The automaton laughed at the pilot’s pomp and at his fiancée’s disgusted expression. “It’s beautiful, Emilio,” he shouted back. “Your design?”
“Every single rivet.” The man grinned behind a pair of pitch-black goggles that made him look like a juvenile insect wearing a waistcoat and greaves. There was a blue, spectral glimmer deep inside the blackness of his goggles. The crowd kept its distance from the locomocycle, mainly because its boiler gave off an unbearable heat. But they couldn’t stop admiring that automotive marvel. The man called Emilio stepped down from the vehicle, leaning his arm on the boiler. He faced the golem with keen interest. “Is she the lucky one?”
“That’s her,” Fritz answered, holding his lover’s hand, suddenly solemn.
“Did she bring the equipment I asked for?” His gaze was fixed on Chaya, who was uneasy at being scrutinised not only by the scientist’s goggled eyes, but also by the judging eyes of the women at the station, condemning the bourgeois style of her housemaid’s dress. Worse, she wasn’t precisely a maid, for in their eyes she wasn’t a woman, but a construct turned to life by the power of the one thing more terrible than the Holy Church: magic.
“You can speak directly to me, sir. I speak and decide for myself.”
“My dear,” Fritz intervened, “this is Dr Emilio Cavalcante, the one I told you about. Physician, engineer and member of the Order of Oriental Templars.”
“Former member.” Dr Cavalcante raised a mechanical finger as an exclamation mark, his gears spinning with the movement. “Apparently, my friend, the Order does not approve of my mystical theories, not to mention my political practices. And vice versa.” Dr Cavalcante moved two steps closer to the couple, closer to the golem. “Salud, camarada! Forgive me if I sounded a little bit sexist, but I was concerned with the equipment. You see, it’s not every day that—”
“Everything’s here.” She turned her back to the doctor and dragged two wooden crates, one in each hand, to him. The crates moaned, leaving deep scratches in the floor. She released the boxes and faced the insect in the way someone might look at an old, ill-kept and uninteresting daguerreotype. “That’s all I could get. Fifteen carbines, some Prussian pistols and not much ammunition.” The golem looked at the box to her left. “And here’s the equipment you asked for.”
Dr Cavalcante looked at the containers, but his gaze drifted to a point way beyond them, to a dozen crates being unloaded from the aethership’s rear. They were somewhat different and had red marks painted on their sides. “Yeah. Excellent. That’ll do,” the doctor said.
The motolang looked at his boxes and held his friend’s shoulder. “So, you think you can do it, Emilio? You think you can give us a child?”
Dr Cavalcante woke from his trance, extended his mortal arm and shook the motolang’s metallic hand. “Fritz, my friend, if I were you I’d be scheduling the kid’s baptism already. The only problem is to find a priest who hasn’t been fusilladed by the revolution.
Chaya had spent the last three weeks in Catalonia, but the city-factory still fascinated her. The wreckage sacs, the barricades on every corner, the low-fluctuation trucks painted with the revolutionary parties’ initials, and, especially, the strikers’ colours. Everyone, absolutely everyone, either wore red or black and red kerchiefs tied round their necks. Even the mechanoids, their gears exposed on their chests or shoulders, insisted on showing off kerchiefs, ignoring the high chance of an accident. And there were the brick-and-metal buildings carved by bullets, bent at angles that far-surpassed the plans of Gaudi, almost destroyed by Mauritzes’ mortars. However, most impressive was the fact that this place had become their home so quickly. Notwithstanding, it was her home. Sometimes there was no grease and she had to wind her husband, lubricating his gears with butter or fat stolen from the communal depot. And sometimes there was no food, which meant no leftovers for her roots. That was the siege, the embargo, the seldom-run blockade. As when they had arrived on the Nassau. But still, they enjoyed a normal couple’s routine. He worked as a carabineer at the front, and she’d patrol the streets on foot with her Luger. Both came back home at the end of the day, sharing the little stories that filled up their quotidian days. A routine that included almost daily visits to the basements of Hotel Florida.
She lay on a wooden table, an improvised stretcher with one foot shorter than the other three. Dozens of lenses and manipulators hung from coils and wires tied to the ceiling, all of them pointing at her body, analysing, accusing her. You’re an empty vase, a dead tree. The smell of ozone and gaslight unnerved her, especially after two hours of breathing electrical air and smoke, half-naked under the holophotes. Not to mention the fear she had of falling from the table. Every time she breathed a bit too deeply, the table bent to one side, stopping with a sudden thump, a sound that served as an exclamation mark to the many, omnipresent tick-tocks in the room. Some of those sounds were strange to her, but some were not. Inside the wall of darkness, Chaya could only see the blue poltergeist inside Dr Cavalcante’s eyes; Emilio, who had his goggles bolted to his face. It could be just fashion, or something far more sinister. He can see in the dark?
Suddenly, the clattering stopped. The lights came back on slowly, along with calmer, lower tick-tocks. Chaya could see the doctor walking to and fro in front of the analytical engine, exhaling gusts of white steam. He had some punched cards in his hands and was murmuring something to a machine hanging from his shoulders, a trump with a rubber tube linked to a rattling stenograph on his waistcoat, spitting metres and metres of hollowed-out paper.
“So?” Chaya sat up, relieved that the examination was over. “What does your oracle say?”
Emilio spoke over the brass trump, as he looked at the end of the room, at a table covered by a ziggurat-shaped tarp from which came the low sound of boiling water. “It says you ate chocolate today,” he said rather casually.
“Just a tip,” she smiled.
“It’s quite toxic for golems.”
“Just like a shot of cachaça, Emilio.” Chaya was putting on her dress, careful not to let the dark chocolate bar fall from her pocket.
“And just as hard to get these days.” Emilio turned off the stenograph and unfastened the apparatus from his torso. “You been smuggling? Look, Chaya, if people know you’ve been getting stuff from the Mauritzes, you’re gonna be in some serious trouble, especially if the committee hears about it. The way things are, this could end with an execution.”
“If I can’t eat chocolate, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” the golem said, a defying hand in her pocket. “I bought it at the station. Before I got here. On Earth.”
The doctor shook his head and gave a short, dry laugh. “Okay, then. But you’ll have to quit if you want to have a baby. That thing messes with your ecosystem, you know.” He finally rolled up the paper and attached it to the feeder’s tiny hooks on the calculator’s rear. As soon as he did so, the engine re-initiated its mad rattling: the sound of a thousand clocks speeding up to the end of time. The analytical engine ate hole after hole, a data banquet digested by coiled guts and dented wheels, calculating, calculating, calculating.