Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  For whatever you could say about their complementary designs, clearly, they left something to be desired.

  “What a marvelous design for an engine,” both men said at the same time. They looked up at one another, a bit put out, then shook each other’s hand. “I’m Benjamin Decker,” the other chap said. Retaining full memories of his life in the modern world, Mort knew right away this was Santini from an earlier life. Decker, for his part, took Chaplin (Mort’s name in this life) at face value, showing no sign of awareness of their prior acquaintance.

  “You’ll excuse me, I have some final adjustments to make,” they both said. After a brief moment of being stunned by how in sync they were, they returned to work on one another’s crafts.

  Chaplin repaired Decker’s plane by adjusting the compression on the pistons powering the diesel engine so they no longer misfired. The engine hummed almost imperceptibly. The fan blades spun so fast they were no more than a blur. It rippled the air, making the vista beyond it, showcasing the nobleman’s estate, seem more mirage than real.

  Strolling over to throw a wary eye on Decker’s handiwork, Chaplin scrunched his face up until he resembled a pug. It was his way of showing admiration. Decker had patched the leak on the steam pipes leading from his engine with liquid metal that hardened into place once exposed to the steam heat. He adjusted the condenser which sucked humidity out of the air to lighten the load on the water tanks (used as fuel) so it would better extract moisture. This he did by removing the protective housing, which he’d decided it didn’t need, and exposing more surface area to the air. Chaplin had to admit, upon eying the unit all naked and “vulnerable” that it had been unduly thorough of him to shield a unit that was strictly backup anyway from any untoward collisions in the air with geese or other flying dangers.

  Decker adjusted the idle on the engine until it purred. “I think that should do it.” He watched the rear propeller find its groove, as the individual blades disappeared. The front propellers, too, now looked more like a pair of shades dimming the light to the vista in the background, the blades themselves imperceptible.

  To their chagrin, two hunting dogs, driven mad by the chase of a fox, leaped into both of their rear fan blades to be reduced to chunk meat in their efforts to reach the fox.

  The fox bounded into the woods unharmed, while the rest of the pack gave chase.

  A couple more dogs, leaping madly to clear the hurdle of the plane, found Chaplin’s front propellers, where they, too, died grisly deaths.

  It all happened so fast, Chaplin barely had time count bodies. The estate noblemen, racing their horses after the dogs, didn’t even slow, and didn’t notice the few animals their posse of dogs was now down.

  “I suppose that’s quite the testament to the soundness of the engines,” Decker said, “not to mention the propeller designs, of both craft.” He sounded grave and humorless when he spoke, hoping to blunt his love of animals perhaps with his love of engineering.

  Chaplin grunted and, from his tenor, communicated the same solemn regard for life lost that the dogs’ owners couldn’t summon. He wondered if the horsemen had indeed noticed the unfortunate incident and refused to have it detract from the thrill of the chase.

  A beautiful woman, on a black stallion with mane braided in the fashion of steeple-jumping horses, reined her horse in briefly to admire the planes, as they admired her and her fine mount. “My father will expect recompense for the dogs,” she shouted.

  “We’ll expect recompense for de-mucking the engines,” Decker blasted back at her, angrier at her lack of sympathy over the loss of life than her impudence over whom had claims to whose money.

  Chaplin tipped his hat to her, still too taken in by her beauty to pay too much mind to her callous disregard for life. Besides, she had had the decency to stop, which was more than the rest had done, and she even managed to eye the dogs’ remains sadly before trotting on. For a nobleman, that was a great show of emotion; they tended to play their cards rather close to the vests. So maybe she was being unduly gracious by her standards. Leastways, this early into their relationship, Chaplin was fully prepared to defend her honor, until she proved a genuine shit, as most of them did, at which point he’d be forced to reconcile his sexual urges with his desire to wring the neck of any nobleman within reach. An inventor who had reached his station in life under his own steam, pardon the pun, resiliently and defiantly independent, and fiercely keen on working, he was further set apart from the leisure class with his determination to change the world.

  Decker threw a hand around him as much to bring him back into the moment, as to segue to a discussion of the problem at hand. “I’m dying to show you my factory,” he said, “but then you will be in a position to steal all my secrets.”

  “Oh, get off it. We can already see how to steal one another’s designs just by what little we’ve observed of each other’s work. So this is what I suggest. We become partners. Decker-Chaplin enterprises, and get on with designing and testing hybrids that make the most of each man’s designs. Considering the inventiveness I’ve seen here today, I’m thinking we can set the world on fire.”

  Decker laughed and hugged him from the side, as they both watched the beautiful woman disappear into the woods on her horse.

  Chaplin shifted his attention to the castle. “What is this place?”

  “The Harding Estate.”

  “Do you hate noblemen half as much as I do?” Chaplin said.

  “No, I hate them twice as much. They bought our lands and chased my mother and me off when I was a boy. Been working as a grease mechanic ever since to pay for room and board. She died before she could see what a success I’d made of myself.”

  Chaplin walked Decker back to his plane, and gave him a leg up. Waving him off, as the plane began to take off, he shouted, “I’ll follow you to your factory.”

  Mort was curious to find out what had happened to Chaplin that was so traumatizing as to bring this past life to light now, considering how comfortable and at home he felt here, more so than back in his current time in the twenty-first century. Had the Decker-Chaplin partnership soured? Was it a matter of betrayal, either personal or professional? He hopped in the plane, and sped after Decker, for the time being, content to run into the brick wall when it came at him from out of nowhere for the sake of enjoying better the here and now.

  One other thing occurred to him on the flight over: Decker and Chaplin had to have known each other from yet a previous lifetime. Or, as with this steampunk reality, some other timeline running parallel to the one they lived in in the twenty-first century. Not even two chaps sharing a passion in common got along this famously right out of the starting gate. Decker may not have sensed it consciously, but unconsciously, there had to be some powerful dynamic at work there.

  Mort was becoming a fast fan of sliding between alternate realities. He thought again about what the crazy woman had said back at the Renaissance Faire; that the Earth was undergoing a cosmic alignment. Maybe it opened doorways to the entire multiverse. A short-lived time best made the most use of until this two-thousand-year cycle of the zodiac ended, setting the wheel of time to turning once again, and recalibrating it back to its most primitive starting point in the next cycle, and the next Dark Ages. Maybe the even-rarer thirty-thousand-year cycles were all that much more empowering, when the solar system came into better alignment with the entire Milky Way galaxy. Maybe these auspicious times in history just allowed the properly initiated a ticket to ride. He’d have to hit up Sister Gretchen for some advice on the finer points of cosmic wisdom when next they crossed paths.

  THIRTEEN

  Decker proved a relentless worker, what in Mort’s day would have been called a workaholic and then some. He never truly stopped. Every few hours, he got up, stretched, did some calisthenics, or ran like a madman across the overhead catwalks, turning them into his private track. He climbed up and down ropes to the catwalks from the cement floors over fifty feet below, where they assembled their
planes, turning the entire airplane hangar into his personal jungle gym. After giving him a queer look the first couple weeks, and starting to feel stiff from bending over one airplane chassis after another, Chaplin decided, when in Rome… He joined Decker for the frequent breaks and used what was at hand to work out. Chaplin fancied the engine parts, which he hoisted like free weights back home, in his other reality. Decker, after seeing him in action, aped his workout regimen, but decided it wasn’t for him, preferring to play monkey, climbing up and down ropes, and running catwalks.

  ***

  Decker had a wild idea for an engine that essentially electrified the atmosphere in the vicinity of the jet-exhaust, created by the engine “smelting” molecules into atoms, and then splitting the atoms down into even smaller components. He was, in fact, describing an atomic powered craft, though he didn’t have the vocabulary, of course, to put to what he was saying.

  Chaplin, informed by Mort’s memories, elucidated for him some of the missing pieces to hurry the engineering process along. He suggested the use of molten fluoride salt as a fuel, as moderated by beryllium oxide, and liquid sodium as a secondary coolant. He also recommended a thermal exchange system outside the radioactive core to minimize risk of a possible catastrophe that resulted in radiation damage to the environment.

  They discussed the need to contain the core reaction so they didn’t end up creating a bomb, instead, and the need to protect themselves from radiation all the while they were building the thing. Most of all, the need to keep their engine from getting into the hands of anyone who might have other ideas for it. They needed, in short, a design which couldn’t be readily disassembled and re-engineered. An engine that couldn’t be tampered with might be one that had a self-destruct mechanism for anyone getting a little too curious. At which point radiation damage to the environment would be the least of their concerns.

  The prototype, furthermore, would need to frustrate x-ray scans, only now coming on the scene, thanks to some other upstart inventors refusing to respect their places in history; more keen on knotting the timeline than following it slavishly.

  In effect, Mort acted as Decker’s muse. Even with his modern “understanding” of atomic energy, he was way out of his weight class, knowing no more about it than any layman living in the twenty-first century who absorbed what he did from the nightly news and the Discovery Channel.

  Chaplin, however, was an experimental genius in his own right. With Decker playing the theoretical genius, and left to work out the finer points of the atomic engine Mort had inspired, Chaplin was fairly good with the extrapolating to come up with the experimental prototypes. When that didn’t work, Decker stuck his head under the hood, made a few suggestions, and they were off and running again.

  Mort rather liked being a genius, albeit secondarily through Chaplin, and wondered why he’d ever settled on his more oafish twenty-first century persona. Maybe it was a vacation lifetime away from the eternal workaholism engendered by genius, plus a sense of history or social consciousness, which led him to be nearly the workaholic Decker was. In this reality, he stopped only to court the ladies, like the one on the black stallion, whose name he’d managed to wheedle out of the local pub owner fashioning a living close to their factory.

  ***

  With everyone keen on cannibalizing one another’s designs in the steampunk era, the question remained of how to solicit loyal apprentices. Chaplin and Decker interviewed various young men in their late teens and twenties, some into their early thirties, who had managed to do little but bum around, scratching out a living, and not amounting to much. They had done their share of thieving to get by. Since hiring thieves that could steal their ideas and run to the nearest inventor, who could reward them handsomely for the designs, was the last thing they needed, everything hinged on character. Between Decker and Chaplin, they seemed to be a pretty good judge of people of fine stock who were merely down on their luck. They winnowed the list further down to those who had mechanical and scientific aptitudes enough to be of some use.

  Once hired, the boys created a series of “bear traps” to thwart intruders that occasionally Chaplin would stumble into. They could hear him cursing throughout the factory, even when they couldn’t see him because of the rows of stacked equipment. One of the boys, a klutz, forever falling into his own traps, had become adept at applying first aid to himself, and doctored Chaplin, as well. He explained to Chaplin that the traps had to be moved periodically so no one could learn how to get around them, which meant Chaplin had to train himself to look for them before he tripped one. That worked in theory, except when the boys introduced some new invention of their own, inspired by Decker’s and Chaplin’s handiwork to get creative of their own accord.

  Despite arduous precautions, break-ins were frequent. Chaplin had developed the hobby of using the catwalks for his turkey shoots when one or more marauders penetrated the safe confines of the airplane hangar. Between the traps set throughout the factory, and dodging bullets, few made it out of the factory alive. The bodies were promptly reduced to dust in one of several furnaces throughout the plant used for smelting metal into shape for airplane parts. As to the ones that got away, they, too, had become Chaplin’s responsibility. Decker was too busy with engineering duties, having taken over much of the work from Chaplin now that the theoretical design part was over, and finesse was needed to finalize work on the prototypes beyond Chaplin’s tinkering abilities.

  This left Chaplin with his latest pastime, hunting down and finishing off the thieves with rifles and crossbows, all of the steampunk variety, many tinkered together by the lads as part of their security detail. They fired nearly as well and as far as Mort’s twenty-first century .44 Magnum, with nearly as deadly a force. They used gunpowder and shells, as did conventional weapons, and steam compression and oil solvents to clean the cylinders as they were discharged, giving off a fiery trail not too unlike dragon’s breath. All in all, Mort figured that made them arguably superior to modern weapons, at least in the zero-maintenance category.

  As for his latest entertainment of hunting men to their deaths and disposing of their bodies in the river Thames, Mort supposed this might have been the traumatic experience that had led him to repent as a cop in a later life alongside Santini. For a lot of the poor chaps he hunted down, he knew full well, were simply trying to eke out a living using the few talents at their disposal, and had no more claim to being a bad guy than he did, factoring in for desperation and all. All the rationales in the world as to how the world was actually a safer place without their designs getting into the wrong hands, and that, for every one he shot, he was actually saving millions of lives, did little to quell the guilt by the time he returned to the hangar after a long night of playing guard dog.

  ***

  Chaplin was coming to resent playing second fiddle to Decker’s genius, even with the advantage Mort’s memories from the twenty-first century lent him. Maybe on later return visits to this reality, once Mort had incorporated more knowledge of himself from still more lifetimes, he’d get his chance to best Decker. But not this go-around. Maybe that in fact was why he was back here, to learn how to step out of the shadow of greatness.

  With little else to do during the quiet times, Mort contemplated what visiting these timelines meant exactly. After all, he was affecting the equation inhabiting Chaplin’s head, playing copilot. Maybe Fabio was right. There was no such thing as time traveling. One could only open alternative timelines through any efforts to get in touch with another reality.

  He spent his nights trying to get in touch with still more of these alternate realities. But for now at least, his efforts were moribund. He still didn’t have enough power of mind stored up. He hadn’t healed enough wounds by traveling to these other lives and reclaiming the pieces of himself lost there, owning the pain, digesting it, and assimilating the learning into his current self. All this was based on Gretchen’s own time-traveling hypotheses, of course, but Mort had glommed on pretty tightly to
her theorizing. He couldn’t deny the therapeutic effects felt firsthand for what little time-traveling he had experienced so far. He felt stronger and more able to tackle life head on all the time. He felt like the Incredible Hulk trapped in the chair, being irradiated by knowledge from various lifetimes the longer he sat, growing more and more powerful. Even with what Decker was doing to his ego factored into the equation, when last had he played super-genius exactly, and had his hand in building the antecedents of a new age? When, like Tesla, had he last laid down a foundation of technology that would hold up the next one hundred years?

  And then there was Adriana, the black-stallion-riding aristocrat he’d met that fateful day he’d run into Decker, who filled the rest of his time. She condescended to him the entire time they were together. Her verbal digs were endless; it was her idea of foreplay. Provoking the beast to pound her in the bedroom and work out his frustrations with her in a sexual language understood only by brutes. When could he recall having an ego strong enough to withstand the acid test of Adriana? What better proof did he need of growing as a person via his own cockeyed fashion of astral-traveling to alternate dimensions, if that’s what this was? It was power-dreaming for Olympiads determined to be even more full of themselves, he would deride himself occasionally.

  “How do you spend your time, these days?” Adriana asked, slogging back beers with him in his pub of choice—spitting distance from the factory, which he never told her, of course. Nor did he tell her how he actually spent his time. No one got that rich without being nefarious and ingenious, and Chaplin wasn’t looking for more enemies or competitors looking to wheedle their way into his operations.

  “I do what men of my sort do. I beat up the homeless and rob from them whatever money they’ve begged from respectable people.”