The Surgeon slides the brain into its new housing, connects the vitreous filaments to the new opticals (his mother chose green lenses), and seals the top of the silver skull with a soldering torch. Finally, he pulls the hood of elastic skin over the back of the skull and secures it with a permanent adhesive. He signals the Attendant, who flips a switch, sending a current of cobalt energy leaping through the youth’s new body. Gears groan and the body quivers until the charge dissipates. The Attendant hands a brass heart-key to the Surgeon. He inserts it gently into the keyhole in the youth’s chest and turns it…cranking it round and round until the green lenses begin to glow with faint light.
As he primes the youth’s new body, a trio of Transporters enters the room and gathers up the youth’s flesh-and-blood remains. They will remove it cleanly and dispose of the carcass somewhere. Three or four such operations a day creates a lot of cast-off flesh. The Surgeon is glad the disposal of such remnants is not part of his job. He has never thought of asking where they take the fleshy rubbish. Perhaps they cast them into the Well of Bones. He does not care enough to ask.
The youth sits up on the table, his opticals shining bright as emeralds. He lifts his arms and bends his fingers, looking at his adult body for the first time. His bright skull is incapable of expression, but the Surgeon sees wonder in the flaring green opticals. He is used to this moment of enlightenment. It always makes him proud of a job well done.
“How do you feel?” he asks the patient.
The green opticals blink, stare at him. “Brilliant,” says the youth. With some coaxing he stands on his new legs. The Attendant leads him toward the door and his expectant parents.
“You’re truly a Beatific now,” he tells the lad. “A man.”
“Thank you, Doctor…?” he pauses at the door.
“Wail,” the Surgeon says through his smiling mask.
“Thank you, Doctor Wail,” says the boy who is now a man.
The Surgeon bows at the waist. His patient disappears through the swinging doors.
“No more today, Doctor,” says the Attendant.
“Excellent,” says Dr. Wail, stripping off his plastic gloves and surgical gown. “Summon a coach if you would be so kind.”
The Attendant nods and leaves the room.
A few drops of blood are all that is left of the youth’s fleshly body. Wail stares at the crimson stains. What a piece of work is man, he thinks. How frail and tender, how prone to destruction. “Not anymore,” he says aloud to himself.
In the lobby the youth’s family embraces him, their porcelain smiles wide and colored with cheer. Rose-tinted cheeks and scintillating opticals. The father is telling his son to keep his heart-key safe and clean, that he must wind himself back to full strength every morning. The son holds the brass key proudly in his hands. It is the key to immortality.
Dr. Wail exits through the main doors of the Ministère de Science. A black rain falls across the Urbille as his carriage approaches. A pale sun sinks beyond the silhouettes of rusted and jagged towers. The Ministère itself is a gleaming spire of glass and steel behind him, a monument to modernity rising from a landscape of decayed and crumpled metal.
Two clockwork horses draw the carriage through the muddy street. Above and behind them on the driver’s bench sits a steaming Clatterpox, its barrel-shaped body patterned with rust and salt encrustations. Its rod-like arms pull on the reigns, bringing the carriage to a halt before the Surgeon, who has wrapped himself in a gray overcloak. Soiled rain drips from the rim of his top hat. The Clatterpox driver vents a gout of smoke from tubes along its bulky frame, a sound like six teapots gone to boil at once. It swivels its oval head and focuses smudged opticals.
“Coach for the doctor?” asks the Clatterpox, its voice a rasp of scraping metal.
Wail nods, and the driver leaps down to open the door. Its joints creak and Wail thinks the poor fellow might fall apart at any moment. Still, he climbs into the dry, velvet-lined interior and doffs his drenched hat and cloak. He loosens a few buttons on his waistcoat and watches the Rusted Zone roll by as the horses pull him through the squalid streets.
Crowds of Clatterpox wander the avenues, going from factories to taverns, ambling through the red clouds of rust and oily rain. The Surgeon long ago stopped asking himself how people can live like this. A group of naked children, five of them, splash ecstatically in a mud puddle at the mouth of an alley. A shouting Clatterpox (their mother? father?) drives them into a nearby hovel. Wail knows that those children, if they survive another ten or twelve years, will undergo their own Conversions. But unlike the privileged sons and daughters of Beatifics, they will become clumsy, lumbering Clatterpox. For those who cannot afford the services of a Surgeon, the only choice is the Mechanics.
“Should these people even be allowed to raise children?” his wife had once asked.
“Perhaps not,” Wail had told her. “It doesn’t seem fair.”
But like everything else in the Urbille, it was not the Beatifics who made decisions. The Law came only from the Potentates, and The Law was incontestable.
As the carriage leaves the Rusted Zone and its rows of dilapidated factories, it passes into the rolling greenery of the Good Hills. Mansions of ivy-smothered stone dot the hills, one estate after another of sculpted gardens, cast-iron fences, and meandering avenues dotted with gas lamps in baroque shapes. Night has fallen and the windows of the great houses gleam with orange warmth, the light of blazing hearths spilling across lawns set with pathways of ground glass. These are the homes of Beatific families, ancestral estates designed with grace and beauty to house the Urbille’s most graceful and beautiful citizens.
The carriage pulls through the gate of the Wail Estate and up the curving driveway. That same kind firelight flickers from the windows of the house. The Surgeon’s heart gears speed up a bit as he imagines his wife and son waiting for him inside.
Home. He exits the carriage. The window’s glow caresses his porcelain smile.
He drops a single ruby brilliant into the driver’s iron palm and the Clatterpox approximates a quick bow with its bulky frame. The mechanical horses’ hooves click against the cobbled drive, as the Surgeon opens the door that bears the Wail sigil in pressed gold.
In the vestibule and the parlor beyond there is no sign of wife or son.
“Kalmea? Alain?” he calls out, removing his hat and coat.
“Kalmea!” louder now.
The house is stonily silent. Then the rush of padded feet on the carpeted floor. His wife enters the foyer, a single candle burning in her hand. There is no joy in her amber opticals. She wears a face of sculpted ceramic sorrow.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“He is…ill,” she says, a hand on his shoulder.
They rush to the bedroom where young Alain lies under blankets, sweating and moaning. The boy’s pale skin is covered in purple blotches.
The frailty of flesh…
Kalmea tells him of the carriage that brought Alain home from school. He seemed fine at first, but soon began coughing. He would not eat the meal she prepared, and collapsed in the den. “He has been lying here ever since,” she says. “I sent a summons to the Ministère, but they said you had already left.”
“Must have arrived just after I departed,” he says. He examines Alain’s pupils, pulling his soft opticals open gently. They are glazed and unhealthy. What is this sickness? He has never seen such symptoms. He mutters an Incantation of Health but it has no effect. Even as he watches, the dark spots grow larger on his son’s flesh. He administers an Elixir of Prevention with a golden spoon. No response.