Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  In his memory, Claire ran along the side of the wooden training pen, poised to grasp the underwing struts of an éole, the tight cling of her habitual leathers showing the flex of limb and muscle. Now she halted along, and what was hidden beneath her checked skirt was mortal and twisted. He found grotesque possibilities of Claire’s veiled flesh obscene, and hated himself for it.

  Now Claire stumbled and recovered before he could embarrass them both by catching at her. Ian felt a flare of anger, which shamed him because it’s shameful to be annoyed at the cripple exhibiting, like a statue holding stone fruit to the sun, this is how frail your body is, all children of men. You are brave and beset with the need to soar, and it means nothing to the wind that topples you and the air that parts beneath you and the ground that will take you as no lover has.

  “I know why you’re here,” Claire said, still staring at the avion. “We’ve heard rumors about a breeding program for months. Flyboys passing through, repeating gossip. I didn’t think it was true, though. I didn’t think you’d agree to it. Not until I saw you this morning, with your fancy Corps automobile.”

  He listened for the mocking tone to her voice that meant she was angry with him, but she only sounded resigned.

  “It’s not a matter of my agreeing to it, Claire,” he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his too-warm greatcoat to stop himself from taking her arm. “It will happen whether we will it or not. And neither your people nor mine have much choice. You’ve haven’t seen the Roosevelt wrights yet....”

  “Obviously.” Her voice went tart and the band across his chest loosened a little.

  “…but you will, soon. Theodore Roosevelt’s breeding program’s been in effect for what—ten, twelve years? They’ve been tapping their wild herds for the best and they have three lines now, and they’re stocking their Air Corps 80, maybe 90 percent with them. Huge beasts, with endurance ours can’t match, and docile too.”

  “Docile.”

  She began to laugh and was turning to him when she gasped. He seized her arm, thinking her leg had finally given way. Effortlessly she shook him off and hobbled ahead. Ian stood frozen. Over the water came a vast stretch of curved wing and an assembly of cables, flying strong and sure: a blériot, fresh from across the channel. It crested the lip of the cliff-side, circled, and landed with insolent ease, not thirty meters away.

  The éoles started and beat themselves into the air like a scurry of huge gulls, their engines chugging and throwing off steam. The avion took off, flying slow and low to the ground, in search of more berries.

  Shaking off Ian’s arm, Claire stumbled toward the blériot while Ian stood frozen. The flying beast’s motor purred and impossibly, it remained still until she reached it. Claire, chuckling with delight, stroked the side of a parchment panel. Watching her bend her once-bright head to the beast, Ian felt his pulse quicken painfully.

  It couldn’t be the same one. It couldn’t.

  Later that night, after he had a pipe by the fire and read through the Corps dispatches one more time, he went to her bed. She was in the same room, and even the pattern of nicks in the paint on the door were familiar to his touch. Under her old quilt she lay to one side, so there was room for him to slip between the cool sheets. She made no move, either to welcome or repel him. Rough muslin covered the window imperfectly, letting moonlight drape across the coverlet; she blinked at him curiously.

  “How often does it come to you? The blériot?”

  Claire turned on her back; in the dim light he could see her chest rise and fall.

  “Not for months sometimes. Sometimes only once a year, in the spring.”

  “It knows you. I know it’s not possible, but it knows you.”

  She sighed.

  “Do you know the name Wakeman?”

  Her breathing hitched. “I have heard it. He is a great man, I hear. A hunter of repute.”

  “He should be here tomorrow or the next day. The Corps is borrowing him from the British. He’s to clear the wild stock from the forage, if they can’t be driven away.”

  She didn’t answer for a long time, and he thought she might have fallen asleep.

  “I knew the world wouldn’t ignore us forever,” she said at last. “There was a time, when we were young, that I resented it. Being dismissed. Now…you get used to it, and find your peace with it. And all this time we’ve been sleeping on the edge of a precipice, the waters churning below, and only a matter of time before we go down into it. Peace is mere skin over war’s true face.

  “And the flying beasts—there’s no more room for the wild ones in this world. Soon there won’t be an éole or an antoinette alive that isn’t tame, bred, or broke to our need. Soon we’ll forget that they ever ran free. We’ll think we’ve always bred them. Men will believe they built them.”

  When he spoke he was surprised at the anger in his voice.

  “You fell. How could you fall? You were the best. You were perfect.”

  Her voice was deliberately cool. “Such things happen.”

  “Not to you. Not unless you allow it. And you did allow it. I didn’t realize it at first, though something in me recognized it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ian drew a deep breath. “If you’d stayed in the struts, the blériot would’ve crashed, but it would’ve broken your fall. You let go. You let go so it wouldn’t go down.”

  “You can’t think that.”

  “I know that. I know you, Claire. And maybe better after I left.”

  She laughed softly. “Did it make you so angry, then?”

  “Yes. That you could chose between us. That you could break your body so.”

  “Hundreds break in this work. Hundreds more, man and flying beast, will break before this is over.”

  “Yes. But not you. It should never have been you.”

  Her hand found his and they lay there, without speaking, for a long time until her fingers loosened in his and she slept. The moon had set before Ian, listening to her even breathing and the distant tide, turned to the cool of his pillow and slept too.

  One by one the éoles rose and lighted again a few hundred meters away, barely interrupting their feeding. The children laughed, waving shirts and sheets they’d likely stolen off their mothers’ clotheslines. A dog loped from child to child, a big golden retriever, pausing now and then to bark at the flying beasts. The éoles paid it less mind than they had the children, waving their clothing like the pennants of an improbable army.

  “That’s never going to clear them,” said Wakeman.

  The hunter had arrived that morning, accompanied by a small case of personal effects and two long, lovingly polished trunks of dark wood containing his weapons. Ian was discomposed as it was; he had slept far later than he was accustomed, to find sunlight dappling through the curtains and Claire’s side of the bed empty and cold. Entering the cafeteria he found a scant few tardy students and young Plantard escorting the expressionless Englishman, and no sign of Claire anywhere. Ian barely nodded at his countryman, leaving him to find his own place while he went to the cluster of stone cottages that marked where the grounds of the École gave way to farmland.

  He didn’t know these children—the ones who had brought butter and eggs to the École years before were now probably hard-faced farmers. Maybe some labored in the failing mines. But if the cheerfully dirty, towheaded kids didn’t know him they knew the École Aéronautique, and they whooped at the prospect of earning a few sous chasing away the beasts from the grazing.

  But Wakeman was right: the éoles and the avion had long lost their fear of men.

  “No time like the present,” said Wakeman, turning on his heel toward the dormitories. “I heard that blériot was spotted off the coast at dawn. That’s where your chatelaine’s got to. Queer woman, that. Looks right through one.”

  Ian didn’t reply, fingering a pocketful of coins warm from his body as he watched the children forgo all pretense at chasing away the beasts and start playing at bullf
ighting between them.

  “I hear you and mam’selle have a history,” Wakeman threw over his shoulder. “Will that get in my way?”

  Ian shook his head, not caring if the hunter saw.

  Wakeman was right: the blériot was back, perched before the place where the cliff fell away. Claire stood apart, leaning on her cane as he hadn’t seen her do before. The sea beyond was shrouded with the last of the morning fog, rapidly burning away. Wakeman, carrying a large shotgun, had almost reached her. The hunter kept her body between him and the blériot, as if using her as a blind.

  Wakeman nodded at him. Claire didn’t stir or look at Ian when he stood beside her.

  “Claire,” he said. “Go back. You don’t want to see this.”

  Wakeman moved from behind her.

  “That’s never a full-blood blériot,” he muttered, chambering a round. “Too big. Quarter antoinette, at the least.”

  Even a twisted thing can move quickly, and Claire moved quicker than thought, bringing her cane down one-handed on the barrel of the gun. The shot tore into the ground three meters in front of them, tearing the new green grass away from the earth and plowing a furrow into the flesh of the earth. The blériot hopped, startled, toward the lip of the precipice. At the drop-off it paused, and rotated toward them.

  “Go, you stupid thing!” shouted Claire, struggling to regain her balance. Wakeman, jolted back by blow and unexpected angle of the discharge, swore colorfully and opened the chamber.

  “Muzzle your bitch, Chance,” he barked, eyeballing the distance to the flying beast that was, inexplicably, still within range. Claire stood, sobbing. Before Ian could hook an arm around her waist she struck again with the cane, two-handed this time, striking Wakeman hard in the solar plexus.

  The hunter’s breath left him with a great foosh and he sat on the ground, still holding his gun, legs stretched before him in the high grass. Claire drew back and held the burled cane high in the air, as if to bring it down on Wakeman’s head. He looked up at her quizzically, struggling to draw breath, without the presence of mind to swivel the muzzle of the weapon toward her.

  But he would, any second. Ian grasped Claire’s arm.

  “Claire,” he said. “No.”

  She looked at him, eyes wild and streaming. Then with a stifled sob she pulled away and threw down the cane, across Wakeman’s legs. The hunter flinched and struggled to his feet. Claire had turned from both of them, and halted across the grass toward the blériot that still paused at the edge, its engine humming like a swarm of agitated bees in the warm air. Ian followed a few steps and stopped, knowing she didn’t want him.

  He could hear Wakeman breathing heavily behind him. Turning, he saw the hunter sighting down the barrel, aiming square at Claire’s back.

  Ian moved between them, looking not at Wakeman but at the twin holes of the barrel as if he could stare them down. “You will not,” he growled.

  “Not that I don’t want to,” said the hunter, never lowering the barrel, “but I’m waiting for a shot at the beast. She’s right in front.”

  Ian strode into the barrel and grasped the cold metal, shoving the gun down, and watched as Claire stood before the blériot. Shyly, as if she had never touched it before, she reached out to pat the taut material of the wing that curved over her. The beast quivered but stayed put, and her hand moved over the tight silk, down a strut, following the thick rib to the body of the blériot. Never taking her hand away, she moved closer, dragging her damaged leg behind her. When her shoulder touched the main body of the blériot, she felt along the structure, fumbling where years ago she had grasped with confidence. Then, as the beast didn’t move, she seemed to find her old strength and lifted herself into the beast’s undercarriage.

  Suddenly Wakeman twisted the gun out of Ian’s grip. Ian swore and tried to follow, but the hunter moved fast, pulling away from Ian’s reach, and as Claire and the blériot tipped over the cliff the shotgun blast tore a hole through the animal’s left wing, punching a fist-sized hole through the silk, leaving raw edges to flutter in the wind.

  The flying beast tipped dangerously to the right, so far out of true it seemed that it must stall and tumble to the sea below. Ian knew that in the under-carriage Claire must be fighting to shift her weight and help the blériot balance. A terrible fear seized him then, that Claire would do as she had before, cast herself free of the beast that it might fly free of her.

  She wouldn’t be so lucky this time. If you could call it luck.

  Ian heard the click of another shell in the gun and turned on Wakeman. The hunter’s face looked impassive but his jaw was clenched tight and the veins stood out in the sunburned neck.

  “Try it and I’ll have you down for murder,” said Ian. “And I’ll let the flyboys at you first.”

  Wakeman squinted at the horizon. “Sometimes the wounded will come back to land. Out here it’s got nowhere else to go.”

  By degrees the blériot leveled out, finding a way to balance the torn wing and the whole. It made no move to circle back to the coast, flying straight across the Channel. Ian stared after it until it became a pale dot, and then winked out, beyond his eyesight, beyond his ken, taking Claire with it.

  Patrols flew until dusk, looking for any sign of the wreckage. One pair even went as far as Boulonge-sur-Mer, on the off chance that the blériot and its passenger had made it so far. Stations and lighthouses far down the coast, and across the water at Dover too, were alerted. There was no trace, no report.

  The next day they started slaughtering the éoles. Ian stayed at the École Aéronautique, supervising the rebuilding of the pens where the wright flyers would stable. Occasionally a shot would crack the freshening air like a whip.

  At noon he went to see. As he approached the slopes where the flocks had clustered, he heard a thin, high, tearing sound, like a teakettle left to boil. Wakeman was standing by the avion that was crumpled in the grass. A few remaining éoles bleated behind it, chugging goats of steam in their distress, too confused to fly away. One of the avion’s bat-wings was half torn away and thread of steam jetted from its damaged thorax. Calmly, Wakeman chambered a cartridge and aimed just behind the fuselage. The rifle cracked, and the agonized whistle stopped abruptly.

  On the hills behind Ian could see a small cluster of farm children, their dog with them, standing very still. It seemed impossible that they were the same brats who ran between the bat-winged éoles yesterday, waving their clean, tattered blouses.

  He couldn’t watch the rest. More shots rang out through the afternoon, and as the sun began to set he spotted one éole flying out to sea, framed against the bloody sun.

  Ian stayed at the École Aéronautique long enough to see the breeding pair of wrights fly in, their tiered wings shining white in the sun. That night, in Claire’s room, he packed and repacked his few possessions, bound back for Algiers at first light. Adair would be furious; Ian didn’t care. Plantard came to tell him the car would be ready at first light.

  Ian asked if the wrights had settled.

  “Yes,” said the boy. “Ate their fill and roosted. I’ve never seen an American beast. They’re magnificent.”

  He eyed Ian as he took a pair of trousers from the pile in his suitcase and refolded them, pinching the already sharp seams sharper.

  “I want you to know, sir, me and some of the other flyboys—well, we’re not going to stop. Looking for her, I mean. Every day at sunrise, part of the morning exercises. We’re taking turns at it. I mean, you never know what will show up, do you?”

  “You won’t find her,” said Ian.

  “Even so.” The boy’s voice was defiant.

  “She won’t let you find her. She might let you see it, sometimes. To make us remember they were wild beasts once, and never made, whatever lies we tell ourselves. But keep looking, by all means.”

  “You’re not coming back, are you, sir?”

  There was pity in the flyboy’s voice, and compassion, and a little bit of contempt.


  Ian’s hands stilled and he stared at the rough plaster wall. “No, Plantard. I don’t see it.”

  Plantard was silent as he drove Ian over the rough roads to Calais. They wouldn’t remain in disrepair long—as the wrights bred and the École Aéronautique grew, as war quickened between nations they would be rebuilt smooth and straight into the heart of the countryside, tamed like the flying beasts. In the meantime the car rose and fell, rose and fell with the broken pavement and he caught brief glimpses of the gray sea and sky. Once he saw what might be a blériot rising over the waves, but it was probably a gull, hunting for fish in the cold sea.

  Dearest Scribblers and Scribblerixes,

  I ask that my students and clients please pardon the dearth of prefatory pleasantries in this, my brief missive, but I fear that time is not in overabundance: I have just now had the good fortune to lay hold of this hand-crank cellular telephone carelessly left over-near my temporary confines here, and have but a brief moment to text unto you-all my “OMFG”-worthy predicament, for I find myself held prisoner within the extensive bowels of what I am beginning to be made to suspect may be the main (or possibly prime subsidiary) offices of the Fiction-Writing Directorate—a sort of penal colony cum re-education camp for the dedicated writers of Diverting, if Dis-truthful, Fancies.

  GASP!

  Indeed! Lower your shockéd and supercilious brows, Gentle Readers, for it is true: I am held here against my will, all due to what I have begun to suspect are the sinister machinations of the American Meteorological Society, in conjunction with the Target Corporation.

  To abridge what might otherwise be an oppressively complex tale: Some months past I received a certified letter reminding me of an obligation I had made to George Dayton (founder of Target Corporation) in 1906, on the occasion of the celebration of the nuptials of his eldest son, David, and a distant cousin of mine, Beatrix—an invitation I had intended to decline, until I had discovered that I would already be in the vicinity on other business, and that a four-course dinner would be served with open bar (I was not always the well-to-do cephalopod you know and love today, Dear Readers).