Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I heard the inexplicable popping of corks, accompanied by a simultaneous metallic grating, followed by the shattering of glass. Aanschultz later whispered of what he had glimpsed out of the edges of his eyes, and by no means can I—nor would I—discredit him.

  It was the bottles and jars in the filter rack that burst. Or rather, some burst, curved glass shards and gelatinous contents flying, spewing, dripping, clotting the floor and ceiling, spitting backward into the bolt-hole of night. Other receptacles opened with more deliberation. Aanschultz later blushed when he described, with perfect objectivity, the sight of certain jar lids unscrewing themselves from within. The dripping and splashes and soft wet steps I heard, he said, bore an actual correspondence in physical reality, but he refused ever to go into further detail on exactly what manner of things, curdled there and quickened in those jars by the action of that deep black light, leapt forth to scatter through the laboratory, slipping between the feet of his assistants, scurrying for the shadows, bleeding away between the planks of the floor and the cracks of our minds, seeping out into the world. My own memory is somewhat more distorted by emotion, for I felt the girl clutching at my ankles and heard her terrible cries. I forced myself to tear my hands away from my face—while still keeping my eyes pressed tight shut—and leaned down to offer help. No sooner had I taken hold of her fingers than she began to scream more desperately. Fearing that I was aggravating her wounds, I relaxed my hands to ease her pain; but she clung even more tightly to my hands and her screams intensified. It was as if something were pulling her away from me, as if I were her final anchor. As soon as I realized this, as soon as I tried to get a better hold on her, she slipped away. I heard her mother calling. The girl’s cries were smothered. Across the floor rushed a liquid seething, as of a sudden flood draining from the room and down the abat-nuit and out of the laboratory entirely.

  My first impulse was to follow, but I could no longer see a thing, even with my eyes wide open.

  “A light!” I shouted, and Aanschultz overlapped my own words with his own: “No!”

  But too late. The need for fire was instinctive, beyond Aanschultz’s ability to quell by force or reason. A match was struck, a lantern lit and instantly in panic dropped; and as we fled onrushing flames, in that instant of total exposure, Aanschultz’s most ambitious and momentous experiment reached its climax...although the denouement for the rest of Europe and the world would be a painful and protracted one.

  ACETALDEHYDE

  (See “Aldehyde.”)

  ACETIC ACID

  The oldest of acids, with many uses in photography, in early days as a constituent of the developer for wet plates, later for clearing iron from bromide prints, to assist in uranium toning, and as a restrainer. It is extremely volatile and should be kept in a glass-stoppered bottle and in a cool place.

  ACETIC ETHER

  Synonym, ethyl acetate. A light, volatile, colorless liquid with pleasant acetous smell, sometimes used in making collodion. It should be kept in well-stoppered bottles away from fire, as the vapor is very inflammable.

  ACETONE

  A colorless volatile liquid of peculiar and characteristic odor, with two separate and distinct uses in photography, as an addition to developers and in varnish making. As the vapor is highly inflammable, the liquid should be kept in a bottle with a close-fitting cork or glass stopper.

  ACETOUS ACID

  The old, and now obsolete, name for acetic acid (which see). Highly inflammable.

  ACETYLENE

  A hydrocarbon gas having, when pure, a sweet odor, the well-known unpleasant smell associated with this gas being due to the presence of impurities. It is formed by the action of water upon calcium carbide, 1 lb. of which will yield about 5 ft. of gas. It burns in air with a very bright flame, and is largely used by photographers for studio lighting, copying, etc., and as an illuminant in enlarging and projection lanterns. Acetylene forms, like other combustible gases, an explosive mixture with ordinary air, the presence of as little as 4 per cent of the gas being sufficient to constitute a dangerous combination.

  ACETYLENE GENERATOR

  An apparatus for generating acetylene by the action of water on calcium carbide. Copper should not be employed in acetylene generators, as under certain conditions a detonating explosive compound is formed.

  ACETYLIDE EMULSION

  Wratten and Mees prepared a silver acetylide emulsion by passing acetylene into an ammoniacal solution of silver nitrate and emulsifying in gelatin the precipitate, which is highly explosive. While this substance blackens in daylight about ten times faster than silver chloride paper, for years observers failed to detect any evidence of latent image formation and concluded that insights gained in Professor Conreid Aanschultz’s laboratory were of no lasting significance. This misunderstanding is attributed to the fact that, despite the intensity of exposure, it has taken more than a century for certain crucial images to emerge, even with the application of strong developers. We are only now beginning to see what Aanschultz glimpsed in an instant.

  “What man may hereafter do, now that Dame Nature has become his drawing mistress, is impossible to predict.” — Michael Faraday

  Dr. Lash Remembers

  Jeffrey Ford

  Multiple World Fantasy Award winner JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. He lives in New Jersey and teaches at Brookdale Community College. Of his story, he writes, “I think the inspiration was a wicked stomach virus I had right before I wrote the story. It knocked me out for a week, and its symptoms were the same as those described in the tale accompanying the onset of the Steam Plague. When I wasn’t running to the can, I did a lot of sleeping during that hellish week. One afternoon I dreamt about this woman, The Prisoner Queen, who lived on an island in a wrecked castle and had a servant with a weird horn coming out of his forehead. When I woke up, I happened to notice that there was this green stain on my pillow. It freaked me out. My ear was wet. I made my wife come and look. She did and said, ‘So what do you want me to do?’ The stain was shaped like some kind of melted animal with three legs. I studied that creature for a long time and while I did, I pictured The Prisoner Queen in different locations on her lonely island. In one scene she was tending a garden of indigo lilies, in another she was sitting on a stone bench, staring from a crumbling turret out to sea. Eventually, I filled the whole thing up with steam and sent it off to Jeff and Ann.” *

  I WAS WORKING fifteen-hour days, traversing the city on house calls, looking in on my patients who’d contracted a particularly virulent new disease. Fevers, sweats, vomiting, liquid excrement. Along with these symptoms, the telltale signature—a slow trickle of what looked like green ink issuing from the left inner-ear. It blotted pillows with strange, haphazard designs in which I momentarily saw a spider, a submarine, a pistol, a face staring back. I was helpless against this scourge. The best I could do was to see to the comfort of my charges and give instructions to their loved ones to keep them well hydrated. To a few who suffered most egregiously, I administered a shot of Margold, which wrapped them in an inchoate stupor. Perhaps it wasn’t sound medicine, but it was something to do. Done more for my well-being than theirs.

  In the middle of one of these harrowing days, a young man arrived at my office, carrying an envelope for me. I’d been just about to set off to the Air Ferry for another round of patient visits in all quarters of the city, but after giving the lad a tip and sending him on his way, I sat down to a cup of cold tea and opened the card. It was from Millicent Garana, a long-time friend and colleague I’d not seen in months. The circumstances of our last meeting had not been professional. Instead, I’d taken her to the Hot Air Opera and we marveled at the steam-inspired metallic characters gliding through the drama, their voices like so many tea kettles at the boil.

  It was with that gli
ttering, frenetic memory still twirling through my head that I read these words: Dr. Lash, please come to my office this afternoon. When you have finished reading this, destroy it. Tell no one. Dr. Garana. My image of Millicent, after the opera—her green eyes and beautiful dark complexion—sipping Oyster Rime and Kandush at the outdoor cafe of the old city, disintegrated.

  Apparently it was to be all business. I needed to show I was up to the task. I pulled myself together, tidied up my mustache, and chose my best walking stick. There was a certain lightness to my step that had been absent in the preceding days of the new disease. Now as I walked, I wondered why I hadn’t asked Millicent out on another nocturnal jaunt when last we parted. In my imagination, I remedied that oversight on this outing.

  Only in the middle of the elevator ride to the Air Ferry platform, jammed in with fifty people, did I register a sinister thread in what she’d written. Destroy the message? Tell no one? These two phrases scurried around my mind as we boarded, and later, drifting above the skyscrapers.

  We were in her office, me sitting like a patient in front of her desk. I tried not to notice how happy I was to see her. She didn’t return my smile. Instead, she said, “Have you had a lot of cases of this new fever?”

  “Every day,” I said. “It’s brutal.”

  “I’m going to tell you some things that I’m not supposed to,” she said. “You must tell no one.”

  I nodded.

  “We know what this new disease is,” she said. “You remember, I’m on the consulting board to the Republic’s Health Policy Quotidian. The disease is airborne. It’s caused by a spore, like an infinitesimal seedpod. Somehow, from somewhere, these spores have recently blown into the Republic. Left on their own, the things are harmless. We’d have not known they were there at all if the disease hadn’t prompted us to look.”

  “Spores,” I said, picturing tiny green burr balls raining down upon the city.

  She nodded. “Put them under pressure and extreme heat, though, like the conditions found in steam engines and they crack open and release their seed. It’s these seeds, no bigger than atoms, that cause the disease. The mist that falls from the Air Ferry or is expelled by a steam carriage, the perspiration of ten thousand turbines, the music of the calliope in the park—all teeming with seed. It’s in the steam. Once the disease takes hold in a few individuals, it becomes completely communicable.”

  I sat quietly for a moment, remembering from when I was a boy, the earliest flights of Capt. Madrigal’s Air Ferry. As it flew above our street, I’d run in its shadow, through the mist of its precipitation, waving to those waving on board. Then I came to and said, “The Republic will obviously have to desist from using steam energy for the period of time necessary to quarantine, contain, and destroy the disease.”

  “Lash, you know that’s not going to happen.”

  “What then?” I asked.

  “There is no other answer. The Republic is willing to let the disease run its course, willing to sacrifice a few thousand citizens in order to not miss a day of commerce. That’s bad enough, but there’s more. We’ve determined that there’s a 60 percent survival rate among those who contract it.”

  “Good odds,” I said.

  “Yes, but if you survive the fever stage something far more insidious happens.”

  “Does it have to do with that green discharge?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Come, I’ll show you.” She stood up and led me through a door into one of the examination rooms. An attractive young woman sat on a chair by the window. She stood to greet us and shake hands. I introduced myself and learned her name was Harrin. There was small talk exchanged about the weather and the coming holiday. Millicent asked her how she was feeling and she responded that she felt quite well. She looked healthy enough to me.

  “And where did you get that ring?” my colleague asked of the young woman.

  Harrin held up her hand to show off the red jewel on her middle finger.

  “This ring...,” she said and stared at it a moment. “Not but two days ago, a very odd fellow appeared at my door, bearing a small package. Upon greeting him, my heart jumped because he had a horn, like a small twisted deer antler, protruding from his left temple. The gnarled tip of it arced back toward the center of his head. He spoke my name in some foreign accent, his voice like the grumblings of a dog. I nodded. He handed me the package, turned, and paced silently into the shadows. Inside the outer wrapping there was a box, and in that box was this ring with a note. It simply read—For you. and was signed, The Prisoner Queen.”

  Millicent interrupted Harrin’s tale and excused us. She took me by the arm and led me back into her office. She told her patient she would return in a moment and then shut the door. In a whisper, she said, “The green liquid initiating from the ear is the boundary between imagination and memory. The disease melts it and even though you survive the fevers you can no longer distinguish between what has happened and what you have dreamed has happened or could have happened or should have. The Republic is going insane.”

  I was speechless. She led me to the opposite door and out into the corridor. Before I left, she kissed me. In light of what I’d been told, the touch of her lips barely startled me. It took me the rest of the day to recover from that meeting. I cancelled all of my appointments, locked myself in my office with a bottle of Fresnac, and tried to digest that feast of secrets.

  I never really got beyond my first question—Why had Millicent told me? An act of love? A professional duty? Perhaps the Republic actually wanted me to know this information since I am a physician but they couldn’t officially announce it.

  My first reaction was to flee the city, escape to where the Cloud Carriages rarely ventured, where the simply mechanical was still in full gear. But there were the patients, and I was a doctor. So I stayed in the city, ostensibly achieving nothing of medical value. Like my administration of the Margold, my decision to remain was more for me than any patient.

  The plague spread and imagination bled into memory, which bled into imagination—hallucinations on the street, citizens locked in furious argument with themselves all over town, and the tales people told in response to the simplest questions were complex knots of wish fulfillment and nightmare. Then the Air Ferry driver remembered that to fly the giant vessel he was to ignore the list of posted protocols and flip buttons and depress levers at whim. When the graceful, looming behemoth crashed in a fiery explosion into the city’s well-to-do section, wiping out a full third of the Republic’s politicos, not to mention a few hundred other citizens, I knew the end had come.

  Many of those who had not yet lost their reason fled into the country, and from what I’d heard formed small enclaves that kept all strangers at bay. For my part, I stayed with the sinking ship of state. Still tracking down and doing nothing for those few patients suffering from the onset symptoms of the disease.

  Scores of workers remembered that their daily job was something other than what it had been in reality and set forth each day to meddle; renowned experts in delusion. Steam carriages crashed, a dozen a day, into storefronts, pedestrians, each other. A fellow, believing himself one of the gleaming characters at the Hot Air Opera, rushed up on stage and was cut to ribbons by the twirling metal edges of his new brethren. There was an accident in one of the factories on the eastern edge of town—an explosion—and then thick black smoke billowed out of its three stacks, blanketing the city in twilight at mid-day. The police, not quite knowing what to do, and some in their number as deranged as the deranged citizenry, resorted to violence. Shootings had drastically risen.

  The gas of the street lamps ran low and the city at night was profoundly black with a rare oasis of flickering light. I was scurrying along through the shadows back to my office from a critical case of fever—an old man on the verge of death who elicited a shot of Margold from me. As I’d administered it, his wife went on about a vacation they’d recently taken on a floating island powered by steam. I’d inquired if she’d
had the fever and she stopped in her tale for a moment to nod.

  I shivered again, thinking of her, and at that moment rounded a corner and nearly walked into Millicent. She seemed to have just been standing there, staring. The instant I realized it was her, a warmth spread quickly through me. It was I this time who initiated the kiss. She said my name and put her arms around me. This was why I’d stayed in the city.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked her.

  “They’re after me, Lash,” she said. “Everybody even remotely involved with the government is being hunted down. There’s something in the collective imagination of those struck by the disease that makes them remember that the Republic is responsible for their low wages and grinding lives.”

  “How many are after you?” I asked and looked quickly over my shoulder.

  “All of them,” she said, covering her face with her hand. “I can tell you’ve not yet succumbed to the plague because you are not now wrapping your fingers around my throat. They caught the Quotidian of Health Care today and hanged him on the spot. I witnessed it as I fled.”