But ’tis nothing compared to what happens when the door of the chamber opes. ’Twould take me half a lifetime to describe to you the wonders and the horrors of the future world. The garderobe, what they call the ODEC, is housed within a large chamber—a strange room with mechanical monstrosities and a dreadful buzz in the air as if lightning were always just about to strike, a sound they are all indifferent to, much as I became indifferent to the odors of Southwark. And this chamber in turn is inside a vast building, which is on a street full of vast buildings, in a city of streets with vast buildings. Larger than cathedrals some of them, but without ornament or even shape. Like building blocks for giants, so they are. No imagination or love of beauty at all.
Everything functions without human or magical assistance, but I confess most breathlessly that whatever power keeps humanity and its many mechanical servants humming . . . it is far more dazzling than any magic I have ever seen performed.
And I tell you straight out: suspicious this makes me, for what is the cause to bring magic back when it has been replaced by something clearly more serviceable? So the first riddle I put my mind to was this: in a world where carriages travel without beasts to pull them, and food is effortlessly abundant, and there is ample light to sunder any darkness, from all manner of peculiar torches, none of them given to burning down a place even if it is all wood, and where all and sundry wear grander clothes than most anyone in London and an astonishing variety what’s more . . . something there must be, some commodity or advantage, that magic can attain but mankind cannot yet. Nothing material can it be, for no magic I ever knew summoned such luxuries for royalty as everyday folk here take as commonplace.
The environs are not the point of my tale so I shall omit most of the gobsmacking details, but please know I will happily discourse upon it if you’re requesting it of me, Your Grace. To the Kingdom of Heaven I know you are bound soon, but it might not contain half the wonders of yon twenty-first century.
So to get to the telling at last:
Greeted I was by the lady-in-waiting of the ODEC—the first woman ever I met of that time, in that time, and wasn’t she strangely dressed! With teeth every bit as fine as Tristan’s. When I gave her courtesy, why, she was astonished, for isn’t my name one of glorious renown in the future? It is, sure. She proffered me a thick white cotton shift with a belt sewn into it, from a pile of them beside the door, and then a set of absurdly short stockings from another pile (socks, she called them), instructed me to don it all, and asked me to wait—as if I’d anywhere to go now that I’d arrived. Then she spoke directly to her desk, so she did, asking it to send her Lieutenant Colonel Lyons on account of Gráinne had arrived from London.
Within moments there he was, my handsome fella, looking at me through a wall made of the most perfect glass that can be imagined—so smooth and flawless as to be invisible. He looked ever so bizarre in the weeds he must wear in that future time, monotone and snug but shapeless, not glorifying his marvelous shape and yet neither hiding it for modesty as priests are wont to do. ’Twas incredibly dull he looked. After giving me a look up and down, he nodded as if to say “Sure that be Gráinne” and then went to a door in the glass wall, out of my view.
Meanwhile I was hustled away by another young man with gorgeous teeth, who smelled like something I might like to lick (but refrained), escorting me out of the room of the ODEC, he did, under horrible illumination that buzzed fiendishly and made everyone look dead, along a corridor covered in some kind of short, stubby pelt, very firmly set upon the boards, and then into a room tiled with a marvelous substance such as my stockinged feet had never felt before—it both gave way and yet slightly gripped the stocking. This room was blindingly bright and cold, everything made of metal like an armory, but even brighter somehow, as if everything were the color of a new sword—whole walls like silver. Most peculiar it was. At this point, Your Grace, I wouldn’t be lying to say that I was that fatigued and weak, as if all my humors were being slowly drained from me. It occurred to me that a good slumber would be most agreeable. As if he were reading my thoughts, the young man led me to a peculiar piece of furniture, something between a couch and a throne, a sort of upright divan I suppose it was. ’Twas soft and padded and strewn about with blankets and in other ways most inviting for one about to swoon.
But then Tristan came into the room, and that brought me back to my senses.
“God ye good morrow,” myself said gaily. “There’s no need to be looking so surprised, Tristan, sure Rose is attending to my duties in Southwark, and I’d a mind to see for myself the Great Work I am helping build with my journeyman’s efforts. I know you were wanting me to come, so I thought I’d better leg it to you quick as I could.”
“You’re two weeks early,” he said.
“’Twas a change of scene I was wanting, all them natural philosophers were growing dull enough to dry snot. Isn’t it right glad you are to see me, so? Sorry my togemans are so homely, they’re all your maid had to offer me. ’Tisn’t even my knees these stockings reach to, I never knew how tawdry your costume was in this era.”
“Listen to me,” Tristan said in the stoic soldierly way of his, which was grand with me as the whole point of coming here was to hear what he had to say. Besides which, I was growing weaker almost every minute. “There are things in the air here that can kill you just from what you breathe or touch. There is an entire protocol you must go through,” and then he went about using lots of words what sounded Latin and of many syllables, and I wasn’t especially interested in them as I was suddenly fain to sit in the divan. Happily ’twas exactly there he placed me, and talking without pause he was, saying he would have to talk to his superiors while I was going through the ordeal he was about to put me through.
A woman dressed all in white appeared in this room, like a religious acolyte of some pagan creed, and didn’t she and the young man begin to work with some alarming mechanical objects, the which seemed to be alive all on their own, with mysterious eyes and lights and noises and movements, full of hoses and tubes they were, transparent like fine glass but bendable like straw, most confounding. And they were bringing these monsters close to me, and I saw all manner of needles at the ends of the tubes. The woman was introduced to me as a physician (truly! A woman physician!) and the young man as her “nurse,” and they explained in a most unmusical and peculiar kind of English that they had to pump me full of medicine to prevent the invisible airborne humours from imbalancing my own. They had nothing practical there, no leeches or poultices or charms or herbs, nothing but these strange mechanical curiosities. The fellow explained they had to stick needles into my arm to fill me with the medicine—in the form of potion it was—and sure it was the closest I have ever come to panicking. Only Tristan’s familiar presence kept me from something near hysteria, and Your Grace knows I am not easily unnerved.