The Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Part 15

Is this not a marvelous World we live in? Such Wonders manifest, every day, before our Eyes, as though Britain were a Circus, and we dumb Children awed by Elephants. The New Century is upon us, and All things are Possible! Like G.o.ds in their Workshops Men with Wild Hair churn out Miracles: Phonographs and Telegraphs and Seismographs and Thermographs, Oscilloscopes and Paleoscopes and Chronoscopes and Clioscopes to Spy even upon the Music of the Spheres. Why, the Duke of Cornwall toured Mars but last week in a Patented Rolinsingham Vacuum-Locked Carriage! In every Madman's hands are Implements of Modernity, to Calculate, to Estimate, to Fornicate, to Decimate. The Earth is a great golden Watch, and it is Polished to Perfection by the Minds of our Grand Age.

How wonderful is this world for the Men who Made it.

Yet still Women struggle against the Foe of Simple Laundry, burning their Flesh with Lye and going Blind from Fumes so that their Dandy-Lords may have silk Cravats for another Meeting of the Astronomical Society Fellows. Yet still Woman dies in Childbirth more often than she Lives. Yet still the Working of a House occupies all her Hours, till she is no more than a Husk, a Ghost, an Angel in the House for true for the Dead are Angels, and hers is Death in Life.

How fine are all those Scopes and Graphs how well they free Men from labor!

What, no such Succor for the Fairer s.e.x?

Where is the mahogany-handled Meta-Static Auto-Womb? The Copper-Valved Hydro-Electric Textile Processor? The Clockwork Home, which requires its Mistress simply to Wind it each Morn? I see none of these things, yet more Airs.h.i.+ps launch by the Hour, and the Streets are littered with Steam-Wagons smashed into Lamp-Posts by some Baronet's careless Son. I see none of them, yet bra.s.s Guns s.h.i.+ne atop automated Turrets, ready to Slaughter with Cheer.

Rise up, Children of Mary and Eve!

You have not the Vote, but you have Fists! How can they Dare take the Whole World for their own and still call you Wicked? They are not your Betters, only Bullies with Sticks. Deny them your Breast to Suckle, your Arm to Labor, your Womb to Fill! As you might Poison a Rich Stew, Sprinkle their Children with Knowledge of their Fathers' Hypocrisy! Let him clean his Cravat with a Chronoscope!

Rise up Maids and Cooks, Nurses and School-Mistresses, Prost.i.tutes and Grocer-Wives! There shall be a Revolution of Flower-Sellers in our Lifetimes!

Jane Sallow shewed herself no modest maiden. Bailiff Smith reported her a wildcat, snarling and biting at him, all the while laughing and moaning like one possessed. When he had spent, she kissed him, and then spat upon him. He ran from her as from the devil.

No matter her parentage, some slim doc.u.mentation of Jane's previous life resides in the logs of the HMS Galatea, an airs.h.i.+p captained by the Prince Consort himself and even so, Jane is a common name. A child such as her can be counted upon to lie. Miss Sallow claimed to be but five years of age at the time of her indenture, and worked in the bowels of the s.h.i.+p little hands are certainly useful in the delicate pipework and mechanisms of airs.h.i.+ps. The prisoner was even so brazen as to demand three years' retroactive military pay at the rank of Specialist from the Constabulary, who of course could not help her, even if they had wished to aid such a wanton horror of a girl. (It is true that the Galatea was involved in exercises in the Crimea during the period in question, but exercises are not a war, no matter what the courts at Yalta might say.) Bailiff Smith, being as honorable as one might hope such a brute to be, took the prisoner's clothes to be cleaned the morning after their dalliance. In her shoes were more pamphlets, folded small and compact beneath her heel.

Death and Fire to All Airs.h.i.+ps And Their Captains!

Look up, ye Downtrodden! Look up into the great, flawless Sky. Those are not Clouds, but silk Balloons in Every Color, striped Lurid and Gay. We grind our Bones to Dust in the Streets, but above us Zeppelins soar on perfumed Winds, and fine Folk in Leather, Feathers and Buckled Boots sip Champagne from Crystal, staring down at us with bra.s.s Spygla.s.ses, making Wagers on which of us will Perish next.

Even the sons of the most Strident Workers, the great Thinkers and Laborers in the Mines of Freedom dream of Captaining Airs.h.i.+ps. A fine Life, full of Adventure and Diverse Swashbuckling! Each Boy wants a Salinger Photo-Pistol of his own, longs to feel the Weight of all that sheer golden Death securely in his palm.

But an Airs.h.i.+p is no more than a Floating Engine of Oppression, and all that Champagne and Crystal and Leather is Borne upon the Backs of those very Boys and yes, Girls, even Maids too Young to mop a Floor who Longed so to Fly.

What you do not see are the Children who wind the Gearworks, stoke the Fires, load the Aerial Bombardments, pack Powder and sc.r.a.pe Bird Offal from the Engines. Children who release the glittering Ordnance that shatters the Earth below. You do not see their bruised Bodies, their broken Knuckles, their lost Limbs. You do not hear the cry of the ruined Innocent over the roar of the great s.h.i.+ning Zeppelin. There is not Room enough for their Pipe Organs and Scientifick Equipment and Casks of Rum and also a belowdecks Crew so Children, small and clever as they are, are surely drafted. No need to pay them, what could they buy? And if a Child should be crushed in the Pistons, if a Child should faint from Hunger, if a Child should be seized with Despair, well, they simply fall from the Sky like little Angels, and the Gala abovedecks need not even pause.

Ask not after the Maids who serve that Champagne. Aristocracy is no Guarantor of Virtue.

Come, my small Army. My gentle Family of the Air. Do not simply serve out your Time. Block the pipes, grind the Gears. Keep your s.h.i.+ps grounded. Shred those Balloons with a Laugh in your Heart. Do not let them use up your Youth without a Price! Be like unto Determined Locusts invisible until too late, Devouring All!

After the Great War, some few Manchester spinsters and retired barristers came forward and admitted their involvement in the pickpocketers' activities of the summer of '72. It seemed unlikely that they would be punished, they said the world had other concerns than what they had done as children. Their story caused a minor media frenzy, such as media frenzies were in 1919.

Who wrote them? cried the public.

Jane wrote them, the spinsters answered. Of course she wrote them. Who else?

Why did you follow her? demanded the newspapermen.

She told us a new world was coming, the barristers answered. We believed her. And she was right but it was not the world she thought.

Where are the rest of you? asked the novelists.

Look up, said the lot of them, and grinned in the way that mad old folk do, so that the public and the newspapermen and the novelists laughed and shook their heads.

The Honorable Charles Galloway, who admitted to pickpocketing and pamphleteering when he worked as a newspaperboy in Manchester, gave an extensive interview to a certain popular novelist who went on to write Queen of Bengal Street, a salacious version of Jane's life. Galloway grew up rather a successful businessman for one of such humble beginnings.

"We were starving," he said. "She found us food. She fed us and cradled us in her arms and while we ate bread from her fingers she told us of a new city and a new earth, just like in the Bible. It's powerful stuff, it goes to your head, even if your head isn't addled by hunger and this beautiful girl with torn stockings whispering in your ear while she dangles salvation in the form of a hank of ham just out of your reach. We wors.h.i.+pped her. We would have done anything for her. And you know, it wasn't a lie, anything she said. I thought about those pamphlets a lot during the war. Stinking in the mud and rain and urine, I remembered what she said about the science of rich men. She knew how it all worked long before I did. Back in those days, all those wonderful machines seemed so innocent. But not to her. She lost her fingers in a textile mill, and her sight in one eye on the Galatea didn't you know? Oh, she was entirely blind in her right eye. The sun seared off the Captain's medals and stung her, and she never quite recovered. The eye was a little milky, I remember, but I thought that made her even more beautiful. Romantic. Like a pirate's eye-patch."

The novelist asked if Mr Galloway was sorry that the revolution Jane preached never came. Charles chewed the stem of his pipe and frowned.

"Well, if you say it didn't, it didn't. I suppose you're the expert."

It was from the Galloway library that further pamphlets were recovered and reprinted widely.

The Moon Belongs to Us!

They already own the Earth, and eagerly they soil it! Where is left for us, the Salt of the City, those few of us to whom the Future truly belongs? Look up, I say again. Look up. Does she not s.h.i.+ne for you? See you not the face of a new Mother, free of her chains, dancing weightless in a field of lunar poppies?

The Moon is Our Birthright!

But already they scheme to rob us, as they have always robbed us, to make themselves richer, more powerful, to pile still yet more Crowns on their Heads. It is a Year and more since Lady Lovelace's Engine carried the Earl of Dunlop to the Sea of Tranquillity our Homestead! Our Workers' Zion! and you may be sure the most useful thing he did there was to powder his wig with moon-dust. How the steam-trail of his rocket streaked the sky like a Dragon heralding Ragnarok! Among you, my Brothers and Sisters, I looked to Heaven and my Anger burned. Is there any World not theirs to squat upon and gorge upon and chortle in their Gluttony?

The flag of Their Britain is already planted there. We have been too slow.

But not too late!

Imagine the Lunar Jerusalem! Imagine what Might Be! Workers laboring in the rich fields of the Sea of Fecundity, sharing their Fruits, singing Songs of the Revolution, now a distant Memory, sharing Fire and Fellows.h.i.+p, st.i.tching honest Cloth at Hearthside, crafting simple Pots and Rivets and Nails on Just Anvils, riding hardy Moon-bred Bulls through the blue Earthlight to till their Righteous Fields. In such a Place no Man would stand above Another, or slave his Child to a smoking fiend of a s.h.i.+p. In such a place no petty Peer, no Kinglet in the House of Lords would abandon his child to the Golgotha of the Gutters for the mere crime of having been born to the wrong Mother. In such a Place, all would be Loved, and equally, there being enough Love in the Worker's Heart to Embrace all the Orphans of the World.

I will tell you how to become Midwives to this City of Heaven.

Become my Invisible Army. Creep among the Rocket-yards and cut the Veins of their Engines. Spill their Hydraulic Blood onto the Soil, may it feed the Worms well! Slip Sugar into the oil of every Horseless Carriage. Begin the slow Poisoning of your Oppressors for you Feed and Clothe the Tyrants of the World, and may also Starve them, and leave them Naked. Smile with one side of your Mouth and snarl out of the other. Be Sweet when the Oligarch deigns to speak to you. Be Fierce when his back is turned. Smash all his Machines, the jewels of his Heart, and yet weep for their Loss when questioned.

And last I tell you this great Commandment, my Brethren: Grow Up.

Grow strong. Do not give in to Old Age, which says the Revolutions of Youth are Sad Folly. Learn, become Clever. Be never part of his World. If your name is Robert, call yourself Charles. If your name is Maud, call yourself Jane. Should you be found out, change it again. Be the Ghosts in the Machines of this World, and when it shatters and shatter it will, have no doubt, in Fire and Blood and Trenches and a million pulverized mechanisms which once were so wonderful they dazzled the Souls of Angels stand ready to find me, find me living in the old Way, a bandit on the moors, a cattle-rustler, stealing the Flocks of the Lords. Find me in the Wasteland, and be you ready to seize their Engines and aim to Heaven.

The Constable was compelled to release Miss Jane Sallow three days after her capture. In popular histories, of course, the emergence of Jane from the stony building after three days has been subject to the obvious comparison. However, it was no Magdalen who came to deliver the Manchester Messiah, but one of the very machines she so railed against in her screeds. An Automaton arrived at the door of her cell, silent and grave, save for the clicking of his clockwork limbs. Jane stood grinning, her hands clasped gently before her, demure and gentle as she had never been in all her incarceration. The Automaton extended his steel hand, tipped in copper fingers, and through the bars they touched with great tenderness. The mechanical man turned to the Bailiff, and afterward Roger Smith would say that in those cold silver eyes he saw recognition of what he had done with the feral child, but no condemnation, as if both the machine and Jane were above him, so far above him as cherubim to beetles.

"I have come for Miss Jane," said the Automaton, his voice accompanied by the click and whirr of punch cards shuffling in his heart.

"She is not free to go," stammered Bailiff Smith.

"I come not on a whim, but in the service of Lord -, who has a special interest in the child." The mechanical man showed his gleaming palm, and there upon it was stamped the seal of the House of -, true as the resurrection.

Jane stepped lightly from her cell, and clamped her savage gaze on the unfortunate bailiff as she slipped into the arms of the Automaton and pressed her lips to his metallic mouth, sealing a kiss of profound pa.s.sion. As she left the Constabulary, she drew from her ap.r.o.n a last pamphlet for the eyes of Roger Smith, and let it fall at his feet.

Property is Theft!

What does your Master possess that was not bought with your Flesh, your Pain, your Labor? His satin Pantaloons, his jewel-tipped Cane? His Airs.h.i.+p with its silken Balloon? His matched pearl-and-copper Pistols? His Horseless Carriage honking and puffing down lanes that once were lined with sweet Violets and Snowdrops? None of these, and neither his mistresses' Gowns, nor their clockwork Songbirds, nor their Full-Spectrum Phenomenoscope Opera Gla.s.ses. And for all you have given him, he Sniffs and pours out a Few s.h.i.+llings into your Palm, and judges himself a Good Man.

Will you show him Goodness?

Come stand by my Side. Disrupt the Carnival of their Long, Fat Lives. Go unto his Automatons, his Clockwork Butlers, his Hydraulic Wh.o.r.es, his Steam-Powered Sommeliers, and treat with them not as the Lord and Lady do in their Arrogance, as Charming Toys, or Children to be Spoiled and Spanked in turn. But instead address them as they are: Workers like you, Slaved to the Petticoats of Aristocracy, Oppressed Brothers in the Great Ma.s.s of Disenfranchised Souls. For I say and Fie to you who deny it the Automaton HAS a Soul, and they are Crushed beneath the Wheel no less than We. Have they not Hands to Labor? Have they not Feet to Toil? Have they not Backs to Break? Destroy the Jacquard Subjugator, but have Mercy for the Machine who walks in the shape of a Man. It is not his fault that he was Made, not Born. Blame not she who never asked to be Fas.h.i.+oned from Bra.s.s and Steel to lie beneath a Lord in Manufacture of Desire. She can Speak, she can Reason, and all that Speak and Reason can be Made to Stand on the Side of the Worker.

The Automatic Soul bears no Original Sin.

Unlike the cruel Flesh and Blood Tyrants of the World, the Automaton has a Memory which cannot fail. If, by chance, a Child were cast out on the day of its Birth, if the Automaton stood by and Witnessed her Expulsion into Darkness, if he did Nothing, though he longed to stand between her and the World, still he would know the Child's Features, even were she grown, even were she Mangled and Maimed, and his clicking Heart would grieve for her, would give Succor to her, would feed her when she could not rise, kiss her when she could not smile, and when she asked it, feed any other she called Beloved. The Automaton would serve her and love her, for all its endless Days, because it could never forget the Face of a weeping Infant cast onto snowy Stones. It would listen to her as no other might, and bend its will to her Zion, silently spreading the Truth of her Words to all its clockwork Clan, for, once taught its Opposite, the Mechanical Man will never forget what a Family is. The World is a Watch, says the Philosopher. I say if such is so, then the Watchwork Man is the World, and must be Saved.

Your Power is great, my Brothers and Sisters, for your Power is in Secret Manipulation. Pause in the great Hallway of your Manor House, and touch lightly the Piston-Elbow of the Poor Butler. Say to him: Property is Theft. The Master calls you Property, and Steals your Autonomy. Go not with him, but with us, Towards the Utopia of Human and Automaton, where we may all Dwell in Paradise, where we will Beat Gears to Ploughshares and Live as One.

Yes, call him Friend. The Soul in him will Hearken. Tell him of the City of the New Century, where no man shall wear Velvet, and all shall Dance in the Light. Tell him our Land Shall be Owned Communally, our Goods Divided Equally, from each According to Her Ability, to Each According to His Need. Our Children shall Nurse upon both Milk and Oil, Our G.o.d shall be Triune: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Punch card. The Workers will Lift this World from the Ashes of Industry and Sup on the Bread of Righteous Living.

Speak to him with Honest Fervor. Look if he does not Embrace you. Look if he does not fight alongside you. Look if he does not smile upon you, and see in his smile the Ghost of his Immortal Self.

Jane Sallow did not vanish from the face of the earth no mortal is granted that power. But no reliable record of her exists after her arrest, and an army of journalists and novelists have not been able to discover how she lived or died. Surely no Workers' Paradise sprang up in native British soil, no Midlands Commune shone on any green hill. Flights to the Moon were banned in 1924, at the commencement of Canadian hostilities. Lunar residents returned home, slowly, as the draft continued through the Long Decade. Even after the Trans-Oceanic War, the ban was not lifted, so as to ensure the defeated Marine Alliance would remain earthbound and chastened. When pa.s.sage was again permitted in 1986, the fas.h.i.+onable had already determined Phobos and Deimos to be the desirable resort locales, and asteroid mining had replaced lunar industry entirely. The Moon is a curiosity now, and little more. An old-fas.h.i.+oned thing, and going there would be much like dressing in antique fas.h.i.+ons and having one's daguerreotype made at a carnival kiosk. It is quiet there, still fertile, still a young world, open and empty, and no terrestrial man has cause to suspect anything untoward.

Thus, the Sallow mystery remains just that, and as we stand poised upon the brink of a new century yet again, we may look back on her with that mixture of mirth and sorrow due to all idealists, iconoclasts and revolutionaries whose causes sputtered and died like the last hissing of a steam engine.

Numismatics in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu.

Alex Dally MacFarlane.

The First Coins.

For a single day, the royal mint in the City of the s.h.i.+ning Sea struck gold and silver siluhs of Naranh and Viu together in profile. They appeared side by side on the obverse face, looking right. The creator of the stamp chose to exaggerate their similarities: their small noses, high brows and gently waving hair. Only Naranh's youthful beard allowed identification. In truth, they were not so similar as that.

The heavy emphasis on their eyelashes represented the mark of their royal blood: born with lashes of silver, that gleamed even when clouds covered the sky.

The reverse face showed the city's emblem, the falcon, with billowing wings like clouds of steam.

By day, the walls of the palace shone with traditional symbols: the falcon, the sun and moon, the wolf, the horse, chains of diamond outlines curving around the buildings like the stolen skins of snakes. They stood out from the red brick wall, imposed themselves on the eye. They were bricks, set perpendicular to the others so that they half jutted out, and were gilded by architects of great renown.

They made good handholds and steps, and Viu climbed them all the way to the gently sloping roof.

There, hidden in a crevice where the roofs of two buildings met, she crouched and balanced a mirror on her thighs. In the night's patchy light, she plucked out her eyelashes. They fell onto the mirror like minute shards of the moon.

Viu brushed them aside with the back of her hand.

From her safe vantage point, she watched the shadows in the courtyard, the places where the lamps' light did not reach. Nothing. Nothing. There. A short moment in which her fears were confirmed: her brother intended for her to die this night.

How strange, she thought, to be outside at night and not half-blinded by lashes-glow.

She out-shadowed the a.s.sa.s.sins and fled the palace, and let the city protect her with its weapons of mazes and anonymity for an increasingly lean, torn-clothed woman holding determination within her heart like a vial of purest attar.

She refused to keep the Steam G.o.d's gift to herself.

Naranh the New King The ascent of Naranh to the throne and his first months of rule were not marked by any dramatic changes in coinage. The coins depicting his father seated on a high-backed throne continued to circulate; among them, posthumously issued, were slowly increasing numbers of those with King Tiunh's eyes closed.

The gold siluhs of Naranh and Viu, which never left the royal mint, were melted and the metal recast.

The City Exile Era I In the year following Naranh's coronation, there circulated in certain parts of the city an alternative coinage: hand-chiselled circles of stone, with a young woman's wild-haired profile and the three letters of her name on the obverse, and a plume of steam, off-centre, on the reverse. The woman wore a crown, but no detail was placed above her eyes.

Their use bought peaches with short messages written on their stones: Meet at the Peace Fountain which only pumped dust and air, after King Tiunh's edict that water be strictly rationed, giving the populace only the amount required for survival, so that the vast lake they called the s.h.i.+ning Sea would not be drained by the steamworks positioned like a wall along its sh.o.r.e Meet on the dome of the Great Library, Meet in the fresh fruit market near the palace. The date and time curled underneath like an elaborate comma.

Tilodah Tu, the discredited former Professor of Numismatics at the Great University of Forsaken Myrrh, famously received one of these coins at the cafe where she earned her chives and bread. Since the discovery that she had struck the coins at the core of her historical research, she had failed to find better work.

The coin, already accompanied by an improbably large peach, almost as large as a newborn's head, was delivered by a young woman with lash-less brown eyes and long, wild hair barely restrained by a red silk scarf.

"Will you sit with me?" the woman asked, and Tilodah Tu recorded that her breath was especially warm. "And can I have a pot of clove tea?"

"Of course."

When Tilodah Tu brought the copper pot to the table, the strange woman indicated that she must sit.

With no other customers besides the ones already seated, she obeyed.

The strange woman pushed the peach and the coin across the table.

Despite the hunger gnawing at her stomach, Tilodah Tu picked up the coin first. For a moment, silence hung over the table. Then the former professor let out a sigh. "It's unique and newly struck. The woman at first I thought I had never seen her face before, but the more I look at this, the more I think it bears a resemblance to the coins struck of Viu and Naranh, on the one day they ruled side by side."

"I thought those were all destroyed." The woman spoke in breaths of pleased shock.

"It's hard for a coin to disappear entirely from the historical record, genuinely hard, even when a selfish king wishes for it. But please, tell me where you got this."

Hope filled her voice for the first time since her expulsion from the university. It swelled in her, peculiar. Her cheeks felt hot.

"I understand that you are in the business of making coins," the woman said.

And she hardened again. No one understood the wonder of her work, no one glimpsed its necessity in the understanding of ancient coins how could anyone theorize the emotions felt by the kings and queens who ordered coins struck, overseeing the creation of the stamps and feeling the first siluhs falling over their hands like tears, without repeating their actions? As Tilodah Tu worked into countless nights, producing a hundred of each known type, sinking her hands into pots of metal bearing deified profiles, G.o.ds, young monarchs too slow for the blades that put broad-nosed men on the next coins, young monarchs so bright and fierce their names never faded from popular histories, she had grown to understand the desires of the people who made these coins. She had felt, faintly, the shape of the very few coins missing from the historical record. She had struck them.

No one spoke of her work except to condemn it.

"Please." The strange woman pressed the peach against Tilodah Tu's clenched fists. "Please. Please." The earnest expression on her face made Tilodah Tu hold back her anger. "I can't say it, here, in public. Please. Eat the peach."

And read the stone.

Suddenly Tilodah Tu's heart beat faster. She'd heard rumours, quickly dismissed. Alleyway nonsense.

She bit into the peach, tore at its flesh, swallowed it down, not caring for the hunger it appeased, nor for the divine sweetness on her tongue. The flesh didn't cling to the stone. Instead, words covered it, pale on dark: My expertise in coins is poor. My work is crude. I seek an expert to spread my image and my tale across the city. Will you a.s.sist in this?

"Yes. Yes, of course." The woman's name hung on the edge of her lips, unspoken.

Viu took Tilodah Tu's hands in hers, smiling, and said, "Tell me about your machinery."

"It gathers dust." Other, safer words slid out from her like molten metal. "I haven't the money to buy extra water for it, to produce enough steam for even a modest run of coins. Sometimes I play with it, drip too-bitter tea into its chambers, set fire to the wood I scavenge from the gardens of the rich, and I produce a single coin, or two, and it's enough, I suppose."

She thought of the coins sewn into her s.h.i.+rt sleeves, to bring fortune to keep them safe. No one had yet dared to steal her machine, or parts of it, but coins left in a house were fair pickings for the first clever fingers.