John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Brushing his hands together as if to remove invisible soil from his fingers, Driessen released his hold, and Travert deserted his lectern for a new post directly before the cage. He addressed its occupant. “Fifine? You are prepared for a demonstration?”

Leopold was taken aback to hear a reply in French. “How can you ask such a stupid question?” He looked to make sure: yes, it was the nigger herself who answered! “The harm you have caused me with your Condenser has no cure. Haven’t I told you? Yet you persist in destroying all that remains to me of those I love.”

Travert’s cheeks reddened again. “Fifine! Must I gag you? I haven’t touched a hair upon your head! What will His Majesty think?” He turned an embarrassed countenance to the king.

“I think that you had better get on with things.”

The scientist returned hurriedly to the lectern, ignoring the nigger woman’s yammering—as he ought to have done from the first. A red lever was moved to a position paralleling the blue and yellow. Clouds of fog descended from the cage’s ceiling, gray and black. The terrible odor increased, forcing Leopold to retreat to lean upon a bench a few feet back. There was naught to see nearer anyway: coiling smoke filled the cage and obscured its contents.

For long moments nothing more happened. Then the laboring noise of the Condenser’s growling motors ground slowly down to silence.

Gradually the clouds within the cage cleared, disclosing the slumped form of the black on its still-murky bottom. And—other forms? Smaller shapes were scattered around the large one. Did they stir? Yes! Leopold drew closer. A quiet chirping rewarded him. Ghostly birds hopped and fluttered through the dissipating mist. Like dusty sparrows on some plebian roadway, they pecked at their fellow prisoner, soon rousing her.

An odd expression came over the woman’s face. On a white, Leopold would have taken it for a compound of regret and delight. Of course, the lower orders were incapable of such complicated mixtures of emotions. If he hadn’t known this for a fact, however, he would have been hard-pressed not to attribute such feelings to her as she petted the hopping, shadow-tinted birds with the most delicate of touches. Under the machine’s noise and the twittering the bird things emitted, he caught her whispered murmurs and cooed nonsense.

Travert approached him. “The flock has thinned considerably since our first experiment.”

“Indeed?” Leopold imagined the cage busy with the dull-plumed little birds. “What became of them?”

A pursing of his lips made obvious the scientist’s Oriental ancestry. “They furnished us with material for several informative experiments. But have you comprehended the procedure so far? The carbon and other additives being linked to the interacting surface of the manifestations and showing us thereby their outlines—”

Would the man never cease droning on? Stifling his exasperation, Leopold glanced significantly toward Driessen, who stepped forward and placed a silencing finger on the Jew’s thick lips. “Enough!”

A moment Travert’s jaw dropped and hung open; a moment his ungloved hands twitched in the barely breathable air. But then, not being mad, he composed himself and motioned the nigger’s escorts to come with him to open up the cage.

Reluctant as she had appeared to enter the brass-and-crystal enclosure, “Fifine” made yet more difficulty about leaving it. One of the doctor’s assistants gripped her woolly head, even bringing himself to insert his fingers in her gaping nostrils; the other secured her kicking feet. But they had to call for a third man to grasp her wildly flailing arms before they managed to eject her from the room.

Leopold’s eyes followed the disturbance toward the door but came to rest on his queen. The sight of her, almost as green and pale as the walls against which she sought refuge, moved him to hold out a welcoming hand. She ran quickly to catch it up. “I’m so sorry you’ve been put through such an ordeal, Marie,” he apologized. “You need not remain longer if it pains you.”

“I could not desert you!” Her refusal to leave gratified the king. He caressed her plump wrist, intending to raise it to his lips.

THWACK!

Leopold jumped involuntarily. The doctor reacted to his stare with a guilty shift of his eyes, hefting up the meter stick he carried. “My apologies. I missed my mark,” said Travert. “For your convenience, it will naturally be best to clear the Condenser’s apparatus immediately, and as we’ve conducted plenty of trials already with this sort of specimen—” He gave a Levantine hunch of his shoulders and returned to clubbing down the dingy birds shut with him inside the cage. Only four remained active, but they gave the Jew an inordinate amount of trouble, their cries loud and frantic as they flew erratically about. The flat crack of the stick meeting bare metal sounded again and again.

Travert’s three assistants reappeared and soon dispatched the last of the vermin in a flurry of high-pitched little shrieks. The Jew then had them shovel out the corpselike refuse.

At last Travert indicated with a bow that the Condenser’s cage was ready for Leopold to enter. Driessen walked in before him, examining the situation. “His Majesty will require a chair,” the royal physician declared.

Seated upon a velvet-covered, spindle-legged stool, Leopold found the unpleasant odor increased. The cage’s door shut, and the heliotrope in which he’d drenched his handkerchief barely compensated for the intensified smell, which filled the surroundings like a half-live thing. After an interval of building noise above his head, he heard a subtle hiss and looked up to see the dark, descending smoke.

Would it affect him, a European, as it had the quasi-animal “Fifine”?

Rotting grayness clogged his eyes, his nose, and, when he tried breathing through it, his mouth. Stoic determination fled. The king gagged and fainted.

A cool breeze woke him. Refreshed, he opened his stinging eyes to gaze upon a little garden planted with tropical trees, bushes, and flowers—doubtless the produce of his Congolese holdings. He had designed several such gardens to fill the museum’s courtyards. One of Gagnon’s men must have carried him here so he’d more easily revive. Certainly the fresh air was an improvement, and the scene that met his eyes far more pleasing than that of the stuffy cellar: fat stems held nodding blooms of cinnabar, violet, and gold, and broad leaves, some veined in white or pink, quivered softly on all sides.

It was proper that the guard, having brought him here, had departed, but where were Driessen and the queen? Was he actually alone? How odd. No—through the foliage Leopold glimpsed a young girl approaching him. Comely enough, though her final steps showed her to be clad in a boy’s shirt and trousers.

“Hello. I’m Lily.” A frank, open expression sat with habitual ease upon her healthful features.

Meaning to announce his royal status in a charming yet authoritative manner, Leopold was suddenly rendered voiceless: the girl’s left leg had that second become a pulpy mess of gore and bone. His throat filled with vomit. He choked it down.

“Ah. My injury disturbs you. You haven’t yet had time to get used to it as I have.” The girl gazed ruefully down at her shattered limb. “Your soldiers shot me last October, during our rescue of King Mwenda, and I died that very night. Nearly six months now, isn’t it?”

Leopold gaped at her. He must have looked exceedingly foolish. Chief Mwenda had led a rebellion against the king’s Public Forces. “You are a—a gh-gh-ghost?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She flicked a careless hand at the red ruin on which she stood. Impossibly.