[Time for the next installment of Surreal Tender the Technomancer. This story picks up immediately after December Norton. Surreal, James Carker, and Simon Quick are visiting December Norton, sister of the murdered Sarah Norton. To catch up, visit the Table of Contents.
Writing genre fiction — plot-driven fiction — is hard. I’m starting to have mad respect for folks who do this every day.]
“The Confession? Are you sure?”
No sooner had the little maid left Surreal Tender, Simon Quick and James Carker alone with December Norton around that technomancer’s round, green marble table, Surreal put the question to their host:
“I never expected — I knew we were meeting the elder Miss Norton, but — where is Diana? Do you know? Is she alive? Have you heard?”
Silence.
The parlor — a small crowded room on the second floor, taller than it was wide, so draped with tapestries on the walls and throws, furs and blankets over the furniture that you could hardly tell its shape or what it held — rustled with the snap of fire in the grate, the splat of rain on the window.
If it seemed strange — not to mention rude — for Surreal to lead off a condolence visit with that question, December Norton gave no sign of offense. It had been a quarter of a century since Mr. Carker saw two technomancers in one room, but he remembered now: No one else mattered. Not really. Not even, perhaps, December Norton’s younger, recently murdered sister.
A shiver passed over the surface of the wine in his glass.
Mr. Quick sat back in his chair.
December Norton leaned forward, elbows on either side of her untouched plate. “I have seen her. She came here three years back.”
“She knew you lived here?”
The tall old woman shrugged one shoulder. “She must have found out.” December Norton stroked the ends of her silver bob under her ears. Her hair was not thick, or it had been waxed down — the curls rippled along her skull in even waves. Still leaning forward, she half closed her eyes. “She showed up by herself, not carrying anything but a kind of rucksack. Books, equipment — I don’t know what. If she had a change of linen that was her only clothes. She asked me for stockings, I remember. Hers were ruined.”
Surreal also leaned forward.
December continued: “She was broke, but she showed me a letter — the Emperor of the Holy Confession invited her to be his guest. He hadn’t thought to send traveling funds, of course — she owned a company, then.”
“The Confession? Are you sure?”
The technomancer spread her hands. “You knew Diana. She was a bit of a fabulist — but she did have that letter.”
“But not three years past, certainly?” Birkhausen Laboratories had been shuttered a quarter of a century ago.
December shook her head. “The letter was old — decades old. It was written by the father of the present Emperor, or grandfather, or great-uncle … I can’t keep up with these royal families. Belleville for me! Anyway, Diana was out of money and looking for anyone who would fund her continued work.”
Surreal looked at the old woman. “Did she say what she did between now and then?”
“No … ” The old woman passed a hand, heavy with rings, across her mouth. “She asked me to come with her. I wouldn’t do that. But … she was starting a laboratory for wartime research, she said. Apparently she’d had some correspondence with the young Emperor or someone in his court, outside of official channels.”
Surreal laughed. “The myrmidon idea again? We’re too expensive, too finicky of upkeep — easier to feed and train strongmen. And against modern war machinery there’s never been a contest, not from the start.”
“It wasn’t that.” Finally December sipped a spoonful of her soup. “She would never risk one of us against humans — we were always too valuable.” Her lip curled at that word. “I don’t know what she was planning, whether she was building technomancers at all, or whether it was a completely different line. She said we’d figure it out together. I suppose the idea was the Confession would supply her with room, board, a well-equipped laboratory, and plenty of money for gin — and she’d think of something brilliant when she got there.”
Surreal smiled. “Diana always did.”
“Yes, well … ”
The men had quietly finished their soup. Neither Surreal nor December ate. Surreal said suddenly: “But I do apologize, Mr. Quick was going to tell you about the time he spent with your sister.”
Simon Quick sat forward again. “If it wouldn’t be too painful for you. Miss Sarah Norton was uncommonly kind to me … ”
December Norton inclined her head. “Yes, please.”
Now Surreal Tender ate her soup, sopping it up with big hunk of bread the maid had served propped in the dish. The fire died down. She looked at the faces of these four people, gathered for the first time. Mr. Carker was struggling to keep his eyes open. December Norton leaned her chin on her hands, listening to Mr. Quick’s narrative. Simon Quick related day after day, moment after moment, of Sarah Norton’s kindness. For some reason the younger Miss Norton had decided to make the young man her son, at least for the weeks while they were together.
“She saw I was lonely,” Mr. Quick said, “and she never mentioned it, but her compassion was plain in every word.” His eyes shone. “I have known very few people as gracious. I will remember her always.”
Surreal had not realized quite how perfect his memory was — or his attentiveness, his receptiveness and valuation of others’ kindness. Of course he was good to her, but she had attributed that to a personal motive. Now she thought: He’s like this always, to everyone.
Later, the little maid showed her to a room not much wider than the tall window in the far wall. The head of the bed butted against the glass. Surreal knelt up, holding the chilly brass, and look into the night. She could see almost nothing, but a dim light shown from the window below. The rain had turned into sleet.
The maid had put Mr. Carker into the anteroom to her chamber — as if he was a guard dog, Surreal thought, laughing to herself. He was not a personal servant, of course. And anyhow, he was already snoring.
Surreal lay down. The sheets warmed quickly around her and the comfortable weight of the blankets pressed her toward sleep. At first she thought of Diana von Birkhausen. Then as she drifted off she thought of Simon Quick. She thought of his pale, narrow face, too lined for one so young. She thought of his blue-gray eyes and the light, cool pressure of his hand across her forehead.
“A fever?” he had asked, back on the island.
“No, I’m always this warm. — Don’t take your hand away. That’s — ”
Perfect, she had been going to say. But perhaps she had fallen asleep. Life was so soon over, these moments so fleeting, but even now, even after almost a hundred years, they still lighted, quick and unexpected as a butterfly on your finger.
In her dream, she stood in a laboratory in a rank of other technomancers. The windows — tall and wide, small square panes glazed with rippling glass — stood well above the workshop floor. A catwalk ran around about 12 feet up, or on level with the bottom of the windows. Electric lamps hung down from the ceiling, and shop lights were clamped to workbenches here and there.
Surreal did not remember the week when Diana and her technicians replaced the greater part of her body with steam-driven, angel-stone powered parts, infused her remaining bones with metal alloys, threaded spiderweb-fine lunite wire through her muscles and nerves. But she knew, from building mechanical parts for others and witnessing their installation, that she had stood erect, eyes open, supported by a frame. Sometimes two or three volunteers were in process at once.
She wondered if those open eyes collected memories, but she supposed it was not possible. For one thing, her own memories were patently false — hundreds of volunteers, advancing to the next station on a command as if they were clockwork men. That never happened. Each transformation was different, each volunteer individually remade. But she always dreamed it that way. Hundreds of women, assembly-line processing, bodies stepping forward onto a platform where a train car waited.
In her dream the lines stretched ahead of her and behind her. Ranks of graphite-black torsos, upper arms, and upper legs. Hair cut close for the convenience of the laboratory technicians. They were, she supposed, naked, but that hardly mattered — there remained no parts for modesty to defend. Might as well be a dressmaker’s dummy, another technomancer had exclaimed, amused and dismayed, after her transformation. To a woman, they had been more relieved than anything else.
But December Norton — she would have had more to mourn. Thinking this, Surreal Tender remembered she was now in Norton Grange, and therefore not in the laboratory, and therefore dreaming — but the dream went on, uninterrupted.
But this never happened, she thought. A clerk in a plain black Empire-waist dress took a telephone call, making notes on a tablet — Surreal remembered the style of dress, and the workshop phone in the corner, but there was gap of 50 years in the elements of the memory. Then Surreal heard the voice on the other end of the line, a man’s voice with a clipped English accent — that’s not possible either, what is happening — placing an order.
Surreal Tender sat straight up in bed. Somewhere in the house a man was speaking, a man with an English-from-England accent. It was a one-sided conversation. The man lifted his voice a bit the way one does over the telephone — “Yes, sir, that’s confirmed. She showed us the letter this evening. Valid Confessional seals, all that. Can you repeat — ”
Surreal Tender, James Carker, and Simon Quick all spoke English with the distinctive Belleville accent. Surreal never noticed it generally, but since she’d been traveling, she became aware of how little they sounded like anyone else, even other English speakers. December Norton spoke English with her guests, French to the servants. She had a husky alto voice. The servants, all women, had addressed their guests in French.
Surreal had not heard the voice of a person from England for ages, not since she’d assisted Diana with a lecture demonstration series in Oxford 50 years before. But she was very sure. And regardless of that, she did not like the sound of this conversation. Where could it be coming from?
Only one direction. It was an old house with thick walls — but fragile, three-century-old glass in the windows. Surreal struggled with two feather comforters, clambered to the head of the bed, and opened the left-hand side of the casement window. She hitched herself onto the sill, leaned backward and slithered down, bending her legs sharply and pressing her calves into the granite sill to arrest herself from a dead fall down the side the house. She lowered one foot, feeling along ice-covered brick and granite, to press up into the bottom of the sill with the bottom of her foot. Thus clamped in place, she felt for the head of the window below.
There it was. She looked around. Empty lawn, bare fruit trees, bare grape vines, forest crowding thick not 50 yards off. No light but what fell on the ground from below. Surreal Tender waited for the heat of her hands to melt the ice from the granite, then grasped the outside of the head of the first floor window and flipped down, stopping her rotation by curling and plowing her knees into the ivy and brick on the side of the window. Now hanging upright by her hands, she lowered one leg to the very edge of the sill and peered inside.
The room was a small study or library, tall and crowded as every other room she’d seen in Norton Grange. Books filled shelves and stood in tumbling towers on the floor. No fire in the grate. On a small reading table, an electric lamp glowed under a green hood. A man stood near the table, speaking rapidly into the house telephone installed on the wall beside him. He was facing away from Surreal Tender — watching the door to the hallway, she thought, so he could see and hear anyone coming along.
The Englishman, she thought. Well, she would have to make a noise getting at him, but she was so fast it hardly mattered. Standing on the windowsill, she slid her fingers up along the top of the loose right-hand casement. She waited to hear what else he would say.
“ — communication may be delayed, but will leave word for our friend in Peace-and-Progress. Understood. Right. You as well — ”
Click.
Surreal saw the man’s shoulders rise and fall as he breathed in and out. The his posture changed, softened, soldier to dancer, she thought, even as she yanked at the window, ripping the latch out of the wood and throwing the casement open. She leaped into the room, full stretch like a mountain lion, and tackled the man with 300 pounds of lead, silver and bone.
They landed with a crunch and a grunt.
Surreal Tender rolled off Simon Quick, provoking a gasp as two cracked ribs popped back into shape. “Holy blazes, Surreal, what — ”
She grabbed him by the jaw, lifting his head and silencing him. “You can stop the fakey accents if you’re going to talk to me. What are you, a spy? Are you with that munitions man? You’re trying to get to Diana, aren’t you?” Surreal sunk her fingers more tightly into the base of his jaw. “Shall I show you how I treat rats who hurt Diana?”
Mr. Quick didn’t waste breath fighting her. “Please … ” he whispered.
Surreal let him go. His head dropped to the thick carpet and bounced. She watched as he coughed weakly. His breath whistled.
“Roll on your side,” she said. She helped him, pulling him onto his left side, careless of his broken ribs. Mr. Quick suppressed a whimper. He got a couple of breaths and coughed properly, bringing up a trail of spittle and blood.
“Well, don’t ruin December’s carpet.” Surreal felt into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his face. “Do you need to sit up?”
A nod. She helped him to sit. Simon Quick wore his trousers, shirt and waistcoat, but no coat. He was in his stocking feet. He shivered, but she didn’t offer to warm him.
“We aren’t friends,” she told him, “but I won’t actually strangle you, you know.”
“Thank you.” A pause. “What will you do?”
Surreal put her head in her hands. This was exactly the problem. What would she do?
“Keep you in here until morning, if you don’t answer my questions. Then I suppose Miss Norton or her servants can call the gendarmes.”
He looked too pale and sick to answer many questions, though. Surreal found a crocheted blanket on a sofa and wrapped him in it.
The rug was patterned in rose and black. Surreal sat cross-legged, knee to knee with Mr. Quick. She did not know how to begin. Despite two broken ribs and a smear of blood at the side of his mouth, Mr. Quick seemed quite composed. She said, “I bet they picked a consumptive on purpose, just so people would be sorry for you.”
His eyes creased. “No, but it’s helpful.” Then his face sobered again. He looked into Surreal’s eyes. “I’m not a robber, assassin, or spy. I don’t hurt people. I find them. That’s all. I’m an agent of the English government, tasked with locating Diana von Birkhausen and recruiting her, if possible, to our cause.”
“You made friends with me because you thought I might lead you to Diana.”
He shook his head. “No. I made friends with Sarah Norton because I thought she might bring me here, to visit her sister December. I hoped December would know what had become of Diana. She wasn’t in Belleville, or on Nova Terra, as far as I knew. I’ve been looking for some time. Touring around as a conjurer gives me plenty of freedom … anyhow, it was just luck we were together on Twilight Queen.”
He coughed again, blinking as the movement jerked at his cracked ribs. The green reading light cast a grass-and-sunshine glow but gave no warmth.
“Then why did you talk to me?”
“At first, of course, to see if you had any information about Diana.” He smiled, lifting his eyebrows. “Secondarily, to recruit you, too, but it didn’t take much conversation to see that was a lost cause. You have a one-track mind when it comes to Diana von Birkhausen. And so then I thought you might be more useful to me on my quest … as a bodyguard, if nothing else.” He touched his side, wincing. “Not my brightest idea.”
“You’d have been better off buying a clockwork man.”
“I suppose so.” He looked around. “Is there … is there anything to drink?”
“No … yes, wait, there’s a pot with some cold tea.” Surreal poured a little into a used cup. “It can’t be too old.”
Mr. Quick took the cup and sipped the tea. “Thank you.”
“Well. I’ll tell December in the morning and she’ll call the authorities, I suppose.” She took the empty cup. “In the meantime I’m getting Mr. Carker to look after you. He has a revolver, you know.”
“I didn’t know — thank you.” His eyes twinkled.
“What?”
“You’re awfully easy to find things out from. I mean … for a hundred-year-old lady.”
“Ninety-six.” She couldn’t help laughing. “You’re going to unload the whole cart of bricks on me, aren’t you?”
“Fair’s fair. You got the jump on me that time.” He laughed, then gasped again. “Christ, that hurts.”
Surreal wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her head on them. “I suppose I should be glad I’m not breaking your heart after all, I mean — you know — but mostly I’m just disappointed. I want you to be a kind person, not a person who uses people.”
They sat together in the cold room. Surreal turned off the light. Some time later she saw a glint she didn’t understand, then realized was Simon Quick turning a coin through his fingers in the dark. Over, under. Inside, outside.
After a while Mr. Quick said in his quiet voice, “I haven’t misrepresented myself or my profession. I really did grow up selling papers and picking pockets. I really am a conjurer. I just … omitted a few things.”
“And changed your voice?”
“No … well … I did grow up in Belleville.” The coin changed direction. “My mother had been a factory girl, but she was an invalid from as long as I can remember. When she died my father’s mother sent for me. She lived in England … they hadn’t wanted to associate with us while my mother was alive. They said she was, their words, no better than she should have been.”
“But we’re citizens of a free city,” Surreal objected. “You, too! We’re past hierarchy and religious persecution and war and — ”
“You don’t see it.” He flipped the coin in the dark. Surreal didn’t see what happened to it. Several seconds later he reached out to catch it. “You think of yourself as a citizen of a city, and I do understand that, but I am subject of a king. You have a constitution, you see, but I have a relationship … My grandmother was never kind, and I got away from her in a year or two, but — I always knew I had a place. A lowly place, even as a traveling conjurer, but — anyway, when His Majesty’s government recruited me, they didn’t have to ask twice.”
What an innocent, Surreal Tender thought, but she also felt a bit in awe of Mr. Quick. She asked, “Have you seen him? Is he really one of the fairy folk?”
“King Arthur?” He laughed. “No, and I don’t know. But I’d give my life for him just the same.”
“Like me for Diana.”
“Like that.” He reached for her hair, groping in the shadows, and found the coin behind her ear. “I didn’t misrepresent my feelings for you, either.” More coins. He tossed them, glinting, into the air. They didn’t fall.
He went on more briskly, “My report on you will reflect that you’re a competent engineer, no more, with a rather antiquated education. We’d accept you as a volunteer but wouldn’t waste resources recruiting you … ”
“But I suppose I would be useful in the dissection room?”
“I’d like to tell you no.” Mr. Quick finished the cold, many-days-old tea. “I don’t have that answer. Perhaps we would dissect a conveniently dead technomancer, if we had one. I can only tell you I haven’t been tasked with the thing you suggest. I don’t have the skills or inclination for it. If our government was killing technomancers, another agent would have been sent. And you would be dead.”
Surreal nodded. After a while she whispered, “Sarah Norton?”
Mr. Quick sighed. “She told me her sister was a technomancer. I knew the eldest Norton had to do with Birkhausen Laboratories, but I hadn’t realized … anyhow, I had it in hand for her to invite me here, but I also wanted to stick with you. My thought was we would come together — you I, and Sarah Norton. Besides the blow of losing a friend, Sarah Norton’s death was inconvenient for me. I had to find a new reason to come here. I was lucky she gave you Miss Norton’s address; I didn’t have that. Didn’t even know she was in Broceliande.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I put her in danger, but I keep wondering … ”
“Or maybe I did. Someone didn’t want her to be a connection between me and December.”
“Maybe.”
“Well. I won’t join England’s war effort, or anyone’s war effort. I’m looking for Diana. Full stop.”
“That’s fair. I’ve approached you per instructions and received your answer.” Their eyes had adjusted to the dark. Now he looked at her quietly. “And I also know where Diana is. My next task is to approach her. I can do that in your company or on my own. It’s your decision, of course.”
“Or I could turn you in to authorities.”
“This is a neutral country, and anyhow I haven’t committed a crime. At worst they’d show me to the border, at best they’d help me — their royal family’s related to ours, you know.”
“Or I could kill you.”
“Yes, that would be trivial for you … but that’ll be just as true a week or six weeks from now. No rush. Anyhow, I’d rather be crushed by you than die in a TB hospital, that’s for sure.” She felt his hand on hers and at the same moment, without having opened her fingers, the coin nestled into her palm. “And just my luck, you’re too kind and good to kill anyone.”
Surreal Tender turned the Belleville dollar over in her hand and traced the worn images with her finger. Heads, Enterprise, a goddess in a chiton carrying a rod and flail. Tails, Freedom, a naked goddess with broken chains at her feet. Freedom and Enterprise, she murmured to herself, thinking of it as a prayer. Which course shall I choose?
She thought, I need this wise youth who’ll help me find Diana and keep her safe. Besides, he’s a good person … and I could have hurt him badly, much more badly than this, without half trying. And he wasn’t even mad …
“We’ll go together,” Mr. Quick said. His voice smiled, but his face looked grave.
Surreal was shaken. She had just thought that. “You’re telling me now?”
“No … you chose.”
She rubbed her temples. “Lately I don’t seem to be making choices at all. Events drag me along willy-nilly. It’s like running on a merry-go-round going the other direction, or something.”
Mr. Quick shook his head. “You decided what to do about me, sure enough. I’m not mind-controlling you, Jane. Just because I predicted your decision doesn’t mean I made it for you.”
“I’m not that girl anymore.” Surreal covered her face with her hands. “And you’re right, age confuses folks. I was way wiser decades back. I may look 25, but I’m ashamed to drag you into this cobweb mind … ”
“Trust yourself.”
She said bitterly, “I can’t trust myself to know a spy from an honest man.”
“No — I don’t mean that.” Gasping again as he moved, Mr. Quick pulled her hands away from her face. “Trust the rightness of your conscience. That’s all. Do the best you can with the information available to you. What else can we do, any of us?”