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 squeezebulb, 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
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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 constructed 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
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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 parlor 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 legmakers in town had the best wares).
And so when the sisters arrived the following Sunday, they
were led right into the parlor, 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 practiced 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
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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 parlor, 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 queueing 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
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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 7 AM for a mean breakfast—
prepared by unfavored 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 10 AM 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 rotating basis, with
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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.
*
No invention works right the first time around. The
inventors’ tales you read in the science penny-dreadfuls, where
some engineer discovers a new principle, puts it into practice,
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shouts “Eureka” and sets up his own foundry? They’re rubbish.
Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that
leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster,
there’s nothing for it but to fail faster and better.
The first time Monty rolled a paper tape into a cartridge and
inserted it into Grinder, we all held our breaths while he fished
around the arse of Grinder’s trouser
s for the toggle that released
the tension on the mainspring we wound through a keyhole in his
hip. He stepped back as the soft whining of the mechanism
emanated from Grinder’s body, and then Grinder began, very
slowly, to pace the room’s length, taking three long—if jerky—
steps, turning about, and taking three steps back. Then Grinder
lifted a hand as in greeting, and his mouth stretched into a rictus
that might have passed for a grin, and then, very carefully,
Grinder punched himself in the face so hard that his head came
free from his neck and rolled across the floor with a meaty sound
(it took our resident taxidermists a full two days to repair the
damage) and his body went into a horrible paroxysm like the St
Vitus dance, until it, too fell to the floor.
This was on Monday, and by Wednesday, we had Grinder
back on his feet with his head reattached. Again, Monty
depressed his toggle, and this time, Grinder made a horrendous
clanking sound and pitched forward.
And so it went, day after day, each tiny improvement
accompanied by abject failure, and each Sunday we struggled to
put the pieces together so that Grinder could pay his respects to
the sisters.
Until the day came that the sisters brought round a new child
to join our happy clan, and it all began to unravel.
We had been lucky in that Monty’s arrival at St Aggie’s
coincided with a reformer’s movement that had swept Upper
Canada, a movement whose figurehead, the Princess Lucy, met
with every magistrate, councilman, alderman, and beadle in the
colony, the sleeves of her dresses pinned up to the stumps of her
shoulders, sternly discussing the plight of the children who
worked in the Information Foundries across the colonies. It
didn’t do no good in the long run, of course, but for the short
term, word got round that the authorities would come down very
hard on any master whose apprentice lost a piece of himself in
the data-mills. So it was some months before St Aggie’s had any
new meat arrive upon its doorstep.
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The new meat in question was a weepy boy of about 11—the
same age I’d been when I arrived—and he was shy his left leg
all the way up to the hip. He had a crude steel leg in its place,
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