The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(55)

September twisted her cold hands. “Will things work themselves out?” The Watchful Dress was valiantly trying to dry itself, but having little success. Parts of it inflated and deflated as it shook off the Forgetful Sea.

“They usually do. If you take the long view, as I do. Formally, I’m a Queer Physickist, but I dabble in Questing, too, hence my Barometer. We Queerfolk are big-picture types. You have to be, to see how the Queerness of the World works itself through everything. Queer Physickists are so terribly Queer that most people don’t even like to have us for tea. We might wear the tea on our heads to prove our theory on the Gravitationals of Guest Magic. We might be practicing Being a Broom or on a Visibility Fast. So many just shun us altogether. You have to be able to see the world as a whole to bear it—to see the Queerness that moves in every bit of Fairyland, how it threads through every heart and field, how we are all bound together up in the Weird Well of the World. Can’t get too upset about folk being wicked. The Queer old world does so love to turn itself on its head on the regular. Anyway, Fairyland has a kind of weight to it. It tends to settle back into its own ways. Oh, we’ll have a wicked Thorn-King for a century or nine, but in the end, where there’s a Thorn-King, there’s a Rose-Maid to throttle him silly. It might take her a while to get here, but like I said, you have to take a long view.”

“That’s not much comfort to people who have to live their whole lives with a Thorn-King being wretched to them!”

“Isn’t it? I think it’s comforting. I thought about it a great deal when the Marquess was making her mess. I had a good place to watch it all happen, up in Groangyre Tower. I could see her warping the weft of the world. And I certainly didn’t appreciate her telling me to stop my Electricks program or to fire Miss Lovewool just because her Reign Gauge said the old tyrant wouldn’t last. Well, I know what loyalty is, thank you very much. And at night I comforted myself by lathing out a Calendar Centrifuge—to whirl out the present, dark day and leave behind only the distant tomorrow when I would be able to breathe again. It was comforting. Of course, Fairies can afford to look at things that way. We live so long.”

“But … Miss Cabbage, do you really? I know something’s happened to the Fairies up above. There are rather few of you left. Do you really live so long? If it’s something the Marquess did, shouldn’t it be all mended by now?”

“You know,” said the Mad Scientist, “many years passed between Queen Mallow and the Marquess. She was hardly the only person capable of making dreadful things happen. I am working on the problem. I and all of us in Groangyre and Shearcoil both. You needn’t worry about it. What I mean to say in plain Professorial terms is mind your own business, begging your pardon. I know humans have sensitive manners.”

September minded her business. She didn’t know quite what else to say, however. An awkward silence fell between them like a curtain.

“Would you like to see what I’m working on now?” Cabbage said hopefully.

“Certainly!” said September gratefully.

The Fairy rummaged behind her Dread Device, leaning over it to get something on the far side of her worktable, kicking her legs up into the air as she reached. She came back with a most peculiar object which she pointed alarmingly at September, a strange sort of gun made of brass and silver and mother-of-pearl. It had a big barrel, as big as a grown man’s fist, and a long pneumatic tube hanging from it, attached to nothing in particular.

“Oh, don’t worry!” Cabbage laughed, seeing September’s understandable concern at having a gun pointed at her. She had not even known Fairyland had guns, and she would really rather it didn’t! “I haven’t invented bullets for it yet.”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s a Rivet Gun, obviously.”

“What is it meant to rivet?”

Belinda Cabbage looked at the Rivet Gun curiously, peering down its monster of a barrel. “That’s not how Science works, love. First, you build the machine, then it tells you what it’s for. A machine is only a kind of magnet for attracting Use. That’s why we say things are Useful—because they’re all full of the Use that chose them to perform itself. Understand?”

September didn’t.

“Well, take the Dread Device. Do you think I had the first idea what a squidhole was when I invented it? Certainly not! I was just messing about! That’s when the very best and very Maddest Science gets done, you know. I thought, Why, this alabaster octopus looks like it wants a nice transmission inside it, and fairly soon I had a thing that obviously had a Use, though what that Use could be was a total mystery. I set it out to cool on the windowsill of Groangyre and what do you know, within a year or two it had punched six holes in the damask of space-time (that’s what it’s made out of, if you didn’t know it, and of course, I’m sure you did) and I had a lovely vacation in Broceliande! Take my Sameness Engine over there.” She pointed to the other end of the room, where a huge silver-green machine squatted. It looked like a printing press had grown claws and teeth. “I haven’t the first notion of what it’s for! That’s not why I made it—I made it for the sheer joy of making something new! It’s getting up to telling me what it wants to do, though, I can just feel it. It’s been giggling a lot at night. I expect sooner or later the Rivet Gun will tell me what it’s good for, and until then I have patience. Patience is always the last ingredient in any spell, the last part in any machine, whatever your original blueprints say.”