The Mammoth Book of Steampunk

by Sean Wallace

  Later, over the last of the airship’s Darjeeling, they sat around the Lydia’s reeking tryworks, the earthbound ship’s crew and the winged one’s, and the Lydia’s bosun read the Lady Explorer’s death in the swirling oil of the trypot.

  When the bosun whispered what he’d seen into her ear, the Lady Explorer set down her tea, clambered down onto the ice shelf, and began to walk. Slowly, faltering: her legs leaked strength like water through cupped hands these days, and her joints screamed every time a foot shot sideways on the ice.

  “She’ll come back,” the bosun told the Lady Explorer’s son when he hissed a curse and stood, brow creased with equal parts concern for her frailty and anger at her stubbornness, to follow. “They always do.”

  “How will she find her way?”

  “The ghosts’ll show her. Old flensing trails.” The bosun pointed out across the shelf, where, some half-mile inward from the Lydia’s berth of ice, a vast red stain bled up out of the endless white like overdilute watercolor paint. It spread, growing tendrils that stretched out in turn and doubled back and looked, as the Lady Explorer’s son’s field binoculars and the last late light informed him, very like the wakes of bloody booted footprints tacking back and forth around the suggestion of some hulking shape he could not see.

  “What did you tell her?” he asked at length.

  The bosun’s eyes went misty. “That she’d go out in a blaze of glory in a dogfight with a man-o’-war, all hands lost, and she’d plummet from the sky like Lucifer aflame.”

  The Lady Explorer’s son sighed.

  “Well, what d’you want me to have said? It’s what I saw.”

  “I don’t know. Something.” He tipped his head back, watching as the first pale stars came out. “She’s like an old man sleeping in his coffin to get used to the idea. I wish one of you would tell her something that would make her send it off for kindling and get back in her goddamned bed.”

  “Nothing wrong with preparing to greet the spirits on the far side of the river,” said the bosun primly, picking tea leaves from his teeth with a whalebone pin.

  “Not unless when you do greet them,” the Lady Explorer’s son retorted, “you find you have nothing at all to say.”

  Returning along a strange red path she hadn’t noticed on her journey out across the shelf, the Lady Explorer found the Lydia’s crew trying to force the airship’s rudder to fit where the Lydia’s once was and the airship’s crew strapping a new rudder in place with an elaborate harness that put her in mind of a spiderweb. The harness was seal-sinew and her son had carved the rudder from a single block of ice with the tools they’d salvaged from the factory.

  “Almost pieced back together,” the grinning bosun told her as she passed the Lydia. “Patched the hole in her hull with some pitch off a merchantman gone astray a few years back. A few dozen more seals, and we’ll have enough skin for a sail.”

  Her nerves were still raw from mediating the barter for the rudder, and her heart still kicked her every time she recalled how her son had come to her aid against their crew and vowed to get the ship back in the air, and though she’d tried ten times since then to catch his eye and smile, he had never looked her way.

  Coming round from the prow, somewhat stung at her son’s apparent scorn, it nettled her to discover that, for her part, she could not quite meet the gleaming violet placidity of the airship’s regard. She made a shy-eyed gesture at the makeshift rudder, then held up her bad hand for the benefit of the airship’s compound gaze. “Now,” she said, finally hazarding its stare, her face unfathomable, “we’re even.”

  The new rudder took them eleven degrees south before it began to melt. When it had shrunk from the size of an outhouse to that of a steamer trunk, then a tabletop and a sawblade, the airship’s crew set her down on the water and took shifts paddling with whalebone oars, following their collective guesswork of unfamiliar constellations south.

  Four days’ cruising from its landing, a hunting pod of orcas surfaced around the airship and chaperoned it straight to landfall some six hundred miles on. During this leg of the journey, great clumps of kelp and cairns of fish were given to appear on deck, always at night, always when nobody stood watch, and by no agency that anyone on board could later rationally explain.

  V

  In the land of grey houses and grey streets, the Lady Explorer bartered the greatcoat off her back, the machete and flensing knife from her belt, the copper honeycombs and amethystine glass of the airship’s compound eyes, the compass round her neck, the rainwater cistern and the shorn iron-grey length of her hair for her death.

  She tired quickly here. She told herself it was the sullied air, the oppressive angle of the light, the smell of dust and gin and desiccated violets coming off the flocked wallpaper of the medium’s salon. But her hands were veined and mottled, her memory and bladder failed as often as they held, and she did not believe her own lies.

  She flew a ghost ship now. The crew had pooled what they had gained and kept over the years to purchase a retrofitted washbasin of an airship from the shipyard outside town, which they’d (somewhat amusingly, she thought) renamed the Swan. They would break the bottle on her bow within the week, and then she would take wing.

  Her own airship, or what was left of it, rested in the yards, lonely as a boat in drydock, while she and her son paced the warren of its rooms like restive ghosts themselves.

  In what her quest had not ransacked from the captain’s quarters of the airship, the Lady Explorer’s son sat her down on a rotten chaise and took her hands, more to pin her in place when he stared her down than from any outward tenderness.

  Reflected in her dulling eyes he saw a figure trapped as if down a well and glaring out at the world it could not reach. With mild shock he realized that it was himself.

  He forced his gaze back to her. “Look at you,” he sneered. “Have your damnable dials stopped yet? You’ve one foot in the grave already, and what do you have to show for it? Has it never crossed your mind that none of your precious mountebanks can tell your fate any better than I can? Look here, at the scuffing on my boot. There – that looks like a swarm of bees, and there’s the river you jump into, trying to escape them. These pebbles stuck in the mud on the sole signify the rocks you forgot you had in your pockets, and sadly you drowned.” He paused, trying to collect himself. “You look me in the eye and tell me that this …” He gestured at the room, once fine, now as though ravened at and left for dead; and at her, once strong-armed and sharp-eyed, now rotting like a windfall full of wasps; and at himself. “That any of this was worth it.”

  She eyed him very closely. “Do you honestly think that this – that any of this – has ever been about me?”

  Not waiting for an answer, she shook her hands free of him and left.

  In her absence, he took a deep breath, counted to ten, let it out slowly, and when this failed to have any noticeable effect on his level of serenity, he took four long strides across the room and swept a shelf full of framed daguerrotypes and conch shells and hurricane lamps to the floor. For a moment the crash appeared to satisfy him. He half turned. Then spun on his heel and punched the wall.

  From the wall came a whirring and a series of reproachful clicks, and then a panel in the wainscoting slid free, releasing a bloom of mildew and two folded sheets of paper. Both were yellowed with age and buttery soft with rereading.

  The softer and older-looking of the two he recognized. The words were centered on the page in a clump, outlined by a long-armed globular shape, which, in turn, was flanked by smaller outriding shapes. A few squiggles off to either side of the central mass suggested waves.

  Mama,

  Because you always have your Nose in your Book of Maps, I will Hide this Letter there, Disguised as a Map. If you are reading this, I have Tricked you, and I am Sorry, so please do not be Angry.

  I met some Boys and Girls on the Beach yesterday, when you told me to Go Play while the Grown-Ups Sold some Things at the Docks. I tried to Play wi
th Them, but they laughed at me and kicked Sand on my Trouser-Legs. They said that Real Boys and Girls live in Houses and have Pet Cats and Sunday-Shoes and Governesses. They did not Believe that I could live in the Sky and still be a Real Boy. One bigger Boy said that I must be a Gull-Boy or a Crow-Boy and my Mother a Bird. I struck him in the Nose. It bled. A lot.

  Still I think I should like to Live in a House. I do not know what Sunday-Shoes or Governesses are, but I did like to Play with Jacob’s Cat, before we had to Put her in the Stew.

  P.S. I am also Sorry that I spilled your Ink, but I needed a Shape to draw my Coastline from. I told you that little Cora did it. That was a Lie. Please do not be Angry about that too.

  The other was unfamiliar.

  My darling Child,

  Oh! I cannot Call you so anymore, can I, for you are a Grown Man now and I an Old Woman, and much like a Madwoman in an Attic, I fear, as far as our Fellows are Concerned. I do not doubt your Sentiments toward me are similar. Well do I deserve Them!

  To my Shame, I have not been wholly Frank with You. I cannot Undo my Errors now, but I can, perhaps, patch up some few of the Holes that they have Rent between Us.

  When we stole the Airship, I was but a Girl – a Working Girl of Twenty, with Engine Grease in her Hair and all over Bruises, Cuts and Scars from her own Labor. A Girl just Strong enough to stay aboard the Ship, give Birth to You, and there fight to Remain; but a Girl just Silly enough that when we Stopped outside a Town to Make Repairs, and a Traveling Circus joined our little Camp, and those of the Crew with a Spiritist Leaning asked the Circus Fortune-Teller to tell theirs, I went along.

  What the Fortune-Teller told me was that our Airship would be Crippled by a Broadside with a Ship-of-the-Line and drift through Equatorial Waters, deadlocked as a Clipper on a Windless Sea, and that I would Perish of Starvation, along with most of the Crew – and my only Son.

  It was in that Moment that I became the Person you have always Known me as. After a Life of Hardship, which until Then I had Accepted, I resolved that I would Fight – an unseen Enemy, and a Formidable One, and perhaps One who cannot be Defeated, it is True – but I could not leave you to that awful Fate, or to any of the Others, prescribed to me over the Years.

  Because, as perhaps by now you will have Guessed, each Death that I was told was Mine – but it was not Mine Alone. I have seen you Shot, Drowned, Stabbed in an Alley, Run Down in the Street, Fallen off a Widow’s Walk, Shipwrecked, Hit by Lightning and Perished of Consumption in a Garret – and it haunted me. But what Haunts me more is this: would those Deaths have been Mine Alone if I had not Sought to Keep you Close? Will my Attempts to Rescue you lead you to your Doom instead?

  Though I fear I shall never have the Courage to Say it to your Face, it is my one remaining Wish that you get out, get free of this, and live your Life as best you can – and perhaps, one Day, find it in your Heart to Forgive one Foolish Old Woman, who sought to Protect you by keeping you – by keeping Both of us – Encaged.

  And now I am off to Deliver this Letter before I change my Mind. Lest I give the Crew Reason to think that a Woman who has Learned to Repair a Combustion Engine in Freefall or Shoot a Tiger between the Eyes at Ninety Paces is afraid of her own Son!

  P.S. It turns out I am not as Brave as I had Hoped. It is Three Months since I Wrote this Letter. I will Show it to you this Evening, upon your Return from Treasure-Hunting with the Crew, and then likely Flee to my Room like a Child from a Strange Noise on the Stair.

  The Lady Explorer’s son stared at the letter for some time – at the shakiness of the penmanship, the smudges from rereading, and the date at the top, some six years gone. Then he folded both letters back up together, put them back in place, and went to pack his things.

  “The spirits sense resistance in your soul,” the medium said to the Lady Explorer, as the table rose and sank and the chandelier flared and dulled and the curtains snapped against the panes in a gale-force wind localized specifically to themselves. After giving the Lady Explorer ample opportunity to admire these phenomena, the medium took up the mirror in which she’d read the Lady Explorer’s death and swaddled it in black silk. “You’re like a ship fleeing a storm with no sails, no bearings, and no port to pursue. I have dealt with spirits that did not know or accept that they were dead. You seem not to know how to be, or accept being, alive.”

  That evening, the Lady Explorer stood on her balcony, watching as the airship lurched, unmanned and blinded, up through the city’s widow’s weeds of coalsmoke toward its maid’s May-wreath of sun. Once it dwindled to a crow, a flake, a mote, she took herself back inside her newly rented rooms, threading her way between heaps of pelts and boards of butterflies and oddly fleshy potted flowers that would not survive the snow.

  At her desk she sat, dipped her pen, and in rusty penmanship with a quavering hand began to write:

  The Worlds within Us and without Us are the Same. In One as in the Other, We delude Ourselves that there are New Lands to discover, Virgin Territories awaiting Conquerors and Claimants, while in Truth there are only Lands to which We Ourselves have not been. Some Trepidation is natural, then, on the Final Approach to an Unfamiliar Landmass, looming with presumed Malevolence on a glittering Horizon …

  Perhaps the airship would find itself a new batch of disheartened, wanderlustish souls to keep it company. Perhaps it would return for her, or for her son. Perhaps it would be grappled down by scavengers, flayed for parts, before it reached the sea. Or perhaps it would fly on, uncrewed and uncommanded, flaunting for the ghost-ship-hunters and the tall-tale-tellers and what children did not flee its shadow when it spread its wings against the sun – until the years dissolved it as they dissolved her, and it fell in clinker from its perch of air.

  Her head grew heavy, and her pen stopped. As she dropped down into sleep she found herself smiling as she replayed in her mind how she’d returned to the airship from the medium’s that afternoon to find that her son was gone, the thread she always kept tucked in the edge of the false panel in the wainscoting was on the floor, and on her pillow was a sheet of paper.

  It was one of the recruitment broadsides the Swan’s crew had been passing around town, featuring a woodblocked airship folding her wings against her hull to stoop upon some hapless prey or other on a placid sea.

  When she turned it over, penciled on the back she found the note.

  I have seen Sunday-Shoes and Governesses, and I prefer the Sky.

  The Ballad of the Last Human

  Lavie Tidhar

  This is the story of the dog Chancer, who was an adventurer and a philosopher and an occasional thief. Chancer had an airship he had liberated from merchant cats, and he was making his way across the One Continent, stopping at kennel towns and Nests, trading human relics and information and whatever else he was able to carry.

  The winds and a carelessness about his choice of direction led him to the heart of the One Continent, beyond the lands of the cats and the lands of the dogs, into the heartlands where the spiders lived.

  He landed his feline airship at a Web town called Ur, and began trading for silk. Chancer reckoned he’d landed himself in riches: spider-silk was rare and valuable, and here he was, by chance and luck, in the heart of the Webs. All he knew, or thought he knew, was that he was going to get rich.

  Instead he met Mot.

  This is the moment Mot hatched: from a silk sac hidden underground, somewhere safe and secret and forgotten. The sac opened; silk ripped. And a thousand spiderlings came scuttling out into the world. Mot remembered only flashes of that time, tiny slivers of information: a sense of immense dimensions, the glint of light on glass. And something through the glass, something strange and scary. A monster locked away, out of sight.

  When the spiderlings came out of the sac they scattered in all directions. Mot, guided only by the desire to go up, followed an ancient route out of the caverns and into daylight. What he saw when he emerged was the colour blue: it lay in dazzling brightness before him, a giant
, blue world bordered by a sky that mirrored it. He wove a cocoon and got into it, and he floated on the blue world until he reached the outskirts of a Web, touching the water, and climbed out and onto the Web.

  That Web was the city of Ur, which sat like a diamond in the heart of all the Webs, and Mot was adopted into it, just as all his siblings were in their turn adopted by the Web communities they had each found. Spiders were born in secrecy and made their own way in life.

  Since that first moment out of the cave Mot had loved the water, and most of all travelling. He hung out at the dockside of Ur, where the Web touched the water and where silken rafts and boats carried passengers and lit the skyline with gaily coloured lamps. When he grew up enough he too ferried passengers and cargo; for a time he joined a group of treasure seekers who dived into the lake in search of human artefacts.

  That was how he first met Chancer.

  Chancer had spent two weeks in the Web town and he was getting ready to leave. He liked the spiders he met, who were friendly and polite but also quite unsure of what to do about a dog in their midst. He could have bought enough silk to leave and go back to the lands of the dogs and become prosperous, but he didn’t; he hung out in the dockside milk dens and listened to gossip, and talked to people.

  He was sitting there the night Mot came in with a gang of his friends, and he allowed them to satisfy their curiosity about his presence with good grace.

  So you’re treasure hunters, are you? he said at last. Ever find anything worth having?

  The spiderlings were competing with each other about their best finds. All kinds of obscure human relics, the purpose of which no one in fact knew, were mentioned. Chancer nodded and watched.