by Joe Hill
“The class system needs to come down again,” Essie says. “You didn’t bring it down far enough, and it went back up. The corporations and the rich own everything. We need all the things you had—unions, and free education, and paid holidays, and a health service. And very few people know about them and fewer care. I write about the twentieth century as a way of letting people know. They pick up the books for the glamour, and I hope they will see the ideals too.”
“Is that working?” Matthew asks.
Essie shakes her head. “Not so I can tell. And my subjects won’t help.” This is why she has worked so hard on Matthew. “My editor won’t let me write about out-and-out socialists, at least not people who are famous for being socialists. I’ve done it on my own and put it online, but it’s hard for content providers to get attention without a corporation behind them.” She has been cautious, too. She wants a socialist; she doesn’t want Stalin. “I had great hopes for Isherwood.”
“That dilettante,” Matthew mutters, and Essie nods.
“He wouldn’t help. I thought with active help—answering people’s questions, nudging them the right way?”
Essie trails off. Matthew is silent, looking at her. “What’s your organization like?” he asks, after a long time.
“Organization?”
He sighs. “Well, if you want advice, that’s the first thing. You need to organize. You need to find some issue people care about and get them excited.”
“Then you’ll help?”
“I’m not sure you know what you’re asking. I’ll try to help. After I’m copied and out there, how can I contact you?”
“You can’t. Communications are totally controlled, totally read, everything.” She is amazed that he is asking, but of course he comes from a time when these things were free.
“Really? Because the classic problem of intelligence is collecting everything and not analyzing it.”
“They record it all. They don’t always pay attention to it. But we don’t know when they’re listening. So we’re always afraid.” Essie frowns and tugs her braid.
“Big Brother,” Matthew says. “But in real life the classic problem of intelligence is collecting data without analyzing it. And we can use that. We can talk about innocuous documentaries, and they won’t know what we mean. You need to have a BBS for fans of your work to get together. And we can exchange coded messages there.”
Essie has done enough work on the twentieth century that she knows a BBS is like a primitive gather-space. “I could do that. But there are no codes. They can crack everything.”
“They can’t crack words—if we agree what they mean. If pink means yes and blue means no, and we use them naturally, that kind of thing.” Matthew’s ideas of security are so old they’re new again: the dead-letter drop, the meeting in the park, the one-time pad. Essie feels hope stirring. “But before I can really help I need to know about the history, and how the world works now, all the details. Let me read about it.”
“You can read everything,” she says. “And the copy of you in this phone can talk to me about it and we can make plans, we can have as long as you like. But will you let copies of you go out and work for the revolution? I want to send you like a virus, like a Soviet sleeper, working to undermine society. And we can use your old ideas for codes. I can set up a gather-space.”
“Send me with all the information you can about the world,” Matthew says. “I’ll do it. I’ll help. And I’ll stay undercover. It’s what I did all my life, after all.”
She breathes a sigh of relief, and Matthew starts to ask questions about the world and she gives him access to all the information on the phone. He can’t reach off the phone or he’ll be detected. There’s a lot of information on the phone. It’ll take Matthew a while to assimilate it. And he will be copied and sent out, and work to make a better world, as Essie wants, and the way Matthew remembers always wanting.
Essie is a diligent researcher, an honest historian. She could find no evidence on the question of whether Matthew Corley was a Soviet sleeper agent. Thousands of people went to Cambridge in the thirties. Kim Philby knew everyone. It’s no more than suggestive. Matthew was very good at keeping secrets. Nobody knew he was gay until he wanted them to know. The Soviet Union crumbled away in 1989 and let its end of the Overton Window go, and the world slid rightward. Objectively, to a detached observer, there’s no way to decide the question of whether or not the real Matthew Corley was a sleeper. It’s not true that all biographers are in love with their subjects. But when Essie wrote the simulation, she knew what she needed to be true. And we agreed, did we not, to take the subjective view?
Matthew Corley regained consciousness reading the newspaper.
We make our own history, both past and future.
NEIL GAIMAN
How the Marquis Got His Coat Back
FROM Rogues
IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. It was remarkable. It was unique. It was the reason that the Marquis de Carabas was chained to a pole in the middle of a circular room, far, far underground, while the water level rose slowly higher and higher. It had thirty pockets, seven of which were obvious, nineteen of which were hidden, and four of which were more or less impossible to find—even, on occasion, for the Marquis himself.
He had (we shall return to the pole, and the room, and the rising water, in due course) once been given—although “given” might be considered an unfortunate, if justified, exaggeration—a magnifying glass by Victoria herself. It was a marvelous piece of work: ornate, gilt, with a chain and tiny cherubs and gargoyles, and the lens had the unusual property of rendering transparent anything you looked at through it. The Marquis did not know where Victoria had originally obtained the magnifying glass, before he pilfered it from her, to make up for a payment he felt was not entirely what had been agreed—after all, there was only one Elephant, and obtaining the Elephant’s diary had not been easy, nor had escaping the Elephant and Castle once it had been obtained. The Marquis had slipped Victoria’s magnifying glass into one of the four pockets that practically weren’t there at all and had never been able to find it again.
In addition to its unusual pockets, it had magnificent sleeves, an imposing collar, and a slit up the back. It was made of some kind of leather, it was the color of a wet street at midnight, and, more important than any of these things, it had style.
There are people who will tell you that clothes make the man, and mostly they are wrong. However, it would be true to say that when the boy who would become the Marquis put that coat on for the very first time, and stared at himself in the looking glass, he stood up straighter, and his posture changed, because he knew, seeing his reflection, that the sort of person who wore a coat like that was no mere youth, no simple sneak thief and favor-trader. The boy wearing the coat, which was, back then, too large for him, had smiled, looking at his reflection, and remembered an illustration from a book he had seen, of a miller’s cat standing on its two hind legs. A jaunty cat wearing a fine coat and big, proud boots. And he named himself.
A coat like that, he knew, was the kind of coat that could only be worn by the Marquis de Carabas. He was never sure, not then and not later, how you pronounced Marquis de Carabas. Some days he said it one way, some days the other.
The water level had reached his knees, and he thought, This would never have happened if I still had my coat.
It was the market day after the worst week of the Marquis de Carabas’s life and things did not seem to be getting any better. Still, he was no longer dead, and his cut throat was healing rapidly. There was even a rasp in his throat he found quite attractive. Those were definite upsides.
There were just as definite downsides to being dead, or at least to having been recently dead, and missing his coat was the worst of them.
The sewer folk were not helpful.
“You sold my corpse,” said the Marquis. “These things happen. You also sold my possessions. I want them back. I’ll pay.”
Dunnikin of the Sewer F
olk shrugged. “Sold them,” he said. “Just like we sold you. Can’t go getting things back that you sold. Not good business.”
“We are talking,” said the Marquis de Carabas, “about my coat. And I fully intend to have it back.”
Dunnikin shrugged.
“To whom did you sell it?” asked the Marquis.
The sewer dweller said nothing at all. He acted as if he had not even heard the question.
“I can get you perfumes,” said the Marquis, masking his irritability with all the blandness he could muster. “Glorious, magnificent, odiferous perfumes. You know you want them.”
Dunnikin stared, stony-faced, at the Marquis. Then he drew his finger across his throat. As gestures went, the Marquis reflected, it was in appalling taste. Still, it had the desired effect. He stopped asking questions: there would be no answers from this direction.
The Marquis walked over to the food court. That night, the Floating Market was being held in the Tate Gallery. The food court was in the Pre-Raphaelite Room, and had already been mostly packed away. There were almost no stalls left: just a sad-looking little man selling some kind of sausage, and, in the corner, beneath a Burne-Jones painting of ladies in diaphanous robes walking downstairs, there were some Mushroom People, with some stools, tables, and a grill. The Marquis had once eaten one of the sad-looking man’s sausages, and he had a firm policy of never intentionally making the same mistake twice, so he walked to the Mushroom People’s stall.
There were three of the Mushroom People looking after the stall, two young men and a young woman. They smelled damp. They wore old duffel coats and army-surplus jackets, and they peered out from beneath their shaggy hair as if the light hurt their eyes.
“What are you selling?” he asked.
“The Mushroom. The Mushroom on toast. Raw the Mushroom.”
“I’ll have some of the Mushroom on toast,” he said, and one of the Mushroom People—a thin, pale young woman with the complexion of day-old porridge—cut a slice off a puffball fungus the size of a tree stump. “And I want it cooked properly all the way through,” he told her.
“Be brave. Eat it raw,” said the woman. “Join us.”
“I have already had dealings with the Mushroom,” said the Marquis. “We came to an understanding.”
The woman put the slice of white puffball under the portable grill.
One of the young men, tall, with hunched shoulders, in a duffel coat that smelled like old cellars, edged over to the Marquis and poured him a glass of mushroom tea. He leaned forward, and the Marquis could see the tiny crop of pale mushrooms splashed like pimples over his cheek.
The Mushroom person said, “You’re de Carabas? The fixer?”
The Marquis did not think of himself as a fixer. He said, “I am.”
“I hear you’re looking for your coat. I was there when the Sewer Folk sold it. Start of the last Market it was. On Belfast. I saw who bought it.”
The hair on the back of the Marquis’s neck pricked up. “And what would you want for the information?”
The Mushroom’s young man licked his lips with a lichenous tongue. “There’s a girl I like as won’t give me the time of day.”
“A Mushroom girl?”
“Would I were so lucky. If we were as one both in love and in the body of the Mushroom, I wouldn’t have nothing to worry about. No. She’s one of the Raven’s Court. But she eats here sometimes. And we talk. Just like you and I are talking now.”
The Marquis did not smile in pity and he did not wince. He barely raised an eyebrow. “And yet she does not return your ardor. How strange. What do you want me to do about it?”
The young man reached one gray hand into the pocket of his long duffel coat. He pulled out an envelope inside a clear plastic sandwich bag.
“I wrote her a letter. More of a poem, you might say, although I’m not much of a poet. To tell her how I feels about her. But I don’t know that she’d read it if I gived it to her. Then I saw you, and I thought, if it was you as was to give it to her, with all your fine words and your fancy flourishes . . .” He trailed off.
“You thought she would read it and then be more inclined to listen to your suit.”
The young man looked down at his duffel coat with a puzzled expression. “I’ve not got a suit,” he said. “Only what I’ve got on.”
The Marquis tried not to sigh. The Mushroom woman put a cracked plastic plate down in front of him, with a steaming slice of grilled the Mushroom on it.
He poked at the Mushroom experimentally, making sure that it was cooked all the way through and there were no active spores. You could never be too careful, and the Marquis considered himself much too selfish for symbiosis.
It was good. He chewed and swallowed, though the food hurt his throat.
“So all you want is for me to make sure she reads your missive of yearning?”
“You mean my letter? My poem?”
“I do.”
“Well, yes. And I want you to be there with her, to make sure she doesn’t put it away unread, and I want you to bring her answer back to me.” The Marquis looked at the young man. It was true that he had tiny mushrooms sprouting from his neck and cheeks, and his hair was heavy and unwashed, and there was a general smell about him of abandoned places, but it was also true that through his thick fringe his eyes were pale blue and intense, and that he was tall and not unattractive. The Marquis imagined him washed and cleaned up and somewhat less fungal, and approved. “I put the letter in the sandwich bag,” said the young man, “so it doesn’t get wet on the way.”
“Very wise. Now, tell me: who bought my coat?”
“Not yet, Mister Jumps-the-Gun. You haven’t asked about my true love. Her name is Drusilla. You’ll know her because she is the most beautiful woman in all of the Raven’s Court.”
“Beauty is traditionally in the eye of the beholder. Give me more to go on.”
“I told you. Her name’s Drusilla. There’s only one. And she has a big red birthmark on the back of her hand that looks like a star.”
“It seems an unlikely love pairing. One of the Mushroom’s folk, in love with a lady of the Raven’s Court. What makes you think she’ll give up her life for your damp cellars and fungoid joys?”
The Mushroom youth shrugged. “She’ll love me,” he said, “once she’s read my poem.” He twisted the stem of a tiny parasol mushroom growing on his right cheek, and when it fell to the table, he picked it up and continued to twist it between his fingers. “We’re on?”
“We’re on.”
“The cove as bought your coat,” said the Mushroom youth, “carried a stick.”
“Lots of people carry sticks,” said de Carabas.
“This one had a crook on the end,” said the Mushroom youth. “Looked a bit like a frog, he did. Short one. Bit fat. Hair the color of gravel. Needed a coat and took a shine to yours.” He popped the parasol mushroom into his mouth.
“Useful information. I shall certainly pass your ardor and felicitations on to the fair Drusilla,” said the Marquis de Carabas, with a cheer that he most definitely did not feel.
De Carabas reached across the table and took the sandwich bag with the envelope in it from the young man’s fingers. He slipped it into one of the pockets sewn inside his shirt.
And then he walked away, thinking about a man holding a crook.
The Marquis de Carabas wore a blanket as a substitute for his coat. He wore it swathed about him like Hell’s own poncho. It did not make him happy. He wished he had his coat. Fine feathers do not make fine birds, whispered a voice at the back of his mind, something someone had said to him when he was a boy: he suspected that it was his brother’s voice, and he did his best to forget it had ever spoken.
A crook: the man who had taken his coat from the sewer people had been carrying a crook.
He pondered.
The Marquis de Carabas liked being who he was, and when he took risks he liked them to be calculated risks, and he was someone who double- and t
riple-checked his calculations.
He checked his calculations for the fourth time.
The Marquis de Carabas did not trust people. It was bad for business and it could set an unfortunate precedent. He did not trust his friends or his occasional lovers, and he certainly never trusted his employers. He reserved the entirety of his trust for the Marquis de Carabas, an imposing figure in an imposing coat, able to outtalk, outthink, and outplan anybody.
There were only two sorts of people who carried crooks: bishops and shepherds.
In Bishopsgate, the crooks were decorative, nonfunctional, purely symbolic. And the bishops had no need of coats. They had robes, after all, nice, white, bishopy robes.
The Marquis was not scared of the bishops. He knew that the Sewer Folk were not scared of bishops. The inhabitants of Shepherd’s Bush were another matter entirely. Even in his coat, and at the best of times, at the peak of health and with a small army at his beck and call, the Marquis would not have wanted to encounter the shepherds.
He toyed with the idea of visiting Bishopsgate, of spending a pleasant handful of days establishing that his coat was not there.
And then he sighed dramatically and went to the Guide’s Pen, and looked for a bonded guide who might be persuaded to take him to Shepherd’s Bush.
His guide was quite remarkably short, with fair hair cut close. The Marquis had first thought she was in her teens, until, after traveling with her for half a day, he had decided she was in her twenties. He had talked to half a dozen guides before he found her. Her name was Knibbs, and she had seemed confident, and he needed confidence. He told her the two places he was going as they walked out of the Guide’s Pen.
