Shanghai Steam

by Calvin D. Jim

  Madame never calls me by my number. Never. Tears sting my eyes, though the scrolls say my enhancements render this impossible.

  Madame beckons with a long, gold-tipped nail. “Girl, come here.”

  With a glare at me, the girl tugs her shirtfront straight and mounts the mockwood dais. She stops short at the sight of Madame One Ming’s talons and bows her head, not graceful at all. “Right pleased to meet you, ma’am,” she says. “You sure got you a nice dome here, way nicer than Icks or Eye-Vee. Nicest place I ever seen, even back home at Luna Colony. Nicer even than Old Aunt Mazy the banker’s wife’s, and she gots her a real oak settle imported all the way from Earth, not even synthawood.”

  Madame smiles as though this inane chatter is not beneath Her notice. “Good fortune, prosperity, and longevity to you,” She says, and turns to me. “Blossom, please fetch tea. Our visitor must be thirsty after her travels.”

  I knock the floor three times, perhaps too rapidly for proper humility, and hurry from the room. The girl is telling stories in her outlandish accent of Martian desert kraken, of kidnappings, of dancehall droids with immodest programming and garish petticoats — all tales of beyond Dome II, where I have spent my life and where Madame has spent much longer than that.

  Banging cupboards in the Nine-Dragon kitchen pavilion, I try not to wonder how long the new girl will stay. At least a month and two days; that’s how long before Jacob Tinker returns on his regular circuit. As water boils in its patterned iron kettle I duck into the alcove and light a precious incense stick, and entreat Madame’s human ancestors to grant me strength not to kill our honored visitor before sunset.

  Returning with the tray I find Madame laughing — laughing! — at some inanity about cloned cattle and their indelicate genetically modified undercarriages. Madame forgets even to smile at me when I kneel by Her slippers to watch Her whisk tea.

  “…And so Echo and me, we hid in Granpappy Tinker’s wagon under enough hay to feed Old Neddy the Goatman’s entire herd back on Luna, and he took us a slight detour and brought us here. Said you was a real nice lady, used to be married to the richest man on Mars, who was supposed to be my kin, ‘cause I was supposed to marry his youngest son’s youngest, but that didn’t work out so good….”

  Thank Madame’s human ancestors, the girl seems to have run out of air at last. She sits, legs crossed, one braid lifted to her mouth with the thoughtlessness of nervous habit. Madame scoops tea into a jade bowl. “I too came to Mars as a bride. A girl no older than you, no bigger than this little lotus blossom here.” She turns Her gaze on me and my heart swells with radiance. “In my eyes, my future husband was not the richest man on Mars, but a young glassblower’s apprentice from my childhood village.”

  The redheaded girl is still now, rapt and quiet. “You came from Earthside?”

  Madame nods, picking up the ancient wooden whisk. “From farm country, like you. I’d only glimpsed Kun Li Cantrell as a little girl, by the well, scooping water into his experimental glass globes. Or at market, carrying his sealed spheres of water with bright goldfish inside, explaining to anyone and everyone how fish had to carry their atmosphere with them wherever they went, so they could breathe. But then he perfected his glassine compound, and the first domed city of Mars was born.”

  Madame has never told me so much of herself! So entranced am I, picturing Madame young and happy, momentarily I forget to loathe the redheaded girl. Without noticing, I have shifted my posture, and so has she. We kneel shoulder to shoulder before Madame like two students before our teacher.

  “But then you came here, like? And married Mister Cantrell and had lots of babies?”

  I should crush her in the Clamp of the Dragon for her disrespectful outburst, but Madame merely shakes Her head. Whisk whisk, goes the tea. Whisk whisk. “He had honored our little village in asking us to send him a bride. Few girls wanted to venture across an ocean of space just to marry a glassblower’s apprentice. But I remembered the goldfish, and I remembered him juggling his glass spheres by the well.” Madame One’s eyes have gone soft, soft as when She drinks the special tea She never lets me even sip, or smokes that same tea in Her red clay pipe. “I’d completed my genetic reconditioning and training at the Steel Jade School, and thought my fight skills might be useful on a frontier planet. Even if they weren’t useful, at least I was strong, and able to endure much physical hardship. And my skills were embedded in my genetic coding, to be passed to offspring. I felt ready for anything.”

  Unable to contain myself, I bow and kiss Her slippers three times in rapid secession. “Oh, Madame One! If only you still had the use of your poor legs, you could do anything still!”

  Madame smiles. “Thank you, my lotus blossom. But there was a thing I could not do: I could not give my husband a son or daughter. It was what he wanted more than anything else in all the worlds, and the one thing the surgeons eventually told me I could never, never do. When we discovered this, I left Kun Li, brought my few androids — antiques by Earth standards even then — and my lotus seeds, and trekked across the red dunes of Mars to make a new home. I wanted him to be free, you see. Free to send for other women, who might provide what he desired more than everything in all the celestial heavens combined.”

  The Matty girl is counting on her fingers, murmuring numbers as she calculates. “But it’s been…” she points to her fingers as though to an abacus showing a tally, “…that’s nigh on ninety years since Mr. Cantrell settled here.”

  Madame sets aside Her bowl and whisk. Her cinnabar bracelets clack together as She reaches for the tiny porcelain cups. “And I’ve been here for eighty-two: the first twenty in Dometown Prime with my husband, and the last sixty-two without him. I did not even tell him when I fell ill shortly after leaving his city, and the desert wasting sickness left me without use of my legs.”

  You have me, Madame One! I want to cry. You have me! But knowing tonight is the anniversary of my birth keeps me silent. At least Madame has the lotus seeds. Enough lotus seeds for the last sixty-three years, and still a dozen more.

  A sad and heavy silence settles in the room as Madame pours three cups of tea. The only sounds are of tea splashing, and the housedroid gently wheezing as he stokes his belly furnace with internal bellows growing thin and brittle, and behind it all a music so constant, it is the never-ending backdrop against which I experience the rest of the world — the patter of grit blowing against the surface of our glassy dome, red and relentless, the sands of Mars.

  After tea the housedroid rings the gong four times, signaling the minedroids to bring the palanquin. In moments their clanging and bonging — they are not graceful beings — echoes across the courtyard. They enter, the Echo 3000 close behind. His golden orbs swivel to every corner of the room, observing all as a true warrior should. I wonder how I feel about him being present for the blossoming of a new seed. Wonder if I feel anything at all.

  We are unaccustomed to outsiders, Madame and I. She nods with regal graciousness when the Echo 3000 steps to lift Her onto the palanquin. I might wish the Matty girl had not arrived on this exact day, but it’s not as though I’ve lived this past year thinking anything in particular about the blossoming of a new lotus; I’m happy Madame has us to keep Her company, to keep Her safe. To love Her.

  It’s obvious the redheaded girl has more questions than there are pleats in a folded paper flower, but she keeps her silence as our procession wends across the courtyard. She cranes her neck, studying in open admiration the red clay tiles of the Nine-Dragon Pavilion, the peaks of Madame’s pagoda, the rocks of the garden. Inside I feel an unfolding, a warmth and generosity toward her. Perhaps she can help the new lotus with the dry pebble creek I have been building for Madame, where She can see it from Her divan out Her window with the sunrise.

  The Walled Pavilion of Bright Symmetry is not our grandest structure, but it is our largest. Long and low, it does not boast the decorative tiered roofs of the other buildings, nor the colorful reds and oranges and pinks I mix
from ores the minedroids collect at my instruction along with their ammonium salt fuel. Inside walls a meter thick, it is dark and cool, kept so for the sake of the seeds. I draw air into my lungs, hold it, and for a few beats of my modified heart let the peacefulness of the sinking sun wash through me. The horizon past our dome is perfect, the wind having ceased its howling and its blowing for once. The sky is that perfect tangerine color, a color which soaks into your skin and fills you from the inside, ripe and good.

  Madame One Ming’s android bearers shuffle the palanquin to the nearest lit tank. Darkened empty vats stand in rows behind like terracotta soldiers in an ancient Earthside tomb. Numbers stamped deep into the copper are readable even in the gloom: 63 … 62 … 61 … 60 … 59 … 58….

  A startled gasp escapes our honored visitor. She goes to the nearest upright tank of soft gleaming copper. I have polished that copper every day this past year, have kept its rivets free of corrosion, have gently dabbed condensation from the glass window she reaches now to carelessly wipe with her dusty sleeve.

  All my generous feelings of a moment ago are gone in an eyeblink. “No!” I shout, and fling myself at her with Drunken Monkey Off the Vine. Quick as a blink, a metal cable lashes out. Whip whip whip — that smooth segmented cable wraps my torso three times, plucking me from the air and preventing my two-pronged attack of One Fist Flying and Unlucky Bending Eel. The Echo 3000 retracts his telescoping arms slowly, drawing me to his side with unexpected gentleness. His beautiful gold orbs study my face and limbs, scanning for visible damage to my soft tissues.

  “It’s all right, blossom,” says Madame, “she meant no disrespect. Matty, might your mandroid help Lotus Sixty-three up onto my palanquin? Her legs will be feeling weak.”

  Of course that’s why my attack was so easily foiled; it has begun, slid upon me without my even noticing.

  The Echo carries me to Her side to deposit me on the embroidered synthetic silks of the piled blankets and shawls. Lotuses. The pattern of Madame’s embroidery is always of the lotus, which I have seen a thousand times and never thought upon too deeply.

  “But there’s tons of girls here!” says Matty. “I been wandering around, wondering where to find other girls like me, and here’s one, two, three … at least ten of ‘em sleeping right here.”

  “Twelve left,” says Madame. “Twelve beautiful lotus seeds, one blossom maturing each year to replace that from the year before.”

  My arms have suddenly gone numb, but I barely notice in my rapture at Madame arranging Her silks around my face, propping my shoulders with Her own pillow so I might watch the tank with the number after mine, where Lotus Seed Sixty-four, pre-programmed consciousness now ripe and ready to blossom, slumbers in her luminescent amber fluid. Small bubbles rise from tubes snaking past the seed’s naked shoulders, through the floating tendrils of her coal-dark hair, between her tight-closed lips.

  Matty staggers back from the vat, swallowing hard, looking as if she might be sick on the smooth clay floor of the Walled Pavilion of Bright Symmetry. “That’s so … so horrible.” She studies Madame with a disrespectful look I do not care for. Me, she does not look at, nor the Lotus in the vat. With a last glance at me and a motion of his telescoping upper appendage suspiciously like a caress to my cheek, the Echo 3000 moves to her side, supports her as he had me when my legs began to go.

  “Are you comfortable, my blossom?” Madame asks. At my drowsy nod, She says to the girl, “It is not horrible. It is life. The gnat, the cricket, the woman, the sacred golden carp in the pool of a goddess: an hour, a season, a century, a millennium. My blossoms have all the life the surgeons could give them at the time of their creation; one year is all any of the old clones had, once they emerged from the vat. But a year is an eternity to the butterfly. Would you have these seeds destroyed, never to see the light of Martian day? That would be far more horrible, I think. Too horrible for me, though my husband urged it. This was my effort to give him the many children he so desired. But he said it would be like watching me die, every year for the rest of his life.”

  She gazes into my face with what I now see is Her love. Her love burns as bright for me as mine has always burned for Her. No; brighter.

  Receiving Her look of love, almost worship, I wonder: Is this how it feels to be Madame? I’ve never put myself in Her delicious embroidered slippers before, never thought myself worthy. Now, swaddled in Her silks as the sun dips at last below the horizon and the room grows even dimmer, Madame’s bone-thin arms around me, I feel closer to Her than I ever have, feel at last that connection the scrolls say exists in the very genetic coding of a clone’s bones, along with her preprogrammed martial talents and the color of her eyes.

  “I’m from you, Madame,” I say, feeling the wonder of it. “I’m made of bits of you, as though I were real.”

  She smoothes my hair from my cheek. “You are real,” She says. “My beautiful darling blossom. My lovely little lotus.”

  Matty slumps against the Echo 3000, hides her face against his silvery torso as he wraps his upper appendages around her shoulders. The minedroids have withdrawn to stand with the housedroid in a formation of respect I have read about in scrolls, but never seen. Something stirs in the vat. “Oh, look, Madame!” I say. “The seed, she blossoms! Her eyes are opening.”

  But Madame doesn’t look away from my face. A warm drop soaks the silk near my ear, a rivulet in Her white powder where tears wend a path across Her cheek. “Yes, my dear, my beautiful darling child. My child, my baby. Her eyes are opening.”

  * * * * *

  Camille Alexa lives in the Pacific Northwest down the street from a volcano. Her stories appear in Fantasy Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Her book PUSH OF THE SKY earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was an Endeavour Award finalist.

  The Ability of Lightness

  Tim Reynolds

  “Watch me ‘painting a rainbow’, Quon!” Twelve-year-old Yu raised his arms up in curves, his hands above his shoulders, then brought his right hand over his head, turned his head to the left and brought his left arm down and out to the side, palm up. Looming above him, its neck stretched nearly up to the roof of the massive cavern, the giant brass and steel, clockwork Feilong steam-dragon watched without judgement. The mechanical flying beast’s boiler was silent and its marvellous wings folded in and back, but it still dominated the cavern beneath the Galden Namgey Lahtse Monastery, waiting impassively, ready to fly at the hands of the Cloud Monks in defence of the People against the tyrants of the world.

  Yu’s younger brother, Quon, didn’t even look up from the long wooden workbench he stood at. “Yah, yah, Yu. You’re painting a fat little rainbow while I’m being a genius. Your stupid t’ai ji might make Master Wei nod and smile but when he inspects the graduates today and sees me and my steam-driven dragon-steppers display perfect Qinggong, light-stepping across the monastery rooftops, he’ll accept me as his personal student and take me away to Lhasa to be the greatest Warrior Cloud Monk ever. I hope. If this thing works.” He tightened the final brass nut and tugged on the thin copper pipe to test the strength of the new bracket.

  “Of course it will, Quon. In only three weeks, you took all those spare dragon parts and made that machine. I just wish I was smart like you.” Yu was a year older than Quon, a Rabbit to Quon’s Dragon, but he was perfectly happy to follow his younger brother’s lead. “You should try t’ai ji quan, Quon. Come here and follow me. It’s really relaxing and you really need to relax.”

  “I don’t have time for that silliness. Master Wei only visits once every ten years and he won’t be back in Tawang Town until 1899, the Year of the Pig. By then, it will be too late. It has to be today or never.”

  Yu leaned and pushed, moved and pivoted, ‘scooping the sea’. “You haven’t even tested that thing, Quon. Maybe you should.” He finished by ‘looking at the horizon’ and stepped over to make a closer inspection of Quon’s invention.
“Will it really make you dragon-step? How does it work? I see an old pair of boots, some really big springs and stuff, and that looks like a tiny boiler, like the one on the horseless wood-wagon or even the dragon.” He reached out to touch a polished brass strut but Quon slapped his hand away.

  “No! You just break things. Go ‘separate the river’ or something, while I finish up. The Graduation Call-to-Arms should sound any minute.”

  “I thought we were going to have breakfast first. I’m starved.” In spite of his hunger, though, Yu started his movement by ‘raising his arms’, and then followed the sequence their Cloud Monk brother, Jung, had taught him. He moved gracefully in and around the giant Feilong dragon, smiling as the flickering lamplight reflected off thousands of hand-hammered scales. As he finished up by ‘balancing the qi to a close’, a large-bossed gong sounded. “Perfect timing! I feel balanced and calm and even a little lighter on my feet.”

  “Good for you, Round Ass. You need to lose weight. Now hold the cart so I can load up my dragon-steppers. Please.” Quon scrambled to shift his pair of contraptions into a handcart. “Just think, Yu, by the end of today, you will be known all across the Tawang-chu Valley as the brother of Master Wei’s newest student. That should at least get you a small discount in the marketplace.”

  “A discount would be good, especially when I take over the farm from father.” Yu kept a firm grip on the cart’s handles while Quon finished loading and then draped a bright red blanket over everything.

  Quon tucked in the corners of the blanket and stepped back to inspect the load. “Perfect.” He led the way out and Yu followed along, faithfully using his brawn to see his brother’s dream come true. “We have ten minutes to get to the kakaling entrance gate, Yu. The ceremony will be in the courtyard so I’ll dragon-step from the kakaling to the library and make one magnificent leap across to the Dukhang, the assembly hall. It will be a great moment in Cloud Monk history and I want you to be there in the courtyard to make sure they all know who the steam-monk is. I’ll make one final, huge, Qinggong jump down into the court to accept my place at Master Wei’s side.” He sighed to himself. “With luck.”