Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (45 page)

"You should not go," said Pompey the Great.

The other senators agreed, saying, "The Parthians have done us no wrong. You should not invade their kingdom." There were calls for him to cancel his expedition, to give up in the face of divine displeasure.

Crassus announced sharply, "I shall wait until tomorrow and ask the will of the gods again then. Overnight, they shall reconsider."

He went back to his home angry and in disgrace, for he knew that around the tables of all the noble houses that night, people spoke of how the gods did not wish Crassus the Rich to succeed.

It was that evening that a man presented himself at Crassus's door. He was taken in to the
tablinum,
where Crassus brooded, seated across from his son Publius.

The slave announced, "From the Guild of Mechanics: Marcus Furius Medullinus Machinator."

Marcus Furius stepped forward, now a man of more than thirty years, with some early gray in his hair. We are told that he had an astute and careful face, and that he had extremely large, clever eyes of green, quick moving and intent.

When he had been presented, Crassus asked him his business, and Marcus Furius made this speech:

"I come to speak of your eastern expedition against the Parthians. Sir, you cannot trust the public prophesies of your failure. In your time, you have been a man of war—you know that men make their own luck. You know that sometimes the gods allow victory when the signs in the air speak against it, and that often the soothsayers will predict success, only to have a legion surrounded and slain. You, consul, are too wise to entrust decisions about the lives of forty thousand men to the intestines of cows, the chance meanderings of birds, or the ravings of a madwoman snorting fumes and sitting in a chafing dish.

"You might well disbelieve such auguries. And yet, no one wishes to defy the gods, most terrible and most gentle to mankind.

"So I, sir — I propose to make you a machine that shall determine the gods' will. An oracle engine.

"This oracle will not be some drunken priest, singing the praises of Bacchus with slurred speech behind a screen. It will not be some idiot rubric for measuring lines on hands or scat from the temple deer of Artemis. It will be a machine into which I shall feed the stories of all past battles — strategy, tactics, sacrifices made beforehand; the disposition of the generals; the lay of the land; the tricks of wise lieutenants. The machine shall have stored within it the whole history of Greek and Roman battle, and more, for I shall endeavor to teach it the ways of men. Then, when a consul such as yourself wishes to know the future outcome of a battle or a war or even some difficult negotiation, we will arrange the question on a mosaic for the machine to examine. It will sift through a thousand treaties and ten thousand battles, and it will issue a prophesy — and this prophesy shall not be one of the fallible fairy stories of priests, but the wisdom of the gods, who view us from above, set upon the table of the earth, as clear and predictable in our motions and ranks and evolutions as ants in a line."

Crassus asked, as if it was no great matter, how much such a machine would cost.

Marcus Furius named him a price in gold for the construction of the mechanism.

"That is far too much."

Marcus Furius bowed and smiled. He said, "I did not need an oracle to predict you would say so."

"That is just the cost of building the machine," Crassus protested. "But above that, you will charge me a fee for your design."

To this, Marcus Furius replied, "I will charge you nothing on my own account until the engine is complete."

Crassus regarded the man with suspicion. "Why would you agree to build such a machine without surety of pay?"

For a moment, we are told, Marcus Furius stared at the consul, and in that instant, it was as if the fire in that dark street of the Esquiliae still burned, reflected, in his eyes.

Then he made the semblance of a smile and replied, saying, "My motive? Nothing mercenary, sir, though it may be immodest. I wish for Rome's eternal glory and for my own renown as an inventor, a votive of Minerva. As children in the Guild of Mechanics, we heard the stories of those machinists who had come before us and were inspired by them: I speak of Prometheus, first artificer, who in the first age assembled the automaton called
man,
and set him walking on the earth, and gave him fire fallen out of heaven. I speak of clever Odysseus, who raised up the horse that, breathing coal smoke and flame, trampled Troy and kicked down the towers of Ilium. I speak of Daedalus, who built the Labyrinth of Crete and made its walls to shuffle so the Minotaur could clamp its victims with no hope of their escape; the same Daedalus, who, when this atrocity was completed, the corridors creaking open and closed along their toothed coulisses, sought to flee the isle of Crete with Icarus, his son, inventing the first flying machines so they could do so. They flapped away from that island prison, watching the Labyrinth diminish behind them, laughing at their freedom, father and son—until Daedalus flew beneath a cloud and the plates on his engine were cut off from the nourishing sunlight, dropping him with horrible precipitation into the sea; whereas Icarus, flying higher, receiving all the beams of Phoebus, stayed buoyant, reached the land, and so became the first to give the gift of flight to human men. I speak of Archimedes, who designed for his Sicilian king many engines of war, and who first drew plans (now lost, alas) for the dire Curse of Syracuse, dropped upon the city of Carthage to destroy it utterly and end the Punic Wars. There is no machine more terrible than that blight of fire, and none more sought after by our generals — for even now, a century later, Carthage is a wasteland where no crop will grow and no living thing can thrive. It is despised by the gods, a broken plain fit only for whimpering jackals with eyes that bleed and jaws that cannot close and legs that cannot carry them. There shall be no life where that upstart city stood for a hundred generations.

"Save the gods themselves, only inventors may confer such miraculous powers upon mortals. Though my arm may be weak, a lever is strong. Men of action such as you, Crassus, and your excellent son Publius—who I see before me — you still may benefit from the aid of a poor recluse like myself, a man who would be a laughingstock were I to stagger onto a field of battle carrying sword and scutum.

"So this I do for fame, Licinius Crassus, and for the glory of Rome. I have laid before you an opportunity to attract the notice of Jove himself and all his retinue. I can say no further — nor should I, since night has so advanced, and I must return to my study, my lamp, and my lucubrations. If you have no interest, tell me frankly, and I shall remove myself and instead present this mechanical oracle notion to Pompey—whom they call
the Great,
if I am not mistaken — or to young Julius Caesar, who shows such promise. They might, perhaps, have interest."

The next day, Crassus engaged Marcus Furius Machinator to build the first oracle engine.

Marcus Furius took a week to hire several metalworkers of the highest skill to assist him. By that time, Crassus had paid the decemvirs and the priests of Apollo sufficiently in gold that when he returned to the temple, the auguries for his future success were very happy j ndeed —j ubilant, even. So he made arrangements for his army to depart, taking with him Marcus Furius and his smiths. Crassus sent seven legions by aquatic quadrireme to meet him in the province of Syria. He and his advisers, Marcus Furius among them, traveled by airship, sputtering across the wine-dark seas, stopping for fuel each night at Thessalonica or Pergamum or other cities where Crassus might announce himself and collect tribute. At long last, the shadows of their ships were cast over the waters and banks of the Euphrates River.

There, they met the seaborne legions, who had marched across Galatia, and together they made camp at the town of Zeugma, which stood at the border of the Parthian Empire. It looked down upon the banks of the Euphrates, and its houses, I am informed by travelers, resembled wasps' nests of mud.

Marcus Furius and his smiths set to work. They hired a forge and enlarged it, taking also for their own a warehouse nearby where the engine could be assembled.

The forge being in blast, they began work on the mechanism. First, they made a huge number of small metal grids, each divided by many lines into many squares, just as the soothsayer's floor is divided into quadrants. At each intersection of the lines, there was a peg, which could be moved either up or down and fixed in place. Each metal grid represented one battle or skirmish or negotiation, and upon each there were perhaps sixteen hundred pegs, every one of them answering one question—yes or no — about that conflict.

With painstaking labor, Marcus Furius set the pegs to answer a great host of questions, according to a written key: the pegs, in their totality, indicated the number of infantry, cavalry, and aerial
levitatii
on each side; the disposition of those troops on the battlefield; the maneuvers that followed; what sacrifices had been made by each side before the battle (cattle, goat, or fowl), and to which gods; and whether each general had been humble or proud. Then Marcus Furius scoured histories and primed the machine with tales of the past: the war of the Greeks against the Persians; the fall of Troy; the Samnite War; Hannibal rumbling down out of the Alps with his battle machines, their snouts hurling artillery from the slopes above Lake Trasimenus; the guile of Fabius the Dictator; the disastrous impetuousness of the consul Varro. Marcus Furius fed the machine the histories of Polybius, Herodotus, and Thucydides. When he finished establishing the information upon each grid, he stacked it carefully atop the others.

Crassus, hearing that Marcus Furius often worked through the night, like a man haunted (indeed) by the Furies, suggested that they should hire some local youths to help with the training of the machine, so it might be concluded more quickly. Crassus's demand was that the youths must live in the workshop and agree to take an oath at the altar of Minerva that they would tell no one else of the oracle engine, and that they would be entirely faithful to him alone. "A sort of order of male Vestal Virgins," said Crassus, "cut off from the world."

"I believe," said Marcus Furius, "that an order of male virgins who never see the light of day would be ideal for the operation of a computing machine such as this."

Seven youths were sought out and hired. They were clad in white robes and shoes made of soft leather from the hide of sacrificial beasts. Thus was founded the inviolable sect of the Minervan Virgins.

In these weeks while the machine was being assembled and oriented, Crassus wasted no time in securing the border of Roman territory. He did not march far into Parthian territory—waiting as he did for the oracle engine to be completed so that it might suggest to him the best tactic to pursue — but he engaged his time making small sorties to towns and cities in the region, ensuring that they pledged allegiance to Rome. None of them offered much resistance, save Zenodotium, which was quickly reduced by Crassus's legions.

These early victories might have brought Crassus pleasure, except that his son Publius arrived with news from Rome: that already Julius Caesar's victories in Gaul were being applauded as prodigious, and Pompey the Great was so beloved by the people of the capital that the Senate grew uneasy. Meanwhile, the auguries at Rome once again forecast failure for Crassus: when his expedition was discussed, horses grew restless, banners toppled, and the sacred owls would sweat.

Hearing this, Crassus made his way to the engineers' workshop and demanded that Marcus Furius tell him when his machine would be completed. He needed it to calculate certain questions. There were rumors that the king of Parthia had split the Parthian army into two and that both halves were roaming through the plains, awaiting Roman movement. Should Crassus move to attack one force or the other? Or might he slip by them both to assault the city of Ctesiphon or woo the city of Seleucia or plunder ancient Babylon?

Marcus Furius replied, "You will wish us to take more time. The more the machine has been taught, the more accurate it will be." Crassus noted with some displeasure the angry intensity of Marcus Furius's gaze. He asked whether there was anything that was not to the engineer's liking. But Marcus Furius said merely, "No. I have a name for the machine now. It is called the
stochastikon,
for it calculates fate."

Hearing of this continued delay, Crassus took aside one of the Minervan Virgins and asked the youth whether the calculations were legitimate. He demanded that the virgin pledge that the machine would operate precisely as promised.

"So long as it is given enough examples to consider," the virgin answered, "its foresight shall be astounding."

Crassus agreed to wait, even as the king of Parthia wandered north and invaded Armenia.

Now that Marcus Furius had assistants, he was determined to acquaint the oracle engine not only with the military and political history of nations but also with the character of individual men and women — for it would not be accurate unless it understood the nature of mankind itself.

And so, through the long nights, through the hot days, he began populating grids with tales taken from the comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus, the tragedies of Sophocles. He described the ancient cycles of revenge: father kills daughter, sacrificing her to the gods; mother, outraged, kills father; and the son, almost crazed with grief, kills the mother — and so the cycle goes on, murder for murder, inexhaustible. Oedipus slays his father on the road and weds his mother. Foolish King Pentheus, mocking the god Dionysus, is pulled apart, limb from limb, by his own mother, the queen, in a fit of religious ecstasy. Great men bake each other's children in pots. All of this the oracle engine learned.

The weeks went by and Crassus heard that in his army the legionnaires said, "The general waits for this machine as an excuse. He is afraid of the desert and of the Parthians, though they are nothing but ragged barbarians without the power of flight. He is no commander of men."