With Fate Conspire (7 page)

“How long?” he asked, and downed another gulp of mead.

Niklas answered for Wrain and Ch’ien Mu, in a gruff voice still colored by traces of a German accent. “Ve haven’t tested it yet. It vould slow the problem—”

“But at a cost,” Wrain finished, when Niklas hesitated. “It wouldn’t just unravel; the elements that make it up would be destroyed. And we cannot generate those out of nothing. To craft new pieces of the Hall, we would have to distill the raw substance out of existing materials.”

In other words, render down the contents of the palace. If that would even be enough. Hodge was out of mead; he stared moodily into the empty cup. Given time, they might be able to find other sources—but even with this machine, time was sorely lacking.

Well, he could set someone to looking, and in the meantime, try to solve the underlying problem. “What would make it last longer?”

Because this was the Academy, he didn’t get a wave of helpless shrugs; he got a deluge of speculative answers, everyone talking over each other. “The original anchoring—”; “—given the capacity of the human soul to shelter—”; “—a more suitable weft, perhaps—”; “—perhaps the Oriental elements—”; “—write to Master Ktistes in Greece; he might—”

Hodge put up his hands, and the speculation trailed into silence. “You don’t know. All right. Get to work on finding out. Wilhas, is the Calendar Room still usable?”

Niklas’s brother, blond haired to his red, chewed on his lips inside the depths of his beard. “Yes. For now. But from the map you showed me, the tracks vill run very close to the Monument. Ven they put those in, it may destroy the room.”

Taking with it anyone inside. But they had to risk it; the Calendar Room, a chamber beneath the Monument to the Great Fire, contained time outside of time. With it, the fae could do months or years of research and planning, at a cost of mere days in the world. “I’ll keep my eye on the newspapers and railway magazines,” Hodge said, as if he did not read them incessantly already. “We should
’
ave some warning before they lay any track.”

Nods all around. Wrain began to discuss with the others who would go into the Calendar Room, and who would stay outside. The other machine, their calculating engine, could possibly be used to determine what variable might be added to increase durability; they could look for sources of material. If worse came to worst, they could unravel select parts of the Hall, to weave protection around places like this, that needed to survive.

None of it was anything he could contribute to, not personally. Suppressing a groan, Hodge pushed himself to his feet. “Right, you get to that. Let me know when you’ve got some answers.” For now, the most useful thing he could do for them all was to stay alive.

Memory: April 12, 1840

She both dreaded and longed for the dreams.

Dreaded, because without a doubt they were signs of the madness her mother warned her about, a shameful inheritance from her shameless and lunatic father. But longed for, because in these dreams she could permit her creativity free rein; her conversational partners not only welcomed but encouraged her wildest flights of fancy, never once murmuring about hereditary insanity.

“Of course he will never get it built,” she said to the inhuman creatures that sat on the other side of the tea table. “I hold Mr. Babbage in the greatest esteem, but he lacks the social gifts that would gain him the cooperation of others; and without that, he will never have the funding or assistance he requires.”

The taller and more slender of her guests grimaced into his tea. The name of this one was Wrain, and he was a dear friend of her dreams; she had imagined conversations with him many times over the years. “You don’t say so,” the spritely gentleman muttered, with delicate irony. “We thought to offer him our own assistance, but…”

“But he is even ruder than I am,” the shorter and stockier fellow said cheerfully, with a distinct German accent. She hesitated to call this one a gentleman, given his dreadful manners. Properly he was Mr. von das Ticken, but Wrain mostly just called him Nick.

Because it was a dream, she could allow herself to laugh. “Oh dear. The two of you, attempting to converse … that cannot have ended well.”

“It went splendidly,” Wrain said, “for all of thirty seconds. But we have begun to pursue the notion on our own, you know; it’s too great a challenge to forego.”

Of course he was building it; these were her dreams, after all, and she would dearly love to see the Analytical Engine in operation. That Wrain was not presenting it to her right now could only mean that her mind had not yet fully encompassed Babbage’s intricate and brilliant design. Such insufficiency, however, did not stop her imagination from leaping ahead. “At this point the challenges are quite mundane, simple matters of obtaining funding and suitable engineers. I have already begun to look beyond.”

“I think you underestimate the difficulty of the engineering,” Wrain said dryly, but he was half-drowned out by Nick’s expression of sudden, sharp interest: “Vat do you mean by ‘looking beyond’?”

Happiness lifted her spirit, like a pair of bright wings. These two would not mock her, or warn that she had best confine herself to what was mathematically and scientifically possible. She could tell them whatever she dreamt of, however outrageous. “If we—by which I mean my dear Babbage, of course—can design an Analytical Engine to calculate the answers to equations, can we not design other sorts of engines for other sorts of tasks?”

Frowning, Wrain said, “You mean, other devices that can be instructed by cards?”

“Precisely! Engines which can perform complex tasks, more rapidly and accurately than any human operator could achieve. Composing music, for example: provide the machine with cards that instruct it as to the form of a song—a hymn, perhaps, or a chorale, or even a symphony—and then, by execution of the operations, the engine returns a new composition.” Her love for music was an abiding thing, close kin to her love of mathematics, though she suspected her mother—for all the woman’s knowledge of the latter subject—never quite understood the similarities between the two. “It wants only some means of presenting notes and their relationships in suitably abstract form. Well, that and the design of the engine itself, which of course is no simple matter; I expect it would require tens of thousands of gears, more even than the Analytical Engine.”

Wrain’s mouth fell open by progressive stages during this speech; Nick had gone still as a stone. After a dumbfounded pause, the spritely gentleman said, “With sufficiently abstract representation—”

“Anything,”
Nick breathed, staring off into the distance like he had seen a vision of Heaven itself. “Music. Pictures. It could write books. It could—”

His voice cut off. She felt as if she were flying, lifted above the clay of this earth by the power of her own ingenuity. Only gradually did she realize that while her companions, too, were flying, the path they followed was a very specific one. Wrain and Nick were staring at one another, communicating in half-spoken words and abrupt gestures, too excited to get their thoughts out of their heads before leaping on to the next. “Like a loom,” Wrain said; Nick answered him, “But our notation,” and the gentleman nodded as if his dwarfish companion had made a very good point.

It produced a strange feeling in the depths of her mind. If these were her dreams, then why did it feel as if they had abruptly become about something she didn’t understand? A touch of fear stirred.
Perhaps Mother is right, and this
is
the beginnings of madness.

Wrain leapt to his feet and seized her hand, shaking it up and down as if she were a man. His grip felt very hard, and very real. “Ada, dearest Ada,
thank you
. Oh, I have no idea how to build this thing—we lack even the notation by which to instruct it; I mean, the system of notation we have is dreadfully inadequate, it would not suffice for a Difference Engine, let alone more—but until you spoke I never even
conceived
of such a device. Not for our own purposes. Will you help us?”

Baffled, increasingly unsure of everything, Ada said, “Help you with
what
?”

Nick laughed, a rolling guffaw that made her certain he, at least, was deranged. “Building an engine of magic calculation. Something of gears and levers and wheels, that can tell us how to create things, faerie enchantments, too complex for us to imagine on our own. And perhaps, in time, to
make
them for us.”

No, there was no doubt at all. Ada had taken the first step—or perhaps more than one—down the path of madness her father had followed. Faeries and enchantment, exactly the sorts of things of which her mother disapproved. If she did not turn back now, gambling, poetry, and sexual immorality were sure to follow.

But she did not want to abandon her friends, even if they were phantasms of her diseased mind. Could she not allow herself a
little
madness, and trust to prayer and the rigorous strictures of science to keep the rest at bay?

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron and his mathematical wife Annabella Milbanke, suspected she knew the answer to that—and it wasn’t in her favor.

“Please, Ada,” Wrain entreated her. “I have seen the disaster that is Babbage’s notes; I daresay you understand them better than he does himself. Or at least can explain them to others, which he patently cannot. We will not be able to do this without help.”

It would have taken a harder soul than Ada Lovelace’s to say no to that desperately hopeful expression. With a feeling of both doom and delight, she said, “Charles Babbage is too rude and too sane to ever help you in this matter. Poor though my own intellect may be, I will bend it to your cause.”

Islington, London: March 14, 1884

Eliza had spent the days leading up to the meeting of the London Fairy Society imagining how things might go. The people might prove to be nothing more than a cluster of bored wives, reading collections of stories from the folk of rural England, clucking their tongues and sighing over the loss of a peasant society none of them had ever seen in person. They might be a group of scholars, documenting that loss and forming theories about what defect of education or brain made peasants believe such ridiculous things. They might be the kind of people Eliza had seen at Charing Cross last fall—working hand-in-glove with the faeries to sow chaos among decent folk.

She imagined telling the story of how Owen was stolen away, to the shock and sympathy of her listeners. She imagined haranguing the society’s leader until he told her where to find a faerie. She imagined finding a faerie there in person and shaking the truth out of him.

She never got around to imagining how she would get into No. 9 White Lion Street.

Eliza had never been to Islington before. When evening began to draw close on the afternoon of the second Friday, she took her nearly empty barrow and began walking up Aldersgate Street through Clerkenwell. She asked directions as she went, and eventually was directed to a lane behind a coaching inn, in a busy part of town.

The building at No. 9 proved to be a house, and a respectable one at that. Eliza stared at it in dismay. The setting of her various fancies had always been vague—a room; chairs; faceless people—she had presumed it would be some kind of public building, like the ones where workers’ combinations sometimes met to plan protests against their masters. Not someone’s house, where it would be impossible to fade into the background.

“See here now—what are you doing, standing about like that?”

Biting down on a curse, Eliza turned, and saw a constable eyeing her suspiciously. All at once she became aware of her clothing: two ragged skirts, layered for warmth and because she had nowhere to keep the second but on her body. Men’s boots, their leather cracked and filthy. A shawl that hadn’t seen a good wash since the last time it rained. Her bonnet had once been some respectable lady’s castoff, but that was years ago; the ribbons she used to tie it did not match, and there was a hole in the brim big enough to poke her thumb through.

And she’d been standing there for several minutes, staring at a housefront as if wondering how to break in.

Out of the corner of her eye, Eliza glimpsed a bearded gentleman in a bowler hat knocking at the door of No. 9. “Would you like to buy some oysters, sir?” she asked the constable, her attention on the other side of the street. A maid opened the door, and let the gent in.

“No, I wouldn’t,” the bobby said, nose wrinkling at their old stench. “Get you gone. The sort of people who live here don’t need the likes of you around.”

The likes of her would never get into that house, either. Eliza ducked her head and mumbled an apology, pushing her barrow past the fellow, carefully not looking at the house as she went.

He followed her to the nearby High Street; she was able to lose him in the crowds there. Tongue stuck into the gap where her father had knocked out one of her teeth years ago, Eliza considered her options.

She didn’t have many. But she wasn’t willing to give up, either. If she couldn’t attend the meeting of the London Fairy Society, then at least she could try to see who did.

Making a halfhearted effort to cry her oysters, she turned left on the next street she found, hoping Islington’s tangle wouldn’t defeat her the way the City’s sometimes did. A few narrow courts gave her no luck, before she found an alley that went through, back to White Lion Street. She gave it a careful look before proceeding, but didn’t see the peeler anywhere.

Eliza hurried down the pavement, barrow rattling before her. Memory served her well: the house across the street and down one door from No. 9 had shutters drawn and locked across its windows, and the lamp at the door was not lit. Uninhabited, or the residents had gone on a journey. Either way, no one was around to object if she hid in the area at the bottom of their basement steps.

She waited until no one was nearby, then hefted her barrow down, trying not to spill the remaining oysters everywhere, or trip in the darkness. Then she threw the more ragged of her two skirts over them to mute the smell, and peeped through the iron bars to see what happened on the other side of the street.