Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Part 7

For where the dromedon had been there was now a s.p.a.ce of grey primordial nothingness, and in that nullity she saw the whole span of the universe, past, present, and future, compressed into a s.p.a.ce both absent and infinite.

She went mad.

2: THE CONDUCTOR IN FIRST CLa.s.s.

Virgil Smythe was hurrying down the length of the sleeper car, peeking round the teetering stack of linens in his arms, when he heard the scream. He bent and peered out the window, at the platform, where a lady of quality lay writhing on the ground, scrabbling frantically at her person. A ring of gawkers was already forming.

Virgil did not recognize the woman. In fact, he was quite sure that he'd never met her: not in this life, nor the previous one. Nevertheless, he knew her. Further: he knew her intimately.

This made no sense, but he had no time to puzzle through these imponderables. He turned around, braced the linens against the wall, and knocked on Mr. Renault's door.

It opened, and Mr. Renault peered out, a round, aged faced ringed in a faintly angelic aureole of spa.r.s.e white hair. "Ah, Terrence," he said. "You have come."

"Forgive the delay, Mr. Renault. I had some difficulty locating the items you requested. Will these serve?"

Mr. Renault opened his door all the way and studied the linens. "They are not quite the shade of green I'd hoped for, Terrence. They have a faint aquamarine quality to them, do they not? I believe I requested something in the chartreuse family."

"Indeed you did, sir. But I'm afraid we have nothing in that vein. The only other shade I could find was a dark forest green."

Mr. Renault backed away and put his hands up in horror. "Oh good lord, no," he said. "I could never sleep on a forest green. Simply loathsome color. Much worse than the ecru horrors that clothe my bed at present."

"May I make up your room then, sir?"

Mr. Renault chewed on his lower lip, considering. "I suppose so," he said. "I shall probably manage an uneasy slumber, though this aquamarine will likely make a mash of my bowels. Which are, as you know, extraordinarily sensitive to the slightest upset, Terrence."

"Indeed, sir," said Virgil. Bells were ringing up and down the length of the car. Virgil was by now devoting all of his energies to masking his impatience, a skill at which he excelled. He'd spent this life catering to the odd whims of the unreasonably wealthy, and embracing their eccentric obsessions as his own. And he'd spent his previous life indulging in these selfsame whims and obsessions. There was a time when he'd stood on the opposite end of these sorts of colloquies, making irrational demands with the blithe insouciance of a monarch dropping edicts.

That was before the catastrophe, of course.

Virgil Smythe unbecame himself in a dingy apartment in Yorkshire Bubble, in the year of our Lord 2503.

It began-as all such tragedies begin-with ambition. From the beginning, Virgil knew that it was his destiny to become a concert pianist. He taught himself how to play at age eight, and had mastered Rachmaninov's Third by age ten, Mozart's piano concertos by twelve, Beethoven's entire canon by thirteen.

All of which would seem to presage a brilliant career, save for one unfortunate impediment: his monstrous lack of talent. All of the music he played, he played very, very badly. Indeed, the last of his teachers, a nasty old German with sallow breath and Promethean eyebrows, suggested that Virgil wouldn't recognize talent if it tapped him on the shoulder and introduced itself.

But Virgil was wealthy, impatient, and obsessed. At eighteen, he decided that if his destiny refused to come to him, he would simply have to hunt it down.

And so he left his home and ventured into the realm of fungible reality known as the bubbleworlds, seeking a chaos wizard named Angstrom Jones, who-it was said-could mine the nether-region of unattached causality between the bubbles, and reshape desire into reality. Jones was something of a mythical figure in the sequential universe, and many of the stories surrounding him were plainly farcical. But if even a tenth of the powers ascribed to him were real, he would be able to grant Virgil his dreams.

He found Angstrom after many months of fruitless searching, in a tenement in Yorkshire Bubble. Or rather, he found a drunken and disheveled old man who had once been Angstrom, but was now a broken-down derelict with no prospects and only a tenuous attachment to life. Virgil spent many weeks nursing him back into some semblance of health and sobriety, and many weeks more convincing him to perform the service he required.

The transformation took place in Mr. Angstrom's filthy apartment. They sat on the floor, cross-legged, while the wizard chanted himself into some sort of trance. When he opened his eyes, he seemed a different person: preternaturally calm, supremely confident. He curled his hand into a claw and tore a slit in the world and withdrew from it a small dancing something. It was golden or leaden or silver, liquid or solid, brilliant or dull. It was an orb, or it was a rod, or it was a box. Or it was all of these things. Or none of them.

Virgil could not look at it for very long. It made his mind hurt.

"This ore," said Angstrom, "is a distillate of pure, una.s.signed potential. It is reality so primitive and unformed that it can be shaped into anything. How am I to shape yours?"

"Into the best pianist that humanity has ever known," said Virgil.

"This is difficult."

"Nevertheless," said Virgil.

Angstrom nodded, gravely, and began to do something complex with his hands. The ore warped and shuddered, flashed and rumbled. Virgil looked away again, but the room about him began to change too: it melted and reformed, it slid into and out of existence, it guttered. When the wizard spoke again, his voice was small, distant, and frightened. "Oh dear," he said.

And then the world broke into a billion pieces, and skittered away on ticking spiderlegs.

Virgil awoke on a tiny bed in a tiny apartment in Calcutta Bubble, feeling very strange indeed. He rose, ran a hand through his hair, and then studied himself in the mirror that hung over a small dresser near the door. The face that looked back at him was not his. It was narrow and hungry and a little haggard. Eyes that should have been blue were brown. His finely sculpted aquiline nose was puggish now, his blonde hair brown.

He turned back to his bed and saw his wife stirring under the sheets. He looked at his infant child, sleeping fitfully in her crib. It occurred to him that he did not have a wife, or a child. And that he did not live in Calcutta Bubble.

But he did, of course. He had been born here, schooled here, married here. At age twenty-three, he had entered service as a conductor on the King's Railroad. He could not play the piano. He had never even seen a piano, except perhaps in photographs, and on the television.

His name was, and ever had been, Terry Hawthorne.

And so it was Terry Hawthorne who watched Mr. Renault step reluctantly aside, at last. It was Terry Hawthorne who hurried past him, and began the process of removing one set of sheets and applying another. It was Terry Hawthorne who strove fruitlessly to ignore the jangling stateroom bells ringing up and down the length of the corridor outside, and it was Terry Hawthorne who reconciled himself to the stern reprimands he would now inevitably receive from the head conductor.

Virgil Smythe was present still, but only as a memory. A false memory, at that. Virgil Smythe had never existed.

3: THE PIRATE IN SECOND CLa.s.s.

Something was happening outside. William looked up from his book and saw a crowd forming around a lady who had collapsed onto the platform. It was hard to make out her face-she was just a mound of lace and bloomers, at the moment-but she seemed young. Probably another corset incident.

A little farther away, near the platform's entrance, a small troupe of train officers were applying electrical truncheons to a flailing dromedon. William watched the poor creature convulse and shudder and flip helplessly from shape to shape.

"Good lord, what's all this about?" said his cabinmate, a young fop in a bowler hat. He peered through the window. "Ah. Some d.a.m.nable dromedon mischief."

"Quite," said William. He'd reserved a private cabin, but the train was full, and they'd placed him instead in a shared berth with this creature: a spoiled wastrel heir named Percival Wiggins, who proved himself to be as loud as he was insipid, and apparently incapable of silence.

Worse: William was disguised as a spoiled wastrel heir, and was thus compelled, by the edicts of his a.s.sumed cla.s.s, to carry on a conversation with this man.

"What I don't understand," said the fop, "is why we don't get rid of the lot of them. If those beastly dromedons are so unhappy living among us, why don't they just go away?"

"Indeed," said William, determined to say nothing else. And yet he said: "Of course, they didn't ask to be here."

"Oh?" Percy turned away from the window and smirked at William. "Father tells me that they sneak across the border for work. Taking jobs away from good bubble citizens, etc., etc."

"Well-I've a friend who works at the bubbleworks in Kingsbridge. Good chap, brilliant fellow. He tells me that these creatures were caught up in the causality field when the bubbles were forged. They're native betweeners, I gather, atemporal and all that. Most of them just died when we imposed time on their habitat. But a few survived. Adapted, I suppose."

"Atemporal? What on earth does that mean?"

William checked his watch. They'd be out of Hampshire Bubble in twenty minutes, and then there would be an interval of ten minutes before they could begin. So another half-hour with this ridiculous creature. "Atemporal? Oh, I think it means that they can't exist in time. There's no time in the between, you see. Just the raw substrate of events, floating free, with no particular relation to one another. Nothing really ever happens out there-or rather, everything happens, at once, and forever."

The fop laughed. "Good lord, w.i.l.l.y. You sound like one of those loathsome intellectuals that father dotes on. Speak English, won't you?"

William forced a chuckle. "Forgive me, old chap. Mother insisted that I attend university this term. I'm afraid some of the schooling managed to penetrate."

"Quite all right. Knowledge happens to the best of us."

"Yes. Well, as I understand it, the dromedons were a kind of lifeform that existed in the between. Not life as we'd understand it, of course, rather some sort of quasi-sentience that could withstand and even thrive in a causeless environment. Trapping them in time was like hauling a fish out of its pond, or exposing an anaerobic cell to oxygen. That's why so many of them died."

Percival was losing interest. He brushed an arrant something off his trousers, and said: "Interesting."

"Isn't it though? And think of the implications. Taking something that's completely free of the notion of time and squeezing it into a body that's utterly shackled to it. It would feel like prison, I imagine. If not torture."

"Oh dear, how melodramatic. I, for one, would welcome that kind of structure to my day."

"Quite, quite. That is their grievance, however. Or so they claim."

"Well, then, I say it again: they should just go back to their formless void, if they're so very unhappy."

"But that's the problem, you see. They can't. Once you're part of time, you simply cannot go back. The ones who made the attempt suffered the same fate as we would."

"Which is?"

"Madness."

"Oh. That." The fop shrugged. "Well, if all of that rubbish is true, I suppose they'll just have to learn to live with us. G.o.d knows they've had enough time to adjust."

"But time is exactly what they don't want, old man."

The fop threw up his hands, and laughed. "Enough! You win. The dromedons are poor downtrodden unfortunates. Humanity is a pack of beastly genocidal colonist occupiers. Satisfied?"

William thought about the machete in his valise. "Oh dear, Percy. Please don't mistake this little intellectual exercise for actual beliefs. I'm merely trying to pa.s.s the time."

"Good. I was beginning to suspect you of convictions."

"Heaven forbid," said William. They were lifting the woman on the platform onto a gurney, now, and strapping her down. She writhed and screamed, continuously. The sound filtering in through the thick gla.s.s of the window was strained, attenuated, feral. "That woman seems to be in a bad way."

"Women," said Percival. "Now there's a subject I can warm to."

William checked his watch again. and half-listened to Percy blather on about his latest conquest, some lady's maid in Kingsbridge Bubble. His thoughts returned to the machete secreted in his valise, and he fell happily to contemplating its many excellent uses.

4: THE DROMEDON IN THE BAGGAGE COMPARTMENT.

Jeremy Albert Benjamin tapped the lid of his small prison. He did this methodically, one action following the other: starting at the corner nearest his head, and sliding his fingers down the velvet-lined inner surface of the chest, tapping, listening for the tell-tale hollowness, tapping again.

Presently, he found what he was looking for. He curled his hand into a fist and rapped the spot with his knuckles, and then withdrew his pocketknife and cut a hole in the velvet, exposing the wood underneath. He probed the hollow area with his fingers, and then pressed. Nothing. He tried again, pressing harder, and was rewarded with a soft click. He replaced the pocketknife, and, using both hands, pushed upward on the lid, praying that nothing had been stacked on top of him. It lifted easily.

He opened it a crack, and peered out into the hulking gloom of the baggage compartment. Dark squarish shapes surrounded him, suitcases and valises, crates and chests, boxes and coffers. A cat prowled back and forth in its cage, eyes slitting the darkness like twin filaments of green flame. Moving quickly, he lifted himself out of the crate and landed crouching by its side, then paused, listening. Birdcages rattled, crates shifted, leather creaked, the cat hissed-but otherwise, silence.

He withdrew his tuxedo from the chest, and dressed quickly. He was, as ever, stymied by the bowtie, tying and retying it several times before he was satisfied. He was something of an obsessive when it came to human neckwear. A badly tied bowtie was, he maintained, a dead giveaway. He fancied himself something of an expert on the subject. This was, after all, not the first time he'd attempted to infiltrate human society.

Dressed at last, he crossed to the full-length mirror strapped to a steamer trunk near the back of the car, and studied himself. He was short and squat, though neither as short nor as squat as most dromedons. He had two hands, each with the requisite number of digits, and a head that could be compelled to stay in the same place for long stretches of time, overtopped by a thatch of something that looked very much like hair. He also had facial features that approximated the sensory organs of the sequentials: a squat nose flanked by two holes filled with gelatinous ocular b.a.l.l.s; and an oblong hole above his chin line guarded by a pair of fleshy pink extrusions, able to both admit food and emit conversation.

Jeremy Albert Benjamin's resemblance to the men and women who had enslaved his kind was an accident of circ.u.mstance, but a fortuitous one: he was a natural spy. Today he would be Frederick Howells, a prosperous banker from Kingsbridge Bubble, bound for Piccadilly Bubble. He had a suit, a pa.s.sport, a pistol, and a tiny golden device secreted in the front pocket of his waistcoat.

He adjusted his bowtie, and then closed his eyes and said a prayer. He prayed for the soul of Philip George Herbert, who had supplied the necessary distraction on the platform; for the Viceroy's daughter, sunk now in the pit of her own insanity; and for the sequentials on this train, all of whom would shortly suffer the same fate. He did not pray for himself. The things that he had done, and would do, in the service of his cause rendered him unworthy of that particular balm.

He made some final adjustments to his bowtie, took a breath, composed himself, then opened the baggage car's door, and stepped out into the train.

5: THE CONDUCTOR IN THE SLEEPING CAR.

Virgil reached Number 14 just as the bell sounded again, knocked, then slid the door to. A large, froggish woman, wrapped up in some monstrous pink chiffon concoction looked up at him. Her porcine face was an alarming shade of red.

"Ah, Conductor," she said. "You have come. How very good of you."

"Forgive me, Madame. I was preparing Monsieur Renault's bed for the evening."

"I rang thirteen times. Thirteen times exactly. Is that the correct number? Thirteen?"

"No, Madame. You need only ring once."

"I rang once twelve times, and you did not come. But on the thirteenth ring, you came. That is the basis for my hypothesis." She sniffed. "I suppose I should consider myself fortunate."

Virgil said: "Forgive me, Madame. It is inexcusable."

The d.u.c.h.ess glared at him. "Fetch my spectacles."

"Of course, Madame." He paused, and said: "Would Madame be so kind as to tell me where I might find them?"

"Tonight, in my prayers," said the woman, "I will ask G.o.d to forgive me for whatever transgression has doomed me to a conductor who is not only deaf and cretinous, but blind." She gestured toward a small table at the foot of her bed, which held an ashtray, a small paperback romance novel, and a pair of reading gla.s.ses. "But perhaps I should be more specific. It is that object consisting of two small circles of gla.s.s encased in a metal frame. We in the sentient cla.s.ses use these devices for reading. You've heard of reading, Conductor? It's a kind of preserved talking."

"Indeed, Madame." He picked up the woman's spectacles, walked the two steps to the chaise on which she was splayed, and handed them to her. "Will there be anything else, Madame?"

She gave him a long, level look. Her face had dimmed from its original curried scarlet to a sort of sunset crimson, but her chins still quivered with indignation. "Not at present, thank you."

He bowed and backed out of her compartment, slid the door shut, and closed his eyes. He applied the same curative principle to anger that one did to splinters embedded in the skin-teasing it out slowly, letting it rise to the surface. Patience, he thought. Patience.

A door opened on the opposite end of the carriage and a small fat man waddled through. He was dressed in the opulent style of a bygone era, tuxedo and spats, small vermillion bowtie and matching c.u.mmerbund, black tophat.

"Good evening, sir," said Virgil.

"Good evening," said the dwarf, and smiled. He was possibly the ugliest man that Virgil had ever encountered, his features seemingly configured with the explicit purpose of triggering revulsion. And yet he had a sincere and friendly smile, and Virgil warmed to him instantly.

"I'm afraid I've quite lost track of the time," said the dwarf. "Is dinner still being served?"

"It is, sir. But you'd best hurry. The kitchen will close in twenty minutes." Virgil lifted his arm and pointed with his index and middle fingers. "Six cars down."

"Thank you, sir," said the little man, tipping his tophat, then proceeded past Virgil. He moved with a laborious rolling gait, as if crossing the pitching deck of a storm-tossed ship. Virgil smiled. The little man reminded him of the odd academicians who'd frequented his mother's salon, back on Piccadilly Bubble.

This memory gave rise to other, less-pleasant ones, and he turned to the squat gentleman, just now reaching the end of the carriage. "Sir?"

The man turned. "Yes?"

"May I see your ticket please?"

A pause. "I believe I already showed it to my conductor."