On the Rails
In which we meet a new friend
[Back to Surreal Tender the Technomancer. Surreal, her secretary James Carker and the conjurer Simon Quick are visiting another technomancer, December Norton, in her house in the magical country of Broceliande. We’ll leave them to their plotting and planning.
Meanwhile, the inventor Diana von Birkhausen is more or less under house arrest in the Empire of the Confession. But she has a fat research budget — what more could a mad scientist want? Lots of things, apparently. Let’s see what she’s up to.
Oh, yeah, remember that motorcycle? The one that rescued the geologist Randal Jasper back on Atlantis? Or helped him abscond, depending on your point of view? Well, we’re about to find out who was driving it.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Starlight played over the trim-mown grass and splashing fountains in the quadrangle at the center of the imperial compound in Peace-and-Progress, the capital city of the Empire of the Confession. Though in fact this was not true starlight; electrical fairy lights strung from tree to tree created the illusion that the heavens were swinging low to the ground.
Two figures in evening dress stood in close conversation.
“Who was that?” Luke Stirner the mathematician lifted an eyebrow and cut his eyes to indicate the man behind him.
His companion, a slim woman of 30 wearing her inky hair in a low knot and balancing a bakelite cigarette holder between her third and fourth finger, watched as the tall, red-haired man slipped through the side door of the cream-colored Rococco building. His silhouette, seen dimly through one tall window after the next, continued up the stairs leading to Diana von Birkhausen’s private apartment.
“The Nova Terran? He’s a diamond-hound, I think.” She shrugged. “Or an oil well man. He’s a Hilly-Billy. Or do they call them Hidley-Bidleys? From the wild back woods that don’t belong to anyone but the oil companies and the fairies. He’s some kind of prospector — anyway, he’s struck gold now.”
She spun her fingers in a languid circle, making the scented smoke wreathe.
Stirner narrowed his eyes, smiling. “Isn’t that what they keep you for, Anis?”
“Oh, Lord!” Anis leaned in to him. “I couldn’t keep up with that woman. If she is a woman. What did she do to herself to make her skin so green? It’s like Cleopatra had a love-child with her own asp.”
“All coiled up?” Stirner suggested.
Anis held out her arm. The white skin was marked with a spiral bruise. She rotated her wrist a bit to show it going all the way around, passing itself.
“That,” Stirner said, “is delicious.”
“But exhausting.” She took his arm. “Come on. Let’s go experience the exotic delights of a chaste evening followed by an early bedtime. Lord Cukuface is setting off fireworks in the garden.”
They went off down the path together, two sleek black heads glinting in the electric torchlight under the lime trees.
Under the silken, down-filled blankets, Randal Jasper felt in his pocket and pulled out his cigarette case. He passed it into Diana’s hand, and she pushed it up somewhere over her head — into a pillowcase, maybe. He didn’t want to know.
The case had been heavy, but not surprisingly so — after all, it was lined with lead.
“About payment … ” Diana murmured. “Here’s a note of credit to my banker in Broceliande. For ten troy ounces of gold … that’ll buy you about 10,000 Belleville dollars, I think.” She pressed a folded paper into his hand.
“Thank you, ma’am.” He wrapped his fingers around the heavy, slightly greasy paper of the note of credit. “Whew! I’m smothering under here.”
“Sorry about that,” Diana said. “The room isn’t bugged, but someone’s bound to be watching through the windows. This is the easiest excuse for you to be here — everyone knows I’m a raging nympomaniac; it covers so many worse sins, you know, darling.”
“I’ll bang around a bit and make it look like something’s happening.”
“Obliged.”
A few minutes later, they sat up, pretending to be buttoning clothes. Randal poured blueberry muddle out of a carafe and handed it to Diana.
“Thanks.” She smiled up at him. “You really do look like you’ve been exerting yourself.”
The tall young geologist leaned against the chinoiserie wallpaper, propping a boot behind him and leaving a smudge. He took out his handkerchief to mop sweat from his forehead. “You’re not like the other technomancers I’ve met. You — ”
Diana lifted an eyebrow.
“You’re — you’re — all over — like liquid stone.” He poured himself a tumblerful. “And under the blankets — you glow. You glow like a radium dial.”
“New model, darling.” Diana slurped a bit of crushed ice out of her glass. It hissed on her tongue. “Not a chassis. Total transformation. My own little secret. But … what other technomancers have you met?”
“Well, ma’am, it’s a strange story — ”
Randal Jasper sat down in a robin’s-egg blue velvet chair, stuck his long legs out in front of him, and told her all about how he met Surreal Tender and his adventures on the island nation of Atlantis.
Diana von Birkhausen’s rooms in the Dower House at the south corner of the imperial quadrangle possessed a balcony looking over a shade garden and a goldfish pond. Beyond, lime trees half-hid the view of the party taking place toward the center of the quadrangle. Diana and Randal Jasper leaned on the railings and smoked, watching the last of the fireworks spend themselves over the treetops like sparks dropping onto a pond.
In the dim light you could hardly see Diana’s greenish color; her long, slender fingers looked pale and glimmered almost like marble. She looked at her fingernails. Of course, they were perfect half-moons.
“You don’t know where they were going?”
Jasper shook his head. “No, ma’am. I had to cut out pretty quick myself after they put me under house arrest. I’m lucky I had a friend there, and she had a friend — anyhow, Miss Grey’s been in contact with me since.”
Jasper put his hand in his pocket and rattled its contents. Keys, a knife, rocks.
He continued: “My colleague wasn’t following up on that technomancer, of course, but she kept up the prospecting end with a local guide. She found the flakes of meteoric ore I just gave you, and she believes there’s more in the same cave. Characteristic wormholes cutting through the fault lines and subsequently filled with sedimentary — anyhow, the original meteorites weren’t much bigger than pebbles, but they burned through rock like bullets through butter.”
He looked at Diana. The girl — but of course she wasn’t a girl; she was a 150-year-old woman wearing a body made by human artifice — was gazing out over the treetops. Lights blinked slowly past as a shadow blocked the dim stars: a dirigible.
“Will you need more of this here ore, ma’am?” Jasper asked.
Diana came out of a reverie. “Yes.” Her fingers drummed the wrought iron. “Yes, I will. But not here.” Now her hand moved to her necklace. She began telling the beads through her fingers as if ticking off thoughts. “I’ll need these facilities through at least the end of the winter, not to mention their brains — these men are remarkably acute, some really original thinkers, though of course they don’t train the girls here — anyhow, it serves me. But I have something in mind I’m not starting in their laboratories.”
“Sounds interesting,” Jasper said. But she felt him shiver.
“Oh, it is.” For the first time she looked at him. “I just wish I knew where Surreal Tender has gone. It surprises me that she ever left Belleville. But I suppose everyone goes on vacation sometimes.” She shrugged. “No matter. See what that oaf Christian Leopold wants you to prospect for. You can make bank if you serve him the goods.”
“So I hear.”
“Just don’t ever become his man.” Diana patted Randal Jasper on the front of his dinner jacket. “I’ll meet you on Atlantis.”
The train gathered speed. It had only been a flying stop after all — the engine slowed to a heartbeat, the conductor put down a set of wooden steps, the young salesman stepped briskly off and turned to catch his carpetbag as it was tossed after him, the conductor picked up the steps again, leaning for them a little as the train caught speed — and it was done.
On the far side, under the locust hedge, Randal Jasper rolled into the dense shadows, arms wrapped around his rucksack. He caught his breath. Twenty minutes later, he emerged from the far side of the hedge and plunged into a field of winter wheat.
A small woman wearing trousers and a leather cap stood peering between the gray boards of a ramshackle barn. She had been there all morning. Now as the sun cleared the hilltop she saw Randal Jasper emerge from the head-high, waving grain. She rolled a motorbike out through the barn doors, trotted alongside a few paces downhill, and swung a leg over. After a few more hard pushes — leaning precariously to the side, as her legs were short — the motorbike rattled to life. She righted herself and sped downhill toward the auburn-haired geologist. She didn’t have to stop as he caught her pace and swung into the sidecar.
Trixie Grey had her goggles on her eyes and her attention fully absorbed in navigating the bumpy furrows down toward the hedgerow and the road beyond, but she gave Randal Jasper an affectionate cuff on his head.
He hollered something — she saw his teeth flash in a smile — but his words were lost on the wind.