The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (110 page)

There on the Quai d’Orsay, to his own astonishment, he found himself agreeing to act as the troupe’s guide in America. He had tried to escape his past, but his past had eventually outrun him.

In the shuttered Algerian Theater, Chabane and Papa Ganon found the unconscious stranger being tended by two of the troupe’s female performers. Though they went veiled when in the public eye, in chador or hijab, in private they favored western dress.

“I tell you, it is Salla,” one of the women said, daubing blood from the stranger’s face with a wet cloth. Piled on the ground were shards of glass they’d pulled from his wounds. “Look, he has Salla’s eyes.”

The other woman, Dihya, shook her head. “Taninna, you’ve gone mad. Salla is dead and buried. Besides, eyes or no, this man looks nothing like him.”

Chabane crouched beside Taninna, looking closely at the man. There were cuts all over his face, arms, and hands, and underneath the wool blanket the women had thrown over him, the stranger was completely naked.

The ministrations of the two women had already staunched the flow of blood from the stranger’s arms, and Chabane reached out to touch one of the scars, which looked older than the others, already healed, running like a ring around the stranger’s upper arm. But when Chabane’s fingers brushed the scar, he got a slight shock, like a spark of static electricity, and pulled his hand back quickly.

“What shall we do with him, amin?” Dihya asked, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.

Chabane was thoughtful. “I’ll go speak with the tin soldiers, see what they have to say.”

Just opposite the Algerian Village, across the Midway Plaisance between the Old Vienna concession and the French Cider Press, was a Fire and Guard Station, manned by members of the Columbian Guard, the private police force of the Columbian Exhibition. The Guard was headed by Colonel Edmund Rice, a former infantry officer who had gained some small measure of fame during the Battle of Bull Run, where the Union army’s new-minted prometheic tanks had put an end to the short-lived southern insurrection. Under Rice’s command, the Columbian Guard was meant to be a model peacekeeping force, committed to the safety and security of all who strode upon the Exhibition grounds. In their uniforms of light blue sackcloth, white gloves, and yellow-lined black capes, though, they looked more like spear-carriers in a Gilbert & Sullivan production than officers of law. And their talents at peacekeeping, often, left something to be desired, more interested in presenting a dashing profile than in seeing justice done. It wasn’t for nothing that the concessioneers had taken to calling them “tin soldiers.”

As Chabane approached the Station, framing how best to broach the subject of the unconscious man who lay bleeding in the Algerian Theater, a trio of Columbian Guards rushed through the narrow door, the one in the lead shouldering Chabane aside.

“Out of the way, darkie,” the Guard sneered in English, patting the buttoned holster at his side. “We don’t have time to hear about any damned stolen monkeys.”

Chabane held up his hands, palms forward, and stepped back out of the way, presenting as inoffensive a profile as possible. “My apologies,” he answered, in his best drawing room English. If he’d wanted, he could have swept the legs out from under all three Guards, and taken their firearms from them as they fell. At the moment, though, he was more interested in what had stirred the normally laconic Guards to such a frenzy.

The three guards were hustling up the Midway, around the wheel and towards the Columbian Exhibition itself. A few of the other Midway concessioneers were still in the street, and Chabane could hear them muttering suspiciously to one another, like wives gossiping over a garden fence. Some had overheard the Guards within their hut, and had heard the summons to action.

There had been a murder in the park.

As he trailed behind the Columbian Guards at a discreet distance, keeping them just in sight as they hurried up the Midway, Chabane tallied up the number of deaths in the park since the previous summer, when the Algerian troupe had arrived from New York. Like the Algerian sword-swallower Salla, who had been working in a construction position in the park while waiting for the Midway to open, the deaths had all been accidents, all of them workers killed at their duties because of poor safety conditions. Salla had fallen from the airship mast and drowned in the waters of Lake Michigan, others had broken their skulls when masonry had fallen on them from improperly lashed cranes, or been crushed under piles of girders that slipped from the pincers of poorly programmed auto mata.

And it wasn’t just the dead men buried in paupers’ graves south of the park that had been affected. Even now, in the city itself, striking workers agitated for better working conditions, or for assurances that they would not lose their jobs to automation. The motto of the Columbian Exhibition was “Not Matter, But Mind; Not Things, But Men,” but Chabane could not help but wonder whether such noble sentiments were any salve to men who had been replaced at their posts by “things” in recent months and years. He knew it came as no comfort to those men who had died in automata-related accidents.

But accidents were one thing. A murder was a different matter entirely. And as much as the Exhibition’s Board of Directors might turn a blind eye to the loss of a few workmen, news of a murder would be bad business indeed for the fair.

It seemed a likely explanation that the bleeding and bewildered man now laying in the Algerian Theater was another victim, one who had escaped the killer’s grasp. But it seemed to Chabane just as likely that the Board of Directors would be eager for a scapegoat on which to hang the crime, and a confused stranger, unable to defend himself, would suit their needs perfectly. He wasn’t about to hand the stranger over to them, until he knew he wouldn’t be signing the man’s death warrant to do so.

Chabane followed the Guards through the 60th Street entrance and into the Columbian Exhibition itself With only two weeks to go before the grand opening, it was clear there was still a significant amount of work to be done. The grounds were covered with litter and debris, with deep ruts cut across the greens. Lumber was piled haphazardly at the intersections of pathways, and empty crates and the discarded remains of worker’s lunches were strewn everywhere.

The Guards continued east, past the Children’s Building and the north end of the Horticultural Exhibition, before turning right and heading south along the western shores of the Lagoon. Chabane trailed behind, and when he rounded the corner of the Horticultural building, he could see the gentle rise of the Wooded Island in the middle of the Lagoon. Since he’d last come this way, they’d finished work on the fanciful reconstruction of the “Antediluvian” temple at the southern tip of the island. Supposedly based on archeological findings in Antarctica, it looked more like something out of Mezian’s story-papers. Also new since he’d last seen the Lagoon were the miniature submersibles bobbling along on the water’s surface, waiting for patrons to rent them for brief excursions to the bottom of the Lagoon once the Exhibition opened.

Chabane couldn’t help wondering what Captain Nemo would have made of that.

For that matter, what might Verne himself have made of the airship now drifting at anchor atop the mast just visible on the far side of the Lagoon, past the Manufactures building, on the pier out over Lake Michigan. It was a prometheic airship, its envelope buoyed by the red vapor produced by the reaction of prometheum and charcoal.

Prometheum was such a simple substance. It looked like water and flowed like mercury. Add it to water, and it would set the water to boil. Add it to charcoal, and it turned the charcoal into still more prometheum. Put it in a vacuum and shake it, and it glowed bright white.

Now that the sun had slipped below the buildings to the west, the park’s lamplighters had set to work, cranking the clockwork mechanisms at the base of each lamppost that set the cut-glass globes at the top of the posts to vibrating, agitating the prometheum within. Chabane had a pendant on his lapel, a little crystal flask, stopped with silver. If he were to shake it now, the clear, viscous liquid within would glow soft white, and not dim until almost sunrise.

Chabane watched as the Guards continued past the Transportation building, then turned left into the so-called Court of Honor, with the golden dome of the Administration building at its center. Chabane hurried his pace, so as not to lose sight of which building they entered.

As he rounded the corner of the Automata Exhibition, Chabane watched as the three Guards hurried through the massive doors of the Machinery Exhibition across the way. He followed behind at a somewhat more leisurely pace.

To Chabane’s left, opposite the massive Machinery hall, were the twin Automata and Prometheum buildings. Between them stood the fifteen-foot tall statue of Cadwalader Ringgold, in one hand a sextant, in the other a model of the crab-like Antediluvian automaton he’d brought back from the South Pole.

Of course, Ringgold hadn’t been the first to return with one of the automata, the first proof of the existence of the “Antediluvians.” That honor had fallen to James Clark Ross, who had brought back the broken husk of a mechanism with articulated limbs from the island that now bears his name in 1843, the year after Ringgold and the rest of the Wilkes Expedition had returned from the south seas. This had set off a race to the Pole, to find other examples of this strange, unknown technology. The Ringgold Expedition had won the golden ring when they returned with another, more intact automaton from deep within an icy mountain crevasse, in whose tiny engine there still rested a few precious drops of prometheum. A few drops were enough to change history, though, since added to charcoal it quickly produced more. And in short order, the automaton itself had been reverse-engineered.

The debate still raged about just who the Antediluvians had been. Had they been some forgotten race of man? Or visitors from another world or plane of existence? Some wild-eyed savants even suggested that the Antediluvians were actually the originals of the Atlantis myth, their existence remembered only in legend. All that was known for certain was that they had left behind a scant few examples of a technology that far outstripped that of modern man in the 1850s.

It had not taken modern man long to catch up, Chabane mused, as he passed through the entrance into the Machinery Exhibition.

The interior of the building was massive, looking like three railroad train-houses side-by-side. And though many of the stalls and booths were already installed, there was still considerable work to be done before the park opened, and the massive steam-powered cranes mounted overhead still hurried from one end of the building to the other and back again, time and again, moving the heavy machinery into place.

At the far left of the building, the west end of the hall, were installations from other countries – Canada, Great Britain, Austria, Germany, France – with the rest being American products. Behind the far wall, on the southern face of the building, was the boiler-house, where tanks of lake water were impregnated with small amounts of prometheum, which set them to boil almost immediately, transforming hundreds of gallons into steam in a matter of moments.

Nearly all of the exhibits drew their power from the steam-powered line shafts spinning at between 250 and 300 revolutions a minute, running from one end of the hall to the other at fourteen feet above the ground. Pulleys were strung from the drive shafts down to the exhibit stalls, strung tight as guitar strings, powering more kinds of machines than Chabane had known existed: water pumps, bottling mechanisms, refrigerating apparatus, triphammers, sawmill blades, printing presses, stone-saws, refinery mechanisms, and others whose uses he could scarcely guess. All powered by prometheic steam and, according to the banners and type-written signs hung on each installation, all of them profitable, the marvels of the age.

In the south-east corner of the building, though, where Chabane could see the Columbian Guards congregating, could be found less marvelous, less profitable exhibits. And it was around the smallest of these that the Guards were now milling.

There wasn’t much to the exhibit, just a shack, a banner proclaiming The Latter-Day Lazarus, a podium, a few pedestals, and a table designed to lever up on one end. The only machinery in evidence appeared to be some sort of motor, attached by a pulley to the drive shaft overhead. But the motor isn’t attached to anything but a pair of long, thick cables, one of which snaked towards the shack, the other towards the levered table. It took Chabane a moment to recognize it as the same sort of device he’d seen displayed in London, years before. It was a machine for generating electricity.

Outside of Mezian’s dime-novel, Chabane had heard precious little about electricity in years. It had been something of a novelty a few years back, and marketed as a new brand of patent medicine before the danger of electrocution had driven it from cata log pages all together, but aside from its use in telegraphy it was now all but abandoned. What was the product or device promoted by this “Lazarus” exhibit, and why the unnecessary risk of electricity?

The Columbian Guards he’d trailed had joined with the others already on hand, inspecting the area. Most of them were already inside the shack, which appeared to be the scene of the crime. Intent on their work, none seemed to pay any notice to Chabane. It wasn’t surprising. Like many of the Americans he’d encountered since the last summer, the Guards seemed to look upon men and women with dark complexions as nothing more than menials – janitors, gardeners, busboys, maids – and so Chabane had found it possible to slip in and out of groups of them all but unnoticed, effectively invisible.

With his eyes down and an unthreatening expression on his face, Chabane slipped into the shack. He had expected to see a body, perhaps some blood or signs of violence. What he found, instead, was like something from a Grand Guignol.

On the dusty floor, covered by a sheet, was a still human form, presumably the body of the dead man. Overhead, wire cages hung empty from the tarpapered ceiling, the floor of each caked in excrement.