The troops from Azilia arrived three weeks later, a weary, bedraggled-looking lot numbering around four thousand, including some two hundred warriors who had joined them in Apalachee. They were led by Thomas Nairne and a man named Martin from Newbern. Oglethorpe was not with them. They were welcomed in grand style, with fife and drum and trumpet, which seemed to cheer them considerably. Don Pedro insisted on getting out of bed to greet them, though the doctors much advised against it. He whooped and hollered and only occasionally clutched the bandages at his side.
Franklin clasped Nairne warmly at the approach to the chateau. The man had aged considerably since Franklin had last seen him; he walked with a limp and his shoulders seemed somehow more sloping.
“Mr. Franklin,” he acknowledged. “You seem to have done your job.”
“As best I could, Governor, as best I could.”
“Can you bring me to date?”
“Of course. Let us find you quarters, first.”
“Mr. Franklin, your wife, Lenka. I fear—I fear I have misplaced her.”
“Never fear, she is found, or she found me. Though that presents its own problems.”
Nairne nodded. “As long as it's off my shoulders.”
New Paris and Franklin had not been idle, awaiting the troops. The capital of Louisiana would not be taken from the sea, as the English colonies had—at least not without hideous cost. The harbor was mined all the way to the open ocean, and more sparsely for miles up and down the coast. The fortress had been reinforced with depneumifiers, as well, to separate any airships or underwater boats from the malakim that powered them.
On the landward side, a perimeter of towers was erected, hidden amongst the huge pines and dense cypress, depending on the terrain. These were furbished with devil guns as well, and together constituted a wall through which no ordinary malakus-driven machine should be able to pass. That left only the thousands of enemy soldiers and warriors marching their way, apparently from east and west.
The newly arrived Carolinians were put immediately to work in shifts, digging and building more mundane sorts of fortifications. Scouts went north, west, and east to gather intelligence. New Paris swarmed with men building defenses like an ant nest some child had kicked— or so Franklin thought, remembering his earlier observations of those insects.
Nairne watched all this with weary resignation.
“I fear it will not be enough,” he said. “This has never been a real battle, just rats trying to bark at the hounds.”
“Keep heart,” Franklin cautioned, “or pretend to. When Oglethorpe arrives with King Charles, things will look better.”
“Oglethorpe is his own luck charm,” Nairne replied, “but he went back toward the lion's maw. I would not count on him to return. Too much stands in his way, and too many acts of God. Consider; he must learn to sail those amphibian ships well enough to slip through the sound, beneath the nose of Fort Marlborough. Then, on the open sea, he must find Charles before the fleet dispatched to sink him does. Then he must convince Charles that he is a friend and speaks for us, though he swims with Russian fins. If it can be done, Oglethorpe will do it. But it may be that it cannot be done.”
“Then we will find victory without him,” Franklin said softly. “We must, you understand.”
“I understand. I'm just tired.”
“Rest, then. We've still got time, God willing. Something has delayed the army from the west. Each second is another bullet in our guns.”
“As you say,” Nairne told him. “I'm just tired.”
In that week and the week that followed, Lenka never once spoke to Ben, though he sought her out every day. She continued to dress as a soldier, working at the fortifications like the others. To make matters worse, he saw her often with Voltaire, who also didn't seem to be speaking to him. The whole situation was ridiculous, but if they were going to behave like spoiled children, so be it. He had too much to do.
One of those things was working on the countermeasure with Vasilisa, something that became more frustrating every day.
“There's something missing,” he told her, pacing across the laboratory, hands clasped behind his back. “Why can't you tell me what it is?”
Vasilisa stood near a window, suffused in grayish light, her eyes slits of pearl. Beyond her, treetops lashed at a sky pregnant with tempest. Thunder snarled in the distance.
“Because it isn't my formula,” she said with a trace of irritation. “As I told you, I copied it from the notes of Swedenborg. I don't understand all of it. That's why I needed you. I tried to kidnap you, remember, for that very reason.”
“How did you expect to carry me, if I may ask?”
Her lips bowed slightly. “Please, Benjamin. How difficult do you think it was to persuade a couple of musketeers to my point of view?”
“Ah. Couldn't those same musketeers have helped you escape, after we caught you?”
“They offered. I refused. This is a stupid place to make a last stand, but where else should I go, alone? The Ottoman empire? China? No woman would ever be listened to there, even if they weren't as thoroughly under the spell of the malakim as Russia—and they are, I assure you. And since I am committed to live or die here with you and your beggar's army, I also assure you I'm not holding back. You say something is missing—I believe you. But I don't know what it is. I couldn't copy all of his notes, after all.”
“Why me? Why didn't you take this to one of your Russian colleagues?”
“Oh—there is one who might have helped, though I rather fear her. But I did not have that option. Benjamin, I was on the tsar's ship when it fell. They spared my life only because I pretended to be with them, traitor to my tsar. I was convincing— even now he will not speak to me.”
“That upsets you,” he noticed, with some surprise.
“Of course it does. He thinks I betrayed him.”
“But you didn't?”
“No. I stole Swedenborg's formula. When the tsar escaped, I took advantage of the confusion to steal an airship. I tried, at first, to find him, but their pursuit proved too much a danger to me. I knew the English colonies were under attack by then, so I came here.” She turned back to him. “All of this wastes time. What do you see as missing?”
“Your other ‘angelic’ devices all have, at their hearts, an articulator. Though they vary in detail, all are premised on Sir Isaac's design. That is what the depneumifier attacks—it disrupts the chime and thus severs the contact. I thought at first all we would need here was a very powerful depneumifier, but that's not the case.”
“Are you saying you have no ideas at all?”
“I'm saying I was hoping to make these things go poof and vanish, but see no way to do so. Can't you recall anything this Swedenborg might have said that will help?”
“He wasn't present when I was there— one of his assistants was. They were expecting him, but I fled before he arrived. But I think …” She paused. “This prophet of theirs seemed necessary for the actual creation of the engines. Swedenborg was coming with the perfected formulas, and together they were going to —”
“Wait. The perfected formulas? These are not them?”
“I thought you understood that, Benjamin.”
“No, I most certainly did not.” He closed his eyes, trying to will the irritation away and unclog his mind for proper functioning. “You say Swedenborg needed this holy man?”
“And certain devices. But the prophet—the Indians called him ‘Sun Boy'—was the key.”
“Well. That is important. Did you know that the Indians of this country have a method of creating spirits by carving off bits of their own souls?”
Her glance told him she not only didn't know it, she didn't believe it either.
He shrugged. “It's true. I've examined the phenomenon.”
“What could that have to do with this?”
“I don't know. This talk of a prophet—ah, well. I wish Red Shoes were here.”
She didn't ask who Red Shoes was, though she was clearly curious. He left her so.
“In any event—it's almost as if there is no connection between these Swedenborgian engines and the aether. But if there is no interlocution—if they are not motivated by the malakim—how can these devices be ‘angelic'?”
She spread her hands.
“Well,” he murmured. “Let's leave that aside. If we cannot simply dissolve them, perhaps we can draw their teeth.” He spread the diagrams and pages of symbols out on the table. “The problem, again, is that I don't see what sort of teeth they have. Are you certain that these things exist? Or could it be that this Swedenborg is deluded, and has deluded you as well?”
“Swedenborg is not natural—he is strange, perhaps mad. But he is a genius. He believes these engines will function, and I believe him.”
“His notes speak of great conflagration, yet I see nothing here that resembles combustion. Very much the opposite, in fact. From what I can tell, this takes ash and puts it back together.”
“I … didn't understand that part.”
“I comprehend it, I just don't understand what it's supposed to do. The engine attracts the graphite—carbonis, he calls it here—which is present in many things. It crushes the ferments together and another substance—he calls it niveum— is formed.”
“Perhaps it is poisonous, this substance.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps—” A terrible thought occurred to him. “Perhaps the purpose is not to make this new substance but to destroy the old. Oh, dear heaven, that's it.”
“I still don't understand.”
“Carbonis is present in all living things, Vasilisa. Where these engines pass, nothing will remain alive.”
“How?”
“I suppose all would just crumble apart. Or, no, let me figure this.” He took to paper with his pen and worked through the formula. He stared at the results for a second, frowned, and started over. “That can't be right,” he muttered.
It came out the same way a second time. He did it a third.
“I must be making some faulty assumption.”
“How so?”
“Two things. First, only a fraction of the carbonis attracted undergoes transformation. That doesn't make it less dangerous, because most of the carbonis within its radius—which looks like miles—is attracted, which still means death. But the amount of niveum produced is negligible. Why do it at all?”
“And the second thing?”
“Some of the matter disappears during the process. It just goes away. You see? Carbon is made up of four atoms of damnatum, four of phlegm, three of lux, one of gas. This new substance ought to have double all that, yes? Because he's crushing them together. But it isn't so. Two damnatum atoms are missing, and he accounts for them nowhere. It makes no sense. If there were two lux left over, that might explain the ‘furnace’ he talks about, though it would be more like a match, I think. But here, you see, he talks about a great number of lux atoms released—a very great number—though there are none left over. They come from nowhere.”
“Benjamin?” Vasilisa's eyes had gone dreamy.
“What?”
“What if the damnatum atoms are changed into lux?”
“That shouldn't be possible. Atoms themselves are unchangeable and irreducible.”
“So Newton thought. What if Newton was wrong?”
“There's no proof he was wrong, just this crazy formula.”
“Benjamin, even if you are skeptical, how can we take that chance?”
“Maybe this is all a distraction, something to keep us from working on the defenses we know will work.”
“I don't think so. That is not Swedenborg's nature.”
“If either Newton or Swedenborg has to be wrong, I know who I choose to trust.”
“Really, Benjamin, Newton was at least as mad as Swedenborg—probably more so. Do you trust a dead man?”
That stung a little. It was what he had told d'Artaguiette, turned against him.
“I'll think about it some more. The most important thing— if these devices are indeed real—is to make it so that they cannot attract graphite ferments.” He began to doodle. “We could make our own attractors—”
“Which would kill just as surely as theirs.”
“Of course. But we could use them to create something like a firebreak, a zone where they would have no sustenance.”
“Why not make a repulsion against the new substance, the niveum?”
He blinked at her. “Of course. Of course, that is the answer, Vasilisa. By God, you still have a wonderful mind.”
“Why, thank you, Benjamin.” She actually seemed pleased. “That's a compliment indeed, from you.”
They were close, bent over the same sheet of paper. He could feel her breath. “We are the only ones left,” she said. “We are the only Newtonians still alive.” Her eyes were bright with tears.
It was the last thing he had ever expected from her. The very last thing.
It took twelve years off his life, made him a boy again, as when Voltaire had proposed his toast …
“No,” he said huskily. “There is Voltaire.”
She snorted and turned away. “He was never one of us; he said it himself. He never much understood Newton's theories or any of our own. Maclauren, Heath, Stirling—and me, I like to think. And you, of course, the greatest one of all.”
“The others had no opportunity to become great. I—”
It caught him like an explosion, this thing he had learned to keep bottled up so well. He choked on it as it came out. “Dear God, Vasilisa. What did we do to the world? What did I do to it?” He was weeping too, like a little boy, as he hadn't in years.
She reached for him, and for an instant he forgot everything—her great betrayal, her attempt to kidnap him only scant weeks before. He remembered only what it was like when the world was wonderful, full of possibilities. That she knew and understood what he had done, what weight lay on his shoulders, and that she shared some of it.
And did not hate him for it.
He clutched her to him so tightly that after a moment he was afraid he might break her. He held her that way for a long time.
Finally, the terrible thing in his chest subsided, ebbed enough to be put back in its bottle and to be stoppered tightly. He released her gently.
“Come,” he murmured. “There is still time to make amends. What's done is done. We have a new problem to solve.”
“Can we be friends, Benjamin? Can you ever forgive me, and be my friend again?” She stroked his cheek.
“I think so,” he replied, his voice unsteady. “I think I can do that.”
They worked the rest of the day on various proofs, seeking the repulsion for niveum. Swedenborg had described the material in some detail, which gave them a good starting point, but it was still no easy task.
Vasilisa fell asleep, slumped over her notes; and Franklin, rubbing his eyes, noticed it was sundown. He stood and stretched, then went to find a servant to conduct Vasilisa to her room.
He went out into the cooling air and walked into the briny wind from the sea, following the mud-puddled road to Fort Condé. What remained of the thunderheads rolled over, painted gold and flame by the retiring sun, and once he was out of New Paris, the salty air mingled with the heavy perfume of flowers and the lingering scent of the rain. A whippoorwill started to sing, the cicadas chirped, and he almost felt he might have been walking along the edge of Roxbury Flats on a particularly hot summer night in his native Boston.
Very ordinary. Very pleasant.
As a boy ordinary and pleasant had bored him to tears. His real life always lay around some approaching bend, when he would go to college, or take to the whale roads like his brother, or run off to apprentice in the new sciences.
Well, his road had taken a number of bends, hadn't it? And always, somehow, even with everything that had happened to him, he still imagined that his real life was just about to start. That he would soon find his real position in life, his real home, his real—
He stopped, watched the sky ebb darker. His real wife.
That was the trouble, wasn't it? It had nothing to do with any defect in Lenka. It was his flaw, his …
Up ahead, at the fort, a bell suddenly began to ring. He stood for a second, wondering what it could mean, then began to run as quickly as he could in the near darkness.
Fort Condé loomed ahead, a brick and timber structure some three hundred feet square. At the moment it was aglow with lanthorn light, and a lot of the lanthorns were in motion.
The soldier on duty at the gate challenged him and recognized him at about the same moment, but Franklin gave the password anyway as he hurried past, through the yard, and into the command post, breathing heavily.
Nairne was there, along with a French lieutenant, one Regis Du Roullet.
“What's the noise?” Franklin asked.
Nairne was grimacing at one of the three opticons Franklin had built the previous week.
“Four airships have just come up to the northwestern perimeter,” he said. “The debt for the time we borrowed is come due.”
Franklin felt his heart go chunk-a-chunk, like the water-filled drums some of the Indians used. “Did the depneumifier prove effective?”
“I don't know. The ships stopped short and infantry debarked. Then the ships flew off, still out of range.”
“Oh.”
“I was afraid of this,” Nairne went on. “They used the same trick against us in Carolina. They can't use the airships direct, for our devil guns, but the ships are still terrible weapons. Moving troops without having to march them is an incredible advantage.”
“They're hastening the war,” Franklin noticed. “Even with their ships—and I'm told they have only a few—they can move only small numbers of their total host. Why rush them in here in numbers we might be able to account for, rather than waiting for their mass to settle on our frontier?”
“To give us less time to prepare, naturally,” Nairne replied.
“How many men did they land?”
“We don't know yet,” Du Roullet said. “We also have some intelligence that the underwater boats are putting troops ashore about thirty miles up the coast.” He smiled grimly. “One of our Taensas scouts reported a great deal of bubbles boiling up somewhat closer. They must have found our mines too impeding.”
Nairne rubbed his eyes. “Two fronts,” he murmured. “With the permission of you gentlemen, I should like to take command of the northwestern line. That will be where the hardest and most immediate fighting will be. They may have made a mistake, coming at us in pieces, like this. We might manage to swallow a number of small bites as we could not the whole meal.”
“True,” Du Roullet mused. “Which makes me wonder, with Mr. Franklin, why? Do they so fear what we might do in just a few days?”
They might, Franklin thought, if they got wind of what Vasilisa and I are working on.
He didn't say anything, though. If there was a traitor, best not to let him know his existence was suspected. “Have you sent for the tsar?” Franklin asked. “He might have some insight into this strategy.”
“A runner just went for him.”
Franklin nodded. “I had hoped we had a few more days.”
Nairne shrugged. “We got more than we did at Venice, and that turned out well enough. I have faith in you, Mr. Franklin.”
It struck him, then, that they did have faith in him, and it went cold into his bones.
“I will meet with you gentlemen later,” he said. “I need to talk to someone.”
Euler stirred awake almost instantly. It was disconcerting, the way he went from sound sleep to complete attentiveness. Franklin didn't like it.
“Mr. Franklin. Back out of my box?”
Franklin took a deep breath before beginning. “Mr. Euler,” he said, “it may be that I have treated you shabbily. I see no sense in apologizing for it. Trusting you comes hard, and I think you understand that. But you've done us more good than the people I trust. You warned us of the ships in Charles Town harbor and you told me how to provoke Sterne into revealing himself. I need you again.”
Euler looked frankly at him. “I am your prisoner,” he said.
“No. I've already given the order—you are no longer confined to the palace. You can leave without listening to another word from me. If I were you, I probably would. But I'll be plain. I need you.”
“Of course you do,” Euler snapped, his brow wrinkling. “You needed me weeks ago.”
“I know, but it's too late for that. Will you help me now?”
“Help you how?”
“Two things. First, the answer to a question, if you know it.”
“Ask it.”
“The army from the west hastens to attack us. But I have seen Swedenborg's designs for the engines.”
“You know her?”
“Of course. Go on.”
“It's a tidy question. They can be used at great distances. Why haven't they used them?”
“I thought I explained that. They won't use them until it's clear their military assault is a failure. Once they commit, the war in heaven will break full gale, and it will be a terrible one. Why risk that, when it seems clear that their forces can dispatch you—us, I should say—with relative ease?”
“You mean if we contrived to lose, the engines will never be used?”
“Never is a long time, Mr. Franklin. But possibly. Make no mistake—humanity will still perish—slowly. Or, if luck is with us, the Liberal faction will return to power in time to save a few of us, though our great cities and all our learning will be stripped from us by then.”
“But our race might live.”
“Might.”
Franklin sighed and raked his hand through his hair. “They attacked earlier than we thought, using the most mobile elements of their forces rather than waiting until they have the whole bear trap about us. Why? That only increases the likelihood, however small, that they will lose and have to use their engines.”
“They must suspect you are near a countermeasure. Or else …” He trailed off, then flicked his sharp gaze up at Franklin. “There is something else, something they fear themselves. I think they worry that if they unleash the engines, they might somehow turn on them. I don't know how—it's mostly intuition, gleaned from a word here and there, nothing I can put my finger on.” He considered another few seconds. “Does Swedenborg say how the engines are made?”
“I think they aren't machines that empower malakim—I think they are a new sort of creature, created from malakim. I'm not sure.”
“Think. Think what else you might do, if you had that sort of power. Wonder what might also be created, what the malakim might fear enough to make them hesitate.” “Nothing comes immediately to mind.” “Not to mine, either.” “But will you be willing to help me? In the laboratory? So that when the time does come, we will have countermeasures?” Euler smiled faintly. “Mr. Franklin, I thought you would never ask.”