Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [8]
“But Dr. Hobbwright is our first vibratologist,” the Countess reminds Lotte, then turns to Jonathan and says, “My granddaughter and I believe that the right sort of specialist has finally come to Castle Kralkovnik.”
“Speak for yourself, Mother,” Lotte says. “You were convinced that Dr. Pollifax’s silver bullets would free the golems, likewise Dr. Edelman’s caustic butter, not to mention your misplaced faith in Dr. Callistratus, who wasted six days attempting to deplate the cat.”
Jonathan helps himself to a second glass of burgundy. “Might I presume to ask how Baron Nachtstein met his end?”
“Violently,” Lotte says.
“His creatures assassinated him,” the Countess says with equal candor. “The details are unpleasant.”
“My father died even more horribly than my mother, who suffered a fatal hemorrhage giving birth to me,” Lotte says. “Just as the Baroness Nachtstein’s fertility destroyed her, so did Baron Nachtstein’s brilliance occasion his downfall.”
“Your father was extraordinarily gifted, but his journal also reveals a man obsessed,” Jonathan says.
Lotte sips her rhenish and glowers at the vibratologist. “It’s the golems who are obsessed, incapable of seeing beyond their idée fixe about damnation. I ask you, Dr. Hobbwright, does not the fact that they declined to plate my father argue for the fundamental benevolence of the procedure? If their condition is as intolerable as they maintain, they would have logically inflicted it on their creator instead of simply murdering him.”
“In that case, perhaps I should return to Oxford,” Jonathan says, sensing that in defending the Baron so vociferously, Lotte has overstepped the bounds of her actual beliefs. “Given that your father’s creatures are such incurable dissemblers, I see no point in helping them.”
“No, please—you must stay,” Lotte insists. “Perhaps my father was mistaken. If the golems say their situation is unendurable, it behooves us to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
13 January 1869
Nonentity 157 and his bezalelite brethren are adamant on one point. They insist that a wandering soul’s burning need is to venture forth from its cadaverous habitat and dissipate, occasionally favoring its survivors with a benevolent gesture en passant. By tampering with this process, I have plunged the golems into an irreparable despair. Indeed, I have dispatched them to hell.
My instincts tell me to ignore these complaints. Creatures in such a metaphysically unprecedented state are wont to indulge in hyperbole. Like the vast majority of sentient beings, my golems are unreliable narrators of their own lives.
As it happens, their illusion of damnation is useful to my purposes. By promising to return them to the electrolyte bath any day now, subsequently reversing the plating process and dissolving their husks, I retain a remarkable measure of control over their minds. I cannot speak for the whole of creation, but here in the Schwarzwald law and order enjoy a proper degree of hegemony over anarchy and chaos.
Judging from my latest series of animal experiments, I would have to say that, alas, bezalelite plating can occur in one direction only. I would do well to sequester that unhappy fact in the pages of this journal. Were the golems to comprehend the immutability of their situation, they would suffer unnecessary distress.
To date I have brought forth one hundred and thirteen electroplated souls, most of them terminal consumptives and cancer patients from Freiburg, Pforzheim, Reutlingen, and Stuttgart. With each such parturition I come closer to perfecting my methods. To help maintain a constant ion level, I have learned to add potassium cyanide to the bath, along with salts of the bezalelite itself. Conductivity can be further enhanced with carbonates and phosphates. As it happens, if the golem-maker first deposits a layer of pure silver on the subject’s epidermis, no more than one-tenth of a micrometer thick, total adhesion of the alloy to the protein substrate is virtually guaranteed. Finally, if the experimenter wishes