Agatha H. and the Airship City (7 page)

As a result, there was a well-established tradition of such constructs being viewed with suspicion at best, discriminated against with impunity, and made the butt of jokes in sensationalist novels, such as those chronicling the adventures of the Heterodyne Boys. Their loyal construct companions, Punch and Judy, were portrayed as oafish clowns. Music halls and traveling shows across Europa also embraced this interpretation, and the two were solidly established as the personification of low humor. Constructs tended to avoid popular entertainments.

Refreshingly, the Baron had long let it be known that blatant discrimination against constructs was officially frowned upon within the Empire, and he backed this policy up with force.

But this was a rule that was often ignored in the small towns and rural villages that rarely saw the Baron’s forces or polysyllabic words. As a result, constructs moved into the larger, more cosmopolitan towns and cities. There they were reluctantly embraced. Those like Adam and his wife, who, with a bit of effort, could pass as human, tried to do so.

And thus Adam and Lilith lived happily amongst the general populace of Beetleburg, and were respected members of the community. Adam impressed many with his ability to repair the simpler Spark creations, and did regular piece-work for the Tyrant. Lilith played the piano, giving lessons in music and dance, and provided entertainment at various functions. There were those in town who knew what they were, but usually they were constructs themselves.

Suddenly the door slammed open behind Adam, and before he could react, he found a sobbing Agatha clutching at his chest. “Oh, Adam,” she cried, “I’ve had the most awful day in existence! Dr. Beetle is dead! And I was robbed! And I’m not allowed back in the University! Ever!”

Adam strained to keep his balance, and the arm holding up the tractor began to shake. Agatha continued, “I can’t think of anything that could make it worse!” Sweat began to form on Adam’s brow as he tried to gently disengage Agatha from his shirt with one hand.

The door to the inner house opened, and Agatha’s mother appeared. “What is all the noise out here?” She blinked at the scene before her. “Agatha? You’re back? What’s wrong child? Come here.”

To Adam’s great relief, Agatha turned to his wife. “Oh, Lilith, Dr. Beetle is dead!”

Shock crossed Lilith’s face. “What? How?”

“He was killed in his lab by Baron Wulfenbach!”

At the sound of Wulfenbach’s name, Adam gave a start, dropping the tractor, again shaking the building.

Lilith’s eyes widened. “Baron Wulfenbach! Here?”

Agatha looked at her in surprise. “Yes. He’s taken the town. You didn’t notice?”

Lilith looked embarrassed. “I’ve been canning all morning—” she looked at Agatha again, “Klaus Wulfenbach. Are you sure?”

“Lilith, I work in the main lab. I was right there. I saw the whole thing!”

Lilith only looked more worried. “Did he see you?”

“Dr. Beetle introduced all of us.”

“Yes, of course he did. Why shouldn’t he? How did—?” Suddenly a look of horror crossed Lilith’s face and she grabbed Agatha and lifted her up before her eyes. “Your locket!” she exclaimed. “Where’s your locket?”

Agatha looked surprised at the turn of the conversation. “I was robbed. By two soldiers.”

“Wulfenbach soldiers?”

“I… I don’t think so. They looked too shabby.”

Lilith set Agatha back down and turned to Adam. “We’ve got to find it!” Adam nodded.

Agatha interrupted. “With everything else that’s happened— that’s what you think is important?” Adam and Lilith looked at each other, unspoken communication passed between them.

Lilith’s face took on an expression that Agatha knew as “I’ll explain this when you’re older,” a look that at eighteen, she no longer had any patience for. “Your uncle was very clear. You must

always wear—”

“Dr. Beetle is dead! Don’t you understand?”

“Agatha, when your uncle left you with us, he told us things we’d need to know if—”

“If he didn’t come back! Things I needed to know! Well what are you waiting for? It’s been eleven years! Maybe… maybe he never meant to come back at all and—”

Adam’s vast hand dropped gently onto her shoulder, cutting her off in mid-word. The look in his eyes as he slowly and deliberately shook his head conveyed the message that whatever else, her uncle had never intended to leave for good.

Lilith nodded in agreement. “Agatha, your uncle loves you very much. Almost as much as we do.” With a sigh, Agatha allowed herself to be enfolded by the arms of the two constructs. The quiet minute that followed would be one of Agatha’s most poignant memories.

It was ended by Lilith straightening up and assuming her no-nonsense voice. “Now. Agatha, Adam and I are going out. There are a few things you must do. We’re leaving Beetleburg. Pack everything of importance to you, but it must fit into your green rucksack. No more than two sets of clothes, but take two extra sets of stockings, the thick wool ones, and linens.”

Agatha blinked in surprise. “Leaving town? But the shop! Our house! Your canning!”

Lilith nodded. “It can’t be helped. If Baron Wulfenbach has taken the town then we have got to leave.” Agatha opened her mouth, but Lilith cut her off. “Once we are on the road, I’ll answer everything, but now there is no time. Prepare similar packs for Adam and myself, as well as the blue shouldersack that is already packed in our closet and—” she paused, and seemed embarrassed, “Our generator.”

Agatha looked somber. “We really are leaving.”

Lilith nodded and looked around the cozy room. “Yes. I’m afraid so.” While they were talking, Adam strode over to the fireplace. Lifting aside the rag rug, he exposed a stone tile over a meter square set into the floor. In the center was an indentation that was revealed to be a handle, as Adam grasped it and effortlessly lifted. The tile was revealed to be a cube that easily slid from the hole with the sound of stone on stone. Depositing it to the side, he leaned in and lifted out a thick money belt, as well as several small canvas bundles, before smoothly sliding the block back into place.

Lilith continued. “Then you must clean the house.” Agatha opened her mouth, but Lilith raised her hand. “Start a fire in the fireplace. Burn everything in the red cabinet. This is very important, Agatha. When you’re done with that, I want you to disassemble our two spare generators and scatter the parts around the shop. Then go through the house and if you find anything that you think would tell someone that the people living here were constructs, get rid of it.”

“You’re terrified of Baron Wulfenbach finding you.”

“Yes. And you should be too.” She forestalled Agatha’s next outburst. “Tomorrow. Now Adam and I will go and check the pawnshops and jewelers for your locket. If it’s not there, we’ll talk to Master Vulpen and see if it has made its way onto the Thieves’ Market. In any case, if we’re not back, make sure all the doors are locked, be in bed by eight o’clock and ready to leave by dawn.”

“The Baron has established a curfew,” Agatha warned her. “He’s using clanks and those creepy Jägermonster things.”

Adam and Lilith looked at each other. To her surprise, Agatha saw that they were more relaxed than she had seen them in quite a while. “Really? It’ll be like old times then. Now get to work, lock the door, put up the ‘Away’ sign, and don’t let anyone in while we’re gone.”

“Okay.” Agatha headed up the stairs. “Be careful.”

Adam and Lilith watched her go. Lilith allowed herself a brief fierce hug with Adam. “Confound the master,” she muttered into his vast chest, as he tenderly patted her head. “We’re not equipped to deal with this. Eleven years! Where can he
be?”

Three hours later, Agatha sat wearily on her bed. She had tackled the cleaning of the house first, then the dismantling of the generators. Although she knew that Adam and Lilith were constructs, her parents had never talked about who had created them. Agatha suspected the reason had something to do with the competence of that unknown Spark or, rather, the lack thereof. There were numerous flaws with the pair, such as Adam’s inability to speak. The most painful to them was their inability to have children. The most embarrassing was the lack of care that had been taken when assembling them regarding things like uniformity of skin tone, and Lilith’s left eye, which was noticeably larger than her right. When she was younger, Agatha had pointed out that the variegated skin revealed that at least their creators had been equal opportunity exhumers, while her mismatched eyes were a flaw shared by the famous Heterodyne construct, Judy, and thus no detriment. Lilith’s reaction to this statement had always puzzled the youngster. It was only as she got older that she realized that the Heterodyne plays that were performed at fairs and circuses by traveling players consistently portrayed the Heterodyne Boys’ construct servants as buffoons, and that none of the constructs that her family knew enjoyed these plays. Agatha had thus realized that constructs were considered second-class citizens, and explained her parents’ efforts to keep their status as such hidden.

But the most annoying flaw in their construction was that they were unable to maintain the charge that gave them life. Periodically, they had to hook each other up to a small hand-cranked generator and re-vitalize themselves. At a young age Agatha had once stumbled upon them during this process and had suffered nightmares for several weeks as a result. The generator was never talked about except when absolutely necessary.

Agatha looked around her room now, and mentally packed the large rucksack at her feet. No matter how she did it, there were things she loved that were going to have to be left behind.

Before Adam and Lilith, she had lived with her Uncle Barry. All she could remember about him was that he was a large, good-natured man who was very good at repairing things, seemed very worried about things he couldn’t talk about, and who would, without warning, periodically uproot them from whatever town they had established themselves in and have them travel for days, sometimes for weeks, to another town.

In the beginning Agatha had thought it was fun. But as she got older, she realized that she had no friends. Partially this was caused by their constant travel, and partially by the fuzzyheadedness that began to increase its hold upon her thinking around that time. Upon their arrival in a new location, children could tell that there was something not quite right about the newcomer, and with the casual sadism of the young, proceeded to give her a hard time. After an especially cruel series of pranks, which even her perennially preoccupied uncle had noticed, they had come to Beetleburg, and the Clays, where she had found the loving stability she had so desperately needed.

She remembered the guarded joy she had felt when the Clays had told her that this was her room. For quite a while, she tried to do as little to it as possible, convinced that they would soon leave. It had started out as a simple, bare attic, but as time passed, Agatha had begun to devote a great deal of time to it, and now it was a thing of beauty.

At a young age, Adam had shown her how to carve wood, a skill many machinists honed, as they often had to design and forge their own parts. Her early efforts defaced the bottoms of newel posts and cabinet doors, but eventually she began to develop a grace and geometric precision that allowed a profusion of cunningly interlaced designs to cover many of the wooden surfaces. The ceiling had been painted a dark blue and covered with bright yellow, white and orange stars. Hanging from the ceiling were various objects that Agatha found interesting: a gigantic dried sunflower (which she had been convinced was the result of some Spark’s biological tinkering), a stuffed iguana she had discovered in a musty old junk shop, an airship kite that her uncle had built for her long ago, and a Roman sword that Dr. Beetle had discovered while digging the foundation for a new building. Crammed on shelves were her precious books, fossils, unusual bits of madboy tech, clocks, and a small misshapen clay dog that a boy had given her when she was eight.

On the shelf in front of her single window were racks containing pots of plants, some common herbs, some exotic and strange things that she had collected from the spice shops or the Tyrant’s Botanical Gardens.

It would all have to be left behind.

Even, and the thought filled her eyes with tears, her work table, a vast swivel-topped affair that Adam had constructed in secret for her one Yuletide several years ago. All that remained on it were her drafting tools, her notebooks, and the remains of the few, painfully few, devices she had constructed that actually worked: the butter clock, the air-driven quill sharpener, the hooting machine, and the wind-up hammer. They had already been dismantled, and that had been the hardest thing to do. With a groan she allowed herself to fall back onto the bed in despair.

They had all lived together happily for several months, and Uncle Barry had made the occasional trip while leaving Agatha in the care of the Clays. Agatha had vague memories of a growing tension amongst the grownups, which culminated in a late night argument she could dimly hear from her bedroom. The next morning, the tension appeared to have cleared and Barry announced that he was going on another trip. A lengthy one, that might take as long as two months. He had written three times: once from Mechanicsburg, the home of the fabled Heterodyne Boys; once from Paris; and over a year later, a much travel-stained letter, full of disquieting and vague ramblings, that was found to have been slid under the Clays’ front door while they had been outside the city picking apples.

It was the last they had heard from or of him.

The thought of returning to that wandering lifestyle filled her with apprehension and she felt her head begin to throb in a peculiar way that left her feeling dizzy.

“Maybe a short nap,” she muttered, and stripped down to her camisole and pantalets before burrowing under the covers. A thought eased its way to the forefront of her mind even as she felt herself begin to slide into sleep: her whole day had started going wrong when that electrical phenomenon had appeared. But bizarre things occurred all the time, such as last week’s sudden mimmoth infestation. The tiny pachyderms had been discovered living in the sewers, and an ill-thought-out poisoning scheme had seen the creatures emerging from drains in alarming numbers and establishing themselves in houses all over town.