[This is the third story in the cycle of very short tales about Surreal Tender, the technomancer, and her private secretary, Mr. Carker. Here we learn more about Surreal’s youth and her mentor, the engineer Diana von Birkhausen.
Surreal was created in an imaginary country with one great port city sometime in the middle of the 19th century, but it’s now 1919. Her technology is rather outdated, and she never could do what she was designed to: detect astral bodies. Instead she’s an expensive, obsolescent, remote-sensing multimeter with just-slightly superhuman speed and strength. But she looks really cool.
I have no idea where this is going. It’s short, that’s one thing. I bet it’s finished by Christmas. There are only four main characters — Surreal Tender, Diana von Birkhausen, James Carker, and Mr. Carker’s as-yet unnamed previous employer who died under mysterious circumstances.
To catch up or find other stories or essays, check out the Table of Contents.]
One statue of the great Diana of Ephesus features pendant, oval-ish ornaments on the goddess’s skirt and torso that might be breasts and might be clustered grapes and might — some scholars speculate — be testicles or even beehives.
“Bees,” Diana said once to Surreal Tender, back in 1853 when that technomancer was still called Jane Sumner. “They’re giant bees, anyone can see that.”
Diana von Birkhausen kept bees. She had a modest country place half a day’s ride out from the city, a cottage on the ruins of the great house and a garden and a few orchards and so on. She invited Jane to stay with her several times, and it was that time — the long summer visit during which they had been lovers — that she had told Jane all about her fascination with bees.
“They’re better than humans, darling. The live for the hive.”
The women lay on a quilt on the grass. Their notebooks, pencils, pens, inkpot, abacus, slide rule, and book of logarithms had spilled in all directions.
Jane pushed herself up on her elbows. “But they drive the queen out.”
Diana picked a hawthorn petal out of the younger woman’s black hair, which she wore loosely gathered on her head.
“When her time is up, darling, yes. And I think she understands.”
Later, Surreal Tender wondered very much about Diana von Birkhausen. The great engineer, the notorious sapphic, the disciple of Mr. Stirner — and yet enamored of a race that dwelt in community and lived for the good of the whole.
As a young woman Jane never wondered about Diana. Diana was a grown person, middle-aged when they met. She was Jane’s hero, briefly her lover, and finally and most important, her mentor and creator. So Jane was of a mind to accept her without question. She never reflected that Diana, like her, had grown from girl to woman and had chosen one among many possible paths.
It was only after Diana’s disappearance that Surreal Tender asked herself: Had Diana ever loved anyone? What did she live for? Why did she create the technomancers? Had she predicted their rapid obsolescence? Was she no more than an egoist, after all? And— most urgently — what happened to her? Where did she go?
Diana had abandoned all interest in Birkhausen Laboratories years before she died. Sold the workshop and intellectual property to an investment company, and was long gone before they realized she left only partial notes. They could create clockwork humans, large toys that tended to malfunction while spouting black smoke. And they could make useful prosthetics — arms that moved at a thought and so on — but they built no more technomancers.
Foolishly, they invested in the clockwork toys and not the prosthetics. The business failed.
“Bees,” Jane Sumner murmured, that day in 1853. The train chugged along. Jane’s head slid down Diana’s shoulder and onto her lap. The boy came down the aisle with a fan, shooing flies away.
“How far to Nun’s Well?” Jane started to ask the boy. But Diana put her hand over her mouth. Afternoon faded to evening. Diana loosened Jane’s hatpins and stroked her hair. Then she removed her glove and slid a finger into Jane’s mouth. She took the wetness and traced the rim of Jane’s ear.
This is who I am, Jane thought. She is making me who I am.
But Surreal Tender never took another woman lover, and precious few lovers at all. No interest, really. She wondered what happened to her younger self, those few years with Diana von Birkenhausen. How it was that adoration for one person could turn another person into someone — not alien, exactly, but a version of herself that never would have existed without the Beloved, and evaporated after the Beloved’s passing like dew under a summer sun.
When Mr. Carker, late of Birkhausen Laboratories, came to work for her, Surreal Tender began to think about Diana again. So she wasn’t surprised, exactly, when he begged a few minutes of her time, left the room, and came back with a ledger box.
“What’s that?” she asked him.
“The box I mentioned.” He opened it on her desk, revealing stacks of the red-cloth-bound ledgers Surreal remembered, along with a lot of loose paper. “I think it’s code. I think Diana von Birkhausen was murdered. And I think she was trying to warn someone who was going to do it, and why.”
Surreal touched the top ledger. “That’s why you said I’m in danger.”
“Maybe not you specifically. Maybe this technology, maybe — ”
She looked up at his face. He seemed very close. She could see the lines around his mouth and eyes, how they were made up of smaller lines crisscrossing. At a distance, he looked like a creature of cut marble. Up close, though, his skin might be made of white petals just starting to wither.
Thinking words something like the frailty of life, the certainty of death, she said:
“But we’re all failing, anyone who knows much about us knows that. If an enemy wants to see technomancers dead, they just have to wait us out. Especially if they’re a person or organization so long-lived they could have killed Diana back in the 1870s and still be a threat now in 1919.”
He nodded, eyebrows lifting. More lines. “It’s a mystery, isn’t it?”
“If you’re interested in pursuing it, knock yourself out.” Surreal stood. “I don’t forbid you. But I’m not so eager to live another seven decades that — ”
Looking at his face, she stopped. She had never seen anyone so stricken, she thought, but it was gone in a moment.
“I do thank you for your interest.”
He also stood. “I won’t trouble you unnecessarily, madam. But if I have any technical or historical questions about the documents in this box — ”
“Yes, of course. Ask me whatever you like.” She looked down at him. He was tidying the contents and closing the ledger box. It was long, made of scarred dark wood. It had been burned once, she thought.
Anything she might say to Mr. Carker would be taken as pity because it would be pity. She felt sorry for him. Then she thought of something.
“There’s nothing left but a falling-down cottage, but Diana left me Nun’s Well in her will. If it interests you, we could go down together some time.”
Later she would wonder if he hadn’t planned for her to make this offer all along.
Diana and Jane spent the afternoon in round pavilion inside the Cyclorama, the wheel-shaped exhibition hall built several decades before for the city’s 500-year anniversary. There was fighting across the sea; profiteers sailed away with munitions and brought back holds stuffed with artifacts of dubious provenance. Hundreds of miles away, the two women did not much care whether Diana of the Bees was a Greek original or late Imperial reproduction. Holding hands, they circled her again and again.
They looked for guards and saw only one. He strolled lazily along the colonnade. He stretched and yawned, then turned to roust a homeless man sleeping against a column. Pigeons filled the space between the two women and the guard like clover on the cobblestones — a rippling, cooing bed of clover, ceaseless motion under the hot, hazy blue sky.
They looked at each other and realized the same thing. The pigeons would warn them if the guard crossed the pavilion.
Together, they approached the statue. There was no barrier. No velvet rope like indoors. Nothing.
The marble creature stood on a pedestal just a low step up from the ground. Together, Jane and Diana mounted. They took off their gloves and laid their palms against hyacinth-cluster breasts, the bees. Jane touched the flail and sickle the statue held in her hands. Diana stood tip-toe to reach her crown. Jane saw the facet joints of Diana’s leaded-silver spine slide against each other as the engineer tilted her head up.
Diana felt the younger woman’s gaze on her back and looked down. She smiled into Jane’s eyes.
“Soon,” she reassured her student. “Soon.”