Senlin wanted to argue. He wanted to rouse the young man from his despair and inspire him with some grand plan. He tightened his jaw to keep back the flood of advice. This wasn’t the time for motivational speeches or proposals; Adam had emptied his heart, and his confession needed no critique. Adam sat like an under-stuffed doll, and Senlin knew the only thing to do was to break the pall of misery that had fallen over the room. He stood and began shoving his arms into the sleeves of his black overcoat. “I have never seen the inside of a pipe organ,” he said, and took up the aerorod, holding it now as if it were a cane. “You know what the old organist at my college used to call his instrument? The plumbing that sings. He joked that every time he pulled out a stop, somewhere on campus, a toilet flushed.”
With this and a half dozen other silly anecdotes, Senlin endeavored to revive Adam’s spirits. Adam hardly resisted as they departed the station house, requisitioned a steam carriage, and began the trip into New Babel. Whatever was to come, Senlin was not about to let his friend face it alone.
Adam steered the shambling autowagon through the streets of New Babel. Steam clung to the road and curb like a piecrust. Seated on the high driver’s box alongside him, Senlin watched as traffic careened in and out of the gloom, mad as jacks. Ashy white buildings rose about them like grim teeth. Bats swooped through the fog, which glowed a molten gold in the electric light of streetlamps. The air was heavy with a damp chill. He hated the stygian city and had avoided it for months.
Had it been left up to him, Senlin would never have found the notorious Steam Pipe. From the outside it looked like every other building on this and every other block; it looked like an undecorated crypt. But Adam was well versed in the subtle variations of the New Babel grid, and had no trouble finding it. He parked the autowagon on the street, and led Senlin to a metal service door at the end of a narrow alley.
They were met and let in by an older cleaning woman, who Adam obviously knew. The two of them chatted amiably about her sore foot and the inconsiderate, young women she had to clean up after, and other banalities Senlin could not contribute to. He was distracted by the room anyway. The broad ceiling stepped closer to the rough plank floor the further they went in. Senlin supposed that they were under the risers of some great room, probably the tiered seats of a theater. Crammed inside the shrinking room were the brass intestines of a leviathan: pipes snaked out from a central tank, running to every corner of the room. Black needles danced across the white faces of gauges. The room was pleasantly warm, a rarity in the Boudoir. Senlin took the opportunity to open his coat and loosen his collar.
“Wet steam comes up into that boiler, and is superheated,” Adam said, materializing at Senlin’s side. Senlin glanced about and realized the cleaning woman was gone. “Most of the pipes go to heat the theater and the bedrooms upstairs, but these,” Adam said, and pointed at a trio of thick pipes, “power the turbine which inflates the bellows of the organ.”
Adam continued his technical explanation, and Senlin could sense the young man’s passion for the intricacies of the machine, even as the details flew over his head. He tried to force himself to follow Adam’s explanation, but he was distracted by their stooped passage behind the boiler and its medusa of pipes that sweated and hissed about them, through a tunnel that thrummed with the drone of an engine, and up a narrow, unlit stair.
They stood before a model city of spires. Some of the towers were made of wood, others of copper, or tin and lead. They stretched up between a black-painted wall full of scaffolding and rigging and an immense red curtain. Such a strange, unexpected spectacle! The towers of this model city, he quickly realized, were in fact the pipes of a mighty organ. There were hundreds of them. Adam explained that they had passed under the main stage of the Steam Pipe, and were now backstage.
“There are pipes on stage that look like diapasons, but they’re just dummies. They blow air, but don’t produce sound. They’re just for show.” Adam said, concluding some lengthy mechanical note that Senlin had missed the start of.
“If they’re dummies, why do they blow air?” Senlin asked gamely, but before Adam could answer, they were interrupted by a man entering from the backstage wings of the theater. Over a tuxedo, he wore a cape that was silver-lined and crimson-backed. Senlin couldn’t decide whether it made him look theatrical or insane.
The man was in his prime, at least. He wore his dark hair oiled and in a queue, and the skin of his face was tightened to the bone, unlined when relaxed and, Senlin suspected, heavily rouged. This could only be Rodion, the whoremonger.
“There’s something wrong with the Ottava Diapason, Adam. It has no oomph. A crack in the pipe, or perhaps the rats have been at the seals again,” Rodion said lightly enough, as he swept to a stop before them. He eyed Senlin like a dominant rooster. The metallic threads in his cape glittered ridiculously even in the dim backstage light. Perhaps if he had met Rodion at a dance social last spring, Senlin would’ve been intimidated by the man’s ostentation, but as it was, the whoremonger reminded him of a watered-down Commissioner: a weak man in strong costume. Senlin was afraid the Commissioner might pursue him to the ends of the earth, but Senlin doubted Rodion was capable of such persistence. He looked like a dramatist, a man with more props than power. Far from being impressed, Senlin wanted nothing more than to put his thumb in the man’s eye.
Rodion continued, “Voleta goes on in twenty minutes. If the organ isn’t fixed, I’ll have to find her some other work for her this evening.”
The implication was clear enough. Senlin could feel Adam’s tension, which came on as reflexively as a salute. Adam seemed to calculate how long the repairs would take, frowned at the worrisome conclusion, and curtly excused himself to work on the problem.
Rodion turned back to Senlin. “Port Master Thomas Senlin, finally we meet,” Rodion said without a hint of warmth to his voice.
“I came to assist Mr. Boreas,” Senlin said.
“Liar. It doesn’t take two men to stuff a rag in a mouse hole. Either Finn sent you to spy on me or you came to see some knickers.” Rodion leaned in to the Port Master.
“I came for the— um, show,” Senlin said.
“Of course you did. I’ll find you a seat,” he said, with a sizing glance. He seemed to be gauging Senlin’s level of interest in his sordid business. Obviously, the whoremonger was accustomed to capitalizing upon other men’s lust, so he was testing the Port Master, tempting him in the hopes that Senlin would expose some exploitable weakness. Senlin saw a clear advantage in allowing Rodion to believe that he held something over him. Let the man think what he wanted. The whoremonger’s mislaid confidence would make him vulnerable to flattery and manipulation later. All Senlin had to do to coddle the man’s ego was sit through a burlesque performance that starred Adam’s sister.
Senlin suppressed a shudder, quickly replacing his grimace with a smirk that reflected Rodion’s own knowing smile. “You really must see what all the fuss is about,” Rodion said.
Chapter Eight
“Today’s candidate: the Fat Alistair. She’s a merchant ship, forty-six feet, stem to stern, with two twenty-pound guns and bunks for twelve. A good candidate on the surface of it; unfortunately, she flies the colors of Pelphia. Stealing from the Pells, who I must one day infiltrate, seems beyond stupid. The search continues.”
- Every Man’s Tower, One Man’s Travails by T. Senlin
Senlin sat rigidly in the plush theater seat he had been ushered to, his aerorod laid across his knees. He was sure the boiler room was beneath him; he could feel the slight pulsation of machinery through the floor. The contrast between that gloomy underworld and the golden theater that soared about him was almost surreal. Senlin was surrounded by hundreds of men decked in what passed for formal attire in a city of laborers; moth-chewed coats, threadbare hats, and collars the color of cigar smoke were in evidence everywhere. The men were agitated and eager. Ornate theater boxes, arrayed with plaster friezes of reclining nudes, hid wealthy spectators
from the prying eyes of the rabble below.
Mid-stage, Rodion sat at an organ keyboard that was shaped like a crescent moon. He played with stiff-armed vigor. The organ sounded like an aviary. Each note was loud enough to prickle the skin. Rodion pulled at the banks of ivory stops as expertly as a cherry picker, changing and layering the tones to suit the passage he played. The man’s talent was undeniable.
Behind the organist’s console, a bank of pipes rose in tiers from the floor half way up the presidium archway, filling the stage. The lush red curtain, which Senlin had recently seen the back of, fluttered from the wind that burst from those dummy pipes. Most of the gleaming copper resonators seemed large enough to swallow a man. Above him, the high, domed ceiling had been painted the color of a clear sky.
But it wasn’t the vast and polished pipes, or the flamboyant organist, or the thunderous chords that enthralled the men who filled the theater. It was the women who came on stage and climbed the face of the brass mountain with flirtatious immodesty. They climbed up and pranced along the tops of the pipes, agile as mountain goats, graceful as ballerinas. They were uniformly young and made up, their eyes exaggerated with charcoal and paint, their mouths lurid as smashed cherries. All were ribbed with tightened corsets; frilly skirts flowered at their hips. Blasts of air erupted from the pipes beneath the climbing and bounding dancers, blowing their skirts above their waists. The dancers covered their mouths in a parody of modesty. The audience leaned and rocked and applauded in their seats. The black stockings. The white garters. The flashes of bare thigh. It was as if the erupting music was peeling them bare.
The thought that Marya might somewhere have been reduced to the same fate was enough to make him want to shoot out the lights and strangle the organist and plunge the whole horrible scene into silence. But he was in the obvious minority. The rest of the audience didn’t see sisters and daughters, lost souls and adventuresome hearts. They saw beams of limelight swinging across banks of kicking legs. They saw greased teeth and jouncing bosoms. When their locks were blown straight above their heads, the women appeared to be hanging by their hair like fruit from a tree.
Senlin wondered which one was Voleta.
Rodion concluded his song with a volcanic flourish and turned on his bench to face the crowd. The ladies grabbed their skirts and curtsied above him. The applause slowly died as he held up a white-gloved hand for calm. “Good evening gentlemen and welcome to the Steam Pipe.” He paused for the wave of sincere cheers. “Please see the doormen if you’re interested in a more private performance. My staff is as clean as my pipes!” Laughter pealed. “Not all women are created equal.” He continued, and Senlin recognized the words as scripted. “Some are beautiful; some are daring. Some have a talent, athletic or exotic.” An obscene call from the crowd elicited a new bout of laughter. “But I have only ever known one woman capable of flight! And so without further ado, the girl you all paid to see, Voleta the Flying Girl.”
A hatch opened at the apex of the blue dome, and a woman seated on a trapeze was lowered through. The voluminous black hair that hung in wild kinks about her shoulders made her head appear large and her body slight. She wore a purple leotard that covered her muscular bust and broad hips, and bared her lithe, olive-skinned legs.
Even from a distance, Senlin could’ve identified her as Adam’s sister: she had the same broad mouth and the sharp nose, but her eyes were all her own: large, violet and painted round with green. Blue sequins glinted at her temples. She smiled, not seductively but like an artisan taking delight in her work. She pumped the trapeze until she swept up the incline of the audience, then back up the cliff face of the pipes. Such fluidity and nonchalance! Rodion played a haunting, theatrical tune that seemed full of danger. Senlin was mesmerized. In one deft motion, Voleta flipped over the bar, and for a moment, he was sure the trapeze would leave her behind. But she twisted in the air like a wisp of smoke, and caught the bar again. Dangling by her arms, her slippers brushed the outstretched fingers of the more brazen men who reached after her from their seats. Then, at the limit of her swing, she released the bar and corkscrewed like a maple seed, catching the bar as it began its return. When she somersaulted, her unruly, beautiful hair accentuated her body like the tail of a kite. Senlin’s heart rose into his throat, enlarged by fear and awe. She was spectacular.
After a few further acrobatic feats, she slowed the swing of the trapeze, waved with childish abandon at the crowd, and was hoisted back through the hatch in the dome. This time Senlin found himself contributing to the manic applause.
There was a brief, but touching reunion backstage among the rigging, fire buckets, and the sparkling dandruff of a thousand costumes. Adam’s usual haggard expression fell away as he swung Voleta about in a glad embrace. Senlin felt privileged to be present for the happy moment. The grounded Voleta seemed somehow smaller than the Flying Girl. She was unreserved, almost silly in her expressions, and seemed in many ways the opposite of her brother. Adam introduced Voleta to Senlin, and she shook his hand with the soft, shy grip of a child. But she was not a child, and there was a quick intelligence behind her gaze. Even so, she had her tics; she often guffawed after anyone spoke with any seriousness, as if she found earnestness itself funny. The guffaw was short, not at all feminine, and sounded more like a baritone’s “huh-huh” than an eighteen year old girl’s laugh. It was an oddly endearing quirk.
Voleta talked rapidly about her routine and her frustration with being kept always inside and her jealousy that Adam got to see the sun anytime he wanted. She concluded this single streaming sentence with an effusive description of a box of four bonbons she had been given as a gift, three of which were heavenly, and the fourth, disgusting. Adam said little, but his smile was eloquent enough. Senlin suspected these occasions were rare for them, and he wondered whether lost loved ones were perhaps sometimes preferable to imprisoned ones.
Then, all too soon, Rodion appeared, followed closely by a retinue of young women, ushers, makeup artists, and a slew of other stagehands. He preceded them like a king, still wearing his foil and crimson cape, but now with a new addition: the silver butt of a pistol protruded from a holster at his hip.
Rodion insinuated himself into their happy little trio, driving the smile instantly from Adam’s face. He pointed at Voleta, “The next show is in a half hour. You need to eat and get back to wardrobe. Go on,” the whoremonger said in a tone that parodied parental concern. Voleta gave him a sour smirk, though one that was free of any real rebellion, and turned to peck her brother on the cheek.
“Don’t eat the bonbons, Voleta. They aren’t gifts. They’re installments from men who are trying to buy you,” Adam said.
Voleta let out one of her honest huh-huh’s, and said, “If somebody wants to buy me with chocolate, they’re not going to like what they get,” she said, ballooning her cheeks and hooping her arms around an imaginary large belly. This time Adam didn’t laugh; he looked pale and bereft. Voleta turned her violet eyes on Senlin. “You’re his boss. Order him to be happy, and then hit him with a stick until he is. Just follow him around, with a broom handle and give him a whap when he sighs,” she said, clapping her hands. Before Senlin could answer, she rose to the points of her toes and kissed him on the cheek just as she had with her brother.
Voleta was absorbed again into the procession of dancers and stagehands, the group fizzing away into the bowels of the theater where changing rooms turned into bedrooms, and some spectators paid handsomely to become leading men for a while.
As the group was turning the corner, one straggling yellow-haired dancer glared back at them… no, not them, but at Senlin. Her glare had a sinister edge to it, and he realized he’d seen her before. Yes, he’d seen her on the barge on which he’d escaped the Baths. Hadn’t she glowered at him then, too?
Before Senlin could pursue the bothersome thread of thought, Rodion grabbed the reigns and whipped the conversation toward his own destination. “Such priceless genius,” he said, nodding after the re
ceding chatter of the group. His chest puffed with undeserved paternal pride. “Priceless! I would never dream of letting that sort of talent languish in obscurity. The whole world deserves to see her act.”
Senlin could tell that Adam knew the whoremonger was baiting him. The young man did not rise to the bait. Senlin was proud of him, though the victory was short-lived.
“An Algezian Baron caught her act the other night and was impressed. He wanted a private performance, but, per our agreement, I told him that such exceptional beauty and skill was not for rent.” Rodion’s tight, anemic skin piled about his mouth like an old man’s knuckle; it was a ghastly smile. “I’m a whoremonger. I prefer dealing in whores. There’s no courting, little turnover, no complex negotiations, or proof of maidenhead, or questions of pedigree with whores. The life of a wifemonger is exhausting! But your sister does all the work for me. She goes on stage and she courts them, and haggles with them, and proves herself a hundred times more convincingly than any doctor or genealogist ever could. She is making this old whoremonger into a peddler of wives. I said she was priceless, but she has been searching for her price. The Algezian Baron suggested that it might be twenty-five mina. But what are your thoughts? What do you think your sister is worth?”
Adam strained forward, his ears red; the veins in his neck stood out roundly. Senlin knew what was coming. He had on many occasions in his time as headmaster seen the victims of bullies abruptly arrive at their breaking point. The fight that followed was invariably bloody. Rodion was pushing Adam to the edge of self-restraint. He was looking for an excuse to shoot the troublesome brother of his star performer. Senlin had to intervene.
Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1) Page 29
