Shapechanger's Birth Read online

  The stem of the match was very long. Before Mary had to shake it out she got all the lamps alight and moved into the back room and lit the gas burner in the little alcove that served as the laundry's kitchen. She filled the tea kettle, put it over the burner, and set out cups and the tins of tea and sugar. She took out the cream jar, uncapped it, and sniffed inside.

  It was still unsoured, long past its normal time. Good.

  Mary had recently figured out a way to prevent milk from souring. The magical sense of see/taste/feel that accompanied her invisible extranatural hands had long told her that all air and water and earth were filled with invisible microlife. During her first year at the Kilrush orphanage she had come to understand that this microlife was what caused infections, bad colds and flu, made yeast rise, and soured wine and milk. She suspected that it caused cholera and ruined potatoes so badly that Ireland suffered periodic famines.

  Mary could kill this microlife when she wished her magic hands to do so, with a very tiny burst of heat. But she was perhaps the only person alive who could do this, and she had been experimenting with ways so that anyone could kill microlife. Now she had found a way and she was sure she could make money off the process. Or processes; there were other ways once you understood about microlife.

  The doorbell jingled and the woman they had hired to supervise the laundry bustled into the front door. A big rawboned woman with grey hair up in a bun, widow Eliza Dunworth was very good at her managing job though a tad too intimidating to the other women working under her.

  "Good morning, Mistress McCarthy! Bless you!" She eagerly took up the task of making tea. After giving Bridget and Mary a cup of tea, seasoned the way they liked it, she fixed herself a cup. She took a sip of the hot drink, warmed her hands around the cup for a minute or so, and took it with her to continue getting the laundry ready for another day.

  Soon the bell was ringing again as the other women who worked for Bridget and Mary showed up and the day was well begun. And one man, late as usual, apologizing as usual, a big, seemingly clumsy boy-man with surprising deft hands, a nephew of Mrs. Dunworth.

  It was untraditional for a man to do laundry. However, there were some tasks for which a man's greater upper-body strength was well suited, and Mary was a great believer in efficiency. It was the modern way, one which she had appreciated more after hearing a lecture on manufacturing and commerce from Sir Robert Kane, the president of the Queen's College Cork on the western edge of Cork City.

  It had been at a meeting of the Cuvierian Society. Mary had attended because she was a business owner (or one-quarter owner, anyway). The lecture had excited her and given her many ideas.

  Soon the customers were arriving and Bridget and Mary became very busy at the front counter. These customers were mostly servants or flunkies of gentlemen, though it was not unusual for the great men to come in themselves. Mary knew that this was because she and Bridget were beautiful, but she had no shame about using one of the few advantages women had in a world run by men.

  The morning rush died down and Mary and Bridget took turns from the counter to help out with the laundering. There was another rush of customers at noon and Mary detailed one of the laundresses to take her place. Mary was more blatantly sexy than the queenly Bridget and noon was when women customers began to show up. In midafternoon when the cream of the quality showed up Mary rarely set foot up front.

  Part of this was diplomacy, partly because she usually had the afternoon off to pursue her education, which she needed to do if she ever decided to become a governess and tutor to children of the quality. She normally returned to work in the evening but today she worked a full day at the laundry. Tonight she was going to attend the Thursday night weekly session of the Cork Scientific and Literary Society.

  Business was going very well now that the first lean startup months were over. They had seven people working for them, so her schedule lately had become much more flexible.

  The laundry closed at 7:00 but began to shut down at 5:00 when Bridget left to get home before dark. That was when Mary had decreed that dinner would begin. Only one of the employees left before then; the rest stayed to share an evening meal, encouraged by Bridget because of compassion and by Mary for efficiency reasons.

  For some of these people this was the only substantial meal they ate and Mary encouraged them to eat all they wanted. She encouraged partly with words and partly by example. She ate more even than Mrs. Dunworth's nephew Maurice (who understandably preferred to be known as Morry). Her extrahuman strength and health made correspondingly extra demands on her diet.

  Bridget had accidentally begun the informal employee-feeding program out of sympathy for one of the laundresses. Mary had gotten behind the idea after a lecture on efficiency by Sir Robert. He had emphasized that employees were as big a resource as machines and capital, and that it was shortsighted to endanger their health from overwork and dangerous work conditions.

  Though his rhetoric was pitched toward the presumably uncompassionate prejudices of the rich.

  "You fatten your cattle for the market. It is only sensible that you fatten your workers for your service. Tend to your workers and they will tend to your machines! "

  Caring for their workers' welfare seemed to work. Not one of Bridget's and Mary's employees ever missed a day, and not just because missing work cut into their wages. Partly this was because Mary had given them extraordinary health, and partly from loyalty to Bridget and Mary. If anything Mary found them embarrassingly loyal and sometimes she had to shoo them out of the laundry.

  At 7:00, alone in the shop, Mary opened the closet where she had stored overnight a bright blue dress. For a moment she stood looking at and fingering the cloth.

  She had bought it just the day before in a shop on South Mall just two blocks south. It was silk taffeta with a subtle ribbing that made the blue cloth shimmer when its wearer moved or the light changed around it. This was the first time in her life that she had ever been able to afford something so fashionable and expensive.

  She sniffed at the dress to see if it had absorbed the delicate odor from the sachet she had hung in the closet to take off the new-cloth smell. Satisfied, she freshened up and donned her new dress, then strode briskly down Patrick Street toward Corn Market Street where a biweekly meeting would be held in Gillman's Civic Library.

  It was a little past sundown. The day's light lingered and combined with the gas streetlights to give the artificial canyons of the city a glow that seemed suspended in the air itself.

  The speed of her walk plus a mild breeze made her curly red hair stream back behind her in a bouncing fiery mane. It was an immodest display, but lately she had let herself to want men to notice her.

  She had been gradually altering her face, coaxing her eyelashes to grow and darken and her eyelids to change shape so that her eyes seemed bigger. She had been migrating fat into her lips, changing their shape, and reddening them so that they were lusciously kissable. Her tall, slender body had needed no extranatural attention to form the curves appropriate to her physical age of seventeen years. She had no doubt that every man she passed was conscious of her.

  Her heels clicking on the stone of the street, Mary enjoyed the attention and the certainty that some time in the not-too-distant future she would acquire a lover. When she had died the first time three years ago her body had been 53 and she had been long past both sexual desire and a way to satisfy it .

  But there was more than just the pleasure of being desired, and the satisfaction of her own desires, to the changes she was making in herself. Cork City and its surroundings contained almost 100,000 people, a veritable ocean of humanity, and she was determined to shine in the public eye. Not because she cared for fame, but because it was a way to move herself onto the stages of the influential. From there she was determined to begin influencing rather than merely being influenced. She had been given a second chance at life and she was not going to waste it.

  Though, actually, now that she though
t of it, it was really a third chance. She had died a second time ten months before.

  As she turned the last corner she saw the library ahead on the right, the only red-fronted building of the row of four-story office buildings built so shoulder-to-shoulder that they appeared one long building stretching the length of the block.

  Besides a smattering of pedestrians there were a few wagons with two big sturdy wheels under a flat bed. These shared the street with other two-wheeled wagons more daintily built and roofed over: hansom cabs. There was also one four-wheeled Royal Post stagecoach moving briskly.

  A bright yellow-white light visible through the open door illumined the inside of the library and streamed out and down the short flight of steps. People were entering the library in ones and threes, past the large, exquisitely calligraphed sign.

  SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY SOCIETY

  Some Evidence for a Theory of Vision

  Mary imprisoned her hair in a modest blue cap and entered the door, eyes cast down, and hung back from the other people — not because she was shy but because she wanted to be thought shy and un-forward. The forces behind learned societies like this one were older upper-class women. To them she wanted to excite maternal feelings rather than jealousy.

  "Mistress McCarthy! So good to see you again." This came from a lean lady of middle age who sat at the table just inside the entrance collecting signatures and handing out the one-page folded programs.

  "Lady Granville! Thank you. Oh, what a beautiful fabric. And cut so well."

  Lady Grantville knew she was a laundress, so Mary's next words were only to be expected.

  "It's an English twill wool, isn't it? That satin gabardine. I so admire the texture, so delicate, and that silver sheen. It's a lightweight, isn't it? Does it keep you warm enough?"

  "Warm as warm can be, without being too much." She handed Mary a program. "I hope you enjoy the lecture."

  Mary went into the room and pretended to pretend to study the paintings on the walls to keep from pushing herself on people. She was greeted graciously by several women and one very tall but stooped man of about seventy, all habitués of the Society.

  Three young men near the front of the meeting hall stood out. They were all dressed nicely and expensively but discreetly so, with dress coats, black string or foulard bow ties, and vests with gold or silver chains across their middles. Two had black top hats and their suits were a matching black. One wore a creamy white bowler and his suit was cream-colored. Their mustaches were all small, which itself spoke of gentry. Only quality could afford to shave cleanly and neatly every day.

  They spoke to no one but each other and she guessed that they — or one of them — were the speakers. To her increasingly man-hungry eyes they were quite handsome.

  It was some little time later when Lady Granville called the meeting to order and presided over some bits of S&L Society business. Then she introduced one of the young men as Dr. William Penrose. He was the one in the cream-colored outfit.

  The young man stood up from the front row and placed his hat on the seat behind him. He thanked the audience and made a small joke, not expecting or getting more than a mild laugh. He seemed quite self-assured.

  He was also well prepared, placing several large white cards, perhaps a foot wide and a foot-and-a-half high, on a wooden easel beside the speaker's podium. There was large text on the front, a few short phrases.

  "Now it would be a pity if in a lecture on vision not everyone could see my cards. So everyone move a little closer and, if you have a problem still, please come to the front and we will make a place for you."

  There was a little good-natured laughter and the two- or three-dozen people shuffled themselves around, filling the front row of seats almost full. Mary stayed in her place in the back. She had perfect eyesight and could change her eyes into binoculars to bring his cards closer.

  "Recently," Dr. Penrose said, "there has been advancement in our understanding of vision, brought about with much assistance from the German Hermann von Helmholtz. He is a physicist and surgeon and the inventor of the ophthalmoscope."

  He turned to a diagram of that device on the first card on the easel. Pointing, he described briefly how it shined a light into a lens into a patient's eye so that a doctor could look inside and see a magnified view of the interior of the eye. He spoke well, just as Mary did when she was reading a story to children, speaking sometimes louder or softer, slower or faster, pausing occasionally. There was nothing monotonous about him, nothing to put an audience to sleep.

  She watched his technique as he continued, recognizing some of her own. In an odd way it was like watching herself.

  Part of it, she concluded, was his body language. He strode about the podium, not in a nervous way, but as if unable to contain his excitement about what he said. Occasionally he would point dramatically, or stop and look at the audience.

  He was like an actor on a stage yet also unlike, never over-dramatic or self-important. In fact, he occasionally made little self-deprecating jokes.

  Mary liked that. It was a sign of strength to be able to laugh at oneself. Strength. And he had brains. Oh, my. Two qualities that made her wet between her legs. And they had. And she had this sudden image of him below her, of straddling his body with his manhood deep inside her.

  Laughing silently at herself, she switched off her sexual response to him and focused her esoteric power on the wetness, evaporating it, leaving her thighs and dress dry. She, an old woman of 56, panting after a man like a virgin!

  Though, come to think of it, she was a virgin again. Three years ago her body had not only cured itself of death and old age but also returned her maidenhead to her.

  Dr. Penrose had spoken briefly of where vision began: the light with which the sun or fire flooded the world. Then he removed the first card on the easel to the back of the stack of cards. The new one revealed a drawing of a flattened oval which Mary instantly recognized as a diagram of an eye viewed from the side.

  "Here is the marvelous camera that God perfected long before man ever conceived its poor imitation. Its working is familiar to many of you here. Lady Granville, for instance, is so proficient with a camera that she has been asked more than once to loan her pictures to public exhibits."

  How interesting. The Countess had never mentioned that in her several — brief — conversations with Mary or which Mary had overheard. She thought it revealed a woman with a self-assurance that required no bragging to bolster. And more accomplishments than merely being born into quality.

  Or maybe she just didn't consider Mary important enough to impress!

  The doctor pointed out the lens in the eye that focused light, and the muscles attached to the eyeball and the lens. These he said pulled or relaxed to focus the lens on different parts of the world.

  As he spoke Mary focused her extrahuman senses inside herself, as she had many times before, on one of her own eyes.

  Once she would have had to close her physical eyes to view what her magical eye/tongue/fingers perceived. She was long past that now, swapping instantly between one perception of the world to the other without effort.

  She noticed something that he did not mention. Nor did the diagram show it — the nerves that connected the lens muscles to the rest of a body. Simple logic should have told him that they had to be there, to control the flexing of the lens muscles.

  At this point Penrose switched to the back of the eye.

  "Here is where the natural photo-emulsion resides. It is a very thin film of skin that contains the cells that are sensitive to light. These cells are like the grains of silver chloride in a photograph that become darker or lighter when light strikes it. These grains are then exposed to a chemical developer in a photographer's darkroom, making the image stronger and making it permanent. "

  Here he reminded the audience of what modern biologists had discovered, that all life is made up of living "cells," even those hard parts of the body, bones.

  "These vision cells are
marvelous inventions of God, much tinier than the grains of photographic emulsion. They are so small that there are about 25 thousand of them inside a circle the size of a pence."

  He held up one such coin over his head, roughly a half-inch in diameter, and paused to let them take in what he had said.

  "Imagine this coin curved to fit the back of your eye and reduced to a thin film."

  Mary focused her magical sight on the back of one of her eyes and expanded the view so that it was if she was looking through an extranatural microscope. Just out of the grave she had been able to view grains of dirt as if they were fist-sized stones. After three years of experiment and use she could now view individual cells as if they were that size.

  The only problem was, though she could see these vision cells clearly in her magic sight, she had nothing to compare them with. There was no way to tell exactly what their size was.

  She chewed her lip for a few seconds, till a way suggested itself. She pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper from the little purse she carried as a substitute for a reticule, and made a miniscule little checkerboard pattern on it.

  Done, she folded it into a little tent shape and placed it on the floor in front of her chair — being the last in the row meant no one could see her being inattentive to the speaker. The tent shape let her look at the checkerboard pattern almost flat on, and she'd guessed its distance properly. The dots on the paper blurred together.

  Hmm. She did an instant calculation based on the size of the dots and the distance of the paper.... Yes. That meant the back of the eye held 100 thousand to 150 thousand vision cells.

  If the cells were, pretty much, evenly distributed.

  While she had been thinking about this Doctor Penrose had put up another diagram and was talking about color.

  "As early as 1802 physician Thomas Young proposed that there were three kinds of vision cells. One that saw only red light, one that saw green, and one blue. Helmholtz shares that idea."