The Steampunk Trilogy by Paul di Filippo

arrives. Is there anything else, Edward?”
    “No,” sullenly replied the assistant.
    “Very well, then, you are dismissed.”
    Desor left in a sulk.
    After some further consultations with his staff, Agassiz ventured into the house’s kitchen. There, he found Jane.
    Jane Pryke was the household’s cook and maid, a buxom English lass of eighteen, with a charmingly freckled complexion. Her flaxen hair she conventionally wore in a long braid. In her initial interview for the job she had replied to Agassiz’s query about the correct pronunciation of her surname with the verse, “Rhyme it with ‘shrike’ if you like, but not with ‘trick,’ ’less you want a kick.” Agassiz had laughed and immediately hired her.
    Now he approached the nubile factotum quietly from behind, as she stood at the woodstove stirring a pot of fish chowder compiled from specimens found unfit for mounting. Grabbing her around the waist beneath her apron and causing her to emit a shriek, Agassiz began to nuzzle her neck.
    “In my chambers, after supper,” he whispered.
    Jane giggled, and lost her spoon in the soup.
    For the rest of the afternoon, Agassiz found himself mentally reciting a kind of contrition: Cecile, please forgive me.
    But the guilt did not suffice to spoil completely that evening’s intercourse.
    After the physical interlude, Agassiz fell asleep.
    He awoke in darkness to the sensation of someone stroking his face.
    “Jane. . . .” he murmured, then stopped.
    Jane’s hands were somewhat work-roughened, but they certainly did not feel like this—
    Agassiz rolled away from the stroking and fumbled for an Allin-patented phosphorous match on his bedstand. He struck it, then looked to his bedside.
    The hideous face of an ape glowered back at him.
    Then the ape smiled, and said, “ Bonjour, Monsieur Agassiz .”

2
    SINUS PUDORIS
    O NCE AGASSIZ HAD had a nightmare. In the nightmare, he was an animal, a deer of some sort. Though whether Cervinæ or Rangiferinæ was unclear. (Imagine, the great Agassiz, splendid representative of Homo sapiens ,an animal . . .!) In that dream he had been trapped, one hoof pinned in a crevasse. And bearing down on him was a glacier, one of the great ice sheets that had scoured the Northern hemisphere, whose geological traces he, Agassiz, had brilliantly construed, thereby earning himself the title “Discoverer of the Ice Age.” (And damn Charpentier, Schimper and Forbes as egregious liars, for all their claims to a share in the discovery!) As he struggled to extricate his hoof, the speed of the ice began to increase. Soon it was moving fast as a steam locomotive, tons and tons of blue-white, air-bubbled ice descending on him, eager to grind him to a red smear on the gravel, take up his bones and deposit them in some future moraine. . . .
    He had awoken in a cold sweat, found Cecile sleeping peacefully beside him, and gratefully hugged her to him.
    The sensation Agassiz now experienced, as he confronted the repulsive visage of the grimacing French-speaking ape, was in all respects identical to what he had experienced as a trapped animal about to be crushed. He was immobilized by fear; beads of perspiration burst through his pores like the foul exudation of some toad ( Bufo marinus ,say), on his brow and across his bare hairy chest. All he could conceive was that he was about to be torn to shreds.
    The match, burning down, reached Agassiz’s fingertips. The pain jerked him out of his immobility. As the room was plunged once more into darkness, he rolled out of bed and began to crawl on hands and knees across the floor, heading toward the door.
    Suddenly, the room was illumined again, this time by an Argand oil lamp thrust through the open window that gave onto the seaward side of the house.
    “Hallo!” called the bearer of the lamp. “Ist dis not der house of Doctor Agassiz?”
    In the fuller light of the lamp, Agassiz laid his eyes once more on the ape who, after stroking his cheek,