A Journey by Night
Surreal Tender ponders her situation
[Happy Memorial Day! Time for more Surreal Tender the Technomancer. Surreal, her secretary James Carker, and the conjurer Simon Quick are traveling East by train, on their way to the Empire of the Confession of Christ where they hope to find the inventor Diana von Birkhausen.
Diana — we know but they don’t — is under house arrest over in the Confession. However, with a well-provisioned laboratory and girl courtesan to amuse her, she doesn’t seem too eager to escape. Meanwhile, the geologist Randal Jasper and his sister Trixie Grey are traveling across the countryside by motorbike, hoping to intercept Surreal Tender.
Actually, we should probably enumerate who knows what:
Surreal knows Simon Quick, a former fellow-citizen of the free city of Belleville, is an agent of the Kingdom of England. Mr. Quick, by his own account, has been sent to recruit Diana to work for his new country in the coming war.
Surreal doesn’t know — not exactly — why James Carker is so interested in Diana’s welfare and whereabouts. But she so nearly worships Diana that she assumes everyone else does, too.
Surreal doesn’t know what happened to Mr. Jasper after he escaped from Atlantis. But we know Mr. Jasper went to see Diana, then met up with a stunt driver, later revealed to be his sister Trixie Grey. Good guess is Trixie was also the one piloting the motor boat.
Surreal doesn’t know what became of Silas Norton the weapons manufacturer and his clockwork man after they all left Atlantis, and neither do we.
We also don’t know who pushed Sarah Norton, sister of December Norton the technomancer, to her death on Atlantis.
A lot of things are going to happen very fast, but we’ll give Surreal a few hours to ponder her situation before emptying the whole dump truck on her.]
The train sped north, then swung east, puffing strongly up the steep grade into the mountains. Surreal Tender curled in her too-short bunk. Her bunkmate, a woman named Mrs. Lemon, snored.
Mrs. Lemon had said she was secretary to a gentleman traveling to Byzantium, a Flemish man. Surreal had not seen him and was curious to — she had never met a Flemish gentleman. Perhaps Mr. Carker would point him out to her.
Muscle by muscle, Surreal moved from her left side to her right. She could not damage the stout accommodation, but she had the idea Mrs. Lemon was afraid of her. No need to further alarm the — tourists?
She had thought that word, but of course she was the tourist, and what was she doing here, anyway? Pretending — it was the easiest course — to be part of a traveling demonstration of spiritualism. Pretending the failed experiment had succeeded.
Everyone half-thought it had, anyhow. Folks tended to feel a numinous awe for technomancers. This usually baffled and annoyed Surreal, but now it should be useful. If Mr. Quick drew respectable audiences, she’d do a sight more. Between his professional skill and her now-natural abilities, they could do some pretty tricks. She’d been amazed how quickly he could turn what she thought of as meaningless knacks — just barely superhuman strength and speed, the ability to sense living beings as electrical fields — into sham lecture-demonstrations that were pure poetry.
She had been less pleased that, from behind a black screen, her hand created a ghostly image on a photographic plate. That was too much like rayons de Becquerel, Becquerel rays. Surreal did not like having her suspicions about angel stone confirmed; she did not want to be radioactif, no, radioactive, of course.
But if she was truly radioactive, wouldn’t she make everyone around her sick, in time? Though that was just speculation — some scientists said les substances radioactive were dangerous; others denied it.
Anyway, maybe angel stone worked along an entirely different principle. Maybe —
Well, she was going to find Diana; Diana would tell her.
She put her hand to her jaw. No pain, well, maybe a little, but was she conjuring it? Or here, along her spine? She imagined spinal lesions and shuddered.
You’re turning into a fussy old lady, Surreal told herself. You’re fine.
She wished she had some laudanum. She wondered where Mr. Quick was.
Then she opened her eyes. Shadow surrounded her. The lights were turned down, velvet curtains pulled closed. Under the blanket she was warm with her own heat; the air in the Pullman car, though, felt pleasantly cold. She drew a long breath. Wool blanket. Lavender. Wood varnish. Smoke. Miss Lemon’s sweet-orange perfume. Slowly Surreal slide her hand behind the curtain alongside her bed and pressed her fingers against the frosty glass of the car window.
The train car felt like a world, self-contained, throbbing, and warm — at least compared with the winter night — but that was an illusion. Against the miles of vast countryside the car was a speck, her own powerful body a clockwork trinket. If, say, the train tumbled off the side of the mountain, all her companions, all these strangers, would die. She would probably survive; her bones were leaded silver. But would she be able to push the weight of a train car up and off herself?
No, unless she had the wits to jump clear, she would be trapped. And she would starve. Not as quickly as most folks, but in a few months, drinking water from snow, she would starve.
Unless she ate Mrs. Lemon.
Surreal Tender giggled to herself. She liked Mrs. Lemon, though the poor woman feared and disapproved of her; she did not want to eat her.
But if she was already dead — of course one used what resources one had.
At that thought she blinked her eyes.
Of course one used the resources one had, anyone did that —
Mr. Quick, for instance. She did not now have to think of laudanum to wish for Simon Quick; all it took was to fancy she had a pain anywhere in her body. All it took was to wonder, Who am I? What am I? Is the source of my power making me sick?
And she was always wondering that.
Now. She was always wondering that now. She’d managed to live 95 years without becoming a hypochondriac or a metaphysician, and now in year 96 her thoughts kept drifting back to the puzzled of who she was, what she was —
Because she had wondered that back on Atlantis, and had felt pain, real or imagined, and Mr. Quick had given her laudanum.
The mystery of her existence was tied to that evening in the warm dark room in the pension, the smell of gum benzoin, the glass bottle with its thick paper label marked with a skull and crossed bones, Mr. Quick’s light, gentle hand and light, gentle voice —
He’s done it on purpose, she thought.
Then, Done what?
Made me dependent upon him.
But why would he do that?
Then she shook her head. She didn’t need to know why to see that Mr. Quick, a rational young man, would intend the reasonable outcomes of his actions.
But he’s a safe person to be dependent on, she told herself. A kind person.
A safe, kind person who by his own admission is the agent of a foreign government, a spy —
Well, and what government do you represent? What interests? she asked herself. Is it possible to do anything as a private person? Who are you here as? Who are you here for?
Again Surreal Tender was stumped. You’re the citizen of a free city, she had said to Mr. Quick, stunned that he would put fealty to a king above being a free citizen of Belleville. We both are.
She had assumed she could come to these strange lands as a private person on a private quest: to find her friend, creator, and one-time lover, Diana von Birkhausen.
But was that all too naive?
Surreal Tender felt a wash of homesickness. In the great city of Belleville she never felt like anything but a private person; no one did. You might work for one company or another, but you could always leave your employment. Likewise, you could be let go any time. Everyone knew she was on her own.
Every great city in Nova Terra described itself as sovereign; each citizen was, in her way, sovereign — even when it meant, as it so often did, free to starve on her own terms. The burden and privilege of freedom, that was the old term, fell squarely on each person’s shoulders. Of course some folks were born poor, some rich, some clever, some dull. But those were accidents of chance.
Surreal pictured her garret workshop with her desk stacked with drawings, her cabinets filled with tools, and her worktable at the center of the clutter, cleared for action.
Climb to the ridge pole, as she often did, and the city spread out all around. Garret windows like hers twinkled through the smog. Lamp-lighters passed below, lighting the gas lamps. Horse-drawn carriages clattered past, carrying late-night theater-goers home from a show. An automobile, more common nowadays, purred along in the other direction.
Jump from one roof to the next, swing down onto a fire escape, leap across and clamber up again and she was on the knitting mill roof. In her imagination she peered through the tar and shingle to see into the mill. A boy was sweeping up lint and paper lunch wrappers, clearing the workshop floor before the girls arrived. Soon she would hear their voices calling up through the icy fog, hear their lockers clank open and clap shut. The whistle would blow to start the shift.
And the sun would rise —
Surreal imagined herself sailing out from the metropolis like a hang glider with the sun behind her. Further out she’d come to tenements and larger factories where they made automobiles and motor bikes, rubber tires and lead pipes. Then came the suburbs where she’d grown up, then a ring of farms, then the more noisome mills and factories — paper mill and fertilizer plant, tannery and cannery.
If she could rise straight up into the the air the city would disappear into its smoggy garment, a black bulls-eye inside rings of green and gray and brown, and finally the darker expanses of pine forests that stretched mile upon mile west and south and north, threaded through by the rivers and canals that connected Belleville to the free cities inland.
East of Belleville you came on Vieux-Port, then Port-Neuf, where the salt marshes had been dredged out centuries ago to form a harbor. Then you came to the ocean.
Funny, nowadays the Franks mostly lived in their own quarter, or up in the timber country, and were called wild and ungovernable by Belleville folk, but once Franks had founded the place.
And before that, there were fairies —
And there were fairies here in the Old World, they were everywhere, maybe there was truth in the stories they had underground tunnels linking all the world, even tunnels under the oceans —
I want to go home, Surreal thought, falling asleep. I am the citizen of a free city, not part of these silly intrigues. I am free as a comet, a star —
She spread her fingers from where the window had grown warm under their touch to find fresh, icy glass. She imagined herself in the heavens, somewhere up amongst the concentric crystal spheres, looking down on the world.
From that vantage, the train felt mighty close to Belleville, and equally remote.
I am home, she thought. Wherever I am is home. I am the citizen of a free city, and my freedom lives in me and cannot be taken away.
She remember Diana saying, about the crystal spheres with the sun at their center, Of course the sun isn't the heart of the galaxy for real, darling. Things don’t work like that. But sometimes the equations work better if we pretend that they do.