Marcus-Sebastian looks neither angry nor disappointed. He just nods confirmation and takes Wend-E’s wine-crate module from her. The motion-effect pictures of Wend-E on the sides wave goodbye to her, smiling as though all is forgiven. But Isabella knows it’s not. She hesitates before the closing door, mouth open to release words that can’t find their way out. Unthinking she jams a foot in the narrowing gap. The heavy door squashes her foot, and this encourages some words to come, just not the ones she was looking for.
Marcus-Sebastian waits for the tirade to die down. ‘Yes?’ he says.
‘It seems to me you could use some help to run this place, and I’ve just come into rather a lot of money,’ says Isabella. ‘And I’ve got a debt that I need to pay back.’
Kate and the Buchanan
Andrew Reid
If you can’t find it, make it. It wasn’t much as philosophies went, but it was the only one Kate had. Dad - God rest his soul - had been the one responsible for it, letting the words and the spirit of them soak into her as she tinkered her childhood days away in his workshop. He’d tried to give her a normal education, but the governess he hired lasted less than a day. She had taken issue with Kate’s unladylike hair - a frizzy puff-ball of curls that defied all attempts to constrain them - and when Kate had argued back put a strap across her hands. After that, he trusted no-one but himself to do the job right.
She wished he’d lived to see The Buchanan. It would have puzzled the hell out of him, but she would have loved for him to see it regardless. They’d been working on a new pipe design when he passed, tubes of knitted fibres knitted so tight you could pass steam down them with no leaks, and flexible enough that they could coil like rope. It had been a labour of love for the pair of them, a flash of insight they’d shared across the workshop table while he’d been trying his hand at darning a sock. He’d wanted the thread to match for some reason, and was trying to unpick a length of yarn from the top of the leg. Do you think it would work, she’d said as she watched him struggle with the yarn, if someone made a pipe like that? By the time she’d been ready to file the patent he was two months in the ground, and the pain had been too close to put their names to it. Their lawyer, an old friend of the family, suggested she pick a pseudonym and patent the design under that. She’d chosen Buchanan, for reasons she now had trouble remembering, and that was that. The name had stuck.
Two more patents went in under the same name before Kate reneged on the idea. The workshop was a quiet place to spend your days, and even though the money came in all the same she started to feel as though she was missing out on the fruits of her labour. There had to be others out there who felt as she did, who wanted to tinker with the world until it worked just so. It wasn’t until she went to see her lawyer that the scales fell away from her eyes.
Buchanan was famous. The first patent she’d filed was a success. Outrageously so, in fact; practically overnight, it had revolutionised the steam engine industry, making them more compact and less costly to make. She had created a stronger link between the engine-makers and the weavers, a consequence that saw her work hailed in Parliament as one of the century’s most progressive inventions. To try and protect her investment and her patent, the family lawyer had retained the services of a small but technically-minded firm in London that was, by virtue of association, now undergoing a period of rapid expansion.
Buchanan’s success was not a problem. That the name was pseudonymous, however, was. The question of Buchanan’s identity had become the great national obsession, and Kate’s second and third patents - one for oil additives, the other for mould-shaped alloys - had been picked apart in the search for clues as to who Buchanan might be. Her lawyer had kept her identity a close secret, even from his own staff, and had taken the precaution of keeping a close eye on the nation’s press so that he would know who to sue should it ever be revealed. The prevalent theory in the intellectual set was that Buchanan was not one person but a collective, a group of great minds pooling their resources together to push the boundaries of science outward for the betterment of society. It wasn’t a theory that many held faith in. There were a number of ‘great’ minds in the country, and the myriad advances that they contributed to the glory of science were dwarfed by their ongoing contributions to patent law and legal precedent. There wasn’t one invention among them that wasn’t disputed by another of their lot, and each was spending as much as they earned - some even approaching bankruptcy - in retaining lawyers to defend their claims. The collective noun for inventors, it seemed, was a litigation.
Kate decided against revealing herself as Buchanan. There was a kind of desperate madness to it, that people seemed to attach so much worth to the mystery of the inventor and not the wonder of the invention itself, and she found that thought depressing. The silence of her workshop suddenly seemed the better option, and she chose to remain anonymous.
To better occupy her mind, she started investigating calculation engines. The few that had been built were lumbering, clumsy affairs, all cogs and clicks and close-fitting tolerances, and the thought that there had to be a simpler way nagged at her. It took the serendipity of a dream to solve the problem, and almost ten years to bring it to fruition. In her dream, there had been a gear that turned with only two teeth. Each tooth had a value, but because there were only two, it became a switch. It was the simplest configuration, and therefore the most versatile.
Constructing an analytical engine composed entirely from those gears, however, was a far greater challenge than Kate had expected. It wasn’t until she built a voltaic pile that it occurred to her the electrical connection possessed the same qualities as her switch; that if a wire could pass from one state to the next, it could transmit information.
By the time she was done, her electrical engine took up almost ninety percent of the manor house she bought to house it. Walls had been knocked through and ceilings pulled down and replaced with steel walkways so she could have better access to the full range of the machine’s components. When it was done, there was only one name she could think of to christen it with. Buchanan.
With the engine operational, calculations that had previously taken her days now took mere hours to perform. Even building it had challenged her ingenuity, and the list of patents and periodical communications that appeared under Buchanan’s name flourished once again. Interest that had waned in the years between waxed new once more, but Kate paid it no mind. There was still work to be done.
Behind the manor house, Kate kept her workshop. In deference to the scale of her endeavours, it was somewhat larger than the workshop she had grown up in. Instead of an L-shaped room it was a barn that backed onto the manor house, swallowing up most of the rear of the building. For the sake of light and ventilation, she kept the doors wide open, and enjoyed the feeling of being almost outdoors while she worked.
The latest component was almost ready. It was a bafflingly ornate construction, based on a regular array of wooden panels mounted on a sturdy iron frame. On each panel, looped bundles of wire were mounted in groups of sixteen. Each wire was individually coated in rubber, and throughout each bundle were interspersed a series of fingertip-sized magnets, threaded onto wires like beads. The insulated wires looped back and forth, and over and through each other, and Kate was struck by how much it reminded her of her father hunched over at the table, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he tried his hardest to unpick a sock.
A shuffle of movement interrupted Kate’s thoughts, the metallic snap of unfamiliar gear work, and she looked up into a sudden flash of blinding light. She put up her hands, too late to ward it off, and tried to blink away the purple ripples that swam across her vision.
‘Mister Buchanan, I presume…’ Her eyes cleared, and Kate was confronted by the sight of a young man, one hand extended in greeting, a triumphant grin fading quickly off his face. He looked down, and started to frantically inspect the object he held in his other hand. It was a camera, one of the type known as a box-quarte
t. The body held four small plates, and four lenses to project an image onto them. The mechanism at the front was a clockwork switch; when fired, the lenses opened and shut one after the other, taking four shots in the space of two seconds. Kate hadn’t seen an actual example before, but she was familiar with them. No less than three of her patents had resulted in its development. A fractional part of that camera’s sale, she realised, had helped to build the Buchanan. The man was swearing now, and wrestling with the camera’s front end as if trying to re-wind the shutter mechanism by hand. Kate was about to tell him that he needed a tool to do it, and that she happened to have one he could use, when she remembered that he was trespassing. Trespassing, and taking photographs of her. She turned to the workbench and picked up the heaviest, longest spanner.
‘Who the bloody hell are you?’ Kate waved the spanner in front of his face, drawing his attention away from the camera. He looked up, annoyed.
‘I might ask you the same,’ he said. ‘Who are you, and where is Buchanan?’
‘Buchanan? That’s who you’re looking for?’
‘I am.’
‘And what are you going to do when you find him? Put his picture in the paper so you can get fat and rich off it?’
He drew himself up, the very picture of affront. He wasn’t much taller than Kate, and not very well dressed. His suit had been patched at the elbows, and the condition of the cuffs suggested it was more than an affectation. ‘The public has a right to know.’
Kate’s grip tightened on the spanner. ‘The public has a right to privacy. Now bugger off before I smash your camera.’
‘Buchanan can’t hide forever! I’m going to find him, whether he wants to be found or not.’
‘Tell me, mister-’
‘Housman.’
‘Housman,’ she said. ‘Does it pay well, riding on other people’s coat-tails? Wouldn’t it be better living off the sweat of your own brow for once?’
Housman scoffed. ‘Madam, if you knew the lengths I have gone to get this far, you would not disparage my work. I have been almost two years at this, and just finding my way here has been an arduous journey.’
Kate regarded him dubiously. He seemed so shabbily earnest that it was almost worth hearing how he had found her. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘How did you find your way here?’
‘It was Buchanan’s paper on the stress-tolerances of trees that caught my eye. It had been pulled apart by all of the bright minds in scientific journalism already, of course, and there was no hint of identity to be found in the text. It occurred to me that perhaps they were looking for clues in the wrong place; that instead of examining the text for clues, we should be looking at the observations. The unique stresses that Buchanan had observed were due to extremely high winds, and I worked back from the dates of submission, cross-referencing records at the weather office for records of freak winds across the British Isles. Discarding the Hebrides, which are always battered so, I was left with a strip of England that covered the north east from Newcastle to the Humber.’
Kate suspected he had told this story before, or practised it in the mirror at least. ‘That’s still a fairly large area.’
‘Indeed. After much thought on the matter, I realised that Buchanan could never live far from a port, as he would need iron, coal, and water in great supply. Transport across country would not necessarily be a problem, but then it would leave a noticeable trail for his admirers to follow. Middlesbrough may be an infant compared to the London docks, but she is busy enough that he could make his purchases there incognito.’
‘Closer,’ Kate said. ‘But still not close enough. What did you do then?’
‘I took a leap of faith. It occurred to me that Buchanan might be a charitable sort. There’s always something about the good of mankind in his communications, and it seemed like a natural conclusion that he would likewise partition some of his good fortune in a demonstration of philanthropy. I set myself up as the editor of a circular, a charitable letter to be distributed amongst the social and technological elite of Britain, and canvassed the length and breadth of the country for worthy causes.’
Kate remembered it, and recalled being impressed by an editor so dedicated to the pursuit of charity. She found her voice through gritted teeth. ‘You set out charities as bait?’
‘I did,’ he said, proudly. ‘It took six months, but in the end Buchanan bit. A donation came in from this very area, significant enough to build a new hospital wing. I knew it was him straight away. Once I had passed on the money, I put the last of my rent into a new set of plates and hopped on a train north.’
‘The last of your rent?’
‘Yes. With the right pictures, I’d have had an editor’s desk and a fixed salary out of it.’ He gestured to his camera. ‘If I’d not wasted the plates, that is.’
‘I see.’ Kate regarded him coldly. ‘What if I was to tell you that I am Buchanan?’
Housman’s answering laugh was so quick and so abrupt that even he looked surprised by it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, calming himself. ‘It was cruel of me to laugh.’
‘It was. Why would you find it funny?’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Yes. Why couldn’t I be Buchanan?’
‘Well, forgive me for saying so, but there is no possibility that Buchanan is a woman.’
‘Really? How so? Enlighten me.’
‘Well, to begin with, where would you have trained? No self-respecting workshop or engineer would take on a girl as an apprentice; it would be a scandal.’
‘My father trained me, after my mother passed. There was no risk of scandal because I was his only apprentice.’
‘Your father? How was it no-one had heard of him, then?’
‘Oh he was capable enough in his own way, but Father could never quite see past the schematics. He had no heart for tinkering with something that worked fine as far as he could see it.’
Housman shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Ma’am. I cannot accept, not for a moment, that you are Buchanan. His mind, his passion, his genius is too great to be contained in such a-’
Kate folded her arms. ‘Feminine vessel?’
‘I’m sorry, as I say, to put it so plainly.’
‘Apology noted, if not accepted,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see what I was working on?’
Housman grasped at the olive branch. ‘Yes, if you’d like.’
They turned together and regarded the component. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
‘Is it something to do with electricity?’
‘Well spotted, Mr Housman. The question is, though, what does it do with it?’
He scratched his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’
‘These are instructions for a set of calculations. You noted the work I had been doing on the flexibility and strength of materials like wood. These are much more complex equations, regarding the weight and power ratios of wings in flight.’
The man looked up at the machine in wonder. ‘You don’t mean…’
‘The iron ships that lumber about the world’s oceans are a clumsy means of transport, Mr Housman. What if there was something greater that we could achieve? How much would that story be worth to you?’
Realisation dawned on Housman’s face, and Kate was gratified to see it. She imagined that she had looked much the same when the idea had first come to her, and to finally share that dream with someone else was a moment to be savoured. He started to laugh, and she smiled to hear it.
‘You have my compliments, Ma’am.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and there was genuine gratitude in her voice. ‘I’ve worked long and hard on it.’
‘I’m sure you have,’ he said. ‘A splendid performance.’
‘Performance?’
‘For a moment there I was absolutely convinced that you might actually be Buchanan,’ he said. ‘Such an audacious scheme! First you turn out to be a woman, then this marvellous jumble of wires that you say will give us
the secret of flight… If I were to print it, I would be a laughing stock.’
‘You’re a very clever man,’ said Kate, but Housman was too busy talking to notice how she said it.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Was the trail that led me here intentional? Am I the first?’
‘Don’t ask me, dear. I just play the part.’
Housman looked down at his camera. ‘There might still be something in it yet,’ he said. ‘An Elaborate Scheme by the Smartest Man in the Empire.’ Kate could hear him capitalising as he spoke. ‘Tea-time stuff, of course, but it goes down a treat in the periodicals.’
‘Well, you’d best get off and write it,’ she said. ‘But before you go, there is one thing I can tell you for certain.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re right when you say Buchanan is not a woman.’
Housman touched his forelock in salute before giving her and the machine one last look-over. ‘Amazing,’ he said, almost to himself as he turned to leave.
‘Quite.’ Kate put the spanner down on the bench, watching him go. The sudden impulse that had taken hold, the urge to see herself recognised as the greatest mind of her age, had dissipated. It felt ridiculous to imagine that anyone had moved so much as an inch since her father’s passing, or that they had the wit to do so. That was why she’d built the Buchanan, after all. She shook away the bad feelings and turned back to her work. The iron frame was heavy, even on its trolley, and it would take her the rest of the day to move it through to the main building and ease it into place. Once that was done, though, there was no reason why she wouldn’t be able to start her calculations right away. Just thinking about it was enough to banish Housman from her mind.
One day not far from this one, Kate was going to fly.
Game, Set and Match?
Juliet McKenna
Her bag’s strap slipped from her shoulder as she passed the cycle racks. She made as if to catch the weighty satchel. Too late. It hit the paving with a thud. She crouched down as though to gather up her spilled belongings. Under cover of the bag’s bulk, she drove the large-bore hypodermic through the closest bike’s tyre. As she wiggled the needle, the soft hiss of escaping air confirmed that the inner tube was punctured. Good.
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