Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Alas for her plan, the desk was too high, the light too low, the angle impossible—Tacy could not see the ledger entries, much less examine them. She nipped around the counter and mounted the clerk’s platform. Ah, that was better!

  As she was running her finger down the column of names, the clerk turned to collect another tray. Hurriedly, she ducked behind the desk and peered cautiously around its side. The clerk was holding a tiny, bright gear up to the light to display its intricacies. She turned back to her task.

  The ledger was arranged in a series of columns: date of purchase, client’s name and direction, number and description of the items each had purchased. In addition to Sir Arthur’s own orders, the delicate and expensive Number 475-S appeared thrice. One box had been sold to a watchmaker by appointment to the Queen, and two boxes each to two individuals: A Mr. Thomas Edison, with an address in New York, America, and a certain Mr. Peter Cantrip.

  Breathless with excitement, Tacy wrote down Cantrip’s direction. She was making a note of the other addresses when she heard the clerk’s voice asking her what she was doing.

  Thrusting her notebook in her muff, Tacy stiffened her back and assumed what she hoped was a forbidding expression.

  “Well, brother,” she said. “Are you finished at last? I feel one of my spasms coming on.”

  Dr. Watson’s face was the picture of brotherly alarm. “To be sure, my dear.” Then, man-to-man: “You understand, Mr. Clovelly, I am sure.”

  Mr. Clovelly’s whiskers trembled slightly. “Yes. I mean to say, what are you doing at my desk, miss?”

  Tacy gave an awful groan. The doctor hurried over and took her arm. “She is of a hysterical bent,” he confided to Mr. Clovelly. “Restless, you know. I had better get her home. Thank you for your advice. It was most helpful.”

  And he strode from the shop, Tacy clinging to his arm, struggling to stifle her mirth until Steyne & Sons was safely out of sight and sound. “Poor Mr. Clovelly!” she exclaimed as they rounded the corner. “I thought he was going to have a spasm on his own account!”

  The doctor smiled. “Indeed. I am much obliged to you, ma’am. Mr. Clovelly has given me a thorough grounding in the science of gears and bearings and drive trains, could I only remember it all. Were you able to procure the information you needed?”

  “I think so,” Tacy said. “There were three recent orders for the 475-S, but the only one that signified was Mr. Peter Cantrip. Odd it is how his name is constantly turning up, like a worm after rain.”

  “Odd, indeed. Where does this Cantrip live?”

  “In Spitalfields,” Tacy said. “What sort of district is Spitalfields?”

  Dr. Watson frowned. “Not nearly so respectable as Shoreditch. Ladies do not commonly venture there.”

  “A blacksmith’s daughter, I am.” Tacy gave him a sober look. “Have you such a thing as a revolver about you?”

  Dr. Watson looked startled. “My service revolver is at my lodgings.”

  “We will call at your lodgings on the way, then.”

  * * *

  Where Shoreditch smelled primarily of smoke and stone, Spitalfields smelled of humanity: poor, cramped, and unhappy. As Tacy and Dr. Watson’s hansom churred over the cobbles, rats scampered from its path and hollow-cheeked, ragged men and women stared at it with avid, measuring eyes. At length, the cab turned to enter a barren court, stopping in front of what looked to have been a school, set back behind an iron fence. Its windows were clumsily boarded and its bricks were streaked with moss.

  Tacy tapped the hansom’s speaking tube. “Will you wait for us?”

  “Not in Spitalfields,” the mechanical coachman replied.

  “Come, come, Miss Gof,” said Watson cheerfully. “If you can contemplate with equanimity bearding a mad scientist in his den, the streets of Spitalfields need not alarm you.”

  “I am not alarmed,” said Tacy, with dignity. “Just wondering I was, how we are to get Sir Arthur away, once we’ve rescued him.”

  “One problem at a time, Miss Gof,” he said. “Before we get away, we must get in.”

  The iron fence was provided with a stout gate, secured by a bright new chain and lock. Dr. Watson examined it with a businesslike air. “It seems the mysterious Mr. Cantrip does not encourage casual visitors. Have you such a thing as a hairpin about you, Miss Gof?”

  “Full of surprises, you are,” she said, and drew one out of her coiled hair. As Dr. Watson knelt to address the lock, she saw a movement in the shadows by the door of the building—a misty figure in a white nightdress of antique cut stained down the left side from bosom to hem. It was a figure Tacy had not seen since Angharad had possessed the automaton, and the sight of it filled her with dread.

  She seized the bars and called out: “Angharad! What has that Cantrip done to you?”

  Angharad waved her question aside impatiently. “Around to the yard with you—there’s a door open. ’Ware the rats. Hurry, child!”

  “Is it Arthur?” Tacy gasped.

  Dr. Watson looked around, alarmed. “What is it, Miss Gof? To whom are you speaking?”

  Impatiently, Tacy grasped Dr. Watson’s sleeve and pulled him towards a narrow and noisome alley that ran along a brick wall to an even more noisome yard. And there she halted, overcome with horror. For between her and the half-open door was a heaving grey swarm of rats the size of small dogs. As if moved by a single mind, they lifted their noses and advanced upon the intruders.

  Dr. Watson snatched his revolver from his pocket, pulled back the hammer, and shot the foremost rat between its shining eyes. The resulting explosion of fur, springs, and cogs did nothing to halt the gray tide, which rolled forward, chittering shrilly.

  Shuddering with disgust, Tacy drew the willow whistle she’d whittled that morning from her pocket, put it to her lips, and blew. It made no audible sound, though her ears rang slightly.

  The rats fell over and were still.

  Dr. Watson gaped at her. “Mechanicals,” Tacy explained briefly. “I’ve jammed their mainsprings. Come on!”

  Much to Watson’s credit, he forbore to question her, but kicked a path through the disabled rats to the door. Soon the pair were standing in a bare and ill-lit corridor, cold as a tomb and smelling strongly of damp and machine oil. At the far end, Tacy could just see Angharad floating above the steps of an iron staircase and beckoning urgently like a specter in a penny dreadful.

  Tacy sprang towards her, heart thundering. As she set her foot upon the bottom step, a metallic clatter reached her ears from above, followed by a shriek that froze her to the spot.

  Watson dashed past her, straight through Angharad, who swore dreadfully and disappeared.

  Shaking off her paralysis, Tacy caught up her skirts and sprang after the doctor. She heard Watson shout, “Stand back, or I shoot!” and then she was at the top of the steps and running down a shadowy hall. When she reached an open door, she plunged through it into an atmosphere permeated with metal, spermaceti oil, and high drama. Under the bright cone of an outsized clockwork lamp, Dr. Watson was holding two tall figures in long leather aprons and magnifying goggles at bay with his revolver. They were surrounded by a dizzying array of machines and devices and at their feet lay the bust that had housed the Illogic Engine, open and empty and dented. Behind them, on a metal table, a figure draped in white linen lay ominously still.

  Tacy rushed to the table, her heart clacking like a gear train, and pulled back the sheet to reveal a pair of terrified eyes, lambent as pearls, staring up out of a long, pale face half-obscured by a cloth gag.

  She whirled to confront the aproned figures and addressed them furiously. “What is Mr. Holmes’s Reasoning Machine doing here? Which of you is Mr. Cantrip? And what have you done with Arthur?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the slighter of the figures cautiously removed the goggles masking its face.

  “Hullo, Tacy,” said Sir Arthur Cwmlech.

  In the sentimental romances her mother favored, Tacy had often read of a
heroine’s heart leaping in the presence of her beloved. She had doubted, as a scientifically-minded and rational individual, that an actual human heart would do any such thing. Yet, at the sight of Sir Arthur, his sandy hair in elflocks and his spectacles askew, Tacy’s heart leapt—or at least gave a great thump—and she realized that she loved him, not as a cousin or a brother or a friend, but as her own true love.

  She burst into tears.

  “My dear girl,” Sir Arthur said uncomfortably.

  Tacy dragged her cuff across her eyes. “Only glad you’re safe, I am,” she snapped, giving him a look with knives in it. “I was picturing you kidnapped or tortured or worse!”

  Sir Arthur fiddled with the goggles. “I was kidnapped!”

  Realizing that she loved Sir Arthur did not keep Tacy from wanting to shake him until his teeth rattled. “Kidnapped? This does not look like a kidnapping to me.”

  “If you will allow me to interject,” the second figure said, “I think I may be able to shed some light on the subject.”

  The voice was familiar—urbane, deep, resonant. Tacy had last heard it promising to investigate the theft of the Illogic Engine. “Mr. Holmes!” she exclaimed as the extent of her blindness came clear to her at once. “You’re Cantrip!”—and then, bitterly: “And I am the greatest fool in creation!”

  The inventor stripped off his goggles. “Not at all, Miss Gof.” He shot an irritated look at Dr. Watson, who held his revolver trained steadily upon him. “Please lower your firearm, doctor. There is no danger here.”

  Dr. Watson frowned. “How did you—?”

  “If you wish to abandon your profession, you must stop carrying a stethoscope in your pocket,” Tacy snapped. “Oh, put away the pistol, man. The rascal is right. There is no danger in the world—only a pair of clever-boots with more notions than sense. Arthur, tell me plain: What are you doing here, dressed up like a mad scientist in a pantomime?”

  Sir Arthur wore the uncertain air of a dog standing over a chewed slipper. “Mr. Holmes has been most hospitable.”

  Tacy gaped at him, bereft of words.

  Watson restored the revolver to his pocket, crossed to the table, and removed the gag from the bound figure’s mouth.

  “You will regret that,” Mr. Holmes remarked.

  The Reasoning Machine propped itself on its elbows and gave a bark of laughter. “It’s you who’ll regret it, Mycroft, when I’ve told them what you’ve done.”

  The voice—wild, half-hysterical—was as far from its previous expressionless tones as possible, putting it beyond all doubt that Mr. Holmes had indeed succeeded in introducing the Illogic Engine into his Reasoning Machine.

  Watson unbuckled the straps binding the automaton to the table and helped it to sit on the edge, where it hunched with the sheet clutched around its shoulders, gulping like a frightened child. The doctor laid a soothing hand on its arm, whereupon it buried its face in the astonished man’s shoulder with a piteous wail.

  Tacy watched this display of unbridled emotion with wonder. The program needed calibration, of course, but there was no doubt that the Illogic Engine worked more or less as she and Sir Arthur had envisioned. Yet, seeing the Reasoning Machine now—distressed, disheveled, and desperate—Tacy could not think of it as a made thing, subject only to the laws of mechanics, but as a living, feeling, suffering fellow-creature.

  “I fear my Reasoning Machine is not nearly as reasonable as he was before the introduction of your Illogic Engine,” Mr. Holmes observed dryly.

  “I warned you it hadn’t been tested in a working automaton.” Sir Arthur’s tone was defensive.

  Mycroft Holmes sighed. “So you did. No, the fault is mine, for being impatient.”

  Tacy rounded upon him. “Impatient, you call it? There’s lazy you were, and irresponsible and deceitful, and—yes—cruel! Quite apart from what you have done to that poor creature by there, there’s you tricking poor Swindon into thinking you were his friend, with your darts and your beer and your good fellowship. Then, to abuse his hospitality so! Can you deny that you took advantage of his invitation to dine with him so that you might take wax impressions of the house keys? The poor man is all but prostrate with shame.”

  The inventor shrugged his massive shoulders. “There is no shame in succumbing to a superior intelligence.”

  “And that diabolical whistle you made!” Tacy went on. “Not only did it disable the guard mechanicals, but it froze every mainspring in the house. How could you know it would not destroy the Illogic Engine as well?”

  Mr. Holmes eyed her with reluctant respect. “So you know about my whistle, do you? It was a risk, but not a great one. A very little investigation informed me that Sir Arthur procured the springs for the Engine from Messires Baume et Gaulitet. Their alloys, I have reason to know, are particularly resistant to sonic influence. Have you any more crimes to task me with?”

  Really, the arrogance of the man was almost past comprehension. “What say you to the charges of theft and kidnapping? What,” she said, “of murder?”

  “Murder?” For the first time, Mycroft Holmes seemed to be at a loss. Tacy knew a moment of triumph.

  “What have you done with Amos Gotobed? Never think to deny it, Mr. Holmes. Having arranged his escape to give the police a convenient red herring to chase, you needed to put him out of the way, in case of blackmail. What surer way than to kill him?”

  Holmes’s look of bewilderment gave way to one of pure delight. “Well done, Miss Gof! Now I recognize the intelligence behind the elegance of the Illogic Engine’s mathematics.” He smiled at her like a mastiff confronted with an angry kitten. “All’s fair in love and invention. There was no real harm done by my little deceptions, and perhaps much good. For instance, you may set your mind at rest over the dangerous Mr. Gotobed. I had him conveyed directly from prison to a ship bound for the Antipodes.”

  Tacy was unmollified. “No harm! What of Angharad?”

  Mr. Holmes’s pale gaze darted, as if compelled, towards the roof beams. Tacy followed it to Angharad, who was perched gauzily among the rafters, dangling her bare, bloody feet like a small child.

  “Angharad!” she exclaimed, relieved.

  Sir Arthur brightened. “Am I to understand that Angharad is present? I am extremely relieved to hear it.” He peered around him. “You hear that, Angharad? I am very pleased!”

  “Would someone,” Dr. Watson said plaintively, “have the goodness to tell me what is happening?”

  Angharad drifted down to the workshop floor, eyeing the doctor with disfavor. “I do not believe I have been introduced to this gentleman,” she announced.

  “You know very well he can’t hear you, Angharad,” Tacy said crossly. “Dr. Watson. May I present to you the ghost of Sir Arthur’s ancestress, Mistress Angharad Cwmlech? In front of you, she is,” she added as he stared about him, “and a little to the left.”

  Obediently, Dr. Watson nodded at what he clearly perceived as empty air. “Your servant, ma’am.”

  The Great Detective lifted his head. “I remember,” he exclaimed joyfully. “It was before I began to be interested in things, but I do remember. There was an automaton here—a clumsy, ugly, awkward thing with a voice like a cheap music box. It cursed at Mycroft in Welsh and then it went still and they couldn’t make it go again. It had quite broken down. Mycroft was most distressed.”

  Tacy looked from the inventor’s rigid countenance to Angharad. “Do you mean to tell me, then, that he can hear you?”

  “See me, too,” Angharad said. “His ghost I am now, apparently. Got more than he bargained for, look you, when he tried to kidnap me. Oh, he meant well, in his way. Offered me a new body, he did, perfectly and everlastingly beautiful. For what purpose, I know not—and my firm opinion it is that he does not know either.”

  Holmes’s face might have been carved of pink marble.

  “I told him what he might do with his body,” she went on. “If I am to be some man’s chattel, I would sooner it were my great-nephew o
wned me than yon coc oen. Quite heated, I became—too heated, I fear. One moment, I was scolding that pig-headed tub of lard and the next, I was as you see me now.”

  Her filmy bosom rose in a breathless sigh. “Seventeen years of life I had, with my mam after me day and night to mind my needle and my manners. Then there was the war, and the Roundheads and their rifles sentencing me to two centuries of watching Cwmlechs go about their tedious affairs—in my nightdress, look you, with no hope of a change nor anyone to talk to. And if my mam’s rules of ladyhood were burdensome, then those binding a ghost to its curse were more burdensome still. Poor as it was, young Arthur’s automaton gave me the only freedom I’ve ever tasted.”

  At this pitiful speech, Mr. Holmes abandoned his pretense of deafness. “My dear lady!” he protested. “My fondest wish is to make a body worthy of you. You may design it yourself, if you wish, down to the smallest detail.”

  “Ha!” Angharad was scornful. “Very well that would be, were that body not your property in law to be turned on and off at your will, displayed, sold, or loaned to an institution, like any other machine.”

  “Never in the world,” the inventor cried. “You have my word.”

  “The word of a scoundrel and a knave!”

  Mr. Holmes pulled himself up to his full considerable height. “How if I see to it that you are granted full personhood under the law? Would you accept a new body, then?”

  “I would consider of it,” Angharad said with dignity.

  “Now that is what I call a handsome offer!” Sir Arthur exclaimed.

  Tacy remembered that she was still angry with him. “And I suppose you knew nothing of any of this?”

  “My dear girl!” Sir Arthur was indignant. “Of course not! The carriage broke down some way from Berkshire House, so I left James to see to it and hailed a hackney, which drove us here over my strenuous objections. I promise you, I was as distressed as you to discover that Mr. Holmes had engineered the whole.”