Praise for
THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE
“Gibson and Sterling tackle their Dickensian dystopia with verve and aplomb, lifting current issues into a vastly different social and ethical matrix. Their gaslight-and-computers world is both plausible and eerie.”
—LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
“Smartly plotted, wonderfully crafted, and written with sly literary wit … spins marvelously and runs like a dream.”
—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“Offers many pleasures for the reader to unpack and examine. Highly readable as an alternate-historical romp, it moves in its closing chapters to a brooding meditation upon history and consciousness, and hints at a further level of significance that the reader will be some time in pondering.”
—NEW YORK NEWSDAY
“Enormously entertaining.”
—THE BOSTON PHOENIX
“Demands a second reading that I’m in the midst of—and enjoying.”
—SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE
“Intelligent … with a light touch … [a] mixture of real and imagined history, worked up into a ripping adventure yarn.”
—LOS ANGELES TIMES
“[A] tour-de-force adventure … the book resembles Babbage’s marvelous machines: the story spins on gears and uncoils like springs.”
—PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
“A peculiar and fascinating twist to history … a fascinating historical treasure hunt … follows the cyberpunk tradition.”
—SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
“An alternate 19th century where the computer revolution has arrived early to create a hybrid society, half modern, half traditional, where Victorians must cope with the effects of future shock a few generations early … ingeniously designed and depicted.”
—LOCUS
“A crackling-good spy story.… It’s a joy to find a book in which the words shine as brightly as the premise.”
—SEATTLE TIMES
“Splendidly extraordinary.… It is stimulating to have one’s intelligence overestimated by such brilliant writers.”
—THE SUNDAY TIMES (LONDON)
“An erudite but snappy Victorian techno-thriller.”
—GLAMOUR
“A visionary steam-powered heavy metal fantasy! Gibson and Sterling create a high Victorian virtual reality of extraordinary richness and detail.”
—RIDLEY SCOTT, director of Blade Runner and Black Rain
“I read it with great pleasure. There’s a Victorian-like love of science and technology in the air these days, and an information-driven revolution in human affairs in progress. Gibson and Sterling show how deep the revolution will be by mapping it wittily and realistically onto a known past.”
—STEWART BRAND, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog
Books by William Gibson
NEUROMANCER
COUNT ZERO
MONA LISA OVERDRIVE
BURNING CHROME
VIRTUAL LIGHT
IDORU
ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES
PATTERN RECOGNITION
SPOOK COUNTRY
Books by Bruce Sterling
INVOLUTION OCEAN
THE ARTIFICIAL KID
SCHISMATRIX
ISLANDS IN THE NET
CRYSTAL EXPRESS
MIRRORSHADES (ed.)
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
GLOBALHEAD
HEAVY WEATHER
HOLY FIRE
DISTRACTION
A GOOD OLD-FASHION FUTURE
ZEITGEIST
THE ZENITH ANGLE
KIOSK
THE CARYATIDS
THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE
A BANTAM SPECTRA BOOK
Bantam hardcover edition published April 1991
Bantam paperback edition/February 1992
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1991 by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
Map designed by G D S J Jeffrey L. Ward.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 90–4276.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: BANTAM BOOKS.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80127-2
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Tradmark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Random House, Inc., New York, New York.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Map
First Iteration: The Angel of Goliad
Second Iteration: Derby Day
Third Iteration: Dark-Lanterns
Fourth Iteration: Seven Curses
Fifth Iteration: The All-Seeing Eye
Modus: The Images Tabled
About the Authors
FIRST ITERATION
The Angel of Goliad
COMPOSITE IMAGE, OPTICALLY encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.
A villa, a garden, a balcony.
Erase the balcony’s wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair’s wheel-spokes.
The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.
These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.
Her name is Sybil Gerard.
Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium.
Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible grace—metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon.
Like starlings, Sybil thinks.
The airship’s lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance.
Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and memory.
She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about her—till, by the walls of Newgate, the shadow of her father’s hanging falls …
And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway—one where it is always evening.…
It is January 15, 1855.
A room in Grand’s Hotel, Piccadilly.
One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the door’s cut-glass knob. Another was draped with clothing: a woman’s fringed mantelet, a mud-crusted skirt of heavy worsted, a man’s checked trousers and cutaway coat.
Two forms lay beneath the bedclothes of the laminated-maple four-poster, and off in the iron grip of winter Big Ben bellowed t
en o’clock, great hoarse calliope sounds, the coal-fired breath of London.
Sybil slid her feet through icy linens to the warmth of the ceramic bottle in its wrap of flannel. Her toes brushed his shin. The touch seemed to start him from deep deliberation. That was how he was, this Dandy Mick Radley.
She’d met Mick Radley at Laurent’s Dancing Academy, down Windmill Street. Now that she knew him, he seemed more the sort for Kellner’s in Leicester Square, or even the Portland Rooms. He was always thinking, scheming, muttering over something in his head. Clever, clever. It worried her. And Mrs. Winterhalter wouldn’t have approved, for the handling of “political gentlemen” required delicacy and discretion, qualities Mrs. Winterhalter believed she herself had a-plenty, while crediting none to her girls.
“No more dollymopping, Sybil,” Mick said. One of his pronouncements, something about which he’d made up his clever mind.
Sybil grinned up at him, her face half-hidden by the blanket’s warm edge. She knew he liked the grin. Her wicked-girl grin. He can’t mean that, she thought. Make a joke of it, she told herself. “But if I weren’t a wicked dollymop, would I be here with you now?”
“No more playing bobtail.”
“You know I only go with gentlemen.”
Mick sniffed, amused. “Call me a gentleman, then?”
“A very flash gentleman,” Sybil said, flattering him. “One of the fancy. You know I don’t care for the Rad Lords. I spit on ’em, Mick.”
Sybil shivered, but not unhappily, for she’d run into a good bit of luck here, full of steak-and-taters and hot chocolate, in bed between clean sheets in a fashionable hotel. A shiny new hotel with central steam-heat, though she’d gladly have traded the restless gurgling and banging of the scrolled gilt radiator for the glow of a well-banked hearth.
And he was a good-looking cove, this Mick Radley, she had to admit, dressed very flash, had the tin and was generous with it, and he’d yet to demand anything peculiar or beastly. She knew it wouldn’t last, as Mick was a touring gent from Manchester, and gone soon enough. But there was profit in him, and maybe more when he left her, if she made him feel sorry about it, and generous.
Mick reclined into fat feather-pillows and slid his manicured fingers behind his spit-curled head. Silk nightshirt all frothy with lace down the front—only the best for Mick. Now he seemed to want to talk a bit. Men did, usually, after a while—about their wives, mostly.
But for Dandy Mick, it was always politics. “So, you hate the Lordships, Sybil?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Sybil said. “I have my reasons.”
“I should say you do,” Mick said slowly, and the look he gave her then, of cool superiority, sent a shiver through her.
“What d’ye mean by that, Mick?”
“I know your reasons for hating the Government. I have your number.”
Surprise seeped into her, then fear. She sat up in bed. There was a taste in her mouth like cold iron.
“You keep your card in your bag,” he said. “I took that number to a rum magistrate I know. He ran it through a government Engine for me, and printed up your Bow Street file, rat-a-tat-tat, like fun.” He smirked. “So I know all about you, girl. Know who you are …”
She tried to put a bold face on it. “And who’s that, then, Mr. Radley?”
“No Sybil Jones, dearie. You’re Sybil Gerard, the daughter of Walter Gerard, the Luddite agitator.”
He’d raided her hidden past.
Machines, whirring somewhere, spinning out history.
Now Mick watched her face, smiling at what he saw there, and she recognized a look she’d seen before, at Laurent’s, when first he’d spied her across the crowded floor. A hungry look.
Her voice shook. “How long have you known about me?”
“Since our second night. You know I travel with the General. Like any important man, he has enemies. As his secretary and man-of-affairs, I take few chances with strangers.” Mick put his cruel, deft little hand on her shoulder. “You might have been someone’s agent. It was business.”
Sybil flinched away. “Spying on a helpless girl,” she said at last. “You’re a right bastard, you are!”
But her foul words scarcely seemed to touch him—he was cold and hard, like a judge or a lordship. “I may spy, girl, but I use the Government’s machinery for my own sweet purposes. I’m no copper’s nark, to look down my nose at a revolutionary like Walter Gerard—no matter what the Rad Lords may call him now. Your father was a hero.”
He shifted on the pillow. “My hero—that was Walter Gerard. I saw him speak, on the Rights of Labour, in Manchester. He was a marvel—we all cheered till our throats was raw! The good old Hell-Cats …” Mick’s smooth voice had gone sharp and flat, in a Mancunian tang. “Ever hear tell of the Hell-Cats, Sybil? In the old days?”
“A street-gang,” Sybil said. “Rough boys in Manchester.”
Mick frowned. “We was a brotherhood! A friendship youth-guild! Your father knew us well. He was our patron politician, you might say.”
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t speak of my father, Mr. Radley.”
Mick shook his head at her impatiently. “When I heard they’d tried and hanged him”—the words like ice behind her ribs—“me and the lads, we took up torches and crowbars, and we ran hot and wild.… That was Ned Ludd’s work, girl! Years ago …” He picked delicately at the front of his nightshirt. “ ’Tis not a tale I tell to many. The Government’s Engines have long memories.”
She understood it now—Mick’s generosity and his sweet-talk, the strange hints he’d aimed at her, of secret plans and better fortune, marked cards and hidden aces. He was pulling her strings, making her his creature. The daughter of Walter Gerard was a fancy prize, for a man like Mick.
She pulled herself out of bed, stepping across icy floorboards in her pantalettes and chemise.
She dug quickly, silently, through the heap of her clothing. The fringed mantelet, the jacket, the great sagging cage of her crinoline skirt. The jingling white cuirass of her corset.
“Get back in bed,” Mick said lazily. “Don’t get your monkey up. ’Tis cold out there.” He shook his head. “ ’Tis not like you think, Sybil.”
She refused to look at him, struggling into her corset by the window, where frost-caked glass cut the upwashed glare of gaslight from the street. She cinched the corset’s laces tight across her back with a quick practiced snap of her wrists.
“Or if it is,” Mick mused, watching her, “ ’tis only in small degree.”
Across the street, the opera had let out—gentry in their cloaks and top-hats. Cab-horses, their backs in blankets, stamped and shivered on the black macadam. White traces of clean suburban snow still clung to the gleaming coachwork of some lordship’s steam-gurney. Tarts were working the crowd. Poor wretched souls. Hard indeed to find a kind face amid those goffered shirts and diamond studs, on such a cold night. Sybil turned toward Mick, confused, angry, and very much afraid. “Who did you tell about me?”
“Not a living soul,” Mick said, “not even my friend the General. And I won’t be peaching on you. Nobody’s ever said Mick Radley’s indiscreet. So get back in bed.”
“I shan’t,” Sybil said, standing straight, her bare feet freezing on the floorboards. “Sybil Jones may share your bed—but the daughter of Walter Gerard is a personage of substance!”
Mick blinked at her, surprised. He thought it over, rubbing his narrow chin, then nodded. “ ’Tis my sad loss, then, Miss Gerard.” He sat up in bed and pointed at the door, with a dramatic sweep of his arm. “Put on your skirt, then, and your brass-heeled dolly-boots, Miss Gerard, and out the door with you and your substance. But ’twould be a great shame if you left. I’ve uses for a clever girl.”
“I should say you do, you blackguard,” said Sybil, but she hesitated. He had another card to play—she could sense it in the set of his face.
He grinned at her, his eyes slitted. “Have you ever been to Paris, Sybil?”
“
Paris?” Her breath clouded in midair.
“Yes,” he said, “the gay and the glamorous, next destination for the General, when his London lecture tour is done.” Dandy Mick plucked at his lace cuffs. “What those uses are, that I mentioned, I shan’t as yet say. But the General is a man of deep stratagem. And the Government of France have certain difficulties that require the help of experts.…” He leered triumphantly. “But I can see that I bore you, eh?”
Sybil shifted from foot to foot. “You’ll take me to Paris, Mick,” she said slowly, “and that’s the true bill, no snicky humbugging?”
“Strictly square and level. If you don’t believe me, I’ve a ticket in my coat for the Dover ferry.”
Sybil walked to the brocade armchair in the corner, and tugged at Mick’s greatcoat. She shivered uncontrollably, and slipped the greatcoat on. Fine dark wool, like being wrapped in warm money.
“Try the right front pocket,” Mick told her. “The card-case.” He was amused and confident—as if it were funny that she didn’t trust him. Sybil thrust her chilled hands into both pockets. Deep, plush-lined …
Her left hand gripped a lump of hard cold metal. She drew out a nasty little pepperbox derringer. Ivory handle, intricate gleam of steel hammers and brass cartridges, small as her hand but heavy.
“Naughty,” said Mick, frowning. “Put it back, there’s a girl.”
Sybil put the thing away, gently but quickly, as if it were a live crab. In the other pocket she found his card-case, red morocco leather; inside were business cards, cartes-de-visite with his Engine-stippled portrait, a London train timetable.
And an engraved slip of stiff creamy parchment, first-class passage on the Newcomen, out of Dover.
“You’ll need two tickets, then,” she hesitated, “if you really mean to take me.”
Mick nodded, conceding the point. “And another for the train from Cherbourg, too. And nothing simpler. I can wire for tickets, downstairs at the lobby desk.”