by Unknown
“—and we play cards,” said Martin. “We play gin mostly, and Gideon loses most of the time because he’s no good—”
“—and we meditate and hover over the people of this park like gods.”
“Gideon has some kind of a complex,” said Martin.
“Hey, I paid a nickel to get in here,” said Harold. “Now you guys have gotta show me something. What do I get to look at with this camera for five cents.”
“Impatient,” Martin said, shaking his head. “Impatient. Ending his questions with periods and everything.”
“Impatience might be good,” Gideon said sideways to Martin, and then to Harold, “Usually, we let the people who come up here—”
“But no one ever comes up here,” said Martin. “No one ever does.”
“—select two things to view: one thing that is nearby”—Gideon gestured toward the console where Martin sat—“and one that is far away.” He pointed at the other. “But in your case, if you don’t mind, we’d like to make an exception. You can pick whatever person or thing you want to look at in the park itself. But—and trust us on this, please—leave it to us to demonstrate the strength of this device’s distant vision, and we will show you something—perhaps even someone—you thought you’d never see yourself.”
So those were the two decisions to make—near, and far. Near was easy, and even just saying this eased some of the tension in the boy’s stomach: “I want to see my sister.”
“Unimaginative,” said Martin. “First you are impatient; then you are unimaginative. You can see your sister anytime you want, yes? Better with your own eyes than you can with this machine. So you should pick something else. Choose to see the sleight-of-hand tricks that the carnies use behind their backs to cheat their marks. Or say you want to see a dancing girl, kicking her legs up and showing glimpses of her garters. Ask to see something like that.”
“I want to see my sister,” Harold said. “I paid five cents.”
“Fine,” Martin said, and shrugged. “Where is she?”
“Somewhere around here. I don’t know. She’s with adults.”
“Well why don’t you go ahead and make it hard for me,” Martin said. “Why don’t you make me have to search. Well what’s she look like at least.”
“She’s taller than me, and she’s got pigtails, and she’s with a bunch of adults—”
“Strangers?”
Harold nodded. “And she’s with adults and her face is like my face except there’s always a look on her face like this—” He squinted and pinched his lips shut and frowned, as if he were sucking on a lemon.
“Good enough,” said Martin. “I’ll find her. But it’ll take time. But no one can ever be bothered to come up here anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.”
“And while he’s looking,” Gideon said, placing his hand on Harold’s back and leading him toward the other console, “I will show you the Taligent Tower. And on the Tower, near its top, a balcony. And perhaps, if you are lucky: on the balcony, a girl, waiting.”
ELEVEN
Gideon seated himself in the empty chair while Martin turned his back to him and Harold, focused on the image of light projected on the canvas that hung in front of him. As if notified to begin by some unseen conductor, they simultaneously started to operate the banks of switches and levers in front of them; in response the conglomeration of optics with which the hut was packed came to life, the rods to which the lenses were fastened telescoping and retracting and gliding along their rails. Things spun and danced and clicked, and Harold felt a slight jolt in his feet as the entire hut began to turn on the pole that kept it suspended above the park. The skyline of Xeroville’s downtown began to crawl past one of the hut’s windows from left to right; a slightly different image of that same skyline moved on Gideon’s canvas in the opposite direction, right to left.
“You have to stop it somewhere,” Martin said. “Stop it.”
A second jolt came from beneath Harold’s feet, and he steadied himself against a wall.
“Stopped,” said Gideon.
“Good,” said Martin. “Now go ahead. Give your little speech.”
“Look there!” said Gideon to Harold, pointing not out the window, where Harold could see the Taligent Tower plain as day, but at the canvas directly in front of him, on which was a somewhat blurred image of that same Tower, diluted by its trip through the camera obscura’s lenses. “Look: look at this magnificent Tower!”
“He tries to put a little drama in it, you know,” Martin said to Harold. “So pay attention, and remember to look excited—else he’ll be disappointed, and later on he won’t lose hands of gin to me with his usual good cheer. Try, you know, dropping your jaw, or making your eyes all wide.”
“That Tower was erected by the same man who conceived of this camera obscura,” Gideon said, gesturing expansively at the optics that stuffed the hut’s interior. “Now think of this. You, child, live in the future.”
“No I don’t,” Harold said. “You’re saying something silly now.”
“But listen,” Gideon said. “Right now, you yourself are in the future of the person whom you were just five seconds ago, when you began to speak that ill-considered sentence about how silly I was. And the person who you were five years ago—could he have conceived of a world in which this Tower exists, or this camera obscura, or the mechanical men who inhabit the park beneath us, so common that they are reduced to five-cent entertainments that fail to merit a second glance?”
“When I was little,” Harold said, “I used to draw pictures with crayons of people who had gears inside them instead of the stuff that’s inside normal people. So, yeah.”
“Wait a moment,” said Gideon, as if this interruption to his well-rehearsed monologue had thrown him off track.
“He gets it already,” Martin grunted. “The future’s always ordinary, by the time you get there. Too young to have figured that out. A shame, really.” He went back to fiddling with dials, the image of the canvas above him showing the faces of women wandering through the park, one after another.
“Everybody who’s a kid thinks about stuff like this, like when they’re six years old, if they’re boys,” said Harold. “If you’re a boy you think about this stuff when you’re five and a half. I used to draw pictures of flying cars, and for the first time a couple of months ago I saw a flying car, a real one. And I thought, it’s like the pictures I used to draw. Except that my flying cars had tommy guns stuck on the sides—rat-a-tat-a-tat.”
“Wait a moment,” said Gideon.
“What I say is,” said Harold, “if you’re gonna go to all that trouble to build a flying car, why not go the distance and put some guns on it, too. Flying cars with no gangster typewriters on ’em get the raspberry. They get the raspberry. Pfffbbbt.”
“But the difference!” said Gideon. “The difference between you and Mister Taligent is that while you can do little more than draw pictures in crayons of a future that you wish for, Prospero Taligent is the richest and smartest man in the known world. So he need not guess, or dream, or pretend to foretell—he raises his hand, and the future that he wishes for the world comes to be.”
“Okay,” said Harold. “That’s fair enough.”
Martin snorted.
“Day and night he labors, manufacturing the futures of all the people who live in this city,” Gideon said, turning back to the console. “Think of him as something like those rare benevolent kings of prior, more miraculous centuries, before corporations took the place of nation-states—always concerned with the greater good instead of his own ambitions. He understands the secrets that light carries as it moves through glass, and of flying machines that are heavier than air, but one thing escapes him—”
“Is it love?” Harold said excitedly. “I bet it’s love. It always is with these smart types.”
“That’s what it always is, isn’t it,” Martin grumbled. “Oh, would you look at this one.” He stared at the canvas hanging above him. “Bouncy ba
-zooms and a face that belongs on a coin. And all the kid wants to see is his sister. Ain’t that a shame.”
“The last secret of human love escapes him,” Gideon sighed.
“Look at her,” Martin said wistfully. “She’d say nice things to you. She’d make you breakfast.”
“And so,” said Gideon, “one of his greatest experiments. Look here, child—don’t get dizzy.”
Gideon pulled a giant lever on the side of his console, and the regular grinding of the gears that powered the optical array became a high-pitched whirring; then, on the canvas above Gideon, the image of the Taligent Tower began to fly toward Harold, as if a camera were strapped to the back of a giant bird unerringly winging its way from the camera obscura across the bay to the city’s downtown. He had never seen anything like it before, not even in motion pictures. It made him feel a little queasy.
“His adopted daughter, Miranda,” said Gideon, “the light of his life. But often when he tries to speak to her his tongue turns back on itself; raised in a Tower that holds twenty times as many machines as men, she’s little better. Their dinners together take place in silence, or they’re accompanied by fugues made from the flanging noises of engines—the lullaby that sends the girl to sleep is the sound of steel scraping against steel.”
The walls of the Tower filled the entire canvas now—Harold could see many small round windows, like the portholes of a ship, set into them at irregular intervals. Gideon turned a dial and the viewpoint of the image began to rise, the Tower’s windows scrolling downward. Finally, the image settled on a single balcony, presumably somewhere near the Tower’s roof. The balcony seemed empty at first, but once Gideon pressed a button and it suddenly shot still closer, Harold could just make out the head of a girl peering over it, braids of golden red hair coiled about it in a wreath. Her face itself was hard to discern.
“She is, without doubt, a very strange girl,” Gideon said, twiddling knobs in an attempt to focus the image; resolving it in sufficient detail seemed to be beyond the camera obscura’s capabilities. “The only one in the Tower who will dare to speak to her is her own father—”
“Right enough,” said Martin. “I’ve seen the girl once, and once was enough. She gives me the creeps. She looks at you like she knows the name of the man who’ll dig your grave.”
“—and so the basic rudiments of the spoken word escape her, never mind the subtleties,” Gideon continued. “If she chooses to talk to you, then by turns she seems impolite, or crass, or simpleminded. Bereft of companions she is failing to master the crucial art of conversation.”
“You’re saying that she doesn’t have any friends,” Harold said. “You didn’t have to say all that to say that she doesn’t have any friends.”
“One does not make friends with Prospero Taligent’s daughter,” said Martin. “It seems unwise.”
“No—no friends,” said Gideon to Harold. “No friends; no one to talk to; no one to teach her how to talk. Prospero is approaching the rearing of his daughter in the same way that he’d tackle any other experiment, you see—cold and methodical. He has a certain hypothesis. . . . He believes that the best thing for her would be to have a birthday party for her. With children her own age. But not the sons and daughters of his company’s employees—that’d be a self-selecting group, well-off, with their minds dulled by privilege. He wants to throw her in the midst of strangers from across the city who speak in different voices. He said to us—he said to me: ‘Go out into the city; bring me sickly girls with bad manners who only own one good Sunday dress; bring me the saddest, loneliest boys. Bring me children who—how do you say it?—cuss. I want her to hear some cussing.’ And here we have been, searching for them, and we think that one of them is you. I can look at your face and see it.”
“I don’t cuss that much,” said Harold.
Martin turned in his chair to face Harold. “He’s going to make you an offer now, and you’re not going to have the nerve to take it. That’s okay. I wouldn’t have the nerve either, knowing what I know about the girl and her father. I’d be scared to death.”
TWELVE
“So I’m having trouble finding this sister of yours,” said Martin. “These adults—what do they look like?”
“Some of ’em had big letter X’s on their sweaters,” Harold said. “Big orange letter X’s.”
“Ohhh,” said Martin. “College kids? I thought you meant adults.” But concern was in his voice when he turned back to his console. “At the Tunnel of Love, either going in or coming out. I’d bet money on it.”
Gideon turned in his chair to look Harold in the eye, and Harold was surprised to find that the once genial smile on Gideon’s face now had a twist in it that made it seem somewhat cruel. “Here we are, at the Nickel Empire, and everything costs a nickel. Did you get to see everything you wanted to see?”
“Gee, I haven’t even gotten started yet,” said Harold. “I could be here all day and feel like I hadn’t even gotten started. There’s a bunch of different things I wanna try—I wanna find some cotton candy and get some of that. And I wanna play a couple of games. And I wanna ride the Tornado—that’s why I came here in the first place. Maybe twice. Maybe three times.”
“Well, you sad and lonely boy,” said Gideon, his grin full of toothy menace now, “I am afraid that there will be no cotton candy for you this day. There will be no treats but the ones already turning to acid in your belly; no games but the one you are about to lose; no frights but the ones in your nightmares tonight. That is, if you want this.”
Gideon flourished with both hands—nothing up his sleeves—and reached behind his back. When his hand came into view again, a whistle lay on its open palm. It seemed an ordinary whistle, made of metal. It did not glow with an inner light, and no spotlight shone down on it from above. It did not emit the hum of a siren’s voice just inside the range of human hearing. It was rusty.
“You are not the owner of this whistle,” Gideon said. “But if you were, and if, at midnight tonight, you were to lean out your window and blow into it with all your breath, once, then the sound that it made would carry all the way to the Tower, and it would be a message that Prospero Taligent himself would receive. Then he would know that, yes, you accepted the invitation that we are extending to you, to the party held to celebrate the tenth birthday of his daughter, Miranda.”
Harold reached out a hand to take the whistle, but Gideon’s own hand quickly closed into a fist. “But there is, of course, a price,” he said. “How much money do you have on you?”
“I’ve got a bag full of nickels, which is all I’ve got,” Harold said. “I had all the dimes I had changed into nickels. But this is the Nickel Empire and everything here is a nickel so five cents is what I’ll pay for it.”
Gideon’s fist extended a finger and shook itself at Harold—no, no; naughty, naughty. “That would be true if we were still in the Nickel Empire. But we’re not—we are above it, and the rules of life are different for those in high places.”
“Now he gets all legal,” said Martin. “He should have been a lawyer. I think I see her, unless I miss my guess. Give me a moment.”
“This whistle,” Gideon said, “will cost you all the nickels that you hold. I will have every last one.”
Tears welled up in Harold’s eyes at the enormity of this proposition, its unmitigated gall. “That isn’t fair,” he shouted (and the whistle lay there and he wanted it, based on nothing more than the memory of a blurry image of a girl standing on a balcony; even that might have been some kind of parlor trick). “That’s unfair—”
“It is unfair,” sneered Gideon. “It’s downright dishonest. And let me be clear, just so you’re certain just how unfair this is—I don’t give a flip about your money. As highly ranked employees of Taligent Industries, Martin and I are quite well paid—I might stick my finger down my throat and vomit forty thousand nickels if I wished. After you hand me the money and leave, I may forget about it, or fling it out the window for my amuseme
nt.”
“Yes,” said Martin to himself. “This must be her. These boys look like they’d think of themselves as men.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” said Gideon. “It’s the simple act of depriving you of your money that matters, for two reasons. First: Prospero told us to bring him sad boys, and we would be remiss if we did not do our best to ensure your sadness. Second: I know you were thinking of all the things you might do today with those coins, but a man who makes the future will not allow a little boy who can only dream of a future to dictate the terms of a bargain. As an act of goodwill you must sacrifice all the futures you might have for the one that he designs for you. Now. The whistle. Yes or no.”
THIRTEEN
“Maybe you’re being a little rough on him,” Martin said, staring up at the canvas above him. “Maybe, you know, you should take it easy.” Had Harold been able to see what Martin was looking at, he might have understood why a certain unaccustomed note of sympathy had crept into Martin’s voice.
But Harold had his eye on that most ordinary whistle, held out to him on Gideon’s palm. Dear imaginary reader, you must have guessed by now that young Harold traded his bag of coins for that whistle, and that this barter set in motion the long and intricate chain of events that took place over twenty years and led to my imprisonment aboard the zeppelin Chrysalis, writing of this person whom I once was. But here is a sad thing. You have probably also guessed that it hurt Harold to make the trade, that that first burst of tears was not just a simple sign of shock, but a true indicator of his feelings. You must think that his mind operated like a child’s mind does, and that he believed that each of those nickels offered him a chance to tumble the locks of heaven’s gates. And though this is true, it isn’t all of the truth.
