The Difference Engine by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

Mallory bade the King farewell a good mile from the Palace of Paleontology; he was unable to bear the fumes of glue any longer, and the van’s lurching had made him badly seasick. He staggered off with the heavy scrolls of libelous and anarchic bills bundled awkwardly in his sweating grip. Behind him, Jemmy and Tom set to eager glue-slapping on the virgin bricks of the Palace of Political Economy. Mallory propped the rolled bills against an ornate lamppost, and re-knotted his cloth mask over nose and mouth. His head spun evilly. Perhaps, he thought, that sticking-paste had had a bit of arsenic in it, or the ink some potent nauseous coal-derivative, for he felt poisoned, and weak in his very marrow. When he juggled up the bills again, their paper wrinkled in his sweating hands like the peeling skin of a drowned man. He had, it seemed, frustrated a lashing bite of the tout’s hydra-headed devilment. But this minor triumph seemed wretchedly small, when matched against the villain’s seemingly endless reservoirs of wicked ingenuity. Mallory was stumbling in darkness — while torn at will by invisible fangs . . . And yet Mallory had discovered a crucial piece of evidence: the tout was gone to earth in the West India Docks! To be so close to a chance to grapple with the scoundrel, and yet so far — it was enough to madden a man. Mallory stumbled badly on a slick lump of horse-dung, then swung the scrolls up onto his right shoulder, in an unstable heap. It was a useless fantasy to imagine confronting the tout — alone, unaided, while the man was miles away, back across the chaos of London. Mallory had almost reached the Palace now, and it had taken well-nigh all he had to manage the trick of it. He forced himself to concentrate on the matters at hand. He would haul the wretched bills to the Palace safety-box. They might prove useful as evidence someday, and they could take the place of Madeline’s wedding-clock. He would take up the clock, he would find a way to flee this cursed London, and he would re-join his family, as he should have done. In green Sussex, in the bosom of the good auld clawney, there would be quiet, and sense, and safety. The gears of his life would begin to mesh once more in order. Mallory lost his grip on the rolls of paper and they cascaded violently to the tarmac, one of them hitting him a smart blow across the shins as it bounded free. He gathered them up, groaning, and tried the other shoulder. In the rancid mists down Knightsbridge a procession of some kind was moving steadily across the road. Ghost-like, blurred by distance and the Stink, they appeared to be military gurneys, the squat treaded monsters of the Crimean War. Fog muffled a heavy chugging and the faint repeated clank of jointed iron. One after another they passed, while Mallory peered forward, standing quite still and gripping his burden. Each gurney hauled a linked articulated caisson. These wains appeared to be canvas-shrouded cannon, with men, foot-soldiers in canvas-colored drab, clustered atop the cannons like barnacles, with a sea-urchin bristle of bayoneted rifles. At least a dozen war-gurneys, possible a score. Mallory rubbed his aching eyes in puzzled disbelief. At Brompton Concourse he saw a trio of masked and batted figures scamper off with light-foot tread from a broken doorway; but no one offered trouble to him. Some civil authority had erected saw-horses at the gate of the Palace of Paleontology. But the barricades were not manned; it was a simple matter to slip past them and up the fog-slick stone stairs to the main entrance. The Palace’s great double-doors were thickly curtained in a protective shroud of wet canvas, hung from the brick archway down to the very flagstones. The thick damp fabric smelled sharply of chloride of lime. Behind the canvas, the Palace doors were slightly ajar. Mallory eased his way inside. Servants were draping the furniture of lobby and drawing-room with thin white sheets of muslin. Others, a peculiar crowd of them, swept, and mopped, and dabbled earnestly at the cornices with long jointed feather-dusters. London women, and a large number of children of all ages, hustled about wearing borrowed Palace cleaning-aprons, looking anxious but vaguely exalted. Mallory realized at length that these strangers must be the families of the Palace staff, come to seek shelter and security within the grandest public building known to them. And someone — Kelly the major-domo, presumably, with help from whatever savants still remained on the premises — had pluckily organized the refugees. Mallory strode toward the lobby-desk, lugging his paper burden. These were sturdy working-class folk, he realized. Their stations might be humble, but they were Britons through and through. They were not daunted; they had rallied in instinctive defense of their scientific institutions and the civil values of law and property. He realized, with a heart-lifting wash of patriotic relief, that the lurching madness of Chaos had reached its limit. Within the faltering maelstrom, a nucleation of spontaneous order had arisen! Now, like a cloudy muck resolving into crystals, everything would change. Mallory flung his hated burden behind the deserted counter of the lobby-desk. In one corner, a telegraph was clacking fitfully, new punch-tape spooling by fits and starts upon the floor. Mallory observed this small but significant miracle, and sighed, like a diver whose head has broken water. The Palace air was sharp with disinfectant, but blissfully breathable. Mallory stripped the filthy mask from his face and stuffed it in his pocket. Somewhere in this blessed shelter, he thought, there was food to be had. Perhaps a wash-basin, and soap, and sulphurated powder for the fleas that had been creeping about his waistband since morning. Eggs. Ham. Restorative wine. Postage-stamps, laundresses, shoe-blacking — the whole miraculous concatenated network of Civilization. A stranger came marching toward Mallory across the lobby floor: a British soldier, an Artillery subaltern, in elegant dress-gear. He wore a double-breasted blue coatee, bright with chevrons, brass buttons, and gold-braided epaulets. His sleek trousers had a red military stripe. He wore a round, gold-laced forage-cap, and a buttoned pistol-holster at his neat white waistbelt. With his shoulders square, spine straight, and head high, this handsome young man approached with a stern look of purpose. Mallory straightened quickly, taken aback, even vaguely shamed, to compare his rumpled, sweat-stained civilian garb to this crisp military paragon. Then, with a leap of surprise, happy recognition dawned. “Brian!” Mallory shouted. “Brian, boy!” The soldier quickened his pace. “Ned — why it is you, ain’t it!” said Mallory’s brother, a tender smile parting his new Crimean beard. He seized Mallory’s hand in both his own, and shook it heartily, with a solid strength. Mallory noted with surprise and pleasure that military discipline and scientific diet had put inches and pounds on the lad. Brian Mallory, the family’s sixth-born child, had often seemed a bit quiet and timid, but now Mallory’s little brother stood a good six-four in his military boots, and had the look in his creased blue eyes of a man who had seen the world. “We’ve been a-waiting for you, Ned,” Brian told him. His bold voice had slipped a bit, by some old habit, into the remembered tone of their childhood. For Mallory, it was a plaintive echo from deep memory: the demands of a crowd of little children upon their eldest brother. Somehow, this familiar call, far from tiring or burdening Mallory, rallied him immediately into a mental second-wind. Confusion vanished like a mist and he felt stronger, more capable; the very presence of young Brian had recalled him to himself. “Damme but it’s good to see you!” Mallory blurted. “It’s good you’re back at last,” Brian said. “We heard tale of a fire in your room — and you vanished into London, none knew where! That put me and Tom in a very mizmaze!” “Tom is here too, eh?” “We both come into London in Tom’s little gurney, ” Brian told him. His face fell. “With dire news, Ned, and no ways to tell it, save to your face.” “What is it?” Mallory said, bracing himself. “Is it . . . is it Dad?” “No, Ned. Dad’s all right; or right as he ever is, these days. It is poor Madeline!” Mallory groaned. “Not the bride-to-be. What is it now?” “Well, it’s to do with my mate, Jerry Rawlings,” Brian muttered, squaring his epauletted shoulders with a look of embarrassed pain. “Jerry wanted to do right by our Madeline, Ned, for he always talked of her, and lived very clean for her sake; but he’s received such a letter at home, Ned, such a foul and dreadful thing! It quite knocked the heart out of him!” “What letter, for God’s sake?” “Well, it warn’t signed, ‘cept ‘One Who Knows’ — but the writer knew so much about us, the family I mean, all our littlest doings, and said that Madeline had . . . been unchaste. ‘Cept in rougher words.” Mallory felt a surge of hot fury rush to his face. “I understand,” he said, in a quiet, choked voice. “Go on.” “Well, their engagement is broken, as you might guess. Poor Maddy has the vapors like she’s never had them before. She liked to do herself an injury, and does nothing now but sit alone in the kitchen and cry rivers.” Mallory was silent, his mind grating over Brian’s information. “I’ve been away a deal of time, in India, and Crimea,” Brian said, in a low halting voice. “I don’t know how matters stand, exactly. Tell me true — you don’t think there could be aught to what that wicked gossip told to Jerry? Do you?” “What? Our own Madeline? My God, Brian, she’s a Mallory girl!” Mallory slammed his fist on the counter. “No, it is slander; it’s a foul deliberate attack on the honor of our family!” “How . . . why would anyone do such a thing to us, Ned?” asked Brian, with a strange look of plaintive fury. “I know why it was done — and I know the villain who did it.” Brian’s eyes went wide. “You do?” “Yes; he is the fellow who burnt my rooms. And I know where he is hiding, at this very moment!” Brian gazed at him in astonished silence. “I made an enemy of him, in a dark affair-of-state,” Mallory said, measuring his words. “I’m a man of some influence now, Brian; and I’ve uncovered the kind of secret, silent plottings that a man like yourself, an honest soldier of the Crown, could scarcely credit!” Brian shook his head slowly. “I’ve seen pagan vileness done in India to make strong men sick,” he said. “But to see it done in England is more than I can bear!” Brian tugged at his whiskers, a gesture Mallory found oddly familiar. “I knew it was right to come to you, Ned. You always seem to see straight through things, the way none else can. Say on, then! What shall we do about this horrid business? What can we do?” “That pistol in your holster — is it in working order?” Brian’s eyes brightened. “Truth to tell, ’tisn’t regulation! A war trophy, gotten off a dead Tzarist officer . . .” He began to unlatch his holster-flap. Mallory shook his head quickly, looking about the lobby. “You’re not afraid to use your pistol, if you have to do so?” “Afraid?” Brian said. “If you warn’t a civilian, Ned, I might take that question ill.” Mallory stared at him. Brian met his eyes boldly. “It’s for the family, ain’t it? That’s what we fought the Russkies for — for the sake of the folks at home.” “Where is Thomas?” “He’s eating in the — well, I’ll show you.” Brian led the way into the Palace saloon. The scholarly precincts were crowded with babbling, raucous diners, working-folk mostly, forking up potatoes off the Palace china as if famished. Young Tom Mallory, dressed rather flash in a short linen coat and checked trousers, sat at table with a companion, over the remains of fried fish and lemonade. The other man was Ebenezer Fraser. “Ned!” cried Tom. “I knew you’d come!” He rose, and seized another chair. “Sit down with us, sit down! Your friend Mr. Fraser here has been kind enough to buy us lunch.” “And how are you. Dr. Mallory?” Fraser inquired glumly. “A bit fatigued,” Mallory told him, sitting, “but nothing a bite of food and a huckle-buff wouldn’t set to rights. How are you, Fraser? Quite recovered, I hope?” He lowered his voice. “And what line of clever nonsense have you been telling my poor brothers, pray?” Fraser said nothing. “Sergeant Fraser’s a London policeman,” Mallory said. “Of the dark-lantern variety.” “Truly?” Tom blurted, alarmed. A waiter worked his way toward the table, one of the regular staff, looking harried and apologetic. “Dr. Mallory — the Palace larder’s a bit low, sir. Simple fish-and-taters would be best, sir, if you don’t mind it.” “That will be fine. And if you could mix a huckle-buff — well, never mind. Bring me coffee. Strong and black.” Fraser watched the waiter leave, with melancholy patience. “You must have had a lively night,” Fraser remarked, when the man was out of ear-shot. Both Tom and Brian were watching Fraser with a new, half-resentful suspicion. “I have discovered that the tout — Captain Swing, that is — has gone to earth in the West India Docks,” Mallory said. “He’s attempting to incite a general insurrection!” Fraser’s lips tightened. “He has an Engine printing-press, and a rabble of confederates. He’s printing seditious documents by the scores and hundreds. I confiscated a few specimens this morning — obscene, libelous, Luddite filth!” “You’ve been industrious.” Mallory snorted. “I’ll shortly be a deal busier yet, Fraser. I mean to hunt the wretch down directly and put a sharp end to this!” Brian leaned forward. “It was this ‘Captain Swing’ who wrote that lying slander against our Maddy, then, was it?” “Yes.” Tom sat up straight in his chair, with a flush of excitement. “West India Docks. Where’s that, then?” “Down on the Limehouse Reach, clear across London,” Fraser said. “That don’t matter a hang,” Tom said quickly. “I’ve my Zephyr!” Mallory was startled. “You brought the Brotherhood’s racer?” Tom shook his head. “Not that old banger, Ned, but the latest model! She’s a spanking-new little beauty, sitting in your Palace stables. Took us all the way from Sussex in a morning, and would have gone faster yet, if I hadn’t had a coal-wain hitched to her.” He laughed. “We can go wherever we like!” “Let’s not lose our heads, gentlemen,” Fraser warned. They fell unwillingly silent for a moment, as the waiter deftly set Mallory’s food before him. The sight of fried plaice and sliced potatoes made Mallory’s stomach knot with a famished pang. “We are free British subjects and may go as we please,” Mallory said firmly, then seized his silverware and fell to at once. “I can only call that foolish,” said Fraser. “Riotous mobs are roaming the streets, and the man you seek is as cunning as an adder.” Mallory grunted derisively. Fraser was dour. “Dr. Mallory, it is my duty to see that you don’t come to harm! We can’t have you stirring up dangerous serpent’s-nests in the vilest slums in London!” Mallory gulped hot coffee. “You know that he means to destroy me,” he told Fraser, locking eyes with him. “If I don’t finish him now, while I’ve the chance, he’ll slowly peck me into pieces. There’s not a dashed thing you can do that can protect me! This man is not like you and I, Fraser! He is beyond the pale! The stakes are life and death — it is him, or me! You know that is the truth.” Fraser, struck by Mallory’s argument, looked shaken. Tom and Brian, even more alarmed at this new revelation of the depth of their troubles, glanced at one another in confusion, then turned to glare angrily at Fraser. Fraser spoke reluctantly. “Let’s not act hastily! Once the fog lifts, and law and order have returned –” “Captain Swing lives within a fog that never lifts,” Mallory said. Brian broke in, with a swipe of his gilded sleeve. “I see no point in this, Mr. Fraser! You have deliberately deceived my brother Thomas and myself! I can put no credit in any of your counsel!” “Brian’s right!” said Tom. He regarded Fraser with a mingled scorn and wonder. “This man claimed he was a friend of yours, Ned, and got me and Brian to talking free-and-easy about you! Now he’s a-trying to order us about!” Tom shook his clenched fist, sinewy and work-hardened. “I mean to teach this Captain Swing a sharp lesson! If I need to start with you, Mr. Fraser, then I stand a-ready!” “Softly now, lads,” Mallory told his brothers. Other diners nearby had begun to stare. Mallory deliberately wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Fortune favors us, Mr. Fraser,” he said quietly. “I have acquired a pistol. And young Brian is also armed.” “Oh, dear,” said Fraser. “I’m not afraid of Swing,” Mallory told him. “Remember, I knocked him flat at the Derby. Face-to-face, he’s nought but a yellow cur.” “He is at the Docks, Mallory!” Fraser said. “D’ye think you’re going to waltz and polka through a riot in the hardest part of London?” “We Mallory lads aren’t fancy-jacks from any dancing academy,” Mallory told the policeman. “D’ye think the London poor more frightful to face than Wyoming savages?” “Actually, yes,” Fraser said slowly. “Considerably worse, I should judge.” “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Fraser! Don’t waste our time with this trifling! We must grapple once and for all with this slippery phantom, and a better chance will never come! In the name of sanity and justice, put an end to your useless, officious grizzling!” Fraser sighed. “And suppose, in this brave expedition, that you are cunningly trapped and murdered, like your colleague Rudwick? What then? How would I answer to my superiors?” But now Brian fixed Fraser with a soldier’s steely eye. “Did you ever have a little sister, Mr. Fraser? Did you ever have to watch that girl’s happiness shattered like a china cup, trampled by a monster? And with her broken heart, the honest heart of a Crimean hero, whose simple, manly intention was to make her his bride –” Fraser groaned aloud. “Enough!” Brian leaned back, looking somewhat crestfallen at the interruption. Fraser smoothed his dark lapels with both hands. “It seems the fated time for risks,” he admitted, with a lopsided shrug, and a passing wince. “I haven’t had a bit of luck since I met you. Dr. Mallory, and I daresay I’m due for a change of fortune.” Suddenly, his eyes glittered. “Who’s to say that we might not bag the scoundrel, eh? Arrest him! He’s clever, but four brave men might catch the nasty wretch with his guard down, whilst he swaggers about in poor stricken London like some Jacobin prince.” Fraser scowled, his lean face twisting with genuine anger. It was an unexpectedly fearsome sight. “Fortune favors the brave,” Brian said. “And God looks after fools,” muttered Fraser. He leaned forward intently, plucking his trouser-legs from his bony knees. “This is no light matter, gentlemen! No lark for amateurs. This is dire work! We shall be taking the law, and our lives, and our honor, into our own hands. If it is to be done at all, it must be done in the strictest and most permanent secrecy.” Mallory, sensing victory, spoke up with an adroitness that surprised even himself. “My brothers and I respect your special expertise, Sergeant Fraser! If you will guide us toward justice, then we will gladly place ourselves at your command. You need never doubt our discretion or our resolve. The sacred honor of our own dear sister is at stake.” Tom and Brian seemed taken aback at this sudden change of tack, for they still distrusted Fraser, but Mallory’s somber pledge brooked no objection from them. They followed his lead. “You’ll never see me peaching!” Tom declared. “Not to my grave!” “I should think the sworn word of a British soldier still accounts,” Brian said. “Then we shall try the venture,” Fraser said, with a wry look of fatalism. “I must get steam up in the Zephyr!” Tom said, rising from his chair. “Half-an-hour my little beauty takes, from a cold start.” Mallory nodded. He would put every minute to good use.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *