The Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Part 28

"To ..." he hesitated, as if searching for words that wouldn't offend her, "to measure time as a people, to bring people together. So people will all see the same time. Right now everyone makes clocks to create whatever time they want. But this it's it tells a time that everyone can agree on."

"That's the idea," said a pa.s.sing livery officer with a firm, manly nod to the apprentice. "Quantify it. Time shouldn't be subjective. We should have one time. I've always thought that." With two gla.s.ses of wine held high, he meant to keep walking but stopped. "How does that clock work?"

"We know when and where we are with this clock. Always. But I'm still combing out snarls," he said, shaking his head at the clock. "It needs little hands. Maybe chimes to tell us a common time."

"Now your clock is telling us time?" Katrina chided. "I thought we were telling it time."

"Well, I'll look forward to seeing your clock when it's finished, and so will my company," the livery officer said. "This mad place needs all the help we can get."

From the cowl of Krina's cloak, the little lookout hissed, "See? What did I tell you?"

"We don't need it," Krina said to the officer's back, as he took his wine away. "Farmers have roosters, and bread bakers know the rhythm of a rise in their stiff wrist bones. No one wants these clocks of yours, because everyone here prizes the license to do as we will. This? This is not our way."

"Not yet," the apprentice said, grinning from Krina to her confidante.

Putting her hands in her pockets, sipping wine through a straw, the confidante lowered her gaze, as if the apprentice's grin were a gift she couldn't accept here.

Ah, there it is, Krina thought, watching the young man.

His clock s.h.i.+fted its feet, jostling the other clocks on the table, who hissed and spat at the eyeless thing. Why would anyone, she wondered, tolerate being told that one's time was the same as everyone else's no worse, no different, no more painful, no more beautiful, fortuitous, or grand? In a place where time has reshaped the very architecture, what effect would such a clock have? One of the other clocks took a swipe at the blind clock, which recoiled, unable to defend itself. "We have a responsibility to keep time, yes, but we must keep it well. Vibrant and strong. It's just cruel," she said, "creating something with a face and no eyes."

She lifted her gaze from the crippled clock to see if her words had reached him, and the apprentice nodded slowly to her, perhaps already building another clock in his mind. "Send me your next," she said, "as soon as you've built it."

"Oh, I plan to," the apprentice said, and for the first time, there was a note of challenge, even threat in his voice.

Krina donned her cloak, and, as she pulled up her hood, she whispered to her confidante, "Go back and buy three pomelos from the fruit-monger, please."

The confidante shut her eyes as tightly as her mouth and, when Krina turned her back, handslanged, Oh, I plan to.

Dusk threw shadows across the chamber but Krina didn't light any lamps or candles. She liked the violet calm of early evening, so she stood in the center of her black brocade rug and felt the darkness deepen while her brother's friends fell into an ode for strings and percussion. She didn't want the wags here tonight, but she could retreat to her apartments if they grew tiresome.

"What's wrong, Krina?" her brother, Lemet, asked after bobbing his head to the music for some time. "You're being particularly ominous tonight."

Cellos and drums rolled and tolled. "I'm afraid of what that new apprentice at the salon will do with his clock," Krina said.

Lemet was a clockmaker, too, had the same broad, strong hands as Krina. He patted his knees in time to the drums and said, "What do you mean? What's to fear?"

"His clocks will kill our clocks, the ziggurat," Krina said.

"You're paranoid."

"My lookout told me," she said. "I'm very serious. My confidante is stacking three pomelos in the apprentice's doorway, as we speak."

Lemet turned down the corners of his mouth as if to say that was a judicious move on his sister's part.

"Oh?" A cellist smirked in appreciation, fingers fretting near his pierced ear. "Is someone about to come down with offcough? The blackspot. Do you use a poisonist, Krina?"

"We pay our dues and use the Method, like everyone in this room," her brother said in calm reprimand, not appreciating the insinuation that Krina was hiring mercenaries. To Krina, he said sotto voce, "Why the Method? You have clocks that could undo the apprentice, right? Use them. Eclipse him."

"Too many people actually want his d.a.m.n clock. You should have seen the crowd around his salon table."

Lemet showed his sister that he was annoyed with her seriousness by turning his attention back to the musicians.

"It's like the ziggurat has a death wish," she said to his profile.

"Such fascism," said a violinist. "Who would want a clock that unifies time?"

Keeping the measure with just a tad more emphasis until the violinist looked at him, the drummer said, "Oh, yes, who would want a unified time?"

Now the musicians were annoying him, which seemed to annoy Lemet further. "Music, yes. But not all of life. That's so beyond boring, and it's beneath us it's below our it's-"

"Yes, there are no words," said Krina, appreciating her brother's stammer. She stood and looked down at a wide esplanade near the lagoon below. Drifts of maroon dust were splayed across the cobblestone concourse, and young boys in great cloaks and kerchiefs over their faces were attempting to sweep the fine powder into pails. Futile work. The very mortar of the ziggurat gasped silt into the air. "This dust."

A ba.s.soon moaned across the cellos and ba.s.s drum.

In birdskin slippers, Krina's feet slid across the floor into her own apartments, away from her brother and his revelers. They would go all night, and she wasn't in the mood to join them. As she shut the door on the boom of a throaty cello, the first clock she had ever built, with intricate, interlocking pinewood scales leaned kindly against her ankle. Seizing the clock by its fat, solid coils, she looked into its eyes of agate.

Immediately, a strange emotion came over Krina and she brought the clock close, embracing it. Though she stood in the center of a darkening room, she was overcome with an emotion she'd never felt before, a feeling that rays of setting sunlight descending through pipe smoke would one day elicit. She'd built this clock to impart the sense of a time yet to be. She could smell sweet tobacco, years of resin in a beloved pipe that would trigger the lonely sadness. She could actually see the warm, orange light sloping through layers of smoke. Why a pipe, or this time of day, and what as yet unmet lover would she identify with this light?

She let the clock slide out of her arms onto the rug and watched it sidewind beneath a wooden secretary as two smaller, very st.u.r.dy clocks galloped into the room, their little hooves thumping the floor, but they were more interested in nipping at one another, and so chased away into the bedroom, kicking a rug across the floor as they ran. Following them, rapt, briefly interested in their cavorting, timeless sense of time, Krina started from an applause of wooden wings. She stepped forward, suddenly, stamping her foot hard to keep her balance, as a heavy, graven thing dropped upon her shoulder. Its digging talons grabbed her and grabbed again, as it settled in place next to her right ear. She turned and looked into the clock's pure-gold eyes. "Give me your time, love," she whispered to it.

Swathes of purple light on the divan and armoire blanched to silver-blue as moonlight replaced dusk, and the murmur of squadrons on the steps became the chatter of bats and swallows.

Krina went to her balcony and looked out at the Ascent. Everyone in the ziggurat enjoyed the feeling of their times growing strange and familiar and strange again, rewinding their clocks and hauling the sun back into the sky, or reverting the ziggurat into old neighborhoods long ago rearranged by the advance of many, many other times, and remaking church towers and wide green s.p.a.ces into cl.u.s.ters of childhood homes so that the lonely song of a piano could play up the alley like wind, as it once did.

From here she could see whole neighborhoods tinged maroon, and the light seemed rusty from dust. The ziggurat is already dying, she thought, watching streets sidewind like her pinewood clock. It won't be able to defend itself from this new kind of time. For through her clock's eyes, she could also see the world as the apprentice would make it, staring blankly back at her from the streets of the refas.h.i.+oned ziggurat, streets preordained and measured like those hashmarks on the betrayer's clocks once and for all time.

The clock gave a birdlike turn of its head and, on oak talons, sidestepped away from her cheek: unclench, clench; unclench, clench. Looking back, it said, "We clocks will become rulers."

"Rulers?" cooed Krina at her clock.

"Not just devices of measurement, but despots. The future is in order now."

"No, the future is in doubt, I've made sure of that," Krina said in cold return. "The Method and I will sing a requiem in blackspot shortly."

She looked out on the vista of the ziggurat's urbanishment, as if from away and above a rare sight and one that only this clock afforded her. A continent raised and floating with a ziggurat built upon its widest salt flat, this landma.s.s's stratified bedrock stood upon thin air, rivers spilling into gulfs of nothing. "You'll have your confidante mark the apprentice?" the clock said. "A stack of pomelos for the Method to find its sacrifice?"

"Snuff the bonfire while it's still just a lit match," Krina answered.

"You can't a.s.sa.s.sinate every young innovator. And you can't urbanish the ziggurat from reality forever," her clock said. "It's dying, disintegrating."

"I know." From here she could see the ziggurat's soaring aqueducts vanis.h.i.+ng into the gasping, rust-colored cloud that enshrouded the city. The urbanishment was a clockmaker's dream literally and clockmakers like Krina believed they would dream the ziggurat and its continent aloft, unmake and remake it forever. She said as in a breathless prayer, "But there's no other way but our way."

"Apparently," said the clock before soaring off, "there's at least one other."

In the street below two fish sellers hailed each other, and Krina backed away from the balcony in a shuffling step, as if beginning a quiet parlor-dance, but then purple shadows engulfed her into a black, unfeeling fugue, swallowing her away into a strange room, into a bed, laying her down beneath velvet duvets. The room's darkness was so black she couldn't see the walls but believed this might well be her own bedroom. Time was a surprising lover this wasn't unusual, to find one's self whisked away in the pa.s.sionate embrace of another's time. She closed her eyes and waited for clarity, listening to the sound of rapid dripping in the dark, a sound like water wanting to be a stream.

"How do you know?" said a disembodied whisper.

Krina lay still, steeped in her fear. She opened her eyes slowly, as if her eyelids parting would make too much noise. But her eyes were useless, and her gaze slid across the impenetrable dark.

Then there was another sound, a sound like skin sliding on skin. A patting, caressing noise. Someone else was in the room, too.

"Yes, but there's no way to know if she has it, yet," said the whisperer.

Has it? Krina wondered. What do I have that they want? They mean to steal something from me?

Pat. Pat. Press. Pat.

Perhaps these thieves didn't even know she was here, but, in the dark stillness, Krina wondered if she could get to one of her clocks. If she could call the walkaway or her farfar, she could pull up the st.i.tches of this time, but she couldn't raise her hand to call for her clocks. Her arms felt foreign, heavy. What was wrong? Even her mind, she realized, was a swaying, lumbering thing, unable to pounce and seize on simple facts. Who was in this room? Was this even her room? What could they want to steal? More pressing and patting, like a pair of soft hands clapping very quietly in the darkness, and through it, over it, suffusing the room, was that mechanical, trickling sound.

"Look at that. A dart?" The voice was male. Young.

A dart? The Method has been here, she thought. But for whom? Who was this? Krina felt so warm, dizzyingly warm, and her throat was dry as sand. Had she met this young man at a party? She tried to recall the voice, but like her gaze flitting across the dark, her mind couldn't connect thoughts. Krina almost felt she should know that caressing skin-on-skin, hand-on-hand noise, too, but her lugubrious mind pondered over it in stupid wonder. She'd been at a party earlier. Two of them.

Press. Pat. Caress. Pat.

"She has it," the young man said, no longer whispering, "The whole ziggurat will know soon."

Feet shuffled in the dark, retreating into a s.p.a.ce, a chamber beyond, then someone came close to Krina. She stiffened in terror, sightless eyes skimming across the black before her. She couldn't even raise a hand to defend herself, as she sensed the nearness of someone, felt the heat of a body, and smelling the very faintest smell of fruit. Of citrus.

Scent of a pomelo, delicate yet distinct, stacked somewhere in this room, Krina guessed.

Someone marked me? Krina thought. But I thought I'd marked someone else. Who was that that I had marked?

A hand scooped under her elbow, lifting it slightly. Another hand pressed itself into her palm, making warm shapes there, a series of symbols made with thin fingers. Handslang.

Your clocks died surprisingly fast. In sympathy. Sorry. Your brother is gone now. Sorry. I brought the pomelos in from your doorstep.

Her confidante retreated from the bedside and dissolved into the somewhere beyond this s.p.a.ce that was filled with fear, fever and her heavy indolent thoughts. Sleep came and went in slow blinks of consciousness, and the circling of this hatching plot was maddening, like a lantern-and-shadow show that had been scrambled and shuffled into nonsense. Finally, deep, orange light broke the darkness, and Krina could see her own arms now, the intricate constellations of fine, black bursts in her skin, and she was so weak that she could barely think what this disease was called. Black. Black something. Someone was here with her, in this strange room, sitting in a chair. A man. His work boots creaked in the quiet, and the rocking chair answered offbeat. She could see his silhouette against a window of bright, rancid light filtering through dust outside, and light knifed through curls of pipe smoke overhead. Her beloved clocks were gone? Blackspot. That was it. Lemet, too? The salon? Where was she? Where was her home? Was this even the ziggurat? Perhaps she had been stolen and secreted away as part of an insurrection, and the urbanishment was at an end. She could smell sweet tobacco in a leather pouch nearby and felt grateful for the lonely smell of it. Feeling oddly nostalgic for pipe smoke (hadn't she only ever smelled this tobacco while holding the fat coils of her clock, peering into this very future?), Krina turned to look for the man's pipe on the nightstand, but saw instead the faceless clock squatting there, staring at her in dumb sightlessness and tap, tap, tap, tapping out its hateful, perfect measures.

Dr Lash Remembers.

Jeffrey Ford.

I was working fifteen-hour days, traversing the city on house calls, looking in on my patients who'd contracted a particularly virulent new disease. Fevers, sweats, vomiting, liquid excrement. Along with these symptoms, the telltale signature a slow trickle of what looked like green ink issuing from the left inner ear. It blotted pillows with strange, haphazard designs in which I momentarily saw a spider, a submarine, a pistol, a face staring back. I was helpless against this scourge. The best I could do was to see to the comfort of my charges and give instructions to their loved ones to keep them well hydrated. To a few who suffered most egregiously, I administered a shot of Margold, which wrapped them in an inchoate stupor. Perhaps it wasn't sound medicine, but it was something to do. Done more for my well-being than theirs.

In the middle of one of these harrowing days, a young man arrived at my office, carrying an envelope for me. I'd been just about to set off to the Air Ferry for another round of patient visits in all quarters of the city, but after giving the lad a tip and sending him on his way, I sat down to a cup of cold tea and opened the card. It was from Millicent Garana, a longtime friend and colleague I'd not seen in months. The circ.u.mstances of our last meeting had not been professional. Instead, I'd taken her to the Hot Air Opera and we marveled at the steam-inspired metallic characters gliding through the drama, their voices like so many tea kettles at the boil.

It was with that glittering, frenetic memory still twirling through my head that I read these words: Dr Lash, please come to my office this afternoon. When you have finished reading this, destroy it. Tell no one. Dr Garana. My image of Millicent, after the opera her green eyes and beautiful dark complexion sipping Oyster Rime and Kandush at the outdoor cafe of the old city, disintegrated.

Apparently it was to be all business. I needed to show I was up to the task. I pulled myself together, tidied up my mustache and chose my best walking stick. There was a certain lightness to my step that had been absent in the preceding days of the new disease. Now as I walked, I wondered why I hadn't asked Millicent out on another nocturnal jaunt when last we parted. In my imagination, I remedied that oversight on this outing.

Only in the middle of the elevator ride to the Air Ferry platform, jammed in with fifty people, did I register a sinister thread in what she'd written. Destroy the message? Tell no one? These two phrases scurried around my mind as we boarded, and later, drifting above the skysc.r.a.pers.

We were in her office, me sitting like a patient in front of her desk. I tried not to notice how happy I was to see her. She didn't return my smile. Instead, she said, "Have you had a lot of cases of this new fever?"

"Every day," I said. "It's brutal."

"I'm going to tell you some things that I'm not supposed to," she said. "You must tell no one."

I nodded.

"We know what this new disease is," she said. "You remember, I'm on the consulting board to the Republic's Health Policy Quotidian. The disease is airborne. It's caused by a spore, like an infinitesimal seedpod. Somehow, from somewhere, these spores have recently blown into the Republic. Left on their own, the things are harmless. We'd not have known they were there at all if the disease hadn't prompted us to look."

"Spores," I said, picturing tiny green burr b.a.l.l.s raining down upon the city.

She nodded. "Put them under pressure and extreme heat, though, like the conditions found in steam engines, and they crack open and release their seed. It's these seeds, no bigger than atoms, that cause the disease. The mist that falls from the Air Ferry or is expelled by a steam carriage, the perspiration of 10,000 turbines, the music of the calliope in the park all teeming with seed. It's in the steam. Once the disease takes hold in a few individuals, it becomes completely communicable."

I sat quietly for a moment, remembering from when I was a boy, the earliest flights of Capt. Madrigal's Air Ferry. As it flew above our street, I'd run in its shadow, through the mist of its precipitation, waving to those waving on board. Then I came to and said, "The Republic will obviously have to desist from using steam energy for the period of time necessary to quarantine, contain and destroy the disease."

"Lash, you know that's not going to happen."

"What then?" I asked.

"There is no other answer. The Republic is willing to let the disease run its course, willing to sacrifice a few thousand citizens in order to not miss a day of commerce. That's bad enough, but there's more. We've determined that there's a 60 per cent survival rate among those who contract it."

"Good odds," I said.

"Yes, but if you survive the fever stage something far more insidious happens."

"Does it have to do with that green discharge?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "Come, I'll show you." She stood up and led me through a door into one of the examination rooms. An attractive young woman sat on a chair by the window. She stood to greet us and shake hands. I introduced myself and learned her name was Harrin. There was small talk exchanged about the weather and the coming holiday. Millicent asked her how she was feeling and she responded that she felt quite well. She looked healthy enough to me.

"And where did you get that ring?" my colleague asked of the young woman.

Harrin held up her hand to show off the red jewel on her middle finger.

"This ring ..." she said and stared at it a moment. "Not but two days ago, a very odd fellow appeared at my door, bearing a small package. Upon greeting him, my heart jumped because he had a horn, like a small twisted deer antler, protruding from his left temple. The gnarled tip of it arced back toward the center of his head. He spoke my name in some foreign accent, his voice like the grumblings of a dog. I nodded. He handed me the package, turned, and paced silently into the shadows. Inside the outer wrapping there was a box, and in that box was this ring with a note. It simply read. For you. and was signed, The Prisoner Queen."

Millicent interrupted Harrin's tale and excused us. She took me by the arm and led me back into her office. She told her patient she would return in a moment and then shut the door. In a whisper, she said, "The green liquid initiating from the ear is the boundary between imagination and memory. The disease melts it and even though you survive the fevers, you can no longer distinguish between what has happened and what you have dreamed has happened or could have happened or should have. The Republic is going insane."

I was speechless. She led me to the opposite door and out into the corridor. Before I left, she kissed me. In light of what I'd been told, the touch of her lips barely startled me. It took me the rest of the day to recover from that meeting. I cancelled all of my appointments, locked myself in my office with a bottle of Fresnac and tried to digest that feast of secrets.

I never really got beyond my first question: why had Millicent told me? An act of love? A professional duty? Perhaps the Republic actually wanted me to know this information since I am a physician, but they couldn't officially announce it.

My first reaction was to flee the city, escape to where the Cloud Carriages rarely ventured, where the simply mechanical was still in full gear. But there were the patients, and I was a doctor. So I stayed in the city, ostensibly achieving nothing of medical value. Like my administration of the Margold, my decision to remain was more for me than any patient.

The Plague spread and imagination bled into memory, which bled into imagination hallucinations on the street, citizens locked in furious argument with themselves all over town, and the tales people told in response to the simplest questions were complex knots of wish fulfillment and nightmare. Then the Air Ferry driver remembered that to fly the giant vessel he was to ignore the list of posted protocols and flip b.u.t.tons and depress levers at whim. When the graceful, looming behemoth crashed in a fiery explosion into the city's well-to-do section, wiping out a full third of the Republic's politicos, not to mention a few hundred other citizens, I knew the end had come.

Many of those who had not yet lost their reason fled into the country, and from what I'd heard formed small enclaves that kept all strangers at bay. For my part, I stayed with the sinking s.h.i.+p of state. Still tracking down and doing nothing for those few patients suffering from the onset symptoms of the disease.