[Back to the adventures of Surreal Tender the technomancer and her secretary and sidekick, James Carker. This story picks up immediately after Atlantis.
I should remind y’all I started this story series on a whim. The phrase surreal tender popped up in an entirely different context, and I thought, What a great name for a technomancer. So I wrote a little toy story, then another, then a third, thinking: Done by Christmas.
Clearly, I wasn’t done by Christmas. But unlike the New Confederacy stories, where I had the end in mind as soon as I moved out beyond Love Letter to a Sock Puppet, I now have no certain idea where it’s all going! But I am working within a venerable structure:
The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins. They were going round and round the island, but they did not meet because all were going at the same rate.
An unknown villain is looking for Surreal Tender, Surreal is looking for Diana von Birkhausen, Diana is looking for angel stone … Sooner or later they’ll stumble over each other, I expect.
In the meantime you have a real 19th-century serialized novel, with your author scribbling while the printer’s boy stands at the door. And he is a boy. You’ll have noticed these folks, heroes and villains alike, are a mess of early-20th-century prejudices, from Mr. Carker’s adorable “I’ve never had a daughter or sister to instruct” to the less-adorable but consistent writing-off of indigenous folk as Little Blue Men. And the narrator’s letting them roll with it. FAIRIES! THERE ARE FAIRIES IN THIS BOOK AND YOU ARE IGNORING THEM!
Yes. Yes, I am. But are they ignoring our characters?
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Later, Surreal Tender remembered her days on Atlantis as scenes burned into her memory sharp as intaglio on a solar plate. Deeply incised, but separate. One print. Then the next. Did she have the order quite right?
The rocky trail. Pale pebbles, sandstone, limestone, granite. Dust. Broom grass in the sun, ferns in the shade. To her left, loosely wooded slope. To her right, a sheer fall. A figleaf of a barrier—a rusty chain threaded through eyelet uprights—ran along knee-high. Some places, though, there were large sandstone slabs on the righthand side. These slabs, large enough for one man to meditate or a dozen men to picnic, were favorites of tourists. Steps had been carved down here and there.
An elder cedar tree. A gnarled ruddy trunk.
A sketchbook with a blue cardboard cover. Scattered pencils.
A disturbance of pebbles and dust.
A woman’s boot print, so, so small, facing the trail. Another, dragging.
Surreal lay down with her head right over the verge. Standing, you would think Miss Norton had fallen hundreds of feet. But at this angle, you saw that the fall down the natural palisade was no more than 90 feet to a narrow trail directly below. That trail ran along the edge of another steep wooded slope.
On the lower trail lay Miss Norton, a pool of blood around her head. A raven —
Rising to her feet in one motion, Surreal took a step forward and a step over the cliff. Only Mr. Quick, who had been closest behind her, saw this eerie feat — she did not need to jump. She just stepped.
Below, Surreal landed half-kneeling beside the body, making the earth vibrate but discomposing no more than her skirt. Dust was already drinking the blood. The ravens rose in anger. Surreal held her hand over Sarah Norton’s head, feeling the whirl and blur of escaping energy as it sparkled through her fingers, then tingled at the back of her head — from Sarah’s point of view, she would have been hovering somewhere behind Surreal’s shoulder, looking in surprise at her own body.
“It’s all right,” Surreal said to the fading soul-stuff that had once, conjoint with the flesh under her hand, been part of Sarah Norton. “I’ll tell your sister.”
In less than half an hour, Surreal sprinted the seven miles that had taken the party all morning to stroll. Men-at-arms drove up from the town on motorcycles, with Surreal, who would have crushed one of the little bikes, jogging alongside. Perhaps for the first time in her life since her transformation, she felt a little winded as they arrived at the picnic spot at the base of the stairs to the overlook.
The Atlanteans’ men-at-arms took over the situation, interviewed the party together and separately, and escorted them all back to the port town, much to Mr. Jasper’s dismay. He had been so eager to see the saltpeter mines. The doctor and more men-at-arms arrived in a Mercedes tractor to deal with the body. They did not permit the visitors to watch.
By evening the authorities issued a statement. Sarah Norton had been murdered by either Randal Jasper, Silas Norton, or Simon Quick, all citizens of Belleville in Nova Terra. As Miss Norton was also a citizen of Belleville, they would inform the ambassador of the situation. In the meantime, they had no intention of hosting murderers on Atlantis. Those three gentlemen would leave on the next available transport, of whatever sort, going in whatever direction. Until then, they would remain in the hotel.
This establishment, which stood on a narrow street that wound up a ridge overlooking the bay, had only eight rooms. These were typically reserved by the dirigible company in blocks to be rented as part of tourist packages. So the new situation did not particularly inconvenience the manager, who had his own apartment across the back garden. He offered to give up his cottage for Surreal Tender and Mr. Carker — the only members of the party not under house arrest pending deportation— or even to rent them rooms in a different lodging at his own expense.
Surreal refused. She was thinking about the saltpeter caves Mr. Jasper mentioned. Where you found saltpeter, you sometimes found angel stone. Surreal imagined a meteorite striking the earth in the years before humans or their predecessors, the fairy folk, roamed the land. She imagined a sparkle of meteoric dust floating in an underground pool, then dissolving. She pictured the processes of crystallization and evaporation that, against all likelihood, united them again in gritty greenish crystals.
That’s why Diana von Birkhausen had come to Nova Terra. Diana was looking for meteoric ores. She found what she wanted — no more than a few ounces, a half-handful — in a saltpeter cave in the Cumberland Highlands.
If they could figure out how Miss Norton really died, perhaps she could visit those caves with Mr. Jasper, Surreal thought. They seemed like exactly the thing that would have attracted Diana. With more angel stone, she could make more technomancers, or, more likely, Surreal thought, improve her own powers some way.
Surreal lay on the bed working through a copy of Madame Curie’s Recherches sur les substances radioactives. The library in the Atlantean town simply called Port had an excellent collection of scientific monographs and reference books, though none was newer than 10 years old. What would Madame Curie make of angel stone? she wondered.
If only the authorities would arrest that Mr. Silas Norton and — Surreal rolled over onto her back, making the bed creak. Mr. Jasper or Mr. Quick could also have either one of them killed Miss Norton. She just didn’t want to believe it. She liked them; she did not like Mr. Silas Norton. He treated his clockwork valet like a machine.
Of course his clockwork valet was a machine.
Scientific method at work, she thought to herself. Little Ada should have built that analytical engine. It would have been more logical than I am, today.
Maybe the authorities would change their minds and say Sarah Norton fell.
No. Someone had pushed Miss Norton. She fell backward, resisting, digging her heels in. Under her dress, her frail shoulders bore the marks of hands.
“That’s all?” Surreal asked Mr. Quick that evening. They were sitting together on a balcony that looked over the harbor. “No arrests, nothing?”
He rolled a Belleville dollar through his fingers. The dull gold glinted, over, under, inside, out. “I think they don’t mind about justice at the individual level, not when it comes to foreigners. They just want to keep their island safe. Wouldn’t you?”
“You’re not angry? If you aren’t angry, I’ll be angry for you. It’s a lifelong exile. A blot on your character.”
Mr. Quick’s chair was pulled closer the low parapet. He looked over his shoulder at Surreal. “It was just a sketching holiday. And since Miss Norton and I had plans to go around together … ”
She watched him turn away to wipe his eyes.
After a while he said quietly, “I don’t think I’ll ever want to come back.”
“I’m so sorry.”
The coin had disappeared. Mr. Quick crossed his arms on the sandstone and rested his chin on them. “You don’t mind sitting here with me?”
“Because you pushed Miss Norton off a cliff and you might throw me off this balcony next?” Surreal, lying back in her chair with her feet on the stone, gazed across the harbor at a few sailboats returning. White sails, gold and apricot sky. “I don’t think for a minute you did. And if you did — if it was you she warned me against — I invite you to try.”
“If — ” The young man turned entirely around in his chair, swinging his leg to straddle it and stare at Surreal Tender. “If she what?”
Surreal recounted her last conversation with Sarah Norton.
Mr. Quick looked at her gravely. “She was concerned about you.”
Surreal nodded. “I keep thinking that’s why — but of course it can’t be why; the three of you were exactly the people who couldn’t have heard her say that.”
“And I keep thinking I should have stayed with her.” Mr. Quick pulled the coin out of the air again. “She said I could be her adopted son for the week.”
“Coulda, shoulda, woulda,” Surreal said. “We’ll drive ourselves mad if we start second-guessing every last step we took today. Mr. Carker, you didn’t hear any of that conversation, did you?”
Her secretary, who had come to lean in the doorway, coughed. “I regret to say I did not, madam.”
“Don’t worry about it. We were all off our footing.”
“But there was no reason anyone should have been so angry,” Mr. Quick said. “No reason to hurt anyone. We were all on holiday.”
Mr. Carker coughed again. The young man stared at him, then fell silent. After a while he asked, “Do you mind if I smoke, Miss Tender?”
“No. But with your lungs you shouldn’t.”
Simon Quick’s thin face lit up in a moment of unguarded joy. Surreal watched his lips part, then firm up again.
“You’re right, of course.” He put the cigarette packet back inside his coat.
Oh dear, Surreal thought. Please don’t.
James Carker strolled onto the balcony and leaned on the stone parapet facing the others. “Mr. Norton’s clockwork man was there, you said, madam?”
Surreal nodded. “I wonder what he feels about all this?”
“Feels?” Mr. Quick asked.
“He doesn’t have rational faculties as you and I understand them,” Surreal explained. “He can’t learn. He can’t analyze information. He can’t do even simple math, though if you tell him the times tables he could parrot back the answers you’d told him. But if you’re around them enough you learn they do feel. Think about how a motorcar responds to a driver with a harsh touch versus one with a sensitive hand. Or how one car’s a lemon and one loves to please.”
“I haven’t driven a motorcar but once or twice,” Mr. Quick said.
“And why should you?” Surreal asked. “Nuisances.”
Mr. Carker raised his eyebrows.
With Mr. Quick looking at her, Surreal couldn’t stick her tongue out at her secretary, but she almost did. “I’l talk to the clockwork man alone if you could distract that pinhead Silas Norton, Mr. Quick.”
“Happy to, though he doesn’t like me — You don’t know who he is?”
“What?”
Mr. Quick stood up. “The pinhead is one of the biggest munitions-makers in Nova Terra. He’s a war profiteer.”
He bowed to Surreal, then vanished without another word.
When Mr. Quick had time to pass through the parlor and out into the upper hall, Surreal did stick her tongue out at her secretary. “You don’t need to protect me from that boy.”
“No, madam.” He almost smiled. “But I rather think I need to protect him from you.”
She joined him at the parapet. “But why is it such a — never mind. It’s all a mess. Now I want a cigarette.”
“With that tooth, madam?”
“I hired a secretary, not a grandpa.”
Despite her enhanced senses, Surreal Tender did not realize Simon Quick was in her room until he sat on the edge of the narrow bed, his slight weight tugging at the mattress.
She sat straight up, whipping her hand out toward the clear electrical form of a human before she could open her eyes and realize: A friend.
Simon Quick rested his hand over her fingers until they relaxed around his throat. She lowered her hand to the coverlet, taking his with her.
“Sorry.”
“Please don’t be. I surprised you.”
“The door was locked.”
“You’re talking to a sleight-of-hand man.” She heard warmth in that light voice. He sounded far more like a Belleville street urchin when he wasn’t projecting for a crowd. He held out a bottle, which the streetlight through the gauze curtain at the window revealed to be labeled with a skull and crossed bones. “You wanted this, I think.”
Surreal took the bottle of laudanum. “How did you know?”
“You have pain and it’s getting worse.” He didn’t look at her but at the bottle. “You wince when you’re at rest, but when you focus in on something outside yourself, your face smooths out.”
Surreal traced the quilting on the coverlet with her finger. “You’re very observant.”
“You might say we have a mutual friend.”
“Never a dull moment?”
She looked up and for a minute their eyes met.
“You might say.” He looked at their hands again. “If it’s not inside, it’s outside, so to speak. But I have my distractions. I’m lucky my profession requires close attention.”
Surreal turned her hand over to hold his. “What were you before you were a conjurer?”
“Paper boy. Pickpocket.”
Surreal laughed, a single big peal, then clapped her hand over her mouth. “Do I have your skills to thank for this?” She wrapped both hands around the bottle.
“No, I purchased it at the chemist’s.” Mr. Quick reached out as if to open it, but instead seemed to twist a grass snake up from the lid. The snake twined his fingers. Over, under. Inside, out.
“While there, I learned something interesting. Monsieur Benayoun sold it to me by authority of the Senate and Folk of Atlantis … you understand? He just murmured it as he handed the package across. The same formula of words the men-at-arms used putting me under house arrest.”
“So?”
“So Benayoun looked like a North African gentleman.” The grass snake turned into the ubiquitous coin. “I asked how long he’d been in business, whether he liked it here. He told me his whole story, grandfather immigrated back in 1850 or so. I asked how long it took to become a citizen here. He laughed at me. ‘Oh, I’m not a citizen, young man. They don’t hand that out like this.’ He shook the bottle. Then he leaned and whispered in my ear. ‘You’ll never see a true Atlantean, not if you live here a hundred years.’ He leaned back and laughed again, a huge belly laugh. I though he was pulling my leg. He went on, ‘And if you do see one, you’ll think he’s someone else. It’s like being governed by a committee of angels. They leave us alone. We leave them alone. And we live in paradise. What more can you want?’”
“I think he was having you on.” Surreal chewed her lip. “Although, if we want to be extravagant — ”
“How’s that?”
“I think a committee of angels, or even one angel, could have heard Miss Norton tell me to be careful of myself, then pushed her off the cliff. A flying invisible murderer would fit all the details.”
“An angel could have made an attempt on you directly, though.”
“Yes — especially if we endow him with every superhuman power convenient for our scenario.” Surreal shrugged. “And why in the world would Atlanteans care about Miss Norton, let alone me? We’d both be gone soon enough.”
“I’m told people like you — technomancers — perceive astral travelers. Is that just lore?” The coin reversed. “I don’t mean to pry.”
“That is the lore.” Surreal touched her head and made an exploding gesture. “The great failed experiment. And I felt nothing besides the six of us and Mr. Norton’s clockwork man.”
He put the coin away. “Do you hurt now? You could take a dose and I’ll stay until you sleep.”
“And throw me out the window after? You’re wasting your time. You couldn’t lift me.”
She slid down under the coverlet. Mr. Quick scooted to make room for her. “See? Quite safe, no matter how nefarious my intentions. You’re impervious to harm.”
He said it lightly, but the words seemed to create an echo. They fell silent.
After a while Mr. Quick unscrewed the bottle and poured a thimbleful of laudanum into the lid. Surreal lifted her head to drink it.
“How did you get past those men-at-arms?”
Mr. Quick turned her pillow so she could rest on the cool side. “I’m a sleight-of-hand man, remember?”