William Gibson & Bruce Sterling - The Difference Engine

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The Difference Engine
William Gibson & Bruce Sterling
Copyright 1991
FIRST ITERATION
The Angel of Goliad
Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel:
aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.
A villa, a garden, a balcony.
Erase the balcony's wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected
sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair's wheel-spokes.
The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard
loom.
These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and
information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.
Her name is Sybil Gerard.
Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed,
flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at
her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium.
Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible grace --
metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny
unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon.
Like starlings, Sybil thinks.
The airship's lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. Effortlessly, with the
incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London:
the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance.
Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and
memory.
She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand,
pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about her --
till, by the walls of Newgate, the shadow of her father's hanging falls . . .
And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway -- one where it is always
evening . . .
It is January 15, 1855.
A room in Grand's Hotel, Piccadilly.
One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the door's cut-glass knob. Another was
draped with clothing: a woman's fringed mantelet, a mud-crusted skirt of heavy worsted, a man's
checked trousers and cutaway coat.
Two forms lay beneath the bedclothes of the laminated-maple four-poster, and off in the iron
grip of winter Big Ben bellowed ten o'clock, great hoarse calliope sounds, the coal-fired breath
of London.
Sybil slid her feet through icy linens to the warmth of the ceramic bottle in its wrap of
flannel. Her toes brushed his shin. The touch seemed to start him from deep deliberation. That was
how he was, this Dandy Mick Radley.
She'd met Mick Radley at Laurent's Dancing Academy, down Windmill Street. Now that she knew
him, he seemed more the sort for Kellner's in Leicester Square, or even the Portland Rooms. He was
always thinking, scheming, muttering over something in his head. Clever, clever. It worried her.
And Mrs. Winterhalter wouldn't have approved, for the handling of "political gentlemen" required
delicacy and discretion, qualities Mrs. Winterhalter believed she herself had a-plenty, while
crediting none to her girls.
"No more dollymopping, Sybil," Mick said. One of his pronouncements, something about which
he'd made up his clever mind.
Sybil grinned up at him, her face half-hidden by the blanket's warm edge. She knew he liked
the grin. Her wicked-girl grin. He can't mean that, she thought. Make a joke of it, she told
herself. "But if I weren't a wicked dollymop, would I be here with you now?"
"No more playing bobtail."
"You know I only go with gentlemen."
Mick sniffed, amused. "Call me a gentleman, then?"
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"A very flash gentleman," Sybil said, flattering him. "One of the fancy. You know I don't care
for the Rad Lords. I spit on 'em, Mick."
Sybil shivered, but not unhappily, for she'd run into a good bit of luck here, full of steak-
and-taters and hot chocolate, in bed between clean sheets in a fashionable hotel. A shiny new
hotel with central steam-heat, though she'd gladly have traded the restless gurgling and banging
of the scrolled gilt radiator for the glow of a well-banked health.
And he was a good-looking cove, this Mick Radley, she had to admit, dressed very flash, had
the tin and was generous with it, and he'd yet to demand anything peculiar or beastly. She knew it
wouldn't last, as Mick was a touring gent from Manchester, and gone soon enough. But there was
profit in him, and maybe more when he left her, if she made him feel sorry about it, and generous.
Mick reclined into fat feather-pillows and slid his manicured fingers behind his spit-curled
head. Silk nightshirt all frothy with lace down the front -- only the best for Mick. Now he seemed
to want to talk a bit. Men did, usually, after a while -- about their wives, mostly.
But for Dandy Mick, it was always politics. "So, you hate the Lordships, Sybil?"
"Why shouldn't I?" Sybil said. "I have my reasons."
"I should say you do," Mick said slowly, and the look he gave her then, of cool superiority,
sent a shiver through her.
"What d'ye mean by that, Mick?"
"I know your reasons for hating the Government. I have your number."
Surprise seeped into her, then fear. She sat up in bed. There was a taste in her mouth like
cold iron.
"You keep your card in your bag," he said. "I took that number to a rum magistrate I know. He
ran it through a government Engine for me, and printed up your Bow Street file, rat-a-tat-tat,
like fun." He smirked. "So I know all about you, girl. Know who you are . . ."
She tried to put a bold face on it. "And who's that, then, Mr. Radley?"
"No Sybil Jones, dearie. You're Sybil Gerard, the daughter of Walter Gerard, the Luddite
agitator."
He'd raided her hidden past.
Machines, whirring somewhere, spinning out history.
Now Mick watched her face, smiling at what he saw there, and she recognized a look she'd seen
before, at Laurent's, when first he'd spied her across the crowded floor. A hungry look.
Her voice shook. "How long have you known about me?"
"Since our second night. You know I travel with the General. Like any important man, he has
enemies. As his secretary and man-of-affairs, I take few chances with strangers." Mick put his
cruel, deft little hand on her shoulder. "You might have been someone's agent. It was business."
Sybil flinched away. "Spying on a helpless girl," she said at last. "You're a right bastard,
you are!"
But her foul words scarcely seemed to touch him -- he was cold and hard, like a judge or a
lordship. "I may spy, girl, but I use the Government's machinery for my own sweet purposes. I'm no
copper's nark, to look down my nose at a revolutionary like Walter Gerard -- no matter what the
Rad Lords may call him now. Your father was a hero."
He shifted on the pillow. "My hero -- that was Walter Gerard. I saw him speak, on the Rights
of Labour, in Manchester. He was a marvel -- we all cheered till our throats was raw! The good old
Hell-Cats . . ." Mick's smooth voice had gone sharp and flat, in a Mancunian tang. "Ever hear tell
of the Hell-Cats, Sybil? In the old days?"
"A street-gang," Sybil said. "Rough boys in Manchester."
Mick frowned. "We was a brotherhood! A friendship youth-guild! Your father knew us well. He
was our patron politician, you might say."
"I'd prefer it if you didn't speak of my father, Mr. Radley."
Mick shook his head at her impatiently. "When I heard they'd tried and hanged him" -- the
words like ice behind her ribs -- "me and the lads, we took up torches and crowbars, and we ran
hot and wild . . . That was Ned Ludd's work, girl! Years ago . . ." He picked delicately at the
front of his nightshirt. " 'Tis not a tale I tell to many. The Government's Engines have long
memories."
She understood it now -- Mick's generosity and his sweet-talk, the strange hints he'd aimed at
her, of secret plans and better fortune, marked cards and hidden aces. He was pulling her strings,
making her his creature. The daughter of Walter Gerard was a fancy prize, for a man like Mick.
She pulled herself out of bed, stepping across icy floorboards in her pantalettes and chemise.
She dug quickly, silently, through the heap of her clothing. The fringed mantelet, the jacket,
the great sagging cage of her crinoline skirt. The jingling white cuirass of her corset.
"Get back in bed," Mick said lazily. "Don't get your monkey up. 'Tis cold out there." He shook
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his head. " 'Tis not like you think, Sybil."
She refused to look at him, struggling into her corset by the window, where frost-caked glass
cut the upwashed glare of gaslight from the street. She cinched the corset's laces tight across
her back with a quick practiced snap of her wrists.
"Or if it is," Mick mused, watching her, " 'tis only in small degree."
Across the street, the opera had let out -- gentry in their cloaks and top-hats. Cab-horses,
their backs in blankets, stamped and shivered on the black macadam. White traces of clean suburban
snow still clung to the gleaming coachwork of some lordship's steam-gurney. Tarts were working the
crowd. Poor wretched souls. Hard indeed to find a kind face amid those goffered shirts and diamond
studs, on such a cold night. Sybil turned toward Mick, confused, angry, and very much afraid. "Who
did you tell about me?"
"Not a living soul," Mick said, "not even my friend the General. And I won't be peaching on
you. Nobody's ever said Mick Radley's indiscreet. So get back in bed."
"I shan't," Sybil said, standing straight, her bare feet freezing on the floorboards. "Sybil
Jones may share your bed -- but the daughter of Walter Gerard is a personage of substance!"
Mick blinked at her, surprised. He thought it over, rubbing his narrow chin, then nodded. "
'Tis my sad loss, then. Miss Gerard." He sat up in bed and pointed at the door, with a dramatic
sweep of his arm. "Put on your skirt, then, and your brass-heeled dolly-boots. Miss Gerard, and
out the door with you and your substance. But 'twould be a great shame if you left. I've uses for
a clever girl."
"I should say you do, you blackguard," said Sybil, but she hesitated. He had another card to
play -- she could sense it in the set of his face.
He grinned at her, his eyes slitted. "Have you ever been to Paris, Sybil?"
"Paris?" Her breath clouded in midair.
"Yes," he said, "the gay and the glamorous, next destination for the General, when his London
lecture tour is done." Dandy Mick plucked at his lace cuffs. "What those uses are, that I
mentioned, I shan't as yet say. But the General is a man of deep stratagem. And the Government of
France have certain difficulties that require the help of experts . . . " He leered triumphantly.
"But I can see that I bore you, eh?"
Sybil shifted from foot to foot. "You'll take me to Paris, Mick," she said slowly, "and that's
the true bill, no snicky humbugging?"
"Strictly square and level. If you don't believe me, I've a ticket in my coat for the Dover
ferry."
Sybil walked to the brocade armchair in the corner, and tugged at Mick's greatcoat. She
shivered uncontrollably, and slipped the greatcoat on. Fine dark wool, like being wrapped in warm
money.
"Try the right front pocket," Mick told her. "The card-case." He was amused and confident --
as if it were funny that she didn't trust him. Sybil thrust her chilled hands into both pockets.
Deep, plush-lined . . .
Her left hand gripped a lump of hard cold metal. She drew out a nasty little pepperbox
derringer. Ivory handle, intricate gleam of steel hammers and brass cartridges, small as her hand
but heavy.
"Naughty," said Mick, frowning. "Put it back, there's a girl."
Sybil put the thing away, gently but quickly, as if it were a live crab. In the other pocket
she found his card-case, red morocco leather; inside were business cards, cartes-de-visite with
his Engine-stippled portrait, a London train timetable.
And an engraved slip of stiff creamy parchment, first-class passage on the Newcomen, out of
Dover.
"You'll need two tickets, then," she hesitated, "if you really mean to take me."
Mick nodded, conceding the point. "And another for the train from Cherbourg, too. And nothing
simpler. I can wire for tickets, downstairs at the lobby desk."
Sybil shivered again, and wrapped the coat closer. Mick laughed at her. "Don't give me that
vinegar phiz. You're still thinking like a dollymop; stop it. Start thinking flash, or you'll be
of no use to me. You're Mick's gal now -- a high-flyer."
She spoke slowly, reluctantly. "I've never been with any man who knew I was Sybil Gerard."
That was a lie, of course -- there was Egremont, the man who had mined her. Charles Egremont had
known very well who she was. But Egremont no longer mattered -- he lived in a different world,
now, with his po-faced respectable wife, and his respectable children, and his respectable seat in
Parliament.
And Sybil hadn't been dollymopping, with Egremont. Not exactly, anyway. A matter of degree . .
.
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She could tell that Mick was pleased at the lie she'd told him. It had flattered him.
Mick opened a gleaming cigar-case, extracted a cheroot, and lit it in the oily flare of a
repeating match, filling the room with the candied smell of cherry tobacco.
"So now you feel a bit shy with me, do you?" he said at last. "Well, I prefer it that way.
What I know, that gives me a bit more grip on you, don't it, than mere tin."
His eyes narrowed. "It's what a cove knows that counts, ain't it, Sybil? More than land or
money, more than birth. Information. Very flash."
Sybil felt a moment of hatred for him, for his ease and confidence. Pure resentment, sharp and
primal, but she crushed her feelings down. The hatred wavered, losing its purity, turning to
shame. She did hate him -- but only because he truly knew her. He knew how far Sybil Gerard had
fallen, that she had been an educated girl, with airs and graces, as good as any gentry girl,
once.
From the days of her father's fame, from her girlhood, Sybil could remember Mick Radley's
like. She knew the kind of boy that he had been. Ragged angry factory-boys, penny-a-score, who
would crowd her father after his torchlight speeches, and do whatever he commanded. Rip up
railroad tracks, kick the boiler-plugs out of spinning jennies, lay policemen's helmets by his
feet. She and her father had fled from town to town, often by night, living in cellars, attics,
anonymous rooms-to-let, hiding from the Rad police and the daggers of other conspirators. And
sometimes, when his own wild speeches had filled him with a burning elation, her father would
embrace her and soberly promise her the world. She would live like gentry in a green and quiet
England, when King Steam was wrecked. When Byron and his Industrial Radicals were utterly
destroyed . . .
But a hempen rope had choked her father into silence. The Radicals ruled on and on, moving
from triumph to triumph, shuffling the world like a deck of cards. And now Mick Radley was up in
the world, and Sybil Gerard was down.
She stood there silently, wrapped in Mick's coat. Paris. The promise tempted her, and when she
let herself believe him, there was a thrill behind it like lightning. She forced herself to think
about leaving her life in London. It was a bad, a low, a sordid life, she knew, but not entirely
desperate. She still had things to lose. Her rented room in Whitechapel, and dear Toby, her cat.
There was Mrs. Winterhalter, who arranged meetings between fast girls and political gentlemen.
Mrs. Winterhalter was a bawd, but ladylike and steady, and her sort was difficult to find. And she
would lose her two steady gentlemen, Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Kingsley, who each saw her twice a
month. Steady tin, that was, and kept her from the street. But Chadwick had a jealous wife in
Fulham, and, in a moment of foolishness, Sybil had stolen Kingsley's best cufflinks. She knew that
he suspected.
And neither man was half so free with his money as Dandy Mick.
She forced herself to smile at him, as sweetly as she could. "You're a rum'un, Mick Radley.
You know you've got my leading-strings. Perhaps I was vexed with you at first, but I'm not so
cakey as to not know a rum gentleman when I see one."
Mick blew smoke. "You are a clever one," he said admiringly. "You talk blarney like an angel.
You're not fooling me, though, so you needn't deceive yourself. Still, you're just the gal I need.
Get back in bed."
She did as he told her.
"Jove," he said, "your blessed feet are two lumps of ice. Why don't you wear little slippers,
eh?" He tugged at her corset, with determination. "Slippers, and black silk stockings," he said.
"A gal looks very flash in bed, with black silk stockings."
From the far end of the glass-topped counter, one of Aaron's shopmen gave Sybil the cold eye,
standing haughty and tall in his neat black coat and polished boots. He knew something was up --
he could smell it. Sybil waited for Mick to pay, hands folded before her on her skirt, demure, but
watching sidelong from beneath the blue fringe of her bonnet. Under her skirt, wadded through the
frame of her crinoline, was the shawl she'd nicked while Radley tried on top-hats.
Sybil had learned how to nick things -- she'd taught herself. It simply took nerve, that was
the secret. It took pluck. Look neither right nor left -- just grab, lift her skirt, stuff and
rustle. Then stand quite straight, with a psalm-singing look, like a gentry girl.
The floorman had lost interest in her; he was watching a fat man fingering watered-silk
braces. Sybil checked her skirt quickly. No bulge showed.
A young spotty-faced clerk, with inkstained thumbs, set Mick's number into a counter-top
credit-machine. Zip, click, a pull on the ebony-handled lever, and it was done. He gave Mick his
printed purchase-slip and did the parcel up in string and crisp green paper.
Aaron & Son would never miss a cashmere shawl. Perhaps their account-engines would, when they
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tallied up, but the loss couldn't hurt them; their shopping-palace was too big and too rich. All
those Greek columns, chandeliers of Irish crystal, a million mirrors -- room after gilded room,
stuffed with rubber riding boots and French-milled soap, walking-sticks, umbrellas, cutlery,
locked glass cases crammed with silver-plate and ivory brooches and lovely wind-up golden music-
boxes . . . And this was only one of a dozen in a chain. But for all of that, she knew, Aaron's
wasn't truly smart, not a gentry place.
But couldn't you just do anything with money in England, if you were clever? Someday Mr.
Aaron, a whiskery old merchant Jew from Whitechapel, would have a lordship, with a steam-gurney
waiting at the curb and his own coat of arms on the coachwork. The Rad Parliament wouldn't care
that Mr. Aaron was no Christian. They'd given Charles Darwin a lordship, and he said that Adam and
Eve were monkeys.
The liftman, gotten up in a Frenchified livery, drew the rattling brass gate aside for her.
Mick followed her in, his parcel tucked under his arm, and then they were descending.
They emerged from Aaron's into Whitechapel jostle. While Mick checked a street-map he took
from his coat, she gazed up at the shifting letters that ran the length of Aaron's frontage. A
mechanical frieze, a slow sort of kinotrope for Aaron's adverts, made all of little bits of
painted wood, clicking about each in turn, behind leaded sheets of bevel-glass. CONVERT YOUR
MANUAL PIANO, the jostling letters suggested, INTO A KASTNER'S PIANOLA.
The skyline west of Whitechapel was spikey with construction cranes, stark steel skeletons
painted with red lead against the damp. Older buildings were furred with scaffolding; what wasn't
being torn down, it seemed, to make way for the new, was being rebuilt in its image. There was a
distant huffing of excavation, and a tremulous feeling below the pavement, of vast machines
cutting some new underground line.
But now Mick turned left, without a word, and walked away, his hat cocked to one side, his
checkered trouser-legs flashing under the long hem of his greatcoat. She had to hurry to match his
step. A ragged boy with a numbered tin badge was sweeping mucky snow from the crossing; Mick
tossed him a penny without breaking stride and headed down the lane called Butcher Row.
She caught up and took his arm, past red and white carcasses dangling from their black iron
hooks, beef and mutton and veal, and thick men in their stained aprons crying their goods. London
women crowded there in scores, wicker baskets on their arms. Servants, cooks, respectable wives
with men at home. A red-faced squinting butcher lurched in front of Sybil with a double handful of
blue meat. "Hallo, pretty missus. Buy your gentleman my nice kidneys for pie!" Sybil ducked her
head and walked around him.
Parked barrows crowded the curb, where costers stood bellowing, their velveteen coats set off
with buttons of brass or pearl. Each had his numbered badge, though fully half the numbers were
slang, Mick claimed, as slang as the costers' weights and measures. There were blankets and
baskets spread on neatly chalked squares on the paving, and Mick was telling her of ways the
costers had to plump out shrunken fruit, and weave dead eels in with live. She smiled at the
pleasure he seemed to take in knowing such things, while hawkers yelped about their brooms and
soap and candles, and a scowling organ-grinder cranked, two-handed, at his symphony machine,
filling the street with a fast springy racket of bells, piano-wire, and steel.
Mick stopped beside a wooden trestle-table, kept by a squint-eyed widow in bombazine, the
stump of a clay pipe protruding from her thin lips. Arrayed before her were numerous vials of some
viscous-looking substance Sybil took to be a patent medicine, for each was pasted with a blue slip
of paper bearing the blurred image of a savage red Indian. "And what would this be, mother?" Mick
inquired, tapping one red-waxed cork with a gloved finger.
"Rock-oil, mister," she said, relinquishing the stem of her pipe, "much as they call Barbados
tar." Her drawling accent grated on the ear, but Sybil felt a pang of pity. How far the woman was
from whatever outlandish place she'd once called home.
"Really," Mick asked, "it wouldn't be Texian?"
" 'Healthful balm,' " the widow said, " 'from Nature's secret spring, the bloom of health and
life to man will bring.' Skimmed by the savage Seneca from the waters of Pennsylvania's great Oil
Creek, mister. Three pennies the vial and a guaranteed cure-all." The woman was peering up at Mick
now with a queer expression, her pale eyes screwed tight in nests of wrinkles, as though she might
recall his face. Sybil shivered.
"Good day to you, then, mother," Mick said, with a smile that somehow reminded Sybil of a vice
detective she'd known, a sandy little man who worked Leicester Square and Soho; the Badger, the
girls had called him.
"What is it?" she asked, taking Mick's arm as he turned to go. "What is it she's selling?"
"Rock-oil," Mick said, and she caught his sharp glance back at the hunched black figure. "The
General tells me it bubbles from the ground, in Texas . . . "
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Sybil was curious. "Is it a proper cure-all, then?"
"Never mind," he said, "and here's an end to chat." He was glancing bright-eyed down the lane.
"I see one, and you know what to do."
Sybil nodded, and began to pick her way through the market-crowd toward the man Mick had seen.
He was a ballad-seller, lean and hollow-cheeked, his hair long and greasy under a tall hat wrapped
in bright polka-dot fabric. He held both his arms bent, hands knotted as if in prayer, the sleeves
of his rumpled jacket heavy with long rustling quires of sheet-music.
" 'Railway to Heaven,' ladies and gents," the ballad-seller chanted, a veteran patterer. " 'Of
truth divine the rails are made, and on the Rock of Ages laid; the rails are fixed in chains of
love, firm as the throne of God above.' Lovely tune and only tuppence, miss."
"Do you have "The Raven of San Jacinto'?" Sybil asked.
"I can get that, I can get it," the seller said. "And what's that then?"
"About the great battle in Texas, the great General?"
The ballad-seller arched his brows. His eyes were blue and crazily bright, with hunger,
perhaps, or religion, or gin. "One of your Crimea generals then, a Frenchy, this Mr. Jacinto?"
"No, no," Sybil said, and gave him a pitying smile, "General Houston, Sam Houston of Texas. I
do want that song, most particular."
"I buy my publications fresh this afternoon, and I'll look for your song for you sure, miss."
"I shall want at least five copies for my friends," Sybil said.
"Ten pence will get you six."
"Six, then, and this afternoon, at this very spot."
"Just as you say, miss." "The seller touched the brim of his hat.
Sybil walked away, into the crowd. She had done it. It was not so bad. She felt she could get
used to it. Perhaps it was a good tune, too, one that people would enjoy when the balladman was
forced to sell the copies.
Mick sidled up suddenly, at her elbow.
"Not bad," Mick allowed, reaching into the pocket of his greatcoat, like magic, to produce an
apple turnover, still hot, flaking sugar and wrapped in greasy paper.
"Thank you," she said, startled but glad, for she'd been thinking of stopping, hiding,
fetching out the stolen shawl, but Mick's eyes had been on her every moment. She hadn't seen him,
but he'd been watching; that was the way he was. She wouldn't forget again.
They walked, together and apart, all down Somerset, and then through the vast market of
Petticoat Lane, lit as evening drew on with a host of lights, a glow of gas-mantles, the white
glare of carbide, filthy grease-lamps, tallow dips twinkling among the foodstuffs proffered from
the stalls. The hubbub was deafening here, but she delighted Mick by gulling three more ballad-
sellers.
In a great bright Whitechapel gin-palace, with glittering gold-papered walls flaring with
fishtail gas-jets, Sybil excused herself and found a ladies' convenience. There, safe within a
reeking stall, she fetched the shawl out. So soft it was, and such a lovely violet color too, one
of the strange new dyes clever people made from coal. She folded the shawl neatly, and stuffed it
through the top of her corset, so it rested safe. Then out to join her keeper again, finding him
seated at a table. He'd bought her a noggin of honey gin. She sat beside him.
"You did well, girl," he said, and slid the little glass toward her. The place was full of
Crimean soldiers on furlough, Irishmen, with street-drabs hanging on them, growing red-nosed and
screechy on gin. No barmaids here, but big bruiser bully-rock bartenders, in white aprons, with
mill-knocker clubs behind the bar.
"Gin's a whore's drink, Mick."
"Everybody likes gin," he said. "And you're no whore, Sybil."
"Dollymop, bobtail." She looked at him sharply. "What else d'ye call me, then?"
"You're with Dandy Mick now," he said. He leaned his chair back, jabbing his gloved thumbs
through the arm-holes of his waistcoat. "You're an adventuress."
"Adventuress?"
"Bloody right." He straightened. "And here's to you." He sipped his gin-twist, rolled it over
his tongue with an unhappy look, and swallowed. "Never mind, dear -- they've cut this with
turpentine or I'm a Jew." He stood up.
They left. She hung on his arm, trying to slow his pace. " 'Adventurer,' that's what you are,
then, eh, Mr. Mick Radley?"
"So I am, Sybil," he said softly, "and you're to be my 'prentice. So you do as you're told in
the proper humble spirit. Learn the tricks of craft. And someday you join the union, eh? The
guild."
"Like my father, eh? You want to make a play of that, Mick? Who he was, who I am?"
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"No," Mick said flatly. "He was old-fashioned, he's nobody now."
Sybil smirked. "They let us wicked girls into this fancy guild of yours, do they, Mick?"
"It's a knowledge guild," he said soberly. "The bosses, the big'uns, they can take all manner
of things away from us. With their bloody laws and factories and courts and banks . . . They can
make the world to their pleasure, they can take away your home and kin and even the work you do .
. . " Mick shrugged angrily, his lean shoulders denting the heavy fabric of the greatcoat. "And
even rob a hero's daughter of her virtue, if I'm not too bold in speaking of it." He pressed her
hand against his sleeve, a hard, trapping grip. "But they can't ever take what you know, now can
they, Sybil? They can't ever take that."
Sybil heard Hetty's footsteps in the hall outside her room, and the rattle of Hetty's key at
the door. She let the serinette die down, with a high-pitched drone.
Hetty tugged the snow-flaked woollen bonnet from her head, shrugging free from her Navy cloak.
She was another of Mrs. Winterhalter's girls, a big-boned, raucous brunette from Devon, who drank
too much, but was sweet in her way, and always kind to Toby.
Sybil folded away the china-handled crank and lowered the cheap instrument's scratched lid. "I
was practicing. Mrs. Winterhalter wants me to sing next Thursday."
"Bother the old drab," Hetty said. "Thought this was your night out with Mr. C. Or is it Mr.
K.?" Hetty stamped warmth into her feet before the narrow little hearth, then noticed, in the
lamplight, the scattering of shoes and hat-boxes from Aaron & Son. "My word," she said, and
smiled, her broad mouth pinched a bit with envy. "New beau, is it? You're so lucky, Sybil Jones!"
"Perhaps." Sybil sipped hot lemon-cordial, tilling her head back to relax her throat.
Hetty winked. "Winterhalter doesn't know about this one, eh?"
Sybil shook her head and smiled. Hetty would not tell. "D'ye know anything about Texas,
Hetty?"
"A country in America," Hetty said readily. "French own it, don't they?"
"That's Mexico. Would you like to go to a kinotrope show, Hetty? The former President of Texas
is lecturing. I've tickets, free for the taking."
"When?"
"Saturday."
"I'm dancing then," Hetty said. "Perhaps Mandy would go." She blew warmth into her fingers.
"Friend of mine comes by late tonight, wouldn't trouble you, would it?"
"No," Sybil said. Mrs. Winterhalter had a strict rule against any girl keeping company with
men in her room. It was a rule Hetty often ignored, as if daring the landlord to peach on her.
Since Mrs. Winterhalter chose to pay the rent directly to the landlord, Mr. Cairns, Sybil seldom
had call to speak to him, and less with his sullen wife, a thick-ankled woman with a taste for
dreadful hats. Cairns and his wife had never informed against Hetty, though Sybil was not sure
why, for Hetty's room was next to theirs, and Hetty made a shameless racket when she brought men
home -- foreign diplomats, mostly, men with odd accents and, to judge by the noise, beastly
habits.
"You can carry on singing if you like," Hetty said, and knelt before the ash-covered fire.
"You've a fine voice. Mustn't let your gifts go to waste." She began to feed individual coals to
the hearth, shivering. A dire chill seemed to enter the room then, through the cracked casement of
one of the nailed-up windows, and for a strange passing moment Sybil felt a distinct presence in
the air. A definite sense of observation, of eyes fixed upon her from another realm. She thought
of her dead father. Learn the voice, Sybil. Learn to speak. It's all we have that can fight them,
he had told her. This in the last few days before his arrest, when it was clear that the Rads had
won again -- clear to everyone, perhaps, save Walter Gerard. She had seen then, with heart-
crushing clarity, the utter magnitude of her father's defeat. His ideals would be lost -- not just
misplaced but utterly expunged from history, to be crushed again and again and again, like the
carcass of a mongrel dog under the racketing wheels of an express train. Learn to speak, Sybil.
It's all we have . . .
"Read to me?" Hetty asked. "I'll make tea."
"Very well." In her spotty, scattered life with Hetty, reading aloud was one of the little
rituals they had that passed for domesticity. Sybil took up the day's Illustrated London News from
the deal table, settled her crinoline about her in the creaking, damp-smelling armchair, and
squinted at a front-page article. It concerned itself with dinosaurs.
The Rads were mad for these dinosaurs, it seemed. Here was an engraving of a party of seven,
led by Lord Darwin, all peering intently at some indeterminate object embedded in a coal-face in
Thuringia. Sybil read the caption aloud, showed the picture to Hetty. A bone. The thing in the
coal was a monstrous bone, as long as a man was tall. She shuddered. Turning the page, she
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encountered an artist's view of the creature as it might have looked in life, a monstrosity with
twin rows of angry triangular saw-teeth along its humped spine. It seemed the size of an elephant
at least, though its evil little head was scarcely larger than a hound's.
Hetty poured the tea. " 'Reptiles held sway across the whole of the earth,' eh?" she quoted,
and threaded her needle. "I don't believe a bloody word of it."
"Why not?"
"They're the bones of bloody giants, out of Genesis. That's what the clergy say, ain't it?"
Sybil said nothing. Neither supposition struck her as the more fantastic. She turned to a
second article, this one in praise of Her Majesty's Artillery in the Crimea. She found an
engraving of two handsome subalterns admiring the operation of a long-range gun. The gun itself,
its barrel stout as a foundry stack, looked fit to make short work of all Lord Darwin's dinosaurs.
Sybil's attention, however, was held by an inset view of the gunnery Engine. The intricate nest of
interlocking gearwork possessed a queer beauty, like some kind of baroquely fabulous wallpaper.
"Have you anything that needs darning?" Hetty asked.
"No, thank you."
"Read some adverts, then," Hetty advised. "I do hate that war humbug."
There was HAVILAND CHINA, from Limoges, France; VIN MARIANI, the French tonic, with a
testimonial from Alexandre Dumas and Descriptive Book, Portraits, and Autographs of Celebrities,
upon application to the premises in Oxford Street; SILVER ELECTRO SILICON POLISH, it never
scratches, never wears, it is unlike others; the "NEW DEPARTURE" BICYCLE BELL, it has a tone all
its own; DR. BAYLEY'S LITHIA WATER, cures Bright's disease and the gouty diathesis; GURNEY'S
"REGENT" POCKET STEAM-ENGINE, intended for use with domestic sewing machines. This last held
Sybil's attention, but not through its promise to operate a machine at double the old speed at a
cost of one halfpenny per hour.
Here was an engraving of the tastefully ornamented little boiler, to be heated by gas or
paraffin. Charles Egremont had purchased one of these for his wife. It came equipped with a rubber
tube intended to vent the waste steam when jammed under a convenient sash-window, but Sybil had
been delighted to hear that it had turned Madame's drawing-room into a Turkish bath.
When the paper was finished, Sybil went to bed. She was woken around midnight by the savage
rhythmic crouching of Hetty's bed-springs.
It was dim in the Garrick Theatre, dusty and cold, with the pit and the balcony and the racks
of shabby seats; but it was pitch-dark below the stage, where Mick Radley was, and it smelled of
damp and lime.
Mick's voice echoed up from under her feet. "Ever seen the innards of a kinotrope, Sybil?"
"I saw one once, backstage," she said. "At a music-hall, in Bethnal Green. I knew the fellow
what worked it, a clacker cove."
"A sweetheart?" Mick asked. His echoing voice was sharp.
"No," Sybil told him quickly, "I was singing a bit . . . But it scarcely paid."
She heard the sharp click of his repeating match. It caught on the third attempt and he lit a
stub of candle. "Come down," he commanded. "Don't stand there like a goose, showing off your
ankles." Sybil lifted her crinoline with both hands and picked her way uneasily down the steep
damp stairs.
Mick reached up to grope behind a tall stage-mirror, a great gleaming sheet of silvered glass,
with a wheeled pedestal and oily gears and worn wooden cranks. He retrieved a cheap black
portmanteau of proofed canvas, placed it carefully on the floor before him, and squatted to undo
the flimsy tin clasps. He removed a stack of perforated cards bound with a ribbon of red paper.
There were other bundles in the bag as well, Sybil saw, and something else, a gleam of polished
wood.
He handled the cards gently, like a Bible.
"Safe as houses," he said. "You just disguise 'em, you see -- write something stupid on the
wrapper, like 'Temperance Lecture -- Parts One Two Three.' Then coves never think to steal 'em, or
even load them up and look." Hefting the thick block, he riffled its edge with his thumb, so that
it made a sharp crisp sound, like a gambler's new deck. "I put a deal of capital in these," he
said. "Weeks of work from the best kino hands in Manchester. Exclusively to my design, I might
point out. 'Tis a lovely thing, girl. Quite artistic, in its way. You'll soon see."
Closing the portmanteau, he stood. He carefully slid the bundle of cards into his coat-pocket,
then bent over a crate and tugged out a thick glass tube. He blew dust from the tube, then gripped
one end of it with a special pair of pincers. The glass cracked open with an airtight pop -- there
was a fresh block of lime in the tube. Mick slid it loose, humming to himself. He tamped the lime
gently into the socket of a limelight burner, a great dish-shaped thing of sooty iron and gleaming
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tin. Then he turned a hose-tap, sniffed a bit, nodded, turned a second tap, and set the candle to
it.
Sybil yelped as a vicious flash sheeted into her eyes. Mick chuckled at her over the hiss of
blazing gas, dots of hot blue dazzle drifting before her. "Better," he remarked. He aimed the
blazing limelight carefully into the stage-mirror, then began to adjust its cranks.
Sybil looked around, blinking. It was dank and ratty and cramped under the Garrick stage, the
sort of place a dog or a pauper might die in, with torn and yellowed bills underfoot, for naughty
farces like That Rascal Jack and Scamps of London. A pair of ladies' unmentionables were wadded in
a corner. From her brief unhappy days as a stage-singer, she had some idea how they might have
gotten there.
She let her gaze follow steam-pipes and taut wires to the gleam of the Babbage Engine, a small
one, a kinotrope model, no taller than Sybil herself. Unlike everything else in the Garrick, the
Engine looked in very good repair, mounted on four mahogany blocks. The floor and ceiling above
and beneath it had been carefully scoured and whitewashed. Steam-calculators were delicate things,
temperamental, so she'd heard; better not to own one than not cherish it. In the stray glare from
Mick's limelight, dozens of knobbed brass columns gleamed, set top and bottom into solid sockets
bored through polished plates, with shining levers, ratchets, a thousand steel gears cut bright
and fine. It smelled of linseed oil.
Looking at it, this close, this long, made Sybil feel quite odd. Hungry almost, or greedy in a
queer way, the way she might feel about . . . a fine lovely horse, say. She wanted -- not to own
it exactly, but possess it somehow . . .
Mick took her elbow suddenly, from behind. She started. "Lovely thing, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's . . . lovely."
Mick still held her arm. Slowly, he put his other gloved hand against her cheek, inside her
bonnet. Then he lifted her chin with his thumb, staring into her face. "It makes you feel
something, doesn't it?"
His rapt voice frightened her, his eyes underlit with glare. "Yes, Mick," she said obediently,
quickly. "I do feel it . . . something."
He tugged her bonnet loose, to hang at her neck. "You're not frightened of it, Sybil, are you?
Not with Dandy Mick here, holding you. You feel a little special frisson. You'll learn to like
that feeling. We'll make a clacker of you."
"Can I do that, truly? Can a girl do that?"
Mick laughed. "Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister's daughter,
and the very Queen of Engines!" He let her go, and swung both his arms wide, coat swinging open, a
showman's gesture. "Ada Byron, true friend and disciple of Babbage himself! Lord Charles Babbage,
father of the Difference Engine and the Newton of our modern age!"
She gaped at him. "But Ada Byron is a ladyship!"
"You'd be surprised who our Lady Ada knows," Mick declared, plucking a block of cards from his
pocket and peeling off its paper jacket. "Oh, not to drink tea with, among the diamond squad at
her garden-parties, but Ada's what you'd call fast, in her own mathematical way . . . " He paused.
"That's not to say that Ada is the best, you know. I know clacking coves in the Steam Intellect
Society that make even Lady Ada look a bit tardy. But Ada possesses genius. D'ye know what that
means, Sybil? To possess genius?"
"What?" Sybil said, hating the giddy surety in his voice.
"D'ye know how analytical geometry was born? Fellow named Descartes, watching a fly on the
ceiling. A million fellows before him had watched flies on the ceiling, but it took Ren6 Descartes
to make a science of it. Now engineers use what he discovered every day, but if it weren't for him
we'd still be blind to it."
"What do flies matter to anyone?" Sybil demanded.
"Ada had an insight once that ranked with Descartes' discovery. No one has found a use for it
as yet. It's what they call pure mathematics." Mick laughed. " 'Pure.' You know what that means,
Sybil? It means they can't get it to run." He rubbed his hands together, grinning. "No one can get
it to run."
Mick's glee was wearing at her nerves. "I thought you hated lordships!"
"I do hate lordly privilege, what's not earned fair and square and level," he said. "But Lady
Ada lives and swears by the power of gray matter, and not her blue blood." He slotted the cards
into a silvered tray by the side of the machine, then spun and caught her wrist. "Your father's
dead, girl! 'Tis not that I mean to hurt you, saying it, but the Luddites are dead as cold ashes.
Oh, we marched and ranted, for the rights of labor and such -- fine talk, girl! But Lord Charles
Babbage made blueprints while we made pamphlets. And his blueprints built this world."
Mick shook his head. "The Byron men, the Babbage men, the Industrial Radicals, they own Great
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Britain! They own us, girl -- the very globe is at their feet, Europe, America, everywhere. The
House of Lords is packed top to bottom with Rads. Queen Victoria won't stir a finger without a nod
from the savants and capitalists." He pointed at her. "And it's no use fighting that anymore, and
you know why? 'Cause the Rads do play fair, or fair enough to manage -- and you can become one of
'em, if you're clever! You can't get clever men to fight such a system, as it makes too much sense
to 'em."
Mick thumbed his chest. "But that don't mean that you and I are out in the cold and lonely. It
only means we have to think faster, with our eyes peeled and our ears open . . . " Mick struck a
prize-fighter's pose: elbows bent, fists poised, knuckles up before his face. Then he flung his
hair back, and grinned at her.
"That's all very well for you," Sybil protested. "You can do as you like. You were one of my
father's followers -- well, there were many such, and some are in Parliament now. But fallen women
get mined, d'ye see? Ruined, and stay that way."
Mick straightened, frowning at her. "Now that's exactly what I mean. You're running with the
flash mob, now, but thinking like a trollop! There's no one knows who you are, in Paris! The cops
and bosses have your number here, true enough! But numbers are only that, and your file's no more
than a simple stack of cards. For them as know, there's ways to change a number." He sneered, to
see her surprise. "It ain't done easy, here in London, I grant you. But affairs run differently,
in the Paris of Louis Napoleon! Affairs run fast and loose in flash Paree, especially for an
adventuress with a blarney tongue and a pretty ankle."
Sybil bit her knuckle. Her eyes burned suddenly. It was acrid smoke from the limelight, and
fear. A new number in the Government's machines -- that would mean a new life. A life without a
past. The unexpected thought of such freedom terrified her. Not so much for what it meant in
itself, though that was strange and dazzling enough. But for what Mick Radley might demand for
such a thing, in fair exchange. "Truly, you could change my number?"
"I can buy you a new one in Paris. Pass you off for French or an Argie or an American refugee
girl." Mick folded his elegant arms. "I promise nothing, mind you. You'll have to earn it."
"You wouldn't gull me, Mick?" she said slowly. "Because . . . because I could be really and
specially sweet to a fellow who could do me such a great service."
Mick jammed his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels, looking at her. "Could you
now," he said softly. Her trembling words had fanned something inside him, she could see it in his
eyes. An eager, lustful kindling, something she dimly knew was there, a need he had, to . . . slip
his fishhooks deeper into her.
"I could, if you treated me fair and level, as your 'prentice adventuress, and not some cakey
dollymop, to gull and cast aside." Sybil felt tears coming, harder this time. She blinked, and
looked up boldly, and let them flow, thinking perhaps they might do some good. "You wouldn't raise
my hopes and dash them, would you? That would be low and cruel! If you did that I'd -- I'd jump
off Tower Bridge!"
He looked her in the eye. "Bar that sniffling, girl, and listen close to me. Understand this.
You're not just Mick's pretty bit o' muslin -- I may have a taste for that same as any man, but I
can get that where I like, and don't need you just for that. I need the blarney skill and the
daring pluck that was Mr. Walter Gerard's. You're to be my 'prentice, Sybil, and I your master,
and let that be how things stand with us. You'll be loyal, obedient, truthful to me, no subterfuge
and no impertinence, and in return, I'll teach you craft, and keep you well -- and you'll find me
as kind and generous as you are loyal and true. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, Mick."
"We have a pact, then?"
"Yes, Mick." She smiled at him.
"Well and good," he said. "Then kneel, here, and put your hands together, so" -- he joined his
hands in prayer -- "and make this oath. That you, Sybil Gerard, do swear by saints and angels, by
powers, dominions, and thrones, by seraphim and cherubim and the all-seeing eye, to obey Michael
Radley, and serve him faithfully, so help you God! Do you so swear?"
She stared at him in dismay. "Must I really?"
"Yes."
"But isn't it a great sin, to make such an oath, to a man who . . . I mean to say . . . we're
not in holy wedlock . . ."
"That's a marriage vow," he said impatiently, "and this a 'prentice oath!"
She saw no alternative. Tugging her skirts back, she knelt before him on cold gritty stone.
"Do you so swear?"
"I do, so help me God."
"Don't look so glum," he said, helping her to her feet, "that's a mild and womanly oath you
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