Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology

by Jay Barnson

  “Now I’m going to bet,” he said, pointin’ that cigar at me, “that you’re no more deaf and dumb than I am. Am I right?”

  “Yessir,” I said. “Of course I read your book, sir, but that whole deaf and dumb thing was just Ozzie’s way of keepin’ me from runnin’ my mouth and spoilin’ the con. Says I’m nearly as green as the marks.” Clemens got a big kick out of that. Sat back, and boy did he laugh!

  Long story short, he talked his friend Mr. Rogers, who owned the Standard Oil Company, into givin’ me a berth on that dirigible, and that was the true beginning of my airship career. I signed on as a deck hand, but pretty soon they saw clear that I had more on the ball than that, and I moved up fast. The captain of the River Raft took me under his wing. Started in to teach me navigation, and found out real quick that I already had a good start.

  Next voyage out, when we went from New York to Gander, Belfast, and London, he made me a midshipman. Three voyages back and forth across the Atlantic, and I was a second mate. Two years later and three voyages all the way around the world, I was first mate.

  It was in London that the Assam State Oil and Railway Company, from the far northeast of India, offered me my own brand new airship, which was just about finished being built in Germany. She was just over half the size of the River Raft, but she was mine! The company was launchin’ a pair of them to use to help build railways, and hunt and drill for oil out in the heavy forest of the State of Assam. Mine was to be called Ganesh. You saw the elephant-head god painted on my bow, right? Ganesh is the lover of wisdom, the protector, the remover of obstacles, the god of beginnings. The sister ship was to be named Kali, after the goddess of time, change, and destruction.

  So that’s how I first went to India. We did fine, my new crew and me, that first voyage from Germany to Assam. And everything was fine for the first few months we worked over the forests of Assam.

  But then the monsoon season hit, and all the work on the ground came to a soggy halt. Worst of all, the Rhodesians started getting bored. Rhodesians was the company’s security police—hired thugs, really, every one of them cut loose for one reason or another from the British South Africa Company. And when they got bored they got meaner than snakes.

  One in particular, a great hulk of a man named Corrock, an ax handle wide at the shoulders and a full head taller than me, was a real animal. I had heard stories about how brutal he was toward the railway and forestry workers, even his own men. He didn’t just keep order for the Company; he loved keepin’ people in fear, beatin’ men, women, and children at random. He would hunt men for sport when they tried to leave the work gangs and go back to their families.

  When the monsoons started, Corrock got it in his head to use the slack time to make some extra money. He and his men took to the forests to poach elephants for their ivory, just as they done in Africa. When they figured out that Indian elephants just don’t produce ivory the way African elephants do, it didn’t stop them. Instead they got angry, ruthless, and all the more brutal. They hunted the bulls until there wasn’t a single tusker alive within a two-days’ elephant ride.

  Corrock was right disgusted to learn that an Indian elephant cow don’t even have tusks—she has “tushes”—glorified molars that can’t even be seen unless her mouth is open. But these maggots didn’t think nothin’ of slaughterin’ an eight-thousand-pound cow for a couple of pounds of near worthless tooth ivory.

  I fought hard against orders to take them up scoutin’ the herds from the air, but in the end, I had to follow orders or lose my ship.

  The mornin’ of my last day as an airman was beautiful: the rains had let up for a bit. Corrock and his men loaded onto the dirigible. Since we was only supposed to go out for the mornin’, scout one particular herd, then come back, I only needed one other man: my loadmaster, a friend we called Assami, to handle the ropes. That day I was both captain and pilot. Corrock brought his whole five-man squad, which should have been my first warning that this was more than just a scouting expedition.

  Corrock sat next to me, up in the co-pilot’s seat, tellin’ me where to fly. He was no airman, so it was easy to make more engine noise than I had to. I could easily have circled upwind of each of the places on his list, then drifted silently downwind. Instead I came directly upwind each time, with all my engines roaring.

  Wild elephants are real smart, and learn quick how to stay away from people, so we flew around for several hours without seein’ a single one. I was managin’ to warn them all to hide. Corrock was none the wiser, but got pretty angry at not having any luck. Finally we come to the last place on his list: a small clearing in the forest barely twice the length of Ganesh.

  I came up on them from downwind just like at the other spots, with all the engines roarin’. But the knot of elephants in the center of the clearing didn’t move. They stood in a tight circle, their heads toward the middle.

  “Circle in on them,” Corrock says. So I did exactly that, hopin’ every moment that they would break and scatter. But they never moved.

  “No tuskers,” I said to him, as soon as we got a close look. “Nine cows, four calves. One more cow in the center giving birth.”

  “Shut your mouth, Yank, and keep circling,” he said.

  Almost as the words came out of his mouth, I heard a sound that made my blood run cold, a sound that will haunt me ‘til the day I die: the rattle and roar of a Vickers machine gun. God help me! I watched the circle of elephants wilt to the ground like a bouquet of flowers under a blowtorch.

  “Don't shoot! Leave them alone! They're mothers with babies!”I screamed, and turned back to Corrock, with a crazy idea that I could talk some sense into him. I found a Colt .45 Peacemaker pointed straight at my forehead.

  “Land,”was all Corrock said. So I did.

  As we neared the ground, my loadmaster jumped out the door with a hawser to make us fast to a fallen tree. Then he doubled over that tree trunk and puked.

  Corrock’s men piled out with bone saws and rifles. They walked through the herd, laughin’ and talkin’, shootin’ into the head of each of the wounded cows and calves in turn, and started sawin’ the tushes out of the jaws.

  I don’t remember leavin’ my seat or climbin’ out of the dirigible. I do remember standin’ over the carcass of the mother who had been giving birth. She was still quivering from the rifle shot to her brain. She was a magnificent beast, easy ten thousand pounds, clearly the matriarch of the herd. In a circle around her, dead on the ground, were fourteen of her daughters and granddaughters. And there, mostly hidden by her body, lay a newborn female calf, so new born that the birth caul still covered her head.

  I remember kneelin’ beside her, clearin’ away the caul, gatherin’ her up in my arms. She was nearly as big as me, but I seemed to have strength to spare. The killers hadn't come to her yet. She was unwounded and still breathing.

  I remember walking with her to Ganesh, and yellin’ to the load master, “Cast off. We’re leavin’.” I laid her down as gently as I could, climbed in, and pulled Assami in after me.

  The propellers had never stopped turnin’. The engines were still runnin’. I had just rotated the propellers for upward lift—we hadn’t yet left the ground—when I heard a scream. I jumped up in time to see Corrock throw Assami out the cargo hatch. As he turned back toward me, he was drawin’ that Colt Peacemaker.

  It was pure reflex: I yanked the handle for emergency ballast dump, just as Ozzie Osmond had done those years before when we first met. The dirigible jumped off the ground just the same, climbin’ even faster than Ozzie’s little blimp, because her propellers was pullin’ hard.

  Corrock was caught off guard, and he fell against the frame of the hatch. Even as much bigger than me as he was, that was all the advantage I needed. I flew through the air and hit him at the knees in a full-on, American-style football tackle.

  He pitched backwards out the door without a sound, his Peacemaker in his hand. It’s a miracle that I didn’t go flyin’ out the door with him,
but somehow I didn’t. By the time I managed to get back to my feet and into my seat, Ganesh was several hundred feet off the ground.

  At first I flew back toward headquarters, but in the end I flew right over, because I knew that even if the fall hadn’t killed him and made me a murderer, there was no way Corrock would let me live after I tackled him like that and left him and his men in the forest. And I had that baby elephant to think about, behind me in the passenger cabin, crying for her mother.

  After two days, I had flown forty-six hours straight, stopping only once for fuel, heading straight to Bombay, to the only zoo I knew about, hoping they could save her. I was coming in low over the hills near the ocean, west of the city. That's when the Kali caught up to me. The first hint I hadn’t made a clean getaway was when I heard their Vickers machine gun open up, above and behind me.

  And it’s just about the last thing I remember for the next several weeks. The next thing I remember is comin’ to real slow, not really knowin’ if I was alive or dead, how much time had passed, or where I was.

  If I was dead, I knew this wasn’t any heaven I ever heard about, because all I could see was pinkish-grey haze. My eyes had been burned bad. I couldn’t feel anything from my shoulders down. I could hear folks talkin’, like from very far away, too dim to make out.

  “You were at the Good Doctor’s leper hospital! In Bombay!” Nick guessed. “That’s how you come to be flying for her!”

  Yep. The Good Doctor. Doctor Lakshmi. I crashed and burned less than a mile from her compound. She came with Kocheril and Gunjita, and they carried me back, more dead than alive. She brought back the baby elephant, who was almost unhurt. It was a miracle. Two miracles.

  She hid me among the leprosy patients when the Rhodesians came lookin’ for me. Convinced them that no one could have survived that hydrogen fire and crash. Which was nearly the truth. She got the baby elephant to the zoo, to a nursing mother with another baby. She lived, and in a year or two she’ll go back to the wild.

  For weeks Kocheril, the orderly, and Gunjita, the nurse, cared for me around the clock. Doctor Lakshmi came every day, and eventually, when I was strong enough, she gave me the first of the ruby light treatments for my eyes.

  She never promised anything—didn’t want to get my hopes up—but finally the day came when she could remove the bandages for good. I really didn’t expect anything at all, except that my eyes were probably burned far too bad for me to ever have hope of seein’ again.

  I remember her slowly, gently unwindin’ the bandage. “Open your eyes slowly. Give them time to adjust to the light. You have been a long time in the dark.”

  I waited a long time before I spoke. “Hmm!” I said. “You look exactly as I pictured you.”

  The Good Doctor laughed. “Is that good or bad?”

  “Very good! Either my eyes work perfectly and you are the most beautiful woman I ever saw, or I’m still asleep and dreamin’. Or hallucinatin’.”

  “You flatter me, young man!” She patted me on the shoulder, which I couldn’t feel, but liked all the same.

  I went on and on to her about how I could never repay her for my life, or for my sight. That’s when she said something that would change my life. Again.

  She said, “I don't need or want repayment. No one here pays for their treatment. But there may be a way for you to help. First there are some people I want you to meet. Gunjita? Kocheril?”

  My eyes must have been big as saucers when I seen those two. They had been strangers months before, but now they were dear friends. And I had never laid eyes on either of them until that very moment.

  I wouldn’t have taken either of them for human at first glance. Not nearly as human-lookin’ as you, Nick. They both roll around on hard India rubber wheels. Totally silent. They’re both encased completely in stainless steel cabinets. Easy to sterilize, I guess.

  Multiple sets of clockwork and hydraulic arms plainly designed for one thing: caring for hospital patients. Only from the eyes up did they look human. Black hair, both of them. Gunjita’s had flecks of gray. The kindest eyes I have ever seen on a human being. Except maybe the Good Doctor’s.

  Kocheril got a good laugh out of it. “Sahib,” he said, “the look on your face is priceless.”

  “Well you no good so-and-so!” I said when I could finally talk. “Makin’ me think all this time you had the strength of three men, liftin’ me around all by yourself like I was a baby!” He got another good laugh out of that.

  “But I do!'” he says. “It takes several non-mech attendants to do what I do. And my body never gets tired. I need far less rest.”

  “He is worth six human attendants,” says Gunjita.

  “And she is worth six human nurses,” says Kocheril.

  When I asked them how they got this way, they told me it was Doctor Malieux’s gift to them, that they were once like I was now, completely without the use of their bodies. Both of them torn up by leprosy, with nothing to do but lie in bed all day, waiting for pneumonia or some other infection to finally kill them.

  She gave them back the ability to move, to be useful. More than anything, she gave them the ability to give back something of the loving care that others had showered on them.

  All three of them was really concerned that I understand that this was entirely their choice. That they chose the life they had. Not like you and the other industrial mechs here in London, Nick. Gunjita and Kocheril are free to come and go as they choose. They are Doctor Lakshmi’s Friends. She calls them “fellow servants.”

  “You mean I get the same chance?” I said. I was pretty excited. “I get to serve right alongside you in the hospital?”

  Doctor Lakshmi smiled. “No, my friend,” she says. “My father and I have been discussing you at length ever since you first came here. You are a karmic gift. A great opportunity.”

  “Your father?”

  “My father is the Maharajah of Golkondah. He is the financial benefactor of the clinic and the colony. We have agreed that having you here—you, a trained airship pilot—gives us a new opportunity. We want to expand our work, to bring the most severe cases from all over India. To fly them here. We want you to lead that effort.”

  “How would I do that?” I asked.

  She said, “I am having a new, very special airship built, one that can be made to serve as your body. You will become a mechanical man. A very large, very special, flying mechanical man. A mega-mech.”

  You could have knocked me over with a feather. I choked up a minute, but when I could finally talk, I said, “Doc! Good glory! If you had offered me this even when I had full use of my arms and legs I mighta took you up on it! To be a creature of the air?To fly?With my very own body? Doc! That’s every airman’s dream!”

  “I thought you might feel that way,” she said. “But I want you to sleep on it, consider it carefully. It would be sad if later you felt you had been rushed into a decision.”

  “I can tell you my answer won’t be no different tomorrow.”

  “Very well. Tomorrow we will speak again.”

  “Like I said, Doc, count me in.”

  “Very well,” she says, with a big grin on her face.

  “One favor, Doc?”

  “What is it?”

  “Could we name the ship after the one I crashed?”

  “Perfect,” she says. “Ganesh. The god of new beginnings.”

  I - Cavatina

  Mr. Jonesburry stepped off the ramp with a heavy sigh of relief as his feet finally touched solid ground. Adjusting his hat with a trembling hand, he fumbled nervously as he recovered his pipe from one of his many coat pockets.

  He placed the stem between his teeth, beginning the quest to locate his tobacco pouch, but stopped short as he laid eyes on a nearby collection of hydrogen tanks. The oversized gas canisters had him quickly rethinking his plan and he returned the pipe to its hiding place, deciding instead to make a beeline for the airfield’s terminal building.

  Jonesburry could remember
when he never used to have a problem with the airships. Quite the contrary: not that long ago, he would have considered himself quite fond of the machines. They often used a much faster form of transport, a blessing given his occupation and the time constraints which were often placed on delivering a bounty to its intended destination. But there was also a time when he rather enjoyed the sensation of flying over the vast expanses of open ocean. There was a certain sense of freedom to air travel that no other method of transportation quite managed to replicate.

  But since this latest job, he had somehow lost his fondness for the contraptions and he knew it wasn’t due to his own misgivings. No, it was MacGregor, the man he had been contracted to retrieve, who had the issue with flying, and it was his insecurities that were beginning to bleed through their shared bond.

  Nothing but giant, flammable death traps.

  That had been the way he had described the airship when they had first boarded back in the colonies. Back then, it had taken nearly all of Jonesburry’s considerable mental effort to compel the overweight man to mount the airship’s boarding ramp. The binding’s link had only been newly formed, and in the first few hours it often took substantial energy to compel a charge to do anything they considered even remotely life-threatening.

  But as time passed and their shared neural bindings deepened, it often became far less problematic for Mr. Jonesburry to direct the actions of his charges against their will. After all the time they had spent together on the airship’s continental crossing, he now had no doubt that he would be able to compel MacGregor to walk straight into the path of an oncoming train—if he were so minded to, that was.