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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