The Constantine Affliction (23 page)

He flagged down a cab, settling for one of the despised two-wheeled open carts despite how dreadfully exposed they always left him feeling. He directed the cab to King’s College, an institution founded just a few decades earlier to provide advanced education to the middle class and to allow secular schooling for nonconformists of all stripes. Pimm, who had attended Magdalen College at Oxford, looked upon the upstart King’s with a certain amount of reflexive disdain, though he was in sympathy with the goals of its founding, and was immensely fond of a gentleman who worked in the school of applied sciences, with a specialty in alchemy.

The cab dropped him a short walk from the wing where Professor Conqueror kept his office. Pimm strolled along, marveling as always at the astonishing youth of the students walking and talking in little groups all about him. Had he ever been so young? He’d certainly never been so
earnest
, or serious about his schoolwork, but then, he’d had the family fortune to fall back on. Seriousness was not a necessity for him.

Once up the broad stone steps and into the musty hallways, he climbed a flight of stairs and proceeded down a narrow hall until he reached an office tucked away around a final corner. The door was open, and the office beyond was graced with overflowing bookshelves, a large dead plant in a pot, and a massive desk that must have dated back to the founding of Londinium, and seen hard use ever since.

Pimm rapped the doorframe with his knuckles, and Professor William Conqueror—oh, the teasing he must have suffered as a boy with a name like
that
!—raised one sausage-thick finger and continued peering at the pages of an immense book on the desk before him. “Just a minute, just a minute, I’m on the trail of a specious argument… ah ha!” He slammed the volume shut and looked at Pimm triumphantly. “Begs the question, doesn’t it? He’s got so many layers of postulates that it takes a bit to unsnarl, but the whole towering edifice rests on an unsupported and indefensible premise, as if I’m supposed to believe him just because he
asserts—
”

Professor Conqueror blinked. He was a big red-headed bear of a man, like something from an ancestral English nightmare of Viking raiders, with more beard than was good for him. “Pimm! If you’re here hoping for more of my good brandy, I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time, because it has all mysteriously vanished.”

“I’ve come for your brain, not your bottle,” Pimm said, lifting a heap of books from a chair and setting them aside before seating himself in their place.

“Oh ho. Another mysterious crime scene reeking of strange chemicals? Did you bring a bottle of peculiar residues scraped from the palms of a corpse? I do so look forward to your little puzzles.”

“I’m actually looking for information about a—well, I suppose you’d call him one of your colleagues. Bertram Oswald.”

Conqueror leaned back in his chair as best he could, though there wasn’t much room to do so. “Oswald, eh? I’m hardly an expert on the man, though we’ve met, of course, and I’m a member of the society he runs. Did you want to know anything in particular?”

“I don’t know
what
I want to know,” Pimm said honestly. “Why don’t you tell me whatever you find most interesting?”

“Mmmm.” Conqueror stroked his beard. “You puzzle me, Pimm. Oswald hardly seems like someone who’d run in any of your circles—neither criminal nor criminologist, and certainly not a gourmand or bon vivant.”

“Do you really need an explanation for my interest?” Pimm said. “I dare say I could make up something plausible, if you’d like.”

“Oh, no, don’t bother prevaricating on my account, you know I prefer it when matters are kept on a firmly theoretical basis anyway. All right. Oswald. The first thing you should know is, he has the most brilliant scientific mind in England.” Conqueror began to fill his pipe with his own blend of tobacco, which Pimm knew from bitter experience had a stench like rancid camel-hide. The professor said, meditatively, “Well, he may not be absolutely
the
greatest mind currently working in the sciences—there’s a young English mathematician who published a treatise on the binomial theorem seven or eight years ago that is frankly astonishing, and caused quite a stir in Europe. They say he’s working on a book about the dynamics of asteroids now, which I await keenly. He’ll be someone to keep a close eye on, if he lives up to his early promise. One can never tell with these young—”

Pimm, who was accustomed to Conqueror’s rather roundabout lecturing technique, provided a gentle nudge back toward the proper course: “You were saying about Oswald?”

“Ah, yes. Oswald is widely regarded as the most towering intellect to grace our nation since Newton. That said, precious little is known about him, or his family. He comes from money, I assume, or at least enough money to finance his own studies and experiments for many years. His first interest was in the biological sciences, and he spent some unspecified number of years abroad, in the jungles of Africa and South America, collecting specimens. Apparently he discovered some quite ground-breaking things about frogs or lizards or some such, though I misremember the details—it’s not my field. When he was not traveling, he lived in some great pile in the north someplace, where he had greenhouses full of exotic plants and laboratories and workshops aplenty. At some point he took an interest in alchemy, and that’s where his true genius blossomed. He studied the behavior of gases, and fluids, and plasma, and how to combine them. That’s how he made his fortune, or at least, his current fortune—occasionally popping up from the realms of pure research to produce something with a practical application. Alchemical lamps, improved batteries, innovative magnetic medical devices, that sort of thing. And of course he designed the new containment barriers and the dome erected a few years ago around the ruins of Whitechapel. His services to the country are legion, though I suspect they’re incidental—he does whatever interests him, and occasionally those interests intersect with the needs of the people. He even took a medical degree, some years ago, having become interested in maladies of the human body, infectious diseases, and the like—that’s how he first met the Queen, you know.”

Pimm raised an eyebrow. “No. I hadn’t heard?”

“He was studying the germ theory with Pasteur,” Conqueror said. “Oswald was instrumental in saving Prince Albert’s life, in fact. Of course, it was Pasteur’s innovations that made the difference, and say what you will about Oswald, he doesn’t try to take credit for the achievements of others—but I gather the Queen was grateful for his assistance, and their friendship, ah, blossomed from there.”

“And when Prince Albert’s infidelity was revealed, when the Affliction transformed him into a woman, Oswald and the Queen became…. more intimate. Or so the rumors say.”

Conqueror shrugged, puffing his foul pipe. “I am hardly intimate with the court, but I’ve heard the same rumors, yes. Oswald is by all accounts less interested in science now than in
society
, and having the Queen’s ear can’t hurt.”

“What do you mean society? You don’t mean… galas and things? Balls? Charities?” Pimm detested all such functions, except those which featured a well-stocked bar.

“No, no. I mean he wants to
improve
society. How many philosophers over the centuries have lamented the tendency of mankind toward evil, and laziness, and selfishness, and cruelty? How many men have dreamed of a better world, of societies that operated on sounder principles than ‘take what you can and don’t worry about the consequences’?”

“I would guess… easily eight or ten men,” Pimm said. “Perhaps as many as a dozen.”

“Ha,” Conqueror said. “The difference between most philosophers and Sir Bertram is that the latter is a
practical
man. When he sees a problem, he becomes obsessed with solving it. And the little nagging voice that most of us have in our heads—the voice that might say, ‘That’s insurmountable,’ or, ‘It’s more than one man can accomplish,’ or, ‘It’s really none of my business anyway’—Oswald doesn’t
have
that voice. He just… gets on with it.”

“Mmmm,” Pimm said. “One wonders what the voices in his head
do
say. So he’s proposed reforms to the Queen, then?”

“Indeed. And she is amenable, at least to some of them, or so I hear.”

“Of course she is,” Pimm said. “She’s always happy to support good ideas. She’s been ceding power to her ministers for decades. It’s really one of her more admirable qualities.”

“A bit problematic for Oswald, though. If he had an absolute monarch as his confidante instead, he’d be able to put a lot more of his ideas into practice. I’ve been to a few of his fundraisers and lectures, mostly just for the
hors d’oeuvre.
Some of his notions are… fairly radical.”

“Such as?”

“Sterilizing criminals.”

“Oh. Is
that
all.”

“The notion being that criminal behavior is an inherited trait, like hair or eye color. If criminals can’t breed, they can’t pass on those traits.” Conqueror blew a few malformed smoke rings. “Of course, even if you grant Oswald’s premise, the problem with sterilizing criminals is that, by the time they’re caught, they’ve often bred already, sometimes quite often. So Oswald wants to catch them before their criminal tendencies manifest themselves.”

“Seems a bit tricky,” Pimm said, “since a criminal is defined as one who commits a
crime
. Catching a criminal before they commit a crime would be like catching a bird before it hatched. You can’t do it. It’s not a
bird
yet.”

“But if you knew it was going to be a hideous terrible bird while it was still in the egg, you could always smash the egg,” Conqueror said. “Not that Oswald suggests getting to these young criminals quite
that
early. He was a member of the Phrenological Society—”

“Phrenology? Isn’t that, what, looking at bumps on a person’s head to find out the nature of their character?” Pimm said. “Didn’t that go out of fashion twenty years ago?”

“Oswald remains a proponent of the theory, in a way,” Conqueror said. “Though he now believes you can observe fluctuations in an individual’s personal magnetic field—using a device of his own invention, of course—to discern whether they have, say, musical aptitude, or an innate comprehension of spatial relationships, or deeply-buried murderous impulses. Scan children, and if they show undesirable traits…”

Pimm was aghast. “What? Make eunuchs of them?”

Conqueror shook his head. “No, he has some sort of chemical approach, I understand, to prevent reproduction.”

“A chemical of his own invention, I don’t doubt,” Pimm said.

Conqueror nodded. “True, but then, who else would create such a thing? There’s not a great deal of demand for nostrums that sterilize
children
. Oswald believes that through an aggressive program of early screening and intervention, we could eliminate criminal tendencies within a few generations.”

Pimm, who would have been saddened by the extinction of criminals in the same way a lepidopterist would be saddened by the extinction of butterflies, frowned. “But what does ‘criminal tendencies’ even mean? All men have the capacity for criminal acts, if circumstances turn against them—consider the proverbial man who steals bread only to feed his starving family.”

“I didn’t say I agreed with his idea,” Conqueror said. “Merely that Oswald espouses it. Frankly, I find it abhorrent. What if his bloody machine is wrong—even
once
? And no machine is perfect. Moreover, how long before he expands his definition of ‘criminal’ to apply to anyone who offends his personal sensibilities? To extend to… I’m sure he’d call them ‘deviants’… of various stripes—political, personal, or otherwise?”

Pimm nodded. Conqueror was what one might call a “confirmed bachelor,” and while Pimm had made a point of never speculating on the man’s personal proclivities or the reasons for his unmarried status, he’d occasionally wondered. “Very troubling.”

“Indeed. But Oswald’s ideas haven’t gotten much traction—too many objections from too many groups, fortunately, and all the ministers look terribly askance at Oswald and his wild ideas, and wish the Queen would stop spending so much time with him. Oswald is entirely too willing to disrupt the status quo. But, fortunately, he is also… mercurial. He’s already effectively abandoned his magnetic personality adjudicators. He’s always leaping off on some new passion, leaving projects half-done once they cease to amuse him.”

“Hmmm. Any idea about his latest interests?”

“I hear he’s been bothering the astronomers lately,” Conqueror said. “Turning his attention to the stars.”

“At least he’s not likely to do much damage up there,” Pimm said.

Conqueror coughed. “You haven’t heard the rumors about the
aurora anglais
, then?”

“What, the lights in the sky? Frankly, I’ve barely
seen
them.”

“You tend to spend your evenings in well-lit rooms, as I recall, or in the bright streets of central London. In the country, with the sky unstained by the light of a thousand street lamps, the
aurora
are… rather more noticeable.”

“It’s just the Northern Lights, though.” Pimm frowned. “I mean, you can see them in Scotland from time to time anyway, I’ve heard. They’ve just been… more common, lately, yes?”

“It’s virtually unheard of to see the
aurora borealis
this far south,” Conqueror said. “And every night for two months? Unprecedented. And those who have seen the
borealis
before say it’s not the same, here—the colors are different. The patterns. The
intensity of the lights.”

“Where does Oswald come in?”

Conqueror glanced toward the door, as if just now noticing that it still stood open. Pimm stood, looked into the empty hall, and returned. “We’re in private,” he said, shutting the door behind him.

The old professor smiled tightly. “It’s silly of me, it’s just, Oswald has given a great deal of money to the college, especially to the Alchemy department—you know, we were calling it the Chemistry department when I started here, wanting to escape images of medieval men in star-patterned robes boiling beakers of lion’s blood, but Oswald insisted the old name was best… Sorry, I’ve drifted again. Ah. Yes. It occurs to me that I shouldn’t speak ill of someone who has so generously contributed to the institution where I am employed.”