William Gibson: The Difference Engine

"Read to me?" Hetty asked. "I'll make tea."

"Very well." In her spotty, scattered life with Hetty, reading aloud was one of the little rituals they had that passed for domesticity. Sybil took up the day's Illustrated London News from the deal table, settled her crinoline about her in the creaking, damp-smelling armchair, and squinted at a front-page article. It concerned itself with dinosaurs.

The Rads were mad for these dinosaurs, it seemed. Here was an engraving of a party of seven, led by Lord Darwin, all peering intently at some indeterminate object embedded in a coal-face in Thuringia. Sybil read the caption aloud, showed the picture to Hetty. A bone. The thing in the coal was a monstrous bone, as long as a man was tall. She shuddered. Turning the page, she encountered an artist's view of the creature as it might have looked in life, a monstrosity with twin rows of angry triangular saw-teeth along its humped spine. It seemed the size of an elephant at least, though its evil little head was scarcely larger than a hound's.

Hetty poured the tea. " 'Reptiles held sway across the whole of the earth,' eh?" she quoted, and threaded her needle. "I don't believe a bloody word of it."

"Why not?"

"They're the bones of bloody giants, out of Genesis. That's what the clergy say, ain't it?"

Sybil said nothing. Neither supposition struck her as the more fantastic. She turned to a second article, this one in praise of Her Majesty's Artillery in the Crimea. She found an engraving of two handsome subalterns admiring the operation of a long-range gun. The gun itself, its barrel stout as a foundry stack, looked fit to make short work of all Lord Darwin's dinosaurs. Sybil's attention, however, was held by an inset view of the gunnery Engine. The intricate nest of interlocking gearwork possessed a queer beauty, like some kind of baroquely fabulous wallpaper.

"Have you anything that needs darning?" Hetty asked.

"No, thank you."

"Read some adverts, then," Hetty advised. "I do hate that war humbug."

There was HAVILAND CHINA, from Limoges, France; VIN MARIANI, the French tonic, with a testimonial from Alexandre Dumas and Descriptive Book, Portraits, and Autographs of Celebrities, upon application to the premises in Oxford Street; SILVER ELECTRO SILICON POLISH, it never scratches, never wears, it is unlike others; the "NEW DEPARTURE" BICYCLE BELL, it has a tone all its own; DR. BAYLEY'S LITHIA WATER, cures Bright's disease and the gouty diathesis; GURNEY'S "REGENT" POCKET STEAM-ENGINE, intended for use with domestic sewing machines. This last held Sybil's attention, but not through its promise to operate a machine at double the old speed at a cost of one halfpenny per hour.

Here was an engraving of the tastefully ornamented little boiler, to be heated by gas or paraffin. Charles Egremont had purchased one of these for his wife. It came equipped with a rubber tube intended to vent the waste steam when jammed under a convenient sash-window, but Sybil had been delighted to hear that it had turned Madame's drawing-room into a Turkish bath.

When the paper was finished, Sybil went to bed. She was woken around midnight by the savage rhythmic crouching of Hetty's bed-springs.

It was dim in the Garrick Theatre, dusty and cold, with the pit and the balcony and the racks of shabby seats; but it was pitch-dark below the stage, where Mick Radley was, and it smelled of damp and lime.

Mick's voice echoed up from under her feet. "Ever seen the innards of a kinotrope, Sybil?"

"I saw one once, backstage," she said. "At a music-hall, in Bethnal Green. I knew the fellow what worked it, a clacker cove."

"A sweetheart?" Mick asked. His echoing voice was sharp.

"No," Sybil told him quickly, "I was singing a bit… But it scarcely paid."

She heard the sharp click of his repeating match. It caught on the third attempt and he lit a stub of candle. "Come down," he commanded. "Don't stand there like a goose, showing off your ankles." Sybil lifted her crinoline with both hands and picked her way uneasily down the steep damp stairs.

Mick reached up to grope behind a tall stage-mirror, a great gleaming sheet of silvered glass, with a wheeled pedestal and oily gears and worn wooden cranks. He retrieved a cheap black portmanteau of proofed canvas, placed it carefully on the floor before him, and squatted to undo the flimsy tin clasps. He removed a stack of perforated cards bound with a ribbon of red paper. There were other bundles in the bag as well, Sybil saw, and something else, a gleam of polished wood.

He handled the cards gently, like a Bible.

"Safe as houses," he said. "You just disguise 'em, you see—write something stupid on the wrapper, like 'Temperance Lecture—Parts One Two Three.' Then coves never think to steal 'em, or even load them up and look." Hefting the thick block, he riffled its edge with his thumb, so that it made a sharp crisp sound, like a gambler's new deck. "I put a deal of capital in these," he said. "Weeks of work from the best kino hands in Manchester. Exclusively to my design, I might point out. 'Tis a lovely thing, girl. Quite artistic, in its way. You'll soon see."

Closing the portmanteau, he stood. He carefully slid the bundle of cards into his coat-pocket, then bent over a crate and tugged out a thick glass tube. He blew dust from the tube, then gripped one end of it with a special pair of pincers. The glass cracked open with an airtight pop—there was a fresh block of lime in the tube. Mick slid it loose, humming to himself. He tamped the lime gently into the socket of a limelight burner, a great dish-shaped thing of sooty iron and gleaming tin. Then he turned a hose-tap, sniffed a bit, nodded, turned a second tap, and set the candle to it.

Sybil yelped as a vicious flash sheeted into her eyes. Mick chuckled at her over the hiss of blazing gas, dots of hot blue dazzle drifting before her. "Better," he remarked. He aimed the blazing limelight carefully into the stage-mirror, then began to adjust its cranks.

Sybil looked around, blinking. It was dank and ratty and cramped under the Garrick stage, the sort of place a dog or a pauper might die in, with torn and yellowed bills underfoot, for naughty farces like That Rascal Jack and Scamps of London. A pair of ladies' unmentionables were wadded in a corner. From her brief unhappy days as a stage-singer, she had some idea how they might have gotten there.

She let her gaze follow steam-pipes and taut wires to the gleam of the Babbage Engine, a small one, a kinotrope model, no taller than Sybil herself. Unlike everything else in the Garrick, the Engine looked in very good repair, mounted on four mahogany blocks. The floor and ceiling above and beneath it had been carefully scoured and whitewashed. Steam-calculators were delicate things, temperamental, so she'd heard; better not to own one than not cherish it. In the stray glare from Mick's limelight, dozens of knobbed brass columns gleamed, set top and bottom into solid sockets bored through polished plates, with shining levers, ratchets, a thousand steel gears cut bright and fine. It smelled of linseed oil.

Looking at it, this close, this long, made Sybil feel quite odd. Hungry almost, or greedy in a queer way, the way she might feel about… a fine lovely horse, say. She wanted—not to own it exactly, but possess it somehow…

Mick took her elbow suddenly, from behind. She started. "Lovely thing, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's… lovely."

Mick still held her arm. Slowly, he put his other gloved hand against her cheek, inside her bonnet. Then he lifted her chin with his thumb, staring into her face. "It makes you feel something, doesn't it?"

His rapt voice frightened her, his eyes underlit with glare. "Yes, Mick," she said obediently, quickly. "I do feel it… something."

He tugged her bonnet loose, to hang at her neck. "You're not frightened of it, Sybil, are you? Not with Dandy Mick here, holding you. You feel a little special frisson. You'll learn to like that feeling. We'll make a clacker of you."