The Steampunk Trilogy

by Paul Di Filippo

  Agassiz looked nervously around, but Jane was not present. “Please, sir, watch your language! I realize that your own ‘wife’ is a savage, but there is another woman in the house, even if she is a servant.”

  Cezar winked. “Vimmen are vorse den men in zuch matters, if druth be dold. But vee are getting avay from der topic. Bopp ist now in America also. He has convinced his king dot he ist on der drail of Kosciuszko—und in druth, he does hate all Poles, for der defeat dey handed der Knights at Dannenberg in 1410—but in reality, he ist intent on capturing der dalisman for himzelf!”

  Agassiz’s head was spinning. “Let me restate what you have told me. A Hottentot sorcerer, possessed of a magical relic which must be activated somewhere in my adopted state, is being pursued by a Polish-Irish halfbreed and a medieval Crusader, all of whom we must circumvent in order to recover the relic first.”

  “Pree-zisely!”

  Agassiz narrowed his eyes on the burly man. “How do you come to know all this, living at the ends of the earth as you do?”

  “Ach, Professor Agassiz, I am not a ztupid man, und ven events impinge on me und mine country, I attempt to learn all I can. Chust because I live on der edge of Kaffraria, do not imagine dot I am cut off from information. Dis vorld is not as large a place as it vunce vas. Ven a steamship can bridge der Atlantic in nineteen days, ven dousands of miles of drain-dracks crisscross der globe, ven der darkest corners of der vorld are beginning to be lit by der arc lamps of science, as zpearheaded by zuch brilliant men as yourzelf—vell, den even a zimple farmer like old Jacob Cezar can learn vot he has to.”

  Agassiz swelled up like a pigeon (Columba fasciata). “It’s true, people like myself are invaluable in lifting the world out of its ignorance—You know, you seem like a reasonable man, Jacob. Could we not discuss the ethics of racial purity—? I see not. Well, perhaps you’ll relent some day. Meanwhile, I suppose we should get busy.”

  Agassiz summoned Jane back to the kitchen with an imperious shout, his usual mode of command. She returned with a flushed face.

  “Lor’, sir, I wish you’d speak to Mister Desor about that wicked tongue of his! The tales he’s been telling me—I know they’re all factual, but it don’t hardly seem decent for a lady to hear them. For instance, did you know that your average whale has a male member ten feet long?”

  Cezar winked at Agassiz, as if to say, Zee, I told you zo. Agassiz grew annoyed.

  “Please, enough of such trivial chatter! Jane, you must put aside your normal chores this morning, since we have a tremendous task for you. Observe this—this tribal creature. I need you to bathe it and clothe it so that it is fit to be seen on the streets of Boston.”

  “Very good, sir. Does she have a proper name?”

  Agassiz brushed off the question. “Bah! That’s of no matter.”

  Cezar spoke up. “Of course der lady does. Dottie ist her name.”

  “Oh, how sweet. I’ve a cousin named Dottie, back in Letchworth. Well, help me get some water boiling, Dottie, and we’ll drag out the old tin tub.”

  “Let us retire to my study, Jacob, and leave Jane to her formidable task. We must discuss our plans and methods.”

  In the atelier, Agassiz was about to outline the limits of his cooperation, when he was preempted by Cezar.

  “Vie must you be zo cruel to mine vife, Louis? Don’t you zee dot Dottie ist chust as perceptive und zensitive as you or I? Zhe understands quite a bit of English, you know, und even if zhe can’t follow you vord for vord, zhe can ztill zense your emotions und be hurt. Perhaps if you knew her whole ztory—

  “Dottie vas born der year before her mudder left for Europe und given under der care of an aunt. Dot vornan had been mine own vet-nurse.”

  Agassiz repressed a shudder. He must exert every ounce of the self-control that had enabled him to study all night while his peers ranged through the beer-halls of Munich. . . .

  “I vas five years old at der dime, und, vit mine fodder gone und mine mudder dead from der bite of a horned snake, vas vunce more in der care of mine old nurse. Dot meant dot Dottie und I vere raised together like ziblings.

  “Vun day, ven I vas ten und Dottie vas five, vee vere playing dogether down by der Breede River ven I zlipped down a zteep clay bank und into der river, zmack dab into a herd of zie koes, der vuns you call hippos. Der mudders, dinking I vas attacking dere young, began to zvarm over me, pushing me under der vater.

  “Chust as I vas going under for der dhird dime, zomeding poked me in der head. I instinctively grabbed onto it.

  “It vas a branch vhich Dottie had lowered to me. I vas able to use it to climb out of der river.

  “From dot moment vhen zhe zaved mine life, I knew I vould marry her zomeday. Und zo I did.

  “I have given her der best education possible. Zhe zpeaks, reads und writes Dutch, French und her native tongue. Zhe has been vorking on her English during der drip over here, und has gotten to der point vhere zhe ist ready for der McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader. In zhort, despite dose outvard features of hers vhich you might find offensive, zhe ist an intelligent, quick-vitted vornan chust as vorthy of your respect as your own vife.”

  The allusion to Cecile—like jabbing a bruise—was the final straw. Through clenched teeth, Agassiz made rejoinder.

  “Herr Cezar, you would be well advised never to make free with the name of my helpmeet again, especially when employed as one of the terms in such an invidious equation. It is enough that I tolerate the presence of your barbaric consort in my home. You must not demand that I accord her equal status with those whom the Creator has fashioned in His true likeness.”

  Cezar flungs his arms up and apart. “Ach! Your head ist dhicker den dot of an elephant, und your heart ist harder den vun of mine country’s diamonds! I von’t argue any more, Professor Agassiz. But you mark mine vords: vun day you vill have cause to regret your prechudice.”

  Agassiz tugged his vest down, as if smoothing his feathers. “Be that as it may, we will operate on my terms or not at all.”

  “As you vill.”

  “Very good. Now, you must realize that I have a full schedule of scientific researches which I cannot just abandon for this improbable quest of yours. I will make discreet inquiries among my acquaintances and business contacts as to the whereabouts of this rascal, T’guzeri, and perhaps I will even venture abroad to track down any leads, should it coincide with any of my various specimen-collecting forays. However, you will mostly be operating on your own, though I will allow you to utilize my not inconsiderable name as a reference.”

  “Oh, Professor, vot a privilege.”

  “It’s nothing. Now, you spoke of a location in this region which possesses certain unique qualities your sorcerer believes will facilitate his rituals. Where is this place? It’s plain that by staking it out, we will soon have the thief in our hands.”

  “Vell, I don’t exactly know. Dot’s vun ding I vas hoping you could help me vit. Perhaps if I described it to you. It’s vun of der zpots vhere life ist zpontaneously created—”

  Agassiz shot to his feet. “What are you saying, man! Are you sure of this?”

  “Ja, as zhure as I am of anyding.”

  Agassiz’s compatriots were divided into two camps on the origin of life on earth. One group believed that life had originated in some mysterious fashion one single time, in some unknown cradle, and diffused outward to cover the globe. These credulous people, among whose numbers were Asa Gray, Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell, also believed in some vague theory called “evolution” (best explained in the epic works Zoonomia by Erasmus Darwin and Système des animaux sans vertèbres by Jean Lamarck), which held that one kind of creature could somehow over the course of time actually become another!

  Agassiz, however, belonged to those sensible types who maintained that the Creator had brought into being all the different species and races separately and fully formed,
each in their own country. And as for “evolution”—Well, the fossil record plainly revealed that one kind of creature did not flow into another, but that all the vanished species had died in different catastrophes, whereupon new ones had arisen from the same wells of creation.

  And now it seemed that Cezar was affirming that one of these sacred primordial wellsprings—perhaps the very one from which the Red Man, the opossum (Didelphis virginiana) and maize (Zea mays) had sprung—existed in Massachusetts!

  Pacing back and forth excitedly, Agassiz said, “Your search becomes more imperative than ever to me, now that I realize its full magnitude. Why, if I could positively identify this American Omphalos, my name would echo down through the ages!” Cezar looked disgusted, and Agassiz hastened to add, “Oh, and of course, the return of the fetiche to the Musée de l’Homme would make me very happy too. Perhaps I was too hasty in limiting my involvement with your quest, Jacob. In fact, I’m sure of it. You may count on my complete cooperation and assistance. Why, together we’ll nab this witch-doctor in a trice.”

  “It von’t pay to get overconfident, Professor. Don’t forget dot vee’ve got zome competition in der chase.”

  “A wild-eyed sansculotte and a myth-besotted martinet? Don’t make me laugh! What chance have they against a scientific Swiss genius?”

  “Ja, dot’s vot Napoleon zaid before Vaterloo. . . .”

  “Come, let’s see how Jane is progressing in making your Hottentot fit for civilized eyes. I suggest that we keep your true nationality a secret, so as not to alert T’guzeri that one of his countrymen is on his tail. We’ll tell people that you’re a latifundian from Dutch Guiana, and that Dottie is a manumitted slave. This town is a hotbed of Abolitionist sentiment, and such a tale is bound to encourage sympathy.”

  Entering the kitchen, Agassiz and Cezar were greeted by an astounding sight.

  Dottie’s native costume had been exchanged for the latest mode of American dress. On her head was a bonnet which, appropriately enough, outlined her coal-colored face in a coal-scuttle-shaped frame. She wore a brown glazed taffeta skirt with a fichu of embroidered tulle over a wide crinoline underskirt whose extravagant dimensions completely concealed her natural posterior endowments. High-laced leather boots completed her ensemble.

  Fussing with the final details, Jane and Dottie were whispering and giggling together. Upon spying the men, they both broke out in gales of laughter, Dottie’s punctuated by queer clicks.

  “Come now, Jane,” said Agassiz sternly. “What’s so humorous?”

  This rebuke served only to provoke further hilarity. At last, however, the women calmed down enough for Jane to say, “Oh, Professor, it’s just that this crinoline’s stiffened with whale bones!”

  “And what, pray tell, makes whale bones so jocose? And mind you now, none of your usual lip!”

  But this unfortunate turn of phrase sent the women into such tearful hilarity that an answer never was forthcoming.

  4

  WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT

  EVER SINCE, AT the age of fifteen, he had outlined in his journal his entire future career, Agassiz had never known failure—or never admitted such. True, some events had transpired in a manner less than absolutely satisfying. His marriage, for one. But there had always been an angle from which to view such partial successes, a perspective which would allow him to salvage radiant victory from black defeat. Never had he been forced to admit incompetence, actually to utter the words, “I’ve failed.”

  Yet now, perhaps, that miserable occasion was here. Much as he hated to confess it, he had found an area of endeavor in which he seemed to possess no skills at all.

  That field was detecting.

  He had been completely convinced that once he applied his intense intelligence to the problem of the missing fetiche, he would be able to lead Cezar straight to the fiendish Hottentot sorcerer, T’guzeri. After all, what was detecting but a pale cousin of science? In both, one was presented with a motley collection of seemingly unrelated facts from which an overarching explanation had to be cobbled, leading to the ability to predict or extrapolate the actions of one’s quarry, whether man or atom. Surely the savant who had read in the grooved rocks of the Rhone Valley the ancient presence of glaciers would be able to follow the clumsy tracks of a primitive blackamoor.

  And yet, such had not been the case.

  Before casting their net far afield, Agassiz had argued that they should positively eliminate the city as T’guzeri’s refuge. As the Hub of the Commonwealth, Agassiz argued, the city should attract the sorcerer, even if it were not the actual Cosmogonic Locus where he would ultimately perform his necromantic rituals.

  And so for two days the naturalist and Cezar had combed the cowpath-twisty streets of Boston. In their search they were accompanied by the silent yet alert and inquisitive Dottie, her inky simian features, startlingly incongruous when framed in Western accouterments, attracting stares and catcalls from the lower-class pedestrians.

  The trio had made inquiry among various strata of society, searching for any information regarding a half-nude Bushman carrying a pickled portion of feminine anatomy.

  First they had tried Agassiz’s contacts at the local wharves, reasoning that T’guzeri must have arrived from Paris by boat, commercial or otherwise. On an off-chance, they even visited the McKay shipyards not far from the Agassiz establishment in East Boston, where Donald McKay built his magnificent clipper ships such as the Flying Cloud and the Sovereign of the Seas, which dominated the China-California trade. But no one they spoke to had seen the Bushman.

  Crossing over from East Boston to the Shawmut mainland by ferry, they arrived at Long Wharf, with its marvelous 2000-foot-long, four-story-tall brick warehouse. But there, amid the drying nets of the fishermen and the tethered schooners, barques and sloops, as well as the rare yacht from Newport, bobbing proudly like a peacock (Pavo cristatus) among chickens (Gallus gallus), they drew a complete blank.

  Forced to assume that the wily magician had landed elsewhere on the East Coast, they checked all train and coach stations, questioning porters and ticket-sellers, vendors, pickaroons and mudlarks. From the Fitchburg Depot on Causeway Street to the Providence and Worcester Terminus at South Cove they roamed. No luck.

  “Zuppose D’guzeri dravelled overland by vun of dose horse-drawn boats?”

  “A canal barge? Let us investigate.”

  But none of the sweaty roughnecks who guided the horses that pulled the seventy-five-foot flat-bottomed barges along the Middlesex Canal from the Merrimack River to Boston Harbor could supply information about the sorcerer.

  The trio of sleuths made a survey of wooden South End row-houses packed with immigrants, to no avail. Hypothesizing that perhaps T’guzeri was using his small stature to impersonate a child, they visited the Home for Vagrant Boys and the many Free Schools. All wards and students were non-Hottentot.

  They inquired at all thirty of the city’s “benevolent, useful and charitable societies,” but enjoyed no success.

  Despairing, they journeyed to the Boston Lunatic Hospital at City Point, thinking that perhaps T’guzeri had been captured and consigned there. In the midst of the inmates’ cachinnations, Agassiz was painfully reminded of the fiasco Desor had brought about at “Bedlam College.” Unfortunately, none of the mooncalves was a Bushman.

  At this point, they were at an impasse.

  “My reasoning was impeccable. I was positive the rogue would hole up in the city, where his presence was most likely to pass unremarked. . . .”

  “Ach, I zhould have gone to zumvun who had experience in dese matters. Like maybe dot writer Edgar Poe. Anyvun who could create a character like dot Auguste Dupin vould be able to solve dis zimple mystery.”

  “Don’t make me laugh! That journalist is nothing but a drunken dreamer, with his talk of a hollow earth and such. And his morals are filthy. Why, he was practically ridden on
a rail out of this city.”

  “Never der less. . . .”

  Thus frustrated, Agassiz turned to his network of field correspondents, men and women, amateurs and professionals alike, who had heard him lecture and been motivated to enlist in the great and glorious Army of Science. From them, he daily received packages of interesting natural oddities, which packages, sometimes slimy and reeking, occasionally still buzzing, croaking or rattling, were a source of much anxiety to Jane, who had the task of accepting the post.

  Late in the afternoon of the second fruitless day, Agassiz had written the same letter to each of his representatives:

  Esteemed Friend of Natural Philosophy,

  Your humble Professor now asks you to keep your senses alert for a rara avis indeed! I have had reports of live African natives of the Hottentot species sighted in these parts, perhaps blown off course during some natural oceanic migration and wafted to these northern shores. I will pay double the usual bounty if you would be so kind as to forward reliable notice of such specimens. Of course, should you be able to trap them, so much the better, and you may count on my paying all freight charges for their speedy delivery, as well as recompensing you for any forage they might consume.

  Yours in taxonomical solidarity,

  Louis Agassiz

  Now there came a clumsy knock at the door to Agassiz’s study. Ah, that would be Jane with the afternoon post. Perhaps there would already be a reply or two from the nearer correspondents. . . .

  “Enter.”

  The doorknob was fumbled, then the door shot open, impelled by a kick, slamming loudly into the wall.

  Jane staggered in, her outstretched arms so full of packages as to obscure her face. She tottered toward a sideboard, but, midway there, let loose a high-pitched shriek and dropped all her burdens.