The Revolutions by Felix Gilman

pointed the way forward down a low-ceilinged, electric-lit corridor.
    “I recall Mr Shaw,” Atwood said. “I recommended his services to Mr Gracewell, didn’t I? It’s very important work, Josephine, very important; but I grant you it’s unpleasant. I wasn’t aware of Mr Shaw’s finer qualities, which you have so eloquently adumbrated. I’ll speak to Gracewell.”
    “Who is Gracewell? What on earth is he doing? What—”
    “He assists the Company with calculations.”
    “But what does that mean? Why is all this secrecy necessary?”
    “Will you permit me to show you?”
    For a moment she was afraid he might open a door to reveal Arthur chained up in a cupboard, shovelling coal or something of the sort.
    “You’re just in time to witness one of our experiments. Our company—you can see what it’s all for, and why it’s so tremendously urgent. You’re not superstitious, are you, Josephine?”
    “Superstitious? I don’t think I am.”
    “Good! It’s a source of constant surprise to me how many people can’t tell psychical science from ghost stories. So many sensitives waste their gifts, led astray by superstition—and I think that you have a quite remarkable gift, Josephine. I don’t say that lightly. Why, if every girl in London who claims to be sensitive really were, it would be a wonder that London doesn’t levitate! Fortunately, I have an excellent sense for the real thing. I dare say you feel it too; when two true sensitives meet, there’s an undeniable spark , isn’t there? The uninitiated might mistake it for something baser, something carnal. And what a waste, when such energies could be put to higher purposes.”
    It was impossible to deny that her heart was pounding.
    He paused with his hand on a doorknob.
    “I can’t say more unless I know you’ll join us. Will you?”
    “Mr Shaw—”
    “We can discuss him later. Will you join us?”
    “I confess, Lord Atwood—I’m curious.”
    “You’ll have to stop calling me that. Call me Mercury. It’s a game, but rather an important one—we don’t use the names of ordinary life here. All are equal. All seekers in the dark, aren’t we? Our common goal is understanding , and we are all equally distant from it. Besides, you can’t have Mr Smith the butcher or Mr Boggs the bank clerk stamping about in the astral stuff, knocking things over. Or Lord What’s-his-name of What-have-you, for that matter. So—you need a new name.”
    “A nom de magicienne ? Something Latin, I suppose?”
    “As a matter of fact, I was thinking Venus .”
    Josephine thought that was very inappropriate, and said so.
    Atwood smiled, and opened a door onto an upper gallery of a large library.
    A wrought-iron staircase led down to the library’s floor, where a little group of men and women stood, making conversation, or carrying out obscure preparations. A large circular table occupied the centre of the room. In the middle of the table there was an arrangement of spherical electrical lamps glowing in a variety of odd hues; the room was otherwise gloomy. A man in a black coat bustled around, wiping the glass of the lamps, adjusting their flames and nudging them in slight orbits around one another, with the care of an artist. Every time he moved a lamp, ripples of dim glinting light ran across the book-bindings on the walls of the room, shimmering like schools of fish.
    There was a pattern painted on the parquet floor, in blue and red, green and purple and gold. It had something of the look of a star-map rendered by an astronomer in the grip of either hysteria or genius. Thick curving lines, with arrow-heads pointing in all directions; lines made of characters that Josephine couldn’t recognise; a series of concentric circles, the outermost of which reached all the way to the feet of the bookshelves at the edge of the room. The table sat near the centre of these circles, nearly but not quite at the heart of the pattern.
    On one wall there was an immense