The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (135 page)

Robinson peered down at the burnt and bludgeoned man on the floor, and with a queasy expression quickly nodded. “Yes, I know him.” He straightened up and looked away. “That’s Tom Edison.”

Rice narrowed his eyes in concentration, and looked from Robinson to the dead man. “I know the name, but can’t place it.”

Robinson nodded again. “Was a bit famous for a time. He invented the phonograph, you may recall?” The colonel shook his head. “In any event, I only spoke with him briefly when he secured his spot in the hall, but it appeared that he’d sunk his fortunes into electricity years ago, and simply couldn’t see a way out.”

“Electricity?” the colonel repeated, disbelievingly. “Why ever for?”

Robinson shrugged. “Who can say? I tried to explain to him that there simply wasn’t any call for such things, not with prometheic steam engines and lights and automation and such, that he might as well try selling butter-churns. But Edison was not to be deterred. He had that wild-eyed look you see in religious zealots, you know the type? He was determined to find a way to make his . . . now what did he call them? Oh yes, his dynamos profitable.”

“That’s a ‘dynamo’ out front, I take it?” Rice asked.

The Machinery chief nodded. “Sad, isn’t it? Still, Edison wasn’t the only one. I’ve heard of a number of inventors and investors who’d hung all their hopes on electricity, in the years before prometheum really took hold. Most ended up going off into industries or trades, sooner or later. I even heard of one, a Serbian I believe, who became a writer of cheap fictions.” He looked back to the dead man on the ground, grimacing at the gruesome sight. “Clearly, though, Edison hadn’t been able to adapt. And it got him in the end. Unless I’m mistaken, he shows every sign of being electrocuted.”

One of the Guards stepped forward, and Chabane recognized him as the one from the Midway who was so quick with the racial epithets. “What do these dyna . . . dynami . . . dyna . . .” He shook his head. “What do these things have to do with this ‘Latter-Day Lazarus’ business? Was your man here intending to raise the dead with this electric thing?”

“If he was,” another Guard called from the rear of the shack, “I think he was doing it one piece at a time.” The Guard held aloft a severed arm, far too large to have come off any monkey.

“Jesus wept!” Rice spat, rearing back.

The Guards began muttering to one another, and Chabane distinctly heard several mentions of “grave-robbing” and “workmen’s bodies.”

“What?” Chabane said, stepping forward, for the first time making his presence known. “What did you say about the workmen’s graves?”

The others turned to him, most of them seeming to notice him for the first time.

“You’re that Jew’s Arab, aren’t you?” the colonel said, narrowing his gaze.

Chabane drew himself up straighter, and in perfect Queen’s English replied, “I am Kabyle, sir, and not of Arab descent, but I am presently in the employ of Mr Bloom, if that is what you mean.” His hands at his sides tightened into fists, but he managed to maintain a calm exterior. “What was the mention of grave-robbing and the remains of the workmen?”

Rice glanced to Robinson, who looked as confused as Chabane, and then back. “It’s not public knowledge, and if the papers get word of it I’ll know where from. But some of the graves to the south have been disturbed, and the bodies laid to rest there have gone missing.”

“Would that include the Algerian who drowned in the lake?” Chabane asked.

Rice shrugged. “Only the Christian graves are marked, as I understand it.”

Chabane ignored Rice, and looked back to the barrels, from which the Guards were still pulling cadaver parts. There were severed hands and feet, a leg, two arms, bits of skulls, even a complete torso. He barred his teeth in a snarl, and turned to look down on the dead man on the floor. “My grandmothers always said that no one is to be lamented who dies during Ramadan, during which the gates of hell are closed and those of heaven always open. It doesn’t seem quite right that a man such as this should get into the gates of heaven uncontested, even if he was murdered.”

“Now hold on,” Rice objected, holding up his hands. “No one said anything about murder.”

“They didn’t?” Robinson asked, eyebrows raised.

Rice turned to the chief of Machinery, fixing him with a hard glare. “You yourself said this was an electrocution, right? An accidental electrocution?”

Robinson’s hands fluttered like caged birds. “I suppose it could have been,” he allowed. “But what about . . .” – he waved at the broken glass, the scattered tools, the splattered blood and viscera – “. . . all of this?”

“This,” Rice said evenly, “could well be simple vandalism. And vandalism is an entirely different order of magnitude to murder. Murder will get plastered over every paper in the country, and run the risk of turning paying customers away, if they think the killer is at large. One more accidental death and a spot of vandalism, that we can handle.”

“You’re joking, of course,” Chabane objected. “Have you no interest in seeing justice done?”

Rice glared at him. “There must be some jobs down south the automata won’t do, boy. Why don’t you get down there with the rest of the darkies and make yourself useful?”

Chabane bristled. There were still a few slaves in the southern United States, not yet supplanted by cheap automata. That this man could so casually dismiss their continued suffering in an off-hand slight brought Chabane’s blood to boil. For an instant, he almost forgot the welfare of the troupe to whom he’d pledged himself, or the stranger who had stumbled beneath the shelter of Chaban’s protection. If he’d been on his own, not responsible for anyone but himself, Chabane would have wished for nothing more than a flyssa saber in one hand and a Webley pistol in the other, and he would show these pale-skinned buffoons his worth. But he wasn’t on his own, and he was responsible for many more souls than just his own.

Marshalling his last reserves of restraint, Chabane strode to the door, and left the shack of horrors behind.

As he made his way back to the Midway, the stars had come out in the darkened skies overhead, and the prometheic lamps were now bathing the park in the soft white glow that had given the exhibition its unofficial name, the White City. But as clean as the white-clad buildings looked in the pure prometheic light, Chabane knew that they were only plaster and boards, hiding the rot and void beneath.

Of course Rice and the rest of his tin-soldiers were more concerned with pay-checks than with justice, happy to paint a murder as an accident if it suited the Board of Directors, whitewashing away any chance of bad publicity. Still, Chabane wasn’t sure that justice hadn’t been done, anyway. He remembered another Kabyle superstition his grandmothers had taught him, that there are never any demons abroad during Ramadan, because God compels them to remain in hell throughout the sacred month. Having seen the gruesome work of the dead man, Chabane doubted any demon ever did worse.

Passing the Terminal Station, he exited the park grounds through the 64
^th
Street entrance, heading north up Island Avenue. Just before reaching the Midway, something bright caught his eye, a splash of color on the pavement reflecting back the prometheic light from above. It was Mezian’s dime-novel. Picking it up, Chabane flipped through the pages as he continued on towards the Algerian concession.

The prose was lurid, the action improbable, but there was something about the image of this future of electricity and equality presented by the author, that resonated with Chabane. This Nikola Tesla was no Jules Verne, but still Chabane was reminded of the sense of boundless potential he used to feel when reading the Extraordinary Voyages story-papers.

Before turning onto the Midway, Chabane saw a handbill posted to a lamp post, advertising the impending Opening Day celebrations for the Columbian Exhibition. In addition to the last living relative of Christopher Columbus, the duke of Veragua, the most honored guest at the ceremony would be the octogenarian Abraham Lincoln, former president of the United States, who would be on hand to cut the ribbon on the Exhibition.

The imagery of “Dane Faraday, Man of Justice” still rolling in his thoughts, Chabane tried to imagine a world in which James Clark Ross had never returned from the south seas with a broken automaton, in which Ringgold had never discovered prometheum, in which the modern age knew nothing of the forgotten Antediluvian civilization. Perhaps in such a world, there would now be an Electricity exhibit instead of a Prometheum one, with Tom Edison’s dynamos at center stage. And perhaps instead of an Automata building, one devoted to some other industry, metal-working perhaps, or mining. But then, in world in which the United States army lacked prometheic tanks, perhaps they wouldn’t have been able to subdue the southern insurrection, and the Union might have split in two over the question of slavery. Perhaps there might not be a Columbian Exhibition at all.

What Chabane couldn’t decide was whether such a world would be better, or worse, than the one he knew.

By the time Chabane returned to the Algerian concession, the sun had long since set, and the fourth prayer of the day, Maghrib, had been completed. Now the troupe was breaking their Ramadan fast. Even the non-observant among them, like Chabane, usually had the good graces not to eat and drink in front of the others while the sun was shining in the holy month. Fast or not, though, Chabane knew that a fair number of the performers, once their meals were done, would slip off and drink spirits, perhaps swapping Algerian wines for the “firewater” favored by Cody’s Indians. Perhaps tonight, instead of trying to stop them, Chabane just might join them.

The stranger sat among the Algerians, in his lap a plate of food, untouched. He had been cleaned up, his wounds ban daged, and dressed in a suit of borrowed clothes. He was awake, but unspeaking, and it was unclear what, if any, tongue he comprehended. He simply sat, watching the others silently, his expression mingling confusion and interest.

“Keep your distance, amin,” Papa Ganon said, as Chabane crouched down beside the man. “My hand brushed his bare skin while we were dressing him, and I got the shock of my life. He’s like a walking thundercloud, this one.”

Chabane nodded, and kept his hands at his sides. In the soft white glow of the prometheic lights overhead, Chabane examined the stranger closely. His coloration, what little of it could be seen beneath the bandages, cuts, and scars, was somehow . . . off. His skin was a darker shade than his light hair would suggest, the little hairs on the backs of his hands darker than his feathery eyebrows. And his features seemed mismatched, his nose too long and narrow, his mouth a wide slash in his face, his overlarge ears too low on his head.

“What will we do with him?” Dihya asked, coming to stand beside Ganon. Taninna came with her, staring hard at the stranger’s disfigured face, as though trying to find something hidden there.

Chabane thought about tradition, about the past and the future. He remembered the superstitions he’d been taught as a child, and the story-papers’ fantastic futures into which he’d fled.

In many ways, the future promised by Jules Verne had arrived, but not in the way the young Adherbal Aït Chabaâne had imagined. But the future that young Mezian now dreamt of, the future promised in Nikola Tesla’s colorful stories? They would never arrive. That wasn’t tomorrow, but was yesterday’s tomorrow. The world of Dane Faraday would never arrive, with its heavier-than-air craft, and wireless communications connecting distant nations, and incandescent lights dangling from wires, and massive dynamos. A world of phosphorescent gas tubes on lampposts, and power-lines crisscrossing the countryside, and antennas atop every house picking symphonies out of the air. Of men and women of all races and nationalities, each measured by their conduct and their character, not by their language or the color of their skins.

Chabane thought about the frisson he’d felt on flipping through Tesla’s story, the familiar thrill of boundless potential. But he realized now it wasn’t a hope for a new world to come, but a kind of nostalgia for a future that could never be. He thought about the dead man in the blood-covered shack in the Machinery building, so committed to a particular view of yesterday’s tomorrow that he had been willing to commit horrible acts to get back to it, whatever the cost.

“Amin?” Dihya repeated, seeing Chabane lost in thought. “What will we do with the stranger?”

Chabane took a deep breath, and sighed. He had tried to escape tradition before, and now knew he never would. “We do what our grandmothers would have us do. No stranger who comes into the village for aid can ever be turned away.”

Maybe it wasn’t all of the tomorrows that mattered, Chabane realized. Maybe what was truly important was preserving the past, and working for a better today. Perhaps that was the only real way to choose what kind of future we will inhabit.

But Taninna was right, Chabane knew, looking back to the silent man sitting in the cool glow of the prometheic light. The stranger did have Salla’s eyes.