“I shudder to think what Ben would do in an enclosed space if someone dashed cold water in his face,” Pimm said.
Winnie sighed. “You have no sense of adventure. But do go on—did you discover anything interesting before Oswald detained you?”
Before Pimm could answer, they heard the click, click, click of Oswald’s peculiar metal walking stick rapping on the floor. He returned to the circle of light cast by the alchemical lamp with Carrington on his heels, but Crippen was nowhere in sight. Oswald sat down on the chair and said, “Bring us tea, Carrington. Enough for everyone.”
“Tea? But—”
“You will find everything you need in the office,” Oswald said. “There is a gas ring, and cups, and pots, and so on. Biscuits.” He made a shooing gesture. “Quickly, please. I will not have time to take a proper meal before the Exposition, and I am famished.”
Carrington bowed and disappeared again into the dark. Oswald regarded the inhabitants of the cage silently for a while, then brushed an imperceptible speck from his knee. “I am not a murderer,” Oswald said, looking up again, fixing his gaze on each of their faces in turn. “You should understand that. No more than a naturalist who pins butterflies to a board is a murderer. I am interested in truth. And, alas, sometimes, the living must join the dead in the service of that truth.”
“Are we to die, then?” Pimm asked. “In your service?”
“That remains to be seen, Lord Pembroke. I would be so bold as to say it’s entirely up to you.”
A Life of Genius
Oswald nodded, as if pleased with himself for making an excellent point. “Let me say, first, that I do not wish to harm any of you. I do not even particularly wish to detain you, and certainly have no desire to kill you—though I will, if given no other choice.” He frowned, as if they were children who’d disappointed him. “Admittedly, when I thought Miss Skyler was merely some middle-class barrister or merchant named Jenkins who’d stumbled on my secret business interests, I would have been content with a more... final solution to the problem of her existence. But now that I know her true identity, I confess I am actually a great admirer of her writing, and would like to see her prosper in the new world I plan to usher in. I want the same thing for you, Lord Pembroke—unlike most of the parasitic aristocrats who puff and strut their way through this city, wasting their pointless lives, you actually have a mind, though you bend it toward lesser pursuits than I might wish. And you, Winifred—surely you would prefer a world where you could be judged on the content of your character rather than the accident of your sex?”
“You must not know much about my character,” Winnie said.
Oswald’s eyes reminded Ellie of a crow’s, looking at something fresh-killed in the street. “I prefer to make allies of my enemies, whenever possible. Do you think Abel Value was originally eager to work with me? Of course not. But he—or she, at the time—wanted something, and I was able to grant her wish. The man you know as Adams was once a rival of sorts as well, but I took him into my confidence, and showed him I valued his contribution, and he soon became part of my great work. As I hope you will be. There is always room for intelligent, resourceful people in my organization.”
“What great work do you mean, sir?” Ellie asked, in her best interested-journalist voice.
“I believe in the power of science, Miss Skyler. Do you?”
“I am as astonished as anyone by the recent advances in alchemy, steam engines, magnetism—”
“No!” Oswald slammed his cane down on the floor with a resounding bang. “You are speaking of technology, not science. Technology is the fruit of science—but science is the tree. Science is a way of understanding the world, Miss Skyler. One makes observations, extrapolates conclusions, carries out an experiment to prove or disprove the validity of those conclusions, and adjusts one’s worldview as necessary. That process is what I believe in—not assumptions, not the base canard known as ‘common sense,’ not God, or the devil, or tradition, or faith, or religion, or all the collective institutionalized weaknesses known as human nature, or worse, human decency. Only the empirical matters to me.” He stood up, his head bowed low. “But the world is a complicated place. Too complicated, truthfully—too chaotic. The key to any experiment is controlling the variables, you see. But how can I conduct truly vast experiments, studies aimed at laying bare the nature of society itself, when so many factors are outside my control? I have tried to conduct certain experiments anyway, despite those limitations, but always, outside forces tainted the purity of my efforts. The fire in Whitechapel, which still burns? Do you know what started it?”
“An illegal experiment in an alchemical workshop, as I understand it,” Pimm said. From his tone, he could have been at a slightly boring dinner party, and not locked in a lion cage at all.
“Illegal? How could it be illegal? There were no laws governing the things I was doing.”
Ellie stared. “It was... you? Your experiment? But how can that be? The fires began years before I was born. You were just a boy yourself, surely you’re too young—”
“You are too kind,” Oswald said. “I made it a point, early in my studies, to find a way to extend my lifespan. Not quite the fabled elixir vitae, it does not restore youth or grant immortality, but it arrests aging, if taken regularly. I am... rather older than I seem, and have reason to believe my longevity will exceed the vast lifespans attributed to certain Biblical patriarchs. I have been obliged to change my identity often over the years, going into seclusion and emerging later to pose as my own son, or nephew, or some other long-lost heir. I am the entirety of the Oswald line, stretching back for generations.
“Yes, the tragedy of Whitechapel was related to my work, though I am not to blame. I was attempting to unlock a source of power less filthy than coal, an energy that would enable me to run colossal engines of unimaginable power. To call my work then ‘alchemy’ is incorrect—it was something closer to geology, in this case. I discovered a strange crystal during my travels in the Amazon, a cave full of glowing purple formations. The local tribes used the shards of crystal as weapons—use one to tip a spear, and anyone stabbed would sicken and die. But hurl one of the shards at a stone with sufficient force... and the stone would explode, reduced to dust, and no plants would grow anywhere that dust fell, ever again. I realized there was enough energy locked in a single crystal to level a mountain, if properly released... and I conceived of a method to control and harness that power, releasing a far greater force of energy than merely tossing a shard at a rock could ever do. I gathered a few crystals, packed them carefully, and transported them to London. I chose to make my lab in a filthy block of Whitechapel, because I knew accidents were possible, and if there were an explosion... well, I could hardly risk blowing up the West End, could I?
“I was careful, oh, so very careful... but I could not personally craft every vessel and every tool. I hired a man to make me a containment box from lead. For reasons I will never know, he did not use pure lead—he adulterated it with some other metal. And why? To do it more cheaply, and keep a few coins for himself? Because he simply had the other materials close to hand? Who knows? But he deviated from my exacting specifications, and when I finally cracked open the secret heart of a crystal to release the energies inside... the forces I unleashed were not contained. The vessel cracked. I was wearing protective garb, of course—one does learn to be careful—but my assistants were not so lucky. The strange energies I released had a deleterious effect on the human body. Sores appeared on their faces, and their hands, and, I presume, all over their bodies. They bled from their eyes, and screamed, and flailed. Of course, their frantic actions and the force from the broken crystal led to an accident in the lab, a terrible fire, chemicals reacting terribly, numerous explosions which caused nearly my entire stockpile of crystals to erupt, and...” He gestured vaguely northward. “The disaster began. Some of those chemical reactions are still ongoing, and may not cease for decades or centuries. I managed to keep my na
me out of the affair. When those first stray dogs came crawling out of the remains of Whitechapel, so horribly changed, and everyone realized how deadly the region had become, I saw a way to turn disaster into opportunity. The crown commissioned a company I owned to build walls to contain the area. I have been improving the barriers ever since, most recently with the addition of the dome, and have made many remarkable discoveries in the realm of materials science in the process. I was very careful with the construction of that wall over the years. I let it be known that any craftsman caught supplying materials of poor quality would be left inside the walls.” His tone throughout this tale was mild, and it seemed the recitation of an anecdote drained of all emotional power by time, or the simple indifference of the teller.
“Your experiments killed hundreds!” Ellie cried.
Oswald frowned. “I killed no one. Thousands died, in fact, counting those who lived near the walls and succumbed to strange illnesses later, but their deaths can be laid at the feet of the man who gave me tin when I asked for lead. Human error, you see—that is the problem. My next course of experiments were meant to eliminate human error. I constructed a device called the Air Loom, which acted to send certain waves and emanations through the air toward specific targets. The purpose of the device was to correct the behavior of unreliable people—”
“Mind control, you mean?” Pimm said. Then, apologetically, “I only wish to be sure I understand.”
Oswald harrumphed. “I suppose you could call it that—but is training a dog ‘mind control’? A well-trained dog is happier and more useful than a feral stray, I am sure you would agree, and its owner is happier, too. I thought I could induce men to behave better, that is all. The Loom had certain shortcomings—it was necessary to douse subjects in a volatile magnetic fluid before the Loom would affect them, which was difficult to do surreptitiously, and when activated, the Loom did not alter the workings of their brains in quite the way I’d predicted.”
“Did the people explode?” Winnie asked. “Burst into flame? Only I seem to recall stories of spontaneous human combustion...”
“No, no,” Oswald said. “That was an unrelated matter. The Loom failed in different ways. Its emanations could affect the fluids in the brain, but instead of altering thoughts, they caused terrible pain and discomfort, and my test subjects either took their own lives, fled the country, or were committed to Bedlam. I had to retire the Loom, though I still think of it fondly—it was a beautiful device. I believe in beauty, you know. I just don’t see beauty in the same things that most people do. The failure of the Loom made me realize I did not understand enough about the human brain to achieve sufficiently precise effects. That is when I retained the services of the man you know as Mr. Adams, Lord Pembroke. He has a keen understanding of all elements of physiognomy—within his limited field of expertise, he far surpasses even my own knowledge, and he has a tremendous grasp of electricity and chemistry as well. We worked together for a time to create a device that would enable us to control human minds...” Oswald sighed. “It could have worked beautifully. Alas, it required brain surgery, which is difficult to do in secret. We recently chose to part ways, and pursue our own efforts separately.”
“And here I heard you shot him in the heart,” Pimm said. Ellie looked at him in alarm.
“Hmm,” Oswald said. “You are a detective, aren’t you? Yes, it’s true. If it gives you consolation, you should know Adams was not truly a man, but a stitched-together amalgam of several corpses, the monstrous reanimated creation of a brilliant natural philosopher, now himself long dead. I did not so much kill Adams as... deactivate him. He had ceased to be useful, and a useless tool may be reasonably discarded.”
“From anyone else, that would sound like a threat,” Winnie said. “But do you know, I don’t even think he meant it that way.”
Oswald waited patiently for Winnie to finish, then went on. “In the past few years my focus has altered, away from changing individuals to addressing problems with the system—with society itself, which is part of why most individuals are so dreadful. One of the greatest problems with our culture is the fact that men and women are treated so drastically differently, their spheres of life so rigorously separated. The class of ‘humans’ is complex enough without adding further arbitrary divisions—men and women are the same, in the aggregate, apart from certain secondary sexual characteristics that do not interest me overmuch. The apparent differences in their abilities are, it seems to me, largely determined by cultural prejudices, excepting generalizations regarding muscle mass and, of course, reproductive ability.”
“You may be right,” Ellie said. “I have certainly grown weary of men telling me no woman can write as well as a man.”
Oswald positively beamed. “You see? We are in agreement. I knew we would find grounds to make common cause. I decided it might be useful to destroy those notions about the essential fundamental differences between men and women, and so I spent several years studying certain frogs, lizards, and fish, and learning about the transmission of various infectious diseases, and—”
“Yes, I was going to mention,” Pimm said. “Sir Bertram here is responsible for creating and releasing the Constantine Affliction.”
The Burden of Vision
After a long moment of shocked silence, Winnie said, “All this time I’ve been cursing God for giving me the Constantine Affliction, when I should have been cursing you.”
Oswald sighed. “Your inconvenience is irrelevant when compared to the greater good, Winifred. And the Constantine Affliction is a foolish name. I was disappointed to see you perpetuate the term in your articles, Miss Skyler. I call it the Great Transformer, in my journals.”
Journals! Ellie thought. Journals meant evidence.
Oswald went on, pacing in front of the cage. “Though it is true that an ambassador from Constantinople was among the first to contract the illness, when I introduced it into a certain brothel. Though he—or she—was not the original carrier.”
“What did you think would happen when you engineered this catastrophe?” Ellie said. “What was your prediction, your hypothesis?”
“Chaos, of course. But I expected—I still expect—that eventually having men transform into women, and women into men, while retaining their same essential minds and faculties, would make people realize how ridiculous and arbitrary the division into male and female ‘spheres’ truly is. I would class that experiment as.... ongoing, rather than a failure. One of the advantages of having an extended life is the ability to engage in long-term social experiments like this one. Of course, one must occupy oneself while awaiting the results. Hence my interest in the clockwork courtesans—”
“That plague killed more people than it transformed,” Ellie interrupted. “Were all those deaths a worthwhile price to pay for your experiment?”
Oswald frowned. “What is this obsession with life and death? Life is not precious, Miss Skyler. Leave a filthy puddle of water alone in a beam of sunlight, and it will teem with life in a few days or weeks. Oh, some lives are more worthy than others, certain individuals more valuable than the rest of the milling hordes—I myself, and the three of you perhaps, and even Abel Value, in his grim and simple way. But if some must die in order to further my researches, what of it? Some of my colleagues study fruit flies. Such flies are wonderful subjects, because they breed rapidly, and their lives are very short, so they churn through new generations at a prodigious rate. Introduce a new variable into a colony of fruit flies, and one can watch the consequences propagate swiftly. Humans are, compared to my own likely lifespan, scarcely more than flies themselves. And anyway, killing off a few people is the humane thing to do.”
“Your powers of rationalization are astounding,” Pimm said.
“Oh, don’t be naive, Lord Pembroke. There are too many people alive now. Do you have any idea how many human beings teem on this earth? One and a quarter billion.” He shuddered. “Such a number is scarcely comprehensible by the human mind!”
“What does deserving have to do with it? They never earned the right to live, so I do not require them to earn the right to die. Have you read the writings of the Reverend Malthus? He pointed out decades ago that population growth is exponential, while the growth of the world’s food supply is merely arithmetical.” He sighed. “I can see by your expressions that you are all functionally innumerate. What I mean is, population grows by leaps and bounds, while our ability to produce food plods along at a rather more modest pace. Malthus predicted that, sooner rather than later, the population will far outstrip our capacity to feed that population. Thinning out the horde is actually merciful, like hunting deer to keep their numbers in check—otherwise, they will overpopulate and starve to death.”
“But we shall not starve today,” Carrington said, returning with a tray of tea. “I found some frosted biscuits, they’re marvelous.”
Oswald seemed peeved at the interruption. He took his own tea cup and told Carrington to put the tray where “our guests” could reach it. With exaggerated care, the secretary placed the tray on the ground and then used Pimm’s walking stick to push it slowly closer to the bars.
“Whatever are you doing?” Oswald demanded.
“I wouldn’t put it past Freddy to hurl hot tea into my face in an attempt to escape,” Carrington said.
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Winnie admitted. “Not to help us escape, of course, that’s obviously ridiculous, but just for my own amusement.” She reached through the bars and poured tea for herself, Ellie, and Pimm, while Oswald tapped his walking stick impatiently—some property of its odd metallic composition made it ring unpleasantly against the floor.
The Constantine Affliction Page 23