The Light Ages Read Online Free Page B

the seventy-sixth year of the third great cycle of our Ages of Industry, the only son and second child of a lower master of the Lesser Guild of Toolmakers. Bracebridge was then a middle-sized town which lay on the banks of the River Withy. It was prosperous in its own way, and perhaps indistinguishable from many another northern factory town to the eyes of those who glimpsed it from the carriages of the expresses which swept through our station without stopping, although, at least in one respect, it was unusual. Derbyshire might have its coalfields and Lancashire might have its mills, Dudley might swarm with factories and Oxford with cape-flapping dons, but for this particular corner of England it was aether which governed our lives, and the one inescapable fact that would strike anyone who visited Bracebridge at that time was the sound, or rather the non-sound, which pervaded it. It was a sensation which passed into all of us who lived there and became part of the rhythm and the substance of our lives.
    SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.
    It was the sound of the aether engines.
    The water wheels that had driven Bracebridge’s first aether engines up on Rainharrow had long been still; their wheels and pistons had rusted, their catchpools lay empty, the shattered windows of their drive houses stared down at the factories that had sprawled in their place. Down in the valley, there was always smoke and sound and furnace glow. Inside the floors of Mawdingly & Clawtson, dervish governors spun, pulleys hissed and chains clattered. Driven down from Engine Floor three hundred feet into the earth, pristine as a jewel yet thick as a ship’s mast and ten times as heavy, a great vertical axle turned, bearing force to Central Floor far below where the ears and lungs of those who laboured there were continually flayed by the deep, demented beat of the triple arms of the aether engines which they and this factory—all of Bracebridge, in one way or another—existed to serve.
    Fanning out from the riven rock, the three steel and granite pistons bellowed back and forth—SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM— drawing out the aether. Connected to those pistons and thin as spiderweb, skeins of engine silk carried the substance to the surface. There, the energy was dissipated in the cloudy waters of the first of many quickening pools, then stirred and filtered until the final vials were packed in lead-lined chests and borne on slow trains west and east and north but predominantly south across England, there to be put to any of ten thousand possible uses, the benefits of which, it always struck me, Bracebridge itself seemed surprisingly bereft.
    Of course, it used to be said that we all took aether for granted then, but in Bracebridge it was working of aether that we took for granted; the slam of iron and the howl of shift sirens and the clump of men’s boots and the grind of engines and soot on the washing and, beyond all that, beyond everything, the subterranean pounding of those engines. It compacted the flour in the larder and tilted the flagstones in the hall. It cracked flowerpots and crazed pottery. It shifted dust into seashore patterns and danced rainbows on the fat globules in the cream. It secretly rearranged the porcelain dogs on the mantelpiece until they crashed to the hearth. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM. We carried the sound of those engines in our blood. Even when we left Bracebridge, it came with us.
    The house in which I lived, the third in the terrace along Brickyard Row, with a steep drop through scratchy copses of birch into lowtown and with many other Rows and Backs and Ways slanting up Coney Mound behind, had stood for most of the Third Age of Industry by the time my parents moved in. Bracebridge then was at the height of a new surge of expansion, and such terraces, facing each other across yards and alleys and the corrugated roofs of outside toilets, had been deemed the most efficient method of housing the workers who were needed to service the new,