The Steampunk Trilogy

by Paul Di Filippo

  Having holed up here in his atelier all morning indulging the black melancholy which had been dissipated so effectively by Captain Stormfield’s fable, Agassiz now enjoyed a return of his accustomed energies. He felt inclined once more to be out and about in the world, uncovering Nature’s secrets, classifying and discovering, collecting and theorizing, and, not incidentally, making his name resound from the lips of the masses as synonymous with modern nineteenth-century science.

  Stepping from his study, Agassiz headed toward the workrooms located in his East Boston quarters hard by the bayshore, which had been so graciously donated by one of his patrons, John Amory Lowell, textile magnate and financier. The establishment was sufficient for the moment, and daily inspired in Agassiz feelings of satisfaction. But he had bigger plans in mind. A separate warehouse for specimens, perhaps fronted by a museum where selected ones could be displayed; larger workspaces, equipped with all taxonomic necessities; a gas-lit office; a lecture-hall; perhaps he would even have his own printshop and bindery, as he had had in Neufchâtel, to handle the steady flow of books from his industrious pen. . . .

  Agassiz put a brake on his fantasies. All this could only be accomplished from a position of power and prestige. The amount of money he could personally invest was insignificant compared to his dreams. True, his lectures had earned him more than he had ever dreamed possible—in the last four months, over six thousand dollars!—but it was all spent as fast as it came in. Salaries alone for his trained team consumed a large fraction of his income. Add in his purchases from the local fishermen, the normal costs of maintaining a household, the expenses of field surveys, entertaining, and so forth, and you were soon running in the red.

  No, only the resources of an institution such as Harvard would be sufficient to propel him to the heights of which he dreamed. He must have the professorship in the new School of Geology soon to be endowed by Abbott Lawrence at the university! His competitors for the seat, Rogers and Hall, were mediocre talents who did not deserve such a prestigious post. He alone, Louis Agassiz, First Naturalist of his times, was entitled to the professorship!

  Approaching the door to the workrooms, Agassiz made a mental note to cajole Lowell into hosting another dinner at which he could subtly lobby Lawrence for the job. . . .

  The workroom was humming like a top with activity. As he entered, all his loyal assistants who had accompanied him from Europe looked up from their benches with dedication and admiration in their eyes. There was Count François Pourtales, who had tramped all over the Alps with Agassiz, busy examining a large coprolite with a magnifying lens. Charles Girard, trained zoologist, was gutting a perch while wearing a gutta-percha apron. Artist Jacques Burckhardt was attempting to sketch a live lobster (Homarus americanus), which unfortunately was bent on scuttling to freedom across the tabletop. Auguste Sonrel, expert lithographer, was busy with his flat stones. (In an attempt to raise additional funds for science, Agassiz had authorized Sonrel to provide a set of illustrations for a private edition of Mister John Cleland’s book under subscription by a group of Boston businessmen.) The only ones missing were Charles “Papa” Christinat, Arnold Guyot, Leo Lesquereux, and Jules Marcou, who all awaited his summons across the Atlantic, which he would issue once he had obtained the Harvard position.

  The scene thrilled Agassiz. This was modern science: teamwork and delegation of responsibilities, a tight unit functioning with a single goal—the further illumination of the name of Agassiz!

  Responding to the jovial salutations employing his nickname—“Bonjour, Agass!” “Agass, come look!” “Agass, zee homard, catch heem!”—the head of this scientific factory made the rounds among his workers.

  As he was inspecting Pourtales’s coprolite in an attempt to discern botanical remnants, Edward Desor emerged from an inner room.

  Desor was Agassiz’s second-in-command. He had been employed by the naturalist for ten years, since 1837. Of German extraction, originally a law student with facility in languages, he had been tutored in the rudiments of science by Agassiz, although his knowledge never passed that of a half-hearted amateur. His main utility lay in his ability to get things done. He had overseen the day-to-day operations at Neufchâtel, and could bring off the most complicated expedition without a hitch.

  Thin and dapper, still under thirty, Desor was inordinately proud of a straggling mustache to which not one hair had been added, as far as Agassiz could determine, since he had come to work for the Swiss. His eyes continually shone with a light that reminded Agassiz of the gaze of a stoat (Mustela ermined). After a decade of constant association, Agassiz still felt uncertain at times of the inner mental workings of his assistant.

  Agassiz was generally ambivalent about Desor. On the one hand, he was efficient and industrious. He did not need to be continually supervised. On the other hand, he was somewhat reckless and imprudent. For instance, there was that lecture Desor had arranged in England, just before they sailed for America. “Bedlam College,” Desor had named the venue, and it had turned out to be an insane asylum, where Agassiz was forced to deliver a talk to the staff amidst the cacophony of caged lunatics. . . .

  Still, Agassiz felt that Desor’s virtues, on the whole, outweighed his defects, and, averse to tampering with a fruitful relationship, defended him against all detractors, chief of whom had been Agassiz’s wife, Cecile.

  Cecile. It had been mainly thoughts of his wife that had plunged him into depression earlier today. Agassiz still felt guilty at having left her and their three children back in Switzerland. But what could he do? He had progressed as far as he could go in his native land, and the Prussian grant—secured by his mentor, Alexander von Humboldt—to travel to America had come at just the right time in his career. He had had no alternative but to take it. Surely Cecile could see the logic in that. Agassiz consoled himself with the observation that she had not cried overmuch. . . .

  How devoted to him she had been when they first met! He had accompanied his school-chum, Alexander Braun, to the latter’s German home for holidays, and met his sister, Cecile, a perfect specimen of Aryan femininity. Infatuated, she had sketched a portrait of him then which he still possessed. (Had he ever looked that young . . .?) Years later, they had married and gone on to live happily.

  But when Desor came to reside with them, things had begun to fall apart. Cecile had found the ex-law-student vain, crude and irresponsible. He had made off-color jokes which embarrassed her. Agassiz had continued to stick up for Desor, almost irrationally (did the man have some sort of spell on him? he sometimes wondered), and the distance between the naturalist and his wife had thereafter grown wider and wider.

  Irritably, Agassiz now put all domestic reverie aside and turned to confront Desor.

  “Yes, Edward, what is it?”

  Desor preened his incipient mustache. “I just want to remind you, Louis, that my cousin, Maurice, will soon arrive. You recall that we discussed hiring him.”

  Agassiz exploded. “How could you think of authorizing your cousin’s passage when we still have other, more competent people yet to bring over? As far as I remember, we had left his hiring unsettled. What prompted you to take such a step?”

  Desor failed to exhibit a suitable chagrin at his employer’s ire. “I knew he would be of supreme use to the establishment, and took the liberty of securing his services before someone else did so.”

  “Refresh my memory as to his qualifications, if you please.”

  Desor now managed to appear a trifle apprehensive. “He is young, energetic, and eager to serve—”

  “But what of his scientific experience?”

  “He is an expert in bovine anatomy.”

  “Meaning?”

  Desor visibly squirmed. “He once worked in an abattoir for a week.”

  Agassiz threw up his hands. “Impossible! But I suppose we cannot turn the ship around, now that it’s sailed. Still, if I receive reports of Mauri
ce’s disappearance at sea, I shall not languish overlong. Well, we shall deal with Maurice when he arrives. Is there anything else, Edward?”

  “No,” sullenly replied the assistant.

  “Very well, then, you are dismissed.”

  Desor left in a sulk.

  After some further consultations with his staff, Agassiz ventured into the house’s kitchen. There, he found Jane.

  Jane Pryke was the household’s cook and maid, a buxom English lass of eighteen, with a charmingly freckled complexion. Her flaxen hair she conventionally wore in a long braid. In her initial interview for the job she had replied to Agassiz’s query about the correct pronunciation of her surname with the verse, “Rhyme it with ‘shrike’ if you like, but not with ‘trick,’ ’less you want a kick.” Agassiz had laughed and immediately hired her.

  Now he approached the nubile factotum quietly from behind, as she stood at the woodstove stirring a pot of fish chowder compiled from specimens found unfit for mounting. Grabbing her around the waist beneath her apron and causing her to emit a shriek, Agassiz began to nuzzle her neck.

  “In my chambers, after supper,” he whispered.

  Jane giggled, and lost her spoon in the soup.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Agassiz found himself mentally reciting a kind of contrition: Cecile, please forgive me.

  But the guilt did not suffice to spoil completely that evening’s intercourse.

  After the physical interlude, Agassiz fell asleep.

  He awoke in darkness to the sensation of someone stroking his face.

  “Jane. . . .” he murmured, then stopped.

  Jane’s hands were somewhat work-roughened, but they certainly did not feel like this—

  Agassiz rolled away from the stroking and fumbled for an Allin-patented phosphorous match on his bedstand. He struck it, then looked to his bedside.

  The hideous face of an ape glowered back at him.

  Then the ape smiled, and said, “Bonjour, Monsieur Agassiz.”

  2

  SINUS PUDORIS

  ONCE AGASSIZ HAD had a nightmare. In the nightmare, he was an animal, a deer of some sort. Though whether Cervinæ or Rangiferinæ was unclear. (Imagine, the great Agassiz, splendid representative of Homo sapiens, an animal . . .!) In that dream he had been trapped, one hoof pinned in a crevasse. And bearing down on him was a glacier, one of the great ice sheets that had scoured the Northern hemisphere, whose geological traces he, Agassiz, had brilliantly construed, thereby earning himself the title “Discoverer of the Ice Age.” (And damn Charpentier, Schimper and Forbes as egregious liars, for all their claims to a share in the discovery!) As he struggled to extricate his hoof, the speed of the ice began to increase. Soon it was moving fast as a steam locomotive, tons and tons of blue-white, air-bubbled ice descending on him, eager to grind him to a red smear on the gravel, take up his bones and deposit them in some future moraine. . . .

  He had awoken in a cold sweat, found Cecile sleeping peacefully beside him, and gratefully hugged her to him.

  The sensation Agassiz now experienced, as he confronted the repulsive visage of the grimacing French-speaking ape, was in all respects identical to what he had experienced as a trapped animal about to be crushed. He was immobilized by fear; beads of perspiration burst through his pores like the foul exudation of some toad (Bufo marinus, say), on his brow and across his bare hairy chest. All he could conceive was that he was about to be torn to shreds.

  The match, burning down, reached Agassiz’s fingertips. The pain jerked him out of his immobility. As the room was plunged once more into darkness, he rolled out of bed and began to crawl on hands and knees across the floor, heading toward the door.

  Suddenly, the room was illumined again, this time by an Argand oil lamp thrust through the open window that gave onto the seaward side of the house.

  “Hallo!” called the bearer of the lamp. “Ist dis not der house of Doctor Agassiz?”

  In the fuller light of the lamp, Agassiz laid his eyes once more on the ape who, after stroking his cheek, had so shockingly addressed him. After a moment of redoubled amazement, he realized the true nature of the visitor.

  Not an ape, but a Negro!

  And not a Westernized slave, but a wild African!

  The Negro, slight of stature, was attired thusly: a mantle of sheepskin over its shoulders—fastened in front with bone buttons through leather loops—and a multilayered raffia skirt threaded with colorful glass beads. Its arms and legs were festooned with rings of iron and copper, as well as shell-strung leather thongs. The flesh left bare was covered with what appeared to be an admixture of rancid animal fat and soot.

  As Agassiz, frozen on all fours, stared in horror at the leering monkey-face of the African intruder, a bulky, pantaloon-clad, booted leg thrust itself through the window after the lamp-bearing arm. A second hand clamped itself onto the window-frame. Then there ensued a period of intense grunting, followed by an exclamation:

  “Gott be damned, mine fat zelf ist ztuck! Dottie, come und help!”

  The wild blackamoor turned then and moved toward the window. Agassiz was astounded to see that the creature’s skirt in back was rucked up over enormous fatty buttocks so huge and disproportionate as to render the very term “obscene” an instance of litotes.

  “One moment, Jacob,” said the Negro, and the timbre of its speech, in conjunction with the name by which it had been addressed, roused in Agassiz the realization that the savage Ethiop was female!

  At the window, the Negro grabbed the wrists of her companion and tugged. The booted foot already inside found purchase on the floorboards, and soon the rest of the man followed.

  Big as some bear (perhaps Ursus horribilis) from the notebooks of Lewis and Clark, plainly of European extraction, the man wore a dirty white blousy shirt and a conical cap made out of what Agassiz recognized as an animal’s stomach. His jocund, sun-cured face was decorated with mustache and chin-whiskers rather in the manner of the British story-teller, Dickens.

  Setting down his lamp, the man hastened over to Agassiz and, gripping him under the armpits, hoisted him weightlessly to his feet, all the while issuing a stream of atrociously fractured English.

  “Doctor Agassiz, mine greatest apologies for making der disturbance of your dreams in zuch a vild fashion, like rascals in der night, ja, to be zhure, but vee have only chust arrived—mine boat, der Zie Koe, she is anchored right outside your vindow—und dere ist not a moment’s time to vaste if vee are to find der ztolen fetiche!”

  Agassiz stared at the madman in stupefaction. He swivelled his gaze briefly, just long enough to ascertain that the Negro woman—that abominable anthropological specimen whose touch had profaned his face—was hanging back near the window at a suitable, if not entirely comfortable distance. Then, finding his tongue, he spoke.

  “Who—who are you? And what do you want?”

  The uninvited visitor slapped his forehead and exclaimed, “Vot a dumb zhit! Mine apologies, in zpades! To be zhure, I forget minezelf totally. Your name ist zo famous, und I know of your zircumstances so vell, dot I imagine you zhould know me alzo. Vell, permit me. Mine name ist Jacob Cezar. And dis vun vit me ist Dottie Baartman.”

  The man leaned confidently toward Agassiz and said, “Of course, her real name ist Ngldatu, but I get to call her Dottie.”

  The Negro, responding to her click-punctuated name, smiled once more toward Agassiz, her gruesome flat nose wrinkling horribly.

  Agassiz shivered uncontrollably, and not from any effects of the warm June air. He snatched some bedclothes up and wrapped them around his waist. Then he faced Jacob Cezar once more.

  He was feeling somewhat more charitable toward the intruder, who had exhibited at least enough breeding both to apologize and to praise Agassiz’s fame. “Your name, sir, fails to prompt my recognition. And I am still in the dark as to how I may help you. . . .�
�

  “Let us zit down, und I vill explain all. Perhaps dot decanter of zherry I zee dere vould help lubricate mine zpeech—”

  Obliging his guest’s request, all the while keeping one eye on Dottie Baartman where she squatted on her haunches by the wall, her raffia skirt falling between her legs and revealing more of her hideous black haunches, Agassiz tried to compose himself to listen to the man’s tale.

  He was not prepared, however, for his reaction to Cezar’s opening words.

  “I am der zun of Hendrik Cezar, und Dottie ist der daughter of—”

  Suddenly, recognition dawned. “The Hottentot Venus!” exclaimed Agassiz.

  Jacob Cezar smiled. “Ach, I zee Europe ztill remembers her.”

  And to be sure, Europe, in the person of Louis Agassiz, still did, though the woman in question had died when Agassiz was only eight years old, in 1815.

  In the year 1810, a man named Hendrick Cezar arrived in London and set up a sideshow in Piccadilly. His exhibit consisted simply of a large cage on a platform elevated a few feet above the eager spectators.

  Inside was a black woman.