“Steam?” Edie murmurs.
“Hah!” Abel Jasmine says. “Thought you’d like that. It goes over a hundred miles an hour, and barely makes a sound. And of course, it burns whatever you shove in the furnace, so it doesn’t deplete our resources as badly as a petroleum engine would.”
“But it’s vulnerable,” Edie argues in spite of herself. “A shot to the pressure tank…” She trails off. This sort of interjection is the kind of thing which caused Miss Thomas to call her a lost child.
“Quite right, Miss Banister!” Abel Jasmine cries, delighted, “quite right, indeed, which is why the steam is contained in the very heart of the vehicle and the cylinder is most heavily shielded. But you have spotted our vulnerability, all the same. Well done. The Ada Lovelace is a compromise between stealth, strength, versatility, and security. It is perfect in no respect save that it functions excellently in all.”
Amanda Baines—the woman who has a ship of her own—looks at Edie as if to say “boys and their toys,” but Edie is smiling at the improbable thing, not for what it is, but for the world it promises. Having your own engine means no timetables, no delays. It implies that Abel Jasmine, indeed, can command delay, can re-arrange the structure of the nation’s rapid-transit system for his own convenience.
“It’s amazing,” she says, and Abel Jasmine allows that it’s not bad at all. Edie stops, considering. “It’s Ruskinite, isn’t it?”
He looks at her very sharply, then at Amanda Baines, who grins like a big dog around her pipe.
“Yes,” Abel Jasmine says. “It is. Mind you, it’s behind the curve now. Out of date by the time we finished it. That’s the pace of change… Well,” he adds to the driver, a dour moustachioed fellow in blue, “carry on, Mr. Crispin. Let’s be about it!”
The train is not less wondrous inside. Edie stares at rippling surfaces of wood and brass, trimmed with a rich azure and gold like a cathedral, and windows of resin-ish stuff which is like Bakelite, only tougher. She walks up an open spiral stair to the upper deck and peers out at the night as it hurtles by. For the first time in her life, she feels free. She presses her head against the not-glass and smiles a wide smile.
“Blue colour is everlastingly appointed by the deity to be a source of delight.”
She turns. A broad, grey-haired man in overalls stands at the far end of the carriage. Edie judges him to be nearly sixty, but very strong.
“The train,” he says. Edie scrutinises him for signs of condescension, finds none. As he turns, she sees a monk’s tonsure at the back of his head.
“It’s amazing,” she says.
“It’s called the Ada Lovelace. Do you know who she was?”
“Lord Byron’s daughter.”
“Much more. A genius. A visionary. We named this engine for her.”
“I’m sure she would have approved.”
“Perhaps. It’s enough that we remember her a little. I’m the Keeper,” he adds, and then, because Edie’s mouth must be open as she tries to think of a polite way of asking, “Of the Order of John the Maker.” When she doesn’t immediately nod, he adds, “The Ruskinites.”
It had not occurred to Edie until this moment that “Ruskinite” might be a noun. She ponders. The adjective, she has no problem with. A Ruskinite item is going to be crafted, considered, inspired. It will have respect for the human scale of things. It will strive to exemplify the divine in the everyday. It’s an admirable set of qualities for, say, a tea service, or even a giant secret locomotive.
A Ruskinite person, however, is something other, and she’s not entirely comfortable with it. A strange sort of Christian with strong feelings about the working man and the essence of the world.
The Keeper smiles.
“What?” Edie Banister demands.
“You’re trying to work out if I’m an engineer or a cultist,” he replies.
“I suppose I am.”
“Excellent, Miss Banister. Very good, indeed. Come. Let me show you the Lovelace. You can interrogate me on the way.” And to her amazement, he offers her his arm, like a baron to a duchess.
The Lovelace is eleven carriages long. There is accommodation, a kitchen, bathrooms, and two carriages of strange machinery in glass and metal which the Keeper will not explain, but which looks to Edie like a mixture of a franking machine, a music box, and an abacus. She deduces it has to do with numbers and therefore with logistics, and possibly also with ciphering.
There is a radio set, an engineering room, and a pair of administrative offices, a private stateroom occupied by Abel Jasmine himself, and a doorway leading to the engine beyond. From the cowcatcher at the front (first designed by a friend of the original Lovelace herself, a man named Babbage, remade by the Ruskinites and manufactured to specification by a foundry in Padua) to the scrolled ironwork at the back of the last carriage, there is not one inch of it which is not made and maintained by hand.
“This train is our blood,” the Keeper says. “It is the product of our work. We know every part of it. The designs were perfect, but the materials are not. They cannot be. So we compensated. Does it look sheer? Does it look absolutely true? It’s not. Here we shaved an eighth. There we padded. The rivets are not exactly the same. They are positioned to avoid splitting the wood. They are loosened here and there to allow for expansion. The machine doesn’t know when it is vulnerable. The mechanical drill has no idea when it is destroying the substance it cuts. But we know. We feel and hear. We touch. Touch is a truer sense than sight.”
“And all this… it makes your machines better?”
The Keeper shrugs. “It makes us better,” he says. “Or at least, it means we do not become casual about effort and art. We appreciate the weakness of the world and come to understand the glories and stresses of our selves. But yes. The product is better, by perhaps a single percentage point, than it would be if it were made by machines to perfect tolerances. It doesn’t matter until you stress it. Stress this train, and it will hold. It will hold beyond what the specifications say; beyond what any of us believes. It will hold beyond reason, beyond expectation, beyond hope. Derail it, drive it across sand, twist and heat it. It will do what it can for you. It will hold as if it was alive, and filled with love. And when it fails, it will fail hugely, heroically, and take your enemies with it. Because it has been made that way. But we trust it will not need to, in this case. The Lovelace is not a ship of the line.”
“Cuparah is.”
The Keeper smiles. “Cuparah will hold, too.”
Which is reassuring, but does not tell her any more about Amanda Baines’s vessel. Drat.
Edie Banister, six months later, in sensible shoes and modest underwear—although not entirely modest, because she has long legs and just a hint of womanliness about her now—sweats and toils amid strange machines. Ada Lovelace is narrow and sways with a strange, eerie motion, as if she were dangling off the edge of a precipice. For the first few weeks, this made Edie extremely nauseous, but now she hardly notices, except when something sticks briefly in its gimbal and falls out of sync with the rest of the room. The sound of metal against metal rings beneath her feet, and then is replaced by a sudden whooshing of waves and wind. Edie feels, around her ankles, a blessed gust of cool air. The machine room sheds a great deal of heat when it goes over a bridge.