Steampunk International

by Ian Whates

  ‘Add extra gum to render the patch ever more adhesive?’ enquired Agnes.

  ‘Cleanse and dry the sodden area in the birth channel. Apply the Dark Olympic Victor’s Ointment with extra gum, allow to dry and become adherent. The channel is closed temporarily so the urine escapes as normal through the designated passageway. The tender skin heals. Then, surgery. We may have found a solution.’ Marion was almost beyond jubilation.

  ‘Appraise the outcome to the Dark Olympic patch, repeat as required. A sympatexic, excuse me, the celestial water is at fault, a sympathetic outcome.’ Simpson grinned.

  Jessie placed the stoppered chloroform into its case. ‘We should partake of some Saloop now for ‘tis nearly time for sweet departures.’

  ‘“We four have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine, but seas between us broad have roared, since days of long ago”,’ Marion launched into a Scottish accent. ‘My Teresa reads Robbie to our children at night.’ He smiled innocently at Simpson, Jessie and Agnes.

  The roar of laughter from Simpson was infectious, and none of them noticed at first when a butterfly the hues of sunset landed on his sleeve. As she flapped her wings, a flash of colour caught his eye and he looked down.

  ‘My! What a beautiful creature you are,’ he said, delighted at her presence.

  ‘Hamearis Lucina I believe. Named for Lucina the Goddess of Childbirth,’ declared Marion.

  The butterfly fluttered above the mahogany table, an altar to the Oracle of Delphi, and gossamer wings conveyed the message: where knowledge blooms, then will arise belief, hope and redemption for the rights of women and all of mankind.

  James Young Simpson, a prominent Scottish obstetrician, introduced anaesthesia to childbirth, while J. Marion Sims is the father of modern gynaecology. Simpson would sit at his table and experiment with chloroform – there is a famous picture of him and his guests in various stages of intoxication at said table, and under it.

  The issues mentioned in “The Athenian Dinner” party are a stark reality, particularly relevant in underdeveloped areas of the world, where they affect millions of women.

  Derry O’Dowd is the father-daughter team of Michael and Katy O’Dowd. Michael is an obstetrician gynaecologist, author of The History of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (with Elliot E. Philipp), and The History of Medications for Women: Materia Medica Woman. Katy spent years working as an arts and entertainment journalist before moving into copywriting, and onto fiction. She is the author of steampunk books The Lady Astronomer and Memento Mori.

  The first in The Scarlet Ribbon historical fiction series by Derry O’Dowd is available from all good bookshops and at amazon.co.uk/Derry-ODowd.

  STEAMPUNK

  FINLAND

  Magdalena Hai

  Anne Leinonen

  J.S. Meresmaa

  Osuuskumma

  Osuuskumma is a Finnish co-operative publishing house specialising in all kinds of strange fiction – fantasy, sci-fi, horror, New Weird, steampunk, and the like. Recently we have branched out into international publications under “Osuuskumma International” to offer top-quality Finnish speculative fiction in languages other than Finnish.

  Foreword

  J.S. Meresmaa

  The Age of Finnish Steampunk can be said to have begun in 2012 when the first part of Gigi and Henry trilogy by Magdalena Hai was published. As a small and reclusive northern country in the armpit of Russia, not really a part of Scandinavia and not a part of Eastern Europe either, Finland is a bit of an odd bird. It is not uncommon to have the trends of the wider world land on our doorstep a bit late. Often we miss a trend or two. But sometimes we pick up something that becomes all the rage in a short span of time. Steampunk could be said to be one of those things. Since 2012 a lot has happened: In addition to Hai’s trilogy there have been three anthologies, novels, audio short stories and individual short stories published in magazines and e-zines. (And I'm only talking about fiction, here. There's even a steampunk-themed bar in Helsinki.) So you can imagine it wasn't easy to pick just three short stories to represent the Finnish steampunk scene.

  The stories I have chosen for this anthology are all from prolific Finnish authors who have also published steampunk in long form. “The Winged Man Isaac” by Magdalena Hai is set in an alternate reality in the late 19th century where a change in the Gulf Stream has partially melted the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Vikings are a major trading power. It shares the same world as her landmark trilogy Gigi and Henry, but it is aimed especially for adult audience. Great in worldbuilding, vast ideas and heavy in emotion it's a fine example of steampunk with Nordic flair.

  Masterfully paced, quirky, and full of engineering marvel, “The Cylinder Hat” by Anne Leinonen offers a glimpse of Finnish city life with a twist of black humour. The main character of Siiri's story will reappear in long form as the author is currently working on a novel manuscript that sheds light on parallel realities, and Siiri becomes Iiris.

  Lastly, “Augustine” by J.S. Meresmaa, yours truly, features a young girl with bad hearing and high hopes of becoming an engineer. Feminism meets capitalism in a story that takes place in Paris, France in the late 1800s. It is set in the same alternative Europe as the author's trilogy The Ursine Affairs, which introduces a world where some of the great beasts from the last glacial period have survived in the wilds of Siberia and magic exists among the shamanistic tribes.

  J.S. Meresmaa

  Tampere, Finland

  April 2018

  The Winged Man Isaac

  Magdalena Hai

  Translated by Christina Saarinen

  If they hadn’t harmed the children, everything might have gone differently. Because whenever One-Ear allowed herself to think back to those days, she always thought about the children more than anything. The one Isaac had lost, and the one that was never born.

  Sometimes she thought of Isaac, as well.

  One-Ear had found him in a trash heap, lying in a foetal position, his upper body covered by a huge mechanical wing. She had cautiously lifted the edge of the wing. On his lower half, the man was wearing clean, sturdy wool pants and leather boots. But instead of a shirt, his upper body was sheathed with strips of metal like talons that wrapped around from back to front and kept a tight grip on his ribcage. The wing let out a metallic creak as One-Ear stretched it upward. The structure was surprisingly stiff, but not heavy. She had a clear view of the man’s face as he slept under the wing.

  One-Ear stood silently, chewing her shirtsleeve, unable to move.

  The sky began to grow light. Somewhere, a child shouted.

  The man shuddered. His eyes, blackened by blood and soot, opened. He turned his pained face toward One-Ear.

  “Help.”

  One-Ear wasn’t sure how she managed to get the man to the apartment. The stairs leading up to the top floor were narrow, and the man was nearly as limp as the wings dangling from his back, which scraped the walls of the stairwell and got caught on the handrails in the corners. The man was nearly unconscious and scarcely managed to carry his own weight. One-Ear’s head felt unnaturally light, too. Her underskirt grew stiff with the blood she had lost, and the rough fabric rubbed mercilessly against her thighs and shins. Convulsions of grief rose up within her, but she forced herself not to think about what had been. The most important thing now was to escape the reach of the spiders.

  Isaac awoke. It was late evening, or night. The gas lights of the airships turned the red sky a nauseating yellow. With every movement pain tore through his muscles, but Isaac pulled himself up to sit. He was in a large apartment, from which all the furniture had been removed, apart from the straw-filled, striped mattress he was lying on. The dirty wallpaper hung in shreds from the walls, and the broken windows had let in rain sullied by coal smoke, which had soaked into the floorboards and a twisted rag rug grey with age. In the middle of the floor, a fire place had been built from a few loose bricks. The fire that had once smouldered under a hot plate in an old three-legged pot had gone out,
but the iron still radiated heat into the room. There was a dented pot on top of the hot plate. The room smelled like mould and smoke.

  Isaac tried to recall what had happened. He remembered a few moments at home, in the workshop. Worrying about Anneliese and Mathilde. The thrilling feeling when the wings that now bit so mercilessly into his back had lifted him into the air, over the rooftops. After that, he had only an indistinct sense of time’s passing. Of the days and the nights that slipped past in a torpor. Isaac didn’t know how he had ended up here, in this worn-out, grey apartment under a fiery sky.

  The door opened with a creak. A mouse-haired young girl came in, thin as a reed under her ragged clothes. The girl barely glanced at him, going instead to the hot plate and lifting the lid of the pot. Steam carried the appetizing scent of barley porridge into the room. Her pale blue eyes glanced thoughtfully at something behind Isaac’s shoulder, as if she didn’t see him at all. Her narrow lips moved to the rhythm of soundless words. Then, suddenly, the girl’s gaze fell on him, and Isaac realised that the girl was not a child, but a young woman. Thin and harrowed-looking, but a woman all the same. She had a symmetrical face, with an attractive plainness. Strikingly high cheekbones. Her tribal features and colouring, vapid like the northern sky, revealed centuries of isolation. Isaac swore silently to himself. A woman with that kind of face... Isaac would be damn lucky if she wasn’t a Keloburg Finn.

  “Am I your prisoner?” Isaac asked, and then: “Are you a Demon?”

  When the woman rose, her mouse-grey hair swung aside for a moment, revealing pink scar tissue where her ear should have been. When she noticed his gaze, she covered her missing ear with her hair.

  “They call me One-Ear,” she said simply.

  “My name is Isaac Beckers,” Isaac said, leaning awkwardly on his wings, his chest, marked with deep scrapes, arched painfully forward. “Thank you.”

  The woman shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you.”

  There were shots somewhere, far in the distance. Hollow, sporadic blasts that bounced repeatedly off the brick walls lining the narrow streets. Isaac saw One-Ear tense to listen and then relax when the shots didn’t continue or come closer.

  “You didn’t answer my question. Are you one of the Demons?” Isaac asked. “Isn’t that what you’re called around here?”

  “No,” the woman said. “Not any more.”

  This wasn’t the first time a major accident had occurred in the manufacturing district, of course. The building stock had been replaced at a rapid rate for as long as One-Ear could remember, and they were no strangers to earthquakes caused by the rising land. The great earthquake of 1852, which One-Ear had fortunately only heard about in the stories of older folk, had collapsed an entire section of the city. This time, the earthquake’s most powerful wave struck the core of the manufacturing district late in the afternoon. One of the buildings destroyed was the provincial king’s giant new textile manufactory. That made matters worse. The actions of Keloburg’s aging huscarl had long caused discontent among the poorer residents of the city. The friction between the huscarl and the underground movement, which was gaining more and more support, continued to grow. There was much talk about his preference for hiring children over adults, at half pay, and how he forced his underage employees to work days longer than humanly possible. The manufactory was a massive building, constructed of red brick and iron, which sucked into its dusty depths each morning hundreds of workers like a putrid slumbering beast. Of course, the others did the same, and the old Varjag guard held onto their arrogance as avidly as they did their privileges. But King Ingvar, the huscarl, was worst of all. Most of those who had been trapped under the textile factory’s roof beams and machinery had been less than fifteen years old. Children who were exhausted through and through and could hardly keep standing, much less run, after a fourteen-hour working day.

  The spoon made a sickening screech against the bottom of the pot as One-Ear scooped the porridge into a battered metal plate in the dim gray apartment. From the corner of her eye she saw Isaac stir. He had lost consciousness again.

  It was said that the huscarl had been playing fox and geese with his wife when he received word of the accident. He had calmly finished his game before deigning to lift his raunchy backside off his seat. At the same time, the leaders of the underground – a man called Nightingale and his bitch, Niko – had plastered the streets with posters spelling out the old king’s sins, from first to last. People said there were as many posters hung as there were dead children in the abyss of the manufactory. Enough to dirty the streets. Enough to set flame to the souls of the poor.

  When the riots broke out, the Finns closed the streets with large barrels, passenger cars, and whatever else they could find. Finns Heath, the outlying neighbourhood where they had settled, was located in the far outskirts of the city, adjacent to the sparsely populated Upper Slope and the boggy burial grounds. It was easy to blockade since hardly anyone wanted to travel through the area anyway, especially in times of unrest. The Finns had counted on being too insignificant to either side to be worth drawing into the conflict. After all, what were they in this country, to these people, besides devils and demons? The Finns had a reputation for being skilled at the bucksaw and had been brought to the Isle to fell its forests and fuel the insatiable kilns of the railroads and manufactories. But when the last of the forests around Keloburg had been cut down, the Finns were forgotten, left to fend for themselves. And that’s what they did.

  Even without the roadblocks they had always been set apart. Different.

  One-Ear watched Isaac as he hovered at the edge of consciousness. At times he was delirious; at times he talked in his sleep, and One-Ear listened. A plan began to take shape in her mind. When the man was awake, One-Ear fed him barley gruel, skimping on the kernels. He had a good appetite though it clearly hurt him to eat. The wings, constructed of metal and leather, stretched out behind his back like a fan, their surface occasionally reflecting the flash of firebombs as delicate flecks of light on the grey walls of the apartment. One-Ear considered cleaning the open wounds on the man’s chest, but there were so many that she was afraid she would hurt him more than she could help him. One-Ear was no doctor. But perhaps there was something she could do for him.

  After he had eaten, the man fell asleep with his head hanging against his shoulder. One-Ear took the shawl from her shoulders and folded it under his head for a pillow. Then she drew from her pocket a set of crescent wrenches and screwdrivers.

  When the unrest began, the decision to close Finns Heath was made by consensus, and both the Varjags and the underground were notified. The Demons, along with the rest of their tribe, had sworn to keep the line. No one was allowed inside the borders.

  But the riots had continued and spread, turning into a violent, uncontrollable uprising and, finally, full-fledged urban warfare. Firebombs fell closer and closer to the area where the Finns lived. One-Ear had feared it was only a matter of time before they would be drawn into the conflict. All it would take was some small spark, a rumour or misinformation claiming they sympathised with the rebels, and they too would be swallowed up by war.

  The remains of the destroyed manufactories had been smouldering for three weeks when the Demons mistakenly took custody of a Varjag at a roadblock. One-Ear had protested when Matias decided to take the man with them, but for one reason or another her demands had fallen on deaf ears. Matias was the third to have led the Demons. Before him had been Juhani Korpela, who was hanged for killing a man, and before that Laura, who was called Iron-Hand and had originally established the street gang called the Demons. One-Ear didn’t know what had happened to Laura, but both of her daughters had been members of the Demons from birth. Tilda had started a family and left the gang, but the younger daughter, Liisa, was still heavily involved. Liisa was moody and quick to use her fists, and One-Ear was afraid of her. They had all been satisfied when Matias took control of the g
ang after Juhani got himself hanged. Under Matias, the number of Demons had grown from about thirty to a hundred and now included nearly all of the younger people in Finns Heath.

  Back at headquarters, One-Ear had climbed on top of an old trunk and crossed her legs in front of her. The mound of her belly was growing day by day, preventing her from lifting her knees under her chin as she would have liked. She rubbed the underside of her stomach protectively. The pregnancy hadn’t been planned or wanted, but just a short while ago, One-Ear had started to feel a delicate fluttering, like the brush of a feather. At first, they had puzzled her, but now she realized she was secretly looking forward to the little nudges.

  There wasn’t a sound to be heard from the lower city. The explosions had dropped off during the day. One-Ear tried to imagine the scene on the other side of the roadblock. Collapsed buildings and, between them, small points of fire. Bodies mangled by spiders and bullets, that no one had cleared away. Perhaps the residents were focused on putting out fires. The rebel fighters would have retreated to cellars and caves under the city; an expansive underground network now covered nearly all of the Lowlands. Hundreds of feet above them, the Varjagian airships floated silently and threateningly, like thunderclouds.

  The air felt oppressive – as if it too was waiting for something to happen.

  One-Ear stared at the Varjag lying on the floor of the hut. A group of men in civilian clothing had come in the dark of night and tried to penetrate the area by force. How could they have known? Everything had happened so suddenly. When the fight was over, the Demons had found among the corpses a man just barely alive. He was sprawled alongside the roadblock with blood spurting from the corner of his mouth. The Demons had dragged the man to headquarters for questioning, and only when they stripped off his jacket did they notice the two-headed snake of Keloburg tattooed on his forearm.