[Happy New Year! Let’s start 2024 with another installment of Surreal Tender the Technomancer. This one happens a few weeks after This Quiet Earth. Surreal and James Carker, her secretary and sidekick, think the missing scientist Diana von Birkhausen might be in the Old World, so they’re taking a dirigible from Nova Terra across the ocean to look for her there.
For folks who play Shadowrun: They were technomancers in the classical sense all along. There were just no computers for them to talk to.
Everyone: This story cycle started as a bagatelle to go with the cool name Surreal Tender and now it’s wandering into all kinds of science. I haven’t touched math or science since I graduated from high school in 1990, so things may be bumpy! Corrections welcome; there’s always the comment button. Geography and history are all mine; after all, this is a world of which the first inhabitants were fairies.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
“Phossy jaw.” Surreal Tender, reclining against the window of the dirigible with her long legs propped on the bench seat in front of her, flipped the newsprint page over. “Just like phossy jaw all over again.”
James Carker, asleep with the afternoon sun in his face, blinked his way awake. The slanting light filled their private cabin, gleaming against varnished wood and brass finishings. “Madam?”
“Look.”
Surreal held out the paper.
WOMEN VICTIMS TELL RAVAGES OF RADIUM SALT
Witness’ jaw separates from her skull before death.
Putting on his spectacles, Mr. Carker glanced over the headline and dek. The women, painters of watch and instrument faces, were encouraged to point up their brushes with their tongues before dipping them in paint made with phosphor and radium. The women were now suing their employer for injury caused by the glowing paint — sores, tooth and bone decay, anemia, sterility, death.
“Not surprising,” he said. “It’s radioactive like angel stone, isn’t it?
“Angel stone,” Surreal Tender reminded him, “doesn’t exist. But yes, the first of our volunteers at Birkhausen Laboratories contracted something like phossy jaw in their bones. Except, you know, all their bones, starting with the spine and sternum. We discovered radiation poisoning before it had a name.”
She put her graphite-gray hand over her chest, concealing the flesh of her palm. Within her ribcage, the fleck of angel stone powering the engine of her heart continued to shed energy, driving a process that could keep her alive a thousand years or more if the rest of her didn’t fall apart first.
Or, of course, if the elaborate radiation soaks that threaded her flesh like mould through wet loam failed.
“I wonder what failsafes Miss Curie uses to protect herself,” she said. “She must work with radium every day.” She glanced at Mr. Carker. “I don’t suppose our itinerary would permit a visit?”
“I remind you, madam, that we have an abduction to solve and a mad genius of science to find.” He polished his spectacles and left them in his hand, relieving himself of the sight of the victim’s necrotic jaw and empty left eye socket, ghostly black shadows in the newspaper photo.
Cora Bentham had been but 1 of 31 who died in the manufacturing town of Bessemer, he’d read in the first quick glance. Bessemer — just 150 miles upriver from Belleville. Armaments had been flowing downriver all the past year to supply the war overseas. Belleville, as it had in the last war 75 years ago, exported materiel to all sides and imported spoils by means fair or foul. Ports bustled. Barge trains clogged the canals. Clockwork polemen, knockoffs of Birkhausen Lab’s last, mindless mechanicals, toiled incessantly, walking steel hands up and down poles until the wood splintered before the operator tired.
One of 31 factory girls dead to supply a war the rich men of Nova Terra had no intention to enter but were eager to turn a profit on, he thought. Until he went to work for Surreal Tender, he had lived his life in service to those rich men. Clerk, head clerk, manager — but never a radium girl. Someone like him had issued the instruction, perhaps provided verbiage for printed notices: Lick, dip, paint.
Surreal Tender, after a glance at him, dropped the paper on the seat.
“Maybe they’ll be together. Diana and Miss Curie.” She sat up and pushed the wine-colored velvet headrest, which now rested between her shoulder blades, over to the other side of the seat. “Damn these miniature furnishings.”
“Dirigibles weren’t designed with the new woman in mind,” Mr. Carker said dryly. Freed from the sight that seemed to predict his employer’s future, he put his spectacles on his nose again. “I imagine both Miss Curie and Diana von Birkhausen are involved in the war effort. In some capacity.”
“If there’s a war and she’s anywhere near, Diana will be into it,” Surreal agreed. “She used to say war was the — the accelerant to mankind’s rise to godhead, something like that. Burn away the dross, all that bosh.”
“I don’t suppose she ever saw a war.”
Surreal Tender laughed suddenly. “She did, in fact. Before I was born.” Again she shifted on the too-low, too-narrow bench and resumed her sideways position, back against the window and legs tented in front of her. “She fought in the Greek War of Independence where, she said, she had an affair with Lord Byron before he died. That’s how she became little Ada’s godmother.”
Someone tapped at the cabin door and slid it open. It was the steward, a violet-skinned aboriginal of Nova Terra with a shimmer of wings, or at least wing-like witchlight, along his shoulders. “Will you take dinner in the lounge or have it served here?” he asked. “I have the menu card.”
“The lounge, I think.” Surreal stretched. “This cabin’s pretty as a music box and small as one.”
The steward’s eyes shone. He had himself well in hand, but like almost everyone Surreal and Mr. Carker encountered, he had never seen a technomancer and was taking in every detail to share with his friends and relations later. “Very good, madam.”
The lounge, Surreal knew, would be crowded. The dirigible had 36 passengers this crossing. The steward would tell every last one.
As the door closed she said to Mr. Carker, “You know, both hypotheses could be true.”
“Madam?”
She began to unbraid her hair so she could put it up for dinner. “She thought she was in danger, as her notes indicate. But the danger never caught up with her. She faked her death and ran off.”
“Do you imagine she feared for her life, madam?”
“You’re the one who came to me with that idea,” Surreal reminded him.
James Carker nodded. “I know she believed she was in danger. But the more I learn about her, the less I think that would deter her from anything.”
“Someone who went toward, not away.”
“Exactly, madam.”
“Well, that’s how you become a mad genius of science, I suppose.” Surreal began looping her hair up in a French twist, exposing her open cervical vertebrae. She didn’t mind providing a thrill when she wanted to, but she usually couldn’t be bothered. Mr. Carker wondered what she had in mind. She interrupted his thought to continue. “I bet someone made her an offer she couldn’t turn down. Money, I’ve been thinking, but now I’m wondering if it wasn’t — oh, some miraculous new element, salts of soul-stuff, I don’t know what.”
“I don’t like the thought of radium in your old teacher’s hands.”
“Nor I, but the woman who crystalized angel stone from a few flakes of meteorite wouldn’t be impressed with radium.” Surreal glanced up at him. Her eyes sparkled. “I’ve started at the wrong end, but now I think I’ll dress for dinner, really dress, for a change. Do you mind giving me the room for a minute?”
James Carker took the newspaper and retreated to the corridor.
“The Confession of Christ, then, is no more than the claim of the individual to self-creation.” Christian Leopold Augustus, Emperor and Champion of the Faith, examined the tip of his pen before continuing. A modern man, he thought, should use a typing machine, but he had never gotten the hang of one. And he spurned to employ an efficient young woman who would gaze expectantly at him when he paused for thought. Though such women — if Christians — were true exemplars of the ideology of the Empire he had inherited and sought to perfect.
And expand, of course.
He decided he was satisfied with his pen and continued. “By dispensing with the clotted bureaucracies of church — academy — government — law — the enlightened emperor may promulgate reforms through an agile executive body answering only to himself. Likewise, each Christian subject may fulfill the drive to self-creation unhindered by superstition, custom, or corruption. The resulting Empire will become a cradle of intellectual and scientific advancement, material profit, and — damn!”
He said, and almost wrote, the last word. Someone tapped again on the door.
“Enter!”
Luke Stirner the mathematician stepped through the door and, as the Emperor’s new rule specified, dispensed with the old formal bow in favor of a graceful nod of his head.
“My friend, my friend.” Christian Leopold, glad of an excuse to stop wrestling with a sentence that threatened to meander away like a rainwater channel through a muddy meadow, gestured toward a small table. “A drink, coffee?”
Stirner joined his Emperor.
“Sit, sit — I’ll do the honors.”
It put his teeth on edge, but Stirner sat while Christian Leopold checked the temperature of the electric percolator, added molasses to the cups, and poured in a splash of coffee equal to the portion of syrup in each cup.
While Christian Leopold fussed with the coffee things, Stirner let his eyes travel the room, admiring how the Deco furnishings had been selected to harmonize with the classical architecture. The Emperor’s morning room was a circular chamber with a domed ceiling, a door to the hallway on one side, and a door to a balcony about 45 degrees further along the wall. The walls were eggshell white, the furnishings acid green. A few long tapestries kept echoes to a minimum. Gilt trim brought it all into harmony.
Stirner minded sitting while his Emperor stood, but not because he felt especially deferential. Rather, he knew, and his Emperor knew he knew, that a word from Christian Leopold could see Luke Stirner hustled into the garden and shot.
And yet his Emperor believed that the two men were friends, equals in mind and spirit, partners on a glorious venture.
I, this buffoon’s mere equal! Stirner thought, looking at the syrupy mix in the porcelain cup. He supposed it worked out. He was violently less powerful, and violently more intelligent, than his Emperor. The two gradients met at a central point that could, he supposed, be called friendship. They did share a mission.
His sipped his coffee and tried not to wince. “À l’aborigène?” he asked.
“Just so!” Christian Leopold, an athletic man in his 30s with sharp features, blue eyes, and a trim black beard and mustache, sat down on a small, gilt-legged chair. He stared at his subject, as he stared at everyone. “We have some, ah, some blackstrap molasses in from Nova Terra. Fortifies the blood, they say.”
He threw back his coffee. Stirner followed suite and almost gagged. Creosote, he thought. He did not let his eyes wander to the manuscript on the table. His Emperor would want to read him more twaddle. But Christian Leopold merely said: “And what brings you by this fine morning?”
Stirner set his cup on the table.
“I bring good news, my friend” — again he cringed inwardly — “and bad. And I was hoping you could help me discern which is which.”
Christian Leopold leaned forward, steepling his fingers. At this distance, his blue stare felt overwhelming. “Tell me your dilemma, my friend. Between us, it is soon solved.”
And, Stirner thought, Christian Leopold was probably right. For a mediocre mind he had marvelous acuity.
“The English have beaten me,” he said. “Or, perhaps better said, Diana believes they will have beaten me by the time it matters. Set against my calculating machine, they will soon develop a true analytical engine.”
The Emperor did not blink. “Explain that part?”
“Diana calls it a Leibniz engine, though of course she’s rather old-fashioned.” Stirner looked for the words to describe an engine that did not exist to a man who had no training in mathematics. “You studied logic in school?”
“Oh, my grandfather did, I suppose. Part of the trivium. You mean, if this then that?”
“Yes, but you annotate each of your starting concepts as true or false. One or zero. Take the Socrates is a man exercise. Either he’s mortal or he isn’t, right? True or false. A Leibnitz engine would construct a truth table of some sort and arrive at a conclusion on his mortality for each possible set of conditions. Say we tell it both conditions have to be true to return an answer of true. Men are mortal, one, Socrates is a man, one, result one. True. He’s mortal.” Stirner ticked off the second possibility on his fingers. “Men are not mortal, zero, Socrates is a man, one, result zero. False. He’s not mortal. And if we don’t insist he’s a man, we can try: Men are mortal, one, Socrates is not a man, zero, answer zero. He’s not mortal.”
The Emperor clapped his hands in delight. “An angel! And I suppose the last remaining possibility: He’s not a man, zero, men are not mortal, zero — ”
The Emperor paused.
“Yes,” Stirner laughed. “We can tell the machine how to analyze two negatives. Maybe we want the machine to return an answer of true only when both terms are true. Maybe we’re indifferent; two negatives also return a result of true. And there are ways we can add in the understanding that men aren’t the only mortals — ”
The Emperor was still enjoying his joke. “But this machine would take, what — ” He looked at his watch — “ten minutes to work through what either you or I could do in a twinkle of thought!”
“Certainly, sir.” Stirner spread his hands. “But say we’re analyzing a million named entities and need to come up with a list of the mortals right away. Or say we have several dozen, or several hundred, decision points to analyze.”
The Emperor stopped laughing. “Applications?”
“Business espionage comes to mind. Code-cracking, analyzing stock trades, all that.”
“Code-cracking would be more immediately useful in the war effort.”
Stirner had got his Emperor where he wanted him. “Precisely.”
The Emperor now had his elbows on his knees. “How would you actualize such a thing?”
Stirner shook his head. “Diana doesn’t know. Switches of some kind. We assume it’s an electrical mechanism, something like a miniaturized telegraph, but anything we could imagine would be as big as an industrial loom and take its own steam plant to power. And still work at a snail’s pace.”
The Emperor nodded. “That’s bad news, as you say, but good news as well. What anyone else can develop, we can develop.” He twinkled. “Guess this puts your calculating machine to shame, my friend.”
Stirner took this gracefully. “I’m afraid it does.” He glanced at his cup, weighing the tarry consistency of the café à l’aborigène against his sudden need for more sugar. The Emperor followed his eyes. “More coffee?”
Stirner resigned himself. “Indeed yes.” While his Emperor heated the percolator again, he thought how to point up the second horn of his dilemma. Christian Leopold was thinking the same thing. He watched as Luke Stirner choked down a second concoction of strong coffee and blackstrap molasses. Then he asked: “If that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?”
“If the analytical engine works, or will work, by electric telegraphy as we surmise, we can read its mind.” He waited for the Emperor to react and got nothing. “Specifically, Diana von Birkhausen can read its mind, and she says any extant technomancer has the same capability, though many may not realize it.”
The Emperor sat up, then leaned back in his chair. “She can — intercept? translate? — electrical telegraphy from a distance?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I did not know?”
The Emperor did not raise his voice or stand, but Luke Stirner felt very much as if he had.
“No one thought it was much more than a gimmick, a funny accident, sir.” He licked his lips. “At least not until now.”
A porcelain cup no bigger than a tulip cracked in the Emperor’s hand. Stirner no longer felt like one friend opening his mind to another.
“Your Most Sacred Majesty … ” he hesitated, saw no change in Christian Leopold’s now-pale face, and went on. “Your Majesty, if an electric analytical engine is ever created, we’re there first. Whether or not we create our own. We have the power — at this moment — to pick its thoughts from the air. Perhaps, indeed, we can act from a distance to turn it to our side. Or, I should say, Diana von Birkhausen can do so.”
“An engine.” The Emperor breathed quickly. “A computing machine or, as your lady friend calls yours, a glorified abacus. That can be — converted, you said — to our Confession.”
Stirner had not said quite that. And its conversion was more a matter of supplying new instructions from afar. But Diana would not quarrel with the language.
Stirner nodded.
Christian Leopold passed his hand over his mouth. “A machine with a soul … ”
Stirner did not know whether his Emperor meant the hypothetical analytical engine or Diana von Birkhausen.
The Emperor stood and rang a bell. Stirner also stood. A third door to the room must have opened, for the Emperor’s valet entered, plump, competent and deferential, from behind a tapestry.
Christian Leopold addressed him without turning. “Send for the heads of the secret police and the general staff.”
The valet bowed and disappeared.
Emperor Christian Leopold Augustus turned to look at Luke Stirner. “I can see why your friend Diana did not join our little chat.”
Stirner must have started without realizing it, for the Emperor held out his hand, palm down, in a calming gesture. “Oh, she’s safe enough with us here. She’ll confine herself to the grounds of the palace or the Academy of Noble Sciences, of course. But every other remaining technomancer, here or abroad, must join our Confession or be destroyed.” He paced a few steps, then turned back to smile at his friend. “There can’t be many, I shouldn’t think.”
All 36 passengers of the dirigible Twilight Queen dined in the passenger lounge that evening. The six tables staggered along the promenade windows buzzed. The minutes before the dinner service when everyone mingled were worst — or best, Surreal Tender thought. She focused on the cumulous clouds, violet tinged with glory, that marched toward the southern horizon. She had traveled by dirigible before, but never across an ocean. Her last crossing had been on a steamship.
Behind her she felt the electric buzz of the crowd’s attention. No one, she knew, pointed or gaped openly, but they all gazed — some in thirsty glances, some directly. Surreal Tender, looking like Sargent’s Madame X in her black evening gown, turned at last and enjoyed the rustle of people looking quickly away.
She watched her secretary intercept a matron who had “once seen a technomancer exhibited at the fair, back in 1886, that must have been, and I wonder if the young lady — ?”
“My employer, madam, is a woman of science.” Mr. Carker steered the matron away. “She has never performed for the public.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean — ”
“Of course not, madam.”
Now half a dozen passengers gathered around. A party of businessmen. Surreal let their pleasantries swirl past her, answering some, rebuffing others. One was a prospector of rare earths and minerals, she found.
“Are you self-taught?” she asked. “Or did you study geology — ”
“University of the Cumberland, down where the Little Blue Men still live in the hollow hills.” He laughed. “I’m just pulling your leg, ma’am, it’s all tobacco and little farms with two cows and a pig down our way. And the one Little Blue Man I know’s the head of Geology. He’s got a sign outside his office: Good Clean Dealings in Dirt.”
“That’s delightful.”
“Ain’t it, ma’am?” The young prospector ran his hand through his red hair. “He’s a cave mapper in his spare time, and I’m a bit of the same. After Atlantis, I’m surveying some caves in Africa, if the deal comes together. Lots of money in industrial diamonds, they say. I’ll be a rich man time I’m 30.”
Surreal nodded. She had joined the other passengers on a hunch. Someone on this strange route — Belleville to Atlantis, Atlantis to New Havre in the war-torn Old World — would be bound to have something to tell her. A bit of news she had missed. A connection, a clue — but whatever it was, the young prospector did not have it. He continued spinning his future. Surreal ignored him.
A voice spoke close at her shoulder, deeper and husky. “Evening, Beauty. Do you have a young man?”
Surreal turned, glad of a reason to ignore the young prospector. The new speaker was another of the business travelers, a man in evening dress. He wore his black hair combed back and stood as tall as Surreal Tender herself. She felt his breath on her neck and started to step back, then remembered there was nothing but a plate glass window between her and a 15,000-foot drop into the ocean. Neither the fall nor the impact would hurt her. But Surreal’s bones were lined with lead. She would sink like a stone.
Of course she could wring his neck. But apart from that — she opened her mouth and hesitated. The man in evening dress put his hand on her shoulder. “I’ve heard clockwork women — ”
He did not finish the sentence. A thin young man in worn evening clothes stepped up to him. “Excuse me sir, I think you’ve lost something.”
The older man turned and moved away from Surreal. “What’s that?”
“Your senses.” Surreal did not know what happened, but with a ripple of movement the young man stood between her and the tall man, back to her, fingers not quite touching the man’s chest. His other hand passed behind the man’s ear. He held out two pennies. “All two of them, I think that’s about right?”
A few of the others applauded. The black-haired man opened his mouth. “You little — ”
The young man was shorter than Surreal Tender, but still tall, towheaded and pale as if he’d been ill. He moved sideways away from Surreal, taking the crowd’s glance with him. “Still dolorous?” A Belleville street accent, nasal but faint. “Does this make it up to you?”
This time holding out his hand and opening it, he exhibited a palmful of gold Nova Terran dollars. The black-haired man hesitated, then took them.
“Are these real?”
“What is real?” The fair-haired conjurer waited. “I imagine they’re as real as your belief in them.”
A few women joined the crowd.
The conjurer persisted. “Hold out your hand, sir.”
The black-haired man did so. He still clutched a fistful of gold coins. The conjurer’s voice warmed. “A man of faith, I see.” The man retreated. The conjurer scanned the crowd. “You, madam. Do you believe in magic?”
He smiled gravely at a teenager dressed in blue satin, who giggled.
“Anyone? No one believes in magic, spirits, astral bodies, messages from the beyond?”
Astral bodies.
“No followers of Madam Blavatsky?”
Long ago, Diana von Birkhausen had created technomancers to bridge the divide between human and spirit worlds. To talk with astral beings. She had failed, of course. But —
I believe, Surreal Tender almost said, just so the young conjurer would turn around. She had not seen his full face. But she said nothing. He was moving away from her, entertaining the crowd with silk flowers and gossip about popular spiritualists. Saving her, she thought, without a backward glance.
Diana von Birkhausen had never hired bodyguards and did not want them now. She glanced up and down her laboratory — the long row of black Bakelite tables, the whitewashed walls, the vaulted ceiling, the afternoon sun making the tall windows glow. One guard stood at the north doors, one at the south.
The leader of the two — everything in the Confession had a hierarchy which was considered indiscrete to acknowledge — had explained when they arrived that afternoon there had been threats on the Confession’s scientific community. Diana never quarreled with underlings. She took her complaint straight to the chancellor, who said the order didn’t come from her.
Under the Confessional doctrines of freedom and agility, the Board of Trustees had been dissolved five years ago. The chancellor answered to no one but the Emperor.
Diana now contemplated a scene, a full breakdown with smashed dishes and torn garments, at the state dinner that evening. She had a century and a half’s experience throwing scenes, including one at a reception for Mr. Edison. Rather than fight the goons who stepped out of the corners, she flung herself out of a third-floor window into the street — a stunt she knew wouldn’t hurt her, but that dazzled and terrified the crowd.
Diana thought it through. A scene would satisfy her feelings for the moment. But there was a war on and she wanted to be part of it — not as a fighter, though that was fun once upon a time, but as a member of a scientific team with wartime funding. In point of fact, she was broke.
She contemplated switching sides and working for England or one of their allies. They lacked resources, but perhaps the staff would be better trained. The girls of the Imperial Confession were quick, but they had never progressed beyond basic geometry and algebra. No calculus, rudimentary physics if any.
Turning back to the letter she was writing to a Nova Terran prospecting company about deposits of meteoric earth, she saw a tall young woman in a high-collared white dress of the last century bending over a notebook.
She dropped her pen.
“Jane?”
Diana had not thought about her young apprentice for decades now. Her tongue, soft and almost human, flicked over her jade lips. “Jane?”
The form moved and elongated. Not a woman. A gleam of light on the glass door of an instrument cabinet that stood in a shadowy corner.
Diana picked up her mechanical pen. “ — by discrete inquiry, I would be thankful. While under academic obligations at the moment, I have long contemplated a second visit to Atlantis and — ”
James Carker opened his eyes. He did not understand the dim roaring noise all around him. Then he did understand it. He was flying through the night in a dirigible. Starlight shone on the white coverlet and outlined a shadow on the wall beside him. Surreal Tender stood in the doorway of the berth.
“Madam?”
All around them were similar berths like closets in a row. She whispered. “I’m so sorry, but you have the medicine kit.”
Surreal Tender never needed medicine. But in his overnight case Mr. Carker kept a little oilskin pouch containing gauze, scissors, tweezers, a tiny bottle of iodine, a couple of packets of stomach powder, a small bottle of phenacetin, and a smaller bottle of quinine.
“Of course.” He rolled on his stomach, fished under the bunk, and in a few seconds came up with the kit, which he held out to Surreal Tender. She pulled out the phenacetin and shook a couple of capsules into her hand.
“Thanks, sorry to bother you.”
“Not at all, madam.”
Mr. Carker put his possessions in order, settled under the coverlet, and closed his eyes.
But his thoughts followed Surreal Tender down the corridor to her larger, but still cramped, berth. She slipped inside, latched the door, and poured herself a cup of water. She was out of practice with pills. It took her a few tries to swallow the phenacetin.
Far too tall to stretch out on the bunk, she lay curled on her side.
The excursion down the corridor had distracted her, but now the pain along her lower jaw came roaring back, so large for a second she was lost in it.
Gone in 10 minutes, she told the pain. Then, as it subsided just enough to let her contemplate the full duration of a night alone with it: Gone by morning.
She wished she had carried away the whole bottle of pills. But she might need them later.
She remembered this negotiation from the year after her heart was replaced. Pain, morphia, pain, and constant dialogue: I’ll wait four hours. No, three. In three hours I can have laudanum. Two hours, but a half dose. But that won’t do any good. Two and a half hours and a full dose. But I’lll use it all up at that rate, and Nurse won’t bring any more until morning. I’ll read this chapter and check the clock then. Half a chapter, then check.
Her jaw pulsed.
I always imagined it would start in my chest, near my heart. But her sternum and ribs and vertebrae were all leaded silver. Her chassis contained no human bone at all.
I’m hallucinating this feeling. It was reading about those radium girls. That did it.
But she knew she wasn’t hallucinating. Surreal Tender lay staring into the dark. Pain filled her mind like a bubble expanding, squashing her thoughts around the edges of it. I knew I would obsolesce and die, but why couldn’t I have died before I got to the horrible part?
Because I have to see Diana again, that’s why.
But she didn’t believed life deferred to human purpose like that. She hadn’t for ages. Not since Diana (as she thought until six weeks ago) died. Even now this was more Mr. Carker’s quest than hers. She has been sorry for him, she had humored him, and now the thought of seeing Diana alive was too much for her to resist. She seemed dragged along by events in a way she didn’t quite respect in herself.
She put her finger in her mouth and felt along her teeth. None seemed tender. The pain was localized at the hinge of her right jaw, as if someone had punched her and the bruise had rotted inside.
But it wasn’t there an hour ago.
I’m imagining it, she thought again.
The phenacetin overcame her, or exhaustion did. She fell asleep.
In the morning she remembered the hour of anguish as a negligible twinge and a smattering of nerves. In a few minutes she did not remember it at all. She stood beside Mr. Carker and watched through the promenade window as the archipelago of Atlantis rose, island by island, over the horizon.