Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  “What…what is it?” I whispered.

  Mr. Spoons said, “Rockets.”

  Night-time, the castle is surrounded by B-men, there is no escape on land, through these wild mountains, through the Borgo Pass, to Bucharest or the sea.

  I have to make the attempt, must get word of Babbage’s plan to Mycroft, to the Queen…

  In a moment I shall open my window, and go out there, on the ledge, and…

  I am deathly afraid.

  In the air, somewhere above Transylvania—

  Wounded. My blood drips on the page as I write. The airship moves silently above the Borgo Pass, to freedom. The engines drive it, fast and dark. For the first time I feel hope.

  Rockets.

  The valley had been filled with rockets.

  They shot at me as I escaped. Beyond the window the wind howled, pushing at me, and I tottered, and nearly fell. A fall would mean death, it was a long way down. I held on to the mooring line and then, gathering myself, I pulled myself up, legs wrapped around the line, and with my hands pulled myself, step by torturous step, towards the airship.

  A black sky above me, countless stars shining, the same distant stars Les Lezards may have come from…the same stars that were my Lord Babbage’s destination.

  He was mad.

  But I had seen the valley, Mr. Spoons had taken me there, in the baruch-landau, and I had seen: the city of Braşov, an old, beautiful place of stone, transformed now. Thin needle spires rose into the air and mechanical vehicles moved everywhere, and in a converted palace of culture I saw Babbage engines beyond count, operating, and beyond the city the rockets stood, immense, metallic, strange…

  “The stars,” Mr. Spoons said, in his menacing, high-pitched voice. “Our destination.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Slowly, he turned, looking at me.

  “Because they’re coming,” he said, and said no more.

  Somewhere above Europe—

  I had bandaged my wounded shoulder. The airship moves almost without guidance, it is very fast, and the night is cold.

  I look up at the stars. Could humanity really go there? It seems impossible, and dangerous.

  And something else…

  I had escaped too easily.

  And now I wonder, Mycroft.

  Have I truly gone there to record Babbage’s story?

  Or did he bring me there for another reason entirely?

  Did he know you would approach me?

  Was this just one more step in the great game we play, was I allowed to escape, in order to bring you this document?

  They are coming, Mr. Spoons said.

  Over the Channel—

  Home, soon. I hope my signal is detected. Soon I shall reach my destination. I am afraid, yet filled with wild hope, too. Could this nightmare journey really be over?

  Richmond Park, London—

  Flares rise into the night, signalling the landing site. As I come down low the lights illuminate men down below, and as I watch I see a larger flare rise, and then—

  My hand slips, the side of the airship is in flames—

  Tilting—

  The ground approaches fast, I—

  —end of Stoker Memorandum. Retrieved successfully by Bureau operative Lucy Westenra. Classified Ultra, for Head of Bureau Eyes Only—

  One night, I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice, as I did when I was a child. The words were familiar to my ear, they matched the voice that formed them, but it was not until I had opened my eyes to the dark of my room and my husband’s snoring that I remembered the words were calling me away from my warm bed and the steady breathing of my children, both asleep in their own rooms across the hall. “Because I could not stop for death,” my mother used to tell me, “he kindly stopped for me.” They were Dickinson’s words, of course, not my mother’s, but she said them as if they were hers, and because of that, they were hers, and because of that, they are now mine, passed down with every other object my mother gave me before I left for what I hoped would be a better world. “Here, take this candy dish.” Her hands pushing the red knobbed glass into my hands. “Here, take this sweater.” Her hands folding it, a made thing, pulled together by her hands, so that I could lift it and lay it on the seat as my car pulled me away. Her hand lifted into the air above her cloud of white hair behind me. The smoke of that other city enveloping her, putting it behind me, trying to put it behind me, until I had the words in my mouth again, like a bit, and then the way opened up beneath me, a fissure through which I slipped, down through the bedsheets, no matter how I grasped at them, down through the mattress, down through the floorboards, down, down, down, through the mud and earth and gravel, leaving my snoring husband and my steadily breathing children above, in that better place, until I was floating, once more, along the swiftly flowing current of the Fourth River.

  When I rose up, gasping for air, and blinked the water from my eyes, I saw the familiar cavern lit by lanterns that lined the walls, orange fires burning behind smoked glass. And, not far downstream, his shadow stood along the water’s edge, a lantern held out over the slug and tow of the current, waiting, as he was always waiting for me, there, in that place beneath the three rivers, there in the Fourth River’s tunnel that leads to Smoke City.

  It was time again, I understood, to attend to my obligations.

  History always exacts a price from those who have climbed out to live in the world above. There is never a way to fully outrun our beginnings. And here was mine, and he was mine here. I smiled, happy to see him again, the sharp bones of his face gold-leafed by the light of his lantern.

  He put out his hand to fish me from the river, and pulled me up to stand beside him. “It is good to see you again, wife,” he said, and I wrapped my arms around him.

  “It is good to smell you again, husband,” I said, my face pressed against his thick chest. They are large down here, the men of Smoke City. Their labor makes them into giants.

  We walked along the Fourth River’s edge, our hands linked between us, until we came to the mouth of the tunnel, where the city tipped into sight below, cupped as it is within the hands of a valley, strung together by the many bridges crossing the rivers that wind ’round its perimeter. The smoke obscured all but the dark mirrored glass of city towers, which gleamed by the light of the mill-fired skies down in the financial district, where the captains sit around long, polished tables throughout the hours and commit their business.

  It did not take the fumes long to find me, the scent of the mills and the sweaty, grease-faced laborers, so that when my husband pulled me toward the carriage at the top of the Incline Passage, a moment passed in which my heart flickered like the flame climbing the wick of his lantern. I inhaled sharply, trying to catch my breath. Already what nostalgia for home I possessed had begun to evaporate as I began to remember, to piece together what I had worked so hard to obscure.

  I hesitated at the door of the Incline carriage, looking back at the cavern opening, where the Fourth River spilled over the edge, down into the valley, but my husband placed two fingers on my chin and turned my face back up to his. “We must go now,” he said, and I nodded at his eyes like chips of coal, his mustached upper lip, the sweat on his brow, as if he were working, even now, as in the mill, among the glowing rolls of steel.

  The Incline rattled into gear, and soon we were creaking down the valley wall, rickety-click, the chains lowering us to the bottom, slowly, slowly. I watched out the window as the city grew close and the smoke began to thicken, holding a hand over my mouth and nose. An Incline car on the track opposite passed us, taking a man and a woman up to the Fourth River overlook. She, like me, peered out her window, a hand covering her mouth and nose as they ascended the tracks. We stared at each other, but it was she who first broke our gaze to look up at the opening to the cavern with great expectations, almost a panicked smile on her face, teeth gritted, willing herself upward. She was on her return journey, I could tell. I had worn that face myself. She had spen
t a long year here, and was glad to be leaving.

  They are long here, the years in Smoke City, even though they are finished within the passing of a night.

  At the bottom, my husband handed me down from the Incline car, then up again into our carriage, which was waiting by the curb, the horses nickering and snorting in the dark. Then off he sent us, jostling down the cobbled lane, with one flick of his wrist and a strong word.

  Down many wide and narrow streets we rode, some mud, some brick, some stone, passing through the long rows of narrow workers’ houses, all lined up and lean like soldiers, until we arrived at our own, in the Lost Neighborhood, down in Junction Hollow, where Eliza, the furnace, blocks the view of the river with her black bulk and her belching smoke. They are all female, always. They have unassuming names like Jeanette, Edith, Carrie. All night long, every night, they fill the sky with their fires.

  Outside, on the front stoop of our narrow house, my children from the last time were waiting, arms folded over their skinny chests or hanging limply at their sides. When I stepped down from the carriage onto the street, they ran down the stairs, their arms thrown wide, the word “Mother!” spilling from their eager mouths.

  They had grown since I’d last seen them. They had grown so much that none of them had retained the names I’d given them at birth. Shauna, the youngest, had become Anis. Alexander was Shoeshine. Paul, the oldest, said to simply call him Ayu. “Quite lovely,” I said to Anis. “Very good then,” I told Shoeshine. And to Ayu, I said nothing, only nodded, showing the respect due an imagination that had turned so particularly into itself during my absence. He had a glint in his eyes. He reminded me of myself a little, willing to cast off anything we’d been told.

  When we went through the door, the scent of boiled cabbage and potatoes filled the front room. They had cooked dinner for me, and quite proudly Anis and Shoeshine took hold of either elbow and led me to the scratched and corner-worn table, where we sat and shared their offering, not saying anything when our eyes met one another’s. It was not from shame, our silence, but from an understanding that to express too much joy at my homecoming would be absurd. We knew that soon they would have no names at all, and I would never again see them.

  We sipped our potato soup and finely chewed our noodles and cabbage.

  Later, after the children had gone to bed, my husband led me up the creaking stairs to our own room, where we made love, fitting into one another on the gritty, soot-stained sheets. Old friends, always. Afterward, his arms wrapped around my sweaty stomach, holding me to him from behind, he said, “I die a little more each time you are away.”

  I did not reply immediately, but stared out the grimy window at the rooftops across the street. A crow had perched on the sill of the window opposite, casting about for the glint of something, anything, in the dark streets below. It cawed at me, as if it had noticed me staring, and ruffled its feathers. Finally, without turning to my husband, I said, “We all die,” and closed my eyes to the night.

  The days in the city of my birth are differentiated from the nights by small degrees of shade and color. The streetlamps continue burning during the day, because the sun cannot reach beyond the smoke that moves through the valley like a storm that will never abate. So it always appears to be night, and you can only tell it is day by the sound of shift whistles and church bells ringing the hours, announcing when it is time to return to work or to kneel and pray.

  No growing things grew in Smoke City, due to the lack of sunlight. On no stoops or windowsills did a fern or a flower add their shapes and colors to the square and rectangular stone backdrops of the workers’ houses. Only fine dusty coatings of soot, in which children drew pictures with the tips of their fingers, and upon which adults would occasionally scrawl strange messages:

  Do Not Believe Anything They Tell You.

  Your Rewards Await You In Heaven.

  It Is Better That Others Possess What I Need But Do Not Understand.

  I walked my children down the road, past these cryptic depictions of stick men and women on the sides of houses and words whose meanings I could not fathom, until we came to the gates of the furnace Eliza, whose stacks sent thick plumes of smoke into the air. There, holding the hands of my two youngest, I knelt down in the street to meet their faces. “You must do what you are told,” I instructed them, my heart squeezing even as I said the words. “You must work very hard, and never be of trouble to anyone, understand?”

  The little ones, Anis and Shoeshine, nodded. They had all been prepared for this day over the short years of their lives. But Ayu, my oldest, narrowed his eyes to a squint and folded his arms over his chest, as if he understood more than I was saying. Those eyes were mine looking back at me, calling me a liar. “Do you understand, Ayu?” I asked him directly, to stop him from making that look. When he refused to answer, I asked, “Paul, do you understand me?” and he looked down at his feet, the head of a flower wilting.

  I stood again, took up their small hands again, and led them to Eliza’s gates, the top of which was decorated with a flourish of coiled barbed wire. A small, square window in the door opened as we stood waiting, and a man’s eye looked out at us. “Are they ready?” he said.

  I nodded.

  The window snapped shut, then the gate doors began to separate, widening as they opened. Inside, we could see many people working, sparks flying, carts of coal going back and forth, the rumble of the mill distorting the voices of the workers. The man who had opened the gate window came from around the corner to greet us. He was small, stocky, with oily skin and a round face. He smiled, but I could not manage to be anything but straight-faced and stoic. He held his hands out to the little ones, who went to him, giving him their hands as they’d been instructed, and my heart filled my mouth, suffocating me, so that I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands.

  “Stupid cow,” the gateman said, and as soon as I took my hands away to look up, I saw Ayu running away, his feet kicking up dust behind him. “See what you’ve done?” Do not look back, I told Ayu with my mind, hoping he could somehow hear me. Do not look back or you will be detained here forever.

  Then the gates shut with a metallic bang, and my small ones were gone from me, gone to Eliza.

  The first month of my year in the city of my birth passed slowly, painfully, like the aftereffects of a night of drunkenness. For a while I had wondered if Ayu would return to the house at some point, to gather what few possessions he had made or acquired over his short lifetime, but he stayed away, smartly. My husband would have only taken him back to Eliza if he found him. That is the way, what is proper, and my husband here was nothing if not proper.

  We made love every night, after he returned from the mill, his arms heavy around my waist, around my shoulders. But something had occurred on the day I’d given up the last ones: my womb had withered, and now refused to take our love and make something from its materials.

  Still, we tried. Or I should say, my husband tried. Perhaps that was the reason for my body’s reluctance. Whenever his breath fell against my neck, or his mouth on my breasts, I would look out the window and see Eliza’s fires scouring the sky across the mountaintops, and what children we may have made, the idea of them, would burn to cinders.

  “You do not love me anymore,” my husband said one night, in my second month in the city; and though I wanted to, badly, I could not deny this.

  I tried to explain. “It is not you, it is not me, it is this place,” I told him. “Why don’t you come with me, why don’t we leave here together?”

  “You forget so easily,” my husband said, looking down into his mug of cold coffee.

  “What?” I said. “What do I forget?”

  “You have people there, in the place you would take me.”

  I looked down into my own mug and did not nod.

  “It is what allows you to forget me, to forget our children, our life,” said my husband.

  “What is?” I asked, looking up again. Rarely did my husban
d tell me things about myself.

  “Your bad memory,” said my husband. “It is your blessing.”

  If my memory were truly as bad as my husband thought, I would not have been returned to the city of my birth. He was incorrect in his judgment. What he should have said was, Your memory is too strong to accomplish what you desire, for I would not have been able to dismiss that. It is true, I wanted nothing more than to eradicate, to be born into a new world without the shackles of longing, and the guilt that embitters longing fulfilled.

  But he had said his truth, flawed as it was, and because he had spoken this truth we could no longer look at each other without it hovering between us, a ghost of every child we had ever had together, every child I had taken, as a proper wife and mother, to the gates. They stared at me for him, and I would turn away to cook, clean, mend, to keep the walls of the house together.

  Another month passed in this way, and then another. I washed my husband’s clothes each day in a tub of scalding water. The skin on my hands began to redden, then to peel away. I began to avoid mirrors. My hair had gone lank and hung about my face like coils of old rope, no matter how I tried to arrange it. I could no longer see my own pupils, for there was no white left in the corners. My eyes had turned dark with coal dust and smoke.

  One day a knock at the front door pulled me away from the dinner I was making for my husband’s return from another sixteen-hour shift. When I opened the door, a man from the mill, a manager I vaguely recognized, was standing on my stoop. He held a hat against his protruding stomach, as if he had taken it off to recite a pledge or a piece of poetry. “Excuse me,” he said, “for interrupting your day. But I come with sad news.”

  Before he could finish, I knew what he would say. Few reasons exist for a mill manager to visit a worker’s wife.