Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (12 page)

The sister who came to sit up with us mourning kiddies that night was called Sister Mary Immaculata, and she was kindly, if a bit dim. I remembered her from my stay in the hospital after my maiming: a slightly vacant prune-faced woman in a wimple who'd bathed my wounds gently and given me solemn hugs when I woke screaming in the middle of the night.

She was positive that the children of Saint Aggie's were inconsolable over the suicide of our beloved patron, Zophar Grindersworth, and she doled out those same solemn cuddles to anyone foolish enough to stray near her. That none of us shed a tear was lost on her, though she did note with approval how smoothly the operation of St. Aggie’s continued without Grinder’s oversight.

The next afternoon, Sister Mary Immaculata circulated among us, offering reassurance that a new master would be found for Saint Aggie's. None of us was much comforted by this: we knew the kind of man who was likely to fill such a plum vacancy.

"If only there were some way we could go on running this place on our own," I moaned under my breath, trying to concentrate on repairing the pressure gauge on a pneumatic evacuator that we'd taken in for mending.

Monty shot me a look. He had taken the sister's coming very hard. "I don't think I have it in me to kill the next one, too. Anyway, they're bound to notice if we keep on assassinating our guardians."

I snickered despite myself. Then my gloomy pall descended again. It had all been so good. How could we possibly return to the old way? But there was no way the sisters would let a bunch of crippled children govern themselves.

"What a waste," I said. "What a waste of all this potential."

"At least I'll be shut of it in two years," Monty said. "How long have you got till your eighteenth?"

My brow furrowed. I looked out the grimy workshop window at the iron gray February sky. "It's February tenth today?"

"Eleventh," he said.

I laughed, an ugly sound. "Why, Monty, my friend, today is my eighteenth birthday. I believe I have survived Saint Aggie's to graduate to bigger and better things. I have attained my majority, old son."

He held a hand out and solemnly shook my hook with it. "Happy birthday and congratulations, then, Sian. May the world treat you with all the care you deserve."

I stood, the scrape of my chair very loud and sudden. I realized I had no idea what I would do next. I had managed to completely forget that my graduation from Saint Aggie's was looming, that I would be a free man. In my mind, I'd imagined myself dwelling at Saint Aggie's forever.

Forever.

"You look like you just got hit in the head with a shovel," Monty said. "What on earth is going through that mind of yours?"

I didn't answer. I was already on my way to find Sister Immaculata. I found her in the kitchen, helping legless Dora make the toast for tea, over the fire's grate.

"Sister," I said, "a word, please?"

As she turned and followed me into the pantry off the kitchen, some of that fear I'd felt on the bridge bubbled up in me. I tamped it back down again firmly, like a piston compressing some superheated gas.

She was really just as I remembered her, and she had remembered me, too — she remembered all of us, the children she'd held in the night and then consigned to this hell upon earth, all unknowing.

"Sister Mary Immaculata, I attained my eighteenth birthday today."

She opened her mouth to congratulate me, but I held up my stump.

"I turned eighteen today, Sister. I am a man; I have attained my majority. I am at liberty and must seek my fortune in the world. I have a proposal for you, accordingly." I put everything I had into this, every dram of confidence and maturity that I'd learned since we inmates had taken over the asylum. "I was Mr. Grindersworth's lieutenant and assistant in every matter relating to the daily operation of this place. Many's the day I did every bit of work that there was to do, while Mr. Grindersworth attended to family matters. I know every inch of this place, ever soul in it, and I have had the benefit of the excellent training and education that there is to have here.

"I had always thought to seek my fortune in the world as a mechanic of some kind, if any shop would have a half-made thing like me, but seeing as you find yourself at loose ends in the superintendent department, I thought I might perhaps put my plans on hold for the time being, until such time as a full search could be conducted."

"Sian," she said, her face wrinkling into a gap-toothed smile, "are you proposing that
you
might run Saint Agatha's?"

It took everything I could not to wilt under the pity and amusement in that smile. "I am, Sister. I am. I have all but run it for months now, and have every confidence in my capacity to go on doing so for so long as need be." I kept my gaze and my voice even. "I believe that the noble mission of Saint Aggie's is a truly attainable one: that it can rehabilitate such damaged things as we and prepare us for the wider world."

She shook her head. "Sian," she said softly, "Sian. I wish it could be. But there's no hope that such an appointment would be approved by the board of governors."

I nodded. "Yes, I thought so. But do the governors need to approve a
temporary
appointment? A stopgap, until a suitable person can be found?"

Her smile changed, got wider. "You have certainly come into your own shrewdness here, haven't you?

"I was taught well," I said, and smiled back.

The temporary has a way of becoming permanent. That was my bolt of inspiration, my galvanic realization. Once the sisters had something that worked, that did not call attention to itself, that took in crippled children and released whole persons some years later, they didn't need to muck about with it. As the mechanics say, "If it isn't broken, it doesn't want fixing."

I'm no mechanic, not anymore. The daily running of Saint Aggie's occupied a larger and larger slice of my time, until I found that I knew more about tending to a child's fever or soothing away a nightmare than I did about hijacking the vast computers to do our bidding.

But that's no matter, as we have any number of apprentice computermen and computerwomen turning up on our doorsteps. So long as the machineries of industry grind on, the supply will be inexhaustible.

Monty visits me from time to time, mostly to scout for talent. His shop, Goldfarb and Associates, has a roaring trade in computational novelties and service, and if anyone is bothered by the appearance of a factory filled with the halt, the lame, the blind, and the crippled, they are thankfully outnumbered by those who are delighted by the quality of the work and the good value in his schedule of pricing.

But it was indeed a golden time, that time when I was but a boy at Saint Aggie's among the boys and girls, a cog in a machine that Monty built of us, part of a great uplifting, a transformation from a hell to something like a heaven. That I am sentenced to serve in this heaven I helped to make is no great burden, I suppose.

Still, I do yearn to screw a jeweler's loupe into my eye, pick up a fine tool, and bend the sodium lamp to shine upon some cunning mechanism that wants fixing. For machines may be balky and they may destroy us with their terrible appetite for oil, blood, and flesh, but they behave according to fixed rules and can be understood by anyone with the cunning to look upon them and winkle out their secrets. Children are ever so much more complicated.

Though I believe I may be learning a little about them, too.