CHRIS ROBERSON
Chris Roberson (www.chrisroberson.net) lives in Austin, Texas, and, with his wife and business partner, Allison Baker, runs the small press MonkeyBrain Books. He is an up-and-coming writer of fantasy and science fiction, with nine novels to his credit so far. His short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Postscripts, and Subterranean, and in original anthologies such as Live Without a Net, Future-Shocks, and Forbidden Planets. He has so frequently been praised as a writer to watch that he remarks, “With all of these recommendations that people should watch me, I get the feeling I can’t be trusted.” His work has been nominated for awards for writing and he himself for his publishing and editing.
“Edison’s Frankenstein” was published in Postscripts 20/21, the ambitious magazine published and edited by Peter Crowther in England. It is an alternate history Thomas Edison story, in the venerable tradition of the Edisonade, with an unusual central character for this characteristically American form, an Algerian. And so this Year’s Best ends as it began, with a non-traditional transformation of the matter of SF.
It was late afternoon when Archibald Chabane finally found the boy, perched high on the steel trestle of the elevated railway. From that vantage, he could look out across the intersection of 62nd St. and Hope Avenue, over the high fence into the backstage area of Bill Cody’s concession, now christened Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.
“Mezian,” Chabane called, but over the muffled roar of the crowd in Cody’s 8,000 seat arena and the rumble of the Illinois Central Railroad engine coming up the track, he couldn’t make himself heard.
“Mezian!” Chabane repeated, cupping his hands around his mouth like a speaking-trumpet. He glanced to the south, trying to see how close the train had come. When Chabane had been a boy, watching the 4-6-0 camelback engines lumbering along the Algiers-Constantine line, he’d always been able to see the black smoke billowing up from their coal-fed furnaces from miles away. These new prometheic engines, though, produced nothing but steam, and virtually all of it used for locomotion, so the trains could be heard long before they could be seen.
Chabane leaned a hand against the nearest steel girder, and could feel the vibrations of the train’s approach.
He shouted the boy’s name once more, at the top of his lungs.
Mezian looked down, blinking, and his lips tugged up in a guilty grin. “Oh, I didn’t see you there, amin.”
Chabane had only to cross his arms over his chest and scowl, and the boy began clambering down the trestle like a monkey from a tree.
To the Americans, like Bill Cody—who’d already warned Sol Bloom to keep “his damned Algerians” away from the Wild West Show’s Indians—Archibald Chabane was Bloom’s assistant, translator, and bodyguard.
To Sol Bloom, “Archie” was just a Kabyle who’d gotten off the boat from Paris with the rest of the troupe, and threatened to throw Bloom into the waters of New York Harbor if he wasn’t more polite to the performers. Bloom had offered him a cigar and hired Chabane to be his liaison with the Algerian troupe on the spot.
To the Algerians, though, Chabane was something more. At first only their guide in a foreign land, he had become their elected amin, as much the head of their “Algerian Village” concession as if he were sitting in the djemaa of a Kabyle village back home.
“Careful,” Chabane warned, as Mezian swung from a steel girder. “I promised your mother I’d bring you back in one piece.”
The boy just grinned, and dropped a full five feet to the pavement, something colorful fluttering to the ground after him like a lost bird.
“Mother won’t give me a dime to get into the show,” Mezian said by way of explanation, pointing at the banners which fluttered over Cody’s concession, proclaiming THE PI LOT OF THE PRAIRIE.
“Mr. Bloom has sworn it’s my hide if any of our troupe is caught drinking with Cody’s performers again,” Chabane said, arms still crossed over his chest. Many of the Algerians in the troupe were not the most observant of Muslims, and even now in the final days of Ramadan they could be found passing a flask back and forth once the day’s audience had cleared out. “If Cody catches one of us peeking at his show without paying, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Mezian scuffed his feet against the pavement, his gaze lowered. “Sorry, amin.”
“You dropped something.” Chabane reached down and picked up the garishly-colored pamphlet that had fallen from the boy’s pocket. It was a story-paper, what the Americans called a “dime novel.” The title in oversized letters was Scientific Romance Weekly, featuring “Dane Faraday, Man of Justice, in The Electrical World of Tomorrow.” Handing it back to the boy, Chabane quirked a smile. “She won’t give you ten cents for the Wild West Show, but she lets you spend money on cheap fictions?”
The boy shrugged, slipping the folded pamphlet into his back pocket. “They’re meant to help me practice my English.” He paused, drawing himself up straight, and then in stilted tones added in English, “Hands up, the miscreant, you are the surrounded.” Switching back to French, he gave Chabane a quizzical look. “What is a ‘miscreant’?”
“It means unbeliever,” the man explained, “or infidel. A villain, in other words.” He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and gently propelled him forward. “Come along, your mother is waiting.”
As they headed up 62nd to Island Avenue, they could hear the muffled applause from the crowd inside Cody’s arena. Open only a little more than a week, and already the Wild West Show was drawing bigger crowds than all the concessions on the Midway Plaisance combined. In another two weeks the Columbian Exhibition proper would finally open to the public, and it remained to be seen whether there’d be crowds left over for any of the outside attractions.
“So your story-papers,” Chabane said, as they turned left and headed north up Island Avenue. “Are they any good?”
Mezian shrugged. “They are alright, I suppose. Not as good as the French ones I could get back home, or in Paris.”
Chabane nodded. “When I was a boy, I devoured every installment of Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages I could lay hands on.”
The boy pulled a face. “Verne?” He shook his head. “Much too dry. No, give me Paul d’Ivoi’s Eccentric Voyages, any day.”
They passed 60th Street, then turned left onto the Midway Plaisance. The looming form of Ferris’s still unfinished wheel dominated the horizon, even seven blocks away. Steel-bodied automata spidered up and down it on their crab-like legs, welding girders into place, stringing high tension wires. The builders promised that it would be ready to start spinning within another week, two at the most, just in time for opening day. Chabane was less than optimistic about their predictions, but knew that if not for the automata, it would not even be that far along, and would never have been ready in time.
Chabane couldn’t help but think about the boy he’d once been, reading Verne in second-hand story-papers. Not yet Archibald Chabane of London, just Adherbal Aït Chabaâne of Dellys, reading about men who traveled beneath the waves, or across the skies, or to the moon in glorious machines. It had seemed a distant, ungraspable vision that he could scarcely hope to see. Then came the famine, and the oppression of the Kabyle at the hands of their French colonial masters, and finally the failure of Muhammed al-Muqrani’s revolt. Chabane had been too young to fight, but his father and his uncles had not, and with the revolt put down his family name had been outlawed in Algeria, never again to be spoken in the djemaa. The young Adherbal, seeing no future in his native land, had gone instead to live among the Romni, as the Kabyles, remembering the Romans of ancient times, still thought of all foreigners across the middle sea. He ran away to the north, away from the superstitions of his grandmothers and the traditions he had been taught. He had gone looking for the future, to reinvent himself in a rational world. In England he’d made a new life for himself, the bodyguard to a wealthy man, and had tried to forget the past.
In the end, thoug
h, he learned the past was something we carry with us, and can never escape. And even though the future had arrived, it had not been quite as he’d expected.
Chabane and the boy continued up the Midway, past the various concessions just shutting down for the day. Like the Wild West Show, they’d been able to open early, while work on the Columbian Exhibition was still being completed. Some of the concessions, like the Algerian Village, had been open as early as the previous summer. And like the Algerian troupe’s “exhibit,” the other concessions were all, in one way or another, caricatures of the countries they purported to represent, pantomimes of pasts that never existed. There were Irishmen in green felt, Germans in lederhosen, Lapps in fur, Turks in fezzes. But as clownish as the others often seemed, it struck Chabane that the worst indignities were always reserved for those from the African continent. Like the natives of Dahomey, only recently conquered by the French, being presented as “cannibal savages” for the amusement of American audiences. A once proud people, reduced to the level of sideshow performers.
As they neared the towering wheel, beyond which lay the Algerian concession, Chabane heard his name called. It was one of the performers from the Street in Cairo concession, which was proving the most popular of the Midway’s attractions.
“Another of our monkeys has been stolen, Chabane,” the Egyptian continued in Arabic. “You Kabyles haven’t been breaking your Ramadan fast with monkey stew, have you?”
“Keep your ruffians away from our women, Zewail,” Chabane answered, good naturedly, “and I’ll keep my people away from your monkeys.”
As they passed under the lengthening shadow of Ferris’s wheel, the Algerian Village concession coming into view, Mezian drew up short, looking behind him, a look of alarm on his face. “I’ve lost my story-paper.” He patted his pocket, craning his head around and twisting to look down over his back, as though the dime novel might be clinging to his shirt-back.
Chabane turned in a slow circle, scanning the ground at their feet, looking back the way they’d come. “You must have dropped it.”
Mezian looked up, his eyes wide. “My mother will kill me.”
Chabane gave a sympathetic smile, but before he could answer he heard the sound of footsteps fast approaching. He spun around, expecting trouble, instinctually dropping into a defensive posture, but relaxed when he saw it was only Papa Ganon, the Algerian troupe’s glass-eater.
“Amin!” Ganon shouted. “Come quickly!”
Chabane tensed once more when he saw the blood darkening the front of Papa Ganon’s burnous.
“What is it?” Chabane said, rushing forward. “Are you hurt?”
Ganon responded with a confused look, then followed Chabane’s gaze to his blood-stained front. He shook his head. “It isn’t mine, amin. There’s a stranger, badly bleeding and confused, found hiding behind the theater.”
Chabane drew his mouth into a line, and nodded. “Run along and find your mother, Mezian.” Then he started with long strides towards the Algerian theater, Papa Ganon following close behind.
The Algerian Village was almost identical to that which the troupe had originally set up in the Paris Exhibition four years before. It had been there that a young Sol Bloom had seen them, in the shadow of Eiffel’s tower, and hired them to come perform in the United States. But when the time had come to leave Paris, the troupe had been uncertain about venturing into the unknown wilds of America.
At the time, Archibald Chabane had not heard his native tongue since leaving Dellys, years before, but traveling to Paris on business he had chanced upon the troupe on the Quai d’Orsay. After a friendly meal and reminiscences about their erstwhile home, Papa Ganon had spoken for the others in begging the assistance of the worldly, mannered Chabane. Ganon had called up Kabyle tradition, which held that a Kabyle journeying abroad was obliged to come to the aid of any Kabyle in need, even at the risk of his own fortune and life.
Chabane had thought he had put such traditions behind him. But looking into the hopeful faces of the Algerian troupe, he couldn’t help but remember the sacrifices his family had made during the famine of 1867. Tradition demands that every stranger who enters a Kabyle village be treated like an honored guest, given food, lodging, whatever he requires. But even with more than ten thousand strangers from all over Algeria pouring into Dellys, not a single person died of starvation, nor had the djemaas been forced to ask aid from the government. Among the European settlers in the larger cities, police measures were needed to prevent theft and disorder resulting from the influx of strangers; in Dellys nothing of the kind was needed. The Kabyles took care of their own affairs.
There on the Quai d’Orsay, to his own astonishment, he found himself agreeing to act as the troupe’s guide in America. He had tried to escape his past, but his past had eventually outrun him.
In the shuttered Algerian Theater, Chabane and Papa Ganon found the unconscious stranger being tended by two of the troupe’s female performers. Though they went veiled when in the public eye, in chador or hijab, in private they favored western dress.
“I tell you, it is Salla,” one of the women said, dabbing blood from the stranger’s face with a wet cloth. Piled on the ground were shards of glass they’d pulled from his wounds. “Look, he has Salla’s eyes.”
The other woman, Dihya, shook her head. “Taninna, you’ve gone mad. Salla is dead and buried. Besides, eyes or no, this man looks nothing like him.”
Chabane crouched beside Taninna, looking closely at the man. There were cuts all over his face, arms, and hands, and underneath the wool blanket the women had thrown over him, the stranger was completely naked.
The ministrations of the two women had already staunched the flow of blood from the stranger’s arms, and Chabane reached out to touch one of the scars, which looked older than the others, already healed, running like a ring around the stranger’s upper arm. But when Chabane’s fingers brushed the scar, he got a slight shock, like a spark of static electricity, and pulled his hand back quickly.
“What shall we do with him, amin?” Dihya asked, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.
Chabane was thoughtful. “I’ll go speak with the tin soldiers, see what they have to say.”
Just opposite the Algerian Village, across the Midway Plaisance between the Old Vienna concession and the French Cider Press, was a Fire and Guard Station, manned by members of the Columbian Guard, the private police force of the Columbian Exhibition. The Guard was headed by Colonel Edmund Rice, a former infantry officer who had gained some small measure of fame during the Battle of Bull Run, where the Union army’s new-minted prometheic tanks had put an end to the short-lived southern insurrection. Under Rice’s command, the Columbian Guard was meant to be a model peacekeeping force, committed to the safety and security of all who strode upon the Exhibition grounds. In their uniforms of light blue sackcloth, white gloves, and yellow-lined black capes, though, they looked more like spear-carriers in a Gilbert & Sullivan production than officers of law. And their talents at peacekeeping, often, left something to be desired, more interested in presenting a dashing profile than in seeing justice done. It wasn’t for nothing that the concessioneers had taken to calling them “tin soldiers.”
As Chabane approached the Station, framing how best to broach the subject of the unconscious man who lay bleeding in the Algerian Theater, a trio of Columbian Guards rushed through the narrow door, the one in the lead shouldering Chabane aside.
“Out of the way, darkie,” the Guard sneered in English, patting the buttoned holster at his side. “We don’t have time to hear about any damned stolen monkeys.”
Chabane held up his hands, palms forward, and stepped back out of the way, presenting as inoffensive a profile as possible. “My apologies,” he answered, in his best drawing room English. If he’d wanted, he could have swept the legs out from under all three Guards, and taken their firearms from them as they fell. At the moment, though, he was more interested in what had stirred the normally laconic Gu
ards to such a frenzy.
The three guards were hustling up the Midway, around the wheel and towards the Columbian Exhibition itself. A few of the other Midway concessioneers were still in the street, and Chabane could hear them muttering suspiciously to one another, like wives gossiping over a garden fence. Some had overheard the Guards within their hut, and had heard the summons to action.
There had been a murder in the park.
As he trailed behind the Columbian Guards at a discreet distance, keeping them just in sight as they hurried up the Midway, Chabane tallied up the number of deaths in the park since the previous summer, when the Algerian troupe had arrived from New York. Like the Algerian sword-swallower Salla, who had been working in a construction position in the park while waiting for the Midway to open, the deaths had all been accidents, all of them workers killed at their duties because of poor safety conditions. Salla had fallen from the airship mast and drowned in the waters of Lake Michigan, others had broken their skulls when masonry had fallen on them from improperly lashed cranes, or been crushed under piles of girders that slipped from the pincers of poorly programmed automata.
And it wasn’t just the dead men buried in paupers’ graves south of the park that had been affected. Even now, in the city itself, striking workers agitated for better working conditions, or for assurances that they would not lose their jobs to automation. The motto of the Columbian Exhibition was “Not Matter, But Mind; Not Things, But Men,” but Chabane could not help but wonder whether such noble sentiments were any salve to men who had been replaced at their posts by “things” in recent months and years. He knew it came as no comfort to those men who had died in automata-related accidents.
But accidents were one thing. A murder was a different matter entirely. And as much as the Exhibition’s Board of Directors might turn a blind eye to the loss of a few workmen, news of a murder would be bad business indeed for the fair.
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