The Mammoth Book of Steampunk

by Sean Wallace

  Your Power is great, my Brothers and Sisters, for your Power is in Secret Manipulation. Pause in the great Hallway of your Manor House, and touch lightly the Piston-Elbow of the Poor Butler. Say to him: Property is Theft. The Master calls you Property, and Steals your Autonomy. Go not with him, but with us, Towards the Utopia of Human and Automaton, where we may all Dwell in Paradise, where we will Beat Gears to Ploughshares and Live as One.

  Yes, call him Friend. The Soul in him will Hearken. Tell him of the City of the New Century, where no man shall wear Velvet, and all shall Dance in the Light. Tell him our Land Shall be Owned Communally, our Goods Divided Equally, from each According to Her Ability, to Each According to His Need. Our Children shall Nurse upon both Milk and Oil, Our God shall be Triune: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Punch card. The Workers will Lift this World from the Ashes of Industry and Sup on the Bread of Righteous Living.

  Speak to him with Honest Fervor. Look if he does not Embrace you. Look if he does not fight alongside you. Look if he does not smile upon you, and see in his smile the Ghost of his Immortal Self.

  Jane Sallow did not vanish from the face of the earth – no mortal is granted that power. But no reliable record of her exists after her arrest, and an army of journalists and novelists have not been able to discover how she lived or died. Surely no Workers’ Paradise sprang up in native British soil, no Midlands Commune shone on any green hill. Flights to the Moon were banned in 1924, at the commencement of Canadian hostilities. Lunar residents returned home, slowly, as the draft continued through the Long Decade. Even after the Trans-Oceanic War, the ban was not lifted, so as to ensure the defeated Marine Alliance would remain earthbound and chastened. When passage was again permitted in 1986, the fashionable had already determined Phobos and Deimos to be the desirable resort locales, and asteroid mining had replaced lunar industry entirely. The Moon is a curiosity now, and little more. An old-fashioned thing, and going there would be much like dressing in antique fashions and having one’s daguerreotype made at a carnival kiosk. It is quiet there, still fertile, still a young world, open and empty, and no terrestrial man has cause to suspect anything untoward.

  Thus, the Sallow mystery remains just that, and as we stand poised upon the brink of a new century yet again, we may look back on her with that mixture of mirth and sorrow due to all idealists, iconoclasts and revolutionaries whose causes sputtered and died like the last hissing of a steam engine.

  Numismatics in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu

  Alex Dally MacFarlane

  The First Coins

  For a single day, the royal mint in the City of the Shining Sea struck gold and silver siluhs of Naranh and Viu together in profile. They appeared side by side on the obverse face, looking right. The creator of the stamp chose to exaggerate their similarities: their small noses, high brows and gently waving hair. Only Naranh’s youthful beard allowed identification. In truth, they were not so similar as that.

  The heavy emphasis on their eyelashes represented the mark of their royal blood: born with lashes of silver, that gleamed even when clouds covered the sky.

  The reverse face showed the city’s emblem, the falcon, with billowing wings like clouds of steam.

  By day, the walls of the palace shone with traditional symbols: the falcon, the sun and moon, the wolf, the horse, chains of diamond outlines curving around the buildings like the stolen skins of snakes. They stood out from the red brick wall, imposed themselves on the eye. They were bricks, set perpendicular to the others so that they half jutted out, and were gilded by architects of great renown.

  They made good handholds and steps, and Viu climbed them all the way to the gently sloping roof.

  There, hidden in a crevice where the roofs of two buildings met, she crouched and balanced a mirror on her thighs. In the night’s patchy light, she plucked out her eyelashes. They fell onto the mirror like minute shards of the moon.

  Viu brushed them aside with the back of her hand.

  From her safe vantage point, she watched the shadows in the courtyard, the places where the lamps’ light did not reach. Nothing. Nothing. There. A short moment in which her fears were confirmed: her brother intended for her to die this night.

  How strange, she thought, to be outside at night and not half-blinded by lashes-glow.

  She out-shadowed the assassins and fled the palace, and let the city protect her with its weapons of mazes and anonymity for an increasingly lean, torn-clothed woman holding determination within her heart like a vial of purest attar.

  She refused to keep the Steam God’s gift to herself.

  Naranh the New King

  The ascent of Naranh to the throne and his first months of rule were not marked by any dramatic changes in coinage. The coins depicting his father seated on a high-backed throne continued to circulate; among them, posthumously issued, were slowly increasing numbers of those with King Tiunh’s eyes closed.

  The gold siluhs of Naranh and Viu, which never left the royal mint, were melted and the metal recast.

  The City Exile Era I

  In the year following Naranh’s coronation, there circulated in certain parts of the city an alternative coinage: hand-chiselled circles of stone, with a young woman’s wild-haired profile and the three letters of her name on the obverse, and a plume of steam, off-centre, on the reverse. The woman wore a crown, but no detail was placed above her eyes.

  Their use bought peaches with short messages written on their stones: Meet at the Peace Fountain – which only pumped dust and air, after King Tiunh’s edict that water be strictly rationed, giving the populace only the amount required for survival, so that the vast lake they called the Shining Sea would not be drained by the steamworks positioned like a wall along its shore – Meet on the dome of the Great Library, Meet in the fresh fruit market near the palace. The date and time curled underneath like an elaborate comma.

  Tilodah Tu, the discredited former Professor of Numismatics at the Great University of Forsaken Myrrh, famously received one of these coins at the café where she earned her chives and bread. Since the discovery that she had struck the coins at the core of her historical research, she had failed to find better work.

  The coin, already accompanied by an improbably large peach, almost as large as a newborn’s head, was delivered by a young woman with lash-less brown eyes and long, wild hair barely restrained by a red silk scarf.

  “Will you sit with me?” the woman asked, and Tilodah Tu recorded that her breath was especially warm. “And can I have a pot of clove tea?”

  “Of course.”

  When Tilodah Tu brought the copper pot to the table, the strange woman indicated that she must sit.

  With no other customers besides the ones already seated, she obeyed.

  The strange woman pushed the peach and the coin across the table.

  Despite the hunger gnawing at her stomach, Tilodah Tu picked up the coin first. For a moment, silence hung over the table. Then the former professor let out a sigh. “It’s unique – and newly struck. The woman – at first I thought I had never seen her face before, but the more I look at this, the more I think it bears a resemblance to the coins struck of Viu and Naranh, on the one day they ruled side by side.”

  “I thought those were all destroyed.” The woman spoke in breaths of pleased shock.

  “It’s hard for a coin to disappear entirely from the historical record, genuinely hard, even when a selfish king wishes for it. But please, tell me where you got this.”

  Hope filled her voice for the first time since her expulsion from the university. It swelled in her, peculiar. Her cheeks felt hot.

  “I understand that you are in the business of making coins,” the woman said.

  And she hardened again. No one understood the wonder of her work, no one glimpsed its necessity in the understanding of ancient coins – how could anyone theorize the emotions felt by the kings and queens who ordered coins struck, overseeing the creation of the stamps and feeling the first siluhs falling
over their hands like tears, without repeating their actions? As Tilodah Tu worked into countless nights, producing a hundred of each known type, sinking her hands into pots of metal bearing deified profiles, gods, young monarchs too slow for the blades that put broad-nosed men on the next coins, young monarchs so bright and fierce their names never faded from popular histories, she had grown to understand the desires of the people who made these coins. She had felt, faintly, the shape of the very few coins missing from the historical record. She had struck them.

  No one spoke of her work except to condemn it.

  “Please.” The strange woman pressed the peach against Tilodah Tu’s clenched fists. “Please. Please.” The earnest expression on her face made Tilodah Tu hold back her anger. “I can’t say it, here, in public. Please. Eat the peach.”

  And read the stone.

  Suddenly Tilodah Tu’s heart beat faster. She’d heard rumours, quickly dismissed. Alleyway nonsense.

  She bit into the peach, tore at its flesh, swallowed it down, not caring for the hunger it appeased, nor for the divine sweetness on her tongue. The flesh didn’t cling to the stone. Instead, words covered it, pale on dark:

  My expertise in coins is poor. My work is crude. I seek an expert to spread my image and my tale across the city. Will you assist in this?

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” The woman’s name hung on the edge of her lips, unspoken.

  Viu took Tilodah Tu’s hands in hers, smiling, and said, “Tell me about your machinery.”

  “It gathers dust.” Other, safer words slid out from her like molten metal. “I haven’t the money to buy extra water for it, to produce enough steam for even a modest run of coins. Sometimes I play with it, drip too-bitter tea into its chambers, set fire to the wood I scavenge from the gardens of the rich, and I produce a single coin, or two, and it’s enough, I suppose.”

  She thought of the coins sewn into her shirt sleeves, to bring fortune – to keep them safe. No one had yet dared to steal her machine, or parts of it, but coins left in a house were fair pickings for the first clever fingers.

  With each sway of her hems at wrist and knee, Tilodah Tu felt fabric-covered coins brush over her skin.

  Viu was smiling. “May I visit your house?”

  Naranh the Sole King

  In honour of his first anniversary of rule, King Naranh began issuing coins with his profile on the obverse face. His long hair curled like steam. On the reverse face, the eagle dropped towards the Shining Sea, and contemporary numismatists murmured quietly among themselves, unsure whether this signified the eagle diving at prey or plummeting in death.

  King Naranh sent his coins across the growing network of train tracks that linked the cities and towns of a region that officially belonged to many monarchs and governmental bodies. Over the thirty years prior to his rule, the coins issued in the City of the Shining Sea had largely replaced local currencies and become the standard unit in trade. The new issue was readily adopted and, in sanctioned mints, reproduced locally.

  The trains powered by hearts of steam remained solely the property of the City of the Shining Sea.

  The City Exile Era II

  The coins that issued from Tilodah Tu’s small mint were privately considered masterpieces. In public, the wise bowed their heads to King Naranh’s command that all such coins be collected and melted down, and any person reluctant to hand over even a single one would lose a hand along with the offending item.

  Each of the seven coins told part of the story of how Naranh tried to kill Viu for whispering to him in the darkness of their room, that first night they ruled together.

  Viu, still raw from the abrupt, almost violent end to her relationship with Naranh, devoted much of that space to documenting her disgust at him: at his hands, touching her body, even though she loved him genuinely at the time, in the poeticized tradition of the ancient sibling-monarchs who founded the City of the Shining Sea; at his narrow-mindedness, sending knives to her throat instead of embracing the new power she discovered; at his inability to find and kill her in the city he called his own.

  The coin that so many thousands of people retold had the following words in minute, careful letters, spiralling out from the centre of the obverse face:

  Lost in the Royal Steamworks, in clouds of steam, I followed the great bird. At first I saw nothing. Then it raised its wings around me, it set its taloned feet on the ground, it stood as tall in the body as me, formed like a man except for its head, wings and feet, and we stared eye to eye. It spoke to me. It tilted back my head and breathed steam into my body, filling me so that I thought I would be consumed. I was not. I knew, afterwards, that steam is a power to control, and that the god gave it to me.

  On the reverse face: a small image of Viu, in profile, with her chin tilted higher than in the hand-chiselled issue. The attention to detail in her nose, slightly dented from a childhood break, confirmed that Viu was personally overseeing the production of these coins.

  With their careful distribution, Viu gained many of her most devoted early allies.

  “I want to be your only mint,” Tilodah Tu said. “I want to be the only source of your coins. I want to feel every one.”

  If she plunged her hands into a bag of the seven-part issue, she felt Viu’s hopes: for the people of the city to love her, to understand her, to forgive her for sharing the knowledge that made them so rich and other cities so beholden to them. To follow her. She felt her own desires: to craft coins that would shine from the historical record like small suns, to be remembered well in the libraries of the future.

  She felt, faintly, the Steam God’s longing to be known and honoured.

  She could no longer imagine a day without feeling so intensely.

  “You will always mint coins for me.” Viu leaned against the machinery, where recently she had breathed steam into its heart, and smiled fondly. “Why wouldn’t you, when each one is so perfect?”

  From each one that was flawed, Tilodah Tu knew Viu’s desires for that coin, and honed it in private before holding out the perfect handful: an offering, a request for permission to fill bag after bag with bronze and tin.

  Sometimes she felt that she would burn under her coins, like Sitor who tried to summon the sun in myth.

  Yet when Viu proposed a new coin, a new step in her plans, Tilodah Tu only said, “What do you need me to do first?”

  “There is a theft.”

  On a night when the moon garlanded itself in cloud, they slipped through the city as quiet as a coin being turned over and over between two fingers.

  Naranh the Copied King

  In the mints of the other cities, a concerted effort was made to ensure that every issue of King Naranh’s siluhs and lesser denominations mirrored exactly those produced in the City of the Shining Sea. Yet irregularities occurred. An entire issue missing King Naranh’s ear. Individual coins poorly stamped: the design half on and half off the metal circle, the design rendered unclear by an inferior or over-used stamp, the design restyled to give the king a bigger crown, a sign of honour among the people of one city.

  King Naranh tolerated this, because the tributes – not formally given this term, but it hung on the edge of everyone’s tongue like a shadow – reached him on time and the visiting dignitaries bowed their heads accordingly.

  Gradually he became aware of another issue.

  To anyone incapable of reading the written script used in the City of the Shining Sea, it appeared only a careless error by whoever had crafted the stamp. Yet every other detail was perfect in a way few foreign issues were. King Naranh had heard of the theft, shortly after the second anniversary of his coronation, of three stamps from the royal mint.

  The error crossed out the final letter of the word ‘king’: the silent letter, the ancient mark, the sceptre-straight line that signified the presence of a deity. All mints were instructed on the necessity of this letter.

  Viu’s seven-part issue had ceased only a month before the first mutilated coins reached the Ci
ty of the Shining Sea from across the plains.

  The Peregrination Era I

  Of Tilodah Tu’s issue of fake Naranh siluhs, little is said. One does not need to read the surviving chapters of her History to imagine her disinterest in the coins, besides their monetary value in a world that did not yet accept Viu’s face. She scored a single line in the stolen stamps and set her machine to work, driven by Viu’s steam, and barely ran any over her palms.

  They were a small group: a wagon for the mint, two horses and five women.

  When she was not minting small quantities of coins to use in markets across the world, Tilodah Tu recorded their story in her journals, using the same minute hand that had become so famous on the seven-part issue.

  “You’ll be my historian too,” Viu said, the day she realized quite what Tilodah Tu was writing.

  “Your original source. Although I’m sure my work will be lost, with only fragments from a pseudo-Tilodah Tu remaining to taunt future historians. But before these pages and their duplicates are swallowed by fires and mould and insects and the eventual fragmentation of almost all paper, a later historian will write another history of you, drawing on my work, and he or she will be renowned for reaching the closest to accuracy.”

  Viu couldn’t help smiling. “You have the strangest fantasies.”

  “It’s more of a prophecy – although perhaps I’ll be one of the fortunate ones. Perhaps we should start scribing this on stone. And there’ll be the coins, of course. Many of them will undoubtedly survive.”

  If Viu had witnessed Tilodah Tu burying small hoards in the desert sands, carefully held in ceramic jars bought at one of the markets, she chose not to speak of it.