Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

  “Waste not, want not,” Sholt says piously, and leads them across the roof to a sort of tower.

  There’s a cool draught blowing through the room, and a strange smell of dry leaves, sugar, and turpentine, and now, above the sounds of the house and the wind, and the roar and rush of the waves, he can hear another sound, a deep orchestral twang which comes from all around. Or, actually, from tall, narrow boxes in neat rows.

  “My bees,” Ted Sholt says. “Live ones,” as if this were in doubt. “I rather like them. They’re simple. Uncomplex. They require care, of course. Although ironically what they mostly require is leaving alone. And the honey is good. They make heather honey, round here, and gorse. Sometimes other things in the mix. I trade it with Mrs. Tregensa. For eggs and such. I had three hives die last summer. Two the year before. The bees are not well. The Americans are having a terrible time. Some keepers have lost all of them. The bees are dying, Mr. Spork. All over the world. Do you know what percentage of the world’s food production is based on bees?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “About one third. If they die, the human effects will be appalling. Migration. Famine. War. Perhaps more than that.” He shakes his head. “Appalling. But we don’t see it, do we? We never see it.” He’s veering off again, into his own world, and his gaze slides from Joe’s. “Another sign, I suppose. It’s time, and past time. So …” He threads between the hives to a lump in the middle of the room, covered by a cloth. “Camouflage, you see? Where would you hide a tree? In a forest, of course. So … where to hide this? Amid a forest of bees!”

  He throws back the cover, and underneath is a brassy object, three foot high and chased in silver. Sort of Art Deco. Sort of Modern. Sort of Arts and Crafts, and almost certainly handmade to order. Joe Spork stares at it.

  It’s a model beehive.

  The body of the hive is in the classic style, like a tower of doughnuts, each one smaller than the one below. Etched into the metal, a fine tracery of curlicues and lines, and at the top, a curious basin which speaks of an absence. There’s something missing, like a Rolls-Royce without a hood ornament. He wonders what it could be, then realises the answer is obvious.

  “The Book,” Sholt says fraughtly.

  Joe starts guiltily, and takes the doodah from his bag.

  “Yes,” Sholt murmurs. “Read the Book, muffle the drum. Muffle the drum. Marching soldiers, someone comes.” Then, with sudden suspicion, “Will it work?”

  “I think so. I did my best with it. It’s … special.”

  “Yes,” Sholt murmurs. “Yes, of course. That was very good of you. Appropriate. I’m never sure whether Ruskin would approve of this. Truth and deception. Light and shadow. They used to say that Gothic architecture was about creating spaces for shadows. All that ornamentation was about what you couldn’t see. Concealment. The divine in the darkness. I’m not sure he’d approve. But we’re not Ruskin, are we?”

  “No,” Joe says, after a moment. “We’re not.”

  Sholt gestures to the hive, and suddenly it can’t happen soon enough, his hands are shunting Joe forward, little knobbly fingertips poking, faster, faster. Joe moves forward, and arranges the doodah and sets its various parts in place. So, and so. The armature immediately opens the cover, and starts to flick through. Flickflickflick. And back to the start. Teeth lock in the punched section of each page, rapid brass flickers like lizard tongues. Well enough.

  He’s delighted, actually. A clockwork item dormant this long (and unwound? Or, is this thing powered by something more baroque?). He closes the panel, noticing on the inside the familiar weird little symbol, like an umbrella blown inside out by a storm. From within the hive, he hears a sudden quickening, flickaflackflack, and thinks “It is alive!” He manages to refrain from throwing back his hands and saying this, Frankenstein-style, to Sholt. He suspects it would be inappropriate.

  Sholt embraces Joe in mute delight, and then, because Billy Friend is too slow to get his guard up, him as well. Then the roof of the hive opens.

  From within, bees emerge. In single file, each on a little platform, they come into the scant daylight and bask. They flutter their wings as if stretching or drying out. Ten, twenty, thirty of them, in a gorgeous geometrical spiral around the hive. More. Joe peers at them. They must be real. They cannot possibly be what they appear to be. Mechanical bees?

  He looks closer. Black iron, yes. And gold. Tiny legs jointed with hinges. He’s suddenly conscious that he doesn’t know, really, how real bees are assembled. It is possible—plausible—likely, even—that he would not be able to tell the difference between the rare Apis mechanistica, with its deceptive metallic-seeming wing-cases and chitinous body which gives the appearance of etching (assuming such an animal exists), and a bee made of actual gold. In his mind, David Attenborough discusses the rare bee in breathy, pedagogic phrases husked out as he lies on his tummy and tries to get a closer look: Dormant until the conditions are right, this is England’s rarest insect. It’s so unusual that it has no natural predators at all … Of all the inhabitants of the Earth, only man is a danger to this extraordinary bee … and it is splendid.

  Joe reaches out, then hesitates. He doesn’t particularly like bugs. They are buggy, and alien. The nearest bee stops, and wriggles. He hears a whirr and imagines there might also have been a tiny clank. Breathless, he touches the bee on its back with his index finger. Ambient temperature. Dry. It does not apparently object. A machine would not. An insect … he has no idea. Probably. But bees are phlegmatic, and this one is sleepy. Perhaps Apis mechanistica likes to be stroked. He removes his hand. The bee rolls off the sculpture onto the floor, makes a very clear metallic tink and lies still.

  He glances guiltily at Ted Sholt, but Sholt does not appear to be enraged. Joe reaches down to pick up the bee. Looking closely at the legs, he can see bolts, pins.

  Amazing.

  He puts it back onto the hive, and it pauses, then hums to life again. The others move into a new pattern. The little plates or platforms which brought them retreat into the hive to fetch more, but the original bees remain where they are, still fluttering. More magnets, Joe surmises, moving under the skin of the hive. Or—he’s not clear on physics, but it must be possible—perhaps an electrical current running through the skin itself. If this object dates from the fifties, it’s plausible.

  Sholt watches, entranced.

  “Breathtaking,” Joe says after a moment. It is. It’s a combination of craftsmanship and engineering beyond anything he has ever seen. And yet, it seems a bit disappointing. How much more could you do with all that effort?

  But perhaps it does do more. Perhaps he’s mistaken the timescale. Victorian automata are short-lived performances, like Billy’s rutting nobility. Sholt’s hive is more recent, and at least as much a thing of science as glamour. Someone took great pains with this, and set it out here on the edge of Britain, in the wind and rain. Wind powered? Waves? Perhaps it’s a fanciful way of measuring weather: a barometer of bees. Or it could owe allegiance to an altogether different perception of art, a motile sculpture—the full cycle could last a year. With the right equations, it could be almost infinitely varied, a thing of beauty in constant flux. A mathematical proof, writ in precious stones. Cornwall is filled with the insane, brilliant products of men and women washed down from London to the farthest reach of the south-west: Fermat’s theorems sculpted in papier mâché, Heisenberg rendered as music, Beethoven as blown glass. Perhaps this is some such piece, lost for half a century and now awoken. He smiles to himself. He’s part of something.

  A fragment of his mind tells him he needs to be part of things more often.

  “Yes,” Sholt breathes. “It is. It still works! All this time! Oh, the world’s going to change now! Everything will change! Hah! Everything.”

  Joe peers at it. Perhaps the world will change for Sholt, he concedes. Ted Sholt, owner of one of the most prestigious mechanical mobile sculptures in the world, precious metals and jewels alone worth a hundred g
rand, value as an artefact almost incalculable. One of Joe’s Middle Eastern clients would pay almost anything for this.

  So, yes. For Sholt, the world will change. That sackcloth robe will be relegated to the greenhouse. There will be women, or men. He will have traction in the world, if he wants it. At least in a small way. Perhaps he will be on the news.

  “What is it?” Joe asks. “What does it do?”

  Sholt smiles. “Oh,” he says. “It makes angels out of men.” And when Joe does not immediately look as if he understands, Sholt continues. “It is an arrow, fired at the temples of Moloch and Mammon. It makes the world better, just by being. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Yes, thinks Joe Spork. That is indeed wonderful. However, it is also somewhat insane and a bit on the weird side.

  The bees are still sitting on the outside of the hive, soaking up the last rays of the weakling sun. They look like tiny holidaymakers on their towels. Joe experiences a jolt of alarm when one of them flies up and circles him curiously, bumping into his forehead, before realising that it must be a real bee which alighted on the hive while he was talking to Sholt. There are real bees all around, of course, in the real hives.

  And what did you make of these things? he asks the departing insect. Did you find them beautiful? Or did they frighten you? Will you declare war on the metal monsters? Or try to make love to them?

  “Do you mind if I take pictures?” Joe asks.

  “Go ahead,” Sholt says, almost limply. “It’s started now. The only thing to do is wait and see. But have a care, Spork the Clock. There are men who will come. Shadows and ghosts.” Sholt stoops, and grasps up the fallen bee from the hive, passes it to Joe. “For luck.”

  Joe is about to object, though he very much wants to accept, when Billy Friend stands heavily on his foot.

  “Well, that’s marvellous,” Billy says cheerfully, to cover Joe’s muted cry of agony. “Top notch. This is quite some place you have here, Ted. Do give us a call.” He presents his card with both hands, Japanese style, and Ted takes it the same way and bows over it. “If you should need any more work done, Friend & Company will be pleased to advise you and assist, subject to the normal fees and suchlike, of course. And there we are, all good.” Billy backs away a little nervously, as if Sholt may leap on him again.

  “Yes,” Sholt says. “It is good. Perhaps we can save the real bees. We really should. The truth will be known.” And then the fog comes down over his face again, abruptly, as if he has been holding it at bay all this time and suddenly it has slipped past him. “You should go,” he says. “It’s not safe here. Not now. Not any more. They’ll come. They will. This will be the first place. Go quickly. Use the back stairs.” He hustles them over to the far door by the open windows, and Billy Friend makes a noise like a dog swallowing a whole squirrel as Sholt throws open the door and the sound of the sea comes not inward but upward.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Billy says, going very pale, and when Joe looks down, he understands immediately why.

  The greenhouse is perched on the very edge of the cliff, the land beneath eaten away by the waves. The entire back half of the room protrudes over the abyss. This gallery, with its weathered planks and rusted rail, is more than twenty feet out above a thrashing, white-capped sea.

  “Go!” Sholt yells. “It’s not safe!” And Billy tells him no, it fucking isn’t, and bolts for the rear stairs and down to the car.

  As they drive away, Billy’s lead foot firmly on the pedal and a stream of furious invective pouring from him, Joe glances back, and sees Ted Sholt outlined against the sky, arms flung wide in a gesture to part the waters. Answering his prayer, a great cloud of bees rises up from the greenhouse and into the air, a swarming, gyrating fog which wraps him and wheels around him, then arrows up and out over the sea. Joe has a brief, mad notion that the tiny clockwork robots have taken flight, and wonders if this means he has committed some sort of robbery or been an artificial midwife.

  “I have no idea, Joseph,” Billy Friend says, and Joe realises he must have spoken aloud, “but one point on which I am very clear is that we should retire to the bloody pub and never speak of this day again.”

  Sholt is still watching the bees—perhaps fearing that they will never come back, insulted by their metal siblings—when Billy grinds the gears and takes the car down into a dip, and the greenhouse is lost from view.

  Tess has gone home when they return to the Gryffin, but the landlord gives Joe a pitying look which says the story of his ineptitude has not been kept entirely out of the public domain.

  “Would you give her my best?”

  “Could do. Better idea might be if you came back at the weekend. Gave it to her yourself. There’s a place in town does a decent bite.”

  “You think she’d like that?”

  “I think you’ll never find out if you don’t come back and see.”

  Joe Spork sulks at himself. Of all the things he cannot do, the one he perhaps most despises in himself is his inability to flirt, and to move from flirting to more serious things. It is one reason he always ends up with impatient women, which is, in turn, why he is rarely in a relationship for very long and why the ones which last are usually rather sterile.

  He shrugs off his gloom and reviews the day, flicking through pictures on his camera and contemplating in his mind his small treasures: the bee and the whojimmy. Amazing.

  “Where did you come from?” he asks the collection, a little surprised by the loudness of his own voice. “Who made that thing back there?”

  As if in answer, his fingers find an irregularity on the pommel, a dimple. He pokes at it with a thumbnail. A piece of silvered wax falls away—a jeweller’s trick, metalled wax to conceal a flaw. He picks off another and then another, and another, until a shiny metal crest is revealed: the same sketchy angular symbol like an inside-out umbrella or a trident.

  “Billy?”

  Billy Friend, who immediately upon arriving back at the pub began the process of seducing a bubbly, bounteous American woman who is on a walking tour of the British Isles, is being taught how to say “You are very attractive” the way they do it in Idaho.

  “Billy, come and look at this.”

  “I’m looking at something else here, Joseph. Two somethings, in fact.”

  “Billy …”

  “My darling, would you excuse me? My boring friend over there needs the benefit of my enormous brain.”

  His inamorata makes some sort of off-colour comment of which Billy greatly approves, but releases him. Billy ambles over.

  “Billy, do you know what this is?”

  Billy Friend produces a jeweller’s glass and pops it majestically into his right eye. This evidence of his prowess and wisdom does not go unnoticed.

  “Hello, hello … yes, all right, yes, very good … fine. Didn’t expect to see that here.”

  “You know what it is?”

  “No need to sound so surprised, Joseph.”

  “It’s on the book as well. I’m right? I have seen it around somewhere?”

  “As to that, I’ve no idea. But I do know what it means.”

  “Well?”

  “Hah! Don’t let young Tess see you with it. She’ll never look at you the same way. It’s a webbed foot, isn’t it? It means someone unclean.”

  “Unclean?”

  “In a nutshell. Look, my lot have been in the Waiting game only so long, right? Matter of economic necessity with us, and then it turned out we was good at it. But others, like I told you, they’ve been around a while. And back in the old, old days, right, some people were considered unclean by birth. They weren’t allowed to be around proper folks and they had to wear a goose leg when they were in public so people’d know not to touch ’em. Lepers, maybe. Or redheads. Maybe they really did have webbed feet. Who knows? So they ended up gravediggers and coffin-makers and all that. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take that young lady over there to Heaven and back, and I don’t want any discussion of sewers.
All right?”

  “All right. Have fun.”

  “One of us has to. Be a shame to die grumpy, wouldn’t it?”

  And now, as Joe emerges from the Tosher’s Beat and turns sharp left through a narrow gateway and into a maze of little streets, he is biting his lip and trying not to run. The logic of his worry is very simple and very clear. There are three ways in which Mr. Rodney Titwhistle and Mr. Arvin Cummerbund, not of the Loganfield Museum because it is entirely defunct, could have knowledge of the object Mr. Titwhistle so absently sketched in the air. They might know of it already. They might know of it from a third party. Or they might know of it from Billy.

  That putative third party, of course, might be the irritated former owner of the Book, who paid a visit to the saleroom and whose merest mention gave Fisher the screaming heebie-jeebies. By inference, Brother Sheamus, or his successor.

  There is, however, a limited number of ways in which any of them could know of Joe Spork’s own connection with the item, and top of that list is Billy Friend.

  Carefor Mews is a curious mix of old and new which the developer has in defiance of reason painted white, and which is now predictably grey-yellow with grime. Billy loves Soho. The ready availability of smut, late-night drinking, and intoxicated female tourists is part of the appeal, of course, but Billy confessed to Joe long ago that the place is his heart. Visiting Soho when it’s thronging and celebrating is one thing, but if you live there you see the morning after, the grimy, mournful streets and plastered revellers staggering home after five, the irritable shop-owners starting work and the exhausted tarts knocking off. Soho is a perpetual carnival celebrating how beautiful it is even as the wrinkles set in and the make-up runs. It’s always a last gasp, a last drink, one more fling before you die.