Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [11]
In keeping with the scenario I wrote for them, the orthodox golems—the Singularists, led by Nonentity 741—believe in a unitary deity. The Quadripartists, under Nonentity 899, insist that I am of a piece with a pantheon that includes my mother, Helga, my daughter, Lotte, and my alter ego, Rabbi Judah Löew ben Bezalel. Both sides employ incineration as their principal method for punishing incorrect understandings of my unknowable essence. Once a heretic has been tried and convicted, he is chained to a stake, engulfed by mounds of kindling, and put to the torch. Of course, unlike most victims of religious persecution, Singularists and Quadripartists actually wish to be treated in this brutal fashion, for they imagine that the flames might prove hot enough to melt their shells: a physical impossibility, but desperate specters will not be reconciled to the laws of nature.
This same expectation of deliverance undergirds the theological wars that periodically ravage the Schwarzwald. The sight of a thousand golems falling upon one another with claymores, cudgels, and battle-axes is as exhilarating a spectacle as a deity could ever hope to witness. Needless to say, the carapaces always remain intact. Like the golems themselves, my bezalelite is essentially a supernatural phenomenon, impervious to the ambitions of the quick and the desires of the dead.
12 August 1879
Today I endured one of the most distressing events of my life. Shortly after Nonentity 316 and Nonentity 214 appeared at the breakfast table, the former serving my morning eggs and sausage, the latter bringing me my newspaper, Nonentity 667 strode into the dining hall, looming over me while I attempted to read an article detailing how the spiritualism fad has come to Vienna.
“You are blocking my light,” I told the golem.
“Rather the way you have occluded our enlightenment,” Nonentity 667 replied. “We have read your journal, Herr Doktor Nachtstein. You have deceived us. The procedure cannot be undone.”
“Nonsense. You have misinterpreted the entry in question. I now have in hand the knowledge by which you will transcend the alloy. Allow me two more experiments, three at the most, and I shall bless you all with oblivion.”
“Perhaps we shall exact our retribution tomorrow, perhaps the next day, perhaps a year from now. But know that our vengeance is coming.”
“You cannot frighten me,” I said, though in truth I was terrified. “For Singularists and Quadripartists alike, I am the only possible source of salvation.”
“Fiat justitia, ruat caelum,” Nonentity 667 said. “Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.”
HEAVY OF HEART, unquiet of mind, Jonathan paces Castle Kralkovnik’s highest point, the roof of Poelsig Tower. His path is an ellipse, its eastern focus marked by Countess Nachtstein, the western by Lotte, the center by a telescope pointing toward the clearing. He wishes he had not assented to Lotte’s insistence on running the resonator at six hundred amperes. Conceivably her directive sprang from some intuitive insight into her father’s intractable alloy, but more likely it bespoke only a mania to cleanse his legacy.
Pausing before the telescope, Jonathan presses his right orb to the eyepiece. He adjusts the tubes, making the image crisp. The golems stand in three concentric circles around the tuning fork, a tableau suggesting a tossed pebble raising rings in a pond. A palpable serenity has descended upon the creatures. They are patience personified. Having waited so many years for their freedom, they can endure whatever interval remains before the chronometer blade drops.
“One month after they stole my father’s journal and learned that the plating is seemingly permanent,” Lotte says, “a mob of golems, two dozen at least, appropriated every dagger, hatchet,