Never Lie if You Don't Need To
Leaving the fairy kingdom
[Time for more Surreal Tender the Technomancer. This story picks up six weeks after On the Rails. The scientist Diana von Birkhausen is enjoying her gilded cage in the Empire of the Confession. Simon Quick the conjurer has healed from the cracked ribs Surreal gave him, and our heroes are getting ready to travel east. Our old friends Randal Jasper and Trixie Grey are traveling west to intercept them. And Silas Norton could be anywhere. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Surreal Tender, Simon Quick, and December Norton sat in front of the French windows that opened onto the garden. A month ago, a frosty mist had obscured the woods just 50 yards off across the dead, gray grass. Now snow blanketed the lawn and outlined each cedar tree.
Yuletide, Surreal thought. She supposed they still celebrated it in the Old World. Yuletide picture postcards always featured quaint churches and pictures of the Holy Family kneeling in a little thatched barn. She had never seen a thatched barn anywhere in Nova Terra, certainly not in Belleville.
The company at Norton Grange — Surreal, Mr. Quick, December Norton, and Surreal’s secretary, James Carker, had fallen into a quiet rhythm the past six weeks. Each was a solitary person — December, the hostess, to the point of eccentricity.
Mr. Carker was always dry, silent, and correct. Mr. Quick, who made his living as a conjurer, had a ready patter that he could dial up from winky street banter to impromptu poetry, giving the illusion he really was a king’s magician out of an old story. But it was all borrowed plumage, and now he gladly put the wings aside.
As dusk fell the window changed from portal to dusky amber mirror. Firelight wavered behind them. They had been arguing about Surreal’s plan to visit the Empire of the Confession to find Diana von Birkhausen, mad scientist and Surreal’s and December’s creator. Mr. Quick’s news that the Confession was detaining all technomancers who tried to pass through had unnerved them.
December Norton’s opinion was simple: she didn’t care whether Diana lived or died and encouraged Surreal to adopt a similar indifference.
“Go back home,” December said. “I lived the first half of my life in Belleville. I remember. Bad as it is some ways, we didn’t have wars or house arrests or secret police. Diana came here knowing the costs — I think she’s from one of the little duchies that the Confession absorbed back a century ago, isn’t she? But she didn’t ask you to come with her.”
Surreal answered, “That’s because her creditors were after her — you said.”
“Diana lies.” December looked at her long, black cigarette and shook off some ash onto the carpet. “And whether or not she lies, if an idiot jumps down a well, that doesn’t oblige you to jump in after her.”
“She doesn’t lie, she’s a fabulist.”
“Still.” December touched the other woman’s elbow. “Go back across the ocean Belleville. You’re on a fool’s errand.”
“We don’t have wars,” Surreal said, not answering the question, “but we do have land seizure, foreclosure, poorhouses, disease, want, starvation, and squalor. Children work locked in factories. Companies use clockwork men to bust unions. We don’t make war on each other, but we litigate each other to death, singly and by groups. Diana’s creditors no doubt own your chassis and mine — or if they don’t, another bunch does. Legally, about 80 percent of your mass is someone else’s property. Same with me.”
She rubbed her temples. She rarely thought in such terms and resented having to do it now. She had managed to live almost a hundred years while mostly soaring over economics and politics, except in the most urgent sense of earning a living. Life should be bounded by her personal quests on one end and the larger questions of science on the other, she thought, without all this middle-ground impedimenta. But from the moment Mr. Carker had walked into her laboratory with his suggestion that something had happened to Diana von Birkhausen, she had been drawn into a complicated world that she felt simultaneously too large for and lost in. Sarah Norton’s murder had convinced her that all this was real, if not pleasant. But she still didn’t know exactly what this was. Money? Politics? War?
She went to the point that seemed to be the crux of the matter. “No one cared while we were big useless walking manikins, but clearly someone’s found some value in us.”
“Someone in the Confession,” December said, “which means that’s the last place you want to go.”
Surreal shook her head. “I want answers.”
“You’ll be detained as soon as you try to leave,” December objected. “Maybe as soon as you arrive.”
“I’ll wear gloves and refrain from telling people I’m a technomancer — silly.”
Simon Quick stood up in front of the windows. “Stand beside me. Look at us. I’m just at six feet tall.”
The two women joined him. The three looked at each other. December Norton loomed over Mr. Quick. Surreal’s eyes were on level with his eyebrows. Mr. Quick, slimmer than either, was also the shortest.
“You’re not monstrously tall — unless someone’s looking for tall women,” he said. “Surreal, you’re going to have to go openly. Their police will clock you as a technomancer the second you step off the train. And appearance of deception is the last thing you want.”
“Openly as what? Part of your act? A circus sideshow?”
“Why not?” He looked quietly at the three reflected images. “I’m a stage performer; you’re a technomancer, no lies to tell.” He smiled. “Never lie if you don’t need to.”
“You’ll love Diana,” Surreal said. She flopped back in her chair. “She never tells the truth if she doesn’t need to.” Then she sighed. “I think that’s why she became an inventor — she wanted to make this world nearer the one she imagined.” She looked over her shoulder at her secretary. “Mr. Carker, what do you think?”
Her secretary was sitting at the table behind them. Now he looked up from the newspaper he had been reading. “The ruse seems beneath your dignity, madam, but it does make sense,” he said. “And I have no doubt of you being able to get out of any place you get yourself into. Where that leaves me and Mr. Quick is another matter.”
“Oh, I can disappear from anywhere,” Mr. Quick said. “I’ll be happy to bring you along on any vanishing acts.”
Mr. Carker took off his spectacles and wiped them. “Then I suppose that will have to do, sir. If you’ve healed enough, I submit we should leave as soon as possible, assuming we have funds.”
Mr. Quick nodded. “My agent has wired me an advance.”
Just then the little fairy maidservant rang the bell. They went in together for supper.
The party ate a light supper, then Mr. Quick and December Norton went off together to her private rooms.
Mr. Carker, back in his armchair with his newspaper, raised his eyebrows. “That’s a bit of a May–December friendship.”
Surreal whooped with laughter, then covered her mouth. “No, it’s sadder than that.” She came to sit in the easy chair with her feet on the window sill. “She’s having him do seances, summon her sister’s spirit.”
“I can’t like him preying on old woman, madam.”
“I don’t think he charges her.”
“Still.”
“Mr. Carker, she would — we would — if a spirit comes, we feel it. It’s not much, just like a kind of static cloud, but it’s a real thing.” Surreal reached for the cigarettes. “She’d know a charlatan, you see. Either she’s comforted by the ruse, or it’s real.”
“I don’t doubt you can feel stray energy after a body dies.” Mr. Carker smoothed his pants legs over his knees. “I have every doubt that young conjurer can summon a spirit.”
“If he’s told her he can — ” Surreal stopped. She did not believe humans could summon spirits. Even technomancers could not. And spirits, as she understood them, were no more than a brush of electromagnetic energy exciting lunite wire. At the same time, she very much wanted Mr. Quick’s lies to be limited to the one omission so grave and unsettling she hadn’t mentioned to anyone else in the party. He was an agent of a foreign government. That was bad enough.
She spread her hands. “He must have a gift.”
“You haven’t asked him, madam?”
Surreal Tender let this impertinence pass. “What I haven’t mentioned is that you had a prior interest in finding Diana. That you came to me about her all those months ago.”
Mr. Carker looked at her a while. “Thank you, madam.”
Surreal smiled, a tired smile. She realized she was hiding Mr. Quick’s secret from Mr. Carker and Mr. Carker’s secret from Mr. Quick.
Then again, what exactly was Mr. Carker’s secret? He had been a secretary or manager of some kind for Birkhausen Laboratories in the days before the company failed; he had worked for a private client who died; he had come to work for Surreal out of an outsized attraction to technomancers.
Many people had that fancy. It didn’t frighten Surreal, who had felt a similar adoration for Diana when she was still Jane Sumner. And at any rate, Mr. Carker had soon come to see her as an individual rather than a beautiful monster. He now acted toward her, in private, something like a crotchety and overprotective grandfather. So far, so good.
But why had he kept records from the failed company? Why did he care so urgently what had happened to Diana?
Surreal held his gaze for a while. “But your question is answered,” she said. “She’s alive. So what’s your opinion — should we look for her, or leave well alone?”
Mr. Carker’s pale, guarded face showed nothing for a minute, then cracked in the thinnest of smiles. “I, too, am curious, madam. And there’s self-interest — I don’t want to see my employer seized in payment of some debt she never incurred. I’d like to unravel this thing.”
“Good.” She grinned. “That makes two of us.”
Sun rose behind jagged mountains. Randal Jasper and Trixie Grey stood just under the eaves of the forest, watching the lemony light hit the towers of the castle across the valley, then snowy fields and barns, and last of all the river that wound below them. Despite the similar coppery hair, the two were a contrast. The tall, lanky geologist stood lazily, while the petite, wiry motorcyclist danced from foot to foot, dangling her leather cap from her fingertips and letting the breeze toss her short-bobbed red curls.
Mr. Jasper drank from the battered canteen Miss Grey handed him.
“Thanks, sis.” He screwed the top back on and tossed it back to her. “Feels so much better now I’m driving. Not scrunched down like a gosling in an egg.”
She giggled. “You did look like a full-grown goose poked back into an egg, in that sidecar.”
“And felt like one.”
“If it honks like a goose — ”
“Hush.”
Miss Grey started rolling the motorbike back down the track into the woods.
Mr. Jasper called behind her, “Wait, hand me the glasses.”
He jogged a step or two back after her, and Miss Grey handed him a pair of binoculars. Then, returning to the treeline, Mr. Jasper looked across the river that marked the border of the Duchy of Normandy. About a hundred yards away downstream, a trestle bridge crossed the river near where the railway line emerged from the trees. An equal distance upstream, a wooden bridge looked like it was mostly used to drive livestock across. What might have been a mud track led up to the approach.
“The train stops at customs on the other side,” he said to Miss Grey, who had joined him, “just there below the castle, see? It won’t have picked up much speed at the bridge. You can hop on there; you’re the nimblest.”
She nodded. “How will I know her?”
Mr. Jasper scratched his auburn hair. “She looks like the girl you liked in A Little Princess, you remember, gray eyes, black hair? But a grown-up, of course — about my height or more. And she walks like a boy — like you, I mean. Big gestures. No mincing.”
Miss Grey wrinkled her nose as she grinned up at him. Her red-gold curls whipped around her forehead. “I like that,” she said. “Thanks.”