Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  He was the captain of the splendid airship that lorded over the mouth of the river. Immense, intricate, and incredibly luridly decked out, it was a marvel in both engineering magnificence and impressively bad taste.

  It was also, according to its captain, an independent country counting all four of its crew members as citizens, a nation-state entity with its own jurisdiction and its own constitution, answerable to no laws except its own. He had christened it the S. S. Discordia—the Sovereign State of Discordia.

  This, as you can imagine, was problematic for our employer, Lord Louis IV, servant of the Royal Empire of Albion and Lord Overseer—as the title went—to the Malayan Colonies.

  Naturally, as any sensible royal would have done, Lord Louis called upon the services of my partner and me. Our first meeting was by the docks. Market stalls clustered around the upper port like lichen patches on a branch, marinating in air heavy with salt and spice and the dusty smell of beans and lentils (five cents a kilo, eighteen for four). I sauntered through the heat and noise in the shade of my parasol, dressed to suit the pretence that I was a lady of some noble birth. I found my quarry—ludicrous in his ever-present goggles, striped breeches, and oversize frock coat, perched on a stool beside a shop selling brass food-heating dragons and other cunning mechanical devices for the kitchen— trying to find chords to a bawdry coolie’s song on his sopranissimo ukulele.

  “Is it not excessively hot to be wearing a frock coat?” I asked, by way of starting a conversation.

  “Miserably! I would dress like you do, my lady, but then I’d have no place to put William.” To demonstrate, he held his tiny instrument aloft, then slipped it into an inside pocket of his coat where it was well hidden under the bulk of the garment.

  “Do you see?” He retrieved the instrument from the pocket and strummed it, as if to prove that it still worked.

  I suppressed a genuine laugh, for the ukulele was the most unexpected instrument I had seen in a long time.

  He had flipped up the lenses on his goggles, and porcelain blue were eyes squinting at me.

  “I presume that you are the hunter Lord Louis has sent after me, yes?”

  I drew myself straighter at the challenge, wondering at the curiosity that had surfaced in his expression, sudden and lucid.

  “And what if I am?”

  “Then I should formally introduce myself!” He leapt to his feet. “I am Captain Godfrey Francis Wolfram Bellamy, President and Prime Minister of the Sovereign State of Discordia. You may call me Captain Bells, for short.” He bowed, deep and ridiculous, his outstretched arm holding the teacup ukulele aloft. Still bent over at the waist, he looked up at me and asked, “To whom do I owe the pleasure?”

  “You may call me Lady Admira,” I told him, adopting a title I had no right to.

  He took my proffered hand and kissed it. “My pleasure, Lady Admira.”

  I knew then, by some quirk of instinct, that the task that had been set for my partner and me was no ordinary one. There was some kind of slyness, a playful craftiness to his manner that intrigued me. I was sure he had some as-yet-undefined agenda.

  Over the next two days we had several more cautious encounters, like dogs sizing each other up before battle. Despite the strangeness of my situation I found it rather refreshing to be dealing with my target in this fashion: straightforward, without the false pleasantries that I had become used to through my dealings with the native sons of Albion. And he had a friendly, albeit eccentric demeanor for his part. I was learning more than I could by just following him.

  Ying, my partner, was not so enamored of my methods. “We are wasting time on this simple task,” she said one evening, flicking her hair over her shoulder as we spied on the Discordia from the window of our shophouse. “Our instructions were to eliminate him. Why could you not have simply done that? A well-placed stroke of your short staff would settle it.”

  It was an unusual thing for her to say, as she was famously reluctant to harm our targets unless absolutely necessary, and I said as much.

  “Not as unusual as your reluctance to complete the job,” she responded tartly. “Was it not you who said the quicker the Empire’s dirty tasks are dispensed with, the less trouble there will be? Yet this assignment drags on. One might even think you are enjoying it.”

  “My interest in this case is purely professional,” I insisted. I did not want to accuse her of jealousy. It seemed such a petty thing to do.

  The incident happened on a Friday afternoon, no more than a few weeks after we had become acquainted. The captain and I met, as had become our custom, at the docks where he usually practiced his ukulele in the heat of the midday sun. Ying, with all her misgivings, made sure to tail behind us. When Bells caught sight of me he tucked the instrument into his coat and stood up, his cheeky grin as pronounced as ever.

  “Ah, my lady. Today I go to visit Uncle Lee in his godown, to see what new marvel he has invented over the week. I think you will find it to your liking.”

  He skipped off without warning, leaving me to catch up with his schoolboyish gait. I imagined that I could feel Ying’s presence somewhere behind us, hear her graceful deerlike footfall.

  Uncle Lee’s godown, as it turned out, was farther down the dock, a whitewashed building full of heat and noise and the smell of throat-burningly sour substance. The interior had been restructured to house four giant machines, each twice as tall as a man and blackened through industry, their great wheels churning at full speed, their functions mysterious. I let Bells lead me through the great room to a small wooden door.

  He retrieved two pairs of gloves and boots made of rubber from a cabinet.

  “These are for safety’s sake,” he explained. “The air inside picks up stray electrical charges quite easily. We wouldn’t want you to get shocked, would we?”

  I put them on with some misgiving—the thick material made me feel hampered, clumsy.

  “And you’ll have to leave your short staff and ring here.” This earned him a fierce look, yet he was adamant. “Uncle Lee’s equipment is sensitive. You could cause an explosion.”

  Now half-convinced he was leading me into a trap, I put aside the weapons that never left me, save for baths and when I was asleep. But I kept with me the vial of nerve poison hidden in its cleverly constructed pouch, well prepared if there were to be trouble.

  “This had better be worth my time,” I told him.

  “I think it will.” And he pushed the door open.

  Beyond was another room—not as high but just as large as the previous. It was stuffed to the brim with workbenches, cabinets, filing shelves, stacks of equipment, and papers pasted everywhere. A scientist’s workroom, it seemed.

  At the far end sat an old man wearing rubber gloves, a massive pair of goggles, and a coolie’s singlet. He did not look up when we approached. Presumably this was Uncle Lee, busy working on soldering something. The familiarity of that smell and the light’s peculiar quality stirred memories that I had tried, for many years, to suppress. I shuddered.

  When he was done the old man held up a single piece of neatly fused copper tubing, the joint blackened by heat. Apparently satisfied with his work, he put the tubing aside and turned his attention to Bells.

  Without warning Bells burst into a staccato spate of a Fujian dialect. He retrieved a small metallic object from the depths of his coat and showed it to Uncle Lee, who muttered something and started rummaging in a drawer of his desk. I knew just enough of the language to follow the conversation: the engine part from Bells’s ship was worn out and he needed a new one.

  Uncle Lee passed Bells a fresh metallic object and Bells held it up to inspect it, clearly pleased.

  “Who is that?” Uncle Lee asked, gesturing at me.

  “My friend,” Bells explained. “She wants to see the, uh....” His limited grasp of the language failed him then and he pointed to a large cabinet to our left. “That.”

  Uncle Lee looked at the cabinet then back at me. “Is she with the Empire?
”

  “Of course not,” he said at once. More interesting than his ease at dissembling was the question of why he would choose to lie. Most curious, I thought.

  Still the old man, apparently satisfied with this answer, nodded.

  The inside of the cabinet revealed a device of a design that I had never seen before. It was a large brass box decorated with no fewer than nine Chinese dragons and a set of depressible keys, each engraved with a different letter of the alphabet. Uncle Lee plugged a plate coated with some sort of matte material into a slot in the side of the device.

  “Hit something,” he said to me, pointing to the keys.

  Very cautiously, I tapped out with gloved fingers: the nights of constantinopole. With every letter I could hear gears moving on the inside of the box. A transmissible-code device, perhaps?

  Uncle Lee pulled a lever next to the set of keys and the device made a long, whining mechanical noise. He pulled out the plate from the slot and showed it to me.

  The matte surface looked blank—this was no punch-machine, then. Uncle Lee put the unmarked plate into another slot—this one lower than the first—and depressed an ornate red button. Something clanked inside—tchak! tchak!—and the device spat out a narrow spool of paper. Uncle Lee tore it off and handed it to me.

  “the nights of constantinople,” I read aloud. The plate had remembered my words but not mechanically. I guessed that the device used a chemical or magnetic medium, much like the oracle machines that studied numbers and told the future, and whose existence was considered one of the Empire’s most deeply hidden secrets.

  Uncle Lee put the plate back into the first slot. “Hit something again,” he instructed.

  I tapped out are cold and lonely, because I did not know what else I wanted to say.

  Uncle Lee repeated the process, taking the plate out, putting it into the printing slot, and pressing the red button. The device whirred, spoke, and spat out another piece of paper. the nights of constantinople are cold and lonely.

  I gave Bells a dangerous look. “This is a transmissible-code device,” I said, in English. Even this was a lie, for the machine was more than a simple transmissible-code device—in function it was frightfully similar to the great machines whose existence was so jealously guarded by the Empire. Incorporate it with an abacus shelf and it could rival an oracle machine. “This is illegal.”

  Bells flipped up the lenses of his goggles. “Then this will be our little secret.” He winked at me, and it was a wink both devilish and elegant.

  There was a clatter of activity at the door and two children came running in—a boy and a girl, no more than a few years apart. Their arms were full of the matte recording plates.

  “Ye-ye,” the boy exclaimed then exploded into a litany of complaints about his sister and how she was ordering him around when they went to get the materials.

  “Did you get all the plates?” Uncle Lee asked. His tone was sharp, but his eyes were full of fondness as he looked upon his grandchildren.

  “We did,” said the boy. The children unloaded their burdens onto the worktable.

  The girl gave me a glance. She was, as the elder of the two, perhaps eleven or twelve, on the cusp of womanhood. From the bright curiosity in her eyes, I could see her privately forming questions about me.

  “Come, my lady,” Bells said, gently taking me by the elbow—a liberty that would have earned him a broken nose under other circumstances. “The Lees are a very busy family.”

  I let him guide me outside.

  When we were back in the sunlight, I disengaged myself from his grasp. “You should not have shown me this.”

  He tilted his head. “Did you not like it? Was it not marvelous?”

  That was hardly the point. “Did you teach them to build the transmissiblecode machine?”

  He seemed almost offended by the implication. “Of course not! The Lees have been inventors and innovators for many generations. I myself did not know how to build a transmissible-code machine. They had to teach me.”

  “But they are not doing this alone. Those materials are not inexpensive, and the children need to eat. Who is supporting them?”

  His smile was both mysterious and infuriating. “Certainly not I.”

  “It is the Merdeka Group, is it not? The freedom movement.” I grabbed his hand. “Tell me.”

  He laughed, delighted. “You really are a lot more impulsive than I give you credit for. All in good time, Lady Admira. Come have tea with me tomorrow afternoon. I will be in the Arab Quarter, as usual.”

  I let him go. When he had completely vanished amid the chaos of the dock, Ying melted out of the shadows.

  “How did you fare?” she asked, without preface. I recounted what I had seen, in all its madness.

  “Now the resistance movement is involved and there are children, too. I do not like it. I cannot get them involved.”

  “That is hardly your fault.”

  “Were we followed again?” I asked her.

  “Indeed. It is as we suspected: his first mate follows him wherever he goes. The captain may be a madman but he is not a fool.”

  “Perhaps the first mate simply intends to keep Bells out of trouble,” I mused.

  Ying’s gaze flicked briefly over her shoulder and her impatience showed. “We should remove him from the equation,” she said. “I would find it no trouble to dispatch him.”

  “I do not wish to hear talk of dispatching anybody,” I said sharply. “Now is not the time.”

  “Then when would it be?” She took my hand and squeezed it imploringly, leaning in close to whisper to me. “My serum will not last another week and we will not receive our payment until we deliver something of value to Lord Louis.”

  This hit me hard. No, I had not forgotten. How could I, when the payment—the serum—was the very thing that kept her alive, without which her organs would fail?

  “We shall follow him for another week,” I promised her, “and then I will report to Lord Louis with our findings. Our discoveries should please him enough to convince him to part with more serum.”

  I could see that Ying was not satisfied with my answer.

  She nodded, nevertheless. I wondered if I was indeed risking too much to satisfy my curiosity.

  I continued to meet regularly with Bells during the following week: in the mornings for breakfast, and sometimes in the afternoons as well. We had tea. He did not bring me to see any more illegal devices, but we did talk. He was, as always, an endless source of inane trivia, telling me about the speed of a laden swallow or the sights he had seen on his journeys with his airship-state. I listened politely. He had the mannerisms of a child, truly, given to verbosity and frank exaggeration. His eyes sparkled as he rattled off his tales. He waved and gesticulated and, very memorably, once knocked a cup of tea off the table in his enthusiasm.

  Yet for all his immaturity he had wisdom hidden deep within him that showed in random flashes during our conversation, like a fossil lost within the reflecting facets of a crystal, visible only from certain angles.

  “You mustn’t blame Lord Louis, you know,” he said once. “As the new consul to this region, he’s under immense pressure from the Imperial Palace. Very large shoes to fill. The poor man wants a prize to present to the Emperor in hopes that he’ll avoid the fate of the last consul here. I pity him, more than anything.”

  On another day he asked me, “Why do you keep working for the Empire? I can tell that you dislike it.” I did not answer him.

  “You must think I’m a madman,” he finally said, over Thursday’s milk tea and naan with masala. He had his chin in his hands and a boyish expression on his face. “Doing what I do, goading the Royal Empire for no reason at all.”

  “I do not think you are a madman,” I said. “I have come to realize that the actions you take are not as random as they seem. You have a reason for toying with Imperial ambitions, but it is not a reason that I can understand. Something in your past, perhaps?”

  He smile
d at my attempt to get him to disclose more about his murky history. “I think you and I are more alike than we seem. After all, you too have your reasons for working as the Empire’s bloodhound, don’t you?”

  “What are you saying?” I asked, eyes narrowing.

  “I notice that your partner has stopped trailing us in the past few days. Howie, my first mate, told me that she seemed ill when he last saw her.” He leaned forward and took my hand in a sudden, urgent movement. “I know how the Empire changed her. She relies on their sufferance to survive, doesn’t she?”

  I jerked my hand from his grasp, shocked. How dare he? This was a private matter. “You do not know what you speak of!”

  “Yet she must consume the serum they provide or her metabolism will fail.” His manner was suddenly intense, deadly serious. “I can help her, Admira. I know the formula that she needs.”

  I jumped to my feet. My heart was beating so hard I thought I might die. Ying’s secret was sacred to us, a condition whose true nature was never to be referred to in public. Who did this interloper into our lives think he was, to speak of it like that? Did he think that my confidence could be so easily won, bartered like a vulgar bag of grain?

  “You,” I snarled, “have turned out to be as dangerous as they said.”

  “Who is more dangerous,” he asked, “an unfettered wildcard like me or the Empire that keeps you on a leash?”

  I turned on my heel and left the scene. I felt betrayed, angry, and frightened all at the same time. I had allowed myself to get too close to my target at the expense of the one I loved. I had risked too much and that was unacceptable.

  I returned to our rented shophouse still shaken, only to find Ying sitting on the bed, her back to me as she gazed out the window. Her hands were cold and her expression distant as I knelt next to her. “How do you feel?”