The origins of the handshake are unclear, though Bascom Octavius speculated in his 19 — work The Social Rituals of the Empire that it might have originated with Sir Lucien Osborne. It had less to do with polite salutation and everything to do with self-preservation, as Sir Lucien liked to assure himself that the man opposite wasn’t holding a sword in his right hand. As Sir Lucien was renowned for his predilection for married women (and their daughters, and—if rumors were correct—the prettier of the noble-born sons as well), this practice worked out very well indeed for him until he bedded the fraternal twins of the Duke of Craighinn, who happened to be left-handed.
It also explained why most bounty hunters thought of a proffered hand as an opening to “slip a mark the Sir Lucien,” but she didn’t have a sword on her and, in any case, They wanted him alive, if possible. There was a brief moment in which she took in his impeccable attire—the man always did know how to wear a dress jacket—and the smile that threatened to undo her all over again before she had him by the wrist.
The last time I saw him in that coat, she remembered, I still had a human heart, too.
Over her more-practical trousers, she wore a bustled overskirt he should have recognized, but what was once virginal white silk with hand embroidery was now tattered and oil-stained. She’d dyed it black with the darkest India ink she could find, torn it apart with a pair of tiny, gold scissors, and stitched it back together with tears and curses as clockwork whirred inside her.
“You don’t look the least bit surprised to see me,” she told her prey as she twisted about, intending to put him on the floor for long enough to cuff him and arrange for transport. “Have you missed me, darling?”
His smile dropped like a handful of surprised scorpions.
“Unpreparedness is not part of my chit-cog library, and neither is desire increased by temporal longevity,” he said, worrying about the grate in his tone. He hadn’t oiled his vocal cables since September 8, 1963, because he so rarely used them. “But you know that, of course. I suppose you’ll be wanting to wrap up these matters?”
One of the screw-records in his skull (one of the few authentic bones left in his body, a process accelerated by a terrible attack in Constantinople, 1922) ticked its needle into a groove he hadn’t used since before the end of the American Civil War. Motes of dust parted as the brass spike read information long, long disused.
It was the kind of information one had to keep quiet about. Allow no outward reaction. Do not let others perceive. But in a powder-flash of inspiration, he realized there might be a way out of this mess.
“If you take my head right now, madam,” he said evenly, “there will be witnesses. How many people here, do you think, can capture photographic permanent impressions via their aethergrammic telephone devices? And then the hunt will be called, will it not?”
He had a point, bugger it all: all matters of the Empire were to be kept sub rosa. Though the patrons of the curious establishment had yet to take notice of her recent actions or her threat to his person, they had noted with various levels of disapproval, condemnation, appreciation, and arousal both her hair and her choice of apparel. Since entering this place, she’d been subjected to stares, catcalls, whistles, and various offers of a dubious nature, all of which had been only moderately less appealing than the stench of food grease and the press of sloppy, imperfect humanity.
Sloppy and imperfect they may well be, but they all carried the aforementioned slim, threatening communication modules equipped with pictorial capabilities. Deactivating him in public wouldn’t help matters any. One set of onlookers might preserve the moment in their curious version of a magic lantern show while the others called for the local law enforcement.
Local law enforcement never helped, in her experience, no matter the time or place.
And there was the problem with his scent. Close enough now to catch the metal-tang of his inner workings, she thought her sense-memory might have betrayed her. While this was indeed her quarry, she couldn’t be absolutely certain this was the man who had left her, if not at the marriage altar then certainly close to it, more than a hundred years before. The tilt to his head, the cut of the coat might be the same, but too much of him had been replaced with machinery over the years to be sure.
I was so certain I’d found him, when They sent me the brief.
“You are going to start walking,” she told him, “and not make a fuss, or I will take just your head back to Them and apologize for leaving the rest of you folded in a heap in Housewares.”
“Very well,” he said, and chose another smile (Prim Closed Mouth #14: occidental lady in train to Peking, 1908). He bowed at the waist, just a fraction of an inch, then proffered his right arm in a most proper manner. “Angelus A. Morphew, at your service.”
A glass bead the size of a printed period fell into its tiny hole in his chest. Four more holes, four more little beads awaited. Lies were not becoming of a true gentleman, not even lily-white ones, and he’d agreed to Doctor Gillenheimer’s Weighted Miniature Artificial Morality Tabulator, Mark III without any real fuss. He made a note to check its calibration—his nom de guerre should not have registered as a mistruth.
She stared at him in a manner that caused another disused part of his workings to tick into action for the first time in countless ages. Truly, this one was a formidable opponent; her mere presence gave his internals a more thorough congruity check than any in even the most austere German labs ever had.
“My apologies,” he said after a half-second’s pause. “We have met before, yes? You will understand if I do not recall. As a man you may be acquainted with once said, Zwar weiß ich viel, doch möchte ich mehr wissen.”
* * *
“Es muß sich erst noch zeigen,” she retorted, the brass German-translator punch card having slid into the correct slot without so much as a by-her-leave, “if you don’t mind my saying so... Herr Morphew.”
She didn’t owe him the courtesy of using a human title; he was at least 75 percent mechanical or she wouldn’t be here. Yet she took his arm as though they were about to enter a dim Victorian parlor, or the Grand Ballroom at Neuschwanstein. It made sense, primarily because she wanted to keep him close and there were several lovely pressure points along the inner arm that she could use, if necessary, to interrupt his artificial bloodflow.
Her boots also pinched her toes, and it was nice to lean on someone for a change.
Fatigue clambered up her skirts with cold fingers, trying to pull her back into a near-coma that would allow her inner workings to run a diagnostic. Shifting always took it right out of her, but this time was different.
Tick... tick... tick….
Her heart’s tiny balance springs and staffs, regulators and wheels had already slowed to a near-standstill. She bit the inside of her cheek and tried to figure out what the hell was happening, because she shouldn’t have been synching to match Morphew’s leisurely and debonair—and human—pulse. Still, now wasn’t the time for the cheap theatrics of a ladylike swoon.
“Corentine Reilly,” she said as they headed to the double doors at the front of the store. “Collector Retrieval Squad, Division 3. Please do me the courtesy of accompanying me somewhere more secluded and appropriate to continue this conversation.”
“A pleasure,” he said as another glass bead slipped into its appropriate hole.
They were seventeen steps from a large pair of double glass doors. Once upon a time, he would have categorized the style of such a portal—Classical Revival, Second Empire, Italianate—but society had eschewed such details for decades, favoring now these artless, flat structures with no real spirit or craft in their manufacture. Rectangles set in bland steel or, heaven forbid, aluminum.
The needle barely ticked over a simple line in its read cylinder: May 9th, 1988, Costa Mesa—this portion has been reallocated. Nothing remained of what had once been a hefty collection of brass data records regarding architectural style. They’d been wiped clean, then grooved again in order
to accompany his growing need for more space on Observation and Investigation No. 644-J-92.
His investigation had been ongoing for long enough that many other segments of brass had been marked with the same note. His head could only carry a finite amount of blanks. Sometimes he wondered what he’d overwritten.
Nothing too important.
“I must confess,” he began, and stopped. She turned to him and waited, the lenses of her goggles reflecting his own visage in tandem, a shrunken version of his face. A gaggle of teenagers in bright colors parted around them (giggling over some crass and impolite joke, no doubt). “Many are the rumors that fly about your branch of the Company, madam. Perhaps you will find me an easier companion to deal with if you would be kind enough to answer a few questions?”
Her head inclined after a moment. Not an explicit nod, but he took what little succor he could and barreled ahead.
“Is the Fifth Empire truly coming to an end? Have collectors of information, such as myself, been relegated to the Great and Terrible Warehouses in favor of silicon and plastic constructs?”
One of the teenagers jostled her roughly; his various belts, chains, and piercings clanked and jingled like a sleigh—
...a Russian troika. Nestled in furs and surrounded by snow, they skimmed the surface of the world gone silent, save for the bells that announced their presence. Two of the horses always turned to look back at the past year, and the center looked ahead to the unknown future. She-who-would-be-Corentine had laughed at the idea that tomorrow held anything but possibilities.
But that was long ago, and that Empire had collapsed and burned as so many of the others before it. Now the Fifth Empire was at a close, and They wanted the information imprinted on the cylinders; documentation used to forge the success of the Rising Sixth.
“Yes,” she said shortly. “And that is the only answer you’ll get from me. For now. This is no fairy tale. There are no riddles three.”
She took another step, but was held fast by the vice of his arm which pinned hers against his side. Rough conversations, the sounds of filthy lucre changing hands, the wail of a despondent infant couldn’t quite mask the whirring in Corentine’s ears as she glared at him.
“I suggest, very firmly, that you start moving.”
With her free hand, she shoved her goggles atop her head. Very few of the Collectors ever looked into Corentine Reilly’s eyes and survived to resist. The Council classified them the same shade as a variety of the mineral beryl (Be3Al2(SiO3)6), colored green by trace amounts of chromium and vanadium. Poets had called them emerald pools and other such nonsense. Corentine simply thought of them as a primary weapon against recalcitrant males, and though they were not physically equipped to shoot sparks, she nevertheless leveled a very narrow look at him.
Much like a stream suddenly branching in two directions, Read Needle 16c came to a fork in one of the grooves in his head. The counterbalance weight shifted it to the left side, and a long-abandoned stream of words floated up out of cold, metallic sleep:
I shall remain, watching all earth and sky;
The house of my heart can be seen in your eye;
A bloodless heart you keep;
And emerald eyes shan’t we—
The needle skipped as it broadsided another information track, jumped into a reset groove, and finished. Peculiar, but it was a peculiar kind of day, and, he begrudgingly noted, quite possibly his last. The last time such a snippet had occurred was for a similar misread error; old information, improperly blanked and rewritten upon.
He could not shake the feeling this one’s eyes had something to do with it. They were beautifully constructed, even when her micro-servos were held at a perfect position to project the possibility of imminent doom.
“Onward, then. In lieu of information, I would beg a boon of you, madam.” He stepped toward the door, uncomfortably aware that she remained close enough to strike if he moved so much as a millimeter toward freedom. “It appears that I have always known that my time upon this, aha, mortal coil would be finite. My brass has been rewritten and blanked so many times that I no longer recall when I was born, nor my original mission.”
They continued along the sidewalk, and each step lowered his odds of survival dramatically. The end was likely nigh by 48.2 percent and rising, plus or minus 0.002 of a percent.
He’d never calculated it as above 13.4 percent. Not even when a mad Cossack had smashed his skull with a rifle butt.
“It has been ages since even a true and proper shop in the service of the Empire has seen my workings. Many of my replacements and internal repairs have been done myself. You can imagine my surprise,” he said as they marched past rows of motor carriages (ugly plastic and vinyl, vinyl, of all the blasphemies mankind could dream up—slick and disgustingly malleable and incapable of storing a proper record for more than a day, but shreds of it remained and lingered for thousands of years in the soil as offal), “when a recent repair of my left temporal aft section, directly behind the ear, yielded a very small scroll wrapped in a scarlet ribbon. Very small writing, in my own hand it seems. I refrained from peeking, but, well...it seems to have been there for quite some time and the placement makes one think it was to be delivered in the event of my demise. Only barest scratches remain in my banks regarding the person it’s addressed to; all I know is that we met in the Russian town of Dobryanka. Would you...could you please see that this final message is delivered?”
He paused, suddenly aware that they’d turned a corner. The back end of a Dillard’s would be, it seemed, his final destination. He’d never understood the shop itself: ridiculous clothing for men and women, the kind that even wanton strumpets of the Bois de Boulogne would never have worn.
68.8 percent, and rising. It was time.
“Please? The scroll is addressed to someone named Annabelle.”
She slammed him into the brick wall, ignoring the rubbish and noisome puddles that dotted the alleyway. Forearm braced against his windpipe, she leaned forward to hiss at him like a snake.
“And what do those barest scratches on your memory banks say, Angelus A. Morphew? Do you remember what this Annabelle looked like? Where she came from? What she was doing in a god-forsaken place like the Permsky Kray with someone like you?”
He didn’t answer, and so Corentine shoved harder, pressing against the unyielding metal plates that covered the masculine-form of the Collector’s body.
“Maybe if I open your panels and stir the metal mess you call a brain, those cylinders of yours will yield better answers. A judicious application of electrical current might also help loosen your tongue.”
As she leaned in—a passerby might have mistaken the gesture as part of a romantic but ill-advised tryst in the dank and narrow corridor between buildings—her right hand slid behind his ear and she extracted the scroll.
Her clockwork heart seized, and for a moment Corentine thought she might remain frozen for all time, trapped in a suit of moldering flesh that would fall away from her, one rotten chunk at a time, until all that was left were upgrades of brass and copper.
She’d almost convinced herself she’d been mistaken, almost convinced herself that he was merely a ghost come to haunt her, to remonstrate, to torture, and condemn. She didn’t know what was written on the scroll, but the blood-red ribbon that tied it had been hers, once upon another time, and the scent-memory attached to it was so strong that she wanted to stagger back, to be sick all over the already-filthy pavement.
Instead, she held fast to the steel in her spine and scanned his face, so different than the one she remembered, the eyes that had been extracted and replaced with glass orbs, the carefully blank expression.
“By all the hells, what did They do to you?”
The needles plucked away from the brass and, as one, they hovered on the outer edges of their respective cylinders. A visiting spider might have heard their ghostly ticks as they sought and found remnant lines outside of the main information tracks.
c
harlatans. One needn’t visit a séance to find
Some were only endings:
once was a thriving port, but the advent of the locomotive has rendered it an abandoned shell.
Others only beginnings:
Should you ever find yourself reading this information, then the game has finally run its course...
That one stopped his mechanisms. It appeared to be a full groove, complete and whole, but none of the mercury valves or cogs showed that he’d ever accessed it. The needle lowered again.
...run its course. As you well know, old chap, the ages have required rather many instances of blanking these copper plates and brass cylinders. Please do trust yourself. Nothing that has been written over was necessary information. On the contrary, it was extraneous and often worthless. Only on a few occasions have you erased anything you might have kept elsewhere, but due to immediate need you chose to heat the grooves and smooth them to nothingness. There is a message in your cranial cavities that will tie up the only loose thread, should you perish, and that one…that one was blanked to spare you a life of suffering and regret, of heartache and loss. You are better off not knowing. Whoever your attacker may be, do all within your power to encourage their hand. Tally ho, sire, and may a flight of angels sing thee to thy well-deserved rest. Vivat Regnum!
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Page 38
