The Great Game (36 page)

  "Everything," he heard Babbage say, as from a great distance as, suspended in mid-air, he felt the cold prick of a needle enter his neck, "is going to be all right, Mr Houdini. It will be all right."

 

Famous last words, Harry thought when he woke up. Woke up and wished he hadn't. Woke up, and found himself strapped to a table, the dim light of the greenhouse replaced with strong white electric lights, a bare room, bare walls, and Harry naked, strapped with thick leather restraints–

  A mirror above him, adding to the humiliation, adding to the horror of it all – the mirror showing him everything, showing him himself, it was attached to the ceiling, hovered above him like a suspended pool of water–

  "We shall begin," a voice said. The same old, pre-recorded voice, and he hated it now, hated that voice, he wanted to kill, he had to escape, he had to–

  "Sir."

  The voice was surprisingly high; it didn't fit with the face of the man who now stood over Harry. A giant of a man, with a bald dome for a head, a scar running down his cheek – he looked like a pirate, Harry thought, the man looked ridiculous in the white lab coat–

  In his hand, Harry couldn't help but notice, as much as his gaze tried to shy away from it, in the man's huge, meaty hand there was a small and delicate and very sharp-looking surgical scalpel.

 
 

 
 
 

"Wait!"

  Harry struggled against his bonds. And was that a small, almost wistful smile on that huge, cratered face above him? His head thrashed, this way and that, seeing now the wizened old man, this Babbage, in his wheelchair and his life-support machines, watching him, waiting…

  "Why are you doing this?" Harry said – whispered. The old man sighed, the sound of bellows releasing air, slowly and tortuously. "You do not know," he said, enigmatically, "how lucky you are."

  Harry thinking, keep him talking, anything to keep that blade from descending, from cutting his flesh, from burrowing into his skin… He said, "Who's he?"

  The man above him smiled again. Nothing friendly in that expression. It made Harry's blood go cold, an expression he'd heard once, did not believe it could become a reality. No help there, not from this brute–

  "His name," Babbage said, "is Mr Spoons."

  "Mr Spoons," the man with the scalpel said, nodding. The same high, almost girlish voice.

  "He used to be boatswain to Captain Wyvern," Babbage said. "The pirate. But that, Mr Houdini, is beside the point. Mr Spoons–"

  "Spoons!"

  "Please proceed with the operation."

  "No!"

  Harry cried out but it was no use. He saw the blade descending, a frown of concentration on the giant's face–

  In the mirror above he could see himself reflected, naked, the blade descending, the blade touching his arm, the blade pushing–

  For just a moment, a flaring of pain, shooting up his arm and then–

  The blade went deeper, made an incision, Spoons moved the blade deftly, opening Harry's arm–

  And the pain suddenly vanished, pain receptors shutting off, and something else, stranger, something Harry had seen before but had tried to forget, had kept telling himself he'd dreamed it, the last time it had happened, it couldn't have–

  Blue sparks shot out of the cut in his arm, and Mr Spoons, startled, took half a step back before remembering himself and reaching out, and with thick fingers pulling open the folds of skin on either side, revealing–

  No blood, no bones. Harry shutting his eyes now, wanting to scream, recollection flooding in–

 

En-route from the Black Hills, his horse, moving fast, stumbling–

  Harry falling, hard, the impact jarring, his head hitting a jutting stone–

  Pain flaring, and he blacked out–

  And woke up, seconds or minutes later, the horse nearby, unharmed–

  Harry's head hurting, his hand reaching to it, finding a sticky residue, his hand, coming back, no blood but a strange, greenish material that seemed to ooze, almost as if alive–

  A shower of blue sparks, falling down, scared him. He reached up and his hand passed through them, harmlessly–

 

  On board the Snark, in the midst of ocean, after too much drink, unsteady on his feet, on board, a piece of metal falling, he turned, it cut his arm–

  The pain, coming, then, just as suddenly, disappearing. Blue sparks, the same green goo oozing, sealing the wound before he had a chance to register it–

  He'd cursed the Bookman, but he'd pushed it away, it had been nothing, a hallucination, there was nothing at all out of the ordinary–

 

"Extraordinary," Babbage breathed – that is, voice machine and breathing machine meshed, for just a moment. Harry, defeated, stared down at his arm. The strange green goo had materialised over it, was sealing Mr Spoons' cut. Harry had a bad feeling, a very bad feeling…

  "Humans," Babbage said, "are such extraordinary machines, Mr Houdini. But you!"

  Was that admiration in the old voice? It was so hard to tell… and the frown on Mr Spoons' face suggested he, at least, was not overly happy with the results, so far, of the operation.

  "I had tried to get hold of the Bookman's technology for years," Babbage said. "I, alone, had deduced his secret. Nothing but a servant!" The ancient man coughed a laugh. "A servant, a copying machine. Yet how he hated them, and hates them still! For centuries, since his escape from that cursed island, he has been moving through the world, our world, a shadowy figure, the first and greatest player of the great game. Fighting his former masters, these… these reptiles."

  And was that a moue of distaste briefly crossing the old man's haunted face?

  "An alien machine, designed to make copies of biological entities, to copy them and to perfect them, to keep them pristine and operational, like a librarian, a bookman or… a zoo keeper," Babbage said. Harry fought against the straps but he couldn't tear them. Is that what he was? he wondered, in despair. A machine? A replica of someone who had been, a human born and raised and named, Erich at first, then calling himself Houdini – was that man, almost no older than a boy, dead forever, killed by a mugger in the dark streets of the White City and he, Harry, no matter that he felt the same, looked the same, was he but a replica, a cheap automaton?

  Not even that, he realised. For he had died before – did that make him a copy of a copy? A copy of a copy of a copy?

  When did one stop being human? When did one become a machine?

  "You…" Babbage breathed. "Remarkable. At last, the Bookman has obliged me. I, who was the greatest builder of automata in the known world, am but a copying scribe, forced to learn from first principles an art perfected long ago under different skies, on alien soil! No more. Now, I have you, Mr Houdini."

  "Let me go!"

  "Join me." Charles Babbage's chair moved mechanically forwards, accompanied by its cloud of machines. His ancient head peered over the table at the captive Harry. "Work with me. You do not understand, Mr Houdini. The time has come! There is a war upon us."

  "War?"

  "War…" Mr Spoons said, and smiled. The idea seemed to delight him.

  "A war," Charles Babbage said, "of worlds, Mr Houdini. A war that was long in coming, a war inevitable, a war unavoidable, as must always be the case when two civilisations meet, and one is stronger, and the other weak."

  "But that's not true," Harry said. Even captive, he sensed the wrong in the older man's words. "When European refugees came to Vespuccia they were received cordially and honourably by the Nations. When European explorers came to East Africa they were welcomed into the trade networks that had existed for centuries between Asia and Africa. When–"

  "When the Lizardine Empire conquered India, it did so by force," Babbage said. "When it–"

  "But it doesn't have to be this way," Harry said. "The great game is played to prevent war. War is not inevitable, it is not a natural solution. Peace–"

  "Peace!" Babbage laughed, and it was not a pleasant laugh – and Harry suddenly realised the man was too old, had lived for too long, so long that his brain had, in some subtle ways, stopped functioning, that he was demented – and for the first time since his arrival here he felt true fear.

  "Let's take a look at his heart," Babbage said, and Mr Spoons raised the scalpel again, and it descended, and the cold hard metal touched Harry's chest and he screamed

 
 

 
 
 

There came moments of lucidity then, intersected with long periods of darkness. He'd wake up in that cold room to find men and women in white coats standing over him, prodding, studying. Sometimes there would be wires attached to him. Sometimes he would wake up and a leg would be missing, or an arm, or his chest would be bared open, skin and flesh removed, showing something alien and inexplicable underneath. At those times he was almost glad of the returning darkness, the no-being that spared him the indignity of dissection.

  Other moments, too, flashes of awakening, almost as if he were in someone else's body, in a new body, being carted around. The baruch-landau moving, this driverless carriage piloted by Mr Spoons in the front and he, Harry, beside him in a passenger seat. Outside, for the first time, though he had no recollection of leaving that cold room. Looking back–

  A castle rising above a cliff, towers and turrets like something out of a fairy tale, surrounded by trees, an access road–

  Black airships above it, moored and floating serenely, around the castle, down below, a pleasant valley but it was full of military-looking personnel. More vehicles, fields of tents, troops at parade in the distance. He said, "Where are we going?" – his voice thick with disuse.

  Mr Spoons: "To Brasov."

  Harry sat back in the seat. The vehicle moved through the valley on a curiously paved road, the journey smooth, the vehicle making almost no sound–

  The city, in the distance–

  A bowl of a valley, surrounded by tall majestic mountains – "The Carpathians," Mr Spoons said, his scarred face placid – the city in the distance, tall spires rising against the sky like delicate towers–

  No, he realised. Not towers at all.

  The car moved closer. Harry watched – an old pleasant city of stone streets and low houses, transformed–

  He said, his voice tinged with awe, "They're rockets."

  Mr Spoons smiled, faintly–

 

  
He woke, and found himself strapped to the table and they were examining him and old Charles Babbage was cackling to himself and he said, "Stop. Stop it."

  
"Join us," Babbage said. "Join me, Harry. The war is coming, and you and I could stop it. Together we could save the world."

  
"You're mad," Harry whispered.

  
"You don't have to be mad to work here," Babbage whispered, "but it helps…"

 

He could not distinguish dreams and awakenings. One night he woke in a room he did not recognise and saw himself, multiplied by a hundred.

  Rows and rows of Harry Houdinis, lifeless, suspended from walls in some medieval crypt in that horrid Castle Babbage, hanging on hooks, like so many dolls, waiting… He blinked and then saw a hundred other Houdinis blink back at him, their eyes staring, and he stifled a scream and then darkness, blessedly, closed on him again.

 

Rockets, gleaming against the skies… "What… What are they
for?"
Harry whispered.

  The same hint of a smile on Mr Spoons' ugly face. "Have you never looked up at the stars?" he said. "Have you never
wondered?"

  "Wondered what?"

  "What it would be like to go there," Mr Spoons said, his face softening. He looked like a big kid at that moment, something childish and almost endearing in his eyes. "I used to look up at the stars, on board our ship. The
Joker
, she was called. I used to stand on the deck, looking up. Wondering… My master was lizardine himself, Captain Wyvern, and we sailed the Carib Sea and beyond… They told me Les Lézards came from there, from the stars… crossing some unimaginable distance in a ship that could sail through space… and I wondered, and I still do – what would it be like, to sail between the stars?"

  Harry had no answer. They drove closer, passing military installations, trucks and dome-like buildings, pylons humming, all the while the rockets dominating the landscape, there in that strange valley bounded by the majestic Carpathians… a hidden valley, a secret valley, here at the edge of the AustroHungarian Empire. Babbage had chosen well.

  "Why are you showing me all this?"

  They drove into the old town – stone-paved streets, lowlying houses, restaurants open, lights coming on, a festive atmosphere – soldiers and scientists sitting around in big groups, drinking beer, laughing–

  "This is your destiny," Mr Spoons said, simply.

 

  
He was in the vehicle with Mr Spoons, watching the rockets, and he was hanging on a peg, on a wall, like a suit of clothes, with a hundred others, and he was on that operating table, being taken apart, piece by piece, and he was in this dark place where the voice was speaking, speaking, a mélange of voices in turns interrogating and lecturing, filling his mind (minds?) with new concepts, new ideas, an ideology he couldn't push away–