Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Ah,” said Lundqvist. “Well, it seems my timing is to its usual standard. I’ll leave you to your evasive maneuvers—”

  The first of the large guns swung to bear on the Regina. Excellent work, I acknowledged with a smaller pang; the automated emplacements were more reliable than most human sentries. “Climb, damn you, climb,” the captain snarled at the helmsman. “We should already be at twice estimated safe distance.”

  “—although I do hope you will keep our discovery in mind. Come, Charles.”

  “Oh, yes,” the captain said over her shoulder. “I will most certainly keep the possibility of attack by serpent-riding air pirates in mind.”

  Jawbone slung over my shoulder, I accompanied the Professora back towards the lift. “Charming lass, our captain,” she said. “Had I both a body and Sapphic inclinations, I do believe I’d be infatuated.”

  I glanced at her, trying to hide my smile. Full-bodied people often expressed surprise that acorporeals or otherwise mechanically augmented persons could harbor such desires. I, of course, had no such false impression, but preferred to maintain the illusion of one. “If you say so, Professora.”

  She laughed, a curious sound coming from her phonograph. “I do say so. Don’t be a stick about it. Why—”

  A concussion like the heavens’ own timpani shook through the ship, followed by a sudden lurch to the right. The Professora’s tank slammed first against a bulkhead, then, as the ship listed deeply, began to roll down the hall towards the empty lift shaft. The first impact had damaged her brakes, I realized, and now she faced the predicament of a glass tank plus high speed.

  I did not think. Dropping the serpent’s jawbone, I ran past the Professora and flung myself across the entry to the lift. I was fortunate in that the ship’s tilt eased just before she struck me, and so I was not mown down completely. Instead I had to shift from blocking her passage to hauling on the tank’s fittings as the ship reversed its pitch and the Professora threatened to slide back down the way we’d come.

  A second concussion rumbled below us, this one more distant, and from down the hall I heard the captain’s cursing take on a note of relief. For a brief and disorienting moment, I felt almost as if I’d seen a childhood hero fall; those guns were supposed to be perfect, impassable, and yet we’d sailed by. That their perfection would have meant my death was almost a secondary concern. I caught my breath, shaken by this strange mental dissonance.

  “Thank you, Charles,” Professora Lundqvist said at last. “I see why Dieterich prizes your services.”

  “I am rarely called upon to do this for him,” I pointed out. “Shall I call the lift?”

  At that point, the lift’s motor started. It rose to reveal Colonel Dieterich. “Good God, Lundqvist, what happened? Are you quite done molesting my valet?”

  Lundqvist chuckled. “Quite. Do give me a hand, Dieterich; I’m going to need some repairs.”

  Dinner that evening was hardly a silent affair, as we had reached the second of the three gun emplacements, and the constant barrage made the experience rather like dining in a tin drum during a hailstorm. As a result of the damage to her brakes, Professora Lundqvist’s tank was now strapped to the closest bulkhead like a piece of luggage, which put her in a foul temper.

  Unfortunately, every academic gathering, regardless of size, always has at least one member who is tone-deaf to the general mood of the evening, and tonight it was one of the anatomists. He had a theory, and a well-thought-out one it was, that a serpent of the kind we’d found could be grown in a thaumically infused tank—one similar to the Professora’s, in fact. (The comparison amused only Colonel Dieterich, who teased Lundqvist about her stature as a Lamia of science.)

  By the time I came to offer coffee and dessert, this anatomist had reached the point where, if our projector had not been packed, he would have been demanding to show slides. I paused at the door, reluctant to be even an accessory to such a discussion, but it was clear that the rest of the party was humoring him. Either encouraged or maddened by the lack of response, the anatomist continued his tirade as I poured, his voice rising to near-hysteria as he argued that what could be created for a serpent could be replicated on both larger and smaller scales, down to minuscule creatures and up to gargantua. Raising his cup, he predicted an Aariscian landscape of clockwork serpents, clockwork horses, clockwork cats and dogs, all living in a golden harmony devoid of human interference. I held my tongue.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Crumworth finally burst out. “Has no one taught this idiot basic thaumic theory?”

  “It could happen,” insisted the anatomist. “Aaris does have the thaumic reservoirs; the ones on the pass, the ones in the Mittelgeist valley—”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Doctor Brackett stirred cream into her coffee until it turned beige. “Yes, there are the reservoirs under the gun emplacements and elsewhere. But they’re the wrong kind. You couldn’t use them to power something like an air serpent.”

  All very sound science, of course, and the Mobility/Sufficiency Paradox was the basis of at least one Society lecture. I turned away to hide my smile, and caught a glimpse of Dieterich deliberately tapping his pipe with the careful concentration that meant he was thinking about something else.

  “It’s like the difference between a geothermic station and a boiler,” Crum-worth went on. “One’s much more powerful than the other, but it’s no good if you’re too far away from the steam for it to power anything.”

  One of the Terranocta astronomers at the far end of the table nodded. “Is why no one give a shit about Aaris.”

  Several members of the party immediately busied themselves with their coffee. It didn’t take much to guess why, and as the person who’d handled most correspondence on this expedition, I didn’t have to guess. After all, no one noticed a valet, especially not if he was there to take care of simple administrative tasks as well, and if some codes were childishly easy to crack, that was hardly my fault.

  While the Royal Society’s ostensible reason for the expedition was to offer the hand of friendship and scientific inquiry to their poor isolated cousins, any idiot could see that it was also to assay whether air power could bypass the gun emplacements. Thaumic reservoirs might be useless for certain engineering methods, but that hardly made them worthless, as the Royal Society well knew.

  At least half of the party were spies (Brackett and Crumworth in particular, each from a rival faction in the same country, which explained their mutual antagonism and attraction), and I had suspicions about the other half. To take the most cynical view, the ship was like any other diplomatic mission in that absolutely no one was as they seemed.

  As if perceiving my thoughts, Dieterich glanced up and met my gaze, and the trace of a smile creased the corners of his eyes. Yes, he was an exception to that. As was the Professora, though all of us had our reasons for being here—Dieterich for the Society, Lundqvist for the prestige, the spies for their countries, the non-spies for curiosity. As for me, I’d been valet to Dieterich for ten years, in general service for ten before that, and I was homesick.

  The sound of guns below us faded into the distance, as if the lull in our conversation had reached them as well. Two down, one to go, I counted. That was if the landscape hadn’t changed, if my memories of the pass still held true.

  The anatomist cleared his throat. “A serpent could—”

  “Oh, do shut up, Klaus,” Lundqvist snapped.

  What happened the day after was pretty much inescapably my fault, in both the immediately personal and the greater sense. We had passed the third emplacement in the very early hours, and while that had been a near thing— scuttlebutt had it that the charts had been wrong, and only the helmsman’s reflexes had saved us—the mood today was light, and the general consensus that we would clear the pass by noon.

  I served breakfast to those of the party who were awake by eight (Dieterich, one of the astronomers, and the immobile, sulking Professora), then made my way up to the ob
servation deck, where I had no business being. It was not the safest place, even with the security of an andropter across my shoulders, but I hoped to catch a glimpse of Aaris before our mission began in earnest. The thaumaturges whose duty it was to keep the Regina airborne were changing shift, each moving into his or her mudra in what an ignorant man might have called clockwork regularity. I exchanged nods with those leaving their shifts and headed for the open-air viewing at the bow.

  The morning sun cast our shadow over the mountain slopes so that it seemed to leap ahead of us like a playful dog. A dozen ornamental lenses along the lower railing showed the landscape in picturesque facets. I risked adjusting my eyes to see ahead.

  Something twinkled on the high peaks that marked the last mountains of the Sterling Pass, and I focused on it just as the captain’s voice roared from the speaking tube. I had enough time to think Ah, so they did get my report on the Society’s air capabilities before I realized that the guns had already fired.

  The next few minutes were a confusion of pain and shrapnel. I was later to learn that the captain’s quick thinking had kept the Regina’s dirigible sacs from being punctured, but at a loss of both the observation deck and the forward hold. What struck me at the time, though, was a chunk of werglass from the lenses, followed by a broken segment of railing that pinned me to the deck. Splinters ground under my fingers as I scrabbled at the planks, first to keep from falling through the wreckage, then out of sheer agony as the railing dug deeper. A detachment borne partly of my nature and partly of my years of service told me that there had been substantial but not crippling damage to my internals, and that the low insistent sound I heard was not mechanical but one of the thaumaturges sobbing quietly as she attempted to keep the Regina aloft.

  There are times when detachment is not a virtue.

  With a rattling gasp, I reached down and pulled the railing from my side. Only blood followed it, and I yanked the remnants of my coat over the gap in a futile effort to hide the wound.

  The hatches from belowdecks slammed open. “Charles? Where’s Charles?” roared Dieterich, and I flattened myself against the boards, hoping to remain unnoticed. “There you are, man! A stretcher, quickly!”

  In short order I was bundled onto a stretcher and carried down to the lab, where Dieterich had me placed on the central table and my andropter unstrapped. The Society party’s pleas to have me taken to the ship’s sawbones were refuted with the quite accurate observation that he already had enough patients, and that furthermore no one was going to lay hands on Dieterich’s valet but Dieterich himself. Crumworth and Brackett exchanged glances at this, coming as usual to the wrong conclusion.

  Dieterich ordered everyone out, then turned on Professora Lundqvist, who observed the whole enterprise from her place by the door. “And you, too, madam!”

  “It will take you a full half hour to attach me to a more convenient bulkhead,” she retorted. “Besides, I have more medical experience than you.”

  Dieterich muttered something about idiot disembodied brains thinking they knew everything, but he let her remain. “Hang on, Charles,” he said. “We’ll soon have you right as rain—”

  He paused, staring at the open wound in my side. I closed my eyes and cursed myself for ever having the idiot sense to join this expedition.

  “Lundqvist,” Dieterich said softly, “your phonograph, please.”

  The Professora acquiesced by extending the horn of her phonograph to the lock on the door and emitting a blast like an air-horn. Cries of dismay followed, and Dieterich kicked the door as he went to pull on sterile gloves. “No eavesdropping, you half-witted adjuncts!”

  He returned to my side and with a set of long tweezers removed one of the many separate pains from my side. “Well,” he said in a voice that barely carried to my ears, “do we need to discuss this?” And he held up the bloodied escapement that he had extracted.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t think so, sir,” I finally managed. “I expect you can infer the meaning of clockwork in your valet.”

  Dieterich reached for his pipe, realized he didn’t have it, and whuffled through his mustache instead. “That’s loyalty for you, eh, Lundqvist?” he said over his shoulder. “Man even ascribes this discovery to me. Very flattering.”

  “I suspected a while ago,” Lundqvist said quietly, turning her phonograph to face us. “When this expedition was first floated.”

  “Eight months past? Pah, woman, you only told me three weeks ago.”

  I stared at her. “How?” I choked, realizing a second later that I’d just confirmed her suspicions.

  “Your transmissions to Aaris. I monitor the radio transmissions from the Society—never mind why, Dieterich, suffice it to say that I had reason—and after some time I noticed your additions. Very well encrypted, by the way; I’m still impressed.”

  The thought came to mind that had I been only a little slower yesterday, I might have been rid of one of those who knew my secret. But the Professora, as usual, gave no indication of what she was thinking, and Dieterich only set the escapement in a sterile tray and began a search for the anesthetic. “Merged,” I said at last. “In Aaris we’re called Merged citizens.”

  “Citizens, hm? Looks like the sociology department’s theory about rank anarchism in Aaris had some foundation.” Dieterich extracted another chunk of shrapnel, this one three-fourths of a gear from my recording array, nestled just below what passed for my ribs. “Charles, if I describe what I’m seeing here, can you tell me how to repair you?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I can, but—” I stopped, the full explanation of merged versus autonomous citizenry and the Aaris monarchic system trembling on my tongue. Had silence really been so intolerable these last years, so much that the first opportunity made me liable to spill all I knew? “If you extract the broken bits and stitch me up, I should be fine,” I told him.

  The Regina lurched beneath us. Dieterich caught the side of the table and cursed. “You’re self-repairing?” he asked as he righted himself, the tone of fascinated inquiry one I knew well.

  I couldn’t say I was happy about being the focus of that interest. “No, I heal up. There’s a difference, Sir.”

  “Thaumic reserves,” the Professora murmured. “Infused throughout living tissue—I did wonder, when I heard about the serpent, whether it was possible. We may have to revise our definition of thaumic self-sufficiency. Dieterich, you’ve missed a piece.”

  “I haven’t missed it; I was just about to get it.” Carefully, with hands more accustomed to steam engines, Dieterich pulled the last damaged scrap from underneath my internal cage and began sealing the wound with hemostatic staples. Each felt like a dull thump against my side, muffled by the anesthetic. “Springs, even... do you know, Charles, if word gets out that I have a clockwork valet, I’m never going to live it down.”

  “I suspect I won’t either, sir.” I took the pad of gauze he handed me and pressed it into place while he unwound a length of burdock-bandage. The pain eased to a dull ache. “What will you tell the captain?”

  “Nothing, I expect,” Lundqvist said, and Dieterich grunted assent. “What did your Aariscian counterparts ask you to do on this voyage, Charles? From our continued existence, I presume your purpose here wasn’t sabotage.”

  I closed my eyes again, then gritted my teeth and attempted to sit up. Dieterich had done a good job—as well he should, being an engineer of automata on a grander scale—and the edges no longer grated, though it was a toss-up whether I’d have recording capabilities again. One more rivet in the vault of my espionage career, I thought, and here was the last: “They didn’t tell me anything,” I croaked, eluding Dieterich’s offer of help. “They haven’t told me anything for fourteen years.”

  And there it was, the reason I’d come with Dieterich on this expedition when it would have been so easy to cry off: not just duty, not just homesickness, but the need to know what had happened in my absence. I covered my face, hiding how my eyes
adjusted and re-adjusted, the lenses carrying away any trace of oily tears. I did not normally hide emotion, but I could at least hide this mechanical, Merged response.

  The Regina shuddered again, followed by a screech that sent shivers up to my medulla. Dieterich glanced upwards, pity temporarily forgotten. “That wasn’t a gun.” He stripped off his gloves. “Lundqvist, keep an eye on him.”

  “And how am I to do that?” Lundqvist asked as Dieterich unbarred the door and ran out. “Charles? Charles, do not go up there, you are not fit to be on your feet—”

  I might not be fit, but both my employer and my home were now up there. I yanked Dieterich’s greatcoat on over my bandages and followed.

  We had passed the last of the guns, truly the last this time, and the sunlight on the decks burned clear and free of dust. Just past the bow of the Regina, I caught a glimpse of Aaris’ green valleys.

  Between it and us hovered a knot of silver, endlessly twisting. Serpents, I thought first, and then as the red-cloaked riders on each came clear, Merged serpents.