By contrast, here is his grandfather’s workdesk, with the tools Daniel Spork constructed for himself. It is polished by time, unvarnished but smooth, and on the left is a slight imprint: the pressure of the old man’s elbow. On the right, a vise and a new rubber hose feeding an ancient Bunsen burner. Greying scars from heat, pale ones from tools. The grain of the wood is silvery, and in those lines is the literal DNA of the House of Spork, Daniel’s own co-mingled with his grandson’s—blood drawn by a moment’s inattention, tears choked out in times of sorrow, each drop carrying the blueprint of Daniel’s body, and Joe’s. Even Mathew is represented, probably, because Papa Spork was no stranger to this bench, for all that in his hands it became an armoury, a pouring place of molten lead and sharp-scented powders: a den of alchemy.
For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one who deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which use humans to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own weird little ecosystems. For reference and archive, though, he’s glad to have his baby Canon with its lens by Zeiss.
So. Three pictures from each angle, close and distant. Each fragment documented. He feels Grandpa Spork’s measuring gaze upon his back: Daniel Spork, dead these seven years and some, eyes bright in anticipation of a puzzle—and better, a puzzle shared with his best-beloved student, the son of his wastrel son.
Joe smiles to himself, a little sadly, in acknowledgement of the beloved, irascible dead. He doesn’t look over his shoulder, doesn’t want to see the empty room. Instead, he asks a question of the air, and lets his mind throw back Daniel’s responses.
“What next, old man?”
Use your eyes, boy. What are you looking at?
“It’s a doodah.”
Joseph, no. No, no, and no. In the first place, tell me you have not been dealing with that William Friend?
“Once in a while.”
Pfft.
“What’s the second place?”
Idiot child of my criminal son, you know what I am going to say. You do. Of course you do.
Of course, he does. He knows the speech by heart. Seek the stricture. Find the lesson, the purpose, the essence. The rest is window dressing, and will give itself to you entirely, if you first understand the thing and the nature of the thing.
Joe Spork’s grandfather believed—or sometimes believed, and always maintained—that every object on Earth was created by God with the capacity to impart to the attentive student some virtue or grace.
Consider glass. What is the nature of glass?
It is a curious material used for windows and drinking vessels. It must be created in a crucible, purified and smelted until its nature becomes clear—and during this period it can be ruined by a moment’s inattention, which might also prove lethal to the unwatchful glazier; it is beautiful, friable, explosive and transparent.
Go on. What else?
At every stage in its existence—when it is molten, and must be poured from its cup at the end of a long pole; when it is glowing, and can be blown, but remains so vigorously hot that any organic thing placed in proximity to it will instantly take fire; when it is cooling and clear, and has acquired some definition, but will still shatter if it is not cooled with painful slowness in a series of incubating ovens; and when it is cold, and brittle, and the merest impact from a metal point causes it to become a collection of lethal knives which cut so finely that the nerves are sliced clean and a man may miss the fact that he is injured until he smells the blood or sees it upon his shirt—glass is a lesson.
Yes, Joe. Precisely. And so the lesson, the stricture of glass?
“Caution.” He says it aloud, and jumps a little at the sound of his own voice.
Well and good. A salutary inquisition. Very spiritual.
Joe Spork, with his grandfather’s waspish ghost at his elbow, considers the object before him.
So, question: what do we have here?
Answer: a mess. A book which is also a set of punchcards. A tool which doesn’t fit anything. Fragments. A ball which may be an egg, but which, if so, is locked. There’s something inside, but that need not mean it’s intended to open. Like those Chinese concentric spheres. It’s heavy. Gold, maybe. There’s a design—a clue? Or just an embellishment?
He sets it aside for the moment, and continues his inventory: here’s the whojimmy, right enough. One end carved mahogany wood with a pommel or stud, the other a funny, tangled thing with a circular mouth and a roller-coaster track of polished metal which doubles back on itself. Some ornamentation on one side of the track, the other side very smooth. Some mistake, perhaps, in the connecting of one with the other? This could be a child’s game, a wild, weird variant of ball-and-cup. Cut steel, by the look of it, and quite pretty in a way. The Victorians rather liked steel for ornamentation, though this isn’t that old. Still … hard to see what possible use it could be. Heavy, too. Oh, blast, and how has that happened?
He peers, vexed, at the whojimmy, and scolds himself. The tool is covered in a thin layer of grime and grease. A culpable error, to allow that to happen.
Or, no: not grease. He runs a finger over the strange stuff. Eyes are overrated. Touch. Touch is important. It feels dry and feathery. Cold. Iron filings.
The whojimmy is magnetic.
He sits back again, considering. The tool and the ball must interact, if any of them do. The whojimmy is the key. The ball is the keyhole. The book and the fragments fit together with the ball to make … what?
Question, then: what is the defining characteristic of this thing? He grins. “This thing.” Not “these things.” He has decided they are one object. Good. Follow the instinct. So: it is baroque, even Byzantine. It is complex. And yet, above all, it is elegant. His grandfather’s voice comes back, excited.
I once saw a very elegant design from Shanghai. A sealed box in ivory. Traced on the outside, a pattern. Move a magnet over the pattern outside, and on the inside a metal rod slides through a maze and touches all the pins in the right order to open the box. Voilà! The original magnet was set in a ring, of course, so that the whole thing was like magic. A child’s toy, for a princess. Like casting a spell, yes?
I showed it to your grandmother. She made love to me. Then we opened it together. The magnet was hers.
He remembers the conversation, an evening spent in this very room with a bottle of Ardanza and a plate of Italian sausage. Joe the apprentice, Daniel the mentor, sharing confidences and romances over glass after glass of Spanish red. Tricks of the trade and reminiscences, rolled together, and so convivial that Joe had eventually been so emboldened as to ask the unaskable question.
“Who was she, Grandfather?”
But Grandpa Spork did not answer questions about the woman he loved. It was known that he met her in France in the thirties, and together they had a child. It was all very Bohemian, very modern, and they never married. When the Germans invaded, Daniel and the boy escaped, but his lover was elsewhere and had to be left behind. She found him again after the war, but by then everything was different for reasons which could not be spoken aloud.
Mathew’s mother, Frankie.
Frankie was the almost-glimpsed dream of the House of Spork, invoked with caution lest the use of her name summon her—or rather, fail to do so, to the jagged sorrow of her husband and the startling fury of her son. Swamp gas. An atmospheric phenomenon. A myth.
So, then. A magnet and a box. He waves the magnetic whojimmy in the general direction of the doodah. Something clunks, but beyond that it has no effect. Not surprising: you wouldn’t make something like this and then set it up so that a single movement near a magnet would do the job. He grips the whojimmy. It’s awkward. What’s this wild tangle good for? Except, it can’t be awkward. This thing is elegant. It is the shape it should be. More, the holding of it suggests the employment. With the handle against his palm, he is abruptly certain: it invites y
ou to do the right thing. What I want to do is what I am supposed to want to do.
So … what does he want to do? Flourish it. But not wildly. Slowly. In a measured way. He wants to roll it.
To roll it.
He peers … Roller-coaster track … track. Now that he looks closely, part of the tangle is ratcheted … oh.
He hefts the ball in one hand, weighs the whojimmy in the other. Fiendish yet obvious. Hidden in plain sight. Perfect for preventing casual scrutiny, not hellishly hard to use in real life … very much in keeping with the mind behind this puzzle. A mind, he is increasingly sure, which was as bonkers as it was brilliant.
He slots the ball through the mouth of the whojimmy. It fits. It rolls along the tracks, the spiral engraving on the surface meshing nicely with the ratchet on the whojimmy, turning and turning. A complex pathway created by a simple structure. Very nice. Puh-clink! That’s a new noise. Very good. Clinkclunkscrrrr … glack. The ball emerges from the pattern. Joe tests it gently with his hands.
It opens.
He looks at it for a while.
“… Bloody hell …” says Joshua Joseph Spork.
When he can breathe again, he reaches for the phone.
“Billy, I don’t care. No, I don’t. I don’t care how limber she is or if she has three sisters. No. Billy, shut up. Shut up! I need to meet the client. I need to know where it comes from!”
Resolve is in his voice, and the novelty of this alone is almost enough to exact a moment of obedience from Billy Friend. All the same, Billy dislikes making introductions. It is against his middle-mannish creed. He objects that the client might be unhappy.
“Well, if they needed me for this they’re going to need me again. Whatever it does, it’s not going to do it without me and you can say I said so. It will need maintenance and it may need work doing in situ. It’s a bloody treasure and I want to know—What? Yes. Yes, I am shouting! Because it’s important!”
Joe Spork draws a breath. He is aware that this is not his normal way of interacting with the world. One, two, three. All right. “You have to see it to understand, Billy. Or actually, I’m not sure you would. It’s a clockwork thing. The point is, it’s unique. All right? I mean, absolutely unique. What? No. No. Still no. Well, you could call it priceless. It depends on your perspective.”
Just a little bit unfair, that. It might be more accurate to say that you couldn’t put a value on it. From a scholarly perspective, it’s a diamond unlooked for. In sheer monetary terms, it’s probably not all that exciting, unless the machine of which it is a part does something really interesting or is as ridiculously beautiful as the item in front of him, which would be … well, epic. And not impossible. Billy Friend, however, has senses beyond the merely human, and words like “priceless” are a sort of dog whistle to him.
“Yes, Billy, I did say that. Yes. This is six o’clock news stuff. No, before the swimming bunny. Before the sports. Yes. Exactly. So we’ll deliver it together, won’t we? In person. Very good. Yes. Yes, ‘priceless’. I’ll see you at the station, then.”
Joe puts down the phone.
On the work bench in front of him, the ball lies revealed in all its glory. He has photographed it already, so that he can prove it exists.
Metal like soft cotton, not linked but threaded; warming in his hand: Woven Gold.
The trick is whispered from time to time in kasbahs and jeweller’s shops and at conventions and gatherings and markets, almost revealing itself and then vanishing so thoroughly that many consider it a fiction.
Joshua Joseph’s grandfather came upon it this way:
“Good morning, madame. How may we be of service?”
“My husband’s watch. Or rather, it is my watch, but it was a gift from him. He had it from a man in Cambodia, you see, and now it is broken. I think it may also be wise to see to the strap. It becomes loose. Although that may be because I am shrinking.” And from this you might deduce that the lady client was elderly, and that English was her second language, learned in haste and never entirely polished.
From her bag, she withdrew a small parcel of bunched tissue paper, and this she placed in front of him, with some considerable misgiving.
“It is Asian,” he said, “and I think it is beautiful, but there is no hallmarking, so I do not really know that it is gold.”
Daniel Spork made haste to assure her that the craftsmen of Asia were capable of splendid things, though he worried that he would be forced, when the thing was revealed, to tell her that her husband’s impulsive purchase had been an error. Many travelling gentlemen, lulled perhaps by a sense of north-western superiority, are gently gulled of large sums by enterprising persons in the streets and shops of Asian cities, and deserved in Daniel Spork’s opinion no less for their hubris. He did not extend this judgement to their families, however, and did not relish telling little old ladies with treasured gifts that they were not gold and emeralds but leaf and glass.
He glanced at her, and when she nodded, picked it open with long, unsteady fingers.
The timepiece itself was unexceptional; well made and simple, the face a thin wafer of polished ebony in a gold oval, with a flat glass cover. It was the bracelet which arrested Daniel’s attention, which clenched about his heart and stopped his breath in his throat. He had, until now, never seen its like. Rumours had reached him, and he had dismissed them. Now he held the thing in his hands, and knew it to be almost as far beyond him as it was beyond this nice, unknowing old dame who had brought it in. The difference was that after a lifetime of gears and movements, of gold and lamé and carats and weights, he knew when he was surpassed, when he was in the presence of a master’s work. He passed it back to her, very gently.
“Your husband is—is?”
“Was.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was long ago.”
“He was a very wise man, madame. And this thing you have brought me, which he found for you, it is a thing for which a lesser man might search a lifetime. You must treasure it.”
“I do.”
“So, good. And if ever you should meet anyone who can repair such a thing—who understands how this is done—please say to them that you know a man in Quoyle Street in London who dares not ask if they will tell him the secret, but would count it more than a privilege to drink a cup of tea with them and know that someone, somewhere, retains the trick of this, and will make sure it is never lost.” He sniffed.
“I have made you sad.”
“No, madame. You have made me more than happy. I can fix the mechanism for you, but I will not touch the strap. I would not know where to begin. Come back when I am old. Perhaps I will learn.”
Woven Gold. And that is not the most remarkable thing about the doodah. Joe Spork saw what was inside it for the first time twenty minutes ago. He has no idea what it does.
First, there is the matter of the lock. It is, in fact, five locks, each one tiny and rotated by a different section of the whojimmy, each one unlocking the next one, until the last twist releases a clasp and allows the whole to open. These locks are distributed around the interior of the ball in a strange cage-like architecture which reminds Joe distantly of the aviary at London Zoo. Disconnected from one another, they flip back like the wing-cases of a glorious beetle, clasped loosely around the ball’s clockwork heart. That, by itself, is enough to attract his most alert scrutiny. It is good work, and that modest assessment is in the trade tongue, the dour speech of craftsmen looking at their own: Not bad, your Taj Mahal, old son. Bit bald about the edges, mind. And, Oh aye, replies the master builder, it’s all right. You don’t think the water feature’s a bit loud? Wish I’d had time to build t’other one in black, that would have been something … Still, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose. You can’t get everything right.
That kind of good work.
Rare work.
Brilliant work.
White-gloved and with a pair of softwood tweezers (better they should break than this object shoul
d be scratched) he examines it again, unfolds the locking mechanism—not without a slightly filthy feeling that he’s undressing a sleeping princess—and examines the mechanism within under his thick, jeweller’s lens.
The largest cog is perhaps two-eighths of an inch across. The smallest is so tiny that Joe has no idea how it could have been made, except that he knows exactly: someone made a special tool, a thing which mimics the gestures of a normal-size tool on a far smaller scale. Write your name normally on the left, and it is scratched into the panel on the right small enough to fit on a grain of rice. Half a grain. And then—this is the part which boggles his mind—each individual piece, each spring and cog and counter, was made by hand and fitted together. It is a rippling, shifting landscape of interlocking gets and pins, tracks and catches.
The envisioning of this apparatus, the planning, without a computer or even a photocopier, must have taken a year in itself. If a normal piece of clockwork is a person, this thing is a great city. It is folded on itself, each section fulfilling several roles, turning in one axis, then another, then another. There is, just here, a yet smaller case which performs some outré function he cannot fathom, but which itself is also the weight driving some manner of self-winding system. The cog which is the output stream, which pokes through the ball at the north pole and meets whatever remarkable thing is driven by this tiny engine (although it’s not an engine, of course, it’s something far more strange and powerful: a storage medium, a computer’s hard disk made of brass), is actually just a dust cover. When the thing is active it slides to one side to reveal a plug of gears so complex that Joe Spork has come to call it in his mind by a modern name. He calls it an interface.
Enigma, he wonders. Colossus? Is this a wartime thing? A code-breaker or a code-maker? He has no idea. He knows only that it is unrecorded, magical, genius. Hence: priceless.
And yes, there is a small flaw, but hardly a surprising one after decades in a sack somewhere. He reaches in—and stops. A tiny sparkle beneath his tweezers.
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