Shadow Conspiracy (15 page)

Charles led the way down the steep ladders, past the first deck, down to the second, and the third. At last Charles pushed open a metal hatchway and stood aside. Heat and light from an open furnace poured over her. Ada stepped over the threshold into the long, low boiler deck. The furnace filled the air with stifling heat and stench. The silent boilers waited hulking in the darkness, giant brass and copper spiders casting confusing shadows in the blazing furnace light.

On a long table by the furnace lay a skeleton of brass and of bronze, struts, gears and delicate cables designed to simulate joints, bone and muscle. To one side lay the carefully crafted face, painted with startling realism. Above hung the portrait from which the likeness had been taken.

Ada
found she no longer had the strength to hold her lantern, and set it carefully on the floor. She could not bring herself to approach the table with its gleaming metallic burden. “What are you doing, Mr. Babbage?”

“He is building an automaton, Lady Lovelace.” A rail-thin and stooped old man stepped out from behind the nearest boiler. “I thought you would recognise the process.”

Ada
tried to draw herself up and failed. What strength and determination had carried her here had vanished. “And you are...?”

The man bowed. “Fletcher, my lady.” His face looked chalky, almost cadaverous, in the blazing light. His clothes were worn, but the holster containing the pistol at his side was very new. “I have the honour to serve your father, Lord Byron.”

“My father is dead.”
You’re a ghoul, sir. A ghoul!

Fletcher smiled, and she saw his blackened, crooked teeth. But his lips quickly spasmed as a violent cough took him.

“Not so, my lady,” he said, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. “Not entirely, not yet.” He smiled at the portrait, and the half-completed automaton. “Your father long dreamed of another, more perfect, more enduring home for his soul, which was too strong for his mortal shell.” Fletcher smiled fondly, and his long fingers caressed the metal struts of the automaton’s arm in a way that made Ada shudder inwardly. “But the first great endeavour failed. He never spoke of why, and I was not able to read his papers before they were stolen by those who only professed to admire him.”

“Mr. Murray.”

“And a certain Thomas Moore. Small-minded men, only after profit. But I kept faith. Across all the years, I kept faith.” Fletcher’s face was sad and proud, and Ada realised in his youth he must have been very handsome. “But I am dying, my lady. If I have a year left to me, it is more than I expect. I had to act. I needed to create a new housing for my lord by whatever means could be found.”

“A new housing? What...?” She stared at the half-completed automaton on its table. She stared at the portrait hanging on the wall above. “Oh, no, Mr. Babbage. No.”

“The men of the East Indies have long known the secret of the transference of souls,” said Fletcher. “As did the pharaohs of Egypt. Old Daedalus of Greece knew, and it was in Greece where my master was made immortal, a pure soul, asleep and waiting until I could bring him into the world again.”

But Ada found she was barely listening to him. All her attention was on Mr. Babbage hunched beside the table, his shadow falling across the perfectly painted, perfectly cast face. “Mr. Babbage?” His name burst out of her. “You permitted your life’s work to be endangered for madness?”

Mr. Babbage spread his hands. “They would have ruined me, Ada. They would have said I stole the design of the original difference engine. They had the documents ready. The scandal...the scandal would have destroyed me. Us.”

“You are stronger than anyone this man could bring to bear.”

“Not stronger than Lord Melbourne.”

Ada
’s mouth snapped shut.

“Yes,” said Fletcher, still stroking the automaton’s arm. “Lady Melbourne was the only other so unswerving in her love to his lordship. While Mr. Babbage has led an exemplary life, her husband’s reputation is much more fragile, as is his position with our young queen who is so eager to make her court and cabinet over to undo the... excesses of the late king.”

Appearances again, always appearances. And to whom would appearances matter more than the Prime Minister?

It was madness. It was said her father drove those nearest him to insanity, and here was proof.

No more.
Ada straightened.
I will not permit it
. “I am taking Mr. Babbage out of here.”

Mr. Babbage raised his hands, warning her, but Ada stopped him with a gesture. “It is over. Whatever this insanity is, it is done with, and we are returning to London. And do not,” she added to the sad, mad old man, “think of attempting to threaten me.”

“I make no threats, my lady,” Fletcher replied harshly. “Promises only, and I promise I will not permit even you to interfere.” He drew the pistol from his holster. Ada was quite sure the antique thing was loaded and primed. “Mr. Babbage will not lift a finger to help you”—He cocked the hammer back—“and you’ve left your dog far above. You are quite alone, my lady. “

“There, Mr. Fletcher, you are most mistaken.”

Ada
raised her overskirt. The shock of that unladylike act froze Fletcher in his place, but it was the sight of the spiders, the three huge black spiders scuttling down from her white crinolines, that sent him reeling backward.

“They don’t know you, Fletcher,” said Ada as the man bumped against the cold boiler. “They are commanded to attack the ones they do not know.”

“Call them off!” Fletcher aimed at Ada. “I will shoot!”

Ada
remained perfectly still. The first spider sprang, and the pistol fired. Mr. Babbage cried out, and Fletcher fell.

The spider scampered off his breast, and Ada lifted her overskirt again and spoke another word. All the spiders returned to their hiding place in the voluminous folds of starched white muslin.

She lowered the skirt and looked at Mr. Babbage, much saddened. “I know why you did it, Charles,” she murmured.

He turned his face away.

“You thought if my father could be brought back, perhaps your wife could be, and your children.”

“I’m sorry, Ada.”

She held out her hand. “Come, before the men on guard become worried and try to get past Vigilance.”

Together, she and Mr. Babbage walked out into the honest night.

Ada
found she was not in the least surprised to see Mr. Worth was waiting for them on the quay.

Sarah Zettel is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author and one of the founding members of Book View Cafe. She has written fourteen novels and a roughly equal number of short stories over the past ten years in addition to practicing tai chi, learning to fiddle, marrying a rocket scientist and raising a rapidly growing son and helping found the
Book View Cafe website
. She is very tired right now. 

… by Steven Harper

...My hand shakes so from mere contemplation of the impossible. Not dead, not dead at all. Not merely the echo that haunts my life, but in existence still, mad, bad and dangerous to know, waiting curled and coiled in dread suspension until he may walk abroad again. It cannot be so. It must not be so. I will
prove
that it IS NOT so.

But a negative cannot be proved. If Fletcher was not in all ways insane, if
he
still exists in some form, which of the others might also live? The poet Shelley, so fantastically drowned and with his body burnt upon the beach with only my father and one other as witness? What of Mary Godwin, whose hand wrote of the dead brought back to life? Oh, God in Heaven! What did she know? And Polidori? Failed doctor, failed author, so in love with
him
?
What did
they
truly do in that year of darkness on the shores of Lake Geneva?

I must know. Madame M. Must be called into action. Fraser as well. Wretch he is but clever, quick and useful.

I am resolved. I will begin with the doctor. But where can he be? After all these years, with a whole world in which to hide himself?

From the private journals of Ada Byron King, Countess Lovelace

The iron spider clicked across the table and delicately dropped the sugar cube into my cup. I stirred, careful to keep my cuffs away from the crumbs that littered my plate.

“They’re wrong, every one of them,” said Victor Kalakos from across the table. “From Archimedes to Newton.”

“I don’t see how.” I sipped. The tea was nicely sweet, but had gone lukewarm. “The laws of physics are inviolate. Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. If that weren’t so, my spider wouldn’t be able to walk across the table. It would sink into the surface instead.”

“But the physical laws ignore what makes it walk in the first place, and that invalidates even Newton!” Kalakos exclaimed with more enthusiasm than accuracy. His own cup was long emptied, as was the silver flask standing next to it. The spider skittered to the edge of the table, paused, and turned left. “There! You see? It turned left. Based on what? I’ll tell you, my boy: the sum of its experiences. And there is no physical law to explain that.”

“Like John Locke claimed.”

“Exactly. We are the sum of our experiences. Let me give you an example. If you were to pull one leg from that spider and replace it, would it be the same spider?”

“Of course.” I turned the spider, and it clicked back toward the teapot.

“What if you replaced all eight legs?”

“More or less.”

“Would that spider turn left or right at the edge of the table?”

I shook my head and glanced out the car window. The train wasn’t moving. Clouds darkened above the River Liffey as the sun set, and Dublin lamplighters were making their rounds. One of our girls had already attended to lighting the car’s hanging lamps, which now shed a soft yellow glow.

Ringmaster Victor Kalakos had an entire train car for himself, a house on wheels. He had a large bed, comfortable chairs, two wardrobes, a small stove, full bookshelves, and a perfectly functional bar.

The wealthier performers usually lived in small wagons—we rolled them into the boxcars when it came time to move—while the poor ones pitched small tents behind the main one. I lived in a wagon myself, but as the ringmaster’s chief assistant, I came and went from Kalakos’s car as I liked. We usually took a late tea together after the Kalakos International Emporium of Automata & Other Wonders had shut for the evening.