When the bee remained quiescent and indeed rather boringly inert, Mercer became less cautious. His first approach was a very tentative poke, administered with a pencil held at arm’s length, in case the bee should turn into an evil machine of death before his eyes. When this elicited no reaction, he nudged it solidly with the blunt end, and it fell over. He blew on it. He shouted at it, coaxed it, wheedled it and scolded it. Finally, he touched it with his index finger, and when he remained unexploded and unzombified, he picked it up and shook it. Joe was moved to protest that it was delicate, and Mercer agreed not to stand on it or throw it at the wall, but refused to hand it over to Joe for closer inspection using his jeweller’s loupe. It was at this point that Mercer began his attempt to educate the bee by example, and Polly Cradle, who had appeared on the brink of objecting that Joe was the expert in curious automata, was apparently stunned into silence by the image of her brother spinning in place with the bee on his outstretched palm and making buzzing noises.
“Nzzzzzeeeeyaoooooowwww!” Mercer concludes excitedly, and stares at the bee with the hopeful pride of a new father. There is a faint sound of someone sneezing from the street outside, and the skitter of leaves on the paving in the little courtyard garden beyond the patio door.
“It’s broken,” Mercer concludes. He glances at Joe Spork. “You broke it.”
“I broke it?”
“Probably. Maybe it was the damp. Or it’s bust a spring. Or you got fluff in the wind-y parts.”
“Fluff.”
“Yes. Lint. Pocket funk.”
“In the …”
“Wind-y. The parts that wind.”
“Those parts.”
“Yes. Which I imagine are susceptible to lint.”
Joe is about to explain that any item which can remain functional for forty years by the seaside, which is made furthermore of gold, and which is purportedly an engine of revolutionary change constructed on the principles of arcane mathematics, ought to be immune to lint. But, in fact, the use of gold in the production might be an attempt to avoid rust and oxidisation, and any machine can be gummed up with goo. So instead of saying “You’re a pillock,” which uncharitable assessment had been on his lips, he says instead “Give it to me,” and sits in the lightest corner of the room with his loupe and his tool bag. A moment later, he opens the bag, and uses a set of padded measuring calipers usually reserved for the interior of watches costing more than the average flat in London to tug at the gemmed wing-cases of the bee.
The cases lift, revealing splendid, gossamer wings beneath. Gossamer, but very strong. The thin stuff gouges a tiny scratch in the edge of the calipers when his hand shakes.
Note to self: Pointy. Do not cut your fingertip off.
Although in fact the wings are made carefully. It’s hard to expose the edge in a way which would let you do yourself an injury. A momentary vision of flying razorbees fades away.
The saddle of the bee comes away, wings and all, revealing an inner cavity. Even through the loupe, he can barely make out the parts. Cogs, yes. Springs. Everything spiralling downward, inward, smaller and smaller and smaller, each layer geared to take instruction from the one below in a repeating pattern. Cellular clockwork? Fractal clockwork?
One thing is certain: he can’t fix this. It’s absolutely beyond him, and beyond Daniel too, without question. And yet … oh. There is something. A change in style where the impossible meets the merely brilliant. Yes. The layer which is humanly imaginable was made by hand, and from the shape of the works and the way in which they are arranged, it could be Daniel’s: it has his finicky preference, his bullish allegiance to the leaf spring and the conventional metals of his time. Below that layer, it’s a different matter, a thing of physics. Mathematics made real. But there at the join, there is … something. The central driveshaft is too thick … oh. Mercer is actually right. There’s a foreign object. Too thin to be an eyelash, and too supple … a single strand of silk. It could actually be a cobweb, wrapped around the spindle. But how to remove it?
He ponders, then laughs, and stands up.
“What?” Mercer asks.
Joe scuffs his feet back and forth vigorously across Polly’s carpet. “It’s clockwork,” he explains. “It’s not electrical. At least, I don’t think it’s electrical.” He grins, and leans down with the loupe, extending his finger to a quarter-inch away from the bee. Through the lens, he can see the thread stand to attention, the static charge from his finger plucking at it. Fatal to electronics. Fine for clockwork.
He waves his finger one way, then the other, and it unravels a bit. He tries again, and then it flies to his fingertip and away. He catches his breath. The bee doesn’t move.
Slowly, he puts everything back in place, layer after layer and then the wings and the cases, and finally sets the bee down on the table.
“Well,” Mercer says after a moment, “I suppose we are no worse off than we were before.”
After a moment, they leave the bee where it is, and turn to the record collection, and the small portable gramophone known as a Piglet.
The little machine does indeed make a soft whiffling noise when Joe Spork turns the crank, and then a sort of grating roink when he gets to the stop point of the spring. He puts the first record on the turntable and a fresh needle in the clamp, and lowers the arm.
The ghost voice speaks again, scratching down through decades, musing and melancholic. His grandmother. His blood. It’s not even a letter, this one. Joe Spork wonders whether she had a recorder of her own. Perhaps Daniel made her one. He pictures her alone at her desk, and his imagination inserts, of all things, an inkwell in front of her and an actual quill in her hand, because all this was such a long time ago. She clears her throat, and speaks.
You said once I knew nothing of the real world, and I replied that you had it exactly backwards. Only mathematicians know the world for what it is. I can see you, waving your hands and shaking your head, Daniel, but it is true. I will prove it to you.
Suppose that you take two clocks, and you place one upon a pedestal in your house and put the other on board a rocket and fire it around the Earth. When the rocket lands, the two clocks will tell different times. Why? Because the clock in the rocket has been closer to the speed of light and less time has passed on the rocket than in your office. That is the least strange thing about the universe, Daniel: that time, which appears most absolute to human beings, is nothing of the kind. It is relative.
Do you still not see what I mean? Very well, then consider a cat in a box with a bottle of poison. At any moment, the bottle may open, or it may not. At any moment, the cat may die. Now: take two pictures, one after another, of what is in the box. Look at the second one first. At that moment, the observation determines what is in the first picture, and what happened to the cat. From our point of view, the information flows backwards through time. This is not a joke or a romance, Daniel. It is quite simply the way of things. The universe is undecided without us—and our minds are part of what exists at some level we do not yet begin to understand.
That is the true nature of the world we inhabit. Not the easy one we mostly encounter. Anyone who tells you otherwise is living in a dream.
The record comes to a stop, the needle looping around the inner ring in an uneven swirl.
Joe leans back as Frankie’s record comes to an end, and looks around. Mercer Cradle is seated on the floor, Buddha-like and unexpectedly limber, a cross-legged legal statue cut from the stone with his eyes closed in thought. The Bethanys have taken up flanking positions on the sofa behind him, slightly fidgety because they were unable to force him into a comfortable chair and they feel strange about sitting above their boss. Polly sits next to Joe, and has a single sheet of paper on a glass clipboard, ready to take notes in soft pencil.
“Next one,” Mercer says quietly, before Joe can wonder aloud whether there is anything here of value.
It is Polly who picks the next record, and this time, the voice is not dissocia
ted or melancholic, but desperate with pain and horror.
They are all dead, and I killed them. I am a murderer now! Yes, I am. Don’t say it is not my fault. I built the machine, oh, with such great intentions. I was saving us all! But I got something wrong, Daniel. Me. I got something wrong, the train stopped at Wistithiel and they are dead, and worse than dead, and I have no idea why I am alive, and I should not be, and Edie came to save me.
I want to believe it was him. Shem Shem Tsien, like an old, bad dream, breaking my machines and pushing buttons. But he was not here, Daniel. I did this all by myself. I killed a multitude, and now they will close me down and the engine will never exist unless I can find a way alone.
I do not want to be alone, Daniel. I am sending you something. You must seal it away. No one must see it, because it is death; death such as no one has ever died until I came along. Death by destiny, by crystallisation, by inevitability. I killed their souls and left their bodies alive. In the history of human life, there has never been anyone so dead as they are.
I am the greatest murderer there has ever been.
And then she cries until the message comes to an end.
Almost unwillingly, Mercer turns the record over. Crackle, pop. Fizzle, splot. Crackle, pop. After the savage horror of the confession, it is almost soothing. They listen for a while. Finally, Mercer scoops another from the bag and sets it on the turntable. The voice is older, and mercifully the horror is absent, though in its place is a soul-deep regret, a sorrow which has weathered in and will never leave.
I confess, I thought you were an idiot. Yes, Daniel, I know, you have never given me cause and I am an impatient old baggage. I am what I am, and what life has made me. I try to be better.
You were right. I made the machine strong so that it would cover a larger area and that made it too strong for the mind.
Pause.
I know the solution, now. How to make it work. I knew even while it was happening, but it was too late. The answer is to retransmit. To have a great network, so that the signal can be very gentle and yet reach around the world.
Do you remember that we made love in the field outside my mother’s house? And you were stung on the rump by a bee and mourned for her because you said bees were creatures of creation, and having only one sting were loath to attack? That this was why almost every culture in the world venerates the bee and hates the wasp?
Make me a bee, Daniel. Just one. Make me a glorious bee which people will love, and I will make something wonderful. Bees will be the messengers of my truth. They will spread across the world and connect everyone.
Make it splendid, Daniel. Make it wild and pretty. The thing I do now must be so much more than a machine.
Polly Cradle is grinning, and so is Joe. Mercer frowns at them both.
“What?” he says. “Don’t tell me it’s just that they were still in love. I shall be sick.”
“No,” Polly says. “I was just thinking: maybe this isn’t a disaster. The bees. The machine. Maybe it’s a good thing that’s happening, and all we have to do is wait.”
Joe nods. Mercer does not. He opens his mouth to make some objection, but then three things happen on top of one another and whatever it was he was going to say is put aside.
The first thing is that the absent Bethany returns and passes a slim folder to Polly Cradle, who frowns at it and then lays it out on the table.
Two photographs, freshly printed from old images, most likely magazines or newspapers: a gorgeous matinée idol with a high forehead, smiling lightly into the camera, and his older brother, grim-faced and silvered, scowling from the hood of a cloak.
“Shem Shem Tsien,” Polly Cradle says, “also known as the Opium Khan. Think Idi Amin with a dash of Lex Luthor. And this Brother Sheamus of the Order of John the Maker. This is a picture of him from before they all started wearing veils all the time.”
Yes. The same man. Although … it can’t actually be the same Sheamus, now. A son, surely, taking up his father’s vocation.
I thought I had it rough, father-wise.
And then:
Does that mean the Opium Khan has reformed, or that the British government has been corrupted?
But while that’s a question which might have made sense a few years ago, no one seriously believes in the good conduct of their leaders any more.
Just as he is about to share this with the others, the second and third things happen, and the world changes.
One is silent and invisible; an intangible explosion which occurs entirely inside the head of Joshua Joseph Spork. The other is very public and very specific, and takes place three and one-half feet off the ground. They happen at approximately the same time, and so the strange, inaudible detonation which afflicts Joe is missed even by Polly Cradle, who otherwise would spot it clearly for what it is.
Between two records—one claiming mendaciously to be by Duke Ellington and the other labelled with equal falseness as being by Eddie Lockjaw Davis—is sandwiched a single sheet of shiny accounting paper, split down the middle into two columns with a single sure stroke of red pen. It has no timer, no spring, and no pineapple indentations which will fly off as shrapnel, and in fact looks almost exactly not like a hand grenade, and yet all the same it goes off under Joe Spork and vaporises him entirely.
Joe Spork, the exploded man, cannot understand why everyone is looking so calm, until he realises that none of them, not knowing Mathew and Daniel and their appalling confrontations, can understand the columns of figures for what they are.
Here, squeezed between the secrets of Daniel’s non-jazz collection, is something the old man squirrelled away. Something he couldn’t face? Or something he treasured and understood, which brought him some measure of peace?
If these numbers are to be believed, if Joe correctly interprets the figures in Mathew’s own somewhat careless hand—and he surely does, having struggled himself for a decade against the same rip tide—Daniel Spork’s great, stand-alone, splendid business of clocks, the bulwark he set against the surge of modernity and careless consumerist tat, lost money hand over fist. The shop was not, had never been, profitable. Only the ceaseless intravenous transfusions of money from Mathew, evidenced here on this hastily scribbled account, ever made it possible to balance the books. And these transfusions Mathew had managed as best he could in conditions of total secrecy, above all from his father, so that Daniel could continue to believe in his straight-arrow path and continue to deride his son’s choices.
Mathew the gangster, Mathew the liar, Mathew the thief, had begun his life of crime to save his father’s honest business. Had carried it, all along.
Joe is still staring at this earth-shaker, this profound and alien intrusion into his universe from another where everything is different, when he hears Mercer’s voice calling to him through the fog and the final event changes the game once more.
“Hey, sleepyhead!” Joe turns, and Mercer tosses him the golden bee. “It’s warm!”
Joe extends his hand, but—he has never been any good at catching, kicking was always his thing—fumbles the take. He drops instinctively to catch the bee before it hits the ground, and misses again.
Misses, because it is not falling.
Six inches from his cheek, the multifaceted rose-quartz eyes glint at him, and gold-veined wings hum in the air. It flitters towards him very slowly, and lands on his nose. Joe tries to look at it, winces as he inevitably crosses his eyes. He swears he can hear the whisper of golden legs as it moves onto his cheek. Am I in danger? And if he is, what can he possibly do about it?
The bee drops back into the air and lands on the tabletop again, where it wanders bee-ishly around in a random pattern.
Apis mechanica. Live and in person. He watches it without thinking about it, because all of his mind is burning with Mathew and Daniel, and the sense that he has misunderstood everything he has ever known to be true.
A moment later, the bee takes wing again and bumbles around the room. It bumps cheerfull
y into Polly Cradle’s head, the lampshade, and finally the window.
Everyone starts talking at once, and in the confusion it’s quite natural for Joe to slip out and wash his face.
When Joshua Joseph Spork steps out of the door of Polly Cradle’s house, it is with a strange feeling of coming home and a powerful sense of betrayal. Moving down the street in the gathering dark, knowing that he is to some degree on the run, he feels a kinship with his father which surpasses anything he has ever before experienced. He flinches at shadows, ducks away from lamplight, and when he accidentally catches someone’s eye, he rides the stare, throws such aggression into it that they immediately look away, and do not see him. Indeed, they actively seek to forget him. He steps onto a bus, and out of sheer perversity steps off at the next stop and takes another which goes the long way around to his destination. Or rather, not perversity, but a natural understanding that what he is doing now is rash, and stemming from that, the certain knowledge that it must be done well, or not at all. It must be done in the high style of the Night Market, with all due deference to misdirection and sleight of mind.
He feels alive.
On the other hand, he feels rotten. Mercer will be fine, will call Joe an idiot and then set about rescuing the situation. It’s not quite so certain that Polly Cradle will be fine. Obviously, she will take no physical harm, but that Joe has sneaked out—successfully executing this time the plan he formulated when she caught him before—will wound her, and he knows it and she will know that he knows it and has done it anyway, and that will hurt her again. He has no regrets about his decision: this isn’t a case of wanting to recant. Blood is not optional. At the same time, whatever is happening between them is also not to be underestimated. They have found in each other some kind of jigsaw-puzzle match, a mutual knowing which goes beyond the smell of her still on his skin, and which he is at pains not to define or recognise until it has time to settle into him.