by Unknown
TWENTY-THREE
“There’s something I don’t understand,” I said. “This afternoon I saw a man who I believed was Martin, rounding up a mob of men to stage an assault on this building. I saw more men like him when I entered the lobby this evening. They all had the same funnels strapped to their heads, and the same silver paint on their faces. Are they actors? Did you hire them, too?”
“No,” Prospero said, “I didn’t. I don’t know what happened to the two of them after they finished their work for me—I have thousands of employees and can’t keep track of them all. But Martin—I remember that he seemed a bit more serious about the role I wrote for him than Gideon did. When I told them all that business about the Virgin and the Dynamo, which really was just something I’d gotten out of an old book and embellished a little with some appropriately fantastic details, Gideon just smiled and took it all in, but Martin—his eyes lit up like he believed it was gospel truth. If what you say is true, he is taking this all a bit more serious than I’d like.
“Justice, I suppose. The inventor of the mechanical man is turned upon by his own invention. Nice.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The clouds began to clear as Prospero and I talked, and the snowfall slowed, then stopped. In the east, the sky began to brighten as the sun rose, lighting the underside of the zeppelin’s gigantic white balloon in shades of rose and gold. The mechanical men had finished loading the ship’s supplies, and now they climbed the stairs to the zeppelin’s gondola, the line of them marching step by step in synchrony.
“I’m not boarding the ship,” I said. “I won’t do it. I don’t know what you have in mind here, but it’s too much. I can’t just leave my life—”
“What life?” said Prospero. “I know about your life. A loveless life like yours is no life at all. You can be replaced at your job, by someone else willing to whore himself out writing doggerel—I’m sure there’s someone. You spend your evenings in solitude with your fingers in your ears to shut out all the sounds. You can vanish and you won’t be missed. I think you know this.
“And here? Here in this world of so much noise? Do you trust yourself to even form a tenuous friendship with a stranger, much less fall in love? Do you trust yourself to always have faith that the person you’re hearing speaks the constant truth to you, or that you haven’t heard the curse she whispered at you under her breath because the noise from an engine of a passing automobile drowned it out? Do you trust yourself enough to be sure whether she speaks to you with sincerity or sarcasm? Will you ever be able to be certain that the meanings of her words haven’t changed between the time they leave her lips and the time they reach your ears? I know you, and I don’t think you do—if you’re not faithless, you’re nearly so. I think you know that if you do not board that ship, you will die a lonely, bitter man.”
“But I’ll die alone if I board the ship as well.”
“You’ll have Miranda.”
“But you said I’ll never be able to touch her,” I said.
“And this is how you know you want it to be,” he said, “even though you won’t admit it aloud.
“Listen,” said Prospero. “I know you. I know you are a storyteller, and therefore a maker of lies as well as tales. I think that even right now you’re constructing a new and pleasing story out of the facts that lie before you. I think that even if I tell you straight out that if you were able to locate Miranda aboard the Chrysalis and take her away from her hiding place, then she would die within minutes: even if I say that, you will find a story to tell yourself that will give you a reason to board that ship. Because even now you are thinking to yourself that the space inside that zeppelin’s gondola is the only place left on earth where it is safe for a man as broken as you are to fall in love.”
TWENTY-FIVE
“Kill him!” Caliban shrieked from the other side of the roof. He wasn’t even bothering now to peck the keys on his typewriter before he spoke. “You have to kill him!”
“You don’t have much time to think this over,” Prospero said. “This is all going to work out for everyone. Listen: the ship is a masterpiece of engineering. The noises of all the machines on board are dampened to inaudibility. The only sounds you’ll hear about the ship will be those you make, and the voices of you and Miranda. Just the two of you speaking to each other, in clear untroubled transmissions. And while the machine-riddled world beneath you goes deaf and loses its mind, while everyone speaks in screams, while babies are delivered from their wombs with burst eardrums and missing tongues, you will refine your private language until you converse with the confidence of people long in love, certain beyond a doubt that you will always be understood. And together, in that soundproof place, you will preserve the beauty of language against the machines.”
TWENTY-SIX
“Why do you want me to kill you?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” Prospero said. “Look: I don’t want you to think of this as murder, in the conventional sense. I have a feeling that the society of this age is about to go through a painful adolescence, and although I’m partly responsible for its present state, I’m secretly convinced that we are about to embark upon one of the most miserable periods of human history. And though it’s selfish, I want to sit this dance out.
“After you shoot me, you’re going to place me in a chamber aboard the zeppelin, as quickly as you can. Close the chamber’s door and pull a lever on its side, and the temperature within the chamber will drop to within a few degrees of absolute zero. This will place my body in a state of cryogenic suspension, where it will remain for a century, perhaps two, until earthbound scientists work out the last secrets of the human body. At that point I will be retrieved from the chamber, the organs damaged by the bullet will be replaced, and I will be brought back to life.
“Think of it. Going to sleep and waking up later in a science fiction future. It’ll be fantastic. The shock and the wonder of it.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
On the other side of the roof, about a hundred-fifty yards from the zeppelin, was a small hutlike structure with a tin corrugated roof and a door labeled STAIRS, and on the other side of this door, a hammering began.
“I believe we’re running out of time for second thoughts,” Prospero said. “It’s time for you to make some rather important decisions.”
He sidled closer to me and slipped his arms around me, resting his head in the crook of my neck. His hat fell off.
He reached down between us, then, to the pistol between us. He turned the gun in my hand and pulled it toward him, pressing its barrel into his stomach.
Dents began to appear in the door to the stairway as it began to come off its hinges.
Standing at the edge of the roof, Caliban was screaming himself hoarse. “Kill him.”
I looked up at the zeppelin hanging in the air above me, and tried to imagine the woman that waited for me inside—what she might look like, what she might say to me when she first saw me. But all I could think of were certain recurring dreams: of the woman twirling at the tower’s edge and falling off. Of young Miranda giggling at me as she stood behind a tree in her playroom: Silly boy. You were trying to rescue the monster.
The head of a double-bladed axe burst through the door to the stairs, sending splinters flying: it was almost down. I heard a concerted chant coming from its other side. Heave. Ho. Heave. Ho.
Then I made a decision, not out of any heretofore untapped reserve of courage or heroism as I’d like to pretend it was, but of the weakness of will that is, I’m sorry to say, the defining element of my nature.
“I’ll do it,” I said, attempting to speak in the tones of blunt surety that I thought a hero would use.
“Kill him,” Caliban screamed.
“You do realize,” Prospero said, digging the tips of his fingers into the small of my back, getting ready to take the bullet, “that I couldn’t make it easy for you. That would have been unfair to you, and her, and me. You do understand that?”
“Of course,�
�� I said.
The stairway’s door collapsed, and false mechanical men with painted silver faces came pouring out of the doorway like circus clowns out of a tiny little car, wielding axes and clubs and rifles and revolvers.
“Wish me luck,” whispered Prospero Taligent.
“Good luck,” I said, and pulled the trigger.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The pistol resounded between us with an unholy crack, and I dropped it immediately as if my hand had been stung by thorns. Prospero’s arms immediately clenched around me.
“Oh me,” he said, thick liquid in his voice. “Oh my.”
He lifted himself off me, steadying himself with his hands on my shoulders, and looked me in the eye.
“Get this fixed up, maybe,” he croaked. “Hm.”
He looked over at the crowd of false tin men on the roof who looked back at us, then at grinning Caliban, then at me again.
“Question,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Do you think we made a mistake?” he asked, and collapsed.
TWENTY-NINE
I came to my feet then, knelt, and scooped up Prospero’s impossibly light body in my arms. How much time did I have if this was going to work? Not too long.
Then I looked over at Caliban, near the edge of the roof.
He was cackling hysterically, with his typewriter placed on the roof beneath him and his twisted body bent over it, held there because of the shortness of the cable that attached the typewriter to the back of his head. In his awkward position, dancing from foot to foot, he seemed as if he was vomiting up his laughter.
Then he picked up his typewriter and cradled it in his arms. “We’ve won!” he shouted across the roof to me. “We tricked him, you and I!”
One of the mob of false mechanical men pointed at Caliban, his mouth open. “One of you guys has gotta tell me what the hell that thing is,” he said.
“Listen!” said Caliban. “Take his body and throw it off the roof. Then everything will work out for everyone. You’ll be proclaimed a hero. You and I will take the Tower and the corporation for ourselves.”
“It’s a monster is what that thing is,” said another of the false mechanical men.
“I know secrets,” said Caliban. “I’ll tell you the secret of human genius. I know about laundered bank accounts and hidden passageways. I’ll tell you everything—”
“My God that thing is hideous—”
“My thought!” cried Caliban. “I’ll walk you through all my theories step by step. I promise that I’ll be as patient with you as I can. You’ll be enlightened like none other. You’ll be able to hold your own at the cocktail parties of the most—
“Now wait.
“You’re going with her, aren’t you?”
The crowd of false tin men on the roof began to drift, slowly, toward Caliban, their weapons at the ready.
Caliban began to perform his strange, hysterical dance again, hopping from foot to foot, coming dangerously close to the edge of the roof. “Are you honestly shunning the lifelong companionship of one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century for that tart? What kind of man are you? . . . Are you not human? Are you nothing more than an animal?”
The mob began to move faster, breaking into a run.
Caliban looked at the crowd, then at me, pure desperation on his scarred and patched-together face.
Then he suddenly spun in a circle, three times, holding his arms out, and flung his typewriter off the roof.
It flew outward into thin air for a short time; then it plunged. Caliban had turned halfway around again, and so he was looking straight at me, his gaze full of blame, when the cable attached to the typewriter jerked his head backward, snapping his neck with a crack. Then he was gone.
THIRTY
That left the false tin men, and me.
They stared at me, and I stared back at them, and none of us moved, and none of us said anything.
Blood ran out of Prospero’s wound, covering my hands and my pants and my shoes, leaving a trail of red on the roof beneath me.
In my arms he was breathing shallowly, his eyes closed, and smiling.
We stood there, all of us silently, for another minute.
Then I turned my back on all of them, and boarded the good ship Chrysalis.
EPILOGUE
aboard the good ship chrysalis
When I entered the Chrysalis’s observation room this morning, I saw that the mask of frost that had once covered Prospero Taligent’s face had melted, and that a hairline crack had appeared in the pane of glass set in the door of the chamber in which he is interred. It’s not surprising, really: many of the machines in this zeppelin have begun to operate in a less than optimal fashion in the months that I spent writing this manuscript, and what was once a soundproof place is now becoming plagued with rhythmic hums and rattles, reminders of the world I left behind.
Still, though, I wonder if perhaps it’s not best for Prospero that the absolute-zero chamber stopped working. In the moment when he died at my hand he had his own heart’s desire—not the actual future, but a hope for the best possible future, one that he could not himself imagine. And, just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want. Had his plan succeeded, and had some doctors in a future century boarded this zeppelin, retrieved his corpse from it, and managed to bring it back to life, I’m sure that when he saw what had resulted from all the time he’d skipped past, he would have been disappointed. Nothing would have been good enough; no sight would have been amazing enough. Is this all there is? he would have said. I’m sure I could have done better than this, if only I’d had the time that you had. Take back the life you gave me; put me back in the chamber; wake me up in another hundred years.
So today I am finally grieving, for the first time. Now I know how it feels and now I know what it means. I am grieving the death of the Author of my life, and in the wake of that grief come other grievings, long delayed. My father and my sister. Dearest Astrid.
I know how it feels now. I’m a wreck. It’s wonderful.
And Miranda? She is silent this morning. She is waiting.
Most of the rest of the story you know, from the moment I entered the zeppelin to now: as soon as I boarded the ship, it broke free from its moorings and lifted off with its crew of mechanical men, all automatically. It hasn’t touched the ground since. And aboard the ship were the few amenities with which the practical Prospero had thought to provide me—food and drink, and his recordings and Caliban’s notebooks, and in a single room, reams and reams of paper and dozens of pencils and pens and hundreds of bottles of ink, more than enough to write everything down. And it was then that I began my willful imprisonment.
I’m near the end now, and as I look through the stack of pages that sit here, it seems I’ve done a decent job of working my life into the shape of a story. The now dead Author who managed my life and bent its path to suit his wishes did so well enough, and even if I resent this and always will, at least I have this to say: that everything in the tale of my life is tidy and ordered, and all of the loose ends are gathered up.
Except for one.
Where is Miranda? Where has her never-ending voice been coming from, all this time?
The truth is: I don’t know. Or, more accurately, I do know—I’m nearly certain of it. But knowing does me little good, and I’m afraid to say much more.
Once again I have the blueprints for the zeppelin spread out in front of me on the observation room’s obsidian desk, and the sheets are covered with drawings and notations and plans and diagrams of electrical circuits, all in Prospero Taligent’s neat and microscopic script. Little of it makes sense to me, but this doesn’t matter. When looking at most of the blueprints I need a magnifying glass to read the long, strange names of all the machines that toil away behind the gondola’s walls, but there is one area which has almost no writing, and little else but empty space: the giant cigar shape of the zeppelin’s hydrogen-f
illed balloon.
Drawn inside the balloon, at its very center, is a simple shape, a circle with eight rays projecting from it in the eight compass directions. Inside this circle are printed three words, and it is here that I believe Miranda resides, here that her father placed her after the months of operations that he and the portraitmaker performed upon her.
I believe that Miranda Taligent is the perpetual motion machine.
I could say more—I have ideas of what she might look like, or guesses at the least. I can speculate on what it must be like to breathe hydrogen, or to see the colors of sunrise muted each morning as they shine on her through the canvas of the zeppelin’s balloon, and as she readies whatever thing serves as her mouth to speak into the microphone that carries her voice throughout the ship to me, no matter where I am.
But describing words are killing words, and so I’ll choose not to describe her—there’s been killing enough. If the reader who comes across this manuscript in an unforeseeable future believes my tale to be true, then he will understand and forgive my reluctance to speak; if he believes this to be an idle fantasy, then he will tear up these pages and curse my final failure of imagination. So be it.
Let it be enough to say that, in the end, after a life of brilliant inventions, Prospero Taligent managed a single miracle, his first and his last. His love for his daughter was twisted, but that does not mean that it was not true. What he did to her with the help of the portraitmaker was undoubtedly terrible, but he did it because he loved her, and because it is terrible it is no less a miracle for that. He sculpted the shape of a voice; he built a virgin dynamo. That is enough.
