“Perhaps,” the Chamberlain replied, eyes narrowed. “Perhaps it slipped my memory that you would not be found in the House of Computation at this hour, and perhaps it did not occur to me that one of your able journeymen might be as suited for our purposes. But perhaps,” the Chamberlain raised a long finger, “it was best that a member of the House of Computation in your position of leadership was present to see and hear what you have. I have always counted on you, O Chief Computator, to find solutions to problems others thought without resolution. Even, I add, solutions to things others did not even see as problems.”
Tsui nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “but of the many hundreds who labor under me in the art of calculation there are others very nearly as adept.” He paused, and then added, “Many hundreds.”
“Mmm,” the Chamberlain hummed. “It is best, then, do you not think, that this device of the British does not meet the Emperor’s standards, that so many hundreds of adepts are not removed from their productive positions?”
That the standards proposed had not been the Emperor’s, but had instead been proposed by the Lord Chamberlain himself, was a point Tsui did not have to raise. The Emperor, in fact, as evidenced by his uncharacteristic inquiry into the production cycle of Napier’s invention, seemed not entirely swayed by the Lord Chamberlain’s stage-craft, the question of the utility of the Analytical Engine not nearly so closed as Tsui might have hoped.
“I could not agree more,” Tsui answered, thin-lipped and grave. “I thank you for this consideration, and value our exchange.”
The Chamberlain nodded, and drawing his robes around him, slid away into the antechamber and beyond, leaving Tsui alone.
The next morning found Tsui in the Ornamental Garden, eyes closed by the northernmost abacus fish pond.
The noise of shoes scuffing on gravel at his side startled him, and he opened his eyes to see Royal Inspector Bai standing at his side. He’d made no other sound in his approach.
“Good morning, Chief Computator,” Bai said, a statement more than a question.
“Yes, Inspector,” answered Tsui, looking down into the waters of the pond. They were silty and gray, the carnivorous fish almost hidden below the surface. “I would say that it is.”
“Surprising, one might argue,” Bai went on, “after the excitement of the evening.” The Inspector pulled a wax-paper-wrapped lump of meat and bread from within his sleeve and, unwrapping it, began to drop hunks of dried pork into the waters.
“Excitement?” Tsui asked, innocently.
“Hmm,” the Inspector hummed, peering down into the water, quiet and still but for the ripples spreading out from the points where the meat had passed. “The fish seem not very hungry today,” he said softly, distracted, before looking up and meeting Tsui’s gaze. “Yes,” he answered, “excitement. It seems that a visitor to the Forbidden City, a foreign inventor, went missing somewhere between the great hall and the main gate after enjoying an audience with the Emperor. The invention which he’d brought with him was found scattered in pieces in the Grand Courtyard, the box which held it appearing to have been dropped from a high story balcony, though whether by accident or design we’ve been unable to determine. The Emperor has demanded the full attentions of my bureau be trained on this matter, as it seems that he had some service with which to charge this visitor. That the visitor is not in evidence, and this service might go unfilled, has done little to improve the temper of our master, equal-of-heaven and may-he-reign-ten-thousand-years.”
Tsui nodded, displaying an appropriate mixture of curiosity and concern.
“As for the man himself,” Bai said, shrugging, “as I’ve said, he seems just to have vanished.” The Inspector paused again, and in a practiced casual tone added, “I believe you were present at the foreign inventor’s audience yesterday, yes? You didn’t happen to see him at any point following his departure from the hall, did you?”
Tsui shook his head, and in all sincerity answered, “No.”
The Chief Computator had no fear. He’d done nothing wrong, after all, his involvement in the business beginning with a few choice words to his more perceptive journeymen and foremen on his hurried return to the Imperial House of Computation, and ending in the early morning hours when a slip of paper was delivered to him by one of his young apprentices. On the slip of paper, unsigned or marked by any man’s chop, was a single ideogram, indicating “Completion” but suggesting “Satisfaction.”
Tsui’s business, since childhood, had been identifying problems and presenting solutions. To what uses those solutions might be put by other hands was simply not his concern.
“Hmm,” the Inspector hummed again and, looking at the still waters of the pond, shook his head. “The abacus fish just don’t seem interested today in my leavings. Perhaps they’ve already been fed, yes?”
“Perhaps,” Tsui agreed.
The Inspector, with a resigned sigh, dropped the remainder of the meat into the northernmost pond, and then tossed the remaining bread into the southernmost, where the languid fish began their slow ballet to feed themselves.
“Well, the Emperor’s service demands my attention,” Inspector Bai said, brushing off his hands, “so I’ll be on my way. I’ll see you tomorrow, I trust?”
Tsui nodded.
“Yes,” he answered, “I don’t expect that I’ll be going anywhere.”
The Inspector gave a nod, which Tsui answered with a slight bow, and then left the Chief Computator alone in the garden.
Tsui looked down into the pond, and saw that the silt was beginning to settle on the murky bottoms, revealing the abacus fish arranged in serried ranks, marking out the answer to some indefinable question. The Chief Computator closed his eyes, and in the silence imagined countless men working countless abacuses, tirelessly. His thoughts on infinity, Tsui smiled.
Wild Copper
Samantha Henderson
SAMANTHA HENDERSON lives on the outskirts of Los Angeles, with an excellent view of the burning hills every summer. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, ChiZine, Fantasy, Abyss & Apex, Weird Tales, and Ideomancer and have been podcast on Escape Pod, Podcastle, Drabblecast, and StarShipSofa. Her first novel, Heaven’s Bones, was released in 2008 and was a nominee for the Scribe Award. You can stalk her at her LiveJournal (samhenderson.livejournal.com) or website (www.samanthahenderson.com). Of “Wild Copper,” she writes that “it had its genesis both in my childhood reading of a collection of tales of the Pacific Northwest Native Americans and a visit to Puget Sound a few years ago to visit my in-laws. The beauty of the area is almost unbearable; I sat on a log cast up on a beach of pebbles and watched the dark, choppy waters where orcas sometimes venture, imagining what lay beneath the surface.”
1
THIS TIME OBERON turned Megan into a deer from the waist down, and nothing remained of yesterday’s snake-tail but the memory of leaves against her belly-plates. She tapped cautiously on the trail with four small hooves.
Oberon did it to amuse himself, and to annoy the Queen. Titania wouldn’t hesitate to transmogrify Megan herself, but the Queen did not appreciate Oberon’s play in metamorphosing her handmaid. What chimera would present herself, dusk by dawn, to do the Fae Queen’s bidding?
Megan knew he was angry. So angry.
Tap, tap on the mossy path. A day to grow into a deer’s grace, then perhaps he would leave her alone for a while.
He would look at her with thousand-year-old eyes, and she’d feel his anger take hold like a tremendous hand, and he’d twist and shape her body until the craving was appeased.
Once he changed her head into a donkey’s, and laughed his black-moss laugh every time he saw her. Titania bit her lip at that, casting her eyes down, and made her bower so cold that Oberon finally went off in a huff. Megan knelt out of sight in the ferns, since the Queen would not look at her. Her shoulders ached, and hot tears crept down her cheeks, under the coarse, itchy hair.
She’d thought she was so lucky. Lucky her uncle was a Ranger, lucky she and Casey and Mom and Dad could see, close as any mortal could, the borders of the Fae Reserve.
Usually Titania’s attendants laughed at Megan’s human clumsiness and the shapes Oberon forced her into—but they didn’t laugh at the donkey’s head. They crept about her, silently, until she slept. Later she woke with a crick in her neck and her own face and a crust of dried tears.
She scrubbed them away and stretched, feeling the rustle of the fairies around her in the weak green light before dawn. The Fae slept through the darkest part of the night and the middle of the day. Dawn and morning, dusk and twilight they woke. She must too, since she had given herself to them of her own free will.
Most nights and afternoons now she nested at the foot of a huge, lightning-twisted cedar. The Fae didn’t like the shattered tree, and left her alone while she slept. Before she found this small sanctuary she’d wake to find her hair tied in elaborate knots, and the laces of her worn sneakers twisted in a way that took her hours to undo.
Megan scrabbled at the roots for the little hollow where she kept her comb—a gift from Titania in a generous mood—and dragged it through her hair. She gritted her teeth as she worked at the knots. This last summer she had let them stay, let Peaseblossom and Moth weave her hair high and wild, let them dress her in acorns and fern, shed her sneakers and had danced like a dervish on the moonlit paths that wound through green pillars and velvet moss and the jet-black, diamond-sprinkled waters of Puget Sound. She knew it pleased the Queen, and Oberon too as he watched from under a canopy of boughs under the starpricked sky.
And in summer’s magic, it pleased her.
But now fall was in the air, and she was recalled to herself, and shed her frond-skirt and put on her shoes. She wanted to be human again.
Maybe that was why Oberon was angry.
So lucky, she thought bitterly.
“It’s no use. They’ll do it again tonight.”
A man leaned against the tree, dressed in worn jeans and a plaid shirt. His hair was dull auburn, but gold sparked from it when he moved in the shaft that struck from a break in the canopy.
He wasn’t quite human. Years of living with the Fae had sharpened her senses. Yet he was nothing like a fairy. The air around him tasted of earth and musk, and a little of the sweat of a working man or hunter.
He knelt, watching her.
“A human come to live with the Fae, to be Titania’s handmaiden. I heard of it, but didn’t believe. I haven’t been surprised in a hundred years. Tell me how this happens.”
He narrowed his eyes, and memories, unbidden, bubbled up like blisters. She tried to fight it but it was like fighting Oberon when he changed her, like trying to swim in mud.
So lucky and it was cool at first but what was the use when you couldn’t go exploring the Reserve anyway just peer in from the edge with Uncle Leroy and the other Rangers hovering over you and she was in charge because she was the oldest and Dad was always fishing and Mom was always shopping in those frou-frou shops like they did on every vacation and when Casey said he wanted to see more she might as well go with him because he’d sneak off anyway it wasn’t like she could tie him up and...
2
...Casey found a place where the thin, taut wires of the electric fence sagged apart, their metal supports rusting away, the recurrent “NO TRESPASSING—U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY” sign rotting in the damp air. They’d go inside, just for a moment, just to say they’d done it, and be back before Uncle Leroy was done with his pile of paperwork back at the station. What could a couple sad fairies do to them, anyway, even if they were Oberon and Titania? England chased them away at the time of Cromwell, and they’d been pushed from refuge to refuge across the United States, shelter given and taken away as the lands they inhabited became valuable, moving west until they came to rest here, at the edge of the continent. How dangerous could they be in their defeat?
Past the thin line of trees at the fence there was a strip of meadow before the imposing, ancient trees of the forest proper began. Casey walked ahead, eager, while Megan trailed behind, so she was a good hundred feet away from him when she realized what he was doing.
Casey had scooped up a handful of wet rocks and started to hurl them at the solid wall of trees. The bark of the nearest cedars bruised with a wet spatter.
“Casey! Casey, stop!” Her voice still echoed in her head. “What do you think you’re doing?” She ran at him, but he didn’t stop. The meadow grass tangled her ankles. Casey threw faster and faster and harder, and just as she reached him she saw two eyes blink open on the bark of a cedar, and then the faint outline of a shoulder, and she tried to grab his arm, but he hurled the last stone as hard as he could and it struck beside the eyes and the sound was different, still wet but with a crunch like clay breaking instead of bark, and the eyes closed, and all she could see was a dark viscous splatter.
Casey froze, his mouth in a horrified “o.”
Splayed against the tree, like a dark-speckled moth on a light-speckled tree, was a hunched outline, slender and bark-clad. It slumped down the trunk, and a wide, dark streak followed it down.
“It’s a dryad,” Megan whispered. All the dark spaces between the trees seemed to lean forward and listen. “Casey, I think you killed her.”
“No,” he said. “You can’t kill a fairy. They’re immortal. You can’t kill them.”
She walked forward in the squelchy undergrowth. The dryad was hunched at the foot of her tree. Even from this distance Megan could see that the side of her head was caved in.
The bile rose in her throat and she turned aside to vomit.
“I didn’t mean to,” said Casey, his voice hoarse. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know...”
“Shut up,” she snapped, kneeling over her mess. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “Shut up.”
The dark places between the cedars did lean forward then, and things moved in the shadows, and they came: Oberon, tall and clad in black and spangled with rain, crowned with broken sticks and spiderwebs; Titania, all russet and ochre, with hair that rippled to her waist and eyes that robbed every living leaf of its green. With them, a multitude of fairies, nymphs, fauns, and tiny, nameless things that crawled between the cracks in the bark and through the litter of leaves.
Big, they were so big, and it wasn’t so much their size as the fact that when you looked at them, you couldn’t think of anything else. They possessed the senses.
* * *
She stayed on her knees in front of them and something twisted in her heart. You could die from seeing something so beautiful.
A faun crouched by the dryad and touched her head. Somewhere someone started to weep, a dry, scratchy sound, grating in the wet silence.
“She is dead,” said Oberon. His voice was deep and rough.
“Dead,” he said again, and his gaze caught the rock by the dryad’s head and went to the gash and the smear on the bark.
“Dead.” He looked straight at Casey. Casey shuddered.
Human footsteps behind them, crunching through the leaves. For a second Megan was angered at their intrusion, their bulk, the way they pushed through air instead of incorporating air.
Rangers, three of them. Uncle Leroy on the right; she didn’t know the others. They stared at the Fae, astonished.
Even Rangers, keeping the boundary of the Fae Reserve, only caught occasional glimpses of sprites and pixies, and the dryads of the border. Uncle Leroy had told them that fifty, seventy-five years ago, one might catch a glimpse of a procession through the trees. But then the Court withdrew into the heart of the forest, and no one ever saw them these days. Megan saw in the three human faces the glad heartbreak she had felt.
Then Uncle Leroy saw Casey stricken and Megan kneeling.
“Megan?” He spoke to her because she was in charge. “Megan, honey, what’s going on?”
“This boy,” said Oberon in his deep woodsmoke voice, mouthing the “b” as if it ta
sted bad, “this boy killed a dryad. Not since Cromwell’s Bane drove us from Albion has a human killed a fairy.”
You lie, thought Megan, startled that she knew. Oberon glanced at her, sharp as obsidian, and at first she thought she’d spoken out loud.
Oberon pointed at the dark streak on the bark. “Blood calls for blood,” he said. “Within the fairy’s domain is fairy’s law. He has trespassed and killed one of our own. He will die.”
Uncle Leroy opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Who was the last human to speak to Oberon? Washington? Lincoln?
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Page 19
