[Welcome to the adventures of Surreal Tender the technomancer and her secretary and sidekick, James Carker. First, if you’ve read the previous stories, you need to know I’ve retconned a couple of dates. Surreal is now 96 years old, not 76. And she got her chassis a little later, in 1848. Twenty-one seems awfully young for her to have been transformed, so I nudged it up a bit.
The rest of the dates are the same. The current date is 1919. A little mathing tells me:
Diana von Birkhausen was born sometime in the middle or late 18th century. She created her masterwork in 1792.
Surreal Tender was born in 1823.
Surreal was given Diana’s chassis in 1848 at age 25.
Surreal got her new heart in an operation performed by Dr. Samuel Binder in 1869. James Carker was born the same year.
Parenthetical: Straight genre fiction is hard to write. Keeping track of timelines and fakey science is annoying! Next will be more like The Sanguine Experiment or The New Confederacy, where weird things just worm their way into normal causality.
Anyhow, our characters have stumbled on a mystery: Where did Diana von Birkhausen’s new chassis (and with it, her body) go? Mr. Carker thinks if they find the body, they may find out who killed Diana. Surreal doesn’t believe anyone killed her, but she wants to know how her beloved Magistra died, too. So they’re about to go grave robbing.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
“Shall I take another turn, madam?”
Surreal looked over her shoulder. James Carker sat on a stump near the place Surreal Tender remembered Diana von Birkhausen requested to be buried. (“Beneath the limestone boulder streaked with green marble on the south side of the old well.”)
Mr. Carker did not look in any condition to do more digging, Surreal thought. Sweat stood on his forehead and in the light of the waning moon he looked paler than ever. He had started off strong with the shovel, but chivalry doesn’t do much good against machinery. And Surreal was nothing if not machine.
She drove the shovel into the soil, ripping through blackberry runners with the force of the blow. “Good thing this hasn’t been a working well for a hundred years,” she said to turn the subject. “Who buries bodies near wells?”
“Mad women,” Mr. Carker replied. “Begging your pardon, madam.”
“My teacher was certainly mad,” Surreal replied. “In her way.” She looked at her arms as she tossed a shovelful of earth aside. “Who builds so much, and destroys so much, to support a science that turned out never to be real?”
An owl laughed. Over the hill, behind the cottage, another replied.
“You know, I do believe in astral bodies,” Mr. Carker said. “I just don’t think they intersect with the physical world much.”
“I’m not sure I believe even that much. And I’m the one who’s supposed to be able to sense them.” Surreal hurled another shovelful of dirt aside. “You want to know what I can do? As kind of a party trick?”
He stood up and arched his back to crack it. “What’s that, madam?”
“Telegraphs.”
With her next delving she struck something other than earth and arrested the movement instantly. For a second she looked like a still frame from a photoplay. Then she lifted the shovel a fraction and moved it softly across whatever she had struck.
Mr. Carker remembered once again that Surreal Tender was not all human.
Bit by bit, Surreal exposed a flat, wooden surface.
“Telegraphs,” she continued lightly. “I know what telegraphs are saying. Returning 15th inst. Bessemer Line 0815. Love. Only if I pay attention, but it’s a nuisance if I’m trying to concentrate on anything and there’s a telegraph line nearby. Wish I’d never learned Morse; it would have been just tickling otherwise.”
“But that’s — you could be a business spy, a train robber — ”
Surreal didn’t bother telling Mr. Carker that she occasionally earned a living in just that manner.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” he asked. “This could have revolutionized the industry.”
“Hardly.” Surreal looked up at him. “I’m a lot more expensive to create than a telegraph clerk.”
“I suppose so,” he said. “But long-term, you understand, the business implications. How close to the wires do you need to be?”
“Really, it’s not much more than a party trick,” Surreal insisted. “And why blab about it? People who have jobs want to keep them, not be put out of work by fancy machines. And who would get the income? Not me, that’s sure. The owners of this chassis would come out of the woodwork — whoever owns it now.”
“It would take an army of clerks and lawyers to unspool the final receivership disposition,” Mr. Carker said. He laughed, a single chuckle. “The receivers who took over Birkhausen Laboratories were companies set up for that purpose, I heard. They’ve probably renamed themselves dozens of times since then. And as to who owned those companies … ” He spread his hands.
Surreal frowned at him. “The lenders, right?”
“Certainly. But who?”
“Banks?”
“In this case, the banks in question handled loans from anonymous investors.”
Surreal had now created a slight margin all the way around a plain, partially rotted wooden box that was coffin-shaped, but longer. She was suspending herself with a leg on either side of the hole like a climber chimneying a cleft in a rock.
“Do we go down, or do we haul it up?” she asked. “I can get the ropes around it now, I think.”
“The chassis will be heavy enough to break through that soft wood, if it’s in there,” Mr. Carker said softly. “I’ll go down, madam, if you expand the space a bit.”
“Thank you, we’ll do now.”
Artie Mills looked doubtfully at her employer’s secretary.
Alone, Mr. Carker had replaced the lid of the coffin, filled in the grave that might as well have been empty, and coaxed, then ordered, Surreal Tender back up the hill, into the house, and to bed. Now he stood in the corridor, oil lamp in hand, and bid good night to the woman of all work.
Miss Mills, her violet-tinged skin and slight stature hinting at her Indigenous heritage, nodded doubtfully and disappeared down the narrow stairs. Mr. Carker looked after her. She had appeared at the door an hour before as if summoned, explaining that she was just in to light the fire, run a rag over the surfaces, and drop off the day’s provisions. He did not realize she preferred to start her day’s duties by four in the morning and complete them before sunrise.
But he took advantage. “I’m so glad you’ve come, Miss Mills. The mistress is unwell.”
Surreal Tender had cried herself into a fever — a serious proposition in a steam-powered creature. Laying a hand on her shoulder, Mr. Carker had jerked away with a blistered palm and fingertips.
Artie Mills made no such mistake. She wet towels in cold water from the pump above the house, replacing them as they warmed, just as one would with a person with influenza.
“Miss Diana used to fly into the worst passions,” she explained to Mr. Carker. “My grandmother tended on her, back in the old days. Said she shot sparks out of her head and caught the roof on fire one time. Of course the house was thatched then.”
Mr. Carker didn’t think much of that story, but kept his mouth shut. He only thanked Artie for her time once again.
“Oh, it’s no trouble,” she said. “And do you think we might start a little digging in the garden round back? I could send my son to turn the earth and do the heavy work, not that Missus here needs any help with that. But it might amuse her to put in beans and herbs and so on, like in the old days.”
Before two hours ago, Mr. Carker would never have thought of his employer as a poor distraught lady who needed amusing. She had seemed so full of resources. Clearly, he hadn’t known her as well as he thought.
The frailty of woman, he said to himself, watching Artie comb through Surreal’s sweat-drenched hair. Of course Artie didn’t count. Women of his class, and certainly of Artie’s, seemed less plagued by such big feelings. His mother, now, had been a lady, and look where that got her.
“She’ll be better soon,” Artie Mills said at last. Then, to Surreal, who lay quietly on the pillow, tears oozing from her eyes and steam rising lightly from her forehead. “Won’t you, lamb?”
Surreal Tender turned her head and pressed it into Artie’s skirt. She whispered. “Diana … ”
Mr. Carker, thinking of the badly covered grave, decided it was time for Artie Mills to go on about her business elsewhere.
It’s a rare man or woman who would prefer their beloved to desert them than to die. Though driven by compressed steam, Surreal Tender’s heart was no different than anyone else’s in that regard. She had been prepared for the macabre spectacle of human flesh half-decayed in the midst of a tangled splendor of leaded silver and lunite wire. She had steadied herself for the worse possibility of a body whose chassis — the entire spine and nervous system, along with most of the rest of the body, knee to torso — had been ripped away without much regard for the remaining human flesh.
But she had not thought that the grave might contain nothing at all.
Or practically nothing. In the rotting wood coffin lay a big clockwork woman of the sort Birkhausen Laboratories made in their decline. A windup toy, no more than one of the dolls out of Mr. Hoffman’s fairy tales.
When Mr. Carker called Surreal to the edge of the open grave she came to the same conclusion he did. Diana von Birkhausen’s death had been faked and a clockwork body of her general size and shape set in place to fool the pallbearers. The inventor of the technomancers was still alive.
Kidnapped, Mr. Carker had time to think, stolen by Bolsheviks or Mr. Edison’s goons or —
Surreal interrupted him. “She left me,” she whispered. She swayed over the gaping hole, the mess of chrome and spiderwebs gleaming out of the shadow. “She left me behind.”
Then she collapsed in tears at his feet.
Now as Mr. Carker locked the door and climbed the stairs again he puzzled it out. Diana was alive, certainly, at least at the time of her burial 20 years ago. And someone didn’t want anyone to know she was alive. But who had performed the sleight of hand? The enemies Diana had hinted at in her journal, or Diana herself?
He tapped on Surreal’s bedroom door. No answer.
“Madam?” He ignored decorum enough to open the door and poke his head around the corner.
The blankets had been thrown back. The bed was empty. But the window stood open. Mr. Carker took a step into the room. Had she thrown herself out the window? A fall of that height wouldn’t hurt her, of course.
“Madam?”
Surreal’s head, upside-down like a bat’s, appeared framed in the window.
“I’m sorry. I was having a think on the ridgepole. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Mr. Carker stepped backward toward the door. “Very good. I’ll leave you to it.”
“Come up, if you like.”
Despite himself, Mr. Carker approached the window. Looking out, he couldn’t see Surreal. She must have disappeared back over the eave which overhung the window. The roof, he remembered, was of a steep pitch and shingled in slate.
“I couldn’t possibly, madam.”
“Sit on the windowsill,” she said from above. “No, not like that. Back first, lean out a bit — ”
Taking his life in his hands, James Carker obeyed. In a second he felt a grasp of steel under his armpits. Surreal Tender lifted him lightly as a toddler and swung him onto the roof.
A few humiliating moments later he found himself sitting on the ridgepole beside his employer. The sun hadn’t risen but there was a pallor on the horizon.
“Isn’t this glorious?” Surreal asked. “I’m sorry about earlier. I lost my nerve, that’s all.”
They discussed the situation. Both agreed Diana must have been alive, at least at her burial at the turn of the century. If she had been dead, why not dispose of her body in the most convenient place — the grave where it belonged?
They did not know enough to see how to go about finding her, though. They fell silent.
The horizon cracked like an egg, exposing them to a splendor of rose-colored light. Mr. Carker glanced at Surreal to see her reaction, and found her again crying, silently this time. She glanced back and smiled, wiping her tears with the palms of her hands.
“I’m all right, really.” She accepted his handkerchief and blew her nose, leaving a smear of greenish, phosphorescent snot on the fabric. She glanced at the handkerchief, considered handing it back, then though better of it and crumpled it in her hand.
“She was my world,” she said. “My entire world. And she didn’t bother saying good-bye.”
“Maybe she was protecting you,” he suggested.
“She knew I didn’t want protection.” Surreal gazed at the treeline where the thread of light was growing into a dazzling ribbon. “She knew I wanted to make big sacrifices for her, the bigger the better. I used to imagine, you know, my life was a golden ball she tossed from hand to hand, higher each time. She understood I was happy for her to risk me any way she liked.”
A pause. Mr. Carker polished his spectacles. Technomancers, he knew, kept their human form as it was when they were transformed. Surreal’s clear profile and rose-petal complexion were probably the same now as they had been when she was 25, three-quarters of a century ago. But he had not thought other parts of her might also stay suspended in time.
He said finally, “I’ve never had a daughter or a sister to instruct. And I speak from the vantage of a mere 50 years. But if you were my gal young un, I would tell you that a grown person who allows themselves to become the entire world to any young woman does not have that young woman’s best interest at heart.”
Surreal had never until this day heard a trace of country in his voice. She looked at him seriously.
“I would have given her my life.” She held her hands out in front of her and turned them over, flesh to leaded silver and back. Sunlight touched her fingertips. “I did give her my life.”
“She did not deserve it of you.”
The sun leapt over the horizon.
Surreal stared at him. Then she dropped her gaze to her hands again. “It’s never about that, though, is it?”
They sat quietly together. Larks rose from the rough meadow grass. Surreal lifted her head, letting the sun blind her for a moment. “I would give every remaining drop of human blood in my body for her to look at me again for one minute — one second — as she used to do.”
Mr. Carker answered dryly, “If you made that gift, you would no longer be able to appreciate her gaze, or anything else.”
“Actually, it’s been tried.” Surreal met his light tone. “The subjects went insane and had to be put down. None survived. So there’s that, I suppose.”
“At least you don’t have to make the same mistake twice.”
“No … ” She stretched her arms wide, arching her back. “Were you ever married?”
“Never, madam.” He smiled to himself. “Since you’re twice my age, I suppose it won’t offend your modesty when I tell you that I have a mutually beneficial agreement with a young person called Atlas. He’s the night porter at the men’s baths on Gypsum Street.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t flatter myself I’m his only patron, of course.” Mr. Carker held out his hand for the soiled handkerchief. “But also, he’s never demanded my life. Now, madam, might I trouble you for help getting down off this roof?”