The Dream of Perpetual Motion Read online

  Harold comes awkwardly to his feet and sees other boys and girls with dazed expressions scattered across the roof; they are being tended to by Prospero’s servants, who are leading them to an elevator that will presumably take them down into the Tower itself. The tin demons and angels that brought them here are standing near them and still as statues, their single purpose for existing served. In the distance Harold can see another late-arriving squadron of mechanical demons that carry ten more boys, lit from behind by the rising sun.

  He feels a hand on his shoulder and turns to look up at Gideon, the man who’d sold him the whistle inside the camera obscura. Gideon has a smile on his face, but there is no hint of menace in it, nor salesman’s guile—he’s genuinely happy.

  “I knew you’d make it,” says Gideon. “I knew you’d make it.” He begins to steer Harold toward the entrance to the elevator. “Come with me. We’ll get you cleaned up and refreshed after your trip. Then we’ll take you all to the banquet hall, and the birthday party will begin.

  “We have so many wonderful things planned for you,” says Gideon. “I’ve seen what’s in store for you with my own eyes, and I can’t even make my mind accept it. You can’t imagine. You cannot even imagine.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Prospero Taligent does not know what to do. He isn’t very good with children (in fact, the only child he’s ever had any real experience with is Miranda), so for him the crowd of boys and girls milling around the banquet hall (red-faced and screaming, kicking and pulling hair, already discovering innovative ways of messing up their brand-new outfits) is something out of nightmares.

  (Actually, not everybody is kicking and screaming and generally being rambunctious. The girls are all standing in a row against a wall, resplendent in their fine dresses of linen and lace and silk, waiting politely with their hands clasped behind them for the festivities to begin. They are glad they are girls and not boys, they think to themselves as they look on with girlish curiosity at the forty-nine-boy brawl on the other side of the hall, fists yanking at ties, teeth biting arms, a mass of prepubescent children in a disorganized pile in which some work their way to the top while others are buried, the boys giggling gleefully as they hurt each other.

  (Wait: forty-nine. Who’s missing? One little boy is standing by himself in corner shadows, shy and timid, watching the goings-on. That would be our hero, Harold Winslow. Watching the pile of children tussling in the middle of the banquet hall, an amorphous writhing mass of arms and legs and fists and faces, he is coming to the realization that a boy’s life, by definition, involves ass-kicking, and that he will most likely be on the receiving end for much of it.

  (Wait: everything’s not quite in order among the girls, either. A little freckled redhead has procured a clod of mud from somewhere—resourceful child, isn’t she!—and is vigorously rubbing it into the golden curly locks of the girl standing next to her. The blonde, whose locks are rapidly losing their golden sheen, is clearly displeased. “Waaah,” she says. “Nnngaaaah! Stop . . . stop . . . stop it!” Now she’s scratching at the redhead’s face, raising little welts across her freckled cheeks. Prospero, watching all this, does not know what to do—)

  Prospero does not know what to do. He had the banquet hall redecorated for the occasion, painted in simple triangular tessellations of primary colors. There are festive balloons, and crepe streams hanging in parabolas from the high ceiling. Two dozen clowns with makeup caked on their faces stand at the ready, primed to entertain at a moment’s notice. Mechanical women with buxom, gold-plated bodies (the mechanical women, like many of Prospero’s other inventions, are something that he feels he must keep to himself, something he feels the world at large will not yet accept: the idea of a man made out of wires and gears is one thing, but a mechanical woman is quite another) stand next to wheeled tables that hold towering, elaborately frosted cakes, and sumptuous pies filled with sweet fruits grown under the hot sun of a distant land. A team of chefs is in the Tower’s kitchens, their flying shining cleavers blurred to the eye as they slice with precision into the finest cuts of meat, cooking dishes that children are guaranteed to like (a consideration that severely restricts their palettes, or palates, as the case may be. No salads, no broccoli, no brussels sprouts, no eggplant, no ostrich, no dolphin, nothing with bones or strange shapes: the list of restrictions goes on without end. The chefs raise their eyes to heaven and curse in foreign languages, incensed that they must sacrifice such succulent specimens of chicken, so plump and tender, to make “nuggets”). A single table with a hundred and two places runs the length of the hall, with two chairs the size of thrones at either end, one for Prospero, the other for Miranda. Everything is planned to the best of his ability, and he really does want this to come off well for his daughter, because he loves her. But the children are causing chaos.

  “Children?” Prospero says. (He is trying his best to look nonthreatening, to play the part of the kind and wealthy uncle, given to pulling silver dollars out of ears. He’s selected a flattering outfit in consultation with his public-image consultant, a smart, deep blue pin-striped suit with a matching silk tie and a deep purple shirt, also silk, beneath. Still, children might find something about his appearance off-putting. He is not tall, but everything about his build is long and thin: his arms; his legs; his fingers; his long, narrow, bony skull with its prominent cheekbones; his long, thin, middle-aged mouth, frozen in a moue that gives a hint of the gaunt, sunken character his face will have in his declining old age, after he goes mad. His dark brown hair, pomaded and swept back, is starting to thin, and it’s already gray at the temples. Long, thin eyebrows arch devilishly over his narrow eyes, which are so brown as to almost seem black. Poor guy: no matter how colorful and stylish his clothing, he will still cut a spectral figure. But he is trying his best.) “Children?” he says, a little louder. One of the boys in the midst of the fracas lifts his head long enough to make eye contact with Prospero, but then the boy is socked in the nose, and with an incomplete set of baby teeth latched into his finger, he is pulled back into the pile and out of sight.

  “Children!” Prospero snaps. This isn’t the impression he’s going for, but he gets their attention. The pile of forty-nine mauling, tearing, and biting boys stops its mauling and tearing and biting and disseminates as the roughed-up kids, faces bruised and clothes torn, go to join Harold, who is uncomfortably standing alone against the wall, facing all the girls. Being in the Taligent Tower seemed like it would be fun at first, but now that he’s actually here, and considering what he had to go through to get here, he’s nervous and sweaty and has a funny feeling in his stomach.

  “Sorry,” one boy says.

  “We was just fightin’ some,” says another.

  “We’re sorry Mr. Taligent,” says a third.

  “Oh, you don’t have to call me Mr. Taligent,” Prospero says, looking around nervously, steepling his fingers. “You . . . you can call me Uncle Prospero.” Out of the corner of his eye he catches the two fighting girls, still shoving and scratching at each other, now both covered in mud. “Young ladies!” he barks, and the girls freeze in a tangled tableau, finger in mouth and hand over face. He turns to one of the gold-plated mechanical women and says, “Would you take these two and get them spruced up in time for lunch?” His words are accompanied by an intricate series of hand gestures, and the mechanical woman nods briefly, walks across the hall (and note her movement: not the jerky all-over-the-place clanking of her male counterparts, but a gentle saunter with a barely perceptible sway in the hips), picks up a girl by the leg with each arm, and takes them through an enormous set of double doors and out of the banquet hall, a spindly girl-leg grasped in each hand, the giggling girls swinging pendulum-like back and forth, their long, matted hair brushing the carpet, their baggy bloomers showing, the hems of their ruined dresses tickling their noses.

  “Well,” says Prospero, “those two will just have to miss the tour. But the rest of you, even though many of you have misbehaved, won’t hav
e to. Come, and I will show you” (and he tries to be majestic here—he knows that the children dream that he is a magician) “the wonders of my Tower! Then we’ll come back here for a lovely lunch, and Miranda will get her birthday present.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Where is Miranda?

  A party is being held for Miranda with a hundred guests, and she sleeps. She sleeps alone, her head on an enormous eiderdown pillow, in the middle of a mattress that seems large enough to her to sleep ten little girls, beneath layer upon layer of silken sheets the color of blood. Not the color of blood that we imagine it to be as it courses through our arteries, but the color it is at the moment it’s spilled. (A difficult lesson to learn: Miranda remembers how Prospero taught it to her, holding the jackknife’s blade to the inside of her elbow, quickly making the cut, shallow and perhaps a half inch long . . . “Don’t flinch . . . don’t flinch or you’ll only make this harder, this is something you have to see . . . there. See? I can look at your face and tell you were expecting to see a pure bright liquid burst forth, the color of an unfurling rose or a piece of cherry-flavored candy . . . but it’s not. You see? Impure. Imperfect. See now? You learn important lessons when you bleed.” Three years later she still carries the tiny scar, and runs her finger over it when she’s nervous.) Miranda sleeps, and her blood moves sluggishly inside her.

  The noises of all the Tower’s machines are muffled to a murmur by the bedroom’s thick obsidian walls. The lights are incandescent, and soft and yellow, and dim. The sheets are nice and warm: silk, with heavy quilted blankets over them. In sleep, it feels good to have silk against the skin.

  The calling voice of her father intrudes as a whisper, coming from a speaker set in the ceiling, growing in volume until it is strong enough to gently pull Miranda up and out of her slumber. “Darling. Miri. Miri. Darling.”

  The little girl rubs her eyes. “Father.”

  “It’s time to wake up. Time for the concert, and the party. Time for smiles and songs.”

  Miranda yawns and stretches. “Time to wake up,” she says. But her blood does not believe it.

  THIRTY-THREE

  An endless row of steel torsos travels past the children’s wide eyes as they peer through a window into one of the assembly rooms. The torsos emerge on a conveyor belt from a featureless circular hole in the wall on the right side of the room. They pass under a series of skeletal parodies of human arms that dangle from the ceiling, elongated spidery steel things ending in hands with digits twice as long as those of a normal adult’s. Quickly, each pair of arms hanging over the belt performs a different task, tossing components from hand to hand with the unerring dexterity of professional jugglers: lifting the torso from the belt; picking up a stainless steel head from a second belt that runs perpendicular to the first and beneath it; deftly screwing the head onto the torso; placing the new head-torso assemblage back onto the belt, where it goes into a hole in the opposite wall to be routed to other rooms, where arms and legs will be added.

  “I’ll bet you thought the stork brought your mechanical servants to your offices and homes,” Prospero says to the boys and girls whose jaws are gaping (and Prospero is remembering what his publicist told him just this morning: remember, when you’re taking the kids on the tour and you’re talking to them, to put a smile in your voice. The expression seems stupid to him: he’s not good with literary devices. He wouldn’t know how to begin to make a voice that has the shape of a smile: that seems absurd. But he figures that if he smiles when he’s speaking, his voice will somehow come out right, will not be frightening as it can sometimes be: he is trying his best). He forces a chuckle out of his throat: “Haw hah! You see now: they’re made here, in factories like this all over Xeroville, and in other distant cities, too, where people speak strange languages!”

  The boy standing next to Harold stares through the glass. He is fat-faced and freckled, his head topped with a mop of chaotically curly deep red hair that his rakishly skewed checkered cap can’t manage to tame. He is clearly troubled: his lower lip quivers as if he’s about to cry. “Uncle Prospero?” he says.

  “What’s . . . what’s your name. Little one.”

  “Sebastian.” The boy turns away from the window, away from the seemingly infinite parade of torsos and heads, to face Prospero. Harold remains transfixed by the scene on the other side of the glass, pressing his palms to the window to feel the rhythmic thunder and throb of the machines as they build the tin men. Beats nested within beats flange and come into sync as the machines whisper a percussive song to the tips of his fingers. He feels it, and by feeling it, he hears it. It is one of the most beautiful things he has ever heard.

  “Well, Sebastian,” Prospero says, “do you have a question for me?”

  Sebastian balks for a moment, the other boys and girls (except for the mesmerized Harold) staring at him, then says, “Does this mean I can’t be a mechanical man when I grow up?”

  Naïve children’s questions like this make Prospero acutely uncomfortable. Smile in the voice. Smile in the voice. “I’m afraid so,” he says. “But don’t let that make you feel like you’re not special. Sure, mechanical men might have superhuman strength, and inexhaustible stamina, but do you know what you have, that they don’t?”

  “What?” Sebastian asks, hands clasped behind his back, innocent eyes looking up.

  Prospero bends to look Sebastian in the eye. “A soul,” he says, his voice just above a whisper now, with a hint of a tremor in it. “Our company files five new patent applications each week, and our technology advances faster than we can keep up with it, but we still—”

  —extending one of his narrow, bony fingers and placing its tip on Sebastian’s chest—

  “—haven’t been able to duplicate this.”

  Prospero rises and turns, gazing through the plate glass at the movements of the automatic assembly line. The sets of arms hanging from the ceiling sway back and forth, going about their tasks with inhuman grace, conducting a symphony born from the thrumming of the conveyor belts beneath them and the muffled noises of machines in nearby chambers.

  “Not yet,” he says.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  An excerpt from the sixth of the seventeen notebooks of Caliban Taligent (which sit before me in a stack on the desk in the zeppelin’s observation room, both sides of their pages filled with line after line of his single-spaced script, his letters cramped and careful, almost as if they issued from a typewriter instead of a human hand):

  —I sometimes fear that when my father’s name receives its final, indelible inscription in History’s long and unforgiving ledger, it will only be with the additional notation that he was a man without a soul. This is not so. As much as I hate my father, I must admit that Prospero Taligent is an extremely soulful person, even more so than most of us blundering our way through this new twentieth century. But Father refuses to believe that there is something in the world, some idea, that can be understood by none but a God dreamed up by humankind and defined in terms of his own unimaginability. The idea that a blueprint for the human spirit lies locked in a treasure-chest in Heaven, its codes indecipherable to all eyes but those of angels, is revolting to him. If this makes Father soulless, would that we were all men without souls.

  For example. I have pointed out to Father on several occasions that perhaps a machine that desires to mimic the human form, with the greatest accuracy possible with our current technology and construction methods, is not a device that would have optimal design efficiency. Perhaps we might add a third leg for greater stability, or fashion the neck so that the head could swivel about completely, instead of being limited to some hundred fifty degrees of arc. However, Father is as much an aesthete as he is a technician. He desires to build the best machine that he can, but it also seems that he desires to construct a human being, with a soul, from scratch. To his mind, these desires are not incompatible; in fact, they are one and the same.

  If Father ever does manage to achieve his grand design, he wil
l have proved two things: that souls exist (a belief that has been considered more or less heretical in respectable intellectual circles for a good many years); and that they are not inexplicable or beyond our comprehension, as those who lived during the long-forgotten age of miracles believed, but that they are objects that can be observed, measured, understood, and constructed.

  My father does have a soul. He just thinks of souls in a different way. I myself am living proof of that.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “Once upon a time,” Uncle Prospero says, “there was a virgin queen.”

  The children are in the Tower’s library. Shelf after shelf of books parade orderly before their sensation-gorged eyes: books bound in leather with metal clasps holding them shut; books with spines of glass, their titles delicately etched in frost; ancient books so large they require three strong men to take them down and open them, with lavish, photorealistic illustrations that are twice the size of life. Mechanical men sort and shelve texts that have lost their places, cradling volumes in their spindly but strong arms, climbing up and down varnished wooden ladders with casters on their bases that can be moved along the shelves.

  “A virgin queen,” Prospero says to the children, who are gathered together around a small circular table on the library’s floor, illuminated by a shimmering pool of white light from a high-powered ceiling lamp several stories above. The lamp casts its beam downward in a brilliant column defined by the dust motes floating through it, and on the table beneath it lies a book that seems several centuries old to Harold, the edges of its pages covered with gilding and mold. Harold is at the back of the crowd of children, having lagged behind them on the tour, and so he is jumping as high as he can, catching glimpses of the book bathing luxuriously in its pool of light (and, yes, the light is indeed doing irreparable damage to the aged volume, but never fear: Prospero normally keeps it in climate-controlled darkness with the other copies he owns, but for this moment, with the children, he believes that theatrics are warranted). The book is open to one of its first pages: —Bote-∫waine. —Heere Ma∫ter: What cheere? To Harold the language seems like his own, but also somehow different, and he wonders what happened to the meaning of these old words in the meantime that made them shift their shapes. —Tend to th’Ma∫ters whi∫tle: Blow till thou bur∫t thy winde, if roome enough. —Mercy on vs. We ∫plit.