The Steampowered Globe

by Неизвестный

  Up close, there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about the statue.

  “Who made the report?” Shu said, swivelling around.

  “I did, constable,” a man said, coming forward cautiously. “I own this teahouse. This morning I came out and found my door god covered with this ... this thing.”

  “The vines?” Iron Inch said, bending down towards the statue. “They weren’t there before?”

  “No, constable. They grew overnight. And inside the flowers ...” His face screwed up in disgust. Iron Inch extended the grapple attachment on her right-arm bracer, delicately took hold of a purple bloom between the tips of the grapple’s smallest points and turned the flower up to the light. At first she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then she looked down into the trumpet – and blinked. The trumpet blinked back.

  Deep inside it, growing where the flower’s stigma should have been, was an eyeball – a tiny round one complete with yellow iris and staring, dilated pupil.

  “Eeeeeuu, that’s gross,” Shu said, wrinkling her nose. “Who did it, do you know?”

  “No, constable. I have no idea. So many people come in and out of my teahouse every day.” The teahouse proprietor’s face was taking on distress as well as disgust. “Constable, I can’t imagine who would want to do something like this.”

  “Didn’t I say it was a little boy’s joke?” Shu muttered to Iron Inch, and more loudly to the regulars, “Lau and Yeung, take his statement.”

  Iron Inch had to agree with her colleague. The flowers were disgusting but harmless. Growing them all over someone’s door god was exactly the sort of silly practical joke a neighbourhood boy might play. While the two regulars questioned the proprietor, Iron Inch snapped off a length of vine with her grapple tips and packed it into a metal specimen box. Shu, meanwhile, got out a large canvas sack and held it open. Iron Inch put the specimen box away, then extended both her arm grapples and grasped the statue by its torso. Bracing her feet apart, she pulled down on the grapple levers and, with a tremendous ratcheting of gears, lifted the solid wood door god straight up off the ground. The vines around its base ripped with a strong smell of sap. Her exoskeleton’s springs creaked as she swivelled slowly around and lowered the statue into the waiting sack. Around her, the watching residents drew even further back.

  The proprietor had noticed by now. “Constables, what are you doing?” he cried. “Where are you taking my door god?”

  “It needs to be brought back to the station for cleansing,” Shu told him. “You’ll be told when you can have it back.”

  Leaving the proprietor staring dolefully at the empty pedestal by his doorstep, they headed back to the station, Iron Inch carrying the bagged statue.

  “That was a waste of time,” one of the regulars remarked as they turned out of the street. “It’s just an ugly vine. He could have cleaned it up himself, no need to make a police report.”

  “You tell the hairy old man that,” Iron Inch retorted.

  “Hah! That’s your job, not mine.”

  *

  Back at the station, the two regulars made themselves scarce, leaving Iron Inch and Shu to check in at the garage where they turned statue and sample over to the elderly head engineer, Woon.

  “Eyeballs?” Woon sniffed, peering into the glass-topped box. “Amateur work. Waste of my time.” He glowered at Iron Inch as if she were somehow to blame for the morning glory. As the station’s head engineer, he was in charge of the mecha garage; he was also in charge of analyzing samples for all hacker investigations and had suffered greatly from the new superintendent’s enthusiasm.

  “You didn’t have to gear up and go out there to collect it,” Shu retorted, backing her exoskeleton into its holding frame and unstrapping herself.

  “That’s your job, woman!” Adnoun disappeared into his cavernous workshop behind the steam generator, taking the box with him.

  “Wait!” Iron Inch shouted after him. “Where do I put this?” She was still holding the bagged statue.

  A muffled reply came back, mostly inaudible under the noise from the generator.

  “Did he just say to shove it up the hairy old man’s nose?” Shu said, disengaging her last strap and dropping lightly to the floor.

  “I’d like to shove it up his nose,” Iron Inch muttered, and set the statue down on the floor with a heavy thump.

  “Help me out of the mech. The hairy old man may have a heart attack if we take much longer to report in.”

  The superintendent’s office was on the second floor of the station, overlooking the street. It had been less than twenty minutes since the squad’s return, but Superintendent Gibson was already pacing impatiently up and down the carpet.

  “What was it?” he demanded as soon as they entered, without even waiting for the customary salute. “Plants or animals?”

  “A morning glory vine,” Shu said with a shrug. “It had eyeballs in the flowers.”

  “Eyeballs in the flowers? What kind of abominations are these hackers thinking up now?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not a hacker,” Shu said, shrugging again.

  “It’s just as well that you aren’t, constable,” Gibson snapped. “This hacker activity is a menace. As if they don’t create enough trouble in the commercial districts, now they plague the suburbs as well? Paper-eating beetles, carnivorous moths and now flowers growing eyes, is there no end to their perversions?”

  Shu rolled her eyes sideways at Iron Inch, but neither of them said anything about the very great difference between man-eating insects and a flower that had been altered to grow an eyeball instead of a stigma.

  *

  Superintendent Gibson was a Union Jacker, hulking and pink-skinned with a great deal of light yellow hair, and like just about every other Union Jacker in the Treaty Territories, he had a near-obsessive fascination with hackers and hacker work.

  “Describe this vine to me,” Gibson ordered now. “Is it an ordinary morning glory plant or was something else done to it? Are the flowers the yellow or purple kind? Was the colour changed by the ... the alterations?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Shu said. “You’ll have to ask Inspector Woon.” Her eyes brightened with mischief. “Why don’t you come down to the garage now and have a look at it yourself, sir? We brought the whole vine back. It was growing on a door god statue.”

  Iron Inch bit her lip to stop herself laughing at the expression on Gibson’s angular pink face. “Are you out of your mind, woman?” he exploded. “You’re only supposed to bring a sample back for the engineers. The mother plant should have been destroyed on the spot.”

  “Couldn’t do that, sir,” Shu said. “It was growing on valuable property. We’d have to compensate the owner. Anyway, Inspector Woon’s going to cleanse the door god and return it.”

  Gibson’s pale blue eyes appeared about to pop out of his head. “Out of the question! The statue is contaminated and has to be destroyed along with the mother plant. Get down to the garage and tell Woon to burn it right now.”

  “Sir, you can’t destroy a door god,” Iron Inch protested. “It’s bad luck.”

  “Superstition,” Gibson snapped. “This is the modern age, constable. Door guardian statues are carved wood, nothing more. Now go and give Woon his orders. Dismissed!”

  “Yes, sir,” Shu said obediently, and turned to go. Iron Inch followed her, but was brought up short by Gibson’s voice.

  “You, what’s your name, Iron Inch? Send a clerk in here. A report must be sent to the district commissioner at once. We can’t have a hacker outbreak in this area.”

  “Yes, sir,” Iron Inch said, already half out the door, but the next thing she heard coming out of the superintendent’s mouth, muttered in an undertone, was “Iron Inch – what kind of name is that for a woman?”

  Iron Inch slammed the door hard enough to rattle the frame. Shu, who had heard it too, gave her a sympathetic look. “Ignore him, Cheun Kum. He’s just an ignorant Jacker.”

  Iron Inch growled wordl
essly and headed for the stairs. Cheun Kum was the name her parents had given her, but Iron Inch Kum was the name written on her birth certificate, courtesy of a semi-illiterate Jacker clerk who had gotten her surname the wrong way around and mistranslated the rest. It might be an appropriate name for a mecha officer in this decade but when she was growing up it had been the bane of her existence.

  She delivered the message about the report to the first clerk she saw, getting a wordless grimace in response, and headed on to the garage with Shu.

  “The hairy old man may not believe in door gods, but he’s certainly superstitious enough about hackers,” she commented sourly as the two of them ran lightly down the stairs. Iron Inch was a trim and muscular woman of average height with the classic black hair and eyes of Southern Han; Shu was somewhat taller and more slender with the grace of an opera actress and a face to match. They had been paired together almost since being assigned to Tsing Mui Shan Station.

  “Even Jackers need to believe in something,” Shu said with another shrug. “Anyway, all this obsession with hackers gives him something to do.”

  “Inspector Woon had better move the door god,” Iron Inch said, changing the subject. “The hairy old man will probably come down in person to make sure it’s burned.”

  The statue, however, had already vanished, bag and all, by the time they arrived back at the garage. Woon was inside his workshop fiddling with a very large flowerpot.

  “Inspector!” Shu shouted over the noise of the steam generator. “The hairy old man says you’re to burn the door god. He says it’s contaminated.”

  “I’ll decide what’s contaminated and what’s not.” Woon’s wrathful reply came back from the depths of the flowerpot. “Am I the head engineer around here or is he?”

  “You are, inspector,” Shu and Iron Inch chorused, grinning.

  Woon had been at the station longer than any of the twelve mecha officers whose equipment he oversaw, and he was cranky enough for all of them put together. Because all mecha officers were female by law, following an imperial study that found women to behave less erratically while controlling the physical power of a spring exoskeleton, Woon had often been the butt of jokes from the young male constables. They compared him to an old eunuch overseeing a harem of concubines and made obscene suggestions about what he could do with his clockwork devices. All that had stopped, however, when Woon built a very large mechanical spider, programmed it to bite ankles and released it into the regular officers’ quarters. A lot of the young constables had been limping the next day.

  “By the way, inspector, just what are you potting over there?” Shu said, craning past the threshold. There was an edge of suspicion in her voice that made Iron Inch lean over to join her.

  “None of your business,” Woon said, straightening up with soil smudged on the front of his leather apron.

  “Go and write your reports for the superintendent. Stop bothering me.”

  “What are you planting, inspector?” Shu persisted. “Is that the specimen we brought back?”

  A few familiar-looking purple flowers were visible over the edge of the pot. Iron Inch looked quickly around the workshop for the sample box she had given Woon, and saw it, open and empty, on a bench.

  “Inspector Woon––” she started.

  “Are the two of you deaf?” Woon turned such a ferocious scowl on the two women that they retreated several steps. “Get lost before I send my spider after you!”

  “All right, all right. No need to get agitated, inspector. We’re going.” Shu scooted back around the generator, pulling Iron Inch with her, and when they were a safe distance from the workshop she rolled her eyes and said, “I wonder what the hairy old man’s going to say?”

  “We’ll find out,” Iron Inch predicted.

  Sure enough, Superintendent Gibson came down to the garage less than an hour later. He did not go into Woon’s workshop, however, but marched straight over to where the off-duty mecha officers, Iron Inch and Shu among them, were drinking cheap tea and playing dice.

  “I want six of you suited up now,” he shouted over the din from where a row of exoskeletons was having their spring boxes rewound. “We are going to Three Dragons Street to finish the clean-up.”

  “Clean-up, sir?” Shu protested. “We already removed the statue and the plant.”

  “That’s not enough, constable. Aren’t you aware that morning glory vines can reproduce through cuttings alone? If you’ve left so much as one stem back there the whole street will be contaminated by tomorrow.”

  With a lot of muttered grumbling that the generator noise disguised, the six women Gibson had pointed out trailed off to get into their exoskeletons.

  “At least he didn’t order us out again,” Iron Inch said when the superintendent was gone.

  “One of these days I’m going to spike his wine with gansui root,” Shu said, looking wistfully after him. “A week spent vomiting up his toes might teach him a lesson.”

  “Then he’ll declare gansui root to be a hacker abomination and start raiding the medical halls,” another constable, Siu Yin, said, and all the remaining officers laughed.

  The six-mecha squad returned late in the afternoon, covered with dirt and several of them with sprung grapples. It turned out that Gibson had ordered them to dig up the spot where the morning glory vine had rooted. This had involved prying up cobblestones, removing the doorstep of the teahouse and excavating a two-metre-deep hole before he was satisfied.

  Inspector Woon took one look at the state of the exoskeletons, picked up a large wrench and headed for the superintendent’s office with a near-homicidal expression on his face.

  “Five copper taels says there’s a spider in the hairy old man’s bed tonight,” Shu murmured when he had disappeared up the stairs.

  “Not taking that bet,” Iron Inch replied automatically, and got up from where she had been laboriously composing a report on the morning’s work – Gibson demanded at least two thousand words per officer per hacker incident. “I want to go and see if Inspector Woon’s really planted that specimen we brought back. Are you coming?”

  Shu nearly knocked her own desk over getting up.

  Woon’s workshop looked as though a typhoon had been through it. Tools, parts and papers lay wherever he had last put them down, piled on benches and shelves or crammed haphazardly into half-open drawers. A partially dismantled exoskeleton spring box sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a litter of gears and bolts. And, as if the mechanical clutter were not enough, a number of used plates were visible here and there, the remnants of meals congealed on them.

  “What a disgusting place,” Shu said, taking a cautious step over the threshold. “Oh, dear heaven. Is that underwear in that toolbox? Dirty underwear?”

  “Stop looking at the inspector’s underwear,” Iron Inch said, finding the large pot among the mess on one bench and gingerly crossing the floor to examine it. Something skidded under her foot and shot away into a corner with a metallic clink.

  “He is growing it,” Shu said, joining her and peering down into the pot where the morning’s specimen was bedded in about a foot of earth. It appeared to have developed several more shoots since they had brought it back. “And look over there. It’s not the only thing he’s growing.”

  Hidden under a bench was a row of three more pots, each containing some kind of plant. All three appeared to have wilted, but the brown and brittle remnants on the far right were still recognizable as a mutant violet one of the other squads had brought in the previous week.

  “He’s been keeping the specimens and planting them,” Shu said, screwing up her face in disgust. “Cheun Kum, I think our inspector is a closet hacker.”

  “Are you going to tell the hairy old man?”

  “Let him find out himself. Our shift’s almost over, anyway.”

  *

  Whatever argument Inspector Woon had with the superintendent over the damaged exoskeletons, he lost it. Gibson then confiscated his wrench, sa
ying it was too dangerous to wave such a heavy tool around outside the garage.

  In revenge, Woon went out to the back of the garage and planted the hacked morning glory behind the men’s privies. The next day one of the regular constables came scuttling back into the station calling the inspector bad names – but not very loudly, because Woon was working on the steam generator just across the garage.

  “What’s he done now, left his spider in the loo?” Shu called lazily.

  “He’s planted that thing behind our outhouse,” the young man spluttered. “The flowers are – are looking through the cracks at us!”

  “So?” Shu said. “Aren’t you proud of having something for them to look at?”

  “Not like this.” And the constable stormed off.

  “Eyeballs eyeing my balls!” they heard him muttering as he disappeared around the corner.

  Despite the complaints, none of the regular constables was really bothered enough to tell Gibson about it. And in any case, the superintendent was busy settling a complaint from the teahouse proprietor. The excavation of the morning glory roots had caused the building’s foundations to sag and a distressingly large pothole had appeared inside the main room. Two clerks and a specialist from the local magistrate’s office had to be sent to assess the damage, and the magistrate himself turned up at the station to give Gibson an earful. Most of the officers sneaked out of the back door when that happened. Iron Inch was the last person to leave because she’d been held up completing her report for Gibson. As a result she was the only person to notice that the morning glory had grown to cover the outhouse’s entire back wall.

  The vine had apparently found the moist and smelly soil around the privies very agreeable. The original cutting had thickened to the breadth of her wrist and put down roots so large they were visible at its base. Some of the purple trumpet flowers were nearly the size of her hand – although, she noticed with amusement, the eyeballs inside them were still tiny. Green tendrils had wrapped around the edge of every board and tile, and as she watched, several of them reached the corner of the station itself and started to crawl up it with visible speed.