She remembered the automaton dancer—a tiny doll, less than two feet tall, which had leapt and pirouetted most realistically when its key was wound. It had been her favorite of all her father’s automata, and very dear to him as well.
Until one day she had, in a foolish excess of enthusiasm, turned the key one too many times. The mainspring had snapped with a hideous metallic twang, leaving the dancer frozen in mid-leap.
She had been in the dunes behind the drying-sheds, desperately shoveling sand over the broken device, when Khema had found her. “What is this, tutukha?” she’d said.
“It’s my father’s automaton dancer,” Arabella had replied, her voice quavering. “It … it broke, and I thought that if I took it away and buried it he wouldn’t notice it was gone.”
Khema’s eye-stalks had curved back in skepticism. “It broke, did it? And I am sure that you had nothing to do with this?”
Exhausted and still all a-flutter from her frantic rush to conceal the damaged automaton, Arabella had been able to do nothing more than shake her head.
Khema had bent down to Arabella’s level, her black and subtly faceted eyes fixed on Arabella’s. “We Martians have a concept we call okhaya,” she had said. “In English you would say ‘personal responsibility,’ though that does not quite convey how very important okhaya is to us. We believe very strongly that if one does something wrong, one should immediately admit it and make amends. To conceal a bad action, or even worse to lie about it, brings very great dishonor.” She had sat back on her heels then, the sand crunching beneath the complex carapace of her knees. Silently waiting.
Arabella had withstood that calm, expectant gaze for no more than a few seconds before bursting into tears and admitting her crime.
The automaton had not been repairable, and she had had no desserts for a month. But, though he was terribly cross at the damage, her father had said he was proud of her for her confession.
Suddenly the coach halted and the door was flung open, making her blink in the unaccustomed light. “London!” cried the driver. “All out!”
*
Arabella stumbled out into a vast confusion. Horses, men, and ladies milled all about in a riot of gaudy colors, the noise of hoofbeats and shouted conversations adding to her bewilderment. Buildings of brick and stone towered three and four stories on every side. A terrific smell of soot and dust and offal assaulted her nostrils.
“Get out there, you!” someone shouted. She turned to see a coach-and-four thundering down upon her, and threw herself from its path only to collide with a woman in a fashionable green dress. “Take a care, you guttersnipe!” she cried, and shoved Arabella rudely away.
Heart pounding, Arabella scrambled to the nearest wall and pressed herself against it, trying her best not to be trampled.
It was the most people she had ever seen in one place in her entire life. The whole population of Shktetha Station, a small town north of Woodthrush Woods, could have fit into this one street without crowding, but this mob of people filled the street and the next one and the one after that … on and on to the limits of the vast metropolis.
The very thought made her giddy.
This was not the first time she had been in London, of course; she had passed through the city when she had arrived on Earth last year. But on that occasion, weak and debilitated after a four-month aerial journey, she and her mother and sisters had been carried from the ship directly into a private carriage and conveyed immediately to Marlowe Hall. Too enervated to even raise her head, her impression of London had been little more than a blur.
And now she found herself in the thick of it. Lost, bewildered, friendless, nearly penniless, dressed as a boy in a suit of stolen clothes, she had to find her cousin Simon somewhere in this enormous crowd and stop him before he could take passage to Mars.
*
The coach had deposited her in front of an inn called The Navigator, whose sign showed a man seated at a writing-desk with a map spread out upon it. If the mail-coach from Oxford always arrived here, Simon might have spent the night here. He might even still be here, awaiting passage to Mars.
Arabella drew herself straight, pulled up her breeches, and took a deep breath before entering. Then she paused and adjusted her padding, which had slipped down to her knee. This business of being a boy was not easy.
The inn was as bustling with people within as the street had been without. Raucous conversation babbled at every table, adding up to a terrible din. Looking around, she identified a lean and unfriendly-looking fellow stacking dishes behind the bar as the likely proprietor.
“If you’re looking for a room,” the barman said as she drew near, “we’re full up.”