Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  Cold steel pressed against the base of his skull.

  “That’s so you understand how fucked you are.” The science soldier took a step back, gun still pointing at Cam. “Stand. Slowly.”

  Cam did as he was told, raised his hands above his head. The broken drive-belt lashed out, almost striking his arm. The pavement tilted beneath his feet, threatening to spill the things he had dropped into the grinding darkness below.

  “One of us should pick those up,” he said. Ahead of them, paving slabs were rising like tombstones and disappearing into the junction.

  “You get the cube.” The guard’s armor hissed as he twisted to stay balanced. “Only the cube. And careful. You touch that gun....”

  Cam heard the crackle of a tesla warming up. The drive-belt snapped out, air brushing his ear as it passed.

  He sank slowly to the pavement, settling onto his knees. Stretching out with one hand, his fingers brushing the familiar face of the icon where it lay next to Urban Drift.

  The drive-belt hissed over his head and slammed into the science soldier. A broken piston screeched and the man staggered.

  The pavement tilted, Urban Drift and Cam’s icon fix sliding toward the dark machines below. Instinctively, he shot out a hand and snatched one, the other tumbling into the void.

  The science soldier crashed to the ground, an arm flailing wildly, whipped around by a broken mechanism.

  The pavement twisted again. Below, roads crisscrossed each other in the darkness. Cam slid, fell, shot out his free hand, and grabbed a passing lamppost. His shoulder crunched and pain shot up his arm, but he clung on, carried beneath the city and away.

  The weather was changing over the city, storm clouds rolling across a clear sky. Raindrops shone like silver in the sunlight as Cam stepped off the pavement and across the road. Patches of blue were vanishing into darkness above a converted warehouse.

  Inside the building, guards led him up concrete steps and through a waiting room that smelled of polish and secondhand leather. Springheel and Jenny sat in silence on a padded bench. Both glanced up as Cam passed. Springheel’s clarasites were removing clotted blood from above a bruise in his hairline. Jenny’s cheek was swollen and scraped.

  Duodiseus Gast’s chair creaked beneath him as he sat back, staring at Cam. A door slammed, sealing them in silence as low suburbs rolled past the window.

  Cam took his time viewing the gangster’s art, admiring the creases of a uniform on a military portrait, the fine artifice of light across a charcoal landscape. His gaze caught briefly on St. Joachim and his flock, but moved on.

  One of the guards coughed. Cam glanced up. The hand of the antique clock above Gast’s head had moved on a quarter hour since he came in.

  “I....” Cam halted, caught by Gast’s glare.

  “That’s twice you’ve kept me waiting.” The gangster’s fingers tapped a rhythm on his belly, the patter of an executioner’s drum. “Once for you to show your face, and once more for you to tell me what I already know.”

  “There was a—”

  “Save it for whoever you’re hiding out with. You’ve got my goods?”

  Cam rummaged in his satchel. Gast’s guards reached inside their jackets, then relaxed as he pulled out a glass cube, its inner etchings glittering like crystals of frozen light.

  A serving girl took Urban Drift on a silver tray and passed it to Gast with a jeweler’s monocle and a curtsy.

  Gast crammed the lens into the fat around his eye. He squinted at the cube, nodded.

  “You may have made a big fuss out of it, Maguire, but you got the job done.” He looked up at one of the guards. “Rensford, fetch me a hammer.”

  Cam clenched up inside. Against all good sense, he spoke.

  “Hammer?”

  Gast was grinning. “I suppose I could melt it, but there’s something satisfying about feeling things shatter.”

  He laughed as he saw Cam’s face. “Don’t worry, Maguire, I’m not going to destroy you. You might still be useful to me in one piece, although I’m not sure how. This, on the other hand, is too well known to sell, and no use to me sitting on a shelf. But once word gets round that it’s been found in pieces, I will own the fourteen most valuable of Efram’s ideals, and I can set my own price.”

  He tossed Urban Drift from hand to hand, corners sketching fine rainbows across Cam’s vision.

  “I know this is all a little beyond you, Maguire. Suffice to say, I am not content to be guided by the invisible hand. Not when I can become its great, grasping fingers.”

  Gast threw the cube higher and higher, his laughter gurgling like a drain.

  Cam thought of the hammer hitting Urban Drift, slithers of light bursting in every direction, losing form, meaning, beauty.

  A serving girl stepped forward at a gesture from Gast. From her tray, eleven oil-paint disciples stared at Cam, promising to carry him closer to God’s bliss.

  “Your pay, Maguire. Don’t let Rensford’s boot hit your arse on the way out.”

  Cam stepped forward, gazing for a longing moment at those bearded faces.

  He seized the edge of the tray and shoved the serving girl to the floor, swinging back to strike an approaching guard with the silver-plated disk. One hand shot out, grabbing Urban Drift. The remaining guard was reaching for his gun even as Cam flung the tray into his face. The man reeled backward, crashing through the window and to the ground. Cam followed, leaping over the street onto a passing corner shop. Gast bellowed after him as he ran, Urban Drift shining in his hand.

  The sun was sinking beyond the city, colors blazing like the heart of a smelting furnace. Cam watched its beams catch the frames of doors and windows, writing red runes on sheets of dark concrete. He smiled and ran a finger over the tiles on which he sat, lost in a sea of soft shadows.

  Something clattered on the roof behind him. The click of a gun being cocked echoed in his ears.

  “Sorry, man.” It was Springheel, his voice trembling, legs creaking as he stepped up behind Cam. “Gast says we’re part of the job. Either we make it good, or.... Well, Jenny said we should hide, but you know that wouldn’t work. Gast gets everywhere. And then there’d be three of us dead, not just one.”

  Cam nodded. “I know. Just give me a moment.”

  “Okay.”

  Springheel paused, hovering uncertainly behind Cam.

  “You know there are buildings that only surface every forty, fifty years?” Cam was smiling still, watching a pack of tower blocks split apart. Some, shiny and new, moved west to form a business district. “Real antiques, not sturdy enough for regular use, but too beautiful to be destroyed. They rise for a few days, and people go visit. Old women reliving washed-out memories. School groups touring a bit of history. Worn-down veterans looking for a few last moments of wonder before they die.”

  One tower was left where the others had clustered, a baroque heap of gargoyles and perilous spires. Its central point rose, needlelike, above the rest. A bell tower, its peak a shadowy void sheltered by four pillars and a domed roof.

  “That’s All Saints.” Cam pointed at the tower. “I saw it once as a kid. My grandma called it All Sinners, some tradition from when she was young.”

  Springheel threw something into Cam’s lap.

  “For old times’ sake,” he said. “Go out buzzing, y’know?”

  Cam set aside the crude painting of St. Thomas.

  “No thanks. That’s not the art I need.”

  He pointed at the tower as it crossed the sun’s path and golden light burst through its intricate tiers.

  “That is.”

  The light caught on something as it shone through the empty bell tower. Caught and fractured into a hundred perfect points, shining and spinning around each other through a prism of crafted glass. Motes danced like tiny angels across the church, then were snuffed out one by one as it descended into the city’s open maw.

  Springheel’s mouth hung open, the gun limp in his hand.

  “You didn’t
....”

  Cam nodded. “I’ll be long dead before it appears again. But so will Gast, and that makes it safe.”

  He turned to Springheel, tears in his eyes.

  “Some things are too beautiful to destroy. But I’m not one of them. So you do what you’ve got to do, and then live a long life. Get to see this again.”

  Cam turned his face toward the sunset as Springheel pressed the gun against his temple. In his mind’s eye, silver points danced in a crystal landscape, never moving but forever changing. Light made life, drawing his soul up to something higher. The hammer clicked back once more, and he smiled.

  “Time to move on.”

  It is December 10. Thirty-three years, then, exactly to the day; and she is eighty-three. The thought does not disturb her. She has had a very long while to come to terms with her mortality. And she has known for a very long while with unwavering certainty that this day would arrive in time.

  Thirty-three years. The machine is complete, the Empress’s oldest wish will come true, and Ada will be able to leave this surreal celestial half-world at last.

  Thirty-three years were lost to her. Thirty-three years were hers.

  The thought is intoxicating, giddying, liberating.

  She is withered; she is decrepit, shrunken with age. In the chrome surface of a in her workshop, she inspects her reflection, unimpressed. This morning she pinned an orchid to the lapel of her padded jacket—not in celebration, mind; she plucked the orchid from the vase at her bedside just because. Now the pink of the bloom stands out, sharp and shrill against her dark complexion. It reminds her of the scarlet sins of a mad, bad George Byron.

  Ada winces, but does not remove the flower. There was a time when she would have found herself preoccupied with a feeling of unease, shrinking away from the thought of her parents and her old life; but she has changed, she is no longer the nervous, pitiable wreck that she was as a younger woman. She has, in truth, so much more to treasure than the aimless philandering of a long-dead poet.

  So she pulls her jacket a little closer about herself, setting her jaw in aged obstinacy. She looks around the room—it will be her last time here, she thinks, and she wants to preserve it in her memory as it is. (If only memories could be moved as easily as she trusts she can move life.)

  The desk by the wall, her cyanotype linens neatly arranged in a corner. The scribe-zhēng beside it, for when she was too tired to handwrite her notes. The she had endeavored to use as a crucible, before she jury-rigged it into part of a wind-up mechanical fan. (And hadn’t that been a laugh? The Empress had been ever so tickled when the court ladies were left bewildered by what to do with their delicate folded of silk.) The cooling engine, with its airflow reversed now that it is winter, clanking away to radiate warmth from the ventilation slats.

  And the small touches that make the room hers—not just a workroom but her study room, her sometime living quarters, hers. Ada is not a sentimental woman; her mother beat any inclination toward romanticism out of her, and she is, in any case, not much given to turning maudlin, even in her cups. But there is a string of pearls, on the table—one of William’s wedding gifts, which she has not worn since their separation. A letter, much read, delivered from Greece—“My lovely, precious child, forgive me....” She cannot hate her father, but she can hate what he did with his life. And, beside the door, a small structure of brass, gleaming from the coat of polish she frequently applies—a perfect miniature model of the difference engine, the work between her and Charles (and Mary Somerville, of course), which was never finished in London or the Paris of her exile.

  Well, she thinks, her amusement grim. Well, the engines. Please God, I at least have done something with my days.

  Outside in the courtyard the clock gong strikes three past the dawn hour. Ada twitches her braid farther over her shoulder, gritting her teeth at the ache of arthritis, and calls into the speaking tube by the door: “Pearl, you may enter now. Godsdamn, where is the child? Pearl!”

  The patter of feet running along the corridor outside. A cautious knock on the door, which Ada flings open.

  “Lady Jin,” the maidservant murmurs.

  Pearl is a good girl, well behaved and sharp of wit for all that she is just fourteen. Her mistress relents.

  “I am going to Her Majesty now,” says Ada, quietly, imperiously. “I do not require that you accompany me, but I want you to take charge of the possessions in this room. Except for what the Crown claims, they are yours, and I have lodged affidavits to that effect.”

  Pearl’s expression is composed, settled. Privately Ada wonders how much the girl knows.

  “Do not worry, Lady Jin. I will apply myself to my studies.”

  Ada has tutored her in mathematics and in engineering; and who knows, perhaps Pearl will even win a scholarship to the imperial colleges. Perhaps she has done right in encouraging the child to dream. Perhaps Pearl will pass the official examinations and take pride of place in the imperial workshops, building aetherships and writing punch cards for the Jacquard engine.

  And perhaps a maid from a poor family will end up married before her sixteenth year, and will spend the remainder of her life in indentured drudgery, no longer able to work magic with numbers.

  So many paths that twist into the future.... Ada shakes off the desire to hug this granddaughter of hers, to whisper, “I will take care of you after I am gone, when you make offerings to me and call me Ada .”

  Instead she gestures Pearl into the room, shuts the door, and walks down the freezing passageway toward the gate into the courtyard. And then across the cobbles of the palace compound, toward the , and into what remains of her life.

  There are many accounts of the arrival of Lady Jin Ada into the Imperial Court, but in truth it was many years ago that Ada found her way into the land under heaven, calling herself Elizabeth King on the passage from England, and using her title of countess when she claimed an imperial audience. Neither of those names had any currency in court—Her Majesty preferred to style her Lady Jin—but she was, sometimes, secretly pleased that she was still recognized as an enchantress of numbers.

  “But that is to be expected!” the Empress exclaimed, when Ada confessed her surprise at this appellation. “If not for natural philosophers like yourself, we would long have been overrun by the field mice of your continent. Overrun, and carved up into extraterritorialities, as was before we liberated it.”

  The Empress said that in a tone so unyieldingly matter of fact, so arrogant, that it was burnt into Ada’s memory. For if she had to situate her empress in an occidental context (for was her empress, far more than the so-distant Victoria Regina), then she would say, in all confidence, “She is our Ailénor d’Aquitane.”

  She learnt her histories, as a child, before her mother set her to algebra and Euclid. She read of Eleanor and she never forgot her. Naughty, wicked Eleanor, who went on crusade to kill, and who adored l’amour courtois. Wife of kings! Mother of kings! Strumpet, warrior, monarch. A paradox, Eleanor, and a paragon at the same time. Even so, Ada told herself, even the inimitable Poitevin queen was but a pale precursor to Cixi.

  Ada was grateful for the Empress’s patronage, grateful with a depth of feeling that she had owed to no one else, not to her mother and certainly not to Charles. The Empress was, for one, honestly proud of Ada’s achievements; and it was for this pride that Ada sold her loyalty to a chit, an upstart whore who somehow jostled her way onto the Heavenly Throne.

  And it was for the challenge also: when the Empress looked at her, with an incomprehensible emotion in her implacable face, and said, “We have brought you in, as our own daughter, to extend the reach of my realm and to defend us from your nation of barbarians, through your skill in the natural sciences. But there is another matter.”

  A pause, during which moment the blood had been thudding so hard in Ada’s ears that she could barely hear a thing.

  “You see,” said the Empress softly—and it seemed to Ada that Her Majesty was weary, slipping
into an informality of speech—“there is also that matter, that small trifle, of my heart’s desire. That one thing that has eluded so many generations of kings and emperors—I believe you will be the one to find it for me.”

  Ada had fallen to her knees at this and pressed her head to the floor, doing obeisance in a manner that would have scandalized her own ancestors. “My queen, my queen, thank you for your trust in me, for harboring me, thank you.” And she took her oath, there and then, under the outraged glances of the courtiers.

  The Great Hall is empty, silent; and the winter cold bites through clothing into bone. The lesser halls, where the Empress holds court sometimes, have mannequins installed along the walls—some as heralds with phonographs, and some to play the zither. (Ada had no part in the design of the phonograph, though she wrote the algorithms for the doll-musicians. She regretted that almost instantly; the mechanical music grates.) Not so which is unadorned by the modernist impulse to technology.

  The only appearance of anything out of place is the new throne that stands upon the highest dais.

  “Your Majesty,” Ada whispers as she approaches, and the sound carries through the mausoleum. (Because this is a mausoleum. It will no longer be used for weddings and coronations, for the great feasts of the monarchy. Not after today. She knows it.)

  “Madam,” the Empress rejoins, voice cracking. This is the closest to intimacy that they will ever achieve. “Help me, if you please.”

  Now that Ada is closer to the throne she can see it more clearly, and she almost rears away in her shuddering horror.

  A monstrosity, she thinks. Grotesque. And then, her repulsion giving way to curiosity: Is this really the fruit of my imagination? Did the architects construct this from my plans?

  The chair—it is a chair, not a throne, an electric chair as lethal as the one that tinkerer boy in Menlo Park has dreamed up so far across the western seas in the Occident—the chair is fitted to the Empress’s frame like a brace. There are iron valves, brass pipes, tubing that she cannot remember having specified in her diagrams.