The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  On 14 August, a Cunard vessel collided with another passenger ship off Cape Race. The friends and relations of those aboard were unspeakably relieved to learn, in a fraction of the time the news would have traveled without the transatlantic cable, that all lives had been saved.

  On 31 August, the commanding officers of two Canadian garrisons learned, via cable, that the Sepoy Rebellion had been crushed and neither the presences of the 62nd nor 39th Regiments were required in India after all. Her Majesty saved approximately a hundred and fifty thousand pounds in troop transport costs.

  An anonymous Yankee wrote a fervent hymn of praise, one of whose verses ran:

  Speed, speed the cable: let it run

  A loving girdle round the earth,

  Till all the nations ’neath the sun

  Shall be as brothers of one hearth.

  ***

  “Pity about Senor Monturiol,” said Kendal. They were sitting over a de-

  canter of port at Redking’s. Bell-Fairfax, who was lighting a cigar, shrugged.

  “Yes, shame. Dr. Nennys tried to dissuade him from resigning, but to no avail.”

  “You won’t be required to—?”

  “Hm? No, no, he took the vow of silence. And, you know, he approves of our goals overall; he’s simply unable to reconcile himself with our methods. I admire a man with a conscience.”

  “I hope we’re keeping the Ballena.” Kendal swirled his port in its glass.

  “We are. We paid for it. I understand he’s got another one half-built in Barcelona. He won’t have our money any longer, but so it goes. How have the Preventers taken defeat?”

  “Cheltenham and the others have been declared martyrs, naturally. Oh, and I found out the name of their new patron, by the way. He wrote them a fine fiery speech, exhorting them not to give up.”

  “Rather irresponsible of him.” Edward sighed, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “I suppose the usual arrangements will be necessary?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, you see—” Kendal broke off, startled, for Greene had appeared in the doorway like an apparition of doom. He strode to them, clenching a yellow dispatch-sheet in his fist.

  “The damned cable’s dead,” he said. Kendal leapt to his feet.

  “Sir, on my honor, the Preventers couldn’t—”

  “They didn’t. Some idiot of an electrician tried to boost the signal and sent two thousand volts through the cable. Burned out everything. Even our gyttite strand.”

  Bell-Fairfax closed his eyes and swore quietly. “Well, we’ll try again,” Kendal stammered.

  “Not for some time. Our usual informants advised us this morning that there won’t be another attempt until 1865. The Americans are going into a civil war, apparently. Freeing their blacks.”

  “Really?” Bell-Fairfax opened his eyes. “That’s something, anyway.”

  “It’s more complicated than you’d suppose,” said Greene bitterly. “Everything is. You may be sure your Preventers will take this as a sign from God, Kendal. Pay a call on their new money man and put the wind up him, do you understand? Take Bell-Fairfax with you.”

  ***

  The gentleman was angry. His domestic situation was inescapable misery, and the only manner in which he might let off intolerable pressure was by walking as far and as fast as he might. It was past midnight, but London was unseasonably warm, for November, and he was on his fifth circumnavigation of Gordon Square when they caught up with him.

  He never heard the other gentlemen coming up behind; they seemed to materialize, one on either side of him. He glanced at the man to his left, then at the one to his right; he had to tilt his head back. He made an incredulous sound.

  “Good evening, sir,” said Bell-Fairfax, as they walked along. “May we have a few private words?”

  “As many as you like,” the man snapped.

  “May I say, first, how much we admire your work? Your efforts on behalf of the poor are laudable. Justice, charity, compassion, reform, have all found a powerful champion in your pen, sir.”

  “True,” said Kendal.

  “Therefore it pains us to discover you have lent your considerable talents to the destruction of a device certain to improve the lot of mankind.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said the man, and then gave Bell-Fairfax a sharp look. “Ah. I see. Well! Let me ask you this, gentlemen: have you ever labored with your hands?”

  “We have, sir.”

  “And were you paid for your labors?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The fellow who earns his bread making chairs, do you believe he ought to be paid when citizens furnish their homes with his work?”

  “Unquestionably, sir.”

  “The cobbler ought to be paid for every pair of boots that leave his shop, then?” The man’s eyes flashed with anger. He seemed relieved to have someone with whom to argue. “Therefore—ought not the writer receive payment for the entertainment he provides?”

  “And you do, sir.”

  “Not in America,” said the man. “No. In the Home of Liberty, any publisher is at liberty to pick my pocket, sir, without respect of copyright. I’m told my novels are popular, read by thousands who enjoy them in American editions for which I have received not one farthing in royalties. I complained to the American authorities, if they can be described as such; I was insulted, and my character defamed in their press, for my pains!

  “And are our own politicians interested in my welfare? No. Literature does nothing to get them into Parliament, and therefore they choose to do nothing on the literary man’s behalf.

  “My ideas change the world for the better—you yourself said so. Why then am I, their author, not accorded the legal protection an artisan enjoys? And what of American writers? How can they persuade American publishers to buy their efforts at fair prices, when the stolen works of British writers are available free of charge?

  “And now the industrialists seek to break down the barriers of time and distance between nations. I tell you that there is no invention so nobly conceived, that some base rascal will not find a way to corrupt it to his own ends! When a man’s property may be transmitted instantaneously to a foreign shore, what laws will protect him?”

  “With respect, sir,” said Bell-Fairfax patiently, “It would take longer to telegraph the text of one of your novels than it would for a copy to be sent across by packet ship.”

  “Today,” said the man. “But tell me, in good conscience, that it will not be so in twenty years. The telegraph is profitable, it is convenient; the brightest minds of the age will turn their attention to improving its speed and reliability, with no thought of the consequences. And in any case, that is not the point! The work of hands is protected by law; why not then the work of the mind?”

  “Sir, you are in some distress, but we must ask you to consider the greater good,” said Bell-Fairfax. “The world will progress more surely from barbarism to civilized behavior, if all men may exchange news freely. Copyright laws will adapt, in time. Balance that in the scales, against your lost profit, and bow to the inevitable.”

  He stopped on the pavement, staring down into the man’s eyes as he spoke. The man pulled his gaze away with effort, shivering.

  “You’re devilishly persuasive, sir,” he said sullenly.

  “It is our earnest hope that you can be persuaded with words, sir,” said Bell-Fairfax. “We should be sorry to have to employ any other means.”

  His pale gaze traveled past the man, into the courtyard before which they had stopped. “This is your home, is it, sir? Yes, I thought so. The one on the end. You live here with your children.

  “I do hope you’ll reconsider your opinion in this matter. Good evening, Mr. Dickens.”

  Caverns of Mystery

  They had been driving since before the sun rose, along the coast highway.

  She had been up, packed already, when her father woke the boys and marched them downstairs to help him load the station wagon; she had heard her sisters compl
aining sleepily as her mother dragged them out of bed and made them dress. The baby wept in his cornflakes at the breakfast table, bewildered by morning in what seemed the middle of the night.

  Everyone shut up once they were in the car at last. The little ones went to sleep in the back and even the boys were unable to stay awake long enough to punch each other more than once or twice. Her parents spoke quietly together in the front seat, while her mother drove through the dark, and she watched through the window as the city lights dimmed and fell behind. There were miles of lemon groves, appearing gradually as night drained away; the fog hung low over the long aisles of trees and the long drooping leaves of eucalyptus swayed as they rushed past, but all in silence.

  The road turned inland and dawn broke over a rolling plain of oak trees and blackberry bramble, white starred with blossoms along the two-lane, all summer country.

  Now and again there were the phantoms, but she had learned long since never to call attention to them. A man crouched beside his campfire, lifting his graniteware coffeepot from the coals, as his horse grazed peacefully nearby. Smoke rose from the stone chimney of a log house, and a woman in a long dress trudged out from the house to a shed carrying a milk can. A thing crawled up out of a creekbed, a skinwalker with a coyote’s head, and it turned to watch as the station wagon approached. Meeting her gaze, it leaped at the door; she pulled her glasses off and covered her right eye, as it clawed at the window. She turned her face away, refusing to

  see it.

  “Are you having another headache?” her mother said. She opened her eyes and met her mother’s gaze in the rear view mirror.

  “No,” she said, a little sulkily. Her mother would never admit the phantoms were there, but she seemed to have developed radar that lit up whenever they were around. “I just got something in my eye.”

  “Bill, is there any Kleenex in the glove box?”

  Her father handed her a tissue over the back of the seat. He lit a pair of cigarettes and passed one to her mother.

  She heard the thump and the yelp that meant the skinwalker had fallen away, and she relaxed. Her brothers woke and began to punch each other again. Her sisters woke and began to chatter like birds. The baby woke and cried. The road ran past barn-red Burma Shave verses appearing out of the fog, always rendered cryptic by one missing sign. The billboards began to feature ladies in bathing suits and the promise that they were only thirty miles from their destination; then fifteen miles; then five.

  They came through a long tunnel of oak trees arching overhead, emerged into brilliant sunlight. Her father cranked his window down. “Man!” he said. “Smell that sea air!”

  She sat up and looked out with interest. The station wagon was going slowly down a little white street with the sea at the end of it. There were old houses with gardens full of lilies. There were motor hotels, courtyards of tiny cottages. All the neon signs were rusting, all the paint was peeling, and sand blew in drifts and piled against the curb.

  At the end of the street was an OFFICE sign in the shape of a swordfish, pointing to the nearest of a row of cottages on the edge of the dunes. Each cottage had its own palm tree, looking gray, weatherbeaten and miserable. But the blue sea sparkled and roared just beyond, a full four lines of breakers foaming white. Her mother steered into the crushed-shell drive and pulled up to the office.

  “Okay, kids.” Her mother got out, went around to the back of the station wagon, and opened it to pick up the baby. The little girls scrambled out and ran immediately over the sand to the sea. She climbed out too. Her brothers were still fighting; her father hauled them out and belted them both, and they glared as he ordered them down to the beach in his master-sergeant voice. They marched off down the dune face, still shoving each other.

  “Watch them, will you, honey? We need to go get the key,” said her mother, groping in the box of groceries they’d brought for a teething biscuit. She nodded, staring around in fascination.

  There was an old gray building behind the cottages with the word ROOMS painted on one wall. Phantoms clustered on the porch, old men with pipes. They all looked more or less like Popeye the sailor, and all gazed listlessly out to sea. She followed their gaze to the beach.

  The children played and fought amid more phantoms: fragments of ships, running horses, weeping women. A double row of old pilings ran from the bottom of the street ramp out into the water, long-broken snags, but their phantoms still rose under the sun of another year. Along the phantom planks of the pier a phantom donkey plodded, drawing a cart full of fish, and phantom men sat at its end mending nets.

  She shivered and turned to look at the office. It was an old frame cottage with a bow window. Growing up against the window was a fuchsia bush. Its flowers were like little firecrackers. It had branched into the cottage through a broken pane and sprawled, profuse, lush, into the window seat. A phantom pirate stood on the other side of the glass, among the scarlet flowers. He looked into her eyes. He smiled at her, tenderly.

  ***

  The station wagon was unpacked, the cottage inhabited. Theirs had two real murphy beds in the living room, one for the boys and one for the girls, and a kind of camp bed in an alcove off the hall, which would be hers. Her mother stalked about checking the mattresses for bedbugs while her father set up the baby’s crib. The other children were wrestled into bathing suits, towels were distributed, and her mother gathered up the wet clothes to take them to the washing machine by the office.

  “Can I go for a walk?” she asked her mother. Her mother paused, her arms full of laundry, and gave her a searching look.

  “No, you need to lie down for a while first. I think you’re overtired. Bill, doesn’t she look overtired to you?”

  “Don’t argue with your mother,” her father said automatically, shrugging into his bomber jacket.

  “I didn’t,” she said, sullen. “Sir.”

  “Kids!” he said. “Line up! Wipe those smiles off your faces. It’s fourteen hundred hours and we will proceed to the beach. There will be no swimming beyond that last piling. There will be no fighting. There will be no crying. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” the others chorused. He marched them out of the house, and her mother went to do laundry. She unpacked her suitcase, setting her copy of The Wind in the Willows on the dresser at the foot of the bed.

  She couldn’t sleep, and after a while got up and explored. The cottage was all right; there was only a little phantom in a sailor suit crouched in the windowseat looking out at the sea, and he seemed happy, and a kind-faced woman in the kitchen, cooking something on a phantom potbellied stove. They had been there a long time. On the back porch a phantom woman sat alone, smoking a cigarette and muttering angrily to herself.

  When they were angry like that it was best not to notice them, best to close the right eye tightly and look away. Paying attention made them pay attention back, and that was never good.

  She locked the back door, and settled down to re-read The Wind in the Willows.

  ***

  The beach, when she was able to get down there early the next day, was wide and sky-reflecting, the tide far out, half a mile of flat sand rippled with wave patterns. Gulls roamed there, stabbing now and then at sand crabs in a half-hearted way, eyeing her approach but not troubling themselves to run. She walked along with her head down, absorbed in looking for shells and wave-tumbled glass, putting the best pieces in the bucket she carried.

  There were phantoms drifting here and there, but they could be ignored. When she’d been younger they had frightened her badly, until she’d learned the trick of closing her right eye. It had helped to understand what they were, and to classify the different kinds.

  None of them seemed to be ghosts, in the sense of spirits of the dead. Some were apparently like photographs, a lingering stain on the air, a moment of someone’s happiness or misery endlessly replayed. Some were so vivid they had attained a sort of awareness. Some weren’t even people: furniture, buildings, trees that had stood i
n one place so long their images had worn through time and remained when they were gone.

  Some were old and wild, like the skinwalker, and inhabited the outdoors. Those could be dangerous, though some were benign. Some looked like real people, but weren’t, and those were always dangerous and she had learned never, ever to show that she noticed them. They did not drift, but moved sleek and arrogant through the world, doing what they liked.

  There were others, too, who seemed to be hauntings of things people had only imagined, like the pirate in the window. The library was full of them, posturing or sitting alone in corners…

  The beach grew narrower the farther she walked. White cliffs rose up to her right, full of fossil shells. She looked up at them and stopped in her tracks, with her mouth open.

  Ahead, out on the clifftop, was the figure of a brontosaur. It stood stiffly in profile, and there was something wrong with its head. It was near a little brick house at the edge of the cliff.

  Fascinated, she walked closer, ignoring the desperate phantom of a man who was trying to pull a phantom mule from a cave swamped by a phantom high tide. The brontosaur never moved; she got close enough to see that it was made of cement over a chickenwire frame, and had no head, but only a rusting unfinished wire outline. What was it doing there?

  ***

  She had to choose her words very carefully.

  “So, when I was out on the beach today, I went walking down by the caves? And, you know what, sir? Up on the cliff, somebody has built a pretend brontosaurus. Out of cement? And it’s really big. And I was just wondering if we could drive out there, and look at it?”

  “Are you making this up?” said her father.

  “No, sir!”

  “Then you take me out on the beach and show me,” he said.

  “Bill—” said her mother.