Angelmaker (23 page)

Edie knew that her training was at an end as soon as she saw the message ordering her “station side”—this being slang in Abel Jasmine’s organisation for the railway equivalent of dry land. She has a strange
feeling in her legs, like a kind of inverted motion sickness; for the first time in weeks, she is standing on solid ground. She can smell bracken and earth, and on the wind, the unmistakable scent of heavy construction: hot metal and burned stone-dust.

In front of her is a rather grim Victorian manor or farm—if your idea of farming is waking at ten and walking along the hedges saying things like “I say, Jock, the wheat looks very fine this year, well done!”—made over into what she can only think of as a secret hideout. There is apparently also a secret greenhouse presumably filled with highly classified tomatoes.

On the other side of the manor, though, something else is taking shape; something the size of an aircraft hangar or a concert hall, with an earthen roof which resembles a hill or a burial mound and a great gawping maw of a doorway. Soon enough, Edie supposes, when the gorse grows back and the grass covers the works, the whole thing will look natural. Into the maw runs a row of railway sleepers without rails—yet—and this giveaway is being carefully painted green and brown, and broken with clever
trompe l’oeil
so that from the air it will look like nothing very much.

Some things, self-evidently, are either too big or too dangerous or too delicate to be done aboard a moving train, even a Ruskinite train with gas-baffle suspension and Brunel-Zeiss-Bauersfeld geodesic architecture, both of which the
Ada Lovelace
possesses and neither of which Edie even vaguely understands.

Edie ponders. The more aggressive aspect of Science 2 is called, prosaically, S2:Active, and is tasked with investigating and very occasionally implementing genuine scientific ideas which are probably completely impossible, but which, if confirmed, will reshape the world. If someone is going to invent a Gatling gun which can fire through solid steel, or an earthquake generator, or a heat-ray, or a devastating sonic cannon which causes tanks to shake themselves apart, Abel Jasmine is the man to ensure that fellow is working for the Crown and not the Axis.

Which brings up a question. “Is anyone doing anything like that?”

Abel Jasmine smiles. He did not announce himself, but Edie always knows when someone is behind her. This time she has also identified him, personally, and continued their conversation from the day before.

“Like what?”

“Superguns in space. Energy beams and lightning weapons.”

“Oh, yes. And not just that. This is a strange time, Miss Banister. The invisible world, it turns out, is considerably larger than the one we know. Men and women wrestle with intangibles and produce … well. Wonders and horrors. Such as the X-ray. A medical triumph. A miraculous thing. Except that direct exposure for too long rots the body like fire and plague. What’s the range? What’s the most powerful effect? Imagine a battlefield of invisible light, scorching from a mile away.”

Edie does, and doesn’t like it.

“Is that what all this is for?”

“No, Miss Banister. This is much more important. Come.” He gestures towards the manor house. A man is waiting for them on the step, an odd, elongated person in artificer’s black.

“Ruskinites,” Edie says, not without a measure of resignation.

It’s not that Edie has a problem with the Ruskinites, exactly. The Keeper—who turns out to be not only the designer of the
Lovelace
but also the top of the Ruskinite tree—is a nice enough person to be around, because his passion is so obvious and so entirely unthreatening. And, yes, she has some sympathy for the notion that all these perfectly reproduced, same same same objects which are gradually replacing the more awkward handmade things she grew up with may be in some way damaging her country’s relationship with itself, causing some kind of ghastly exile of the soul.

She just doesn’t trust people who take things on faith, and suspects that a uniform group which purports to celebrate uniqueness is leaving itself open to going what Miss Thomas would have called “a bit funny.”

She smiles as she reaches the manor.

“Hello,” the Ruskinite says. “I’m Mockley.”

“And what do you do?” Edie responds politely, because to a Ruskinite this is the most important question that can be asked.

“Welding, mostly. I’ve got a sort of gift for asymmetric joints which will experience extreme irregular shear. You have to get to know them a bit.” He waves his hand vaguely.

“Oh,” she says. “How wonderful.”

Mockley beams.

“Take us in, please, Mockley,” Abel Jasmine says.

Inside, the whole room is ringing. Edie can feel it in her chest, a wild, exultant creel of power. They’re cutting solid rock away, digging and burrowing down towards the sea caves below. There’s a glass oven (i.e. an oven for the preparation and blowing of glass, not an oven made of glass, although nothing would surprise her) and a furnace, a crucible, and several giant tubes or tanks whose function Edie cannot begin to guess. There are chemistry retorts and demijohns and vats and condensers and odd-looking gear which somehow resembles the code gear on the
Lovelace
but also looks a bit like a Jacquard loom. A wild hodgepodge, a scientific playground. Or, as Edie walks closer to the central pit, she realises she is wrong. Not a playground at all. A god’s forge, for the making of magic swords and talking sculptures and all the stuff of fairy tales.

Down in the depths, the great, blue-green Atlantic is black and cold and seething, and something is being lowered down and down into the cauldron: a bomb-shaped thing with cables snaking back up the cliff. Below even that, in the probing glare of the giant searchlights which are pointed not up but down, Edie can see something else, a whale-shaped, whale-sized monster lurking on the edge of the light, a hundred foot underwater and more.

She looks back and around, and sees what’s missing from this titanic mosaic.

“Who’s the lucky girl?” she asks, because sure as chips and vinegar this lot is not for her.

“A scientist. It is a woman, actually.”

“Well, where is she?” Edie glances around, looking for a bespectacled schoolmarm with chalk on her fingers. Abel Jasmine sighs.

“Ah. We were hoping you might be able to help us with that, Miss Banister. There’s a slight problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

“His name is Shem Shem Tsien.”

The face in the photograph is in monochrome, tinged with a deep celluloid blue. It is no brighter than the faces around it, no older, no closer to the camera. And yet, it is indisputably
the
face, unique and apart.

Granted, it belongs to the man to whom everyone else is apparently deferring. He is richly dressed, and surrounded by dependants,
concubines, and offspring. And yet, Edie has seen other pictures in the past where one child, caught by chance in an attitude of casual joy, has completely outshone such a parent; where one unthinking scullery maid has glanced at the camera and displayed for a moment her natural beauty, and the social order has been quite overturned. Photography is without mercy—though it’s nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat’s meat men.

There’s no such revolution here. The camera has fallen in love. It has given itself entire to Shem Shem Tsien, thrown itself at his feet and worshipped at his altar. He absolutely gleams, matinée-idol splendid, with broad white teeth and a hero’s moustache in two delicate bars, as if drawn on with charcoal, emphasising the masculinity of his curving upper lip.

Shem Shem Tsien: graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge; debater, gambler, and rake; born the second son of the second son of the Khaygul Khan of Addeh Sikkim, a tiny tinpot nation on the edge of the British Raj. Industrialist and moderniser, favourite dinner guest of presidents and commissars alike, hunter of big game and bronze medallist at the Olympics in the foil event—would have done more, no doubt, but he’d spent the preceding six days drunk in the arms of a Hollywood starlet of pneumatic and renowned athleticism. His smile shatters marriages, unfrocks nuns. As a youth, he ravished Europe and the Americas, was the darling of the society pages—and then, disaster: his father, brother, and his royal master were taken all in one night by a sickness which swelled the brain, leaving Shem to look out for his beloved nephew (seen, indeed, in Abel Jasmine’s photograph, carrying a butterfly net and clinging shyly to his uncle’s knee) which he did by burning the corpses with due ceremony and installing the boy on the Khaygul’s throne. Alas, all unforeseen and unimaginable, a fishbone lodged in the new sovereign’s throat and could not be got out, leaving the wise, educated, clubbable Shem Shem Tsien the last (officially recognised) son of his line.

Or perhaps: Shem Shem Tsien, unfavoured and suspect child, his birth nine months after the visit of a noted British libertine, his face a little too beautiful, his hair too thick to be his father’s boy. Not exiled so much as encouraged elsewhere, he served in the British Army and the Russian, carved out a kingdom in opium country before he ever came back to Addeh Sikkim, knows the Camorra of Naples and the
Yakuza of Kyoto, the Boxer Triads of Beijing and the Kindly Men of London. Red-handed enemy of the Barqooq Beys of neighbouring Addeh Katir, he is a trader, a producer, and a supplier of laudanum to kings and potentates, of anaesthetics and pain relief to armies; a Svengali, a Mesmerist, a blackmailer, an extortionist, and a kidnapper (all things one might expect, notes sniffy Abel Jasmine, in a Cambridge man). He is also a poisoner, a sponsor of thugs and an assassin, a bringer of plagues. Were his brother, father, uncle all dead when he locked them in an iron room and set them on fire? Not known. His inconvenient nephew, Abel Jasmine’s agents report, was quite unquestionably held face down in a plate of Giant Mekong Catfish (and what idiot would eat such a magnificent, doomed thing? It’s like tucking into the last mammoth, a dish for the dissolute and the small) until he choked.

Shem Shem Tsien owns the largest collection of preserved lepidoptera in the world.

He keeps nearly one hundred thumbs in a display case.

He is received in embassies from Brunei to Moscow, owns property in Mayfair.

Fifteen thousand infantry, nine thousand cavalry, and three thousand artillerymen, sappers, and murderers take their orders from his lips alone.

His word is law from Kalimpong to the southern reaches of the Katirs.

Shem Shem Tsien is the Opium Khan.

It occurs to Edie, powerfully, that Shem Shem Tsien is entirely Britain’s fault. For whatever pressing reasons, the mother of democracies has given suck to this man. The Empire’s great educational institutions have shaped him, her military has trained him, and her drawing rooms and salons have completed his development. Oh, all of Europe has played a part. In Shem Shem Tsien, Marx rubs shoulders with Wellington and Paine with Napoleon, each jostling for the unwelcome title of Kingmaker—but it is in Britain’s melting pot that he has been composited. A British fiend, all manners and poisonous politesse, in every sense a home-made International Bastard of Mystery.

Of his whole family, saving himself, only one other member now remains: his revered and gentle mother, Dowager-Khatun Dalan, still known in Bloomsbury as Dotty Catty—quite the girl in 1887, got
herself ejected from a music hall with a peer of the realm, and that was no easy task back then—the only one of the whole brood he trusts enough to leave alive.

The one who has now betrayed him.

Edie Banister, orphan child, born of some poor knocked-up wench in a poor town west of Bristol, adopted ward of schoolmistresses, charities, and latterly the British Government, occasionally has trouble understanding what other people see in families.

She glances at Shem Shem Tsien’s photograph again, then flicks to the beginning of the file. The name on the frontispiece unsettles her:
Angelmaker
. It sounds altogether too churchy, too much like a funeral hymn. She shivers, and turns the page.