A Lease on Wonderland

The Price for Steam

Maybe it was the noxious and sight-blurring steam that caused Matthias to feel as though he was in the presence of an angel or at least a fairy. He almost bowed to the form, but he was too stiff to bend a knee without falling flat on his face. Though, falling on one's face might be a more humbling form of homage than kneeling, Matthias Haddler was first and foremost a gentleman and could not bring himself to fall without first tripping.

What he could say about the young lady was this. However blue her eyes were beyond the color of blue, however golden her hair was in perfect goldilocked-curls, no matter how smooth the petals of her daffodil dress with the violet stripes along the trim, and no matter how her feet were so hidden in the steam that she looked like she was levitating on some plane out of chronology and special legroom, she looked more real than anything to observe in this otherwise story-wise Observastory— including himself which was enough to ponder about.

She looked hyper-real. What he could not figure out was whether she was too real to be true in the sense of her being a person or whether she was too real to be true in the sense of being made from clockwork. No matter how sharply she turned her head or how mechanically stiff she walked, she seemed smoother than animal mechanics and far smoother than a windup machine. She was most of all like a fading dream only sharpened because the dreamer was still unconscious. She was too alive to be a ghost, and he was not certain he believed in those. Did he believe in his own eyes, was the question.

By the look in her eyes, she seemed to be contemplating the same things about him like a mirror of his own reflection in expression while in every other feature opposite. Perhaps she was copying him. That might make sense if she had a clockwork brain and was trying to learn how to think like one with a meat brain. For all the times he thought what good it would do the world for a brain made of clockwork, he realized that in reality unless the brain was very, very large, a clockwork brain would be limited in thought, and perhaps the contraption before him could not even comprehend what it was looking at since it had never seen Haddler before or at least had never seen a puckered brow. For all Haddler knew, perhaps it had never even seen a hat before.

"But does she sound like a real girl?" asked O'Hair suddenly waking Haddler to his senses, and his eyes bulged as he turned to his companion back in the steamy, grinding, clicking, ticking, swelteringly hot room.

Mouse was sound asleep flat on his back, but no one bothered about him. Haddler shrugged to take note in him at all.

"Shouldn't we be asking the one with the longest ears?" teased Haddler with a sneer back to his old schoolboy chum.

"I hear nothing out of the ordinary," retorted O'Hair, but Pom gave him a stethoscope as she turned the living doll around.

O'Hair nodded promptly and bounded over on his strong long legs. Putting the ear tips into his ears and the diaphragm to the girl's back, he paused in surprise to find that the bell-side did actually ring a little, but then after the ring of the medical tool, he lowered his eyelids as he listened.

At first he looked intently but within seconds he was drawing in a yawn— which he found easy to reel in through such a drowsy steam. The steam was so consuming that as he exhaled, some steam went through his nose and ears as much as through his mouth.

"Well, doesn't it sound like clockwork?" demanded Pom.

"Of course, it does," said O'Hair. "That's what's disappointing about it."

"You mean that you expected her to be a real woman?" asked Haddler.

"No, I expected her to sound like a real woman," said O'Hair. "It's all cosmetics, then. Nothing really to show for it."