Part 5 (1/2)

”Fifty-six bits!” I boggled at Monty. A sixty-four-bit rig wasn't unheard of, if you were a mighty s.h.i.+pping company or insurer. But in a private home - well, the racket of the switches would shake the foundations! Remember, dear reader, that each additional bit doubled the calculating faculty of the home panel. Monty was proposing to increase Saint Aggie's computational capacity by a factor more than a quadrillionfold! (We computermen are accustomed to dealing in these rarified numbers, but they may surprise you. Have no fear - a quadrillion is a number of such surpa.s.sing monstrosity that you must have the knack of figuring to even approach it properly.) ”Monty,” I gasped, ”are you planning to open a firm of accountants at Saint Aggie's?”

He laid a finger alongside of his nose. ”Not all all, my old darling. I have a thought that perhaps we could build a tiny figuring engine into our Grinder's chest cavity, one that could take programs punched off of a sufficiently powerful computing frame, and that these might enable him to walk about on his own, as natural as you please, and even carry on conversations as though he were a living man. Such a creation would afford us even more freedom and security, as you must be able to see.”

”But it will cost the b.l.o.o.d.y world!” I said.

”Oh, I didn't think we'd pay for it,” he said. Once again, he laid his finger alongside his nose.

And that is how I came to find myself down our local sewer, in the dead of night, a seventeen-year-old bra.s.s jacker, bossing a gang of eight kids with ten arms, seven noses, nine hands, and eleven legs between them, working furiously and racing the dawn to fit thousands of precision bra.s.s pushrods with lightly balanced joints from the local multifarious amalgamation and amplification switch house to Saint Aggie's utility cellar. It didn't work, of course. Not that night. But at least we didn't break anything and alert the Upper Canadian Computing Authority to our mischief. Three nights later, after much fine-tuning, oiling, and desperate prayer, the panel at Saint Aggie's boasted sixty-four s.h.i.+ning bra.s.s bits, the very height of modernity and engineering.

Monty and the children all stood before the panel, which had been burnished to a mirror s.h.i.+ne by No-Nose Timmy, who'd done finis.h.i.+ng work before a careless master had stumbled over him, pus.h.i.+ng him face-first into a spinning grinding wheel. In the gaslight, we appeared to be staring at a group of mighty heroes, and when Monty turned to regard us, he had bright tears in his eyes.

”Sisters and brothers, we have done ourselves proud. A new day has dawned for Saint Aggie's and for our lives. Thank you. You have done me proud.”

We shared out the last of Grinder's brandy, a thimbleful each, even for the smallest kiddies, and drank a toast to the brave and clever children of Saint Aggie's and to Montreal Monty, our savior and the founder of our feast.

Let me tell you some about life at Saint Aggie's in that golden age. Whereas before, we'd rise at seven AM for a mean breakfast - prepared by unfavored children whom Grinder punished by putting them into the kitchen at four thirty to prepare the meal - followed by a brief ”sermon” roared out by Grinder, now we rose at a very civilized ten AM to eat a leisurely breakfast over the daily papers that Grinder had subscribed to. The breakfasts - all the meals and ch.o.r.es - were done on a rotating basis, with exemptions for children whose infirmity made performing some tasks harder than others. Though all worked - even the blind children sorted weevils and stones from the rice and beans by touch.

Whereas before, Grinder had sent us out to beg every day - excepting Sundays - debasing ourselves and putting our injuries on display for the purposes of sympathy, now we were free to laze around the house all day or work at our own fancies, painting or reading or just playing like the cherished children of rich families who didn't need to send their young ones to the city to work for the family fortune.

But most of us quickly bored of the life of Riley, and for us, there was plenty to do. The clockwork Grinder was always a distraction, especially after Monty started work on the mechanism that would accept punched-tape instructions from the computing panel.

When we weren't working on Grinder, there was other work. We former apprentices went back to our old masters - men and women who were guilty but glad enough to see us, in the main - and told them that the skilled children of Saint Aggie's were looking for piecework as part of our rehabilitation, at a compet.i.tive price.

It was hardly a lie, either: as broken tools and mechanisms came in for mending, the boys and girls taught one another their crafts and trade, and it wasn't long before a steady flow of cash came into Saint Aggie's, paying for better food, better clothes, and, soon enough, the very best artificial arms, legs, hands, and feet, the best gla.s.s eyes, the best wigs. When Gertie s.h.i.+ne-Pate was fitted for her first wig and saw herself in the great looking gla.s.s in Grinder's study, she burst into tears and hugged all and sundry, and thereafter, Saint Aggie's bought her three more wigs to wear as the mood struck her. She took to styling these wigs with combs and scissors, and before long she was cutting hair for all of us at Saint Aggie's. We never looked so good.

That gilded time from the end of my boyhood is like a sweet dream to me now. A sweet, lost dream.

No invention works right the first time around. The inventors' tales you read in the science penny dreadfuls, where some engineer discovers a new principle, puts it into practice, shouts, ”Eureka,” and sets up his own foundry? They're rubbish. Real invention is a process of repeated, crus.h.i.+ng failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there's nothing for it but to fail faster and better.

The first time Monty rolled a paper tape into a cartridge and inserted it into Grinder, we all held our breath while he fished around the a.r.s.e of Grinder's trousers for the toggle that released the tension on the mainspring we wound through a keyhole in his hip. He stepped back as the soft whining of the mechanism emanated from Grinder's body, and then Grinder began, very slowly, to pace the room's length, taking three long - if jerky - steps, then turning about, and taking three steps back. Then he lifted a hand as in greeting, and his mouth stretched into a rictus that might have pa.s.sed for a grin, and then, very carefully, Grinder punched himself in the face so hard that his head came free from his neck and rolled across the floor with a meaty sound (it took our resident taxidermists a full two days to repair the damage), and his body went into a horrible paroxysm like the Saint Vitus dance, until it, too, fell to the floor.

This was on Monday, and by Wednesday, we had Grinder back on his feet with his head reattached. Again, Monty depressed his toggle, and this time, Grinder made a horrendous clanking sound and pitched forward.

And so it went, day after day, each tiny improvement accompanied by abject failure, and each Sunday we struggled to put the pieces together so Grinder could pay his respects to the sisters.

Until the day came that the sisters brought round a new child to join our happy clan, and it all began to unravel.

We had been lucky in that Monty's arrival at Saint Aggie's coincided with a reformers' movement that had swept Upper Canada, a movement whose figurehead, Princess Lucy, met with every magistrate, councilman, alderman, and beadle in the colony, with the sleeves of her dresses pinned up to the stumps of her shoulders, sternly discussing the plight of the children who worked in the Information Foundries across the colonies. It didn't do no good in the long run, of course, but for the short term, word got round that the authorities would come down very hard on any master whose apprentice lost a piece of himself in the data mills. So it was some months before Saint Aggie's had any new meat arrive upon its doorstep.

The new meat in question was a weepy boy of about eleven - the same age I'd been when I arrived - and he was shy his left leg all the way up to the hip. He had a crude steel leg in its place, strapped up with a rough, badly cured cradle that must have hurt like h.e.l.lfire. He also had a splintery crutch that he used to get around with, the sort of thing that the sisters of Saint Aggie's bought in huge lots from unscrupulous tradesmen who cared nothing for the people who'd come to use them.

His name was William Sansousy, a metis boy who'd come from the wild woods of Lower Canada seeking work in Muddy York, who'd found instead an implacable machine that had torn off his leg and devoured it without a second's remorse. He spoke English with a thick French accent and slipped into joual when he was overcome with sorrow.

Two sisters brought him to the door on a Friday afternoon. We knew they were coming; they'd sent around a messenger boy with a printed telegram telling Grinder to make room for one more. Monty wanted to turn his clockwork Grinder loose to walk to the door and greet them, but we all told him he'd be mad to try it: there was so much that could go wrong, and if the sisters worked out what had happened, we could finish up dangling from nooses at the King Street Gaol.

Monty relented resentfully, and instead we seated Grinder in his overstuffed chair, with Monty tucked away behind it, ready to converse with the sisters. I hid with him, ready to send Grinder to his feet and extend his cold, leathery artificial hand to the boy when the sisters turned him over.

And it went smoothly - that day. When the sisters had gone and their car had built up its head of steam and chuffed and clanked away, we emerged from our hiding place. Monty broke into slangy, rapid French, gesticulating and hopping from foot to peg leg and back again, and William's eyes grew as big as saucers as Monty explained the lay of the land to him. The clang when he thumped Grinder in his cast-iron chest made William leap back, and he hobbled toward the door.

”Wait, wait!” Monty called, switching to English. ”Wait, will you, you idiot? This is the best day of your life, young William! But for us, you might have entered a life of miserable bondage. Instead, you will enjoy all the fruits of liberty, rewarding work, and comrades.h.i.+p. We take care of our own here at Saint Aggie's. You'll have top grub, a posh leg, and a beautiful crutch that's as smooth as a baby's a.r.s.e and as soft as a lady's bosom. You'll have the freedom to come and go as you please, and you'll have a warm bed to sleep in every night. And best of all, you'll have us, your family here at Saint Aggie's. We take care of our own, we do.”

The boy looked at us, tears streaming down his face. He made me remember what it had been like, my first day at Saint Aggie's, the cold fear coiled around your guts like rope caught in a reciprocating gear. At Saint Aggie's we put on brave faces, never cried where no one could see us, but seeing him weep made me remember all the times I'd cried, cried for my lost family who'd sold me into indenture, cried for my mangled body, my ruined life. But living without Grinder's constant terrorizing must have softened my heart. Suddenly it was all I could do to stop myself from giving the poor little mite a one-armed hug.

I didn't hug him, but Monty did, stumping over to him, and the two of them bawled like babbies. Their peg legs knocked together as they embraced like drunken sailors, seeming to cry out every tear we'd any of us ever held in. Before long, we were all crying with them, fat tears streaming down our faces, the sound like something out of the pit.

When the sobs had stopped, William looked around at us, wiped his nose, and said, ”Thank you. I think I am home.”

But it wasn't home for him. Poor William. We'd had children like him, in the bad old days, children who just couldn't get back up on their feet (or foot) again. Most of the time, I reckon, they were kids who couldn't make it as apprentices, neither, kids who'd spent their working lives full of such awful misery that they were bound to fall into a machine. And being sundered from their limbs didn't improve their outlook.

We tried everything we could think of to cheer William up. He'd worked for a watch smith, and he had a pretty good hand at disa.s.sembling and cleaning mechanisms. His stump ached him like fire, even after he'd been fitted with a better apparatus by Saint Aggie's best leg maker, and it was only when he was working with his little tweezers and brushes that he lost the grimace that twisted up his face so. Monty had him strip and clean every clockwork in the house, even the ones that were working perfectly - even the delicate works we'd carefully knocked together for the clockwork Grinder. But it wasn't enough.

In the bad old days, Grinder would have beaten the boy and sent him out to beg in the worst parts of town, hoping that he'd be run down by a cart or killed by one of the blunderbuss gangs that marauded there. When the law brought home the boy's body, old Grinder would weep crocodile tears and tug his hair at the b.l.o.o.d.y evil that men did, and then he'd go back to his rooms and play some music and drink some brandy and sleep the sleep of the unjust.

We couldn't do the same, and so we tried to bring up William's spirits instead, and when he'd had enough of it, he lit out on his own. The first we knew of it was when he didn't turn up for breakfast. This wasn't unheard of - any of the free children of Saint Aggie's was able to rise and wake whenever he chose - but William had been a regular at breakfast every day. I made my way upstairs to the dormer room, where the boys slept, to look for him and found his bed empty, his coat and his peg leg and crutch gone.

”He's gone,” Monty said. ”Long gone.” He sighed and looked out the window. ”Must be trying to get back to the Gatineau.” He shook his head.

”Do you think he'll make it?” I said, knowing the answer but hoping that Monty would lie to me.

”Not a chance,” Monty said. ”Not him. He'll either be beaten, arrested, or worse by sundown. That lad hasn't any self-preservation instincts.”

At this, the dining room fell silent and all eyes turned on Monty, and I saw in a flash what a terrible burden we all put on him: savior, father, chieftain. He twisted his face into a halfway convincing smile.

”Oh, maybe not. He might just be hiding out down the road. Tell you what. Eat up and we'll go searching for him.”

I never saw a load of plates cleared faster. It was bare minutes before we were formed up in the parlor, divided into groups, and sent out into Muddy York to find William Sansousy. We turned that bad old city upside down, asking nosy questions and sticking our heads in where they didn't belong, but Monty had been doubly right the first time around.

The police found William Sansousy's body in a marshy bit of land off the Leslie Street Spit. His pockets had been slit, his pathetic paper sack of belongings torn and the clothes scattered, and his fine hand-turned leg was gone. He had been dead for hours.

The detective inspector who presented himself that afternoon at Saint Aggie's was trailed by a team of technicians who had a wire sound-recorder and a portable logic engine for inputting the data of his investigation. He seemed very proud of his machine, even though it came with three convicts from the King Street Gaol in shackles and leg irons who worked tirelessly to keep the springs wound, toiling in a lather of sweat and heaving breath, heat boiling off their shaved heads in s.h.i.+mmering waves.

He showed up just as the clock in the parlor chimed eight times, a bear chasing a bird around on a track as it sang the hour. We peered out the windows in the upper floors, saw the inspector, and understood just why Monty had been so morose all afternoon.

But Monty did us proud. He went to the door with his familiar swagger and swung it wide, extending his hand to the inspector.

”Montague Goldfarb at your service, Officer. Our patron has stepped away, but please, do come in.”

The inspector gravely shook the proffered hand, his huge gloved mitt swallowing Monty's boyish hand. It was easy to forget that he was just a child, but the looming presence of the giant inspector reminded us all.

”Master Goldfarb,” the inspector said, taking his hat off and peering through his smoked monocle at the children in the parlor. All of us sat with hands folded like we were in a pantomime about the best-behaved, most crippled, most terrified, least threatening children in all the colonies. ”I'm am sorry to hear that Mr. Grindersworth is not at home to the constabulary. Have you any notion as to what temporal juncture we might expect him?” If I hadn't been concentrating on not peeing myself with terror, the inspector's pompous speech might have set me to laughing.

Monty didn't bat an eye. ”Mr. Grindersworth was called away to see his brother in Sault Sainte Marie, and we expect him tomorrow. I'm his designated lieutenant, though. Perhaps I might help you?”

The inspector stroked his forked beard and gave us all another long look. ”Tomorrow, hey? Well, I don't suppose that justice should wait that long. Master Goldfarb, I have grim intelligence for you, as regards one of your young compatriots, a Master -” He consulted a punched card that was held in a hopper on his clanking logic engine. ”William Sansousy. He lies even now upon a slab in the city morgue. Someone of authority from this inst.i.tution is required to confirm the preliminary identification. You will do, I suppose. Though your patron will have to present himself posthaste in order to sign the several official doc.u.ments that necessarily accompany an event of such gravity.”

We'd known as soon as the inspector turned up on Saint Aggie's doorstep that William was dead. If he was merely in trouble, it would have been a constable, dragging him by the ear. We half-children of Saint Aggie's only rated a full inspector when we were topped by some evil b.a.s.t.a.r.d in this evil town. But hearing the inspector say the words, puffing them through his drooping mustache, that made it real. None of us had ever cried when Saint Aggie's children were taken by the streets - at least not where the others could see it. But this time around, without Grinder to shoot us filthy daggers if we made a peep while the law was about, it opened the floodgates. Boys and girls, young and old, we cried for poor little William. He'd come to the best of all possible Saint Aggie's, but it hadn't been good enough for him. He'd wanted to go back to the parents who'd sold him into service, wanted a return to his mam's lap and bosom. Who among us didn't want that, in his secret heart?

Monty's tears were silent, and they rolled down his cheeks as he shrugged into his coat and hat and let the inspector - who was clearly embarra.s.sed by the display - lead him out the door.

When Monty came home, he arrived at a house full of children who were ready to go mad. We'd cried ourselves hoa.r.s.e, then sat about the parlor, not knowing what to do. If there had been any of old Grinder's booze still in the house, we'd have drunk it.