Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (10 page)

Monty had promised improvements on the clockwork Grinder by the following Sunday, and he made good on it. Since we no longer had to beg all day long, we children of Saint Aggie's had time in plenty, and Monty had no shortage of skilled volunteers who wanted to work with him on Grinder II, as he called it. Grinder II sported a rather handsome large, droopy mustache, which hid the action of its lips. This mustache was glued onto the head assembly one hair at a time, a painstaking job that denuded every horsehair brush in the house, but the effect was impressive.

More impressive was the leg assembly I bossed into existence, a pair of clockwork pins that could lever Grinder from a seated position into full upright, balancing him by means of three gyros we hid in his chest cavity. Once these were wound and spun, Grinder could stand up in a very natural fashion. Once we'd rearranged the furniture to hide Dora and Monty behind a large armchair, you could stand right in the parlor and "converse" with him, and unless you were looking very hard, you'd never know but what you were talking with a mortal man, and not an automaton made of tanned flesh, steel, springs, and clay (we used rather a lot of custom-made porcelain from the prosthetic works to get his legs right—the children who were shy a leg or two knew which leg makers in town had the best wares).

And so when the sisters arrived the following Sunday, they were led right into the parlor, whose lace curtains kept the room in a semidark state, and there they parleyed with Grinder, who came to his feet when they entered and left. One of the girls was in charge of his arms, and she had practiced with them so well that she was able to move them in a very convincing fashion. Convincing enough, anyroad: the sisters left Grinder with a bag of clothes and a bag of oranges that had come off a ship that had sailed from Spanish Florida right up the St. Lawrence to the port of Montreal, and thereafter traversed by railcar to Muddy York. They had made a parcel gift of these succulent treasures to Grinder, to "help the kiddies keep away the scurvy," but Grinder always kept them for himself or flogged them to his pals for a neat penny. We wolfed the oranges right after services and then took our Sabbath free with games and more brandy from Grinder's sideboard.

And so we went, week on week, with small but impressive updates to our clockwork man: hands that could grasp and smoke a pipe, a clever mechanism that let him throw back his head and laugh, fingers that could drum on the table beside him, eyes that could follow you around a room, and eyelids that could blink, albeit slowly.

But Monty had
much
bigger plans.

"I want to bring in another fifty-six bits," he said, gesturing at the computing panel in Grinder's parlor, a paltry eight-bit works. That meant that there were eight switches with eight matching levers, connected to eight brass rods that ran down to the public computing works that ran beneath the streets of Muddy York. Grinder had used his eight bits to keep Saint Aggie's books—both the set he showed to the sisters and the one in which he kept track of what he was trousering for himself—and he'd let one "lucky" child work the great, stiff return arm that sent the instructions set on the switch back to the Hall of Computing for queuing and processing on the great frames that had cost me my good right arm. An instant later, the processed answer would be returned to the levers above the switches and to whatever interpretive mechanism you had yoked up to them (Grinder used a telegraph machine that printed the answers on a long, thin sheet of paper).

"Fifty-six bits!" I boggled at Monty. A sixty-four-bit rig wasn't unheard of, if you were a mighty shipping company or insurer. But in a private home — well, the racket of the switches would shake the foundations! Remember, dear reader, that each additional bit
doubled
the calculating faculty of the home panel. Monty was proposing to increase Saint Aggie's computational capacity by a factor more than a
quadrillionfold!
(We computermen are accustomed to dealing in these rarified numbers, but they may surprise you. Have no fear—a quadrillion is a number of such surpassing monstrosity that you must have the knack of figuring to even approach it properly.)

"Monty," I gasped, "are you planning to open a firm of accountants at Saint Aggie's?"

He laid a finger alongside of his nose. "Not all all, my old darling. I have a thought that perhaps we could build a tiny figuring engine into our Grinder's chest cavity, one that could take programs punched off of a sufficiently powerful computing frame, and that these might enable him to walk about on his own, as natural as you please, and even carry on conversations as though he were a living man. Such a creation would afford us even more freedom and security, as you must be able to see."

"But it will cost the bloody world!" I said.

"Oh, I didn't think we'd
pay
for it," he said. Once again, he laid his finger alongside his nose.

And that is how I came to find myself down our local sewer, in the dead of night, a seventeen-year-old brass jacker, bossing a gang of eight kids with ten arms, seven noses, nine hands, and eleven legs between them, working furiously and racing the dawn to fit thousands of precision brass pushrods with lightly balanced joints from the local multifarious amalgamation and amplification switch house to Saint Aggie's utility cellar. It didn't work, of course. Not that night. But at least we didn't break anything and alert the Upper Canadian Computing Authority to our mischief. Three nights later, after much fine-tuning, oiling, and desperate prayer, the panel at Saint Aggie's boasted sixty-four shining brass bits, the very height of modernity and engineering.

Monty and the children all stood before the panel, which had been burnished to a mirror shine by No-Nose Timmy, who'd done finishing work before a careless master had stumbled over him, pushing him face-first into a spinning grinding wheel. In the gaslight, we appeared to be staring at a group of mighty heroes, and when Monty turned to regard us, he had bright tears in his eyes.

"Sisters and brothers, we have done ourselves proud. A new day has dawned for Saint Aggie's and for our lives. Thank you. You have done me proud."

We shared out the last of Grinder's brandy, a thimbleful each, even for the smallest kiddies, and drank a toast to the brave and clever children of Saint Aggie's and to Montreal Monty, our savior and the founder of our feast.

Let me tell you some about life at Saint Aggie's in that golden age. Whereas before, we'd rise at seven AM for a mean breakfast— prepared by unfavored children whom Grinder punished by putting them into the kitchen at four thirty to prepare the meal — followed by a brief "sermon" roared out by Grinder, now we rose at a very civilized ten AM to eat a leisurely breakfast over the daily papers that Grinder had subscribed to. The breakfasts — all the meals and chores —were done on a rotating basis, with exemptions for children whose infirmity made performing some tasks harder than others. Though all worked — even the blind children sorted weevils and stones from the rice and beans by touch.

Whereas before, Grinder had sent us out to beg every day — excepting Sundays — debasing ourselves and putting our injuries on display for the purposes of sympathy, now we were free to laze around the house all day or work at our own fancies, painting or reading or just playing like the cherished children of rich families who didn't need to send their young ones to the city to work for the family fortune.

But most of us quickly bored of the life of Riley, and for us, there was plenty to do. The clockwork Grinder was always a distraction, especially after Monty started work on the mechanism that would accept punched-tape instructions from the computing panel.

When we weren't working on Grinder, there was other work. We former apprentices went back to our old masters — men and women who were guilty but glad enough to see us, in the main — and told them that the skilled children of Saint Aggie's were looking for piecework as part of our rehabilitation, at a competitive price.

It was hardly a lie, either: as broken tools and mechanisms came in for mending, the boys and girls taught one another their crafts and trade, and it wasn't long before a steady flow of cash came into Saint Aggie's, paying for better food, better clothes, and, soon enough, the very best artificial arms, legs, hands, and feet, the best glass eyes, the best wigs. When Gertie Shine-Pate was fitted for her first wig and saw herself in the great looking glass in Grinder's study, she burst into tears and hugged all and sundry, and thereafter, Saint Aggie's bought her three more wigs to wear as the mood struck her. She took to styling these wigs with combs and scissors, and before long she was cutting hair for all of us at Saint Aggie's. We never looked so good.

That gilded time from the end of my boyhood is like a sweet dream to me now. A sweet, lost dream.

No invention works right the first time around. The inventors' tales you read in the science penny dreadfuls, where some engineer discovers a new principle, puts it into practice, shouts, "Eureka," and sets up his own foundry? They're rubbish. Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there's nothing for it but to fail faster and better.

The first time Monty rolled a paper tape into a cartridge and inserted it into Grinder, we all held our breath while he fished around the arse of Grinder's trousers for the toggle that released the tension on the mainspring we wound through a keyhole in his hip. He stepped back as the soft whining of the mechanism emanated from Grinder's body, and then Grinder began, very slowly, to pace the room's length, taking three long — if jerky — steps, then turning about, and taking three steps back. Then he lifted a hand as in greeting, and his mouth stretched into a rictus that might have passed for a grin, and then, very carefully, Grinder punched himself in the face so hard that his head came free from his neck and rolled across the floor with a meaty sound (it took our resident taxidermists a full two days to repair the damage), and his body went into a horrible paroxysm like the Saint Vitus dance, until it, too, fell to the floor.

This was on Monday, and by Wednesday, we had Grinder back on his feet with his head reattached. Again, Monty depressed his toggle, and this time, Grinder made a horrendous clanking sound and pitched forward.

And so it went, day after day, each tiny improvement accompanied by abject failure, and each Sunday we struggled to put the pieces together so Grinder could pay his respects to the sisters.

Until the day came that the sisters brought round a new child to join our happy clan, and it all began to unravel.

We had been lucky in that Monty's arrival at Saint Aggie's coincided with a reformers' movement that had swept Upper Canada, a movement whose figurehead, Princess Lucy, met with every magistrate, councilman, alderman, and beadle in the colony, with the sleeves of her dresses pinned up to the stumps of her shoulders, sternly discussing the plight of the children who worked in the Information Foundries across the colonies. It didn't do no good in the long run, of course, but for the short term, word got round that the authorities would come down very hard on any master whose apprentice lost a piece of himself in the data mills. So it was some months before Saint Aggie's had any new meat arrive upon its doorstep.

The new meat in question was a weepy boy of about eleven — the same age I'd been when I arrived — and he was shy his left leg all the way up to the hip. He had a crude steel leg in its place, strapped up with a rough, badly cured cradle that must have hurt like hellfire. He also had a splintery crutch that he used to get around with, the sort of thing that the sisters of Saint Aggie's bought in huge lots from unscrupulous tradesmen who cared nothing for the people who'd come to use them.

His name was William Sansousy, a métis boy who'd come from the wild woods of Lower Canada seeking work in Muddy York, who'd found instead an implacable machine that had torn off his leg and devoured it without a second's remorse. He spoke English with a thick French accent and slipped into joual when he was overcome with sorrow.

Two sisters brought him to the door on a Friday afternoon. We knew they were coming; they'd sent around a messenger boy with a printed telegram telling Grinder to make room for one more. Monty wanted to turn his clockwork Grinder loose to walk to the door and greet them, but we all told him he'd be mad to try it: there was so much that could go wrong, and if the sisters worked out what had happened, we could finish up dangling from nooses at the King Street Gaol.

Monty relented resentfully, and instead we seated Grinder in his overstuffed chair, with Monty tucked away behind it, ready to converse with the sisters. I hid with him, ready to send Grinder to his feet and extend his cold, leathery artificial hand to the boy when the sisters turned him over.

And it went smoothly—that day. When the sisters had gone and their car had built up its head of steam and chuffed and clanked away, we emerged from our hiding place. Monty broke into slangy, rapid French, gesticulating and hopping from foot to peg leg and back again, and William's eyes grew as big as saucers as Monty explained the lay of the land to him. The
clang
when he thumped Grinder in his cast-iron chest made William leap back, and he hobbled toward the door.