Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

  “I have a choice. I can float to my death, on the tide of a man’s destiny, or I can make my own. I can decide I will be great in my own way. I can accept that I, too, have a little aglœca within me. So I asked for you.”

  Edie takes the line she has been given. “What for?”

  “Those soldiers downstairs—they follow your orders?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aglœc-wif. A woman of consequence. A devil hag or a goddess. Do you see?”

  “No. Nearly.”

  “If I must do this thing—if I must betray my one remaining, murderous son—then it is an act of greatness. I do not mean that I am great. Just that this choice is the great kind of choice. So, then: let it be a matter between women of consequence. Between queens.”

  “I’m … I’m sorry they sent me, then. I’m not that important.”

  “Pfft. You have no rank, you mean. You are not Lady Edie or Duchess Edie.”

  “No. Plain old Edie.”

  “And yet here you are, on the far side of the world, with your King’s commission and soldiers to do your bidding. You have achieved things.”

  “Small things, maybe.”

  “With grand results. You play on the great stage.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And you will carry this through. You will get it right, whatever the cost?”

  “I will.”

  “Then you are a woman of consequence, Commander Banister. You will do very well. You will acquire secrets and treasure and weapons. And so that is the second thing: I have a treasure. All crones and witches do, do they not? A great treasure, that must not be held by one such as Shem Shem Tsien. You must take the Frenchwoman, and her impossible mind, and you must take my treasure, and you must spirit them away so they will be safe.”

  “I’m only supposed to concern myself with the scientist—”

  “Of course. But to concern yourself with the scientist, you must do as I ask. Or I shall not help you at all.”

  Mad old hag, Edie Banister thinks, with considerable approval, and extends her hand. Dotty Catty smiles—terrible sight—and shakes it with vigour. Consumatum est.

  “We’re ready to go,” says a shallow, nervous voice from the door, and Edie turns to see a pale young Ruskinite in a sort of warm-weather version of their usual kit, looking very unhappy and clandestine, but trying to be brave about it.

  Dotty Catty leads the way.

  Shem Shem Tsien is a man who likes, after taking his pleasure, to sleep with his hand upon his conquests. Amid the half-eaten carcass of the swan, row upon row of ewers and a heap of slumbering, exhausted trollops—Edie recognises At Your Service on top of the pile—the Opium Khan lies on his side, rapt in dreams of war and pillage. Edie wonders sickly whether he forced the crucified bishop to watch the whole debauch.

  Dotty Catty’s rescue party steps lithely past the doorway of the sleeping Khan and on through corridors of dressed stone and down staircases to rougher tunnels and mazy passages, until a strange, caustic smell floats in the air and a sound as of water falling on a bass drum the size of Kentish Town thrums around them. Dotty Catty holds up her hand, and her two attendants step to the side of the corridor and wait.

  Ahead of them is a stout wooden door. Dotty Catty eyes it with a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty. Edie glances at her.

  “Best get this rescue on the road, ey?” she says.

  Dotty Catty nods. She steps forward and opens the door.

  Edie has a sense of space even before her eyes adjust to the gloom beyond, and in that space, a great presence, as if she has come into the kennel of a titanic dog and can feel the hound snuffling around her. And then her brain lumbers up behind, assembling the pieces.

  The room is vast.

  It’s so big, it isn’t properly a room. It is a chamber, or a cavern. And yet there is a sense of the familiar, even the homely … oh. Of course. Abel Jasmine has been making a place just like this in Cornwall, to greet his transplanted genius when she arrives.

  Above and to one side, Edie can see part of the depthless shaft which plunges from the Khan’s throne room, and passes on through the floor of the cavern to a river down below. And all around, there are figures, man-high and higher, frozen in aspects of combat and carnage, and a battlefield littered with limbs, as if a chess game has come alive and then stopped in mid-course.

  Edie’s first thought is of the lair of the Gorgon Medusa, populated with the petrified corpses of defeated foes. Then she wonders whether at some point some primordial glacier has rolled through this cavern and deposited its frozen passengers here, and finally whether the Opium Khan has arranged a great graveyard of his enemies under his throne. Then she realises that all the warriors—lying atop one another, transfixed and hanging on spears, or slumped over on their knees—are made of metal. The ground is littered with cogs and springs, wires and belts, and the whole cavern smells of heated metal and construction. As Dotty Catty leads the way between them, Edie can pick out the stamps of individual Ruskinite craftsmen on the beautiful, broken arms and fanciful masks. Cogs jut through burnished skins of brass, and the black, grimy stains which run from their wounds are oil, not blood. A legion of homunculi.

  She steps closer, and nearly loses her head as the nearest one swings its sword abruptly forward. She steps back and the blow swooshes past. She stares: the homunculus is pinned to the ground by another’s weapon, but the eyeless face tracks her all the same. A moment later, its opponent turns to face her too. When she stays still, they go back to looking at one another. Behind her she can hear Songbird swearing continuously under his breath.

  “Some respond to light,” Dotty Catty says softly, “others to sound. They are clumsy and simple. But do not imagine they are harmless. They learn. Frankie says it is too much trouble to make them clever, so they start stupid and grow less so, writing their own punchcards. Although I understand they are not actual punchcards. It is all very modern. There is a limit to their understanding, of course, but Frankie has connected them. They appear to be individuals, but they are … like bees. A swarm. Albeit a swarm in which each member hates the others. Frankie says they are useless because their capacity is too small. They learn very little before they are full. But … they can surprise you.”

  Righty-ho.

  Carefully, Edie picks a path which keeps them all out of range, and steps through the curtain of broken toy soldiers only to find that they are barely the beginning; the cavern is a battlefield of broken mechanical armies, generations of soldiers rolling back in time from the most humanlike to the more crude and finally to helpless, curious boxes with fragile arms, all of them locked to one another, half or completely shattered, reels of paper tape, punchcards and springs trailing from gaping wounds. There’s a word … Yes. Roboti. Metal slaves, mindless clockwork trapped in their own for-ever war.

  She can see her team looking at them, and hopes like Hell they aren’t seeing some kind of ghastly reflection of themselves. One of the boxes claws at Flagpole’s leg. He kicks it, then stands on the box and jumps up and down until the metal folds and concertinas and the grasping hand fails.

  “Spunky wee bugger,” Flagpole says, half admiring, and then, when the others look at him askance: “What? Am I noo allowed to touch the furniture, ey?”

  Edie leads them on into the cavern.

  The river must at one stage have thundered through unimpeded, surfacing here and there where the floor has caved in above it, but now it has been yoked by a succession of wheels and turbines, huge screws twisting inside scaffolds and tanks, armatures and driveshafts humming on greased bearings. Coils of copper in huge amount spark and hum behind glass shields which protect them from moisture, and loops of cable and wire like hawsers connect this endless city of capacitance with fizzing globes, crucibles, and other things more strange: wafers of silverish metal, nuggets and pills which hover spinning in the air, and towering black rods topped with shining arcs of electrical power.

  Thick cables trail from one b
ench along the cavern wall to a small cleft, about five foot across at the widest. A strange, flickering light—not blue like the actinic gleam of the throne room but clearer, whiter—emerges in sporadic flashes. And then, a moment later, Edie hears gunfire. Worse yet, she can hear Americans.

  She draws close to the wall and steps inside. The corridor widens abruptly, and she can smell jungle and something else: a rich, pungent stink of mammal, hot metal, and straw.

  She rounds a corner, and sees a cave opening onto a lush nighttime mountain, and—lined up and gleaming in the light of a cinema screen—row upon row of grey legs and towering flanks and wrinkled, trunked faces, staring with mute intensity at the image of a man firing a revolver desperately into a dark alley.

  “Hell, no!” cries the fugitive. “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

  She draws breath to call out, but Dotty Catty draws her back.

  “They don’t like it when you interrupt the film,” she says, very quietly.

  “They’re elephants,” Edie objects.

  “Yes. In my father’s time we put on plays for them, and music. Now they watch films.” Since Dotty Catty thinks this is quite ordinary, Edie doesn’t argue. The old woman sighs. “They’re all I have,” she murmurs, so quietly that the gunfire from the film almost drowns her out. “My fathers’ fathers’ faithful friends. Like children. They trust me. Not him. Only me. And so he will erase them.

  “In armour, they cannot be stopped by anything. But the gift of them is that they will not be used wrongly. They are soldiers of the heart, not machines. And that is why he needs this other thing, this Apprehension Engine. Because he cannot command my elephants. Because he is evil.”

  Her voice remains quite calm and even, but her cheeks are wet. Edie does not embrace her, because she does not wish the woman of consequence to weep upon her shoulder.

  “Frankie’s through here,” Dotty Catty says, a moment later.

  Edie follows the Dowager-Khatun into another chamber, where someone is being very French.

  A throng of Ruskinites is slaving over what appears to be a fish tank made of brass. It is suspended from a hoist or crane, and a broad-backed monk is hauling hard, in company with two others, while his brethren steady the tank as it comes out of the water. The liquid alone, Edie Banister guesses, must weigh a tonne, and then there’s the metal. Those pulleys are very well calibrated indeed.

  In the midst of all this is a small person with a shock of black hair sticking up from her head and an inexpensive ladies’ blouse which has seen better days. She wears a leather apron and a pair of trousers which at some time or another have been either a blackout curtain or a counterpane. Even at this distance, Edie can hear that she is complaining; a sharp, rhythmic patter of what might generously be called “discussion.” The object of her ire is a big Ruskinite wearing a harried expression and forge-master’s gloves.

  “Will it … You are an idiot! Yes, Denis, you are. Look! You have disturbed the wave, and now we have it all to do again … Non! Non, the apparatus is perfect. It will preserve … it will! It will because I say it will! The constructive and destructive interference patterns are cancelled by the … oh, nom de Dieu! It is not switched on! Why is it not … Look! Have you even bothered to engage the secondary coils? Mais non, you have not …”

  “Oh, dear,” Dotty Catty murmurs. “I hope we haven’t come at a bad time.”

  The dark-haired woman—she cuts it herself, Edie guesses, from the strange, uneven fringe and the curious near-baldness on one side—throws her hands in the air.

  “We must begin again!” she says. “Entirely! From the start. Immediately! Where is the compressor?” She turns around, and something makes a bonging noise, and then a soft gurgle as it falls into the river. “Connerie de chien de merde! Was that it? Pray to Heaven that was not my compressor?”

  “It’s all right,” the burly monk says calmly. “It was the teapot.”

  This does not seem to be a huge comfort. The woman pulls a piece of chalk from behind her ear and begins writing on the ground. Then she gets another piece from her pocket and starts writing with her other hand to save time.

  “She is ambidextrous,” Dotty Catty whispers, “unless she is thinking very hard, she does different things at the same time. She says it is good for the brain. I tell her to eat fish, but apparently that is not sufficient.”

  “I can hear you,” the woman calls, without looking round. “Please do not imagine it is any less distracting to have someone very conspicuously trying to be quiet while I work than it is to have a brass band come wandering through here playing ‘Hope And Glory’ while the Home Fleet fires all its guns at the Guggenheim Glass and China Collection, because that is in no sense the case.”

  Denis—the big monk is apparently Denis—sighs into his hands for a moment, then looks up. “You have visitors, Frankie,” he says firmly.

  “I cannot possibly have visitors because no one knows I am here and no one would care if they did know,” Frankie replies firmly, and carries on writing. Over by the side of the torrent, two monks have managed to draw up the teapot by hooking it with a rod. It looks … odd.

  “Are you sure that’s a teapot?” Edie says.

  “I have redesigned it,” Frankie announces.

  “That happens to rather a lot of things here,” Denis says neutrally.

  “The one we had was inoperable,” Frankie continues, “because it was designed on the assumption that it would only ever be half full. At least, I trust that is why it only pours correctly when the upper volume of the pot is empty. Unless … hm … is it possible that there are benefits to the steeping process in having a gas convection environment directly above the leaf suspension? Well, be that as it may, the pouring issue is a serious one. I scalded myself. Also, the quality of the tea was uneven. The end product, you understand. I controlled the leaves very carefully.” She appears to regard this as some species of deliberate action on the part of the old pot, which is now forming part of another apparatus over by one wall.

  “My name is Banister,” Edie begins.

  “I’m Esther Françoise Fossoyeur. You may call me Frankie. Hello, Banister.”

  “Hello, Frankie.”

  “It was nice to meet you and I’m glad we had this little chat! You can see yourself out, can’t you?”

  She turns away. Edie stares at Dotty Catty, who gestures to keep things going, as fast as possible. The Dowager-Khatun looks a little twitchy, above and beyond what might be expected of a woman betraying her mass-murdering son.

  “As for the Apprehension Engine,” Frankie says sharply, over her shoulder, “you may tell the Khan that it is not yet functional. There are some difficulties I had not anticipated. Observation of certain aspects of matter produces glitches which … eh, bien. I have almost perfected a power source. In fact, it is possible … hm.” She stares away to one side, and Edie can almost hear the sound of the universe splitting open as her gaze reaches into it, prods at it. “Yes. Interestingly, the tea experiments may provide the key. I … hm.”

  Dotty Catty intervenes. “Frankie, Commander Banister is from the British government. I asked them to send someone …”

  Edie Banister nods. “I’m here to rescue you.”

  “Rescue me?”

  “Yes,” Dotty Catty says. “We did talk about this.”

  Frankie stares at her a moment longer. A single curl of black hair is tickling her cheek, and she brushes it away, leaving a smudge of char on her skin. Her face is very pale and pointed, and she has freckles. She must be all of five foot two inches tall, and proportionately tiny. The sleeves of her blouse are covered in mathematical notation written in ink. She frowns. “Oh. Did we? Yes, you’re quite right, we did. Because Shem wants me to make him a weapon. Yes. Do you know, he is very charming? I had no idea that was what he meant. He seemed so philanthropic. ‘An end to war.’ I am an idiot. I should have seen. Well, I won’t do it, of course. But now’s not the best time for me to leave. I’m just in
the middle of something rather important.” She peers at Edie, flaps a hand. “Do you think you could come back in a few weeks, Banister?”

  Edie stares at her. “For the teapot?”

  “No, no. That will take a day, at most. No, for some testing of the compressor and the … eh, bien, your eyes are glazing over. For the machines, then. I have begun the process. I am isolating a standing wave. This wave, of course, is composed of water, but the dynamics are mathematically similar.” She gestures at the suspended water tank.

  “A what?”

  “A wave. From the river. I am taking the wave from the river and maintaining it in the box. You see, obviously, what that would mean?”

  “No.”

  “When I am very old I shall make a school for intelligent young persons to be educated in basic science.”

  “Frankie,” Dotty Catty says firmly, “don’t be rude.”

  Frankie gives a growl.

  “All right! Very well, Banister, please listen closely and try not to say ‘What?’ too often or I shall scream …

  “Truth may reasonably be understood as the consonance of our impression of the universe with the underlying reality. Yes? When what we believe matches the external truth about the world … You are staring at my trousers. What is wrong with them?”

  Edie, who has been wondering whether to wallop this garrulous loony over the back of the noggin and carry her off, replies that there is nothing wrong with the trousers. In fact, this is true. They are odd, but shapely, and suggestive of decent legs beneath.

  “Boff. So then: truth is the mind correctly understanding the world. So, like the water in the tank, the human mind is a wave. It is formed around the brain. A very complicated pattern generated by a moderately complicated thing according to fairly simple rules. Your brain is a special sort of stone. The stream runs over the stone, the surface ripples, yes? We call it a standing wave. So, your mind is the ripple. Life is the motion of water through the pattern. Death is the pattern disappearing when the stone is moved or ground away. You understand? For the mind to apprehend truth—to know, rather than simply to believe, the nature of the wave must change. The ripple must extend so that it is able to touch the bottom of the river, to know the reality directly, not via our eyes and our ears. The machine I make will extend the wave. It is like this new sonar: a new sense. A sense of knowing the truth. From this it follows that the world will change in positive ways. Voilà. C’est simple.”