Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

He puts the ball in a smooth hollow on the bench. Any number of things in his world are spherical or nearly so, and many of those should not be allowed to roll around. For a while, the company which supplied him with a particularly ferocious acid for cleaning and etching supplied it in round-bottomed containers so that you would have to use their rather expensive clamps and retorts along with the acid. Poison, 1d ; cure, a guinea. Well, anyway—the ball settles snugly into the hollow. Joe stretches, hearing things pop in his back and arms, then leans back over the bench. Must get a proper chair. Must get a proper chair. Yes, and half a dozen other things I can’t afford.

Item: the whojimmy, precise function unknown. A tool, for the unscrewing of magic bolts and the opening of locks whose existence we do not presently apprehend. A thing made for a specific purpose. An object of destiny. A funny-looking gadget with a handle at one end and a strange twisting loop which winds around it, almost like the basket hilt on an old duelling sword. Joe waves the whojimmy dramatically, then stops. Like the ball, it’s surprisingly dense.

And finally, a square of white card with words written on it in felt tip: a reminder from Billy that the said object is to be treated with respect and could he please have the bawdy gamekeeper in a hurry because his lady client is getting pressing.

So then: to the Batcave! Or at least, to work. He closes the door and puts the sign in the window saying “please ring.”

The erotomaton (he glances at it guiltily, the fruit and milk he is ignoring in favour of cake) shouldn’t be too hard to fix. It probably won’t be all that interesting, either. It can wait until tomorrow. He ponders the figures slumped in their first positions—the most orderly ménage à trois Joe Spork has ever heard of. He knows a few experimenters in polyamory, has observed from the outside the curious triangular relationships and sexual flat-shares, and come to the conclusion that in most cases there’s rather more poly than amory , for all the protestations to the contrary. It’s not that it can’t be done, just that the odds of finding one person to share your days are bad enough, without looking for two who can also share their lives with each other and remain content with the situation whatever perturbations may arise along life’s curious road.

Hard to find just one person, indeed. The big warehouse is very empty today, and the sloosh of the Thames is sorrowful. He makes tea, temporarily replacing the missing foot of his kettle with a pink reminder notice from the gas company, folded three times. He is reasonably certain he has paid it. Sort that out tomorrow.

At the workbench, tea in hand (the approved commencement of a difficult task, the stricture of patience to be borne strongly in mind, lest one be hasty and make an irretrievable error early in the proceedings) he contemplates the fragments before him. All right, well, simple enough: copy and photograph it all. Easy, in these digital days. Joshua Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology—he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system.

By contrast, here is his grandfather’s workdesk, with the tools Daniel Spork constructed for himself. It is polished by time, unvarnished but smooth, and on the left is a slight imprint: the pressure of the old man’s elbow. On the right, a vise and a new rubber hose feeding an ancient Bunsen burner. Greying scars from heat, pale ones from tools. The grain of the wood is silvery, and in those lines is the literal DNA of the House of Spork, Daniel’s own co-mingled with his grandson’s—blood drawn by a moment’s inattention, tears choked out in times of sorrow, each drop carrying the blueprint of Daniel’s body, and Joe’s. Even Mathew is represented, probably, because Papa Spork was no stranger to this bench, for all that in his hands it became an armoury, a pouring place of molten lead and sharp-scented powders: a den of alchemy.

For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one who deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which use humans to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own weird little ecosystems. For reference and archive, though, he’s glad to have his baby Canon with its lens by Zeiss.

So. Three pictures from each angle, close and distant. Each fragment documented. He feels Grandpa Spork’s measuring gaze upon his back: Daniel Spork, dead these seven years and some, eyes bright in anticipation of a puzzle—and better, a puzzle shared with his best-beloved student, the son of his wastrel son.

Joe smiles to himself, a little sadly, in acknowledgement of the beloved, irascible dead. He doesn’t look over his shoulder, doesn’t want to see the empty room. Instead, he asks a question of the air, and lets his mind throw back Daniel’s responses.

“What next, old man?”

Use your eyes, boy. What are you looking at?

“It’s a doodah.”

Joseph, no. No, no, and no. In the first place, tell me you have not been dealing with that William Friend?

“Once in a while.”

Pfft .

“What’s the second place?”

Idiot child of my criminal son, you know what I am going to say. You do. Of course you do .

Of course, he does. He knows the speech by heart. Seek the stricture. Find the lesson, the purpose, the essence. The rest is window dressing, and will give itself to you entirely, if you first understand the thing and the nature of the thing .

Joe Spork’s grandfather believed—or sometimes believed, and always maintained—that every object on Earth was created by God with the capacity to impart to the attentive student some virtue or grace.

Consider glass. What is the nature of glass?

It is a curious material used for windows and drinking vessels. It must be created in a crucible, purified and smelted until its nature becomes clear—and during this period it can be ruined by a moment’s inattention, which might also prove lethal to the unwatchful glazier; it is beautiful, friable, explosive and transparent.

Go on. What else?

At every stage in its existence—when it is molten, and must be poured from its cup at the end of a long pole; when it is glowing, and can be blown, but remains so vigorously hot that any organic thing placed in proximity to it will instantly take fire; when it is cooling and clear, and has acquired some definition, but will still shatter if it is not cooled with painful slowness in a series of incubating ovens; and when it is cold, and brittle, and the merest impact from a metal point causes it to become a collection of lethal knives which cut so finely that the nerves are sliced clean and a man may miss the fact that he is injured until he smells the blood or sees it upon his shirt—glass is a lesson.

Yes, Joe. Precisely. And so the lesson, the stricture of glass?

“Caution.” He says it aloud, and jumps a little at the sound of his own voice.

Well and good. A salutary inquisition. Very spiritual.

Joe Spork, with his grandfather’s waspish ghost at his elbow, considers the object before him.

So, question: what do we have here?

Answer: a mess. A book which is also a set of punchcards. A tool which doesn’t fit anything. Fragments. A ball which may be an egg, but which, if so, is locked. There’s something inside, but that need not mean it’s intended to open. Like those Chinese concentric spheres. It’s heavy. Gold, maybe. There’s a design—a clue? Or just an embellishment?