maybe he ought to have waited, to have grappled with the business of memory before wading in like this. But he hadn’t, and now that he got a good look at Alice, with her dark hair done up in a ribbon, he was happy that he hadn’t wasted another moment.
“I’m sorry about the eggplant,” she said to him, just then glancing up from her book. She squinted at the sight of him, looking unhappily surprised, and he grinned back at her like a drunken man. “That awful suit of clothes,” she said. “You look rather like a dirty sausage in them, don’t you? I’ve seen those before...”
“I’m just getting set to burn them,” St. Ives said hurriedly. “They’re a relic, from the future. A sort of... costume.”
“Well,” she said. “The trousers might look better if you hadn’t waded across the river in them. But I am sorry about the eggplant. I don’t mean to make you eat it every night, but Janet’s cook, Pierre, is apparently fixing it for us this evening. Will you be ready to leave in a half hour? You looked wonderful just moments ago.”
“Eggplant? Janet?” His mind fumbled with the words. Then through the parlor window he saw Alice’s garden, laid out in neat rows. Purple-green eggplants hung like lunar eggs from a halfdozen plants.
“Oh, Janet,” he said, nodding broadly. “From the Harrogate Women’s Literary League!”
“What on earth is wrong with you? Of course that Janet, unless you’ve got another one hidden somewhere. And don’t go on about the eggplant this time, will you?”
Suddenly he could taste the horrible sour stuff. He had eaten it last night mixed up with ground lamb. And the night before, too, stewed up with Middle Eastern spices. He had been on a sort of eggplant diet, a slave to the vegetable garden.
“You could use a bath, too, couldn’t you? At least a wash up. And your hair looks as if you’ve been out in the wind for three days. What have you been up to?”
“I... old Ben,” he began. “Mud. Up to his blinkers.”
But then he was interrupted by a sort of banshee wail from somewhere off in the house. It rose to a crescendo and then turned into a series of squalling hoots.
He stood up, looking down at Alice in alarm. “What...”
“It’s not all that bad,” she said, nearly laughing. “Look at you! Anyone would think you hadn’t ever changed his nappies before. They can’t be a tremendous lot dirtier than your trouser cuffs, can they?”
The baby’s crying had very nearly inundated him with fresh memories. Little Eddie, his son. He smiled broadly. It was his turn to change the nappies. They had agreed against a nanny, were bringing up the child themselves, spoon-feeding it with stuff mashed up out of the garden. Eddie wouldn’t eat eggplant either, wouldn’t touch it on a bet. “Good old Eddie!” he said out loud.
“That’s the right attitude,” Alice said.
And now in the shuffle of the old being washed out by the new, he saw it all clearly for one last long moment. His fears for the future had come to nothing. Alice was safe. They had a son. The garden was growing again. They were happy now. He was happy, nearly delirious. He found that he couldn’t think in terms of future-time selves and past-time selves any longer. None of his other selves mattered to him at all.
There was only he and Alice and Eddie and... rows and rows of eggplant. He nearly started to whistle, but then the baby squalled again and Alice widened her eyes, inviting him to do something about it.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, heading for the stairs. “I love eggplant.” And he very nearly meant it, too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence. He is also a professor at Chapman University, where he has taught for twenty years. Blaylock lives in Orange CA with his wife, they have two sons.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
THE AYLESFORD SKULL
James P. Blaylock
It is the summer of 1883 and Professor Langdon St. Ives, brilliant but eccentric scientist and explorer, is at home in Aylesford with his family. A few miles to the north a steam launch has been taken by pirates above Egypt Bay, the crew murdered and pitched overboard.
In Aylesford itself a grave is opened and possibly robbed of the skull. The suspected grave robber, the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, is an old nemesis of Langdon St. Ives. When Dr. Narbondo returns to kidnap his four-year-old son Eddie and then vanishes into the night, St. Ives and his factotum Hasbro race into London in pursuit...
Also available as a limited edition.
HOMUNCULUS
James P. Blaylock
It is the late 19th century and a mysterious airship orbits through the foggy skies. Its terrible secrets are sought by many, including the Royal Society, a fraudulent evangelist, a fiendish vivisectionist, an evil millionaire and an assorted group led by the scientist and explorer Professor Langdon St. Ives.
Can St. Ives keep the alien homunculus out of the claws of the villainous Ignacio Narbondo?
“The fastest, funniest, most colorful and grotesquely horrifying novel that could ever be written about Victorian London.” — Tim Powers, author of On Stranger Tides
WWW.TITANBOOKS.COM
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Lord Kelvin's Machine (Langdon St. Ives) Page 25