The Difference Engine

Their rooms in the Richelieu were quite modest, with a co

"Is there anything left of the advance?" Lady Ada asked.

"Enough to tip the chauffeur," Fraser said.

"Oh dear. That little?"

Fraser nodded. The French savants had paid little enough for the pleasure of her learned company, and her debts had swiftly eaten that. The meager takings at the ticket-booth would scarcely have paid their passage from London.

Lady Ada opened the curtains, frowned at summer daylight, closed them again. "Then I suppose I shall have to take on that tour in America."

Fraser sighed, inaudibly. "They say that continent boasts many natural wonders, milady."

"Which tour, though? Boston and New Philadelphia? Or Charleston and Richmond?"

Fraser said nothing. The names of the alien cities struck him with a leaden gloom.

"I shall toss a coin for it!" Her Ladyship decided brightly. "Have you a coin, Mr. Fraser?"

"No, milady," Fraser lied, searching his pockets with a muted jingle, "I'm sorry."

"Don't they pay you at all?" Her Ladyship inquired, with a hint of temper.

"I have my police pension, milady. Quite generous, promptly paid." The promptness part was true, at least.

She was concerned now, hurt. "But doesn't the Society pay you a proper salary? Oh dear, and I've put you to so much trouble, Mr. Fraser! I had no idea."

"They recompense me in their own way, ma'am. I am well rewarded."

He was her paladin. It was more than enough.

She stepped to her bureau, searching among papers and receipts. Her fingers touched the tortoise-shell handle of her traveling-mirror.

She turned then, and caught him with a woman's look. Under its pressure, he lifted his hand, quite without volition, and touched his bumpy cheek below the eye-patch. His white side-whiskers did not hide the scars. A shotgun had caught him there. It still ached sometimes, when it rained.

She did not see his gesture, though, or did not choose to see it. She beckoned him nearer. "Mr. Fraser. My friend. Tell me something, won't you? Tell me the truth." She sighed. "Am I nothing but a fu

"Madame," Fraser said gently, "you are la Reine des Ordinateurs."

"Am I?" She lifted the mirror, gazed within it.

In the minor, a City.

It is 1991. It is London. Ten thousand towers, the cyclonic hum of a trillion twisting gears, all air gone earthquake-dark in a mist of oil, in the frictioned heat of intermeshing wheels. Black seamless pavements, uncounted tributary rivulets for the frantic travels of the punched-out lace of data, the ghosts of history loosed in this hot shining necropolis. Paper-thin faces billow like sails, twisting, yawning, tumbling through the empty streets, human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye. And when a given face has served its purpose, it crumbles, frail as ash, bursting into a dry foam of data, its constituent bits and motes. But new fabrics of conjecture are knitted in the City's shining cores, swift tireless spindles flinging off invisible loops in their millions, while in the hot unhuman dark, data melts and mingles, churned by gear-work to a skeletal bubbling pumice, dipped in a dreaming wax that forms a simulated flesh, perfect as thought—

It is not London—but mirrored plazas of sheerest crystal, the avenues atomic lightning, the sky a super-cooled gas, as the Eye chases its own gaze through the labyrinth, leaping quantum gaps that are causation, contingency, chance. Electric phantoms are flung into being, examined, dissected, infinitely iterated.

In this City's center, a thing grows, an auto-catalytic tree, in almost-life, feeding through the roots of thought on the rich decay of its own shed images, and ramifying, through myriad lightning-branches, up, up, toward the hidden light of vision,

Dying to be born.

The light is strong,

The light is clear;

The Eye at last must see itself

Myself…

I see:

I see,

I see

I

!