Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  Beatrice remained cold and distant, no matter how Franz tried to warm their relationship. He was meticulous in his care for her. He read newspapers to her daily; he made love to her with great care. Nothing seemed to get her attention. Should he have tried harder to win the first Beatrice? Should he have pursued her more? Why hadn’t he? And the question that plagued him the most—had Beatrice loved him as violently as he loved her? One night, he told Anna the whole story over a shared supper.

  “I’ll never find out,” he said. “Did she really love me? Would I have loved her at all, once I got to know her? Perhaps it was just a dream. She might be nothing like I thought she was.”

  Anna shook her head, smoothing the pages of the journal she was reading. “I learned something from falling in love with that Koenig & Bauer. Infatuation is worth nothing. It has nothing to do with the real world.” She nodded at the steam engine looming in the corner by her bed. “Me and Hercules, we have an understanding. We take care of each other. It’s a better kind of love, I think.”

  “This Beatrice might come to love me, don’t you think?” Franz said.

  “She might,” said Anna. “And you have her right here. That’s more than you can say about the other.”

  Anna’s relationship to Hercules did seem much happier in comparison, especially when her belly started to swell. The pregnancy was uncomplicated, even though Anna sometimes complained of strange sensations in her stomach. When Franz laid an ear to her belly, he could hear clicking and whirring sounds in there.

  “What will you do when it’s time?” he asked.

  “I can’t go to the hospital,” said Anna. “They’ll take the child from me. You’ll have to help me.”

  Franz couldn’t say no. He stole what he might need from the clinic, a little at a time: suture, tongs, morphine, iodine solution. He had only delivered babies twice, and never on his own, but he didn’t tell Anna this.

  Even when she had contractions, Anna kept feeding Hercules. She wouldn’t let Franz do it. She didn’t stop until she went into labour. The delivery was a quick process. The child was small but healthy, its pistons well integrated in the flesh. But once the placenta had emerged, the bleeding wouldn’t stop. Anna bled out in the warehouse, the child on her belly.

  “Put me in Hercules,” were her last faint words. “I want to be inside him.”

  Franz did as she asked. First he gently washed the child, wrapped it in clean linen and put it in a basket next to Anna’s bed. Then he turned to Anna where she lay on the bed. He wiped the blood off her body with a wet cloth, and folded a clean sheet around her. He lifted her off the bed with some difficulty and carried her over to where Hercules waited. She fit in the oven perfectly.

  “That’s the last you’ll get,” he told Hercules. “I’m not going to feed you.”

  The steam engine seemed to glare at Franz from its corner. The oven hatch glowed with the heat from Anna’s body. Franz turned his back on it and picked the baby up, cradling it in his arms. It opened its mouth and cried with a whistling noise. Franz walked over to his side of the warehouse, holding the baby up in front of his airship.

  “We’re foster parents now, Beatrice,” he said.

  For the first time he could sense a reaction from her. It felt like approval, but it wasn’t directed at him.

  The child was a girl. Franz named her Josephine. He tried to feed her cow’s milk at first, but she spit it out, hissing. She steadily lost weight, her pistons squealing and rasping, until Franz in desperation dissolved some coal in water, dipped the end of a rag in it and stuck it in her mouth. When Josephine immediately sucked the rag dry, Franz understood what kind of care his foster daughter needed. He took the box of maintenance tools Anna had kept for Hercules, and greased Josephine’s pistons carefully with good oil. He fed her a steady diet of coal-water, gradually increasing the coal until it was a thick paste. When she had enough teeth, he gave her small bits of coal to gnaw on. The girl didn’t need diapers, as she didn’t produce any waste; she seemed to spend whatever she ate as body heat. If he fed her too much, she became unbearably hot to the touch, her pistons burning his hands. These peculiarities aside, she behaved much like a normal baby.

  Franz wrote a letter of resignation to the clinic. He sold Hercules to a factory, and Anna’s furniture to an auction house. The money would be enough for rent and food for a long time to come, if he spent it wisely. He would at least be able to take care of his airship and his foster daughter. Whenever he had to leave their home, he put the baby in Beatrice’s gondola. When he came back, the baby was always in a good humour, comfortably cradled in the otherwise hard seat, cooing and playing with dials or tubes that had somehow come loose from the console. When Josephine was old enough not to need constant feeding, he found work at another clinic. Josephine seemed content to spend her days in the gondola. Beatrice radiated affection whenever the girl was near.

  The catastrophe came when Josephine was four years old. The little girl didn’t have vocal cords, but a set of minuscule pipes arrayed in her larynx. She whistled and tweeted until her fourth birthday, when she suddenly started modulating the noise into speech. It was early morning. They had just finished breakfast. Josephine was sitting on the table, Franz lubricating the pistons in her arms. Josephine opened her mouth and said in a high, fluting voice:

  “Father, her name isn’t Beatrice.”

  “Is that so,” said Franz, dripping oil on her finger joints.

  “She says so every time you call her Beatrice. That’s not my name, she says.”

  Franz blinked. “Do you understand everything she says?”

  “Her name isn’t Beatrice,” Josephine repeated. “It’s something else. And she wants to say some things to you.”

  Josephine sat with her legs dangling from the gondola, warbling the airship’s thoughts without seeming to grasp their meaning. Franz was informed of the following: The airship’s name wasn’t Beatrice. It was something entirely different. She had lived as a slave under her husband, and he had raped her while pretending her to be someone else. She hated him.

  “That can’t be right,” said Franz. “We worked on this marriage together. She was the one who wouldn’t make an effort.”

  “She says, I had no choice,” said Josephine. “She says, you’re holding me captive.”

  Franz felt his throat constrict. “I certainly am not,” he said. “I’ve worked so hard.” He shoved his hands in his pockets to stop them from trembling. “I’ve worked so hard,” he repeated.

  “She wants to fly,” said Josephine.

  Franz opened the great double doors to the warehouse, and slowly towed Beatrice outside. He knew what was going to happen. That Josephine was going to climb up into the gondola while he was busy sorting out the tethers. That Beatrice II would tear free of her moorings and swiftly rise up into the sky, drifting east. That she would be gone in a matter of minutes, leaving him alone on the ground.

  He sorted out the tethers. Meanwhile, Josephine climbed up in the gondola. Beatrice II suddenly pulled at the moorings, which snapped, and she ascended without a sound. Franz stood outside the warehouse, watching the sky, until night fell.

  1. The Transformation Problem

  In glancing over my correspondence with Herr Marx, especially the letters written during the period in which he struggled to complete his opus, Capital, even whilst I was remanded to the Victoria Mill of Ermen and Engels in Weaste to simultaneously betray the class I was born into and the class to which I’d dedicated my life, I was struck again by the sheer audacity of my plan. I’ve moved beyond political organizing or even investigations of natural philosophy and have used my family’s money and the labour of my workers— even now, after a lifetime of railing against the bourgeoisie, their peculiar logic limns my language—to encode my old friend’s thoughts in a way I hope will prove fruitful for the struggles to come.

  I am a fox, ever hunted by agents of the state, but also by political rivals and even the occasional enthusiastic
student intellectual manqué. For two weeks, I have been making a very public display of destroying my friend’s voluminous correspondence. The girls come in each day and carry letters and covers both in their aprons to the roof of the mill to burn them in a soot-stained metal drum. It’s a bit of a spectacle, especially as the girls wear cowls to avoid smoke inhalation and have rather pronounced limps as they walk the bulk of letters along the roof, but we are ever attracted to spectacle, are we not? The strings of electrical lights in the petit-bourgeois districts that twinkle all night, the iridescent skins of the dirigibles that litter the skies over The City like peculiar flying fish leaping from the ocean—they even appear overhead here in Manchester, much to the shock, and more recently, glee of the street urchins who shout and yawp whenever one passes under the clouds, and the only slightly more composed women on their way to squalid Deansgate market. A fortnight ago I took in a theatrical production, a local production of Mr Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, already a hoary old play given new life and revived, ironically enough, by recent innovations in electrified machine-works. How bright the lights, how stunning the arc of actual lightning, tamed and obedient, how thunderous the ovations and the crumbling of the glacial cliffs! All the bombast of German opera in a space no larger than a middle-class parlour. And yet, throughout the entire evening, the great and hulking monster never spoke. Contra Madame Shelley’s engaging novel, the “new Adam” never learns of philosophy, and the total of her excellent speeches of critique against the social institutions of her, and our, day are expurgated. Instead, the monster is ever an infant, given only to explosions of rage. Yet the audience, which contained a fair number of working-men who had managed to save or secure 5d. for “penny-stinker” seating, were enthralled. The play’s Christian morality, alien to the original novel, was spelled out as if on a slate for the audience, and the monster was rendered as nothing more than an artefact of unholy vice. But lights blazed, and living snow from coils of refrigeration fell from the ceiling, and spectacle won the day.

  My burning of Marx’s letters is just such a spectacle—the true correspondence is secreted among a number of the safe houses I have acquired in Manchester and London. The girls on the roof-top are burning unmarked leaves, schoolboy doggerel, sketches, and whatever else I have laying about. The police have infiltrated Victoria Mill, but all their agents are men, as the work of espionage is considered too vile for the gentler sex. So the men watch the girls come from my office with letters by the bushel and burn them, then report every lick of flame and wafting cinder to their superiors.

  My brief digression regarding the Frankenstein play is apposite, not only as it has to do with spectacle but with my current operation at Victoria Mill. Surely, Reader, you are familiar with Mr Babbage’s remarkable Difference Engine, perfected in 1822—a year prior to the first production of Mr Peake’s theatrical adaptation of Frankenstein—given the remarkable changes to the political economy that took place in the years after its introduction. How did we put it, back in the heady 1840s? Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? That was just the beginning. Ever more I was reminded not of my old work with Marx, but of Samuel Butler’s prose fancy Erewhon—the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

  With the rise of the Difference Engine and the subsequent rationalization of market calculations, the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary aspect continued unabated. Steam-navigation took to the air; railways gave way to horseless carriages; electric telegraphs to instantaneous wireless aethereal communications; the development of applied volcanisation to radically increase the amount of arable land, and to tame the great prize of Africa, the creation of automata for all but the basest of labour…ah, if only Marx were still here. That, I say to myself each morning upon rising. If only Marx were still here! The stockholders demand to know why I have not automated my factory, as though the clanking stove-pipe limbs of the steam-workers aren’t just more dead labor! As though Arbeitskraft—labour-power—is not the source of all value! If only Marx were still here! And he’d say, to me, Freddie, perhaps we were wrong. Then he’d laugh and say, I’m just having some fun with you.

  But we were not wrong. The internal contradictions of capitalism have not peacefully resolved themselves; the proletariat still may become the new revolutionary class, even as steam-worker builds steam-worker under the guidance of the of Difference Engine No. 53. The politico-economic chasm between bourgeoisie and proletarian has grown ever wider, despite the best efforts of the Fabian Society and other gradualists to improve the position of the working-class vis-à-vis their esteemed—and en-steamed, if you would forgive the pun—rulers. The Difference Engine is a device of formal logic, limited by the size of its gear-work and the tensile strength of the metals used in its construction. What I propose is a device of dialectical logic, a repurposing of the looms, a recording of unity of conflicts and opposites drawn on the finest of threads to pull innumerable switches, based on a linguistic programme derived from the correspondence of my comrade-in-arms.

  I am negating the negation, transforming my factory into a massive Dialectical Engine that replicates not the arithmetical operations of an abacus but the cogitations of a human brain. I am rebuilding Karl Marx on the factory floor, repurposing the looms of the factory to create punch-cloths of over one thousand columns, and I will speak to my friend again.

  2. The Little Match Girls

  Under the arclights of Fairfield Road I saw them, on my last trip to The City. The evening’s amusement had been invigorating if empty, a fine meal had been consumed immediately thereafter, and a digestif imbibed. I’d dismissed my London driver for the evening, for a cross-town constitutional. I’d catch the late airship, I thought. Match girls, leaving their shift in groups, though I could hardly tell them from steam-workers at first, given their awkward gaits and the gleam of metal under the lights, so like the monster in the play, caught my eye.

  Steam-workers still have trouble with the finest work—the construction of Difference Engine gears is skilled labour performed by a well-remunerated aristocracy of working-men. High-quality cotton garments and bedclothes too are the remit of proletarians of the flesh, thus Victoria Mill. But there are commodities whose production still requires living labour not because of the precision needed to create the item, but due to the danger of the job. The production of white phosphorous matches is one of these. The matchsticks are too slim for steam-worker claws, which are limited to a trio of pincers on the All-Purpose Models, and to less refined appendages—sledges, sharp blades—on Special-Purpose Models. Furthermore, the aluminium outer skin, or shell, of the steam-worker tends to heat up to the point of combusting certain compounds, or even plain foolscap. So Bryant and May Factory in Bow, London, retained young girls, ages fourteen and up, to perform the work.

  The stories in The Link and other reformist periodicals are well-known. Twelve-hour days for wages of 4s. a week, though it’s a lucky girl who isn’t fined for tardiness, who doesn’t suffer deductions for having dirty feet, for dropping matches from her frame, for allowing the machines to falter rather than sacrifice her fingers to it. The girls eat their bread and butter—most can afford more only rarely, and then it’s marmalade—on the line, leading to ingestion of white phosphorous. And there were the many cases of “phossy jaw”—swollen gums, foul breath, and some physicians even claimed that the jawbones of the afflicted would glow, like a candle shaded by a leaf of onion skin paper. I saw the gleaming of these girls’ jaws as I passed and swore to myself. They were too young for phossy jaw; it takes years for the deposition of phosphorous
to build. But as they passed me by, I saw the truth.

  Their jaws had all been removed, a typical intervention for the disease, and they’d been replaced with prostheses. All the girls, most of whom were likely plain before their transformations, were now half-man half-machine, monstrosities! I couldn’t help but accost them.

  “Girls! Pardon me!” There were four of them; the tallest was perhaps fully mature, and the rest were mere children. They stopped, obedient. I realized that their metallic jaws that gleamed so brightly under the new electrical streetlamps might not be functional and I was flushed with concern. Had I humiliated them?

  The youngest-seeming opened her mouth and said in a voice that had a greater similarity to the product of a phonographic cylinder than a human throat, “Buy Bryant and May matchsticks, Sir.”

  “Oh no, I don’t need any matchsticks. I simply—”

  “Buy Bryant and May matchsticks, Sir,” she said again. Two of the others— the middle girls—lifted their hands and presented boxes of matchsticks for my perusal. One of those girls had two silvery digits where a thumb and forefinger had presumably once been. They were cleverly designed to articulate on the knuckles, and through some mechanism occulted to me did move in a lifelike way.

  “Are any of you girls capable of independent speech?” The trio looked to the tallest girl, who nodded solemnly and said, “I.” She struggled with the word, as though it were unfamiliar. “My Bryant and May mandible,” she continued, “I was given it by…Bryant and May…long ago.”

  “So, with some struggle, you are able to compel speech of your own?”

  “Buy…but Bryant and May match…made it hard,” the girl said. Her eyes gleamed nearly as brightly as her metallic jaw.