Unnumber’d Spirits
Everyone's making plans
[Back to Surreal Tender the Technomancer. This story picks up a few weeks before King’s Man and carries us forward to the evening after that story takes place. The inventor Diana von Birkhausen is in the city of Peace-and-Progress as the guest of Emperor Christian Leopold Augustus. Meanwhile, Surreal, her secretary James Carker, and her friend the conjurer Simon Quick are staying with another technomancer called December Norton. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.
Also: I’m having fun thinking my way into old-fashioned mindsets. Surreal Tender is in many ways Jo March’s generation mentally, even though it’s 1919 now. And Diana von Birkhausen is old enough to have learned the sciences as one subject — Natural Philosophy — and she brings that totalizing intelligence to the nascent century. Both are generalists in ways we today are not.
My longtime readers will be amused to learn I’m having trouble — if that’s the word — with the leader of my speculative fiction writing group. She simply cannot believe C. Statius Boudinot, a poor 12-year-old from Dalton, can write a fair 18th-century running hand. But all he’s doing is force-feeding himself an 18th- or 19th-century gentleman’s education, which he can handily do with internet access and the motivation of a bad case of Lost Causer-ism. As Doc G says disparagingly, Statius seems like a prodigy by 2045, but he doesn’t know any more than a rather dull white boy of the upper classes — 100 years earlier. I’m gonna have to flee with my tail between my legs when she finds out he reads Latin!
So: Those of you you stick around for this nonsense are much appreciated. And if you want to update to a paid subscription, you could help finance my reading for these stories: I’m neither a romantic Lost Causer nor a Natural Scientist, but I have to at least dummy up the background. Help me keep ordering treats like Origins of the New South and Recherches Sur Les Substances Radioactives to bang my head against.
Finally: I’ve started feeling my way into fakey fantasy science a bit. I think in this universe things work by analogy … so we may get nonsense, but it’ll be poetically coherent nonsense. That’s the idea, anyhow. We’ll see how it turns out.]
Lunite. Angel stone.
Female principle. Male principle.
No grain, no thread either of those substances remained in the known world except that in the living bodies of technomancers. Diana von Birkhausen had used it all.
Let a technomancer die and her corpse rot away from her chassis — or more expeditiously remove flesh and bone — and you find the fleck of angel stone spent and a mess of lunite wire crumbling.
They held the balance, those two — lunite, sensitive to the spirits of the air, and angel stone, unpowered power source. Angel stone animated lunite; lunite absorbed excess energy from angel stone and rendered it safe. Safe for a while, longer than a human lifespan, that was sure.
Now, lying on her chaise longue in her chic and commodious rooms in the royal palace in Peace-and-Progress, Diana opened her hand.
The palace was a compound, really. Elegant 17th-century buildings formed a square; beyond them stood newer offices, garages, a power plant, guard shacks, and perimeter fences. Emperor Christian Leopold Augustus wanted to be at one with his people, but also, people kept trying to kill him.
Diana’s rooms were at the top of the south building, the old Dowager House, which stood diagonally across the quadrangle from the Emperor’s own quarters. Here, though she couldn’t pass the doors without her movements being reported, she had complete privacy. She had insisted on that. She was gratified to note that the Emperor neither denied that spying on his guests was his usual practice, nor tested her.
So no one saw her open her hand. No one saw the heart of stone, a shard small as a grain of sand, revolving in orbit around some hypothetical sun. No one saw the lunite, fine as threads of mold, that formed rings around it. In fact you would need a microscope to tell that the rings were made of lunite wire.
Let me see you, she whispered. In her mind’s eye, the planet and its rings grew large as her fist. They hovered. She searched through them, atom by atom. She swirled her fingers to slow their rotation. Scientists now taught that there were within those atoms coiled protons and neutrons. That around them spun electrons, much as moons circle planets, she supposed.
Well, the names were new. Protons. Electrons. But she had always known it. As above, so below. The stars and planets circled the sun. Today’s astronomers denied that, and their arguments seemed sound enough, but she still thought in terms of the heliocentrism she had learned in her girlhood. At any rate, just as worlds circled this sun, or other suns, so electrons circled cells’ nuclei.
Diana had never gone far wrong doing science by analogy. Now, for instance. Astral beings had never circled the earthly sphere. But men were creating angels to fill the void. Telegraphs, electrical wires — and now, soon perhaps, complex machines that thought in electricity.
No one knew quite how the analytical engine would work. A cross between telegraph wires and rail yard switches, some guessed. But however it thought, Diana would be able to commune with it like one airy sylph — as she used to imagine — sharing thoughts with another sylph a mile off.
She had been right along. Just a hundred years too early.
Still. Her gifts were now a liability to her freedom. She was like one of those new — what did they call them? — tanks. A military asset to be controlled. Diana sat up and let the fleck of angel stone dwindle to its true size in her mind’s eye. Then she shook it back into the locket she wore around her throat.
She let her thoughts play over the situation. Emperor Christian Leopold had given her piles of money for her research, and would give her more. The gilded cage was well-appointed. Yet. She drummed her fingers on her Nile-silk-covered thigh.
Know then, unnumber’d spirits round thee fly, The light militia of the lower sky ... As now your own, our beings were of old, And once inclos’d in woman’s beauteous mould; Thence, by a soft transition, we repair From earthly vehicles to these of air.
She had never met Mr. Pope — he had belonged to her grandparents’ generation, and had died young. Not so young for the times, perhaps, but young enough. But she still loved his poems and had learned many by heart. Her eyelids fluttered. The image rotated in her mind. A cloud of airy spirits formed a nimbus around Belinda’s golden head. Thoughts darted back and forth, animating the cloud as if animating the cells in the human brain.
Assembled, could the remaining technomancers form such a cloud, sharing thoughts like bees in a hive? The result would be intellection magnified by many factors — her thoughts dallied with combinatorics before she called them back — but focused for concerted action. Now that would be a powerful force indeed!
Could human thought be somehow … transposed … into ether, leaving bodies behind, unneeded husks?
What a joke, she thought, if every technomancer Christian Leopold ordered arrested fell dead and useless in her captors’ hands, her thoughts floating off into the air!
On second thought, she had already convinced her volunteers to give up more than half their mortal form. Having convinced them that half was better than whole, she doubted she could now convince them that zero was better than half — human nature did have its hard limits. And she did not know quite how she could effect the science. Of course, souls left their bodies in a drift of tangible energy … well, that was another name for suicide. Time enough for that when every other avenue was exhausted.
Diana went back to the first idea. Yes, she could see how it might work. She now needed to make contact with another technomancer to do the bench research to create the first dyad, and incidentally, to get the word out that they were all in danger. They shouldn’t all come here. And she couldn’t leave — Christian Leopold would have her followed. But others could get started on the same problem, preferably as far away as Nova Terra.
Diana decided to play one side against the other to get the word out. Tomorrow she was giving a demonstration of another project — an improvement on the adding machine, a toy, really — and scientists from other nations had been invited to admire the work. She would send a message with one of them.
Rain dripped down wavy window-panes. A log split and hissed in the fire. Simon Quick stood looking out the window at the dormant turf that almost disappeared into fog before it met the forest, 50 yards away. Though the view was mostly gray, the hemlock shadows of the hidden trees and low clouds darkened the air as if it was late evening.
December Norton and Surreal Tender had turned the purple-covered wingback chairs in the library to face the window. December now sat upright, drinking a toddy and every now and then coughing into a tea-colored handkerchief. Surreal slouched, heels on the window sill.
James Carker leaned on the back of her chair. His eyes moved from one face to the next. He spoke to Mr. Quick. “How did you hear this again, sir?”
Mr. Quick turned back to face the group. “I spoke over the telephone to my agent about a booking in Peace-and-Progress, in the Empire of the Confession.” He shrugged. “The demi-monde always knows everything, as I’m sure you’ll understand. A technomancer who performs as a spiritualist was arrested in the town of Economy. They — you — are all being invited to the Emperor’s court as soon as you cross the border.”
“Has he caught anyone else?” December asked.
“One escaped — I don’t know anything about her.” Mr. Quick leaning against the strip of wall between the two windows, then straightened with a wince.
December Norton took a packet of cigarettes from the ormolu table beside her. “Crack that casement, lad, I want to smoke.”
Surreal Tender had repaired the latch as best she could without tools before dawn. Mr. Quick obeyed December Norton, opening the uninjured side. December lit a long, black cigarette and handed it to Surreal, then lit another for herself. She took a prodigious draw and let smoke drift out through her high-arched nostrils.
December held the packet out to the two men in turn. Both declined. Each person sat silently. Surreal had her eyes closed. Mr. Quick gazed at the carpet. Mr. Carker watched Mr. Quick. December looked dispassionately at the brown lawn outside. After a while she said, “You shouldn’t go.”
Surreal answered, not to the group, but directly to December, “Diana is there.”
“Then she can stay there.”
“You don’t mean that.”
December didn’t answer.
Surreal sat up to make her argument more forcefully. She had indigo circles under her eyes, but her cheeks glowed red. “A danger to one of us is a danger to all of us. If she’s at their university, who knows what secrets she’s giving them — maybe inadvertently.”
“Or under duress,” Mr. Quick added.
Mr. Carker glanced sharply at him. “That’s a dark thought.”
Mr. Quick coughed and gasped.
“You at any rate shouldn’t go,” Mr. Carker persisted. “You appear to be a very sick man, sir, if I may say so — much sicker than you were yesterday.”
“Stay here,” December offered.
After a pause Mr. Quick shook his head. “I’m keeping my engagement. But you don’t know how much that means to me.” He looked at December and smiled. “And don’t worry about me — I don’t plan on doing anything more exciting in the Confession than pulling a few ravens out of my hat.”
She inclined her head, acquiescing. “But stay a while. A few weeks, anyway. He’s right. You’re really not well. My physician’s one of the fair folk. He can call on you today. And — ” Her face hadn’t changed through the conversation, but now she stopped and took another long drag on the cigarette — “If you wouldn’t be bored by an old woman reminiscing about her girlhood, I could tell you more about Sarah.”
Mr. Carker spoke to Surreal. “You could rest for a while, too, madam.”
She nodded. “I think I should.” She ground out her cigarette in the brass ashtray on the table, then rolled out of the chair to kneel at December Norton’s feet. She rested her head on the old woman’s lap. “We can plan how to approach things.”
December raised her eyes to Mr. Quick. “Close that casement, lad, you’ll catch your death.”
He obeyed. Soon the coal-stove warmth of December Norton and Surreal Tender filled the window alcove again. Mr. Quick turned to lean against the frame and look out the window, feeling that warmth seep into his spine. The four gazed out into the evening all afternoon, until snow began to drift down and the frozen wood disappeared into deeper shadow.