Authors: Ian R MacLeod
‘Electricity!’ Master Harrat exclaimed, standing up, leaving his own cake uneaten, his tea unsipped. ‘It’s the way of the future, Robert. You must let me show you …’
At the back of the house, beyond an enormous empty kitchen, he kept a workroom in a long space lit by several mossy skylights. All around us, vials and jars and lenses glinted.
‘Electricity’s invisible, of course—and quite harmless … That is, if treated as you would any volatile chemical. And not that it is a chemical …’ He hovered there, looking about at his many implements as if they surprised even him. ‘Gaslight is a thing of the past, Robert. It was never safe, never ideal, and the demands of the higher-guilded classes are always increasing. Yes, the future, Robert. The future … !’
The next part of our ritual on that and other Halfshiftday afternoons was for Grandmaster Harrat to clear a space on one of his workbenches, and then, promising that he would only take moments, muttering and tutting for hours, tying and twisting copper wires and rolling out acid-filled cauldrons, turning devices which seemed like copper-wound adaptations of my mother’s wringer until the smell of his exertions mingled with all the other scents filling this long room. At the end of it all, Grandmaster Harrat would touch two ends of metal.
‘Electricity, Robert,’ he would wheeze. There on a workbench, clamped within lizard-like jaws, a whisker of filament would turn faint orange for a while until, with an agitated, almost aether-like spark, it died. Of course, I was used enough to my father’s intermittent enthusiasms to show the requisite admiration. But Grandmaster Harrat had visions of houses, streets, towns, cities, lit by this feeble yellow glow.
‘Imagine, Robert, if the trams in London were driven by electricity! Imagine if the trains which ply between our towns and the engines which drive our factories were powered thus! Think how clean the air would be! Think of the purity of our rivers!’
I nodded dutifully.
‘We have endlessly stuck, Robert, in these Ages of steam and industry, all these last three hundred years. Where are the new advances?’
Grandmaster Harrat was in full flight now. I barely had to shrug to keep him going.
‘I’ll tell you where they are, Robert—they’re
here,’
he tapped his skull, ‘and in workshops such as this which our guilds dare not sponsor. And why, Robert?—I’ll tell you
why.
Because the guilds cannot see beyond aether. It makes things too easy for them. Why should there be progress when life is so good for those who grip the haft of power? But the future lies ahead of us, Robert, beyond the ruins of a squandered past. Squandered on gas, Robert. Squandered on coal and steam. Squandered, above all, on the vagaries and inefficiencies of aether …
‘Think of this land of ours—think of the way it’s been shaped the best part of these last three hundred years since the Grandmaster of Painswick made his discovery. Yes, we’ve progressed, if progress you call it. We’ve learned how to harness the power of coal and gas and steam, we’ve learned how to turn out ten thousand versions of the same tatty object from one factory. Of course, and above all, we’ve learned how to use aether. Only the poorest starve, and I hear that nowadays only the weakest and most dissolute and unfortunate are sent to the workhouses. Yes, there’s fresh water for most, and interior plumbing in the better houses of the few, and the worst epidemics are almost always confined to the grimmest quarters of our great cities. I could catch a train from here, and in a few hours I could be in Dudley or Bristol. I could have a message sent there by telegraph almost instantly. But I could have been standing here saying almost exactly the same things a century ago! We haven’t
progressed,
Robert! Yes, there are new products, new fads, new styles and fashions—even the occasional new idea if anyone would dare to publish it—but none of it really counts as anything but more and more of the same. We in England and in the other so-called developed nations of Europe are as fossilised as the strange sea creatures you sometimes find in a lump of coal, and as stonily resistant to change. And I’ll tell you why, Robert—it’s because of aether. It’s because of lazy engineering. When you can make something work with a coating of wyreglow and a spell, why ever worry about improving it, eh … ?’
Grandmaster Harrat’s monologues always went along these lines. He seemed to me to be torn between hope and frustration—with frustration generally winning out. But beneath all of that, I sensed a deeper sadness. Something, I felt, had been done which couldn’t be undone. Some wound, some worm, which was endlessly turning inside him. Something which related to me, to Bracebridge, to aether, and my mother.
Through that winter and into the damp early spring in the year 85 of that Third Age of Industry, my wanderings around Bracebridge grew wider. I felt as if I was claiming the place, mapping it out before I left it. I would climb over the scrolled and filthy cables of the road bridge which spanned the rail tracks as they curved south beyond the factories. The sulphurous heat of the engines blasted beneath and I would ponder as the wagons clacked by—especially aether trucks, with their straw bedding looking soft enough to break my fall—when the best moment would be to make my leap, and the places to which that leap might take me.
By then, I was missing a lot of school; a fact which the teachers were able to accept without challenge, knowing as they all did of my mother’s worsening illness, and welcoming as they probably did one less sullen face at the back of class.
Mother’s a troll … Mother’s going to Northyton …
Grabbing apples and tins of polish from stalls at the Sixshiftday market and throwing them uselessly over walls, braving the blast on that shuddering bridge, smoking stolen cigarettes, facing up to the balehounds as they launched themselves at the fences, wading carelessly through the cuckoo-nettles and sweating through nights of agonised sleep—my whole life seemed filled with a sense of breaking through many small, invisible barriers. At each new turn in the street I was half expecting to find the trollman standing there; not Master Tatlow but someone terrible and tall and in a vast dark cape, as I imagined him, with his face an endless shadow. I took to carrying a knife, but the thing was blunt, cheap, unaethered, and it soon broke in my pocket. I was like one of Grandmaster Harrat’s filaments; charged and ready to erupt into spitting flames.
G
RANDMASTER HARRAT, IN HIS LONG WORKROOM
, moved to draw the blinds back from the skylights.
‘Impurities, Robert!’ he said. ‘Imprecision! That’s what we must fight against … Think of lightning, Robert! I used to look out over the rooftops of Northcentral from my nursery when there was a storm and will it to strike Hallam Tower. And
marvel,
Robert … I used to marvel. There’s no fudge, no doubt. Even then, I could see the start of a new, different Age. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to explain ..
I watched as he leaned over one of the demijohns of acid and a droplet of sweat slid from his chin. Today, all the wires and efforts and smoking spills had failed to produce the slightest glow. But I didn’t care. Shifterm by shifterm, these visits had acquired a soothing predictability, and his failures were as much a part of it as the taste of marzipan. I’d learned by now to keep well back at the crucial moments from the sparks, the burning rubber and the huge chemical-filled jars. Electricity seemed to be dangerous and volatile, and all that Grandmaster Harrat’s experiments had convinced me of was that it would never work. After all, who would ever want to risk having this stuff charging through their house when they could rely on the safety of coal gas, lanterns or candles? All in all, though, I had come to look forward to these Halfshiftday afternoons as rare times of escape and tranquillity.
I could picture the scene back at home at this moment, or at any other moment lately. These last shifterms my mother had lapsed into a feverish coma, tossing and writhing, her eyes wide and white, her thin limbs stretching and aching as her jaw gaped and she struggled to breathe. Beth would be tending her now, just as she did every day and night. She braved the edgy darkness and the scuttling walls of that room. Beth would be wiping Mother’s face and limbs, heating the stone bottles and seeing to the fire and smoothing the wild sheets, holding those long impossible hands that no one else could bring themselves to touch. A few nights ago, the last time I had dared to look in there, my mother had been clawing at the vanishing Mark on her left wrist. The wall above the bed, even after Beth had finished mopping it, was still thinly streaked with hieroglyphs of blood.
‘I really thought we’d reached the essence this time, Robert .. Master Harrat’s voice and the clink of bottles drifted over me. ‘I really thought we’d managed it … Sometimes, I almost wonder if it will ever come about ..
He looked at me. For once, he almost seemed to expect an answer. His glossy lower lip quivered for a moment and his eyes grew grave. He had a way of looking at me like this sometimes. I’d guessed by now that I wasn’t the first lad he’d brought back to his house to eat fairy cakes and watch as he fussed over his experiments. But there was more to it than that.
Grandmaster Harrat nodded to himself then, as if he’d reached some final conclusion. Without speaking he went over to a small, heavy door set in the walls between the gaslamps and spun a numbered dial. His silence in itself was unusual and I had no idea what to expect as, on a turn of oiled hinges, the room leapt with a blaze. Shadows tunnelled as he bore a tinkling tray to the desk. The vials it contained were like smaller versions of the pots that I had seen the women using in the paintshop at Mawdingly & Clawtson, but their wyreglow was much sharper; barely a glow at all, more a shriek of light which blurred into the other senses. The long room flared and grew dark as he placed them down. Each vial, I saw, peering closely at his elbow, bore a small seal.
‘Aether, Robert! Of course, I have to work with it every day to earn the pleasures of this house. I have to pretend to the shareholders that I know enough about its behaviour to maintain Mawdingly & Clawtson’s unparalleled reputation for aether of the highest charm. But I
don’t
know, Robert. And
I
don’t use it—
it
uses me. Give me electricity and light any day—pure, simple math. But we all must live with aether. It pervades this land. We all dance to its tune … And perhaps that’s always true even though I have striven these years for the simple and untrammelled logic of physics and engineering …’
He went on like this at even longer and more breathless length than was usual for him. To me, born in Bracebridge to the pounding of the aether engines, the distinction he was making between the supposed logic of electricity and the illogic of aether was obtuse in the extreme. To me, if anything, it was the other way around. Aether had allowed us to tame the elements: to make iron harder, steel more resilient and copper more supple, to build bigger and wider bridges, even channel messages across great distances from the mind of one telegrapher to another. Without aether, we would still be like the warring painted savages of Thule. I understood, though, that I was witnessing a climactic moment in Grandmaster Harrat’s many struggles with the medium which both drew and taunted him—an experiment in both aether and electricity which he had enacted so often in his thoughts that the actual performance of it now had the heavy air of predictability that such matters long brooded over can assume, as each moment clicks into the next. Me, I simply gazed at the shining vials which he had plainly striven for so long to avoid using in his experiments. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.
My heart was thundering. I’d never been close to aether of anything like this purity before, not even on my Day of Testing.
‘At the end of the day, aether is simple, Robert—like the simplest fairy tale. We make a wish, and aether gives us what we want, although, just as in a tale, not always quite in the way that we want it. But a better engine, a sharper tool, a cheaply made boiler which can sustain pressures far beyond those it should, undeniable economic prosperity, half-mythic brutes like the balehounds and pitbeasts to do our bidding. It gives us all these things. Or now—shall we see if it works?’
Then he was busy again, snipping wires, tweezering out a fresh filament and clipping it into place between the connectors. But for a final bridge between the things he called anodes in their chemical vats—a raised copper gate which I’d grown used to watching him close with a dramatic plunge but often little other effect—the whole circuit was complete. Muttering something I couldn’t catch, Grandmaster Harrat broke open one of the aether vials and squeezed the bulb of a pipette until a glowing line ascended the tube. The pipette then hovered over the space of air where the filament floated. A dazzling bead formed at the tip, a trembling fragment which broke and fell with a slow ease that had nothing to do with gravity. Every distance seemed to extend, and time with it, before the elements were joined. The aether touched the surface of the filament and seemed to vanish.
‘Of course, it knows what I want from it already. The perfect circuit …’ Grandmaster Harrat chuckled but he sounded grim. He re-sealed the vial, removed his leather glove. His hand, as it moved towards the gate of that final switch, was trembling. So was I. I’d never felt such anticipation … And aether of such power, purity, charm—it knew what I wanted too, even if I didn’t. I didn’t doubt that I was about to witness something thrilling and new as, with a long final exhalation, a sigh more of imminent defeat than of victory, Grandmaster Harrat closed the final bridge on the circuit he had created.
It worked.
The filament was humming, glowing.
It was a triumph.
In fact, the filament was incredibly bright, like the sun out of a clear sky when everything else seems to darken … I heard myself gasp as the light intensified. The whole world quivered and spun about me. The foaming rivers, the pounding factories, the shops groaning with produce, the hissing telegraphs and the endless, endless, shiftdays. And for some reason, in one of those actions you understand perfectly when you perform them but lose all logic afterwards, I reached out towards that blazing light. The motion of my hand was slow and I could see the bones of my flesh through the brightness—but I wanted it more than anything.