The Great Game

by Lavie Tidhar

  "Excuse me?"

  "When Les Lézards deposed the old, human monarchy, they didn't kill them," Miss Havisham said. "They transported them to Caliban's Island and bred them there. I am not sure why. I am not sure even they knew."

  "And his mother–"

  "Yes. She escaped – we suspected the Bookman's involvement, at the time. She was killed shortly after giving birth to the boy. Colonel Sebastian Moran, if you recall the name."

  "'Tiger Jack' Moran?" Lucy said.

  Miss Havisham nodded. "He worked for Moriarty," she said. "Never mind. The point is the boy's heritage was meaningless. The empire was on the brink of revolution, a lizard queen was bad enough, a human king would not have made things better."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He went to the island. He came back. We lost him in Oxford. There had been an explosion, deep under the Bodleian Library. The boy survived. So did a girl who called herself Lucy…"

  "She was alive?"

  "It was a mess," Miss Havisham said. "You see, we had suspected for some time that the Bookman was not exactly human. That he – it – was a product of lizardine technology, an artefact that had survived their crash on Earth. The theory was that he had been their librarian, of sorts. A servant. A machine for making copies of living things."

  A library of minds.

  Lucy's own mind shied away from the thought. That creature she saw below the Lizardine Museum. There had been an explosion, Miss Havisham had said. Lucy said, "What happened to the Bookman?"

  Miss Havisham smiled dreamily. "That was the big question, wasn't it," she said. "He died, of course. In the explosion. But…"

  "Yes?"

  "Wouldn't a machine that made copies of beings," said Miss Havisham, "first of all make a few extra copies of itself?"

  PART III

  The Two Deaths of Harry Houdini

  TWENTY-TWO

  The young man who stood, some nights earlier, on the other side of the planet, at the docks of the Long Island, in the territory of the Lenape, was himself contemplating the oddity of replication. There was something miraculous, he thought, in the act of human sexuality, in the way man and woman could get together to produce a new being, an entirely new, alien, mysterious life. An avid reader of the scientific papers – not to mention the somewhat less scientific, yet far more enthralling, tales of scientific romance – romans scientifiques, to give them their better known name – he had been fascinated, too, by the idea that it may be possible to produce identical copies of living human beings – even of dead ones, when it came to that.

  The nineteenth century may be drawing to a close, he thought, yet what a century it had been! The greatest minds of many generations had seemed to erupt, all at once, across the world, to further humanity's understanding of the universe it had, somewhat reluctantly, occupied. Babbage! Freud! Jekyll! Frankenstein! Darwin! Moreau! The great Houdin, in Paris, AKA the Toymaker, from whom the boy Weiss had taken his professional name, which was Houdini. Scientists of the mind, of the body, of the laws of nature and the laws of history!

  And yet, he reflected ruefully, his knowledge – actual, concrete knowledge – of asexual human replication was greater than most, having had cause, as it were, to experience the unpleasant thing at first hand.

  But first, a concise history. The boy was in the nature of going over facts, summaries, all a part of his rather rigorous training.

  Well then.

  Code name: Houdini. Birth name: Erich Weiss.

  Place of birth: Budapest, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Father: Mayer Samuel Weiss, a rabbi. Mother: Cecelia Weiss, née Steiner. Family: five brothers, one sister.

  Recruited to the "Cabinet Noir" in 1890, at the tender age of sixteen.

  Specialities: escapes, disguises, locks of any kind. Recruited by: Winnetou White-Feather, of the Apache.

  Assignments: the boy was sent to the World's Vespuccian Exposition, in the city called Shikaakwa, or Chicagoland, during the ninety-three affair. He had been only an observer at the time.

  Notes: the boy is a promising young agent – his recruiter, Winnetou, speaks highly of him. His cover as a travelling-show magician is promising, and his skills in the art of escapology remarkable indeed. Young, handsome and personable, the only concern is due to a blank period two years after the White City Affair, when the boy went to spend a summer on the island of Roanoke…

  Harry – he preferred Harry to Erich, had been using the name more and more now, until only his family still called him by his birth name – paced the docks. He waited for a ship but the ship was long in coming. He was leaving Vespuccia, that magnificent continent, his adoptive home, leaving behind him the tribes and the new cities, the vast open plains and a sky that seemed never to end, under which one could sleep, in the open air, as peaceful as a child…

  He was nervous, excited. He was being entrusted with a great mission. After a tour of the continent earlier on, when he went from encampment to encampment and town to town, performing his magic show, under the moniker The Master of Mystery! he was now ready for a new challenge. He was leaving Vespuccia, for the first time–

  Had been summoned to the Council of Chiefs one day, weeks before, at the Black Hills, the Mo'ohta-vo'honnaeva in the language of the Cheyenne. Arriving late one night, with a silver moon shining over the hills like a watching eye, Houdini was met by his old mentor. "Winnetou," he had said, hugging him. The Apache warrior hugged him back, then said, gruffly, "You took your time."

  "I came as soon as I received the summons," Harry said, without rancour. "And as fast."

  "Come with me," Winnetou said.

  Harry followed the other man into the camp. The Council was not often convened in full. The chiefs of the Nations met at different places, at different times. It was a very different form of rule, Harry thought, then the one in Europe, with its rigid monarchies and obsolete blood-lines. The Nations had welcomed the refugees from that continent, those who did not wish to live under lizardine rule, but there was no debate over who, exactly, was in charge. Yet the Council was troubled. There was the ever-present threat of the Lizardine Empire, while Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom, had recently showed dangerous signs that it was considering expansion for the first time in centuries. While on their own doorstep, so to speak, the Aztecs waited, in their strange pyramids and with their own designs on the land…

  Harry was taken to the circle of the Council. President Sitting-Bull, smoking a pipe, looked older than he had in ninety-three, the last time Harry had seen him.

  And all the major nations were represented that night. He saw familiar faces, old generals: Sioux and Cheyenne and Cherokee, Apache and Arapahoe and Navajo, Delaware and Shoshone, Mohawks and Iroquois and others, all sitting under the great silver moon, all turning to watch him as he came.

  "The young magician," someone said. Someone else laughed. Harry felt his cheeks turn hot. He didn't let it bother him. Instead he smiled. "You wished to see me," he said.

  "Cocky."

  "Youth always is."

  "Sit him down, Winnetou."

  Without ceremony, Winnetou pressed Harry on the shoulder, pushing him down. He sat, cross-legged, before the chiefs. A great fire was burning, down to coals, on the ground, and the smoke rose, white like a flag, into the air.

  "There's been… a situation."

  "We need you to go on a bit of a journey."

  "You won't be alone, of course."

  "We're recalling most agents."

  "You've been trained well. As well as can be."

  "We want you to go to Europe. To the home of the lizardine race."

  "Others are heading to Asia, Mexica, the South Seas–"

  "We need to guard our interests–"

  "The world is changing, boy. We do not intend to be caught unawares–"

  He sat there, the conversation washing over him, overwhelming him. The chiefs, almost not looking at him directly, their words in the air. All to impart the importance of his mi
ssion on him. This is why you are here.

  "Danger in the stars–"

  "Old artefacts, awakening–"

  "Go, boy. Winnetou will brief you."

  A hand on his shoulder. Pulling him up. Smoke in his eyes, the stars, like the moon, bright above. Drums in the distance, the sound of chanting, the smell of burning tobacco–

  "Come on."

  Winnetou led him away, amidst the tents.

  And now he was waiting at the docks, for a ship to take him, across the sea, to the island where Les Lézards ruled.

  To find out…

  What, exactly?

  He remembered vividly the events of the World's Vespuccian Exposition, in ninety-three…

  The spinning wheel, which they now called a Ferris Wheel, after its inventor, moving against the starry night sky… Houdini had been dressed as a fakir, his skin darkened by sun and cosmetics… performing magic there, in the avenues of the White City, illuminated by electric lights… Tesla himself had been there, lightning wreathing his body…

  Houdini watching – the woman from France, the agent, he was told, of the Quiet Council… She was formidable.

  Milady de Winter. Hunting a murderer in both cities, the Black and the White, in that place called Chicagoland… and hunting something else, also. A mysterious object, a lizardine artefact…

  The Emerald Buddha. An object of mythical resonance. Discovered in the Gobi Desert, centuries before, a jade statue in the image of a royal lizard. Carried by a man. If he had a name Harry didn't know it. He was designated, simply, as the Man on the Mekong.

  But he had come to Vespuccia, had crossed the sea, and come to the White City – supposedly to offer the statue to the highest bidder. But that had been a ruse…

  The White City had been plunged into darkness. High overhead, on the axle of the Ferris Wheel, two tiny figures: the Man on the Mekong and Milady de Winter. And the wheel spun, faster and faster, until the space within it was distorted, and strange, alien stars had appeared…

  The wide avenues of the White City were filled with screams… bodies fighting in the darkness to escape… There had been a terrible voice, filling the night, only it was not in the ears, it was in one's head… a cold, impersonal voice, speaking no language but directly into the mind itself, filling it with the horror of infinity.

  And up there, on the wheel, a third figure, climbing – the killer de Winter had come to find, a man mutated and made grotesque by the power of the statue. That awful voice, speaking: Initiating target parameters. Stand by to receive. A struggle up there, and in the space beyond the wheel, that alien space, something moved…

  The voice saying: Gateway open. Coming through–

  A scuffle, and the killer flying into the space inside the wheel, the statue in his hands, opening–

  And the voice, saying, Gateway sequence interrupted! Explain! And a mental shriek that burned through the brain, and everyone down below clutched their ears, trying to block it, and the voice saying, Gateway linkage shutting down.

  And something had come through the gateway, from that alien space inside the wheel. A dark, saucer-shaped vehicle, hovering in the air…

  Then it was gone, like a mirage, like a bad dream.

  He should have known, back then, that it wasn't any kind of ending.

  It was out there, somewhere. An alien vehicle, an alien intelligence directing it. Where did it go?

  And that had not been the worst of it. No.

  The worst of it had been that, fifteen minutes later, Harry had died.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Would the ship never come?

  In the harbour, there on the Long Island, a plethora of ships: Arab baglahs, Chinese junks, a French steamer, three Aztec longboats, trade ships from west Africa – from the Kong and Dahomey and Asante empires – a couple of Swahili cargo ships, three lizardine tea-clippers, and others: sailboats, dugouts and steamships all crowded in that harbour, coming and going, but the ship Harry was waiting for wasn't there.

  No whalers. Whale-hunting was punishable by death across the Lizardine Empire and, through bilateral agreements, beyond it. Like human slavery, it belonged in the days before Les Lézards. Were they, Harry wondered now, not for the first time, truly enemies of humanity? Many argued over the centuries that the coming of the lizardine race had, by extension, benefited humanity, had stopped some of its more heinous actions. And yet, was it right to let an alien race rule over you?

  Harry felt ill at ease. For he knew one… being, at least, who did not think it right, and who had made it their life's mission to oppose the royal lizards.

  But he didn't want to think about that. Did not want to think of Roanoke, any more than he did of that awful moment in the White City…

  Even after it was over, after that alien space within the wheel had disappeared, when the screams of the passengers in the wheel's cars had stopped, when that alien vessel had disappeared, flying at high speed away from the White City, even then chaos reigned.

  The White City: a marvel of an age, a brand-new city erected especially for the Fair, enormous buildings, wide avenues, a multitude of visitors–

  Plunged into darkness now, and fear, and uncertainty–

  People running through the streets, trying to find a way out–

  And others taking advantage of the situation.

  The White City had been filled with the criminal class. Not just that killer Milady de Winter had been sent to catch, the man they called the Phantom, who had called himself H.H. Holmes, perhaps in mockery of the great detective… There were cut-purses and pick-pockets and confidence men (and confidence women), tricksters and robbers, and in the darkness even those who had not come to the city to commit a crime could be tempted, nonetheless, to take advantage of the situation.

  Harry had walked in the dark, as lost as the rest, trying to locate de Winter, trying to gather information for the Cabinet Noir, that secret organisation that was the Vespuccian equivalence of Les Lézards' Bureau…

  So intent that he did not notice the movement behind him, did not quite hear the snick of a blade–

  The man had smelled of sweat and stale tobacco and gin. The blade flashed, once, in the moonlight–

  Harry remembered the surprise, more than anything else, more than the pain – the surprise and the hurt of it, which was somehow worse, and then it flamed through him, and he tried to breathe, or scream, but no sound came, and he gurgled, helplessly, and sank to his knees, blood gushing out of his throat, and the man's breath was very close to him, he stood behind him, supporting him as he fell, almost gently…

  He was dying, Harry had suddenly realised, and it made him want to cry. He wasn't ready! He was not yet twenty years old! What would his mother say? It couldn't be happening, not to him, not like this–

  The man had rifled through his pockets and had come away with the money and everything else. Then he ran. Shouts in the distance, but Harry's hearing was going, and he could see nothing now, and would never see again… He felt the life slipping away from him. He could have cried.

  He died.

  Harry paced the docks. Swahili sailors speaking in a beach argot with Melanesian islanders, Lenape officials supervising the offloading of cargo, porters loading up bags of coal onto the French steamer. Harry's mission was simple: go to London, find out what you can, try to stay alive. It almost made him laugh.

  You will be briefed further upon landing.

  They needed him to track down Babbage. Lord Babbage, who had not been seen these five years or more. Who, for all intents and purposes, could well be dead.

  But Harry knew even death was not always an end…

  He had woken with a gasp. Air, cool blessed air, came into his lungs. He cried out. He was lying on the floor, in a doorway. The electric lights were burning again, and an air of gaiety filled the White City.

  Harry put a hand to his throat. Nothing there. No cut, no blood–

  He was alive.

  Slowly, he sat up. He look
ed about him. What had happened?

  Again, he felt himself. Nothing. No injury, no pain…

  Had he dreamed it?

  He stood up. He felt fine…

  Something was very wrong.

  The memory was too real.

  And, when he checked his pockets, his belongings were gone.

  So he really had been robbed.

  Had he just taken a knock on the head? Had he hallucinated dying?

  A sudden sense, of being watched.