Angelmaker (54 page)

With decades between her and Frankie’s confessional letter, Edie alights from the single-decker bus and clutches her bag like a woman who fears the temporal world for its sin and iniquity. She wanders as if aimless or bewildered, and her long, roundabout route brings her by happy coincidence to a convent on a dull, dreary street, where Sister Harriet Spork keeps her vigil for a life lived in wickedness.

Edie sits on a public bench and feeds the pigeons. She sits for an hour, with a Bible propped against her hip in case anyone comes, and watches and waits. And finally, her patience is rewarded. Not Joe Spork, whose approach she suspects will be less direct, but a long black car with tinted windows. Edie peers myopically at a seagull, and
gets up to shoo it away from her breadcrumbs. She waggles her hands vaguely at the bird, and it glowers murderously before taking wing. Her return path brings her into the orbit of the car, and she glances in to see a robed, shrouded figure at the wheel and another in the second seat, whose stooping, hesitant motions she finds nauseatingly familiar: quick quick slow. And then she looks into the back and sees the passenger as a car, passing in the other direction, illuminates his shrouded head from the side, and his profile is briefly visible beneath the veil.

Edie stares. Belatedly, she hides her face, panic and outrage rising inside her.

Impossible!

But Edie no longer uses that word, having long ago learned its worth.

M
ercer Cradle stands in his sister’s living room with a vastly valuable and possibly insanely dangerous gold bee in one hand and makes zooming noises. It is the defective bee Joe was given by Ted Sholt, of course, the others being out and about causing consternation in the wider world. Mercer is holding the thing between thumb and forefinger and trying to persuade it, by means of demonstration and sound effects and occasional words of encouragement, to take wing.

Mercer did not begin this scientific experiment immediately upon viewing the small collection of trophies which Joe and his sister brought back from the riverside storeroom. His initial position was that the bee should be imprisoned and X-rayed, MRI’d and electron-microscoped, until it yielded whatever alarming secrets it possessed. Joe Spork observed that these options required equipment they did not have and Polly Cradle speculated that attacking the entity might provoke it, whereupon Mercer adopted a strategy of aloof watchfulness in which Joe was permitted to examine the patient while Mercer loomed nearby with a lump hammer—a sort of short sledge—which Polly had formerly used to drive the iron pilings into the walls of her house.

When the bee remained quiescent and indeed rather boringly inert, Mercer became less cautious. His first approach was a very tentative poke, administered with a pencil held at arm’s length, in case the bee
should turn into an evil machine of death before his eyes. When this elicited no reaction, he nudged it solidly with the blunt end, and it fell over. He blew on it. He shouted at it, coaxed it, wheedled it and scolded it. Finally, he touched it with his index finger, and when he remained unexploded and unzombified, he picked it up and shook it. Joe was moved to protest that it was delicate, and Mercer agreed not to stand on it or throw it at the wall, but refused to hand it over to Joe for closer inspection using his jeweller’s loupe. It was at this point that Mercer began his attempt to educate the bee by example, and Polly Cradle, who had appeared on the brink of objecting that Joe was the expert in curious automata, was apparently stunned into silence by the image of her brother spinning in place with the bee on his outstretched palm and making buzzing noises.

“Nzzzz​zeeee​yaooo​oooww​ww!” Mercer concludes excitedly, and stares at the bee with the hopeful pride of a new father. There is a faint sound of someone sneezing from the street outside, and the skitter of leaves on the paving in the little courtyard garden beyond the patio door.

“It’s broken,” Mercer concludes. He glances at Joe Spork. “You broke it.”

“I broke it?”

“Probably. Maybe it was the damp. Or it’s bust a spring. Or you got fluff in the wind-y parts.”

“Fluff.”

“Yes. Lint. Pocket funk.”

“In the …”

“Wind-y. The parts that wind.”

“Those parts.”

“Yes. Which I imagine are susceptible to lint.”

Joe is about to explain that any item which can remain functional for forty years by the seaside, which is made furthermore of gold, and which is purportedly an engine of revolutionary change constructed on the principles of arcane mathematics, ought to be immune to lint. But, in fact, the use of gold in the production might be an attempt to avoid rust and oxidisation, and any machine can be gummed up with goo. So instead of saying “You’re a pillock,” which uncharitable assessment had been on his lips, he says instead “Give it to me,” and sits in the lightest corner of the room with his loupe and his tool bag. A moment later, he opens the bag, and uses a set of padded measuring
calipers usually reserved for the interior of watches costing more than the average flat in London to tug at the gemmed wing-cases of the bee.

The cases lift, revealing splendid, gossamer wings beneath. Gossamer, but very strong. The thin stuff gouges a tiny scratch in the edge of the calipers when his hand shakes.

Note to self:
Pointy. Do not cut your fingertip off
.

Although in fact the wings are made carefully. It’s hard to expose the edge in a way which would let you do yourself an injury. A momentary vision of flying razorbees fades away.

The saddle of the bee comes away, wings and all, revealing an inner cavity. Even through the loupe, he can barely make out the parts. Cogs, yes. Springs. Everything spiralling downward, inward, smaller and smaller and smaller, each layer geared to take instruction from the one below in a repeating pattern. Cellular clockwork?
Fractal
clockwork?

One thing is certain: he can’t fix this. It’s absolutely beyond him, and beyond Daniel too, without question. And yet … oh. There is something. A change in style where the impossible meets the merely brilliant. Yes. The layer which is humanly imaginable was made by hand, and from the shape of the works and the way in which they are arranged, it could be Daniel’s: it has his finicky preference, his bullish allegiance to the leaf spring and the conventional metals of his time. Below that layer, it’s a different matter, a thing of physics. Mathematics made real. But there at the join, there is … something. The central driveshaft is too thick … oh. Mercer is actually right. There’s a foreign object. Too thin to be an eyelash, and too supple … a single strand of silk. It could actually be a cobweb, wrapped around the spindle. But how to remove it?

He ponders, then laughs, and stands up.

“What?” Mercer asks.

Joe scuffs his feet back and forth vigorously across Polly’s carpet. “It’s clockwork,” he explains. “It’s not electrical. At least, I don’t think it’s electrical.” He grins, and leans down with the loupe, extending his finger to a quarter-inch away from the bee. Through the lens, he can see the thread stand to attention, the static charge from his finger plucking at it. Fatal to electronics. Fine for clockwork.

He waves his finger one way, then the other, and it unravels a bit. He tries again, and then it flies to his fingertip and away. He catches his breath. The bee doesn’t move.

Slowly, he puts everything back in place, layer after layer and then the wings and the cases, and finally sets the bee down on the table.

“Well,” Mercer says after a moment, “I suppose we are no worse off than we were before.”

After a moment, they leave the bee where it is, and turn to the record collection, and the small portable gramophone known as a Piglet.

The little machine does indeed make a soft whiffling noise when Joe Spork turns the crank, and then a sort of grating
roink
when he gets to the stop point of the spring. He puts the first record on the turntable and a fresh needle in the clamp, and lowers the arm.

The ghost voice speaks again, scratching down through decades, musing and melancholic. His grandmother. His blood. It’s not even a letter, this one. Joe Spork wonders whether she had a recorder of her own. Perhaps Daniel made her one. He pictures her alone at her desk, and his imagination inserts, of all things, an inkwell in front of her and an actual quill in her hand, because all this was such a long time ago. She clears her throat, and speaks.

You said once I knew nothing of the real world, and I replied that you had it exactly backwards. Only mathematicians know the world for what it is. I can see you, waving your hands and shaking your head, Daniel, but it is true. I will prove it to you
.

Suppose that you take two clocks, and you place one upon a pedestal in your house and put the other on board a rocket and fire it around the Earth. When the rocket lands, the two clocks will tell different times. Why? Because the clock in the rocket has been closer to the speed of light and less time has passed on the rocket than in your office. That is the least strange thing about the universe, Daniel: that time, which appears most absolute to human beings, is nothing of the kind. It is relative
.

Do you still not see what I mean? Very well, then consider a cat in a box with a bottle of poison. At any moment, the bottle may open, or it may not. At any moment, the cat may die. Now: take two pictures, one after another, of what is in the box. Look at the second one first. At that moment, the observation determines what is in the first picture, and what happened to the cat. From our point of view, the information flows backwards through time. This is not a joke or a romance, Daniel. It is quite simply the way of things. The universe is undecided without us—and our minds are part of what exists at some level we do not yet begin to understand
.

That is the true nature of the world we inhabit. Not the easy one we mostly encounter. Anyone who tells you otherwise is living in a dream
.

The record comes to a stop, the needle looping around the inner ring in an uneven swirl.

Joe leans back as Frankie’s record comes to an end, and looks around. Mercer Cradle is seated on the floor, Buddha-like and unexpectedly limber, a cross-legged legal statue cut from the stone with his eyes closed in thought. The Bethanys have taken up flanking positions on the sofa behind him, slightly fidgety because they were unable to force him into a comfortable chair and they feel strange about sitting above their boss. Polly sits next to Joe, and has a single sheet of paper on a glass clipboard, ready to take notes in soft pencil.

“Next one,” Mercer says quietly, before Joe can wonder aloud whether there is anything here of value.

It is Polly who picks the next record, and this time, the voice is not dissociated or melancholic, but desperate with pain and horror.

They are all dead, and I killed them. I am a murderer now! Yes, I am. Don’t say it is not my fault. I built the machine, oh, with such great intentions. I was saving us all! But I got something wrong, Daniel. Me. I got something wrong, the train stopped at Wistithiel and they are dead, and worse than dead, and I have no idea why I am alive, and I should not be, and Edie came to save me
.

I want to believe it was him. Shem Shem Tsien, like an old, bad dream, breaking my machines and pushing buttons. But he was not here, Daniel. I did this all by myself. I killed a multitude, and now they will close me down and the engine will never exist unless I can find a way alone
.

I do not want to be alone, Daniel. I am sending you something. You must seal it away. No one must see it, because it is death; death such as no one has ever died until I came along. Death by destiny, by crystallisation, by inevitability. I killed their souls and left their bodies alive. In the history of human life, there has never been anyone so dead as they are
.

I am the greatest murderer there has ever been
.

And then she cries until the message comes to an end.