Steampunk! Part 4

I looked him right in the eyes. I'd learned to do that. "You can believe what you want, Chief."

Chief Coolidge's gaze turned hard. "It's a free world, eh?"

"You can even believe that if you like."

When they'd lowered me down, them years ago, I'd done as my mam told me. I lay real still, even though I wanted to scream out, to beg them to pull me up even if I still had all my sin attached. It were as terrifying as the grave under the river. But I were a good girl, a true Believer, and so I made my full confession in my mind, and I waited - waited for the One G.o.d to show me a small glimpse of my future.

It started as the tiniest ticking sound. It grew louder and louder, till I thought I might go mad. But that weren't as bad as what followed. My vision come up over me in a wave, and I felt the weight of it all around me.

Darkness. That were all I saw. Just a vast nothing forever and ever.

There were hands pulling me up then, singing, "Hallelujah!" and pointing to the shape of my sins in the Pitch. But I knew better. I knew they'd never left me.

I slipped into John Barks's duster and headed out into the dry, red morning. On my wrist, the Enigma Apparatus shone. The Pinkertons was fellas. They'd never thought to question a lady's jewelry. I'd given Chief Coolidge a bucket full of bolts what might make a nice hat rack, but nothing that would bend time to his will.

The storekeepers swept their front walks in hopes of a day's good business. The johns stumbled out of the Red Cat ahead of the town's judging eyes. The seeding ships was out, piercing the clouds. Farther on, the Believers packed up their tents. They was done with visions and covenants for another year.

I reached into my pocket, letting my fingers rest for just a second on that Poppy brick before finding the coin in the corner. Forward or back, forward or back. John Barks told me once I had a choice, and I guess it come down to heads or tails.

I flicked the coin with my thumb and watched it spiral into the sudden rain.

Monty Goldfarb walked into Saint Agatha's like he owned the place, a superior look on the half of his face that was still intact, a spring in his step despite his steel left leg. And it wasn't long before he did own the place, had taken it over by simple murder and cunning artifice. It wasn't long before he was my best friend and my master, too, and the master of all Saint Agatha's, and didn't he preside over a golden era in the history of that miserable place?

I've lived at Saint Agatha's for six years, since I was eleven years old, when a reciprocating gear in the Muddy York Hall of Computing took off my right arm at the elbow. My da had sent me off to Muddy York when Ma died of the consumption. He'd sold me into service of the Computers and I'd thrived in the big city, hadn't cried, not even once, not even when Master Saunders beat me for playing kick the can with the other boys when I was meant to be polishing the bra.s.s. I didn't cry when I lost my arm, nor when the barber-surgeon clamped me off and burned my stump with his medicinal tar.

I've seen every kind of boy and girl come to Saint Aggie's - swaggering, scared, tough, meek. The burned ones are often the hardest to read, inscrutable beneath their scars. Old Grinder don't care, though, not one bit. Angry or scared, burned and hobbling, or swaggering and full of beans, the first thing he does when new meat turns up on his doorstep is tenderize it a little. That means a good long session with the belt - and Grinder doesn't care where the strap lands, whole skin or fresh scars, it's all the same to him - and then a night or two down the hole, where there's no light and no warmth and nothing for company except for the big hairy Muddy York rats who'll come and nibble at whatever's left of you, if you manage to fall asleep. It's the blood, see, it draws them out.

So there we all was, that first night when Monty Goldfarb turned up, dropped off by a pair of sour-faced sisters in white capes who turned their noses up at the smell of the horse droppings as they stepped out of their coal-fired banger and handed Monty over to Grinder, who smiled and dry-washed his hairy hands and promised, "Oh, aye, Sisters, I shall look after this poor crippled birdie like he was my own get. We'll be great friends, won't we, Monty?" Monty actually laughed when Grinder said that, like he'd already winkled it out.

As soon as the boiler on the sisters' car had its head of steam up and they were clanking away, Grinder took Monty inside, leading him past the parlor where we all sat, quiet as mice, eyeless or armless, shy a leg or half a face, or even a scalp (as was little Gertie Shine-Pate, whose hair got caught in the mighty rollers of one of the pressing engines down at the logic mill in Cabbagetown).

He gave us a jaunty wave as Grinder led him away, and I'm ashamed to say that none of us had the stuff to wave back at him, or even to shout a warning. Grinder had done his work on us, too true, and turned us from kids into cowards.

Presently, we heard the whistle and slap of the strap, but instead of screams of agony, we heard howls of defiance, and, yes, even laughter!

"Is that the best you have, you greasy old sack of suet? Put some arm into it!"

And then: "Oh, deary me, you must be tiring of your work. See how the sweat runs down your face, how your tongue doth protrude from your stinking gob. Oh, please, dear master, tell me your pathetic old ticker isn't about to pack it in. I don't know what I'd do if you dropped dead here on the floor before me!"

And then: "Your chest heaves like a bellows. Is this what pa.s.ses for a beating round here? Oh, when I get the strap, old man, I will show you how we beat a man in Montreal - you may count on it, my sweet."

They way he carried on, you'd think he was enjoying the beating, and I had a picture of him leaping to and fro, avoiding the strap with the curious skipping jump of a one-legged boy, but when Grinder led him past the parlor again, he looked half dead. The good side of his face was a pulpy mess, and his one eye was near swollen shut, and he walked with even more of a limp than he'd had coming in. But he grinned at us again and spat a tooth on the threadbare rug that we were made to sweep three times a day, a tooth that left a trail of blood behind it on the splintery floor.

We heard the thud as Monty was tossed down onto the hole's dirt floor, and then the labored breathing as Grinder locked him in, and then the singing, loud and distinct, from under the floorboards: "Come gather, ye good children, good news to you I'll tell, 'bout how the Grinder b.a.s.t.a.r.d will roast and rot in h.e.l.l -" There was more, apparently improvised (later, I'd hear Monty improvise many and many a song, using some hymn or popular song for a tune beneath his bawdy and obscene lyrics), and we all strove to keep the smiles from our faces as Grinder stamped back into his rooms, shooting us dagger looks as he pa.s.sed by the open door.

And that was the day that Monty came to Saint Agatha's Home for the Rehabilitation of Crippled Children.

I remember my first night in the hole, a time that seemed to stretch into infinity, a darkness so deep I thought that perhaps I'd gone blind. And most of all, I remember the sound of the cellar door loosening, the bar being shifted, the ancient hinges squeaking, the blinding light stabbing into me from above, and the silhouette of old Grinder, holding out one of his hairy, long-fingered hands for me to catch hold of, like an angel come to rescue me from the pits of Hades. Grinder pulled me out of the hole like a man pulling up a carrot, with a gesture practiced on many other children over the years, and I near wept from grat.i.tude. I'd soiled my trousers, and I couldn't hardly see, nor speak from my dry throat, and every sound and sight was magnified a thousandfold, and I put my face in his greatcoat, there in the horrible smell of the man and the muscle beneath like a side of beef, and I cried like he was my old mam come to get me out of a fever bed.

I remember this, and I ain't proud of it, and I never spoke of it to any of the other Saint Aggie's children, nor did they speak of it to me. I was broken then, and I was old Grinder's boy, and when he turned me out later that day with a begging bowl, sent me down to the distillery and off to the ports to approach the navvies and the lobster backs for a ha'penny or a groat or a tuppence, I went out like a grateful doggy, and never once thought of putting any of Grinder's money by in a secret place for my own spending.

Of course, over time I did get less doggy and more wolf about the Grinder, dreamed of tearing out his throat with my teeth, and Grinder always seemed to know when the doggy was going, because, bung, you'd be back in the hole before you had a chance to cheat old Grinder. A day or two downstairs would bring the doggy back out, especially if Grinder tenderized you some with his strap before he heaved you down the stairs. I'd seen big boys and rough girls come to Saint Aggie's as hard as boots, and they come out of Grinder's hole so good doggy that they practically licked his boots for him. Grinder understood children - I give you that. Give us a mean, hard father of a man, a man who doles out punishment and protection like old Jehovah from the sisters' hymnals, and we line up to take his orders.

But Grinder didn't understand Monty Goldfarb.

I'd just come down to lay the long tables for breakfast - it was my turn that day - when I heard Grinder shoot the lock to his door and then the sound of his calluses rasping on the polished bra.s.s k.n.o.b. As his door swung open, I heard the music box playing its tune, Grinder's favorite, a Scottish hymn that the music box sung in Gaelic, its weird horse-gut voice box making the auld words even weirder, like the eldritch crooning of some crone in a street play.

Grinder's heavy tramp receded down the hall to the cellar door. The door creaked open and I felt a shiver down in my stomach, and down below that, in my stones, as I remembered my times in the pit. There was the thunder of his heavy boots on the steps, then his cruel laughter as he beheld Monty.

"Oh, my darling, is this how they take their punishment in Montreal? 'Tis no wonder the Frenchies lost their wars to the Upper Canadians, with such weak little mice as you to fight for them."

They came back up the stairs: Grinder's jaunty tromp, Monty's dragging, beaten limp. Down the hall they came, and I heard poor Monty reaching out to steady himself, brushing the framed drawings of Grinder's horrible ancestors as he went, and I flinched with each squeak of a picture knocked askew, for disturbing Grinder's forebears was a beating offense at Saint Aggie's. But Grinder must have been feeling charitable, for he did not pause to whip beaten Monty that morning.

And so they came into the dining hall, and I did not raise my head but beheld them from the corners of my eyes, taking cutlery from the basket hung over the hook at my right elbow and laying it down neat and precise on the splintery tables.

Each table had three hard loaves on it, charity bread donated from Muddy York's bakeries to us poor crippled kiddies, day old and more than a day old, and as tough as stone. Before each loaf was a knife as sharp as a butcher's, and as long as a man's forearm, and the head child at each table was responsible for slicing the bread using that knife each day (children who were shy an arm or two were exempted from this duty, for which I was thankful, since the head children were always accused of favoring some child with a thicker slice, and fights were common).

Monty was leaning heavily on Grinder, his head down and his steps like those of an old, old man, first a click of his steel foot, then a dragging from his remaining leg. But as they pa.s.sed the head of the farthest table, Monty sprang from Grinder's side, took up the knife, and with a sure, steady hand - a movement so spry that I knew he'd been shamming from the moment Grinder opened up the cellar door - he plunged the knife into Grinder's barrel chest, just over his heart, and shoved it home, giving it a hard twist.

He stepped back to consider his handiwork. Grinder was standing perfectly still, his face pale beneath his whiskers, and his mouth was working, and I could almost hear the words he was trying to get out, words I'd heard so many times before: Oh, my lovely, you are a naughty one, but Grinder will beat the devil out of you, purify you with rod and fire, have no fear.

But no sound escaped Grinder's furious lips. Monty put his hands on his hips and watched him with the critical eye of a bricklayer or a machinist surveying his work. Then, calmly, he put his good right hand on Grinder's chest, just to one side of the knife handle. He said, "Oh, no, Mr. Grindersworth, this is how we take our punishment in Montreal." Then he gave the smallest of pushes, and Grinder went over like a chimney that's been hit by a wrecking ball.

He turned then and regarded me full on, the good side of his face alive with mischief, the mess on the other side a wreck of burned skin. He winked his good eye at me and said, "Now, he was a proper pile of filth and muck, wasn't he? World's a better place now, I daresay." He wiped his hand on his filthy trousers - grimed with the brown dirt of the cellar - and held it out to me. "Montague Goldfarb, machinist's boy and prentice artificer, late of old Montreal. Montreal Monty, if you please," he said.

I tried to say something - anything - and realized that I'd bitten the inside of my cheek so hard I could taste the blood. I was so dis...o...b..bulated that I held out my abbreviated right arm to him, hook and cutlery basket and all, something I hadn't done since I'd first lost the limb. Truth told, I was a little tender and shy about my mutilation and didn't like to think about it, and I especially couldn't bear to see whole people shying back from me as though I were some kind of monster. But Monty just reached out, calm as you like, and took my hook with his cunning fingers - fingers so long they seemed to have an extra joint - and shook my hook as though it were a whole hand.

"Sorry, mate, I didn't catch your name."

I tried to speak again, and this time I found my voice. "Sian O'Leary," I said. "Antrim Town, then Hamilton, and then here." I wondered what else to say. "Third-grade computerman's boy, once upon a time."

"Oh, that's fine," he said. "Skilled tradesmen's helpers are what we want around here. You know the lads and la.s.ses round here, Sian. Are there more like you? Children who can make things, should they be called upon?"

I nodded. It was queer to be holding this calm conversation over the cooling body of Grinder, who now smelled of the ordure his slack bowels had loosed into his fine trousers. But it was also natural, somehow, caught in the burning gaze of Monty Goldfarb, who had the att.i.tude of a master in his shop, running the place with utter confidence.

"Capital." He nudged Grinder with his toe. "That meat'll spoil soon enough, but before he does, let's have some fun, shall we? Give us a hand." He bent and lifted Grinder under one arm. He nodded his head at the remaining arm. "Come on," he said, and I took it, and we lifted the limp corpse of Zophar Grindersworth, the Grinder of Saint Aggie's, and propped him up at the head of the middle table, knife handle protruding from his chest amid a spreading red stain over his blue brocade waistcoat. Monty shook his head. "That won't do," he said, and plucked up a tea towel from a pile by the kitchen door and tied it around Grinder's throat, like a bib, fussing with it until it more or less disguised the grisly wound. Then Monty picked up one of the loaves from the end of the table and tore a hunk off the end.

He chewed at it for a time like a cow at her cud, never taking his eyes off me. Then he swallowed and said, "Hungry work," and laughed with a spray of crumbs.

He paced the room, picking up the cutlery I'd laid down and inspecting it, gnawing thoughtfully at the loaf's end in his hand. "A pretty poor setup," he said. "But I'm sure that wicked old lizard had a pretty soft nest for himself, didn't he?"

I nodded and pointed down the hall to Grinder's door. "The key's on his belt," I said.

Monty fingered the key ring chained to Grinder's thick leather belt, then shrugged. "All one-cylinder jobs," he said, and picked a fork out of the basket that was still hanging from my hook. "Nothing to them. Faster than fussing with his belt." He walked purposefully down the hall, his metal foot thumping off the polished wood, leaving dents in it. He dropped to one knee at the lock, then put the fork under his steel foot and used it as a lever to bend back all but one of the soft pot-metal tines, so that now the fork just had one long thin spike. He slid it into the lock, felt for a moment, then gave a sharp and precise flick of his wrist and twisted the k.n.o.b. The door opened smoothly at his touch. "Nothing to it," he said, and got back to his feet, dusting off his knees.

Now, I'd been in Grinder's rooms many times, when I'd brought in the boiling water for his bath, or run the rug sweeper over his thick Turkish rugs, or dusted the framed medals and certificates and the cunning machines he kept in his apartment. But this was different, because this time I was coming in with Monty, and Monty made you ask yourself, "Why isn't this all mine? Why shouldn't I just take it?" And I didn't have a good answer, apart from fear. And fear was giving way to excitement.

Monty went straight to the humidor by Grinder's deep, plush chair and brought out a fistful of cigars. He handed one to me, and we both bit off the tips and spat them on the fine rug, then lit the cigars with the polished bra.s.s lighter in the shape of a beautiful woman that stood on the other side of the chair. Monty clamped his cheroot between his teeth and continued to paw through Grinder's sacred possessions, all the fine goods that the children of Saint Aggie's weren't even allowed to look too closely upon. Soon he was swilling Grinder's best brandy from a lead-crystal decanter, wearing Grinder's red velvet housecoat, topped with Grinder's fine beaver-skin bowler hat.

And it was thus attired that he stumped back into the dining room, where the corpse of Grinder still slumped at table's end, and took up a stance by the old ship's bell that the morning child used for calling the rest of the kids to breakfast, and he began to ring the bell like Saint Aggie's was afire, and he called out as he did so, a wordless, birdlike call, something like a rooster's crowing, such a noise as had never been heard in Saint Aggie's before.

With a clatter and a clank and a hundred m.u.f.fled arguments, the children of Saint Aggie's pelted down the staircases and streamed into the kitchen, milling uncertainly, eyes popping at the sight of our latest arrival in his stolen finery, still ringing the bell, still making his crazy call, stopping now and again to swill the brandy and laugh and spray a boozy cloud before him.

Once we were all standing in our nightshirts and underclothes, every scar and stump on display, he let off his ringing and cleared his throat ostentatiously, then stepped nimbly onto one of the chairs, wobbling for an instant on his steel peg, then leaped again, like a goat leaping from rock to rock, up onto the table, sending my carefully laid cutlery clattering every which-a-way.

He cleared his throat again, and said, "Good morrow to you, good morrow, all, good morrow to the poor, crippled, abused children of Saint Aggie's. We haven't been properly introduced, so I thought it fitting that I should take a moment to greet you all and share a bit of good news with you. My name is Montreal Monty Goldfarb, machinist's boy, prentice artificer, gentleman adventurer, and liberator of the oppressed. I am late foreshortened"- he waggled his stump -"as are so many of you. And yet, and yet, I say to you, I am as good a man as I was ere I lost my limb, and I say that you are, too." There was a cautious murmur at this. It was the kind of thing the sisters said to you in the hospital, before they brought you to Saint Aggie's, the kind of pretty lies they told you about the wonderful life that awaited you with your new, crippled body, once you had been retrained and put to productive work.

"Children of Saint Aggie's, hearken to old Montreal Monty, and I will tell you of what is possible and what is necessary. First, what is necessary: to end oppression wherever we find it, to be liberators of the downtrodden and the meek. When that evil dog's pizzle flogged me and threw me in his dungeon, I knew that I'd come upon a bully, a man who poisoned the sweet air with each breath of his cursed lungs, and so I resolved to do something about it. And so I have." He clattered the table's length, to where Grinder's body slumped. Many of the children had been so fixated on the odd spectacle that Monty presented that they hadn't even noticed the extraordinary sight of our seated tormentor, apparently sleeping or unconscious. With the air of a magician, Monty bent and took the end of the tea towel and gave it a sharp yank, so that all could see the knife handle protruding from the red stain that covered Grinder's chest. We gasped, and some of the more fainthearted children shrieked, but no one ran off to get the law, and no one wept a single salty tear for our dead benefactor.

Monty held his arms over his head in a wide V and looked expectantly upon us. It only took a moment before someone - perhaps it was me - began to applaud, to cheer, to stomp, and then we were all at it, making such a noise as you might encounter in a tavern full of men who've just learned that their side has won a war. Monty waited for it to die down a bit, and then, with a theatrical flourish, he pushed Grinder out of his chair, letting him slide to the floor with a meaty thump, and settled himself into the chair the corpse had lately sat upon. The message was clear: I am now the master of this house.

I cleared my throat and raised my good arm. I'd had more time than the rest of the Saint Aggie's children to consider life without the terrible Grinder, and a thought had come to me. Monty nodded regally at me, and I found myself standing with every eye in the room upon me.

"Monty," I said, "on behalf of the children of Saint Aggie's, I thank you most sincerely for doing away with cruel old Grinder, but I must ask you, what shall we do now? With Grinder gone, the sisters will surely shut down Saint Aggie's, or perhaps send us another vile old master to beat us, and you shall go to the gallows at the King Street Gaol, and, well, it just seems like a pity that . . ." I waved my stump. "It just seems a pity, is what I'm saying."

Monty nodded again. "Sian, I thank you, for you have come neatly to my next point. I spoke of what was needed and what was possible, and now we must discuss what is possible. I had a nice long time to meditate on this question last night as I languished in the pit below, and I think I have a plan, though I shall need your help with it if we are to pull it off."

He took up a loaf of hard bread and began to wave it like a baton as he spoke, thumping it on the table for emphasis.

"Item: I understand that the sisters provide for Saint Aggie's with such alms as are necessary to keep our lamps burning, fuel in our fireplaces, and gruel and such on the table, yes?" We nodded. "Right.

"Item: Nevertheless, Old t.u.r.d Gargler here was used to sending you poor kiddies out to beg with your wounds all on display, to bring him whatever coppers you could coax from the drunkards of Muddy York with which to feather his pretty little nest yonder. Correct?" We nodded again. "Right.

"Item: We are all of us the crippled children of Muddy York's great information-processing factories. We are artificers, machinists, engineers, cunning shapers and makers, everyone, for that is how we came to be injured. Correct? Right.

"Item: It is a murdersome pity that such as we should be turned out to beg when we have so much skill at our disposal. Between us, we could make anything, do anything, but our departed tormentor lacked the native wit to see this, correct? Right.

"Item: The sisters of the Simpering Order of Saint Agatha's Weeping Sores have all the cleverness of a turnip. This I saw for myself during my tenure in their hospital. Fooling them would be easier than fooling an idiot child. Correct? Right."

He levered himself out of the chair and began to stalk the dining room, stumping up and down. "Someone tell me, how often do the good sisters pay us a visit?"

"Sundays," I said. "When they take us all to church."

He nodded. "And does that spoiled meat there accompany us to church?"

"No," I said. "No, he stays here. He says he 'worships in his own way.'" Truth was he was invariably too hungover to rise on a Sunday.

He nodded again. "And today is Tuesday. Which means that we have five days to do our work."

"What work, Monty?"

"Why, we are going to build a clockwork automaton based on that evil tyrant what I slew this very morning. We will build a device of surpa.s.sing and fiendish cleverness, such as will fool the nuns and the world at large into thinking that we are still being ground up like mincemeat, while we lead a life of leisure, fun, and invention, such as befits children of our mental stature and good character."

Here's the oath we swore to Monty before we went to work on the automaton: I, [state your full name], do hereby give my most solemn oath that I will never, ever betray the secrets of Saint Agatha's. I bind myself to the good fortune of my fellow inmates at this inst.i.tution and vow to honor them as though they were my brothers and sisters, and not fight with them, nor spite them, nor do them down or dirty. I make this oath freely and gladly, and should I betray it, I wish that old Satan himself would rise up from the pit and tear out my treacherous guts and use them for bootlaces, that his devils would tear my betrayer's tongue from my mouth and use it to wipe their private parts, that my lying body would be fed, inch by inch, to the hungry and terrible basilisks of the pit. So I swear, and so mote be it!

There were two older children in the house who'd worked for a tanner. Matthew was shy all the fingers on his left hand. Becka was missing an eye and her nose, which she joked was a mercy, for there is no smell more terrible than the charnel reek of the tanning works. But between them, they were quite certain that they could carefully remove, stuff, and remount Grinder's head, careful to leave the jaw in place.

As the oldest machinist at Saint Aggie's, I was conscripted to work on the torso and armature mechanisms. I played chief engineer, bossing a gang of six boys and four girls who had experience with mechanisms. We cannibalized Saint Aggie's old mechanical wash wringer, with its spindly arms and many fingers, and I was sent out several times to p.a.w.n Grinder's fine crystal and pocket watch to raise money for parts.

Monty oversaw all, but he took personal charge of Grinder's voice box, through which he would imitate old Grinder's voice when the sisters came by on Sunday. Saint Aggie's was fronted with a Dutch door, and Grinder habitually opened only the top half to jaw with the sisters. Monty said that we could prop the partial torso on a low table, to hide the fact that no legs depended from it.

"We'll tie a sick kerchief around his face and give out that he's got the flu, and that it's spread through the whole house. That'll get us all out of church, which is a tidy little jackpot in and of itself. The kerchief will disguise the fact that his lips ain't moving in time with his talking."

I shook my head at this idea. The nuns were hardly geniuses, but how long could this hold out for?

"It won't have to last more than a week - by next week, we'll have something better to show 'em."

Here's a thing: it all worked like a fine-tuned machine.

The kerchief made him look like a bank robber, and Monty painted his face to make him seem more lively, for the tanning had dried him out some (he also doused the horrible thing with liberal lashings of bay rum and greased his hair with a heavy pomade, for the tanning process had left him with a smell like an outhouse on a hot day). Monty had affixed an armature to the thing's bottom jaw - we'd had to break it to get it to open, prying it roughly with a screwdriver, cracking a tooth or two in the process, and I have nightmares to this day about the sound it made when it finally yawned open.

A child - little legless Dora, whose begging pitch included a sad little puppetry show - could work this armature by means of a squeeze bulb taken from the siphon starter on Grinder's cider-brewing tub and so make the jaw go up and down in time with speech.

The speech itself was accomplished by means of the horse-gut voice box from Grinder's music box. Monty sure-handedly affixed a long, smooth gla.s.s tube - part of the cracking apparatus that I had been sent to market to buy - to the music box's resonator. This he ran up behind our automatic Grinder. Then, crouched on the floor before the voice box, stationed next to Dora on her wheeled plank, he was able to whisper across the horse-gut strings and have them buzz out a credible version of Grinder's whiskey-roughened growl. And once he'd tuned the horse gut just so, the vocal resemblance was even more remarkable. Combined with Dora's skillful puppetry, the effect was galvanizing. It took a conscious effort to remember that this was a puppet talking to you, not a man.

The sisters turned up at the appointed hour on Sunday, only to be greeted by our clockwork Grinder, stood in the half door, face swathed in a flu mask. We'd hung quarantine bunting from the windows, crisscrossing the front of Saint Aggie's with it for good measure, and a goodly number of us kiddies were watching from 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 horse gut while Dora worked her squeeze bulb, and the jaw went up and down behind its white cloth, and the m.u.f.fled simulation of Grinder's voice emanated from the top of the gla.s.s 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 kiddies, 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 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, but he'd also set things up so that the sisters of Saint 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 Saint Aggie's 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 large, droopy mustache, which hid the action of its lips. This mustache was glued onto the head a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembly 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 leg makers in town had the best wares).

And so when the sisters arrived the following Sunday, they were led right into the parlor, whose lace curtains kept the room in a semidark state, and there they parleyed 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 and 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 railcar to Muddy York. They had made a parcel gift of these succulent treasures to Grinder, to "help the kiddies 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 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 fifty-six 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 bra.s.s 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 Saint Aggie's books - both the set he showed to the sisters and the one in which 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 switch back to the Hall of Computing for queuing 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 on a long, thin sheet of paper).