And They Called Her Spider (Galvanic Century) (4 page)

***

"Our most likely candidate," I told Bartleby over dinner, "is one Hector Whitney, class of 1853. In 1870, his masterwork was accepted egregia cum laude by the council of Masters, though he never completed the administrative paperwork for advancement."

"As with your journey-work advancement?"

"Yes. It's fairly common that we forget the small details. Advancement isn't really the point, you understand? It's all about the work."

"But in your case they basically took care of all that for you."

"Yes, and my work was simply maxima cum laude. For a man with this talent-"

"That makes little sense."

"No, it does not. Oh, a bit of luck. One of his classmates is still alive. He might have some insight into Whitney."

"We're running out of time, James." Bartleby reminded me.

I wasn't concerned. Just one more constraint under which to solve this puzzle, as surmountable as any other.

***

"Hector was the best of us, the poor fellow." Bonner had been a civil engineer at the Nash Conservatory for the last decade, and had worked for the Royal Gardens since graduation. He was kind enough to meet with us in the Conservatory visitor's centre.

He was a small, wizened man with a surprisingly soft and wheezing voice. "Not only was he brilliant engineer, but a good man. Had the soul of a toymaker. His first inventions were military, yes, but after the birth of his grandson all he made were toys. He took a lot of scorn for that from a lot of short-sighted people, but they shut up when they saw his masterwork. So much talent. So much tragedy."

"Tragedy?" Bartleby asked.

"Oh yes. This was just after he'd finished his masterwork-- a man-sized doll with a functional circulatory system. Stunned the lot of us. Nothing compared with what you lads are doing now, of course, but this was back in the seventies."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Geopolitics happened. The Franco-Prussian war happened. Hector's daughter and grandson were in Paris when Wilhelm and Bismark's airships lay siege to the city. Killed in the bombing. I think that was what broke Hector's spirit, at last-- he said he was done with the work of men and generals, cleared out his workshop, and disappeared."

"That's terrible," Bartleby said.

"His critics called him a toymaker, but he was so much more. Skilled in a dozen fields from medicine to chemistry to mechanics... the world is worse off without him."

"The Home Office believes he's still alive," Bartleby said. "We're trying to find him. There's a matter of import he can help the Crown with."

"The Queen?"

"Precisely."

"Well. If anyone could come up with a fantastic Platinum Jubilee gift it would be Hector." Bonner seemed ignorant of the irony coming out of his mouth. "I wish I could help you, but I haven't heard from him in over thirty years."

"If there's anything you can remember, any places he used to frequent, other people he used to see..."

"Well, there's this church down in Southwark-"

"We've already been there." I shook my head.

"Oh. Hm. Then what about his daughter and grandson's mausoleum?"

"They were transported to London for burial?"

"Well, no. There wasn't anything to bury. But he had a monument built to them in Abney Park."

***

"The more I consider the matter the more sense it's beginning to make," Bartleby said as we entered the cemetery.

"What is?"

We walked along the main path through the Egyptian-inspired gates. I was half-listening to Bartleby, enamoured of the fact that the trees around Abney Park seemed to have been planted in alphabetical order. It appealed to my driving need for orderly structure. Acer... Alder... Apple...

"Everything. A brilliant engineer, his daughter and grandchild killed in a war, grows disenchanted by the political world of man. He disappears from the world and comes back to kill the politicians and industrialists who represent the powers that be."

"I don't know, Bartleby. Where has he been keeping himself the last thirty years?" Birch... Beech... Box...

"Doing what you do. Playing the hermit, forgetting the world, losing himself in his work. Building himself the perfect assassin."

Cherry... Elm... Hawthorne..." Building? Bartleby, do you mean to suggest that the Spider is some sort of advanced clockwork automaton?"

"Why wouldn't it be?"

"Because it's not possible. Even the most advanced of clockworks can only run simple mechanical routines. They can't react to stimuli. They can't make choices. They just do whatever it is that they've been built to do."

"I'm disappointed in you, James." Bartleby laughed lightly. "Nothing's impossible in this age, you've told me so yourself. What if you combined a clockwork with one of Babbage's difference machines?"

I scoffed. "I would hardly think that--"

"And what could you do if you were locked down in your workshop for thirty years, uninterrupted?"

The only answer I had to that was "a good deal." Bartleby was correct-- every day the limitations of science and technology were being pushed further and further back. One simply had to look at the work of the chemist Jekyll or the galvanic tragedies in Germany over the last century to see that the world as it is bears little resemblance to the world as it could be. An autonomous clockwork-- it wasn't entirely impossible, even if I myself couldn't see a way to do it. Remembering the complexity of Whitney's masterwork, I had little doubt that if anyone could manage it, it would be he.

The Whitney mausoleum was Gothic in its architecture, long with a high pointed front archway. Its exterior carvings mimicked a trellis of interlaced tracery with a repeating pattern of trefoils and quatrefoils. The doors in particular were made to resemble cathedral doors, and upon inspection, we found them to be slightly ajar.

Bartleby drew his pistol as I shouldered the heavy doors open. A lantern in one hand, I hefted a pry-bar across my shoulders and entered. Despite the length of the chamber within, the interior was sparse and empty, containing but two sarcophagi-- one of which was open. I approached it cautiously, length of iron raised, but found that instead of a corpse swaddled in funerary shroud it held a spiral staircase descending down into darkness. Bartleby stuck close to my light, and together we descended deep into the earth.

***

A small light from below grew more visible as we descended, and we found Hector Whitney waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, in what appeared to be a subterranean workshop. He greeted us with a pistol levelled at my chest.

"Stop right there." His hands were gnarled but steady. "I'll shoot if you come any closer. Drop your weapons."

Bartleby slowly put his gun down on the steps, and I followed suit with my pry-bar and lantern.

"What happened, Whitney?" I asked. Bartleby isn't very useful when faced with the prospect of violence; I knew the talking would be left up to me. "You were such a genius. Your work was amazing."

"Life happened. Death happened," he said. "It's not fair. It's not right."

"Life isn't fair. Lots of people lost their family in that war--"

"This isn't about Jessica and William!" He almost screamed, raising the pistol. I braced myself, but he managed to regain some composure. "That's what everyone is going to think, I know, but that's not what this is about."

"Why don't you tell me?" I asked, my voice level, watching for the slightest droop in his gun-arm.

"It's about them and what they did to us. What they're doing. What they are going to do."

"Them?"

"Them! The plutocrats! The politicians! The aristocrats here, the robber-barons in America. Science was supposed to make us all free! It was supposed to make us all equal! It was supposed to usher in a new era of prosperity and lift up the weakest, and look at what we've gotten! Look at the fruits of the industrial revolution! Rich landowners get richer, while the poor fill their lungs with poison, work their children into early graves, and pervert the miracles we give them into weapons of war!"

"Look at the airships!" I said. "The telegraphs! The electric lights! You were a toymaker-- you brought joy to countless children!"

"And now those children are grown and it's time to send them to war with those same toys! It's not your fault. I don't blame you, you don't know--- you haven't seen what I've seen. I've spent the last three decades building weapons of war."

"For whom? Aside from a little sabre rattling, between France and Germany, Europe's been at peace for decades."

"For us all! They don't care. They'll sell them all to anyone. It's coming, young man. Soon. The great war to end all wars. Guns that can wipe out entire cavalry lines. Toxic air that can clear battlefields. Razor wire so sharp it'll slice a man to ribbons. Europe is going to become a charnel house-- be glad you won't be there to see it!"

I tensed, staring at his pistol again. "You might shoot me, Hector, but my partner will drop you before I hit the floor. Just give up, and we'll see you get a fair trial."

"Shoot you?" He actually seemed a little surprised at the suggestion, and a little contemptuous. "This isn't for you. It's mine. My escape. I'll die before I let them make her kill me."

Before I could move he had turned the gun on himself. Before I could reach him he'd pulled the trigger. Before I could so much as cry out, the contents of his beautiful genius mind had splattered all over the wall of his hidden workshop.

***

"That's it then?" Bartleby asked.

We watched from afar as the police inspectors were bringing up armfuls of evidence from the workshop below the mausoleum. They had found more plans and schematics. I'd only gotten a brief glance before Scotland Yard had spirited them away, but what I saw will be burned into my mind's eye until the day I die. Bartleby had been right-- Hector Whitney had built her, but he was off about how. Way off.

"No. The Spider's still out there. You heard that poor old fool. She wasn't helping him escape at the church, she was coming after him. He may have built her, but she isn't working at his behest. Whomever it was that turned her loose on him can still turn her against whomever they please-- and I fear that we may be next."

"Us? Why us?"

"We've tracked down her origins. We might even be able to stop her. It makes tactical sense to go after us before we can ready ourselves."

"Oh lord." He scratched his temple with the butt of his pistol.

I stared at it until he sheepishly slipped it back into his pocket. "Fortunately for us, they're wrong about that."

"About it making sound tactical sense?"

"About us not being ready. Come, Bartleby. We must prepare for the endgame."

Okay, yes, I'd exaggerated slightly to Bartleby about being ready, but the poor man's of no use when he's facing inescapable death.

***

The Spider came for us at five minutes past midnight. We were both in the library, Bartleby reading something by Dickens while I played chess against myself. Don't snicker--- it's great practice, and I never lose. There was little warning before she attacked.

She came from the fireplace, as I had assumed she would, it being the least conventional means of ingress. The flames flared up as she landed, momentarily blinding me, and I felt a sharp pain as a thrown knife struck me with enough force to knock over the chair I was sitting in. The weapon penetrated the thick leather under my surcoat almost half an inch-- were I without it, it would have surely killed me.

Bartleby was moving even before the back of my chair hit the floor--- he can be fast when needs be. From the ground I watched as the Spider spun and danced towards him, firelight reflecting off of steel knives held between gloved fingers. He made it all the way to the hall archway before she attacked, launching herself like a cannonball, hitting him in the small of the back with her knees as she had struck me in the church. By the time I'd regained my feet she'd rebounded and was heading back in my direction. I wrenched the knife out of my leather chest-piece and threw it back at her. A clumsy toss, barely on target, but she ducked from it instead of throwing her knives at me and that was all the distraction Bartleby needed.

He lunged from the ground towards the bell-rope at the entrance to the hall. A deep resonating bass note filled the room, its resonance amplified and reflected by the concealed megaphones I'd secreted around the library's tapestries. The effect on the Spider was immediate and dramatic: she collapsed, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Bartleby, panting,watched her still form for a long moment before scrambling his way over to where I sat against the wall.

"Is she done? Is that it?"

He gathered up the first aid kit from the coffee table and sat next to me as I removed my vest, leather chest-piece, and shirt.

"She's done. The Synaptic Disruptor temporarily interrupts the flow of information between the body and the brain."