Clockwork Souls (18 page)

“But—but that’s
slavery
!”

Startled, Mr. Laurence looked up. “Miss Amy—how do you come
here?”

“I was looking for my dance partner,” she said. Veiled in
tulle and illusion, her white satin ball gown magnified her petite form the way
the mist magnified the moon. She stared with horror into the metal face and the
great glass eyes. “Teddy! Can it really be you in there? And who is this man?
Has there been an accident?”

The automaton made not the slightest gesture. It sat on the
grass, one knee drawn up, still as a statue. In heavy tones Mr. Laurence said, “My
child, forgive an old man’s last folly. You have not heard—it is a dreadful
secret—that poor Theodore killed himself last summer in Sicily.”

Amy gasped. “Oh, dear God! No, I did not know!”

Mr. Laurence rose stiffly, leaning on the cane. “He had
received a final letter from Jo, and it overwhelmed his reason. In the pit of
my despair, I had this automaton crafted, a metal substitute. That is why it is
named Secundus. It is not truly ensouled. That is just a fiction I tell myself,
a pretense to poultice this terrible grief. I beg you: do not tell of this to
the folks at home. Let me break the tragic news to your mother, your sister, in
person.”

“Teddy, poor Teddy! How horrible! But—but this automaton.
His eyes—” Tears welled up in Amy’s own blue eyes and rolled down her pale
cheeks. “They are so like!”

“I had them especially made that way.” Mr. Laurence’s voice
quavered pathetically. “Brown glass from Murano in Italy—”

With a wheezing groan Fanshawe rolled to one side. In his
hand was a single-shot pocket derringer. “You lying bugger,” he gasped.

The automaton moved almost too swift for sight, seizing Amy
by the waist and pulling her backwards in a flurry of satin and petticoat. Mr.
Laurence swung the cane to knock the derringer aside. In the same instant
Fanshawe fired over the heads of both girl and mechanical. Mr. Lawrence swayed
for a moment, a look of immense disdain creeping over his aristocratic
features. Then he crumpled.

“Cunning git,” Fanshawe groaned, and said no more.

Fighting to take a decent breath against her tight corsetry,
Amy sat up gaping like a fish. She was alone with an automaton and two fallen
men! If there had been any other person present she would have been relieved to
faint gracefully away. But without anyone else to bear a hand, she had no
option but to cling to consciousness. With a grim effort she wallowed upright,
irretrievably staining her white gloves on the grass and dragging the heavy
skirts and crushed horsehair bustle. Years of charity visiting with Marmee now
stood her in good stead. Her first responsibility must be the wounded.

Mr. Laurence’s white shirt-front was so blood-boltered that
it was impossible to believe he yet lived. In the moonlight the wide pool of
gore stained the grass black around him, squelching disgustingly under her
white satin slippers as she stepped closer. Shuddering, she clutched her lace
shawl tight around her shoulders and turned away to approach the other man. He
lay on his side, also unmoving. She could not see his chest rise with breath.
In the sickroom with little Beth she had learned how to take a pulse. Very
gingerly, with one finger, she pressed the thick hairy wrist protruding below
the checkered tweed sleeve. There was nothing.

Finally she turned to the automaton. It sat like a stork,
one knee still drawn up for repair. How did you tell if a mechanical man was
alive? Amy licked her lips, nerving herself to address it. “You saved my life,”
she declared, tremblingly.

Then it did move. It looked away. Amy stepped around and
bent to look into the metal face. “Teddy?”

Something in the glass eyes did not look mechanismic. She
pressed on. “Teddy, is it you? Please! You can confide in me—your old
playfellow, Amy.”

A long pause. Then, very slowly, the bronze pate glittered
in the moonlight as the machine nodded. It held up a hand, and Amy helped it
stagger to its feet. The knee joint wobbled but did not give way. Quickly she
scooped up the ebony cane and put it into its hand so that it could support
itself. With this aid it limped over to Mr. Laurence’s fallen form. From the
left coat pocket it extracted a mechanical controller the size of a large cigar
case, a miracle of burnished bronze and smooth steel bristling with brass
levers and vernier wheels. The slim metal fingers slid over the controls.
Slowly the steel lips parted, and a thin voice haltingly creaked, “Aetheric.
Controller. Grandfather—he . . . turned. Off. The. Vox.”

“Teddy! It
is
you!”
Amy wanted to shout with joy, but there was no time. The implications of his
plight surged through her mind. “Teddy, we cannot stay. You know that it is
still illegal in Europe, for souls to be transferred into machines. If you stay
in France the gendarmes will, will—” Her imagination failed her. A smelting
furnace? Forcible disassembly? Surely an ensouled mechanical’s fate here could
not be but dire.

She could hear the gears click around in the automaton’s
chest as the vox mechanical selected word cards. “My. Own. Grandfather. Made.
Me. A Slave.”

Amy thought more rapidly than she had ever done in her life.
“We must tell the authorities that Mr. Laurence perished being—yes, being
robbed by this person lying here. Then we will go straight back to America. At
home, Papa read Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation out loud to us. Our
martyred President freed not only the Negroes, but mechano-Americans as well.
If you will trust yourself to me, Teddy, I will declare you to be my property:
a Christmas gift from your grandfather to—to Jo, back home. Doesn’t that sound
convincing? And then, once we are back in Massachusetts, you will be safe—and
free.”

“No.”

“No? Teddy, can you wish to stay here? What will they do to
you? Are you—” A fresh terror seemed to grip Amy’s heart. Everyone knew that a
dying man’s last words were truth, and so it must be that old Mr. Laurence had
been lying to her—but how much? Could Laurie still be bent on self-destruction?
Was he embracing disassembly and destruction?

He shook his head. “Dangerous. For you.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake.” In her relief Amy could have
smacked him, as Jo had done when they were children. “Teddy, we are behind
enemy lines. This is no time for gallantry! My own Papa, your tutor Brooke, our
boys in blue—they fought to free all the slaves. We must not—I will not!—let
them down by deserting you.”

She watched the metal countenance carefully. Perhaps with
practice she could learn to read its thought, but now it was inscrutable. But
then he moved. Gently he took up her hand and put the aetheric controller into
it. “I am. Yours,” he said.

She clutched it, careful not to disturb the setting of the
levers and silence him again. “Only until we are safe out of Europe, Teddy. I
shall be your Harriet Tubman, guiding you underground to freedom.”

The face and mouth were forever immobile, but the brown
glass eyes spoke volumes: admiration, acquiescence, and more. “Yours,” he
repeated softly, and her heart knew the words had nothing to do with
emancipation.

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Irene Radford

“I am dying, General Pemberton.” Jules de Chingé choked
around a cough. He sat higher, bending forward from his chaise longue in front
of the window overlooking the Mississippi. The cramping in his lungs and the
pressure that filled his chest caused yet another spasm. It wracked his frame;
his entire body tried to turn itself inside out. The blood on his handkerchief
told him it partially succeeded.

“So the doctors tell me,” the Confederate officer replied.
He stood tall and erect. His spine, schooled by four years at West Point, would
not bend in a hurricane wind, even if he had bent his loyalties from the Union
to the Confederacy after marrying a Virginia woman.

“Then the doctors must also tell you that I have not the
weeks left to design and supervise the building of your magnificent gun.” The
physics of such a marvelous cannon—for a moment the prospect allured him with
all the old intellectual force. But no. He must not think of such things. The
battle for his life was lost; he had made his peace with God.

De Chingé turned his gaze away from the white asylum walls
to gaze out on the Mississippi as it chugged and churned its way south toward
his beloved New Orleans. At least he would not live to see how the Union army
and navy had besmirched his natal city when they invaded. Uncouth Union
soldiers had no respect for grace and dignity personified in the loveliest city
in the world. They hadn’t left it to recover either. For the Union used the
city as a launching point to win this other war. They rolled northward from New
Orleans and southward along the Mississippi as relentless as the river.

Only Vicksburg, the Gibraltar of the West, stood in their
way.

“I know that the Union offered you a great deal of money to
design a weapon that would bring about a swifter end to the war,” Pemberton
said, maintaining his unyielding pose.

“Then you must also know that I declined the honor. I have
not the time left to live and enjoy their money. Nor have I heirs to provide
for.” Although there was one quadroon demimondaine who deserved the price of
her freedom. He would like to bequeath something to the lovely Mathilde.

“I do not have money to offer you,” Pemberton said, almost
apologetically. “What I can offer you is life.”

De Chingé lifted an eyebrow, mocking the man’s audacity. “So
you claim the prerogative of God! Sir, the best doctors in the world can’t cure
my rotting lungs.”

“No, sir. But we have purchased an automaton from Lovelace
and Babbage. A very lifelike automaton with the face of one of our fallen
enlisted men. He was maimed, dying in a great deal of pain. And he was our best
forward observer. We decided the war needed his particular skills of
observation and his ability to draw those observations with pen and ink with
amazing detail. We commissioned the automaton to look exactly like him.
Unfortunately his mind was damaged at birth. He could not accept the new body.
He died anyway. The empty body awaits only one procedure to activate it.”

“Non, absolument, non. C’est impossible. C’est le blasphème!”
But there was the puzzle of perfecting the aim of a massive weapon, the
calculations of recoil, the balance of trajectory and size of a shell . . .

“It is possible” Pemberton said with some urgency. “Lord
Byron proved in the summer of ’16 that the soul is measurable, quantifiable,
and transferable. Our scientists have built an electric modulated transference
engine as outlined by Dr. John Polidari. The automaton will accommodate your
genius. All we need is your consent.” Pemberton leaned forward, the light of
fanatic zeal blazing in his eyes. “We can rid you forever of your consumption.
Your genius can live forever.”

“Lovelace and Babbage, eh? They do build magnificent
machines. I have used their unique codex system in some of my designs.” De
Chingé sighed and wished he hadn’t. His lungs immediately rebelled against the
influx of too much air. He coughed long and hard, again and again, until he
could not breathe. A sharp pain ripped through his torso. He’d cracked another
rib with his spasm. Ah, well, he had not much longer to endure the indignity of
dying.

“And if I do not consent, General? I have seen my death in
the sputum that stains my handkerchief. I have made my peace with God.”
I have so many more puzzles to solve. Each
as unique and wonderful as a beautiful woman. If I take the automatic body, I
can continue the puzzles, but I will have to give up my Mathilde, give up every
beautiful woman.

“Have you truly accepted an end to your work, and of you? I
know that the magnificence of a Lovelace and Babbage machine must tempt you,
sexless though the machines are. What man readily goes to his death when he has
an opportunity to live? When there is so much more work to do?”

“Lovelace and Babbage I trust. Polidari I do not. His
machine worked once. He has never managed to repeat the experiment with
success. What if your grand experiment fails?” If the body was so life like as
to be an exact replica of one particular man, could the body fool the lovely
Mathilde? Would he have time to take leave in New Orleans to find out? Once the
weapon was built of course.

“Then you die a few weeks earlier without the long,
drawn-out pain of fighting for air while your lungs collapse inch by inch and
your body leaks blood drop by drop.”

“The possibility of more unique and wonderful puzzles do
entice . . .” With gingerly care De Chingé drew a breath.

“Steady, Sergeant. Keep the balloon steady,” Captain
Thaddeus Hyatt-Forsythe whispered.

“As steady as the wind allows. Can’t afford to light the
engine or spread the aerolons,” Nichols replied, grizzled and the most
trustworthy balloon pilot in Grant’s army.