The Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Part 30

Thus did I find myself in Lady Witherspoon's cylindrical laboratory, a gaslit chamber crammed with worktables on which rested the vessels of which she'd spoken, along with various flasks, bell jars and test tubes, plus a beaker holding a golden substance that the baroness was heating over a Bunsen burner. Bubbles danced in the burnished fluid. At the center of the circle lay a plump man with waxen skin, naked from head to toe, pink as a piglet, bound to an operating table with leather straps about his wrists and ankles. His name, the baroness informed me, was Ben Towson, and he looked as if he had a great deal to say about his situation, but, owing to the steel bit betwixt his teeth, tightly secured with thongs, he could not utter a word.

"It all began on a lovely April afternoon in 1883, back when the Society was content to play croquet with inorganic b.a.l.l.s," Lady Witherspoon said. "I had arranged for a brilliant French scientist to address our group Henri Renault, Director of the Paris Museum of Natural History. A devotee of Charles Darwin, Dr Renault perforce believed that modern apes and contemporary humans share a common though extinct ancestor. It had become his obsession to corroborate Darwin through chemistry. After a decade of research, Renault concocted a potent drug from human neuronal tissue and simian cerebrospinal fluid. He soon learned that, over a course of three injections, this serum would transform an orangutan or a gorilla into not a human being, exactly, but a creature of far greater talents than nature ever granted an ape. Renault called his discovery Infusion U."

"U for Uplift?" I ventured.

"U for Unknown," Lady Witherspoon corrected me. "Monsieur le docteur was probing that interstice where science ends and enigma begins." Approaching a cabinet jammed with gla.s.s vessels, the baroness took down a stoppered Erlenmeyer flask containing a bright blue fluid. "I recently acquired a quant.i.ty of Renault's evolutionary catalyst. One day soon I shall conduct my own investigations using Infusion U."

"One day soon? From what I saw in the gaming pit, I would say you've already performed numerous such experiments."

"Our tournaments have nothing to do with Infusion U." Briefly Lady Witherspoon contemplated the flask, its contents coruscating in the sallow light. Gingerly she reshelved the arcane chemical. "A few years after creating serum number one, Renault perfected its precise inverse Infusion D."

"For Devolution?"

"For Demimonde," the baroness replied, pointing to the burbling beaker. "Such unorthodox research belongs to the shadows."

With the aid of an insulated clamp she removed the hot beaker from the flame's influence and, availing herself of a funnel, decanted the contents into a rack of test tubes. She returned Infusion D to the burner. After the batch had cooled sufficiently, the baroness took up a hypodermic syringe and filled the barrel.

"It was this second formula that Renault demonstrated to the Society," the baroness said. "After we'd seated ourselves in the drawing room, he injected 5 cubic centiliters into a recently condemned murderer, one Jean-Marc Girard, who proceeded to regress before our eyes."

Lady Witherspoon now performed the identical experiment on Ben Towson, locating a large vein in his forearm, inserting the needle and pus.h.i.+ng the plunger. I knew precisely what was going to happen, and yet I could not bring myself entirely to believe it. Whilst Infusion D seethed in its beaker and the gas hissed through the laboratory lamps, Towson began to change. Even as he fought against his straps, his jaw diminished, his brow expanded and his eyes receded like successfully pocketed billiard b.a.l.l.s. Each nostril grew to a diameter that would admit a chestnut. Great whorling tufts of fur appeared on his skin like weeds emerging from fecund soil. He whimpered like a whipped dog.

"Good G.o.d," I said.

"A striking metamorphosis, yes, but inchoate, for he will become his full simian self only after two more injections," Lady Witherspoon said, though to my naive eye Towson already appeared identical to the brutes I'd observed in the arena. "What we have here is the very sort of being Renault fas.h.i.+oned for our edification that memorable spring afternoon. He a.s.sured us that, before delivering Girard to the executioner, he would employ Infusion U in restoring the miscreant, lest the hangman imagine he was killing an innocent ape." The Towson beast bucked and lurched, thus prompting the baroness to tighten the straps on his wrists. "It was obvious from his presentation that Renault saw no practical use for his discovery beyond validating the theory of evolution. But we of the Hampstead Ladies' Croquet Club immediately envisioned a benevolent application."

"Benevolent by certain lights," I noted, scanning the patient. His procreative paraphernalia had become grotesquely enlarged, though evidently it would not achieve croquet caliber until injection number three. "By other lights, controversial. By still others, criminal."

Lady Witherspoon did not address my argument directly but instead contrived the slyest of smiles, took my hand, and said, "Tell me, dear Kitty, how do you view the human male?"

"I am fond of certain men," I replied. Such as Mr Pertuis, I almost added. "Others annoy me and some I fear."

"Would you not agree that, whilst isolated specimens of the male can be amusing and occasionally even valuable, there is something profoundly unwell about the gender as a whole, a demon impulse that inclines men to treat their fellow beings, women particularly, with cruelty?"

"I have suffered the slings of male ent.i.tlement," I said in a voice of a.s.sent. "The director of Marylebone Workhouse took liberties with my person that I would prefer not to discuss."

Before releasing my hand, the baroness accorded it a sympathetic squeeze. "Our idea was a paragon of simplicity. Turn the male demon against itself. Teach it to fear and loathe its own gender rather than the female. Debase it with bludgeons. Humble it with mud. For the final fillip, deprive it of the ability to sire additional fiends."

"Your Society thinks as boldly as the Vivoidians who populate Mr Pertuis's saga of the ubermenschen."

"I have not read your fellow poet's epic, but I shall take your remark as a compliment. Thanks to Monsieur le docteur, we have in our possession an antidote for masculinity a remedy that falls so far short of homicide that even a woman of the most refined temperament may apply it without qualm. To be sure, there are more conventional ways of dealing with the demon. But what sane woman, informed of Infusion D, would prefer to rely instead on the normal inst.i.tutions of justice, whose barristers and judges are invariably of the scrotal persuasion?"

"Not only do I follow your logic," I said, cinching the strap on the apeman's left ankle, "I confess to sharing your enthusiasm."

"Dear Kitty, your intelligence never ceases to amaze me. Even Renault, when I told him that the Society had set out to cure men of themselves, a.s.sumed I was joking." Bending over her rack of Infusion D, Lady Witherspoon ran her palms along the test tubes as if playing a gla.s.s harmonica. "Have you perchance heard of Jack the Ripper?" she asked abruptly.

"The Whitechapel maniac?" I cinched the right ankle-strap. "For six weeks running, London's journalists wrote of little else."

"The butcher slit the throats of at least five West End trollops, mutilating their bodies in ways that beggar the imagination. Last night Lady Pembroke went home carrying half the Ripper's manhood in her handbag, whilst Lady Unsworth made off with the other half. You were likewise witness to the rehabilitation of Milton Starling, a legislator who, before running afoul of our agents, alternately raped his niece in his barn and denounced the cause of women's suffrage on the floor of Parliament. You also beheld the gelding of Josiah Lippert, who until recently earned a handsome income delivering orphan girls from the slums of London to the brothels of Constantinople."

"No doubt the past lives of Martin and Andrew are similarly checkered."

"Prior to their encounter with the Society, they brokered the sale of nearly three hundred young women into white slavery throughout the Empire."

"What ultimately happens to your eunuchs?" I asked. "Are they all granted situations at Briarwood and the estates of your other ladies?"

"Martin and Andrew are merely making themselves useful whilst awaiting deportation," the baroness replied. "Once every six months, we transfer a boat-load of castrati to an uncharted island in the Indian Ocean Atonement Atoll, we call it that they may live out their seedless lives in harmony with nature."

The patient, I noticed, had fallen asleep. "Is he still a carnivore, I wonder" I gestured toward the slumbering beast "or does he now dream of bananas?"

"A pertinent question, Kitty. I am not privy to the immediate contents of Towson's head, just as I cannot imagine what was pa.s.sing through his mind when he kicked his wife to death."

"G.o.d save the Hampstead Ladies' Croquet Club and Benevolent Society," I said.

"And the Queen," my patroness added.

"And the Queen," I said.

Sunday, 26 May The second gathering of the Witherspoon Academy of Arts and Letters proved every bit as bracing as the first. Miss Ruggles presented four odes so vivid in their particulars that I shall never regard a windmill, a b.u.t.ton, a child's kite, or a gutted fish in quite the same way again. Mr Crowther charmed us with another installment of his verse drama about Lazarus, an episode in which the resurrected aristocrat, thinking himself commensurate with Christ, travels to Chorazin with the aim of founding a salvationistic religion. Mr Pertuis brought his ubermensch into contact with a cadre of Hegelian philosophers, a trauma so disruptive of their neoPlatonic world-view that they all went irretrievably insane. For my own contribution, I performed a scene in which Boadicea, bound and gagged, is forced to watch as her two daughters are molested by the Romans. The other poets claimed to be impressed by my depiction of the ghastly event, with Miss Ruggles declaring that she'd never heard anything quite so affecting in all her life.

But the real reason I shall always cherish this day concerns an incident that occurred after the workshop adjourned. Once Miss Ruggles and Mr Crowther had sped away in their respective coaches, having exchanged ma.n.u.scripts with the aim of offering each other further appreciative commentary, Mr Pertuis approached me and announced, in a diffident but heartfelt tone, that I had been in his thoughts of late, and he hoped I might accord him an opportunity to earn my admiration of his personhood, as opposed to his poetry. I responded that his personhood had not escaped my notice, then invited him for a stroll along the brook that girds the manor house.

We had not gone 20 yards when, acting on a sudden impulse, I told my companion the whole perplexing story of the Hampstead Ladies' Croquet Club. I omitted no proper noun: Dr Renault, Ben Towson, Jean-Marc Girard, Jack the Ripper, Infusion U, Infusion D. At first he reacted with skepticism, but when I noted that my tale could be easily corroborated I need merely lead him into the depths of Briarwood House and show him the caged brutes awaiting humiliation he grew more liberal in his judgement.

"You present me with two possibilities," Mr Pertuis said. "Either I am becoming friends with an insane poet who writes of ancient female warriors, or else Lady Elizabeth Witherspoon is the most capable woman in England, excepting of course the Queen. Given my fondness for you, I prefer to embrace the second theory."

"Naturally I must insist that you not repeat these revelations to another living soul."

"I shan't repeat them even to the dead."

"Were you to betray my confidence, Mr Pertuis, my att.i.tude to you would curdle in an instant."

"You may trust me implicitly, Miss Glover. But pray indulge my philosophical side. As a votary of Herr Nietzsche, I cannot but speculate on the potential benefits of these astonis.h.i.+ng chemicals. a.s.suming Lady Witherspoon withheld no pertinent fact from you, I would conclude that, whilst the utility of Infusion D has been exhausted, this is manifestly not the case with the uplift serum. May I speak plainly? I am the sort of man who, if he possessed a quant.i.ty of the drug, would not scruple to experiment with it."

"Mais pourquoi, Mr Pertuis? Have you a pet orangutan with whom you desire to play chess?"

"I do not see why the uplift serum should be employed solely for the betterment of apes. I do not see why-"

"Why it should not be introduced into a human subject?" I said, at once aghast and fascinated.

"A blasphemous idea, I quite agree. And yet, were you to put such forbidden fruit on my plate, I would be tempted to take a bite. Infusion U, you say U for Unknown. No, Miss Glover for ubermensch!"

Sat.u.r.day, 1 June When I awoke I had no inkling that this would be the most memorable day of my life. If anything, it promised to be only the most philosophical, for I spent the morning conjecturing about what Friedrich Nietzsche himself might have made of Infusion U. Being by all reports insane, the man is unlikely ever to form an opinion of Dr Renault's research, much less share that judgement with the world.

Here is my supposition. Based upon my untutored and doubtless superficial reading of The Joyful Wisdom, I imagine Herr Nietzsche would be unimpressed by the uplift serum. I believe he would dismiss it as mere liquid decadence, yet another quack cure that, like all quack cures most notoriously Christianity, the ultimate pater nostrum prevents us from looking brute reality in the eye and admitting there are no happy endings, only eternal returns, even as we resolve to redress our tragic circ.u.mstances with a heroic and defiant "Yes!"

By contrast, I am confident that, presented with a potion that promised to fortify her spirit, my cruel and beautiful Boadicea would have swallowed it on the spot. After all, here was a woman who took on the world's mightiest empire, leading a revolt that obliged her to sack the cities that today we call St Albans, Colchester and London, leaving 70,000 Roman corpses behind. For a warrior queen, whatever works is good, be it razor-sharp knives on the wheels of your chariot or a rare Gallic elixir in your goblet.

This afternoon Mr Pertuis and I traveled in his coach to the Spaniard's Inn, where we dined with Dionysian abandon on grilled turbot, stewed beef a la jardiniere, and lamb cutlets with asparagus.

Landing next in Regent's Park, we rented a rowboat and went out on the lake. My swain stroked us to the far sh.o.r.e, s.h.i.+pped the oars and, clasping my hand, averred that he wished to discuss a matter of pa.s.sing urgency.

"Two matters, really," he elaborated. "The first pertains to my intellect, the second to my affections."

"Both organs are of considerable interest to me," I said.

"To be blunt, I have resolved to augment my brain's potential through the uplift serum, but only if I have your blessing. I am similarly determined to enhance my heart's capacity by taking a wife, but only if my bride is your incomparable self."

My own heart immediately a.s.sented to his second scheme, fluttering against my ribs like a caged bird. "On first principles I endorse both your ambitions," I replied, blus.h.i.+ng so deeply that I imagined the surrounding water reddening with my reflection, "but I would expect you to fulfill several preliminary conditions."

"Oh, my dearest Miss Glover, I shall grant you any wish within reason, and many beyond reason as well."

"Concerning our wedding, it must be a private affair attended by only a handful of witnesses and conducted by Mr Crowther. Your Kitty is a shyer creature than you might suppose."

"Agreed."

"Concerning the serum, you will limit yourself to a single injection of five centiliters."

"Not one drop more."

"You must further consent to make me your collaborator in the grand experiment. Yes, dear Edward, I wish to accompany you on your journey into the dark, feral, occult continent of Infusion U."

"Is that really a place for a person of your gender?"

"I can tell you how Boadicea would answer. A woman's place is in the wild."

Dear diary, it was not the English countryside that glided past the window of Mr Pertuis's coach on our return trip, for Albion had become Eden that day. Each tree was fruited with luminous apples, glowing plums and glistening figs. From every blossom a golden nectar flowed in great munificent streams.

We reached Hampstead just as the Society was finis.h.i.+ng its final match of the day. Standing on the edge of the gra.s.sy court, we watched Lady Harcourt make an astonis.h.i.+ng shot in which the generative sphere leapt smartly from the tip of her mallet, traversed seven feet of lawn, rolled through the fifth hoop, and came to rest at a spot not ten inches from the peg. The other ladies broke into spontaneous applause.

Now Mr Pertuis led me behind the privet hedge and placed a farewell kiss a kiss! on my lips, then repaired to his coach, whereupon Lady Witherspoon likewise drew me aside and averred she had news that would send my spirits soaring.

"Today I informed the others that, acting on your own initiative, you learned of the Society's true purpose," she said. "Having already judged you a person of impeccable character, they are happy to admit you to our company. Will you accept our invitation to an evening of demon baiting?"

"Avec plaisir," I said.

"Amongst the scheduled contestants is a notorious workhouse supervisor whom our agents abducted but four days ago. Yes, dear Kitty, tonight you will see a simian edition of the odious Ezekiel Snavely take the field."

My heart leapt up, though not to the same alt.i.tude occasioned by Mr Pertuis's marriage proposal. "If Snavely were to fall," I muttered, "and if it were permitted, I would put the knife to him myself."

"I fully understand your desire, but we decided long ago that the incision must always be made and dressed by a practiced hand," Lady Witherspoon said. "The G.o.ds have entrusted us with their ichor, dear Kitty, and we must remain worthy of the gift."

Monday, 3 June Sat.u.r.day night's tournament did not turn out as I had hoped. My bete noir conquered his opponent, an abhorrent West End procurer. Dear G.o.d, what if Snavely continues to win his battles, month after month? What if he is standing tall after the Benevolent Society has been discovered and toppled by the London Metropolitan Police? Will his apish incarnation, gonads and all, receive sanctuary in some zoo? Quelle horreur!

In contrast to recent events in the arena, this morning's scientific experiments went swimmingly. We had no difficulty stealthily transferring the Erlenmeyer flask and the hypodermic syringe from the north tower to my cottage. So lovingly did Mr Pertuis work the needle into my vein that the pain proved but a pinch, and I believe that, when I injected my swain in turn, I caused him only mild discomfort.

"Herr Nietzsche calls humankind the unfinished animal," he said. "If that hypothesis is true, then perhaps you and I, fair Kitty, are about to bring our species to completion."

At first I felt nothing and then, suddenly, the elixir announced its presence in my brain. My throat constricted. My eyes seemed to rotate in their sockets. A thousand clockwork ants scurried across my skin. Sweat gushed from my brow, coursing down my face like blood from the Crown of Thorns.

Our torments ceased as abruptly as they'd begun, as if by magic that is to say, by uberwissenschaft. And suddenly we knew that a true wonderworker had come amongst us, le Grand Renault, blessing his disciples with the elixir of his genius. Brave new pa.s.sions swelled within us. Fortunately I had on hand sufficient ink and paper to give them voice. Although we'd severed ourselves from our simian heritage, Edward and I nevertheless entered into compet.i.tion, each determined to produce the greater number of eternal truths in iambic pentameter. Whilst my poor swain labored till dawn, and even then failed to complete his Abyssiad, I finished The Song of Boadicea on the stroke of midnight 210 stanzas, each more brilliant than the last.

Thursday, 6 June And so, dear diary, it has begun. We have bitten the apple, cut cards with the Devil, lapped the last drop from the Pierian Spring. Come the new year my Edward and I shall be man and wife, but today we are ubermensch and uberfrau.

Such creatures will not be constrained by convention, nor acknowledge mere biology as their master. We are brighter than our glands. Each time Edward and I give ourselves to carnal love, we employ such prophylactic devices as will preclude procreation.

We do not disrobe. Rather, we tear the clothes from one another's bodies like starving castaways shucking oysters in a tidal inlet. How marvelous that, throughout the long, arduous process of concocting his formula, Monsieur le docteur remained a connoisseur of sin. How exhilarating that a post-evolutionary race can know so much of post-lapsarian l.u.s.t.

To apprehend the true and absolute nature of things that is the fruit of Nietzschean clarity.

Energies and ent.i.ties are one and the same, did you know that, dear diary? Wonders are many, but the greatest of these is being. h.e.l.l does not exist. Heaven is the fantasy of clerics. There is no G.o.d, and I am his prophet.

Fokken that is the crisp, candid, Middle Dutch word for it. We f.u.c.k and f.u.c.k and f.u.c.k and f.u.c.k.

Wednesday, 12 June An uberfrau does not hide her blazing intellect beneath a bushel. She trumpets her transfiguration from every rooftop, every watchtower, the summit of the highest mountain.

When I told Lady Witherspoon what Edward and I had done with the elixir, I a.s.sumed she might turn livid and perhaps even banish me from her estate. I did not antic.i.p.ate that she would acquire a countenance of supreme alarm, call me the world's biggest fool, and spew out a narrative so hideous that only an uberfrau would dare, as I did, to greet it with a contemptuous laugh.

If I am to believe the baroness, Dr Renault also wondered whether Infusion U might be capable of causing the consummation of our race. His experiments were so costly as to nearly deplete his personal fortune, entailing as they did lawsuits brought against him by the relations of the serum's twenty recipients. For it happens that the beneficence of Infusion U rarely persists for more than six weeks, after which the ubermensch endures a rapid and irremediable slide toward the primal. No known drug can arrest this degeneration, and the process is merely accelerated by additional injections.

The subjects of Renault's investigations may have lost their Nietzschean nerve, but Edward and I shall remain true to our joy. We exist beyond the tawdry grasp of the actual and the trivial reach of reason. As ubermensch and uberfrau we are prepared to grant employment to every species of whimsy, but no facts need apply.

Something June The third meeting of the Witherspoon Academy was another rollicking success, though Miss Ruggles and Mr Crowther would probably construct it otherwise. When Miss Ruggles inflicted her latest excrescence on us, a piece of twaddle about her garden, Edward suggested that she run home and tend her flowers, for they were surely wilting from shame. She left the estate in tears. After Mr Crowther finished spouting his drivel, I told him that his muse had evidently spent the past four weeks selling herself in the streets. His face went crimson, and he left in a huff.

Thursday?

Kitty's head swims in a maelstrom of its own making. Her stomach has lost all sovereignty over its goods, and her psyche has likewise surrendered its dominion. Her soul vomits upon the page.

Another Day Ape hair on Edward's arms. Ape teeth in Edward's mouth. Ape face on Edward's skull.

A Different Day Ape hair in the mirror. Ape teeth in the mirror. Ape face in the mirror.

Another Day They pitted me against him. In the mud. My Edward. We would not fight. They did it to him anyway. Necessary? Yes. Do I care? No. Procreation kills.

No Day On the sea. Atonement Atoll. A timbre intended is a tone meant. I shall never say anything so clever again. I weep.

Habzilb habzilb larzed dox ner adnor ulorx qron mizrel bewq xewt ulp ilr ulp xok ulp ulp ulp ulp ulpulpulpulpulpulpulpulpulpulp Personal Journal of Captain Archibald Carmody, R.N. Written aboard HMS Aldebaran Whilst on a Voyage of Scientific Discovery in the Indian Ocean 20 April 1899 Lat. 110' S, Long. 7142' E I slept till noon. After securing Miss Glover's diary in my rucksack, I bid the watch row me ash.o.r.e, then entered the aborigines' cavern in search of Silver. Despite Kitty's fantastic chronicle, I still think of them as Neanderthals, and perhaps I always shall.

My friend was nowhere to be found, so I proceeded to his mate's grave. Silver ne Edward Pertuis sat atop the mound, contemplating Kitty's graven image. I surrendered the diary to the gelded apeman, who forthwith secured it in his satchel.

The instant I drew the Bible from my rucksack, Silver understood my intention. He wrapped one long arm around the sculpture, then set the opposite hand atop the Scriptures. I'd never performed the ceremony before, and I'm sure I got certain details wrong. The apeman hung onto my every word, and when at length I averred that he and Katherine Margaret Glover were man and wife, he smiled, then kissed his bride.

22 April 1899.

Lat. 611' N, Long. 6832' E.

Two days after steaming away from Lydia Isle, I find myself wondering if it was all a dream. The lost race, their strange music, the bereaved beast grieving over his mate's effigy did I imagine the entire sojourn?

Naturally Mr Chalmers and Mr Bainbridge will happily corroborate my stay in Eden. As for the strange diary, I am at the moment prepared to give it credence, and not just because I spent so many hours in monkish replication of its pages. I believe Kitty Glover. The subterranean tournaments, the demimonde drug, the uplift serum: these are factual as rain. I am convinced that Kitty and Edward ventured recklessly into the terra incognita of their primate past, losing themselves forever in apish antiquity.