“I’ll try a little,” said Lizzie, surprising herself. She was still sorting through all the accusations they had hurled at each other, but she was smart enough to recognize that all of Aggie’s complaints had a common theme.
“Oh, will you stoop to drink my hooch? Big of you.” Still, Aggie handed over the flask.
Lizzie took the flask and wiped the top off on her petticoat before bringing it to her nose. It smelled medicinal. “What is it?”
“Gin. Why, were you expecting after-dinner sherry? Here, give it back if you don’t like it.” She reached out her hand, but Lizzie tilted her head back and took a sip. She coughed, hard, as the gin burned its way down her throat.
“Thanks.” Her eyes were watering as she handed the flask back.
“Not your cup of poison, eh?” Aggie took another swallow.
“Not sure about the taste.” Lizzie’s voice was a bit hoarse, and Aggie laughed again. Actually, the aftertaste wasn’t too bad—sort of like rubbing alcohol with a hint of pine needles. And the warmth spreading through Lizzie’s chest wasn’t awful, either. “I think I like the effect, though.”
Aggie raised her eyebrows and handed Lizzie the flask again. This time, Lizzie took a more cautious sip. “So,” she said, handing back the flask, “you think I need to spend more time with my patients?”
“Not just you, luv. All the med students.” Aggie unbuttoned her dress and hung it in the wardrobe. “On my last rotation, I had this patient...sweet young girl, smart as a whip, can talk your ear off about how the prime minister’s old as the queen and keeps falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, but her legs don’t work.”
“The queen?”
“No, luv, the girl.” Aggie took another swig from her flask, then raised her eyebrows.
Lizzie held out her hand. She wanted her roommate’s approval more than she wanted the gin, so she pretended to take a sip, then wiped the mouth of the flask before handing it back.
“Anyways, they get a Bio-Mechanical to move the girl in and out of this contraption they’ve got rigged up to help her breathe.” She looked down at the flask. “Ah, better not.” Capping it again, she set it aside, then flopped onto her belly, supporting her chin in her hands. “So of course she don’t tell him that she’s getting a bedsore on her hip.”
“That could be dangerous, if it became infected.” There was a pleasant sort of heat in her chest from the gin and the conversation. “Would you like me to take a look at the girl’s wound?”
“Bless me, no! The trouble I’d be in then. You’re still getting over the grippe and the girl’s got weak lungs...they’re ever so careful about letting folks in to see her.”
“Must be lonely.” She was struggling to keep her eyes open; Aggie’s unexpected friendliness had left her relaxed and a little sleepy.
“Look at you, two sips of gin and you’re half-rats.”
“Mmm.”
Aggie laughed. “G’night, Lizzie.” She turned off the light, casting the room into a newly companionable darkness.
Lizzie turned on her side, resting her cheek on one hand, feeling a bit floaty. For some reason, her thoughts kept drifting back to Victor. She found herself thinking about all the times she’d talked and talked at him. She’d treated him the way she’d treated that old farm collie as a child. But he was a person, wasn’t he, with his own thoughts and feelings. There was something wrong with this line of reasoning, but she was muzzy-headed and couldn’t find the fault in her logic.
Unsettled, she turned over in bed. I should really go check on him, she thought. He’s probably wondering what happened to me. She closed her eyes and felt an unaccustomed wave of guilt. Victor was her friend. He had kissed her hand, and then she had not gone back. She had treated him no better than Perry had treated her.
The next morning, she had a headache. She blamed it on the gin.
16
The first time the cat woke Victor, he nearly killed it. He was still mostly asleep when Aldini jumped on his chest, and the first panicked thought was Rats! It wasn’t his thought; he had never felt a rat’s sharp nails scrabbling over his small body in the night. But the memory was there all the same, and his left hand was already in motion, ready to fling the nasty creature against the wall, when the cat began purring.
At that point, Victor came fully awake. The cat regarded him with a steady, golden gaze, as if she hadn’t nearly lost another of her nine lives. “Can’t say I think much of your intelligence,” he said, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice. In response, Aldini kneaded her paws into the blankets covering his chest, and set up a low, rumbling purr. Over his heart, where the metal covered, he felt nothing, but then the cat stretched out her legs and began kneading over the surrounding skin, her claws extending and then retracting, her purr growing louder. When was the last time anyone touched me with affection?
Elizabeth did not count. She was a medical student, not his sweetheart, and he could not forget what he was and what he was not. It shamed him that the memory of her hands on him stirred feelings from another life. He had known a woman’s caress once, but the woman’s face and name were both lost in the mists that clouded his mind. When he tried to dredge up the other woman’s image, all he could see was Miss Lavenza: thick, wavy brown hair pulled back in a loose bun, clever, probing eyes of some indeterminate shade of hazel, faint, childlike freckles scattered across her nose. She had a wide, full mouth—the sign of a sensual nature, they said. He couldn’t remember who they were, but they might be right, considering the way she had pulled back the covers. An innocent, definitely, but a curious one. A man might be forgiven for thinking back to their first meeting and imagining what might have happened if he had shammed unconsciousness and let her uncover him completely.
Except I’m not a man. So easy to forget he was a monster now. Which begged the question of why he could think at all. According to no less an authority than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bio-Mechanicals were like the beasts of the field, furnished with sensory capabilities, but no souls. They were not sensible, any more than cows were, and like cows, they could be disposed of for the greater good of mankind. Indeed, the archbishop had stated, it was easier to raise an objection to the slaughter of an innocent cow than to the slaughter of a Bio-Mechanical created from the body of a convicted thief or murderer. Bio-Mechanicals, he wrote, were only good or evil in as much as they were used for good or evil purposes by their creators. They were man’s inventions, as were cows, which had been shaped by man through selective breeding to better suit his needs for milk and beef.
Yet for some reason, Victor was different—an aberration among aberrations. In one of the glowing green vats, there was a man’s right arm. Was it the match to the devil’s appendage that was attached to his left side? He longed to ask Makepiece the provenance of that limb, but every time he looked at the scientist, something stopped him.
There was something he could not remember, something hidden in the murky recesses of his mind that had to do with Makepiece and the other two middle-aged men who had gathered around him in the laboratory. Damn it, if only he could remember! His head began to pound, the way it had begun to lately whenever he thought of those three: Moulsdale, Makepiece and Grimbald.
The clue, he felt sure, was hidden in the conversation he had overheard that night in the laboratory. We need them to be able to attack an enemy. That had been Grimbald speaking. We need to be able to control them. That had been Moulsdale. But Makepiece had said nothing, until later, when he had been speaking to Miss Lavenza. What was it he had told her? After all, what are we seeking to refine here, if not a modern version of what the alchemists called the elixir of life.
Please, God, he prayed, don’t leave me here, suspended between knowing and not knowing.
Our royal visitor, someone had said. The words evoked an image: a woman’s small frame, covered by a thin blanket. His head throbbed with pain,
and his eyes felt sore in their sockets, but he persisted, struggling to move the block in his mind. Who was the woman, and why did Victor feel that the answer would also tell him why he couldn’t trust Makepiece? Until he could remember more, Victor averted his eyes whenever the scientist was around and pretended to be a mental defective.
The effort of concealing what he understood made his private moments with the cat all the more precious. He stroked his right hand over the Aldini’s soft, black fur, and she responded by butting his hand with her head and rubbing her cheek against his knuckles. That was when he saw the electrodes and understood. She’s like me.
And then, on the heels of that thought, came the realization of what this might mean. A purring, Bio-Mechanical cat, living proof that everything Moulsdale and the others believed about Bio-Mechanicals was wrong.
* * *
Victor and the cat developed an understanding. Now that the nights were colder, Aldini slept with him on his cot, ignoring Igor, possibly because the hunchback snored to wake the dead. Makepiece no longer kept Victor restrained at night, and he now worked alongside Igor, hauling coal buckets up for the little potbellied stove, moving boxes of equipment from the basement that smelled of fresh earth and formalin and, on one memorable occasion, even going outside to hammer the storm shutters into place. The leaves were almost all off the trees now, and soon it would be too cold to run away. Not that he was really ready to go anywhere at the moment, barefoot, dressed in thin rags and barely capable of coherent speech. In his current condition, he would be lucky to wind up in a workhouse.
Yet his speech was improving. Whenever Makepiece was not around, Victor practiced speaking to the cat or to Igor or just to himself. At times, he felt like a fool, but still he forced himself to keep going. The problem was, this sort of one-sided dialogue seemed to lend itself to confidences. Without intending to, he found himself telling Aldini he loved her, or, more embarrassing still, confiding his feelings of inadequacy to Igor. At times, Igor paused in his sweeping long enough to actually look at him and grunt, but Victor had no idea whether the sound was meant to communicate comfort or impatience or just a sign of indigestion. Comfort, he decided. He liked to imagine that Igor was becoming his friend as well as his companion.
To buoy himself up, he imagined the moment when Elizabeth would return—for surely she would return one of these days. Instead of greeting her in monosyllables, he would speak to her like a proper Englishman, and she would look at him with wide eyes and realize...what? He wasn’t entirely certain just what he wanted her to realize. That he was an intelligent being, perhaps, capable of higher reasoning. That he was not just a science project. That he was, in some ways, still a man. Ah, but that was too much to hope for, even in his private fantasies. Better to just imagine impressing her with his abilities.
He stroked the cat’s cheek. “Don’ you hink...think so, Aldini?”
“Mrrowr,” said Aldini, proving herself a far more satisfying conversationalist than Igor.
In any event, Victor wasn’t the only one who talked to himself. Makepiece liked to think out loud while he worked in the laboratory, and Victor did his best to pay attention without appearing to comprehend. This was most challenging when Makepiece addressed him directly, saying, “Well, Victor, that didn’t work,” or, “What do you think? Is the theory at fault, or is it the experimental design that is lacking?” Victor kept careful track of the ingredients Makepiece used as he attempted to formulate a better version of ichor. The current formula appeared to have a half-life of about a fortnight. After that, Bio-Mechanicals needed a fresh infusion, or else they developed what the students used to call “corpse fever.” It began with chills, fever and rash, and ended with convulsions and death.
If he did ever decide to make a break for freedom, he would have to find the correct ingredients, as well as the formula for producing the serum. Unless, of course, Makepiece succeeded in concocting a version that did not degrade so quickly.
Bit by bit, Makepiece began giving Victor more challenging tasks to do. He allowed him to mix the carbolic acid with water. He sent him on errands that took him to the main building and back. One morning, a pair of old leather boots appeared by the side of Victor’s cot. Another day, he found a waistcoat and jacket, old and worn, but serviceable. He’s treating me more like a person.
Then, one morning toward the end of the second week, Makepiece left the door open to his private rooms, exposing a small library that contained a wide, comfortable leather chair, a velvet love seat and a Dutch-tiled wood-burning fireplace. Leather-bound books lined the walls from floor to ceiling.
“Here. Use this.” Makepiece handed him a feather duster and made a brushing gesture; he was to dust off the gilt-embossed titles, which were mostly scientific tomes, with some surprising exceptions: Goethe’s Faust, The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Makepiece, it seemed, had a taste for Gothic tales of devils and maidens.
As Victor dusted, he heard a loud clatter from the laboratory—Igor must have dropped something.
“Careful, Igor,” said Makepiece, leaving Victor alone to see what his assistant had damaged. “Let me see—is it broken?” A moment later, the professor returned to the library, this time holding the box containing Elizabeth’s magnetometer in his hands. Igor shuffled behind, carrying the brass helmet that usually sat atop the Galvanic Reanimator. Victor stiffened. Elizabeth had never used the device on him when the professor was around, but clearly, he must know of its use. Was he planning on resuming the experiments in her absence?
“All right, now, Victor. Enough dusting.” Makepiece opened a door at the far end of the room, and reluctantly, Victor set the duster on a shelf and followed the professor, carefully blanking his expression so he showed no visible reaction to the six-foot-long metal cylinder standing on its side, or to the frail girl-child lying inside it like a magician’s assistant, with only her head showing. There was a pressure gauge attached, and as a bellows moved air in and out of the chamber, he could watch how the pressure rose and fell inside. Victor had never seen the like in his life; it was like something out of a Jules Verne science-fiction novel.
“You are to watch this dial.” Makepiece moved Victor, angling him so that he could see a pressure gauge. “If this line moves here, you must flip this switch. Do you understand?”
Victor inclined his head.
“Hello, Papa,” said the girl, timing her words so that she spoke only on the exhale. “What are we doing today?”
Makepiece looked down at the girl, his expression softening. “A new sort of treatment, Justine, my child.” He took the helmet from Igor and placed it over the girl’s blond head while Igor rocked back and forth, making little chirruping sounds of distress. “Stop that, Igor.”
“Don’t worry so,” said the girl softly, taking little sips of air between words. “I’ll be fine.”
When Makepiece turned on the magnetometer, Victor glanced up from the dial. The girl was watching him with huge pale eyes that seemed to absorb all available light, and then, abruptly, her eyes rolled back and she screamed. He did not remember yanking off the girl’s helmet with his gauntleted left hand, but a moment later he was staring at the torn leather straps, dimly aware of Makepiece berating him.
After that, he was barred from the girl’s room, although he did hear the crackle of the etheric magnetometer being used from time to time. What would Elizabeth do, if she knew her mentor kept a girl prisoner as an experimental subject?
* * *
Outside the window, the darkening sky was streaked with rose and amber. What was Elizabeth doing now? Eating her dinner? Talking with her friends? Perhaps she had a beau. She might even have gotten engaged. Victor’s left hand clenched involuntarily. Stop it, he told himself. Just stop it. You have no right to think of her like that. In his old life, he could have courted her, but in his old life, he probably wouldn’t have bothered. He had been too preoccupi
ed with his studies, with sports, with thoughts of the future and what he hoped to achieve to spend his days mooning over some bluestocking. Would he have even seen Elizabeth in a romantic light? Probably not. It was only now, trapped in this shadow existence, that feelings had become more important to him than facts and stratagems.
Above his head, there was a flittering of wings—bats, stirring from their sleeping place in the rafters. How he envied them. If only he had a special sense that allowed him to navigate through all the dark places, inside and out.
* * *
Aldini usually left in the mornings when Makepiece arrived, then returned late in the evening to spend the night curled up next to Victor on his cot. Then, one day, Aldini didn’t come back in the evening. Days passed without any sign of the cat, and Victor was ashamed by how much he missed her. He hadn’t realized how much he had come to rely on her presence until she was absent. Without her, the hours dragged by, and he felt surges of despair. This tedious room, he thought, will be my whole world till I die.
Aldini returned as abruptly as she had disappeared, yowling and purring, winding herself against Makepiece’s legs for a moment, then going over to Victor and rubbing her cheek against his ankle. Victor was so happy to see her he nearly smiled and gave himself away.
“She seems to like you,” said Makepiece. “Curious, as she never pays any attention to Igor.”
Victor attempted to ignore the cat without actually tripping over her as he stacked crates in a corner. Makepiece scratched his beard, looking away as though solving some problem that had nothing to do with Bio-Mechanicals or cats. Then, very casually, he said, “Stop.”
Victor stopped, still holding a crate of glass vials in his hands.
“Put that down.” Victor obeyed. “Now, pick up the cat.” Victor stared straight ahead, then bent and scooped up the cat. Too late, he realized his mistake; he had picked up Aldini with two hands, one under her hind legs. Surely a mindless automaton would have simply hoisted the creature by its scruff.
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