[Time for the next installment of Surreal Tender the Technomancer. This story starts the afternoon after Laudanum. Randal Jasper, Silas Norton, and Simon Quick are under house arrest pending deportation from Atlantis. Surreal Tender, James Carker, and Mr. Norton’s clockwork man can get out and about, though. Let’s see how they spend their time.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Surreal Tender let the monograph on primitive rocks slide from her fingers. She was now more confused than ever. Meteorites, it turned out, were no more radioactive than Terran rocks — generally less so.
She put her hand over her chest. What, then, powered her heart? What was angel stone?
She had worked with it in the lab. She had followed the safety protocols Diana prescribed — Diana, who was usually so heedless. Despite her insouciance, Diana minded the deaths of the early volunteers. If they had been spectacular deaths now … but they were slow, painful deaths.
Diana wanted a reputation for sun-like fearlessness, not gruesomeness. And she was sorry for the young women, girls a generation older than Jane Sumner. She took more care in future.
Perhaps angel stone wasn’t a meteoric rock after all. Certainly Diana lied as much as she told the truth. She wouldn’t have any reputation at all except for the astonishing feats of practical science she performed — not once, but repeatedly over almost 100 years.
Perhaps it was meteoric rock, but another mechanism besides this newly discovered radioactivity powered her body.
Perhaps —
Perhaps it didn’t matter. No one knew what lunite was, either, after all — Diana didn’t even venture to say where she had found it. It was luna-moth green, hard and glasslike, and could be spun into filaments thin as spider silk.
Diana had talked Surreal through the equations that accounted for the energy powering her body. They were elegant. Everything balanced. And Surreal’s heart beat. But when Diana began to describe what the numbers meant, she used a vocabulary so antiquated as to now sound like magic. Solar energy, lunar energy. Masculine, feminine. The body as a vessel for celestial influences.
Surreal looked over the valley. Sweat, faintly greenish from the lunite threading her body, beaded on her nose. She fanned herself with her hat.
What am I?
Cloud shadows moved over the valley below. With the same singular purpose as the clouds above, sheep slowly traversed the meadow half a mile away downhill. Grass rippled — again, the thousands of supple blades answered to the breeze as if governed by one thought.
The world is in harmony, Surreal thought, and I alone am an aberration.
But she was not alone. The ground pulsed softly beneath her. She looked around for the source of the heavy, silent footfalls and saw Mr. Silas Norton’s clockwork man jogging up the valley.
Returning from the telegraph office and turning from the high street up the winding hillside road that led to their hotel, James Carker paused and turned to his right to enjoy the view over the bay. No dirigible yet — the next craft was not due until Friday. Sailboats, gulls, men lounging, boys running along the seawall, not fast enough for the kite that yanked at the hands of the leader and sailed out ahead of the pack —
Mr. Carker paused to admire the cavalcade of boyhood, so distracted that the first sign he had of the man running full-tilt down the hillside road was when that man barreled into him and knocked him flat.
Surreal would have heard the country in his voice for real had she been there.
“Now looky here — ”
The redhaired man, who had likewise stumbled to his knees after practically running Mr. Carker over, bounded to his feet again and, with a single backward glance, pelted on.
“Jasper!”
The geologist who had until five minutes ago been under house arrest at the hotel.
For a heartbeat James Carker hesitated, ticking through a balance sheet of scenarios before he could draw breath. Then he hollered.
“Help! Stop! Police!”
Having used his first breath to best advantage, he then sprinted off downhill after the young man, waving his hat and yelling again whenever he caught his breath.
A crowd formed, also chasing Randal Jasper. The young geologist was long-legged and quick, but had nowhere to go except along the winding road, which was hemmed in by stone and stucco houses stacked shoulder-to-shoulder on each side.
One of the men-at-arms from the hotel, running belatedly downhill, gained on Mr. Carker, passed him, and drew his sword as Mr. Jasper came to the point where the hillside road met the high street. The man-at-arms wore a sidearm, but could hardly have fired into the summertime crowd of tourists and citizens. Still, Mr. Carker thought as he skidded to a stop, Mr. Jasper was trapped —
He was not. A motorcycle sped up the high street, scattering pedestrians, and came to a turning halt, just long enough for the driver to put his foot to the ground and Mr. Jasper to jump on behind him. The motorcycle picked up speed again, made a sickening turn back on itself down the cobblestone way that led to the seawall, and flew along the rough surface, forcing several boys to dive willy-nilly onto the hard wet sand on the near side.
Mr. Carker, panting around the corner onto the high street, only just saw the motorcycle come to the end of the wall and seemingly take flight. The two passengers leapt to the side and, he thought, into the water.
What he did not see from this angle, but discerned within a few seconds, was a motor yacht making a tight turn in the bay, presumably speeding past under the wall, and soon after appearing a hundred yards out with the pilot and another head — he was not sure whether it was Mr. Jasper, but thought he saw a blaze of red hair — bent low to avoid the bullets that whizzed past them, fired by other men-at-arms who had boiled out of the guardhouse at the commotion.
Within 15 minutes the motorcycle was recovered in pieces. Its driver had vanished.
“Sit down, please.”
The clockwork man sat, crushing lush grass and small white poppies.
Surreal Tender looked at him carefully, knowing he would not mind. She had rarely seen a clockwork person up close. They were one of Birkhausen Laboratories’ last products, invented after the art of creating technomancers had been stolen or lost. The full production run had never numbered a thousand, and many came from the workshops defective, or quickly failed in some way.
Like her, he was scaled just larger than human. And like her — at least parts of her — he had a graphite-colored exoskeleton and a radiant heat envelope that hinted at the miniaturized steam engine powering him. But he had not even the pretense of skin or hair. Even more than Surreal Tender, he resembled a piece of Wilhelm Binder cutlery made with a nod toward human form.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Yes, madam.”
“Call me Surreal.”
“Yes, Surreal.”
Mr. Norton’s remark rankled her. “Do you know my name?”
“No, madam.”
“My name is Surreal Tender. Do you know my name?
She knew what the answer would be, of course. “No, madam.”
Now she couldn’t help herself. “Repeat the last sentence but one.”
“My name is Surreal Tender, madam.”
Now her heart smote her. “I’m teasing you. I’m sorry.”
The clockwork man inclined his head toward Surreal Tender. She felt their heat envelopes join.
She remembered back in the 1830s Jane Sumner once had a dog, a red mix of collie and setter. When Jane teased Nixie, the dog would look woefully up at her and Jane would apologize. Then Nixie might rest her head on Jane’s knee. The dog did not understand that her mistress had done anything to her — she imagined the hurt originating in some fault of her own — but she understood and accepted the apology as remedy.
Surreal Tender shaded her eyes to look at the bay. She could barely make out sailboats and, circling them, a flashing arc of white. It disappeared in the larger glitter of waves.
“Do you remember our walk yesterday? Can you tell me anything about it?”
“The perambulation up the mountain, madam?”
“Just so. Do you remember how many of us went?”
“Five and you and myself, madam.”
He had not included Surreal Tender among the humans.
“How many returned?”
A pause. “Four and you and myself, madam.”
He would not be able to account for the difference, Surreal knew, or even take the initiative to compare the two numbers and know there was a difference. But he would sense the lack. She let herself feel the energy around him. Electromagnetic energy. Vibrational energy. Cautiously, she moderated hers to match.
“I also am sad.”
No answer. But after a while he, too, changed frequency. Yet he was only a machine. Surreal was reminded of Miss Levitt’s book on motorcars:
All cars have their individual idiosyncrasies, and if you alone drive, you get to understand every sound; but if you allow any one to drive you are ignorant of what strain the car has been put to. As a matter of fact, a strange hand on the wheel and levers seems to put the car out of tune.
“Did no one join us during the picnic? At the bottom of the stairs, or on the precipice trail?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Who?”
“One gazelle, madam.”
“Oh! I didn’t see it. No one else?”
“None to my knowledge, madam, excluding small creatures.”
“What kind of small creatures?”
“Three butterflies, 16 gnats, six squirrels, one small gazelle — ”
How had she missed a gazelle and its fawn? He continued: “One rabbit, 27 birds of which I do not know the names, an uncertain number of small ones I could not see, no less than three dozen.”
He might have meant animals, or children, or anything. He would register the electromagnetic fields, and while he was clearly more perceptive than Surreal, he could not discern one type of being from another at any great distance.
But he would not have included a full-grown Atlantean, or angel, or any such creature among “small ones.” More likely, invisible beings did not exist. Mr. Norton’s valet was just the tail end of the train wreck of a failed experiment that had included Surreal Tender as well.
Surreal thought she had made the clockwork man jog a long way for nothing. Then she thought he might not mind. He did, after all, work for a rude pinhead to who treated him like a machine.
And I hurt his feelings by asking him to be other than machine, Surreal thought. I’m making a mistake to humanize this creature. It’s only that I also want to be human. Or is it that I feel alone as a machine and want to make a companion of him?
Still. As long as he was here — “Did your master speak to you about the picnic or the events within the hour before and after it? The events of midday yesterday?”
“Yes, madam.”
“What did he say?”
Any creature invented by Diana von Birkhausen would obey a woman before a man, even contravening the orders of its master.
“He said: I could not save her.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Carker, Mr. Quick and Mr. Norton played Twenty-One in the hotel dining room. All played badly. After a while Mr. Quick began to cheat, at last so outrageously Mr. Norton grabbed his hand.
“Show me your cards.”
Mr. Quick sprayed a trio of Old Maid cards onto the table.
“What the hell is your game?” The older man stood. “I’ll have my man throw you out.”
Mr. Carker, his head bandaged from the collision with Mr. Jasper, looked from one to the other. He lay his hand of cards on the table. “I’ll see myself out, as well.”
“No, please stay.” Mr. Quick tilted his head to look up at Mr. Norton. “I only wanted to get your attention. You are the most famous — the most feared — card-player in Belleville. The only way I can win consistently is to cheat — as you see — and this gentleman isn’t much better. Why aren’t you cleaning our clocks?”
“Just curious.” Mr. Norton sat again. His mouth cracked in a triangular smile.
Silas Norton might have been 35 years old, or 50. His black hair, cut short and waxed tightly back, glinted in the evening light, as did a silver ring on his little finger. His features were straight and regular but unmemorable; except for his tanned skin, he looked like a sketch of a man in a pattern catalogue. Handsome, but not quite filled-in. He and Mr. Norton wore shirt sleeves in the heat; only Mr. Carker, despite his injuries, was still buttoned up in his trim gray coat.
“This fellow here’s cool as gelato.” Mr. Norton nodded at James Carker. “I waste his time all afternoon and he never bats an eyelash. You, though, get antsy and pull a stunt.”
Mr. Quick felt for the tremor through the floor that would announce the clockwork man’s return. Nothing yet. “You’re right, sir. No nerves for this sort of thing. But make it interesting for us, at least. Show us how it’s done. We’ll play for bottle caps, if you don’t like to hurt us too much.”
Nighttime.
Laudanum.
Shadow.
Gum benzoin smoldered on a copper dish. A breath of red. Acrid-sweet smoke.
“And they never found the boat, either?”
Surreal shook her head. “Not that I’ve heard.”
“Bizarre,” Mr. Quick murmured. “He had it all planned.”
“I guess we know who our villain was.”
“I guess.” He did not sound content. After a while he sighed. None of the hotel’s reduced party could fathom the Atlanteans’ utter lack of concern once the motorboat disappeared from view. At dinner Surreal made Mr. Carker tell his story twice, and even those who had heard it already peppered him with more questions. But they supposed the end had been gained: Randal Jasper was off the island, out of the Atlanteans’ hair.
Surreal Tender could not sit on Simon Quick’s lap without risk of bruising his thighbones, but she sat on the bed at right angles to him, legs draped over his. Much of her length was in her legs, so she and Mr. Quick were now more or less the same height. She rested her head on his shoulder. He rested his head on hers.
“Your man warned me off you today.”
Surreal listened to Mr. Quick’s soft, steady heartbeat for a while. She nodded finally, head still against him.
“He was right.”
Mr. Quick had his arm around her. The even, gentle pressure didn’t tighten or wince away at her words. It was as if he hadn’t heard, Surreal thought — but he was very attentive for a man. He had heard.
She liked how he held her. He was frail, but what slight strength he had was fully under his control. He always steady and gentle, never uncertain in his movements.
He was very near a perfect young human, and she was hurting him now, and she would have to hurt him more, sooner or later. Surreal felt more sharply than ever that she wasn’t choosing her path. How had she blundered into this careless way of treating people?
The laudanum, of course. And — Surreal locked in her resolution.
“He was right, because I am in love with someone else, and when I find her, this will vanish from my thoughts like dew in sunlight.”
Surreal had pulled the windows closed after the wind put out the candle twice — the hotel was electrified, but the Atlanteans shut off their municipal electricity after dark. Now the wind rattled the panes.
“And I am a consumptive who may not live 10 more years.” Mr. Quick moved his head against her hair. “Whose time is shorter, do you think? Yours or mine?” Then, as Surreal started to pull away — “Don’t mind me. I don’t mean to be macabre. I just mean … have as much of my time or as little as you like. Any amount is better than none. It was never going to be much, anyhow.”
She stayed where she was. Tears beaded on her eyelashes but she blinked them away. Instead of crying she said with a laugh. “And because I’m probably 70 years older than you are, but of course you’ll have realized that.”
His voice warmed. “But that’ll do you good. I was about a hundred times wiser when I was 21.” He rested his other hand on her knee. “I sometimes think, you know, we’re born with the wisdom we bring from Heaven, and the more we bang around this world, the more it gets beaten out of us and the more foolish we become. I was street-smart as a kid, but now I’m worse. I have an agent in Belleville and an agent in London who get me engagements. I deceive rich people, and they pay me well to do it. Then instead of thinking about the beauty of my art I think about money. I had a purer heart when I was a pickpocket.”
“Want to know how I make money, when I need money?”
“How’s that?”
“Cat burglar. I specialize in technical documents.”
He laughed. “You’re nimble enough for it. But I thought Mr. Carker said you were a scientist.”
“He’s too kind. I was a lab technician in a company that went bankrupt and broke up years ago. I have maybe an undergraduate’s knowledge of a lot of branches of science, but I’m no inventor. I was a creation, you see, Diana was the — ” She paused. “I mean, I repair a few things for private customers, too, and sometimes draw up a design for something — I don’t have a machine shop, though I can assemble from pieces I’ve ordered made. Small clockworks, things like that.”
“You’re an engineer, then. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.” After a while he asked, “Diana is this witch who’s stolen your heart?”
“Yes, and don’t ask me about her.” Surreal did sit up this time, shaking his arm away. “If you’re curious, she’s in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a couple biographies and about 500 newspaper articles.”
“And I think Mr. Shaw wrote a play about her. I think it’s called — ”
“I will squash you like a bug if you finish that sentence. It isn’t even an original comment.”
“Or a true one.” He slid down on the bed. “I was being an ass.”
“Of course you were. Virtuous people are always asses.”
Surreal also lay down.
Mr. Quick felt for her hand. “Do you think you can let me care about you if I’m an ass about it? You’ll worry less about hurting me, that way.”
Surreal Tender curled close and put her arm across him. Her warmth encompassed him. He had not realized quite how warm —
Thunder rumbled. Rain splattered against the windowpanes, then struck all at once in a deluge. They heard it dancing down the gutters.
“Are you all right like this, Miss Tender? Shall I stay here?”
“Yes, please — you’re not in any pain, are you?”
“No. You?”
She shook her head. Then she thought of something. “She gave me that name you just said. Maybe you’d like to use the one I had when I was like you. Younger than you.”
He lifted her hair to kiss her forehead. “Tell me.”
“I was called Jane.”