John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Travert was sallow-skinned and pitiably slight—also balding and bespectacled. Perhaps a clandestine Israelite? Quite likely. They were everywhere, and for the most part harmless. This one waited on the king in one of the museum’s private rooms, which Leopold found rather plain. Undistinguished paneling, ugly gas lamps affixed to it such as he would never choose. The smell of some crude cleaning compound troubled his nostrils.

The Jew bowed deeply. “Majesty,” he began, “I am mindful of the great favor you do me in granting me permission to share with you my new invention. The Variable Pressure Ethereo-Vibrative Condenser displays the most interesting principles discovered to date in the field to which I’ve devoted so much study, so much—”

Marie Henriette wrinkled her pretty brow. “But were you not hired to oversee the care of the inhabitants of the museum’s model village?” In the confusion following the king’s public appearance, she had shed her attendants and somehow insinuated herself into the room, taking a seat at Leopold’s side. “I’m afraid I see no connection between that and your—Elusively Gyrating—whatever you may say.” Her white shoulders shrugged off their covering of lace. “The king is busy. He has been ill, overwrought—”

Driessen coughed meaningfully into his fist.

“My queen,” said Leopold, “this very illness is the cause of my curiosity regarding Dr. Travert’s investigations. They may perhaps be of help in curing me”—he swept one shapely hand in the little Hebrew’s direction—“by means he was just about to explain.”

“Yes, of course.” The bald head ducked in acknowledgment. “You see, my Condenser renders palpable the vaporous emanations of the spirit world so that they may be, ah, dealt with in a corporeal manner: jailed, burned, buried, dissected—”

“It is due to evil spirits you’ve gone on so poorly? You never told me!” Marie Henriette twisted and leaned toward the king. Her breasts huddled forward, threatening to spill over the loose confines of her satin bodice. “Let me bring my confessor to you—tonight, after supper!”

“Why?” demanded Driessen.

Leopold dragged his eyes to where Driessen rocked heel to toe, toe to heel. His brusqueness was to be expected. The royal physician tolerated this latest attempt at reconciliation with Marie Henriette but made no secret of his cynicism in regard to her.

“‘Why?’” the queen retorted. “To disavow the guilty sorrows such things find attractive. You will feel much better, dearest, once you’ve relinquished your burden of sin.”

But Leopold had done nothing wrong. The casualties in the Congo were necessary to the extraction of its wealth. He looked at Marie Henriette as blandly as possible. With age, her fascination was shrinking. “Perhaps,” he temporized. “However, first we’ll try Travert’s method.” It seemed more certain, more scientific.

Though there was one point about which he felt concern. “You have tested the procedure?” he asked.

“Naturally. With the access to your African subjects you have so kindly granted, I was well able. In fact, I have prepared a demonstration for you to view before your own Condensation. It only remains for me to outline for you the particulars of the apparatus’s operation and we’ll get started.”

It required the full force of Driessen’s insistence to make the self-aggrandizing Jew realize he could deliver this outline while simultaneously enacting his far more germane demonstration.

Of Leopold’s personal guard only Gagnon, its head, had entered the room with him. In the crowded corridor they rejoined the rest of the detachment, descending thence via unfinished steps to a basement, where the odor of the cleaning compound threatened to overwhelm him, though he couldn’t determine if it affected anyone else. After they had negotiated several jogs and branchings, Travert called a halt to the procession and unlocked a large wooden door in the passageway’s right-hand wall.

The space they entered held charcoal-colored benches, one covered in a jumble of equipment: glass tubes, snakelike hoses, metal fixtures glittering in the scanty light falling from small windows near the room’s bare rafters. Its far end was obscured by a brown velvet curtain. Travert drew that aside to reveal a lectern and, looming behind it, a tall, narrow booth. Or a cage—that might be a better word for it, since bars of brass stretched from its raised floor to a height crowned with a barrel-like tank and some geared apparatuses he couldn’t quite descry.

Travert swung the cage’s barred door open as they approached. A pale face seemed to coalesce behind it, to shiver and deform itself. Then Leopold realized this was but his own reflection. The bars were backed with smooth panes of leaded crystal, as its inventor explained. At length. They helped to hold in certain vibrations which it was desirable to contain in order to concretize the evanescent portion of the targeted phenomenon. Certain chemicals in combination with steam-driven increases in atmospheric pressure wrought bridging chains of causality between the captive spiritual energy’s various potential states and resulted in manifestations tangible to all.

Before the fumes of whatever nauseating substance was so prevalent here bested his control completely, a scuffle at the room’s entrance ensued. “Ah! Here is my favorite now—” The Hebrew urged a pair of workingmen forward. In their grip they propelled a struggling nigger woman who slapped and kicked them ineffectually, screeching at them an endless stream of what were doubtless heathen maledictions. Reaching the cage, they flung her inside. Like a wild beast she leaped snarling to her feet and charged the door—but Travert speedily shut and secured it.

Her stink fought strenuously against the chemical scent overlaying everything else. Raising to his nose a cologne-soaked handkerchief he hoped would block these disagreeable odors, Leopold leaned forward to scrutinize the lectern to which Travert now advanced. It had been modified by the addition of a peculiar wheel like a gleaming halo and several switches and levers. Manipulating one of these, the doctor set off a low, heavy-sounding hum. The king looked an inquiry.

“Power from that rank of batteries to your right”—Travert pointed to a row of crates formed of some black, dull-surfaced metal—“primes the mechanism while the generators build up sufficient steam.” The nigger wench had ceased her wailing imprecations and sunk to lie sullenly on the cage’s bottom. “Much as when the heat and pressure employed in vulcanization collects prior to…” Ensorcelled by his own arcane activities, Travert allowed the explanation to trail away. Frowning, he slid a yellow-enameled lever down to a position approximating that of a neighboring blue one.

“Go on,” Leopold commanded. His stern tone woke Travert from his trance.

“Whatever manifestations Fifine accords us—”

“‘Fifine’?”

The doctor’s sallow cheeks blushed like a maiden’s. “My name for the subject—I must call her something, and her African name is far too outlandish.”

With the nipples of her flat dugs aimed at the cage floor like dusky arrowheads, the drab resembled no Fifine Leopold had ever known. And he had known a few. But let the man indulge his fancy. “Very well. What would you tell us about the manifestations of this ‘Fifine’?”

“The Condenser will render them visible, palpable, subject to study and measurement. From mere ectoplasmic excrescences they will be focused and solidified—”

“Yes, yes.” The soft hum stealing out of the rafters had been growing steadily louder. Leopold pitched his invitation above it. “Driessen, if you will do the honors?” The royal physician laid his hand over the Israelite’s and gave the lectern’s wheel a swift spin. It connected to the apparatus above the cage by a series of looping belts and toothed cogs, all of which now began to turn. They did not cease to do so when the wheel did.