The Difference Engine

William Gibson
Bruce Sterling

FIRST ITERATION
SECOND ITERATION
THIRD ITERATION
FOURTH ITERATION
FIFTH ITERATION
MODUS
Modus

William Gibson
Bruce Sterling

The Difference Engine

FIRST ITERATION
The Angel of Goliad

   Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.
   A villa, a garden, a balcony.
   Erase the balcony's wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair's wheel-spokes.
   The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.
   These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.
   Her name is Sybil Gerard.
   Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium.
   Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible grace—metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon.
   Like starlings, Sybil thinks.
   The airship's lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance.
   Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and memory.
   She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about her—till, by the walls of Newgate, the shadow of her father's hanging falls…
   And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway—one where it is always evening…
   It is January 15, 1855.
   A room in Grand's Hotel, Piccadilly.

   One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the door's cut-glass knob. Another was draped with clothing: a woman's fringed mantelet, a mud-crusted skirt of heavy worsted, a man's checked trousers and cutaway coat.
   Two forms lay beneath the bedclothes of the laminated-maple four-poster, and off in the iron grip of winter Big Ben bellowed ten o'clock, great hoarse calliope sounds, the coal-fired breath of London.
   Sybil slid her feet through icy linens to the warmth of the ceramic bottle in its wrap of flannel. Her toes brushed his shin. The touch seemed to start him from deep deliberation. That was how he was, this Dandy Mick Radley.
   She'd met Mick Radley at Laurent's Dancing Academy, down Windmill Street. Now that she knew him, he seemed more the sort for Kellner's in Leicester Square, or even the Portland Rooms. He was always thinking, scheming, muttering over something in his head. Clever, clever. It worried her. And Mrs. Winterhalter wouldn't have approved, for the handling of "political gentlemen" required delicacy and discretion, qualities Mrs. Winterhalter believed she herself had a-plenty, while crediting none to her girls.
   "No more dollymopping, Sybil," Mick said. One of his pronouncements, something about which he'd made up his clever mind.
   Sybil grinned up at him, her face half-hidden by the blanket's warm edge. She knew he liked the grin. Her wicked-girl grin. He can't mean that, she thought. Make a joke of it, she told herself. "But if I weren't a wicked dollymop, would I be here with you now?"
   "No more playing bobtail."
   "You know I only go with gentlemen."
   Mick sniffed, amused. "Call me a gentleman, then?"
   "A very flash gentleman," Sybil said, flattering him. "One of the fancy. You know I don't care for the Rad Lords. I spit on 'em, Mick."
   Sybil shivered, but not unhappily, for she'd run into a good bit of luck here, full of steak-and-taters and hot chocolate, in bed between clean sheets in a fashionable hotel. A shiny new hotel with central steam-heat, though she'd gladly have traded the restless gurgling and banging of the scrolled gilt radiator for the glow of a well-banked health.
   And he was a good-looking cove, this Mick Radley, she had to admit, dressed very flash, had the tin and was generous with it, and he'd yet to demand anything peculiar or beastly. She knew it wouldn't last, as Mick was a touring gent from Manchester, and gone soon enough. But there was profit in him, and maybe more when he left her, if she made him feel sorry about it, and generous.
   Mick reclined into fat feather-pillows and slid his manicured fingers behind his spit-curled head. Silk nightshirt all frothy with lace down the front—only the best for Mick. Now he seemed to want to talk a bit. Men did, usually, after a while—about their wives, mostly.
   But for Dandy Mick, it was always politics. "So, you hate the Lordships, Sybil?"
   "Why shouldn't I?" Sybil said. "I have my reasons."
   "I should say you do," Mick said slowly, and the look he gave her then, of cool superiority, sent a shiver through her.
   "What d'ye mean by that, Mick?"
   "I know your reasons for hating the Government. I have your number."
   Surprise seeped into her, then fear. She sat up in bed. There was a taste in her mouth like cold iron.
   "You keep your card in your bag," he said. "I took that number to a rum magistrate I know. He ran it through a government Engine for me, and printed up your Bow Street file, rat-a-tat-tat, like fun." He smirked. "So I know all about you, girl. Know who you are…"
   She tried to put a bold face on it. "And who's that, then, Mr. Radley?"
   "No Sybil Jones, dearie. You're Sybil Gerard, the daughter of Walter Gerard, the Luddite agitator."
   He'd raided her hidden past.
   Machines, whirring somewhere, spinning out history.
   Now Mick watched her face, smiling at what he saw there, and she recognized a look she'd seen before, at Laurent's, when first he'd spied her across the crowded floor. A hungry look.
   Her voice shook. "How long have you known about me?"

   "Since our second night. You know I travel with the General. Like any important man, he has enemies. As his secretary and man-of-affairs, I take few chances with strangers." Mick put his cruel, deft little hand on her shoulder. "You might have been someone's agent. It was business."
   Sybil flinched away. "Spying on a helpless girl," she said at last. "You're a right bastard, you are!"
   But her foul words scarcely seemed to touch him—he was cold and hard, like a judge or a lordship. "I may spy, girl, but I use the Government's machinery for my own sweet purposes. I'm no copper's nark, to look down my nose at a revolutionary like Walter Gerard—no matter what the Rad Lords may call him now. Your father was a hero."
   He shifted on the pillow. "My hero—that was Walter Gerard. I saw him speak, on the Rights of Labour, in Manchester. He was a marvel—we all cheered till our throats was raw! The good old Hell-Cats…" Mick's smooth voice had gone sharp and flat, in a Mancunian tang. "Ever hear tell of the Hell-Cats, Sybil? In the old days?"
   "A street-gang," Sybil said. "Rough boys in Manchester."
   Mick frowned. "We was a brotherhood! A friendship youth-guild! Your father knew us well. He was our patron politician, you might say."
   "I'd prefer it if you didn't speak of my father, Mr. Radley."
   Mick shook his head at her impatiently. "When I heard they'd tried and hanged him"—the words like ice behind her ribs—"me and the lads, we took up torches and crowbars, and we ran hot and wild… That was Ned Ludd's work, girl! Years ago…" He picked delicately at the front of his nightshirt. " 'Tis not a tale I tell to many. The Government's Engines have long memories."
   She understood it now—Mick's generosity and his sweet-talk, the strange hints he'd aimed at her, of secret plans and better fortune, marked cards and hidden aces. He was pulling her strings, making her his creature. The daughter of Walter Gerard was a fancy prize, for a man like Mick.
   She pulled herself out of bed, stepping across icy floorboards in her pantalettes and chemise.
   She dug quickly, silently, through the heap of her clothing. The fringed mantelet, the jacket, the great sagging cage of her crinoline skirt. The jingling white cuirass of her corset.
   "Get back in bed," Mick said lazily. "Don't get your monkey up. 'Tis cold out there." He shook his head. " 'Tis not like you think, Sybil."
   She refused to look at him, struggling into her corset by the window, where frost-caked glass cut the upwashed glare of gaslight from the street. She cinched the corset's laces tight across her back with a quick practiced snap of her wrists.
   "Or if it is," Mick mused, watching her, " 'tis only in small degree."
   Across the street, the opera had let out—gentry in their cloaks and top-hats. Cab-horses, their backs in blankets, stamped and shivered on the black macadam. White traces of clean suburban snow still clung to the gleaming coachwork of some lordship's steam-gurney. Tarts were working the crowd. Poor wretched souls. Hard indeed to find a kind face amid those goffered shirts and diamond studs, on such a cold night. Sybil turned toward Mick, confused, angry, and very much afraid. "Who did you tell about me?"
   "Not a living soul," Mick said, "not even my friend the General. And I won't be peaching on you. Nobody's ever said Mick Radley's indiscreet. So get back in bed."
   "I shan't," Sybil said, standing straight, her bare feet freezing on the floorboards. "Sybil Jones may share your bed—but the daughter of Walter Gerard is a personage of substance!"
   Mick blinked at her, surprised. He thought it over, rubbing his narrow chin, then nodded. " 'Tis my sad loss, then. Miss Gerard." He sat up in bed and pointed at the door, with a dramatic sweep of his arm. "Put on your skirt, then, and your brass-heeled dolly-boots. Miss Gerard, and out the door with you and your substance. But 'twould be a great shame if you left. I've uses for a clever girl."
   "I should say you do, you blackguard," said Sybil, but she hesitated. He had another card to play—she could sense it in the set of his face.
   He grinned at her, his eyes slitted. "Have you ever been to Paris, Sybil?"
   "Paris?" Her breath clouded in midair.
   "Yes," he said, "the gay and the glamorous, next destination for the General, when his London lecture tour is done." Dandy Mick plucked at his lace cuffs. "What those uses are, that I mentioned, I shan't as yet say. But the General is a man of deep stratagem. And the Government of France have certain difficulties that require the help of experts… " He leered triumphantly. "But I can see that I bore you, eh?"
   Sybil shifted from foot to foot. "You'll take me to Paris, Mick," she said slowly, "and that's the true bill, no snicky humbugging?"
   "Strictly square and level. If you don't believe me, I've a ticket in my coat for the Dover ferry."
   Sybil walked to the brocade armchair in the corner, and tugged at Mick's greatcoat. She shivered uncontrollably, and slipped the greatcoat on. Fine dark wool, like being wrapped in warm money.
   "Try the right front pocket," Mick told her. "The card-case." He was amused and confident—as if it were funny that she didn't trust him. Sybil thrust her chilled hands into both pockets. Deep, plush-lined…
   Her left hand gripped a lump of hard cold metal. She drew out a nasty little pepperbox derringer. Ivory handle, intricate gleam of steel hammers and brass cartridges, small as her hand but heavy.
   "Naughty," said Mick, frowning. "Put it back, there's a girl."
   Sybil put the thing away, gently but quickly, as if it were a live crab. In the other pocket she found his card-case, red morocco leather; inside were business cards, cartes-de-visite with his Engine-stippled portrait, a London train timetable.
   And an engraved slip of stiff creamy parchment, first-class passage on the Newcomen, out of Dover.
   "You'll need two tickets, then," she hesitated, "if you really mean to take me."
   Mick nodded, conceding the point. "And another for the train from Cherbourg, too. And nothing simpler. I can wire for tickets, downstairs at the lobby desk."
   Sybil shivered again, and wrapped the coat closer. Mick laughed at her. "Don't give me that vinegar phiz. You're still thinking like a dollymop; stop it. Start thinking flash, or you'll be of no use to me. You're Mick's gal now—a high-flyer."
   She spoke slowly, reluctantly. "I've never been with any man who knew I was Sybil Gerard." That was a lie, of course—there was Egremont, the man who had mined her. Charles Egremont had known very well who she was. But Egremont no longer mattered—he lived in a different world, now, with his po-faced respectable wife, and his respectable children, and his respectable seat in Parliament.
   And Sybil hadn't been dollymopping, with Egremont. Not exactly, anyway. A matter of degree…
   She could tell that Mick was pleased at the lie she'd told him. It had flattered him.
   Mick opened a gleaming cigar-case, extracted a cheroot, and lit it in the oily flare of a repeating match, filling the room with the candied smell of cherry tobacco.
   "So now you feel a bit shy with me, do you?" he said at last. "Well, I prefer it that way. What I know, that gives me a bit more grip on you, don't it, than mere tin."
   His eyes narrowed. "It's what a cove knows that counts, ain't it, Sybil? More than land or money, more than birth. Information. Very flash."
   Sybil felt a moment of hatred for him, for his ease and confidence. Pure resentment, sharp and primal, but she crushed her feelings down. The hatred wavered, losing its purity, turning to shame. She did hate him—but only because he truly knew her. He knew how far Sybil Gerard had fallen, that she had been an educated girl, with airs and graces, as good as any gentry girl, once.
   From the days of her father's fame, from her girlhood, Sybil could remember Mick Radley's like. She knew the kind of boy that he had been. Ragged angry factory-boys, penny-a-score, who would crowd her father after his torchlight speeches, and do whatever he commanded. Rip up railroad tracks, kick the boiler-plugs out of spinning jennies, lay policemen's helmets by his feet. She and her father had fled from town to town, often by night, living in cellars, attics, anonymous rooms-to-let, hiding from the Rad police and the daggers of other conspirators. And sometimes, when his own wild speeches had filled him with a burning elation, her father would embrace her and soberly promise her the world. She would live like gentry in a green and quiet England, when King Steam was wrecked. When Byron and his Industrial Radicals were utterly destroyed…

   But a hempen rope had choked her father into silence. The Radicals ruled on and on, moving from triumph to triumph, shuffling the world like a deck of cards. And now Mick Radley was up in the world, and Sybil Gerard was down.
   She stood there silently, wrapped in Mick's coat. Paris. The promise tempted her, and when she let herself believe him, there was a thrill behind it like lightning. She forced herself to think about leaving her life in London. It was a bad, a low, a sordid life, she knew, but not entirely desperate. She still had things to lose. Her rented room in Whitechapel, and dear Toby, her cat. There was Mrs. Winterhalter, who arranged meetings between fast girls and political gentlemen. Mrs. Winterhalter was a bawd, but ladylike and steady, and her sort was difficult to find. And she would lose her two steady gentlemen, Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Kingsley, who each saw her twice a month. Steady tin, that was, and kept her from the street. But Chadwick had a jealous wife in Fulham, and, in a moment of foolishness, Sybil had stolen Kingsley's best cufflinks. She knew that he suspected.
   And neither man was half so free with his money as Dandy Mick.
   She forced herself to smile at him, as sweetly as she could. "You're a rum'un, Mick Radley. You know you've got my leading-strings. Perhaps I was vexed with you at first, but I'm not so cakey as to not know a rum gentleman when I see one."
   Mick blew smoke. "You are a clever one," he said admiringly. "You talk blarney like an angel. You're not fooling me, though, so you needn't deceive yourself. Still, you're just the gal I need. Get back in bed."
   She did as he told her.
   "Jove," he said, "your blessed feet are two lumps of ice. Why don't you wear little slippers, eh?" He tugged at her corset, with determination. "Slippers, and black silk stockings," he said. "A gal looks very flash in bed, with black silk stockings."

   From the far end of the glass-topped counter, one of Aaron's shopmen gave Sybil the cold eye, standing haughty and tall in his neat black coat and polished boots. He knew something was up—he could smell it. Sybil waited for Mick to pay, hands folded before her on her skirt, demure, but watching sidelong from beneath the blue fringe of her bonnet. Under her skirt, wadded through the frame of her crinoline, was the shawl she'd nicked while Radley tried on top-hats.
   Sybil had learned how to nick things—she'd taught herself. It simply took nerve, that was the secret. It took pluck. Look neither right nor left—just grab, lift her skirt, stuff and rustle. Then stand quite straight, with a psalm-singing look, like a gentry girl.
   The floorman had lost interest in her; he was watching a fat man fingering watered-silk braces. Sybil checked her skirt quickly. No bulge showed.
   A young spotty-faced clerk, with inkstained thumbs, set Mick's number into a counter-top credit-machine. Zip, click, a pull on the ebony-handled lever, and it was done. He gave Mick his printed purchase-slip and did the parcel up in string and crisp green paper.
   Aaron & Son would never miss a cashmere shawl. Perhaps their account-engines would, when they tallied up, but the loss couldn't hurt them; their shopping-palace was too big and too rich. All those Greek columns, chandeliers of Irish crystal, a million mirrors—room after gilded room, stuffed with rubber riding boots and French-milled soap, walking-sticks, umbrellas, cutlery, locked glass cases crammed with silver-plate and ivory brooches and lovely wind-up golden music-boxes… And this was only one of a dozen in a chain. But for all of that, she knew, Aaron's wasn't truly smart, not a gentry place.
   But couldn't you just do anything with money in England, if you were clever? Someday Mr. Aaron, a whiskery old merchant Jew from Whitechapel, would have a lordship, with a steam-gurney waiting at the curb and his own coat of arms on the coachwork. The Rad Parliament wouldn't care that Mr. Aaron was no Christian. They'd given Charles Darwin a lordship, and he said that Adam and Eve were monkeys.
   The liftman, gotten up in a Frenchified livery, drew the rattling brass gate aside for her. Mick followed her in, his parcel tucked under his arm, and then they were descending.
   They emerged from Aaron's into Whitechapel jostle. While Mick checked a street-map he took from his coat, she gazed up at the shifting letters that ran the length of Aaron's frontage. A mechanical frieze, a slow sort of kinotrope for Aaron's adverts, made all of little bits of painted wood, clicking about each in turn, behind leaded sheets of bevel-glass. CONVERT YOUR MANUAL PIANO, the jostling letters suggested, INTO A KASTNER'S PIANOLA.
   The skyline west of Whitechapel was spikey with construction cranes, stark steel skeletons painted with red lead against the damp. Older buildings were furred with scaffolding; what wasn't being torn down, it seemed, to make way for the new, was being rebuilt in its image. There was a distant huffing of excavation, and a tremulous feeling below the pavement, of vast machines cutting some new underground line.
   But now Mick turned left, without a word, and walked away, his hat cocked to one side, his checkered trouser-legs flashing under the long hem of his greatcoat. She had to hurry to match his step. A ragged boy with a numbered tin badge was sweeping mucky snow from the crossing; Mick tossed him a penny without breaking stride and headed down the lane called Butcher Row.
   She caught up and took his arm, past red and white carcasses dangling from their black iron hooks, beef and mutton and veal, and thick men in their stained aprons crying their goods. London women crowded there in scores, wicker baskets on their arms. Servants, cooks, respectable wives with men at home. A red-faced squinting butcher lurched in front of Sybil with a double handful of blue meat. "Hallo, pretty missus. Buy your gentleman my nice kidneys for pie!" Sybil ducked her head and walked around him.
   Parked barrows crowded the curb, where costers stood bellowing, their velveteen coats set off with buttons of brass or pearl. Each had his numbered badge, though fully half the numbers were slang, Mick claimed, as slang as the costers' weights and measures. There were blankets and baskets spread on neatly chalked squares on the paving, and Mick was telling her of ways the costers had to plump out shrunken fruit, and weave dead eels in with live. She smiled at the pleasure he seemed to take in knowing such things, while hawkers yelped about their brooms and soap and candles, and a scowling organ-grinder cranked, two-handed, at his symphony machine, filling the street with a fast springy racket of bells, piano-wire, and steel.
   Mick stopped beside a wooden trestle-table, kept by a squint-eyed widow in bombazine, the stump of a clay pipe protruding from her thin lips. Arrayed before her were numerous vials of some viscous-looking substance Sybil took to be a patent medicine, for each was pasted with a blue slip of paper bearing the blurred image of a savage red Indian. "And what would this be, mother?" Mick inquired, tapping one red-waxed cork with a gloved finger.
   "Rock-oil, mister," she said, relinquishing the stem of her pipe, "much as they call Barbados tar." Her drawling accent grated on the ear, but Sybil felt a pang of pity. How far the woman was from whatever outlandish place she'd once called home.
   "Really," Mick asked, "it wouldn't be Texian?"
   " 'Healthful balm,' " the widow said, " 'from Nature's secret spring, the bloom of health and life to man will bring.' Skimmed by the savage Seneca from the waters of Pennsylvania's great Oil Creek, mister. Three pennies the vial and a guaranteed cure-all." The woman was peering up at Mick now with a queer expression, her pale eyes screwed tight in nests of wrinkles, as though she might recall his face. Sybil shivered.
   "Good day to you, then, mother," Mick said, with a smile that somehow reminded Sybil of a vice detective she'd known, a sandy little man who worked Leicester Square and Soho; the Badger, the girls had called him.
   "What is it?" she asked, taking Mick's arm as he turned to go. "What is it she's selling?"
   "Rock-oil," Mick said, and she caught his sharp glance back at the hunched black figure. "The General tells me it bubbles from the ground, in Texas… "
   Sybil was curious. "Is it a proper cure-all, then?"
   "Never mind," he said, "and here's an end to chat." He was glancing bright-eyed down the lane. "I see one, and you know what to do."
   Sybil nodded, and began to pick her way through the market-crowd toward the man Mick had seen. He was a ballad-seller, lean and hollow-cheeked, his hair long and greasy under a tall hat wrapped in bright polka-dot fabric. He held both his arms bent, hands knotted as if in prayer, the sleeves of his rumpled jacket heavy with long rustling quires of sheet-music.
   " 'Railway to Heaven,' ladies and gents," the ballad-seller chanted, a veteran patterer. " 'Of truth divine the rails are made, and on the Rock of Ages laid; the rails are fixed in chains of love, firm as the throne of God above.' Lovely tune and only tuppence, miss."

   "Do you have "The Raven of San Jacinto'?" Sybil asked.
   "I can get that, I can get it," the seller said. "And what's that then?"
   "About the great battle in Texas, the great General?"
   The ballad-seller arched his brows. His eyes were blue and crazily bright, with hunger, perhaps, or religion, or gin. "One of your Crimea generals then, a Frenchy, this Mr. Jacinto?"
   "No, no," Sybil said, and gave him a pitying smile, "General Houston, Sam Houston of Texas. I do want that song, most particular."
   "I buy my publications fresh this afternoon, and I'll look for your song for you sure, miss."
   "I shall want at least five copies for my friends," Sybil said.
   "Ten pence will get you six."
   "Six, then, and this afternoon, at this very spot."
   "Just as you say, miss." "The seller touched the brim of his hat.
   Sybil walked away, into the crowd. She had done it. It was not so bad. She felt she could get used to it. Perhaps it was a good tune, too, one that people would enjoy when the balladman was forced to sell the copies.
   Mick sidled up suddenly, at her elbow.
   "Not bad," Mick allowed, reaching into the pocket of his greatcoat, like magic, to produce an apple turnover, still hot, flaking sugar and wrapped in greasy paper.
   "Thank you," she said, startled but glad, for she'd been thinking of stopping, hiding, fetching out the stolen shawl, but Mick's eyes had been on her every moment. She hadn't seen him, but he'd been watching; that was the way he was. She wouldn't forget again.
   They walked, together and apart, all down Somerset, and then through the vast market of Petticoat Lane, lit as evening drew on with a host of lights, a glow of gas-mantles, the white glare of carbide, filthy grease-lamps, tallow dips twinkling among the foodstuffs proffered from the stalls. The hubbub was deafening here, but she delighted Mick by gulling three more ballad-sellers.
   In a great bright Whitechapel gin-palace, with glittering gold-papered walls flaring with fishtail gas-jets, Sybil excused herself and found a ladies' convenience. There, safe within a reeking stall, she fetched the shawl out. So soft it was, and such a lovely violet color too, one of the strange new dyes clever people made from coal. She folded the shawl neatly, and stuffed it through the top of her corset, so it rested safe. Then out to join her keeper again, finding him seated at a table. He'd bought her a noggin of honey gin. She sat beside him.
   "You did well, girl," he said, and slid the little glass toward her. The place was full of Crimean soldiers on furlough, Irishmen, with street-drabs hanging on them, growing red-nosed and screechy on gin. No barmaids here, but big bruiser bully-rock bartenders, in white aprons, with mill-knocker clubs behind the bar.
   "Gin's a whore's drink, Mick."
   "Everybody likes gin," he said. "And you're no whore, Sybil."
   "Dollymop, bobtail." She looked at him sharply. "What else d'ye call me, then?"
   "You're with Dandy Mick now," he said. He leaned his chair back, jabbing his gloved thumbs through the arm-holes of his waistcoat. "You're an adventuress."
   "Adventuress?"
   "Bloody right." He straightened. "And here's to you." He sipped his gin-twist, rolled it over his tongue with an unhappy look, and swallowed. "Never mind, dear—they've cut this with turpentine or I'm a Jew." He stood up.
   They left. She hung on his arm, trying to slow his pace. " 'Adventurer,' that's what you are, then, eh, Mr. Mick Radley?"
   "So I am, Sybil," he said softly, "and you're to be my 'prentice. So you do as you're told in the proper humble spirit. Learn the tricks of craft. And someday you join the union, eh? The guild."
   "Like my father, eh? You want to make a play of that, Mick? Who he was, who I am?"
   "No," Mick said flatly. "He was old-fashioned, he's nobody now."
   Sybil smirked. "They let us wicked girls into this fancy guild of yours, do they, Mick?"
   "It's a knowledge guild," he said soberly. "The bosses, the big'uns, they can take all manner of things away from us. With their bloody laws and factories and courts and banks… They can make the world to their pleasure, they can take away your home and kin and even the work you do… " Mick shrugged angrily, his lean shoulders denting the heavy fabric of the greatcoat. "And even rob a hero's daughter of her virtue, if I'm not too bold in speaking of it." He pressed her hand against his sleeve, a hard, trapping grip. "But they can't ever take what you know, now can they, Sybil? They can't ever take that."

   Sybil heard Hetty's footsteps in the hall outside her room, and the rattle of Hetty's key at the door. She let the serinette die down, with a high-pitched drone.
   Hetty tugged the snow-flaked woollen bonnet from her head, shrugging free from her Navy cloak. She was another of Mrs. Winterhalter's girls, a big-boned, raucous brunette from Devon, who drank too much, but was sweet in her way, and always kind to Toby.
   Sybil folded away the china-handled crank and lowered the cheap instrument's scratched lid. "I was practicing. Mrs. Winterhalter wants me to sing next Thursday."
   "Bother the old drab," Hetty said. "Thought this was your night out with Mr. C. Or is it Mr. K.?" Hetty stamped warmth into her feet before the narrow little hearth, then noticed, in the lamplight, the scattering of shoes and hat-boxes from Aaron & Son. "My word," she said, and smiled, her broad mouth pinched a bit with envy. "New beau, is it? You're so lucky, Sybil Jones!"
   "Perhaps." Sybil sipped hot lemon-cordial, tilling her head back to relax her throat.
   Hetty winked. "Winterhalter doesn't know about this one, eh?"
   Sybil shook her head and smiled. Hetty would not tell. "D'ye know anything about Texas, Hetty?"
   "A country in America," Hetty said readily. "French own it, don't they?"
   "That's Mexico. Would you like to go to a kinotrope show, Hetty? The former President of Texas is lecturing. I've tickets, free for the taking."
   "When?"
   "Saturday."
   "I'm dancing then," Hetty said. "Perhaps Mandy would go." She blew warmth into her fingers. "Friend of mine comes by late tonight, wouldn't trouble you, would it?"
   "No," Sybil said. Mrs. Winterhalter had a strict rule against any girl keeping company with men in her room. It was a rule Hetty often ignored, as if daring the landlord to peach on her. Since Mrs. Winterhalter chose to pay the rent directly to the landlord, Mr. Cairns, Sybil seldom had call to speak to him, and less with his sullen wife, a thick-ankled woman with a taste for dreadful hats. Cairns and his wife had never informed against Hetty, though Sybil was not sure why, for Hetty's room was next to theirs, and Hetty made a shameless racket when she brought men home—foreign diplomats, mostly, men with odd accents and, to judge by the noise, beastly habits.
   "You can carry on singing if you like," Hetty said, and knelt before the ash-covered fire. "You've a fine voice. Mustn't let your gifts go to waste." She began to feed individual coals to the hearth, shivering. A dire chill seemed to enter the room then, through the cracked casement of one of the nailed-up windows, and for a strange passing moment Sybil felt a distinct presence in the air. A definite sense of observation, of eyes fixed upon her from another realm. She thought of her dead father. Learn the voice, Sybil. Learn to speak. It's all we have that can fight them, he had told her. This in the last few days before his arrest, when it was clear that the Rads had won again—clear to everyone, perhaps, save Walter Gerard. She had seen then, with heart-crushing clarity, the utter magnitude of her father's defeat. His ideals would be lost—not just misplaced but utterly expunged from history, to be crushed again and again and again, like the carcass of a mongrel dog under the racketing wheels of an express train. Learn to speak, Sybil. It's all we have…
   "Read to me?" Hetty asked. "I'll make tea."

   "Very well." In her spotty, scattered life with Hetty, reading aloud was one of the little rituals they had that passed for domesticity. Sybil took up the day's Illustrated London News from the deal table, settled her crinoline about her in the creaking, damp-smelling armchair, and squinted at a front-page article. It concerned itself with dinosaurs.
   The Rads were mad for these dinosaurs, it seemed. Here was an engraving of a party of seven, led by Lord Darwin, all peering intently at some indeterminate object embedded in a coal-face in Thuringia. Sybil read the caption aloud, showed the picture to Hetty. A bone. The thing in the coal was a monstrous bone, as long as a man was tall. She shuddered. Turning the page, she encountered an artist's view of the creature as it might have looked in life, a monstrosity with twin rows of angry triangular saw-teeth along its humped spine. It seemed the size of an elephant at least, though its evil little head was scarcely larger than a hound's.
   Hetty poured the tea. " 'Reptiles held sway across the whole of the earth,' eh?" she quoted, and threaded her needle. "I don't believe a bloody word of it."
   "Why not?"
   "They're the bones of bloody giants, out of Genesis. That's what the clergy say, ain't it?"
   Sybil said nothing. Neither supposition struck her as the more fantastic. She turned to a second article, this one in praise of Her Majesty's Artillery in the Crimea. She found an engraving of two handsome subalterns admiring the operation of a long-range gun. The gun itself, its barrel stout as a foundry stack, looked fit to make short work of all Lord Darwin's dinosaurs. Sybil's attention, however, was held by an inset view of the gunnery Engine. The intricate nest of interlocking gearwork possessed a queer beauty, like some kind of baroquely fabulous wallpaper.
   "Have you anything that needs darning?" Hetty asked.
   "No, thank you."
   "Read some adverts, then," Hetty advised. "I do hate that war humbug."
   There was HAVILAND CHINA, from Limoges, France; VIN MARIANI, the French tonic, with a testimonial from Alexandre Dumas and Descriptive Book, Portraits, and Autographs of Celebrities, upon application to the premises in Oxford Street; SILVER ELECTRO SILICON POLISH, it never scratches, never wears, it is unlike others; the "NEW DEPARTURE" BICYCLE BELL, it has a tone all its own; DR. BAYLEY'S LITHIA WATER, cures Bright's disease and the gouty diathesis; GURNEY'S "REGENT" POCKET STEAM-ENGINE, intended for use with domestic sewing machines. This last held Sybil's attention, but not through its promise to operate a machine at double the old speed at a cost of one halfpenny per hour.
   Here was an engraving of the tastefully ornamented little boiler, to be heated by gas or paraffin. Charles Egremont had purchased one of these for his wife. It came equipped with a rubber tube intended to vent the waste steam when jammed under a convenient sash-window, but Sybil had been delighted to hear that it had turned Madame's drawing-room into a Turkish bath.
   When the paper was finished, Sybil went to bed. She was woken around midnight by the savage rhythmic crouching of Hetty's bed-springs.

   It was dim in the Garrick Theatre, dusty and cold, with the pit and the balcony and the racks of shabby seats; but it was pitch-dark below the stage, where Mick Radley was, and it smelled of damp and lime.
   Mick's voice echoed up from under her feet. "Ever seen the innards of a kinotrope, Sybil?"
   "I saw one once, backstage," she said. "At a music-hall, in Bethnal Green. I knew the fellow what worked it, a clacker cove."
   "A sweetheart?" Mick asked. His echoing voice was sharp.
   "No," Sybil told him quickly, "I was singing a bit… But it scarcely paid."
   She heard the sharp click of his repeating match. It caught on the third attempt and he lit a stub of candle. "Come down," he commanded. "Don't stand there like a goose, showing off your ankles." Sybil lifted her crinoline with both hands and picked her way uneasily down the steep damp stairs.
   Mick reached up to grope behind a tall stage-mirror, a great gleaming sheet of silvered glass, with a wheeled pedestal and oily gears and worn wooden cranks. He retrieved a cheap black portmanteau of proofed canvas, placed it carefully on the floor before him, and squatted to undo the flimsy tin clasps. He removed a stack of perforated cards bound with a ribbon of red paper. There were other bundles in the bag as well, Sybil saw, and something else, a gleam of polished wood.
   He handled the cards gently, like a Bible.
   "Safe as houses," he said. "You just disguise 'em, you see—write something stupid on the wrapper, like 'Temperance Lecture—Parts One Two Three.' Then coves never think to steal 'em, or even load them up and look." Hefting the thick block, he riffled its edge with his thumb, so that it made a sharp crisp sound, like a gambler's new deck. "I put a deal of capital in these," he said. "Weeks of work from the best kino hands in Manchester. Exclusively to my design, I might point out. 'Tis a lovely thing, girl. Quite artistic, in its way. You'll soon see."
   Closing the portmanteau, he stood. He carefully slid the bundle of cards into his coat-pocket, then bent over a crate and tugged out a thick glass tube. He blew dust from the tube, then gripped one end of it with a special pair of pincers. The glass cracked open with an airtight pop—there was a fresh block of lime in the tube. Mick slid it loose, humming to himself. He tamped the lime gently into the socket of a limelight burner, a great dish-shaped thing of sooty iron and gleaming tin. Then he turned a hose-tap, sniffed a bit, nodded, turned a second tap, and set the candle to it.
   Sybil yelped as a vicious flash sheeted into her eyes. Mick chuckled at her over the hiss of blazing gas, dots of hot blue dazzle drifting before her. "Better," he remarked. He aimed the blazing limelight carefully into the stage-mirror, then began to adjust its cranks.
   Sybil looked around, blinking. It was dank and ratty and cramped under the Garrick stage, the sort of place a dog or a pauper might die in, with torn and yellowed bills underfoot, for naughty farces like That Rascal Jack and Scamps of London. A pair of ladies' unmentionables were wadded in a corner. From her brief unhappy days as a stage-singer, she had some idea how they might have gotten there.
   She let her gaze follow steam-pipes and taut wires to the gleam of the Babbage Engine, a small one, a kinotrope model, no taller than Sybil herself. Unlike everything else in the Garrick, the Engine looked in very good repair, mounted on four mahogany blocks. The floor and ceiling above and beneath it had been carefully scoured and whitewashed. Steam-calculators were delicate things, temperamental, so she'd heard; better not to own one than not cherish it. In the stray glare from Mick's limelight, dozens of knobbed brass columns gleamed, set top and bottom into solid sockets bored through polished plates, with shining levers, ratchets, a thousand steel gears cut bright and fine. It smelled of linseed oil.
   Looking at it, this close, this long, made Sybil feel quite odd. Hungry almost, or greedy in a queer way, the way she might feel about… a fine lovely horse, say. She wanted—not to own it exactly, but possess it somehow…
   Mick took her elbow suddenly, from behind. She started. "Lovely thing, isn't it?"
   "Yes, it's… lovely."
   Mick still held her arm. Slowly, he put his other gloved hand against her cheek, inside her bonnet. Then he lifted her chin with his thumb, staring into her face. "It makes you feel something, doesn't it?"
   His rapt voice frightened her, his eyes underlit with glare. "Yes, Mick," she said obediently, quickly. "I do feel it… something."
   He tugged her bonnet loose, to hang at her neck. "You're not frightened of it, Sybil, are you? Not with Dandy Mick here, holding you. You feel a little special frisson. You'll learn to like that feeling. We'll make a clacker of you."
   "Can I do that, truly? Can a girl do that?"
   Mick laughed. "Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister's daughter, and the very Queen of Engines!" He let her go, and swung both his arms wide, coat swinging open, a showman's gesture. "Ada Byron, true friend and disciple of Babbage himself! Lord Charles Babbage, father of the Difference Engine and the Newton of our modern age!"
   She gaped at him. "But Ada Byron is a ladyship!"

   "You'd be surprised who our Lady Ada knows," Mick declared, plucking a block of cards from his pocket and peeling off its paper jacket. "Oh, not to drink tea with, among the diamond squad at her garden-parties, but Ada's what you'd call fast, in her own mathematical way… " He paused. "That's not to say that Ada is the best, you know. I know clacking coves in the Steam Intellect Society that make even Lady Ada look a bit tardy. But Ada possesses genius. D'ye know what that means, Sybil? To possess genius?"
   "What?" Sybil said, hating the giddy surety in his voice.
   "D'ye know how analytical geometry was born? Fellow named Descartes, watching a fly on the ceiling. A million fellows before him had watched flies on the ceiling, but it took Ren6 Descartes to make a science of it. Now engineers use what he discovered every day, but if it weren't for him we'd still be blind to it."
   "What do flies matter to anyone?" Sybil demanded.
   "Ada had an insight once that ranked with Descartes' discovery. No one has found a use for it as yet. It's what they call pure mathematics." Mick laughed. " 'Pure.' You know what that means, Sybil? It means they can't get it to run." He rubbed his hands together, grinning. "No one can get it to run."
   Mick's glee was wearing at her nerves. "I thought you hated lordships!"
   "I do hate lordly privilege, what's not earned fair and square and level," he said. "But Lady Ada lives and swears by the power of gray matter, and not her blue blood." He slotted the cards into a silvered tray by the side of the machine, then spun and caught her wrist. "Your father's dead, girl! 'Tis not that I mean to hurt you, saying it, but the Luddites are dead as cold ashes. Oh, we marched and ranted, for the rights of labor and such—fine talk, girl! But Lord Charles Babbage made blueprints while we made pamphlets. And his blueprints built this world."
   Mick shook his head. "The Byron men, the Babbage men, the Industrial Radicals, they own Great Britain! They own us, girl—the very globe is at their feet, Europe, America, everywhere. The House of Lords is packed top to bottom with Rads. Queen Victoria won't stir a finger without a nod from the savants and capitalists." He pointed at her. "And it's no use fighting that anymore, and you know why? 'Cause the Rads do play fair, or fair enough to manage—and you can become one of 'em, if you're clever! You can't get clever men to fight such a system, as it makes too much sense to 'em."
   Mick thumbed his chest. "But that don't mean that you and I are out in the cold and lonely. It only means we have to think faster, with our eyes peeled and our ears open… " Mick struck a prize-fighter's pose: elbows bent, fists poised, knuckles up before his face. Then he flung his hair back, and grinned at her.
   "That's all very well for you," Sybil protested. "You can do as you like. You were one of my father's followers—well, there were many such, and some are in Parliament now. But fallen women get mined, d'ye see? Ruined, and stay that way."
   Mick straightened, frowning at her. "Now that's exactly what I mean. You're running with the flash mob, now, but thinking like a trollop! There's no one knows who you are, in Paris! The cops and bosses have your number here, true enough! But numbers are only that, and your file's no more than a simple stack of cards. For them as know, there's ways to change a number." He sneered, to see her surprise. "It ain't done easy, here in London, I grant you. But affairs run differently, in the Paris of Louis Napoleon! Affairs run fast and loose in flash Paree, especially for an adventuress with a blarney tongue and a pretty ankle."
   Sybil bit her knuckle. Her eyes burned suddenly. It was acrid smoke from the limelight, and fear. A new number in the Government's machines—that would mean a new life. A life without a past. The unexpected thought of such freedom terrified her. Not so much for what it meant in itself, though that was strange and dazzling enough. But for what Mick Radley might demand for such a thing, in fair exchange. "Truly, you could change my number?"
   "I can buy you a new one in Paris. Pass you off for French or an Argie or an American refugee girl." Mick folded his elegant arms. "I promise nothing, mind you. You'll have to earn it."
   "You wouldn't gull me, Mick?" she said slowly. "Because… because I could be really and specially sweet to a fellow who could do me such a great service."
   Mick jammed his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels, looking at her. "Could you now," he said softly. Her trembling words had fanned something inside him, she could see it in his eyes. An eager, lustful kindling, something she dimly knew was there, a need he had, to… slip his fishhooks deeper into her.
   "I could, if you treated me fair and level, as your 'prentice adventuress, and not some cakey dollymop, to gull and cast aside." Sybil felt tears coming, harder this time. She blinked, and looked up boldly, and let them flow, thinking perhaps they might do some good. "You wouldn't raise my hopes and dash them, would you? That would be low and cruel! If you did that I'd—I'd jump off Tower Bridge!"
   He looked her in the eye. "Bar that sniffling, girl, and listen close to me. Understand this. You're not just Mick's pretty bit o' muslin—I may have a taste for that same as any man, but I can get that where I like, and don't need you just for that. I need the blarney skill and the daring pluck that was Mr. Walter Gerard's. You're to be my 'prentice, Sybil, and I your master, and let that be how things stand with us. You'll be loyal, obedient, truthful to me, no subterfuge and no impertinence, and in return, I'll teach you craft, and keep you well—and you'll find me as kind and generous as you are loyal and true. Do I make myself clear?"
   "Yes, Mick."
   "We have a pact, then?"
   "Yes, Mick." She smiled at him.
   "Well and good," he said. "Then kneel, here, and put your hands together, so"—he joined his hands in prayer—"and make this oath. That you, Sybil Gerard, do swear by saints and angels, by powers, dominions, and thrones, by seraphim and cherubim and the all-seeing eye, to obey Michael Radley, and serve him faithfully, so help you God! Do you so swear?"
   She stared at him in dismay. "Must I really?"
   "Yes."
   "But isn't it a great sin, to make such an oath, to a man who… I mean to say… we're not in holy wedlock…"
   "That's a marriage vow," he said impatiently, "and this a 'prentice oath!"
   She saw no alternative. Tugging her skirts back, she knelt before him on cold gritty stone.
   "Do you so swear?"
   "I do, so help me God."
   "Don't look so glum," he said, helping her to her feet, "that's a mild and womanly oath you swore, compared to some." He pulled her to her feet. "Let it brace you, should you have doubts or disloyal thoughts. Now take this"—he handed her the guttering candle—"and hunt up that gin-soak of a stage-manager, and tell him I want the boilers fired."

   They dined that evening in the Argyll Rooms, a Haymarket resort not far from Laurent's Dancing Academy. The Argyll had private supper-rooms in which the indiscreet might spend an entire night.
   Sybil was mystified by the choice of a private room. Mick was certainly not ashamed to be seen with her in public. Midway through the lamb, however, the waiter admitted a stout little gentleman with pomaded red hair and a gold chain across a taut velvet waistcoat. He was round and plush as a child's doll.
   "Hullo, Corny, " Mick said, without bothering to put down his knife and fork.
   "Evening, Mick," the man said, with the curiously un-placeable accent of an actor, or a provincial long in service to city gently. "I was told you'd need of me."
   "And told correctly. Corny." Mick neither offered to introduce Sybil nor asked the man to sit. She began to feel quite uncomfortable. " 'Tis a brief part, so you should have little trouble remembering your lines." Mick produced a plain envelope from his coat and handed it to the man. "Your lines, your cue, and your retainer. The Garrick, Saturday night."
   The man smiled mirthlessly as he accepted the envelope. "Quite some time since I played the Garrick, Mick." He winked at Sybil and took his leave with no more formality than that.

   "Who's that, Mick?" Sybil asked. Mick had returned to his lamb and was spooning mint sauce from a pewter serving-pot.
   "An actor of parts," Mick said. "He'll play opposite you in the Garrick, during Houston's speech."
   Sybil was baffled. "Play? Opposite me?"
   "You're a 'prentice adventuress, don't forget. You can expect to be called on to play many roles, Sybil. A political speech can always benefit from a bit of sweetening."
   "Sweetening?"
   "Never mind." He seemed to lose interest in his lamb, and pushed his plate aside. "Plenty of time for rehearsal tomorrow. I've something to show you now." He rose from the table, crossed to the door, and bolted it securely. Returning, he lifted the proofed canvas portmanteau from the carpet beside his chair and placed it before her on the Argyll's clean but much mended linen.
   She'd been curious about the portmanteau. Not curious that he'd carried it with him, from the Garrick's pit, first to the printers, to examine the handbills for Houston's lecture, then on to the Argyll Rooms, but because it was of such cheap stuff, nothing at all like the gear he so obviously prided himself on. Why should Dandy Mick choose to carry about a bag of that sort, when he could afford some flash confection from Aaron's, nickel clasps and silk woven in Ada checkers? And she knew that the black bag no longer contained the kino cards for the lecture, because he'd wrapped those carefully in sheets of The Times and hidden them again behind the stage-mirror.
   Mick undid the wretched tin clasps, opened the bag, and lifted out a long narrow case of polished rosewood, its corners trimmed with bright brass. Sybil wondered if it mightn't contain a telescope, for she'd seen boxes of this sort in the window of a firm of Oxford Street instrument-makers. Mick handled it with a caution that was very nearly comical, like some Papist called upon to move the dust of a dead Pope. Caught up in a sudden mood of childlike anticipation, she forgot the man called Corny and Mick's worrying talk about playing opposite him at the Garrick. There was something of the magician about Mick now, as he placed the gleaming rosewood case on the tablecloth. She almost expected him to furl back his cuffs: nothing here, you see, nothing here.
   His thumbs swung tiny brass hooks from a pair of miniature eyelets. He paused for effect.
   Sybil found that she was holding her breath. Had he brought a gift for her? Some token of her new status? Something to secretly mark her as his 'prentice adventuress?
   Mick lifted the rosewood lid, with its sharp brass corners.
   It was filled with playing cards. Stuffed end to end with them, a score of decks at the least. Sybil's heart fell.
   "You've seen nothing like this before," he said. "I can assure you of that."
   Mick pinched out the card nearest his right hand and displayed it for her. No, not a playing card, though near enough in size. It was made of some strange milky substance that was neither paper nor glass, very thin and glossy. Mick flexed it lightly between thumb and forefinger. It bent easily, but sprang rigid again as he released it.
   It was perforated with perhaps three dozen tightly spaced rows of circular holes, holes no larger than those in a good pearl button. Three of its corners were slightly rounded, while the fourth was trimmed off at an angle. Near the trimmed corner, someone had written "#I" in faint mauve ink.
   "Camphorated cellulose," Mick declared, "the devil's own stuff, should it touch fire, but naught else will serve the finer functions of the Napoleon."
   Napoleon? Sybil was lost. "Is it a sort of kino card, Mick?"
   He beamed at her, delighted. She seemed to have said the right thing.
   "Have you never heard of the Great Napoleon ordinateur, the mightiest Engine of the French Academy? The London police Engines are mere toys beside it."
   Sybil pretended to study the contents of the box, knowing it would please Mick. But it was merely a wooden box, quite handsomely made, lined with the green baize that covered billiard tables. It contained a very large quantity of the slick milky cards, perhaps several hundred.
   "Tell me what this is about, Mick."
   He laughed, quite happily it seemed, and bent suddenly to kiss her mouth.
   "In time, in time." He straightened, reinserted the card, lowered the lid, clicked the brass hooks into place. "Every brotherhood has its mysteries. Dandy Mick's best guess is that nobody knows quite what it would mean to run this little stack. It would demonstrate a certain matter, prove a certain nested series of mathematical hypotheses… All matters quite arcane. And, by the by, it would make the name of Michael Radley shine like the very heavens in the clacking confraternity." He winked. "The French clackers have their own brotherhoods, you know. Les Fils de Vaucanson, they call themselves. The Jacquardine Society. We'll be showing those onion-eaters a thing or two."
   He seemed drunk to her, now, though she knew he'd only had those two bottled ales. No, he was intoxicated by the idea of the cards in the box, whatever they might be.
   "This box and its contents are quite extraordinarily dear, Sybil." He seated himself again and rummaged in the cheap black bag. It yielded a folded sheet of stout brown paper, an ordinary pair of stationery-shears, a roll of strong green twine. As Mick spoke, he unfolded the paper and began to wrap the box in it. "Very dear. Traveling with the General exposes a man to certain dangers. We're off to Paris after the lecture, but tomorrow morning you'll be taking this round to the Post Office in Great Portland Street." Done with wrapping, he wound twine about the paper. "Nip this for me with the shears." She did as he asked. "Now put your finger here." He executed a perfect knot. "You'll be posting our parcel to Paris. Poste restante. Do you know what that means?"
   "It means the parcel is held for the addressee."
   Mick nodded, took a stick of scarlet sealing-wax from one trouser-pocket, his repeating match from the other. The match struck on the first try. "Yes, held there in Paris for us, safe as houses." The wax darkened and slid in the oily flame. Scarlet droplets spattered the green knot, the brown paper. He tossed the shears and the roll of twine back into the portmanteau, pocketed the wax and the match, withdrew his reservoir-pen, and began to address the parcel.
   "But what is it, Mick? How can you know its value if you've no idea what it does?"
   "Now I didn't say that, did I? I've my ideas, don't I? Dandy Mick always has his ideas. I'd enough of an idea to take the original up to Manchester with me, on the General's business. I'd enough of an idea to pump the canniest clackers for their latest compression techniques, and enough of the General's capital to commission the result on Napoleon-gauge cellulose!"
   It might have been Greek, for all it meant to her.

   A knock came. An evil-looking servant boy, cropheaded and snuffling, wheeled in a trolley and cleared the plates. He made a botch of it, lingering as if expecting a gratuity, but Mick ignored him, and stared coolly into space, now and then grinning to himself like a cat.
   The boy left with a sneer. At length there came the rap of a cane against the door. A second of Mick's friends had arrived.
   This was a heavyset man of quite astonishing ugliness, pop-eyed and blue-jowled, his squat sloping forehead fringed in an oiled parody of the elegant spit-curls the Prime Minister favored. The stranger wore new and well-cut evening dress, with cloak, cane, and top-hat, a fancy pearl in his cravat and a gold Masonic ring on one finger. His face and neck were deeply sunburnt.
   Mick rose at once from his chair, shook the ringed hand, offered a seat.
   "You keep late hours, Mr. Radley," the stranger said.
   "We do what we can to accommodate your special needs, Professor Rudwick."
   The ugly gentleman settled in his chair with a sharp wooden squeak. His bulging eyes shot Sybil a speculative look then, and for one heart-leaping moment she feared the worst, that it had all been a gull and she was about to become part of some dreadful transaction between them.
   But Rudwick looked away, to Mick. "I won't conceal from you, sir, my eagerness to resume my activities in Texas." He pursed his lips. He had small, grayish, pebble-like teeth in a great slash of a mouth. "This business of playing the London social lion is a deuced bore."
   "President Houston will grant you an audience tomorrow at two, if that's agreeable."
   Rudwick grunted. "Perfectly."

   Mick nodded. "The fame of your Texian discovery seems to grow by the day, sir. I understand that Lord Babbage himself has taken an interest."
   "We have worked together at the Institute at Cambridge," Rudwick admitted, unable to hide a smirk of satisfaction. "The theory of pneumo-dynamics…"
   "As it happens," Mick remarked, "I find myself in possession of a clacking sequence that may amuse His Lordship."
   Rudwick seemed nettled by this news. "Amuse him, sir? Lord Babbage is a most… irascible man."
   "Lady Ada was kind enough to favor me in my initial efforts… "
   "Favor you?" said Rudwick, with a sudden ugly laugh. "Is it some gambling-system, then? It had best be, if you hope to catch her eye."
   "Not at all," Mick said shortly.
   "Her Ladyship chooses odd friends," Rudwick opined, with a long sullen look at Mick. "Do you know a man named Collins, a so-called oddsmaker?"
   "Haven't had the pleasure," Mick said.
   "The fellow's on her like a louse in a bitch's ear," Rudwick said, his sunburnt face flushing. "Fellow made me the most astounding proposition…"
   "And?" Mick said delicately.
   Rudwick frowned. "I did fancy you might know him, he seems the sort that might well run in your circles… "
   "No, sir."
   Rudwick leaned forward. "And what of another certain gent, Mr. Radley, very long of limb and cold of eye, who I fancy has been dogging my movements of late? Would he, perhaps, be an agent of your President Houston? Seemed to have a Texian air about him."
   "My President is fortunate in the quality of his agents."
   Rudwick stood, his face dark. "You'll be so kind, I'm sure, as to request the bastard to cease and desist."
   Mick rose as well, smiling sweetly. "I'll certainly convey your sentiments to my employer, Professor. But I fear I keep you from your night's amusements… " He walked to the door, opened it, shut it on Rudwick's broad, well-tailored back.
   Mick turned, winked at Sybil. "He's off to the ratting-pits! A very low-sporting gentleman, our learned Professor Rudwick. Speaks his bloody mind, though, don't he?" He paused. "The General will like him."

   Hours later, she woke in Grand's, in bed beside him, to the click of his match and the sweet reek of his cigar. He'd had her twice on the chaise behind their table in the Argyll Rooms, and once again in Grand's. She'd not known him to be so ardent before. She'd found it encouraging, though the third go had made her sore, down there.
   The room was dark, save for the spill of gaslight past the curtains.
   She moved a bit closer to him.
   "Where would you like to go, Sybil, after France?"
   She'd never considered the question. "With you, Mick… "
   He chuckled, and slid his hand beneath the bedclothes, his fingers closing around the mound of her womanhood.
   "Where shall we go then, Mick?"
   "Go with me and you'll go first to Mexico. Then north, for the liberation of Texas, with a Franco-Mexican army under the command of General Houston."
   "But… but isn't Texas a frightfully queer place?"
   "Quit thinking like a Whitechapel drab. All the world's queer, seen from Piccadilly. Sam Houston had himself a bloody palace, in Texas. Before the Texians threw him into exile, he was Britain's greatest ally in the American west. You and I, why, we could live like grandees in Texas, build a manor by some river… "
   "Would they truly let us do that, Mick?"
   "Her Majesty's Government, you mean? Perfidious Albion?" Mick chuckled. "Well, that largely depends on British public opinion toward General Houston! We're doing all we can to sweeten his reputation here in Britain. That's why he's on this lecture tour, isn't it?"
   "I see," Sybil said. "You're very clever, Mick."
   "Deep matters, Sybil! Balance of power. It worked for Britain in Europe for five hundred years, and it works even better in America. Union, Confederacy, Republics of Texas and California—they all take a turn in British favor, until they get too bold, a bit too independent, and then they're taken down a peg. Divide and rule, dear." The coal-end of Mick's cigar glowed in the darkness. "If it weren't for British diplomacy, British power, America might be all one huge nation."
   "What about your friend the General? Will he truly help us?"
   "That's the beauty of it!" Mick declared. "The diplomats thought Sam Houston was a bit stiff-necked, didn't care for some of his actions and policies, didn't back him as strongly as they should have. But the Texian junta that replaced him is far worse. They're openly hostile to British interests! Their days are numbered. The General has had to cool his heels a bit in exile here in England, but now he's on his way back to Texas, for what's his by right." He shrugged. "Should have happened years ago. Our trouble is that Her Majesty's Government don't know their own mind! There's factions among 'em. Some don't trust Sam Houston—but the French will help us anyhow! Their Mexican clients have a border war with the Texians. They need the General!"
   "You're going to war, then, Mick?" She found it difficult to imagine Dandy Mick leading a cavalry charge.
   "Coup d'etat, more like," he assured her. "We won't see much bloodshed. I'm Houston's political man, you see, and his man I'll stay, for I'm the one's arranged this London speaking-tour, and on to France, and I'm the one's made certain approaches as resulted in him being granted his audience with the French Emperor… " But could that be true, really? "And I'm the one as runs Manchester's newest and best through the kino for him, sweetens the press and British public opinion, hires the bill-stickers… " He drew on his cigar, his fingers kneading her there, and she heard him puff out a great satisfied cloud of cherry smoke.
   But he mustn't have felt like doing it again, not then, because she was soon asleep and dreaming, dreaming of Texas, a Texas of rolling downs, contented sheep, the windows of gray manors glinting in late-afternoon sunlight.

   Sybil sat in an aisle seat, third row back in the Garrick, thinking unhappily that General Sam Houston, late of Texas, was not drawing much of a crowd. People were filtering in as the five-man orchestra squeaked and sawed and honked. A family party was settling in the row before her, two boys, in bluejackets and trousers, with laid-down shirt-collars, a little girl in a shawl and a braided frock, then two more little girls, ushered in by their governess, a thin-looking sort with a hooked nose and watery eyes, sniffling into her handkerchief. Then the oldest boy, sauntering in, a sneer on his face. Then papa with dress-coat and cane and whiskers, and fat mama with long ringlets and a big nasty hat and three gold rings on her plump soft fingers. Finally all were seated, amid a shuffling of coats and shawls and a munching of candied orange-peel, quite patently well-behaved and expecting improvement. Clean and soaped and prosperous, in their snug machine-made clothes.
   A clerky fellow with spectacles took the next seat to Sybil's, an inch-wide blue strip showing at his hairline, where he'd shaved his forehead to suggest intellect. He was reading Mick's program and sucking an acidulated lemon-drop. And past him a trio of officers, on furlough from the Crimea, looking very pleased with themselves, come to hear about an old-fashioned war in Texas, fought the old-fashioned way. There were other soldiers speckled through the crowd, bright in their red coats, the respectable sort, who didn't go for drabs and gin, but would take the Queen's pay, and learn gunnery arithmetic, and come back to work in the railroads and shipyards, and better themselves.
   The place was full of bettering-blokes, really: shopkeepers and store-clerks and druggists, with their tidy wives and broods. In her father's day, such people, Whitechapel people, had been angry and lean and shabby, with sticks in their hands, and dirks in their belts. But times had changed under the Rads, and now even Whitechapel had its tight-laced scrubfaced women and its cakey clock-watching men, who read the 'Dictionary of Useful Knowledge' and the 'Journal of Moral Improvement', and looked to get ahead.
   Then the gas-lights guttered in their copper rings, and the orchestra swung into a flat rendition of "Come to the Bower." With a huff, the limelight flared, the curtain drew back before the kinotrope screen, the music covering the clicking of kino-bits spinning themselves into place. Broken frills and furbelows grew like black frost on the edges of the screen. They framed tall letters, in a fancy alphabet of sharp-edged Engine-Gothic, black against white:

   Editions
   Panoptique
   Presents

   And below the kinotrope, Houston entered stage-left, a bulky, shabby figure, limping toward the podium at the center of the stage. He was drowned in dimness for the moment, below the raw and focused glare of Mick's limelight.
   Sybil watched him closely, curious about him, wary—her first glimpse of Mick's employer. She'd seen enough American refugees in London to have ideas about them. The Unionists dressed much like normal Britons, if they had the money for it, while Confederates tended to dress rather gaudy and flash, but peculiar, not quite proper; to judge by Houston, the Texians were an even queerer and madder lot. He was a big man, red-faced and beefy, over six feet tall in his heavy boots, his broad shoulders draped in a long coarse-woven blanket rather like a mantelet, but barbarically striped. Red and black and umber, it swept the Garrick's stage like a tragedian's toga. He had a thick mahogany cane in his right hand, and he swung it lightly now, as if he didn't need it, but his legs shook, Sybil saw, and the gold fringe trembled on the fancy seams of his trousers.
   Now he mounted to the darkened podium, wiped his nose, sipped at a glass of something that plainly wasn't water. Above his head the kinotrope shuffled into a colored image, the lion of Great Britain and a sort of long-horned bull. The animals fraternized beneath small crossed banners, the Union Jack and the single-starred flag of Texas, both bright in red and white and blue. Houston was adjusting something behind his podium; a small stage-mirror, Sybil guessed, so he could check the kinotrope behind him as he spoke, and not lose his place.
   The kinotrope went to black and white again, the screen's bits flickering, row by row, like falling dominoes. A portrait-bust appeared in shaded jagged lines: high balding forehead, heavy brows, thick nose bracketed by bristling cheek-whiskers that hid the ears. The thin mouth was set firmly, the cleft chin upraised. Then, below the bust, the words GENERAL SAM HOUSTON.
   A second limelight flared, catching Houston at the podium, flinging him into sudden bright relief before the audience. Sybil clapped hard. She was the last to finish.
   "Thank you very kindly, ladies and gentlemen of London," Houston said. He had the deep booming voice of a practiced orator, marred by a foreign drawl. "You do a stranger great honor." Houston looked across the seats of the Garrick. "I see we have many gentlemen of Her Majesty's military in the audience tonight." He shrugged the blanket back a bit and limelight glittered harshly from the medals clinging to his coat. "Your professional interest is very gratifying, sirs."
   In the row before Sybil, the children were fidgeting. A little girl squealed in pain as one of her brothers punched her. "And I see we have a future British fighter here, as well!" There was a ripple of surprised laughter. Houston checked his mirror quickly, then leaned over his podium, his heavy brows knitting in grandfatherly charm. "What's your name, son?"
   The wicked boy sat bolt upright. "Billy, sir," he squeaked. "Billy… William Greenacre, sir."
   Houston nodded gravely. "Tell me, Master Greenacre, would you like to run away from home, and live with red Indians?"
   "Oh, yes, sir," the boy blurted, and then "Oh, no, sir!" The audience laughed again.
   "When I was about your age, young William, I was a lad of spirit, like yourself. And that was the very course of action I pursued." The kino shuffled behind the General's head, and a colored map appeared, outlines of the various states of America, oddly shaped provinces with confusing names. Houston checked his mirror and spoke rapidly. "I was born in the American state of Tennessee. My family was of the Scottish gentry, though times were hard for us, on our little frontier farm. And though I was born an American, I felt little allegiance to the Yankee government in far Washington." The kinotrope displayed the portrait of an American savage, a mad-eyed staring creature hung with feathers, cheeks streaked with kino-blocks of warpaint. "Just across the river," Houston said, "lived the mighty nation of the Cherokee, a simple folk of natural nobility. I found this suited me far better than a life with my American neighbors. Alas, for their souls were pinched by the greed for dollars."
   Houston shook his head a bit before his British audience, pained at his own allusion to an American national failing. He had their sympathy, Sybil thought. "The Cherokees won my heart," Houston continued, "and I ran from home to join them, with nothing, ladies and gentlemen, but the buckskin coat on my back, and Homer's noble tale of the Iliad in my pocket." The kinotrope shuffled itself bottom-to-top, producing an image from a Grecian urn, a warrior with a crested helmet, his spear upraised. He bore a round shield with the emblem of a raven, wings outspread. There was a light pattering of impressed applause, which Houston accepted, nodding modestly, as if it were meant for him.
   "As a child of the American frontier," he said, "I can't claim to have had much fine schooling, although in later life I passed the bar and led a nation. As a youth, however, I sought my education in an ancient school. I committed every line of the blind bard's book to memory." He lifted the medal-strewn lapel of his coat, left-handed. "The heart within this scarred breast," he said, and thumped it, "still stirs to that noblest of stories, with its tales of a valor to challenge the very gods, and of unstained martial honor that endures… till death!" He waited for applause. At length it came, though not as warmly as he seemed to expect.
   "I saw no contradiction in the lives of Homer's heroes and those of my beloved Cherokees," Houston persisted. Behind him, the Greek's javelin sprouted the dangling feathers of a hunting-spear, and war-paint daubed his face.
   Houston peered at his notes. "Together we hunted bear and deer and boar, fished the limpid stream and raised the yellow corn. Around the campfire, under open skies, I told my savage brothers of the moral lessons that my youthful heart had gleaned from Homer's words. Because of this, they gave me the red-man's name of Raven, after the feathered spirit that they deem the wisest of birds."
   The Greek dissolved, giving way to a grander raven, its wings spread stiffly across the screen, its chest covered by a striped shield. Sybil recognized it. It was the American eagle, symbol of the sundered Union, but the white-headed Yankee bird had become Houston's black crow. It was clever, she decided, perhaps more clever than it was worth, for two of the kinotrope bits in the screen's upper-left-corner had jammed on their spindles, showing dots of left-over blue; a tiny fault but annoying all out of proportion, like a bit of dust in one's eye. Mick's fancy clacking was working the Garrick's kino very hard.
   Distracted, Sybil had lost the thread of Houston's speech. "… the brazen cry of the battle-trumpet, in the camp of the Tennessee volunteers." Another kino-portrait appeared: a man who looked rather like Houston, but with a tall shock of hair in front, and hollow cheeks, identified by caption as GEN. ANDREW JACKSON.
   There was a hiss of breath here and there, led by the soldiers perhaps, and the crowd stirred. Some Britons still remembered "Hickory" Jackson, without fondness. To hear Houston tell it, Jackson had also bravely fought against Indians, and even been President of America for a time; but all that meant little here. Houston praised Jackson as his patron and mentor, "an honest soldier of the people, who valued a man's true inner worth above the tinsel of wealth or show," but the applause for this sentiment was grudging at best.
   Now another scene appeared, some kind of rude frontier fort. Houston narrated a tale of siege, from his early military career, when he'd fought a campaign under Jackson against the Indians called Creek. But he seemed to have lost his natural audience, the soldiers, for the three Crimea veterans in Sybil's row were still muttering angrily about Hickory Jackson. "The damned war was over before New Orleans… "
   Suddenly the limelight flashed blood-red. Mick was busy beneath the stage: a tinted glass filter, the sudden booming of a kettle-drum, as little kino cannons cracked gunpowder-white around the fort, and single-bit flickers of red cannon-shell arched rapidly across the screen. "Night after night we heard the Creek fanatics howling their eerie death-songs," Houston shouted, a pillar of glare beneath the screen. "The situation demanded a direct assault, with cold steel! It was said to be certain death to charge that gate… But I was not a Tennessee Volunteer for nothing… "
   A tiny figure dashed toward the fort, no more than a few black squares, a wriggling block of bits, and the entire stage went black. There was surprised applause in the sudden darkness. The penny-boys up in the Garrick's gallery whistled shrilly. Then limelight framed Houston again. He began to boast about his wounds; two bullets in the arm, a knife-stab in the leg, an arrow into his belly—Houston didn't say the vulgar word, but he did rub that area lingeringly, as if he were dyspeptic. He'd lain all night on the battlefield, he claimed, and then been hauled for days through wilderness, on a supply cart, bleeding, raving, sick with swamp-fever…
   The clerky cove next to Sybil took another lemon-drop, and looked at his pocket-watch. Now a five-pointed star appeared slowly amidst the funereal black of the screen, as Houston narrated his lingering escape from the grave. One of the jammed kino-bits had popped loose again, but another had jammed in the meantime, on the lower right. Sybil stifled a yawn.
   The star brightened slowly as Houston spoke about his entry into American politics, presenting as his motive the desire to help his persecuted pet Cherokees. This was exotic enough, Sybil thought, but at its heart lay the same snicky humbugging politicians always talked, and the audience was growing restive. They would have liked more fighting, or perhaps more poetic talk about life with the Cherokees. Instead, Houston had settled into a litany of his election to some rude equivalent of Parliament, various obscure posts in provincial government, and all the while the star grew slowly, its edges branching elaborately, becoming the emblem of the government of Tennessee.
   Sybil's eyelids grew heavy, fluttered, while the General blustered on.