Homunculus (2 page)

The gondola righted itself, the moon vanished beyond rooftops, and the dirigible had passed, humming inexorably along toward east London. For the missionary, the issuance of the blimp was an omen, the handwriting on the wall, an even surer sign of coming doom than would have been the appearance of a comet. Business picked up considerably, a round dozen converts having been reaped by the time the sun hoisted itself into the eastern sky.

It was with the dawn that the blimp was sighted over Billingsgate. The weathered gondola creaked in the wind like the hull of a ship tossing on slow swells, and its weird occupant, secured to the wooden shell of his strange swaying aerie like a barnacle to a wave-washed rock, stared sightlessly down on fishmongers’ carts and bummarees and creeping handbarrows filled with baskets of shellfish and eels, the wind whirling the smell of it all east down Lower Thames Street, bathing the Custom House and the Tower in the odor of seaweed and salt spray and tidal flats. A squid seller, plucking off his cap and squinting into the dawn, shook his head sadly at the blimp’s passing, touched two fingers to his forehead as if to salute the strange pilot, and turned back to hawking and rubbery, doleful-eyed occupants of his basket, three to the penny.

Petticoat Lane was far too active to much acknowledge the strange craft, which, illuminated by the sun now rather than the reflected light of the new moon, had lost something of its mystery and portent. Heads turned, people pointed, but the only man to take to his heels and run was a tweed-coated man of science. He had been haggling with a seller of gyroscopes and abandoned shoes about the coster’s supposed knowledge of a crystal egg, spirited away from a curiosity shop near Seven Dials and rumored to be a window through which, if the egg were held just so in the sunlight, an observer with the right sort of eyesight could behold a butterfly-haunted landscape on the edges of a Martian city of pink stone, rising above a broad grassy lawn and winding placid canals. The gyroscope seller had shrugged. He could do little to help. To be sure, he’d heard rumors of its appearance somewhere in the West End, sold and resold for fabulous sums. Had the guv’nor that sort of sum? And a man of science needed a good gyroscope, after all, to demonstrate and study the laws of gravity, stability, balance, and spin. But Langdon St. Ives had shaken his head. He required no gyroscope; and yes, he did have certain sums, some little bit of which he’d gladly part with for real knowledge.

But the hum of the blimp and the shouts of the crowd brought him up short then, and in a trice he was pounding down Middlesex Street shouting for a hansom cab, and then craning his neck to peer up out of the cab window as it rattled away east, following the slow wake of the blimp out East India Dock Road, losing it finally as it rose on an updraft and was swallowed by a white bank of clouds that fell away toward Gravesend.

ONE

THE WEST END

O
n April 4 of the year 1875 - thirty-four centuries to the day since Elijah’s flight away to the stars in the supposed flaming chariot, and well over eighty years after the questionable pronouncement that Joanna Southcote suffered from dropsy rather than from the immaculate conception of the new messiah - Langdon St. Ives stood in the rainy night in Leicester Square and tried without success to light a damp cigar. He looked away up Charing Cross Road, squinting under the brim of a soggy felt hat and watching for the approach of - someone. He wasn’t sure who. He felt foolish in the top shoes and striped trousers he’d been obliged to wear to a dinner with the secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In his own laboratory in Harrogate he wasn’t required to posture about in stylish clothes. The cigar was beginning to become irritating, but it was the only one he had, and he was damned if he’d let it get the best of him. He alternately cursed the cigar and the drizzle. This last had been falling -hovering, rather - for hours, and it confounded St. Ives’ wish that it either rain outright or give up the pretense and go home.

There was no room in the world of science for mediocrity, for half measures, for wet cigars. He finally pitched it over his shoulder into an alley, patted his overcoat to see if the packet beneath was still there, and had a look at his pocket watch. It was just shy of nine o’clock. The crumpled message in his hand, neatly blocked out in handwriting that smacked of the draftsman, promised a rendezvous at eight-thirty.

“Thank you, sir,” came a startling voice from behind him. “But I don’t smoke. Haven’t in years.” St. Ives spun round, nearly knocking into a gentleman under a newspaper who hurried along the cobbles. But it wasn’t he who had spoken. Beyond, slouching out of the mouth of an alley, was a bent man with a frazzle of damp hair protruding from the perimeter of a wrecked Leibnitz cap. His extended hand held St. Ives’ discarded cigar as if it were a fountain pen. “Makes me bilious,” he was saying. “Vapors, it is. They say it’s a thing a man gets used to, like shellfish or tripe. But they’re wrong about it. Leastways they’re wrong when it comes to old Bill Kraken. But you’ve got a dead good aim, sir, if I do say so myself. Struck me square in the chest. Had it been a snake or a newt, I’d have been a sorry Kraken. But it weren’t. It were a cigar.”

“Kraken!” cried St. Ives, genuinely astonished and taking the proffered cigar. “Owlesby’s Kraken is it?”

“The very one, sir. It’s been a while” And with that, Kraken peered behind him down the alley, the mysteries of which were hidden in impenetrable darkness and mist.

In Kraken’s left hand was an oval pot with a swing handle, the pot swaddled in a length of cloth, as if Kraken carried the head of a Hindu. Around his neck was a small closed basket, which, St. Ives guessed, held salt, pepper, and vinegar. “A pea man, are you now?” asked St. Ives, eyeing the pot. Standing in the night air had made him ravenous.

“Aye, sir,” replied Kraken, shaking his head. “By night I am, usually up around Cheapside and Leadenhall. I’d offer you a pod, sir, but they’ve gone stone cold in the walk.”

A door banged shut somewhere up the alley behind them, and Kraken cupped a hand to his ear to listen. There was another bang followed close on by a clap of thunder. People hurried past, huddled and scampering for cover as a wash of rain, granting St. Ives’ wish, swept across the square. It was a despicable night, St. Ives decided. Some hot peas would have been nice. He nodded at Kraken and the two men hunched away, sloshing through puddles and rills and into the door of the Old Shades, just as the sky seemed to crack in half like a China plate and drop an ocean of rain in one enormous sheet. They stood in the doorway and watched.

“They say it rains like that every day down on the equator,” said Kraken, pulling off his cap.

“Do they?” St. Ives hung his coat on a hook and unwound his muffler. “Any place special on the equator?”

“Along the whole bit of it,” said Kraken. “It’s a sort of belt, you see, that girds us round. Holds the whole heap together, if you follow me. It’s complicated. We’re spinning like a top, you know.”

“That’s right,” said St. Ives, peering through the tobacco cloud toward the bar, where a fat man poked bangers with a fork. Lazy smoke curled up from the sausages and mingled with that of dozens of pipes and cigars. St. Ives was faint. Nothing sounded as good to him as bangers. Damn pea pods. He’d sell his soul for a banger, sell his spacecraft even, sitting four-fifths built in Harrogate.

“Now the earth ain’t nothing but bits and pieces, you know, shoved in together.” Kraken followed St. Ives along a trail of sausage smoke toward the bar, crossing his arms in front of his pot. “And think of what would come of it if you just set the whole mess aspin. Like a top, you know, as I said.”

“Confusion” said St. Ives. “Utter confusion”

“That’s the very thing. It would all go to smash. Fly to bits. Straightaway. Mountains would sail off. Oceans would disappear. Fish and such would shoot away into the sky like Chinese rockets. And what of you and me? What of us?”

“Bangers and mash for my friend and me” said St. Ives to the publican, who looked at Kraken’s peapot with disfavor. “And two pints of Newcastle.” The man’s face was enormous, like the moon.

“What of us, is what I want to know. It’s a little-known fact”

“What is?” asked St. Ives, watching the moon-faced man spearing up bangers, slowly and methodically with pudgy little fingers, almost sausages themselves.

“It’s a little-known fact that the equator, you see, is a belt - not cowhide, mind you, but what the doctor called elemental twines. Them, with the latitudes, is what binds this earth of ours. It isn’t as tight as it might be, though, which is good because of averting suffocation. The tides show this - thank you, sir; God bless you -when they go heaving off east and west, running up against these belts, so to speak. And lucky it is for us, sir, as I said, or the ocean would just slide off into the heavens. By God, sir, this is first-rate bangers, isn’t it?”

St. Ives nodded, licking grease from his fingertips. He washed a mouthful of the dark sausage down with a draught of ale. “Got all this from Owlesby, did you?”

“Only bits, sir. I do some reading on my own. The lesser-known works, mostly”

“Whose?”

“Oh, I ain’t particular, sir. Not Bill Kraken. All books is good books. And ideas, if you follow me, facts that is, are like beans in a bottle. There’s only so many of them. The earth ain’t but so many miles across. I aim to have a taste of them all, and science is where I launched out, so to speak.”

“That’s where I launched out too,” said St. Ives. “I’ll just have another pint. Join me?”

Kraken yanked a faceless pocket watch out of his coat and squinted at it before nodding. St. Ives winked and pushed away once more toward the bar. It was an hour yet before closing. A tramp in rags sidled from table to table, uncovering at each the stump of a recently severed thumb. A man in evening clothes lay on the floor, straight out on his side, his nose pressed against a wall, and three stools, occupied by his sodden young friends, propped him up there as if he were a corpse long gone in rigor mortis. There was an even cacophony of sounds, of laughter and clanking dishes and innumerable conversations punctuated at intervals by a loud, tubercular cough. More floor was covered by shoe soles and table legs than was bare, and that which was left over was scattered with sawdust and newspaper and scraps of food. St. Ives mashed the end of a banger beneath his heel as he edged past two tables full of singing men - seafaring men from the look of them.

Kraken appeared to be half asleep when minutes later St. Ives set the two pint glasses on the tabletop. The pleasant and solid clank of the full glasses seemed to revive him. Kraken set his peapot between his feet. “It’s been a while, sir, hasn’t it?”

“Fourteen years, is it?”

“Fifteen, sir. A month before the tragedy, it was. You wasn’t much older’n a bug, if I ain’t out of line to say so.” He paused to drink off half the pint. “Them was troublesome times, sir. Troublesome times. I ain’t told a soul about most of it. Can’t. I’ve cheated myself of the hereafter; I can’t afford Newgate”

“Surely nothing as bad as that…” began St. Ives, but he was cut short by Kraken, who waved broadly and shook his head, falling momentarily silent.

“There was the business of the carp,” he said, looking over his shoulder as if he feared that a constable might at that moment be slipping up behind. “You don’t remember it. But it was in the
Times,
and Scotland Yard even had a go at it. And come close, too, by God! There’s a little what-do-you-call-it, a gland or something, full of elixir. I drove the wagon. Dead of night in midsummer, and hot as a pistol barrel. We got out of the aquarium with around a half-dozen, long as your arm, and Sebastian cut the beggars up not fifty feet down Baker Street, on the run but neat as a pin. We gave the carps to a beggar woman on Old Pye, and she sold the lot at Billingsgate. So good come of it in the end.

“But the carp affair was the least of it. I’m ashamed to say more. And it wouldn’t be right to let on that Sebastian was behind the worst. Not by a sea mile. It was the other one. I’ve seen him more than once over the fence at Westminster Cemetery, and late at night too, him in a dogcart on the road and me and Tooey Short with spades in our hand. Tooey died in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, screaming mad, half his face scaled like a fish”