William Gibson: The Difference Engine

"Sir, may I wait for Her Ladyship with you? I hope I will not intrude if I request her autograph."

"At the corner," Fraser nodded. "The gurney." He offered her his left arm, tucked the sword-cane in the pit of his right, his hand resting easy on the handle. It would not hurt to get a bit of distance down the pavement, before Lady Ada approached; he wanted to watch this woman.

They stopped at the corner, beneath an angular French gas-lamp. "It's so good to hear a London voice," said the woman, coaxingly. "I have lived so long in France that my English has grown quite rusty."

"Not at all," Fraser said. Her voice was lovely.

"I am Madame Tournachon," she said, "Sybil Tournachon."

"My name is Fraser." He bowed.

Sybil Tournachon fidgeted with her kid-skin gloves, as though her palms were perspiring. The day was very hot. "Are you one of her paladins, Mr. Fraser?"

"I'm afraid I fail to take your meaning, madame," Fraser said politely. "Do you live in Paris, Mrs. Tournachon?"

"In Cherbourg," she said, "but I came all that way, by the morning express, simply to see her speak." She paused. "I scarcely understood a word she said."

"No harm in that, madame," Fraser said, "neither do I." He had begun to like her.

The gurney arrived. The chauffeur, with a bold wink at Fraser, hopped from behind the wheel and whipped a dirty chamois from his pocket. He applied it to the tarnished trim of a scalloped fender, whistling.

Her Ladyship emerged from the lecture-hall. She had remembered her hand-bag. As she approached, Mrs. Tournachon went a bit pale with excitement, and took a lecture-program from her jacket.

She was quite harmless.

"Your Ladyship, may I present Mrs. Sybil Tournachon," Fraser said.

"How do you do?" Lady Ada said.

Mrs. Tournachon curtsied. "Will you sign my program? Please."

Lady Ada blinked. Fraser, adroitly, handed her the pen from his notebook. "Of course," Lady Ada said, taking the paper. "I'm sorry—what was the name?"

" 'To Sybil Tournachon.' Shall I spell it?"

"No need," said Her Ladyship, smiling. "There's a famous French aeronaut named Tournachon, isn't there?" Fraser offered his back to the flourish of Her Ladyship's pen. "A relation of yours, perhaps?"

"No, Your Highness."

"I beg your pardon?" Lady Ada said.

"They call you Queen of Engines…" Mrs. Tournachon, smiling triumphantly, plucked the inscribed program from Her Ladyship's unresisting fingers. "The Queen of Engines! And you're just a funny little grey-haired blue-stocking!" She laughed. "This lecture-gull you're running, dearie—does it pay at all well? I do hope it pays!"

Lady Ada regarded her with unfeigned astonishment.

Fraser's grip tightened on the cane. He stepped to the curb, swiftly opened the gurney door.

"One moment!" The woman tugged with sudden energy at one gloved finger, came up with a gaudy ring. "Your Ladyship—please—I want you to have this!"

Fraser stepped between them, lowering the cane. "Leave her alone."

"No," Mrs. Tournachon cried, "I've heard the tales, I know she needs it…" She pressed against him, stretching out her arm. "Your Ladyship, please take this! I shouldn't have wounded your feelings, it was low of me. Please take my gift! Please, I do admire you, I sat through that whole lecture. Please take it, I brought it just for you!" She fell back then, her hand empty, and smiled. "Thank you. Your Ladyship! Good luck to you. I shan't trouble you again. Au revoir! Bonne chance!"

Fraser followed Her Ladyship into the gurney, shut the door, rapped the partition. The chauffeur took his post.

The gurney pulled away.

"What a queer little personage," Her Ladyship said. She opened her hand. A fat little diamond gleamed in its filigreed setting. "Who was she, Mr. Fraser?"

"I should guess an exile, ma'am," Fraser said. "Very forward of her."

"Was it wrong of me to take this?" Her breath smelled of brandy and seltzer. "Not really proper, I suppose. But she would have made a scene, otherwise." She held the gem up, in a sheet of dusty sunlight through the window. "Look at the size of it! It must be very dear."

"Paste, Your Ladyship."

Swift as thought. Lady Ada pinched the ring in her fingers like a bit of chalk, and ran the stone along the gurney's window. There was a thin grating shriek, almost inaudible, and a shining groove appeared across the glass.

They sat in companionable silence, then, on their way to the hotel.

Fraser watched Paris through the window and recalled his instructions. "You may let the old girl drink as she likes," the Hierarch had told him, with his inimitable air of mincing irony, "talk as she likes, flirt as she likes, saving open scandal, of course… You may take your mission as fulfilled if you can keep our little Ada from the wagering-machines." There had been small chance of that disaster, for her purse held nothing but tickets and small-change, but the diamond had rather changed matters. He would have to keep a closer eye, now.

Their rooms in the Richelieu were quite modest, with a connecting-door he had not touched. The locks were sound enough, and he had found and plugged the inevitable spyholes. He kept the keys.

"Is there anything left of the advance?" Lady Ada asked.

"Enough to tip the chauffeur," Fraser said.

"Oh dear. That little?"

Fraser nodded. The French savants had paid little enough for the pleasure of her learned company, and her debts had swiftly eaten that. The meager takings at the ticket-booth would scarcely have paid their passage from London.

Lady Ada opened the curtains, frowned at summer daylight, closed them again. "Then I suppose I shall have to take on that tour in America."

Fraser sighed, inaudibly. "They say that continent boasts many natural wonders, milady."

"Which tour, though? Boston and New Philadelphia? Or Charleston and Richmond?"

Fraser said nothing. The names of the alien cities struck him with a leaden gloom.

"I shall toss a coin for it!" Her Ladyship decided brightly. "Have you a coin, Mr. Fraser?"

"No, milady," Fraser lied, searching his pockets with a muted jingle, "I'm sorry."

"Don't they pay you at all?" Her Ladyship inquired, with a hint of temper.

"I have my police pension, milady. Quite generous, promptly paid." The promptness part was true, at least.

She was concerned now, hurt. "But doesn't the Society pay you a proper salary? Oh dear, and I've put you to so much trouble, Mr. Fraser! I had no idea."

"They recompense me in their own way, ma'am. I am well rewarded."

He was her paladin. It was more than enough.

She stepped to her bureau, searching among papers and receipts. Her fingers touched the tortoise-shell handle of her traveling-mirror.

She turned then, and caught him with a woman's look. Under its pressure, he lifted his hand, quite without volition, and touched his bumpy cheek below the eye-patch. His white side-whiskers did not hide the scars. A shotgun had caught him there. It still ached sometimes, when it rained.

She did not see his gesture, though, or did not choose to see it. She beckoned him nearer. "Mr. Fraser. My friend. Tell me something, won't you? Tell me the truth." She sighed. "Am I nothing but a funny little grey-haired blue-stocking?"

"Madame," Fraser said gently, "you are la Reine des Ordinateurs."

"Am I?" She lifted the mirror, gazed within it.

In the minor, a City.

It is 1991. It is London. Ten thousand towers, the cyclonic hum of a trillion twisting gears, all air gone earthquake-dark in a mist of oil, in the frictioned heat of intermeshing wheels. Black seamless pavements, uncounted tributary rivulets for the frantic travels of the punched-out lace of data, the ghosts of history loosed in this hot shining necropolis. Paper-thin faces billow like sails, twisting, yawning, tumbling through the empty streets, human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye. And when a given face has served its purpose, it crumbles, frail as ash, bursting into a dry foam of data, its constituent bits and motes. But new fabrics of conjecture are knitted in the City's shining cores, swift tireless spindles flinging off invisible loops in their millions, while in the hot unhuman dark, data melts and mingles, churned by gear-work to a skeletal bubbling pumice, dipped in a dreaming wax that forms a simulated flesh, perfect as thought—