The Shadow Conspiracy II

by Phyllis Irene Radford

  “And we can sell new patterns for other types of projects. But this means you would have to re-draw each picture for each arm?”

  “No, I think once we break down the patterns into modules, and have ones that are capable of drawing the picture, that as long as they set up the lucida correctly, it will work,” she assured him. “Make me wax pattern cards, and I will cut them as the prototypes. I think we should design them for right-handed individuals, though. Those of a sinister persuasion can contact us for private lessons!”

  Sam’s laugh barked out in response, and he started helping her replace the patterns in the gearbox. “I have a piece of news for you,” he said abruptly.

  “Yes?”

  “The mechanical arm and camera lucida are yours.”

  Aidan stared at him, puzzled.

  “I mean that sometime in the past few years, Da added a codicil to his will. The mechanical arm, his camera lucida, his tools and supplies for building automata — in fact, this studio — are left to you by name, as well as a stated price for your dowry.” He then named a sum that caused her to blink.

  “Can...can the estate afford that sum?” she finally asked, quite surprised at the amount. You’d think she was the granddaughter of a lord.

  “Yes — especially if the money is set aside now, in its funds. I contacted a friend in banking to make sure it’s paid out in a good balance of the funds father bought,” he added, carefully closing the automaton.

  “Look! Tell me what you see!”

  What was she hearing? “Sam...are you worried about father’s solicitor? Or...Owen?”

  Samuel held open his handkerchief and set the new wax pattern into it. “No, not that exactly. But Owen doesn’t have much respect for a woman’s opinion. Remember that mother being French and having to learn English kept her tied tighter to Da’s side than was good for either of them. Stupid of him, but Owen is funny about that — part of the reason he hasn’t married. He wants a wife with some spunk, but then expects himself to do all the thinking? Hard to find, that. I think he would prefer to keep you and mother dependent on him.”

  “I’d...rather not be going to Owen for every penny I need for material or paint,” she said slowly.

  He gave her a sharp look. “No, I didn’t think so. Da taught you how to run the house finances quite well — and Mother knows how to pressure a tradesman to the ounce. I am not at all worried about you — although you know Elizabeth will insist on my saying something if she disapproves of any young man you start seeing!”

  That made her laugh. “Samuel, as if your wife would hold back her opinion on any topic, much less one so important!” Still smiling, she said: “I can’t promise you I will be orthodox in my choice of a husband, but I do promise not to marry simply to disoblige you!”

  “Well, Owen could have driven you to that. I made sure the solicitor knew I had no worries about you running the household. If I don’t protest, Sean and the others won’t. Let Soames run the farm, and Owen put his two cents in there, and —”

  “Let Owen run the gallery as he pleases? Of course. He does a very good job with it.” Except for not wanting my paintings.

  “I knew you’d see it, if I pointed it out,” he said, smiling. “Elizabeth was afraid you’d tell me I was seeing things.”

  “You have very good eyesight, Samuel,” Aidan said softly, collecting the tools — her tools, now! — and putting them in their chest.

  She knew he would understand what she meant.

  Taking the prototype automaton and cards with him, Samuel promised her an arm to teach within the week. Pleased with herself, Aidan shut the outer doors to the studio and began lighting lamps, carefully setting them at a distance from her father’s mechanical arm. Her father had enjoyed night painting, too, and the color changes at night with these glazes....

  First she made sure that her own place was ready, her crystal — still hers, until Owen objected–-set to catch the light of the lanterns and the smooth paper on her board. Aidan placed modeling clay to mark the lantern placement, so she could remove the lantern by day until both versions of the Chinese still life were complete.

  Then...carefully Aidan lifted away the board from her father’s favorite easel, setting the drawing aside, and placed a new board with fresh paper and the lucida in its place. “I thought that this same still life of bowls might look quite interesting by lamplight,” she announced to the room at large. “Especially if I put water in the largest bowl, which I did.” The pencil in the automaton was freshly sharpened; she reached for the key...and paused.

  “It seems to me that somehow, the crystal is the important piece, the key,” she said softly. “Da...if you ever wish me to...break...this crystal lens, if you feel imprisoned by it, or tired of it? Simply draw a broken key. And I will know that there is something in this arm that needs to be set free.”

  Five full turns to reach the perfect tension. Aidan moved the arm over the paper, and then settled in her own seat. As she heard the light sound of scratching, she swallowed the lump in her throat and lowered her gaze to her own camera lucida.

  She might need to get her Da’s paint palette ready tonight, but it was a complex enough drawing that Aidan thought it could wait. Of course, night color would be new and exciting again, too....

  She would wait and see.

  Steel Seraph

  A story of speculative fiction

  Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  San Francisco Chronicle, December 4, 1896

  AN AIRSHIP WHICH RODE IN A WAGON WAS PLANTED IN A GULCH:

  The latest fake to deceive the credulous

  Built of galvanized iron and conveyed to a secluded spot, the airship was found early this morning. The Seraph of the air spread its wings like a giant condor...and slid downhill in the vicinity of the Sunnyside House on the Corbett Road and with a peculiar whirring sound, scraped the paint off its underside.

  Sunnyside House fronts a milk ranch and herders heard a noise shortly before midnight that they describe as like an earthquake. Rushing forth they heard cries proceeding from an ill-favored gulch where the cows ruminate at nighttime. Going to the spot they found a strange-looking craft of metal.

  They did not examine the machine closely, for the writhing forms of two men appealed to their humanity. The writhing forms...recovered sufficiently to explain that they were the inventors and builders of an airship in which they had been sailing about when the machine got out of order and they fell to earth. In proof, they pointed to the immense, cigar-shaped metallic tube with its propellers and wings. Messengers were hurried to the Almshouse for medical assistance and word was conveyed to the press.

  When the Almshouse physician and reporters arrived, it took but a moment to puncture the fake. Captain Reddy recognized in Professor J.D. DeGear the inventor, a man who had through the Almshouse telephone, called up a prominent local amusement director...whom he assured that...”she” would go tonight for sure.

  The reporters found that the airship was constructed of galvanized iron; that the paint was not yet dry upon it; and that the propeller blades would bend at a touch; and the thing was left to rest where it had fallen.

  The inventor vainly endeavored to convince them that it had once sailed the skies, but under close cross-questioning, admitted that it had been hauled to the crest of the hill on a wagon and dragged down into the gulch...

  It would be cliché to say that the evening leading up to that story was an ordinary one. It was nothing of the sort, unless one calls being lured into the boondocks on a false lead “ordinary.”

  I’d chased a story to a tavern on Corbett Road, only to find I had been hoaxed. The person who had called me there did not exist, and the story — the appearance in a neighboring field of some exotic beast — was bunkum.

  The tavern patrons had a good laugh at my expense, then stood me to a round of drinks — a sop to my embarrassment. When, not long after, a colleague from the Oakland Tribune appeared and inquired slyly if I had seen the “co
w pasture creature,” I knew who had initiated my chase. He led our fellow patrons in another guffaw.

  “There,” he said. “Consider that payback for that disgraceful Embarcadero affair.”

  “Nonsense, Duggan, I didn’t send you out at the witching hour on a wild monster chase.”

  “No, you simply deflected me from a story long enough to file it yourself.”

  It was a fond memory. “All’s fair,” I told him, raising my glass.

  “Exactly.”

  We fell into friendly conversation until, not long after midnight, the tavern owner — Sam Whitehouse by name — announced that he intended to be asleep within the hour. Scottie Duggan paid for my last drink and we filed out into the fog-bound roadway with a handful of die-hard locals, milling like confused geese in the mist. A gibbous moon rode high in the sky, peering at us through tattered holes in fog and cloud.

  Duggan and I were at the point of parting company when we heard a shout from the darkness beyond the tavern. Approaching us from the expanse of pasture that bordered Corbett Road were a pair of bobbing lanterns. In a matter of moments, I made out two men attached to the lanterns, waving their arms as they approached.

  “I wonder what they’re on about?” asked my companion.

  The answer was quick, but jumbled. The older of the two men was Frank Goddard, a farmer, who explained that he and his son had been bringing in the milk cows from the pasture when they heard the “awfullest noise.”

  “There’s been an accident of some stripe. Over across the meadow, below the bluff.” Goddard jerked his head back toward his pasture.

  His son, white-faced and bug-eyed, nodded like a stick puppet. “S’true. There’s been a crash. We’ve come for help.”

  We went without hesitation, envisioning a carriage or wagon overturned onto Goddard’s property from the road above. The reality was much stranger.

  Something certainly lay at the foot of the little bluff, but it was no farm wagon. It was much larger and metallic, and was the shape — as near as I could tell — of a weaver’s shuttle, or a fat cigar. It had some sort of canopy suspended above the body that looked as if it had once been supported by the delicate metal framework.

  I wondered, as I approached, if I was looking at a new design for a hot-air balloon and gondola, but there wasn’t enough fabric clinging to the wreckage to amount to a balloon.

  At the bow of the thing was the most peculiar feature of all — a propeller, but not like any I’d seen on steam vessels. This had long, thin blades, each perhaps four feet in length. Drawing close, I raised a hand to one of the blades and pressed it back. It gave under my hand, bending sharply. I guiltily pulled my hand away and the blade followed it, springing back into position so quickly, I jumped.

  At that moment, a groan from beneath the crippled framework pulled my eyes away from the propeller. The craft was manned.

  “Here!” I shouted to the others, who were gingerly skirting the wreck. “There are injured here!”

  Two men had inserted themselves into a pair of pockets cut in the surface of the thing’s hull, just forward of amidships. Their bodies were entirely within the craft; only their heads were in the open. Those heads were covered with odd leather bonnets, faces at least partially concealed by masks that made them look like plucked owls.

  Their obvious distress hastened our efforts to clear away the canopy above their heads. This was not easy, for the structure was attached to the hull with peculiar jointed struts that were not nearly as spindly as they looked.

  Beneath the twisted framework, the air smelled strongly of machine oil. I’d been aboard the Navy’s newest battleships; this was the perfume of the engine-room. There was another odor that I didn’t recognize — sharp and pungent.

  I managed to climb up to the first of the compartments, where one man made ineffectual attempts to remove his headgear. I fumbled to help him while Duggan pulled himself up to the aft compartment.

  “This fellow seems to be unconscious,” he said, beckoning to the farmers. “By God, he’s cold as a fish.”

  I pulled away the first victim’s bonnet. It was leather and had gleaming brass rivets or grommets above the ears and eyebrows. It sported a pair of lenses that looked only superficially like spectacles.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked the fellow.

  “Ahhh...no. I am unharmed.”

  “We’d best get you out,” I told him. “Both of you. Your companion is unconscious.”

  He nodded his understanding and reached down inside the compartment with gloved hands. I heard two distinct metallic clanks, then he tried unsuccessfully to lever himself out. In the end, it took Scottie Duggan and me both to remove him and deposit him on a patch of grass beside the craft, for he was quite heavy for his stature.

  “How in heaven’s name did you come to be here?” Duggan asked him. “And what is...” He gestured toward the vessel, if such it was. “...that,” he concluded.

  The fellow turned his head from side to side slowly as if making sure of his neck. “Everything was going fine. I don’t know what happened. Down-draft? One minute we were flying along, level, on course. The next...” His eyes surveyed the wreckage. “God, she’s a ruin. The wings...”

  “Wait,” said Duggan, standing suddenly upright. “Would you have us believe that this thing...flew?”

  “Flew? Of course. Seraph of the Air.” He cleared his throat and blinked up at us owlishly, his face below the pale mask outline dark with dirt and oil.

  “And these impossible things are wings?” Duggan grasped a dangling strut and shook it.

  “Wings, yes. They mimic the wings of the condor. My design.”

  Scottie tilted his head and gazed down at me. “Well, Lee, my boy, this is the most outrageous prank you’ve pulled yet. How in heaven’s name did you arrange it?”

  He turned to where the milk rancher was working over the second victim. “Of course, I see you had help.”

  “What are you babbling about, Scottie Duggan? I’m as much agog at this as you are.”

  “Like hell you are,” he told me. “And good morning to you. I’m going home to catch some sleep. Seraph of the Air, indeed.”

  He was gone before I could stop him.

  I returned my attention to the groggy gentleman. “Are you claiming you flew this craft here, Mister...?”

  “Professor. DeGear. J.D. DeGear, I — .” He cut off in obvious confusion and regarded me warily. “Am I...am I a prisoner, sir?”

  Prisoner? Why would he think himself a prisoner? “I’m Lee Cranfeldt — a newspaper reporter. San Francisco Chronicle. And no, you’re not a prisoner; you were in an accident of some sort with this machine. Don’t you remember?”

  DeGear swiveled his head to look at the mechanical ‘condor.’ “I remember...flying at about two hundred feet. Low, but above the fog, below cloud cover. Something went wrong.” He struggled to stand. “Please, help me up.”

  I did, concerned that the stiffness of his movement betrayed an injury. I glanced over to where the farmer knelt next to DeGear’s companion.

  He followed my eyes. “Harry! Dear God, is he all right?”

  Frank Goddard heard him and looked up. “Alive, but knocked senseless. I sent my boy up to the Almshouse for a doc.”

  DeGear nodded, still looking dazed, but his attention was already on his Seraph. He stumbled to the bow and ran a hand along one of the propeller blades.

  “What do those do?” I asked, following him.

  He moved aft along the hull of the craft. “They work as well in air as they do in water, Mr. Cranfeldt, and will push or pull a vessel forward in either medium.”

  “You seem sure of that.”

  “I designed submersibles once. No longer. Damned war.”

  “Ah, and the wings hold it aloft, I suppose.”

  “Yes. Except in this case...” DeGear had stopped just beneath the crumpled starboard wing to finger a misshapen metal ring in the fabric. “A malformed grommet. Something so small...” He
didn’t finish the thought, but ducked under the wing to continue his inspection.

  I followed DeGear aft, pausing at the wing only long enough to feel the dunnish fabric. It was supple, thin, and glistened like wet fish scales in the flickering light. The hull also looked wet, but when I pulled my hand away, it was dry.

  Abaft the wing, DeGear was hanging nearly upside-down in one of the seating compartments. I’d seen native kayaks designed like this and wondered if those had served as a model for it. Which begged the question: why?

  “Professor, may I ask what this craft is?”

  He pulled his head out of the well. “It’s a flying machine.”

  “Yes, but...where is the balloon? Is that what happened? Did the balloon separate from the gondola?”

  His eyes finally focused on me, and his face — which was disturbingly pale — went blank. He collapsed against the side of his ship.

  I dove to keep him from striking his head, nearly losing the oil lamp. I dragged him back under the wing with one arm and deposited him as gently as possible in the grass. He let out a hiss of pain.

  I saw that the police had arrived, along with a contingent from the Almshouse infirmary. I waved to them, then edged back over to the vessel, where I poked my head into the seating pocket Dr. DeGear had lately inhabited. I don’t know what I expected to see, but it was not this array of little dials and levers and glass-covered gauges. I’d seen such things on steam engines, but I’d swear there was no steam engine made that could fit into such a craft as this. The faces of the gauges seemed to glow faintly even when I held the lamp away from them. On the floorboards of the vessel was a metal helm that mimicked the leather one on his head. Strands of wire connected it to the control console. I reached for it.