How do I know this truth? In part, I have always known because it is in my bones. But also because I have come into possession of information about my remote forebears, my great-great grandmother and grandfather (am I adopted? I’ll never tell), whom I shall call here simply XX and XY, to protect their memory from S. and the agents of Fascism.
My story, then, is the story of XX and XY. They lived in New England at the end of the 1800s, perhaps in Delaware and perhaps somewhere else. They lived in a big, ancestral house on the edge of a town that shall remain nameless, the house a boundary or buffer between that town and an artist commune that had sprung up despite resistance from the town’s more solid citizenry (read: people with lemons stuck up their asses).
These were the scourges of the time: the proto-hippies, proto-environmentalists, the proto-free thinkers. Their innocence and their trust created one of those bubbles of understanding that cannot but eventually pop: blind to race, religion, and class, they worked together and apart as children of the same dream. In their backyards, bungalows, and loft spaces, women and men alike, gay and straight, native and foreign, black and white and all-mixed-together, toiled to transform the landscape. They erected huge canvases and metal sculptures, created art across forms, aided by an anonymous benefactor referred to only as “the Prisoner Queen” and rumored to be the widow of a “famous nudist.” In all ways, they engaged in behavior that is like the smell of bloody flesh unto wolves to S. and His Great Eye.
XX and XY’s location on the cusp of this site composed (and composted) of great industry, of the heresy of true equality, came as the result of an inheritance from XY’s side of the family, which wanted nothing more than for XY to be made a memory, a ghost, a nothing. The break had occurred, according to the journals, a year earlier, and they were now outcasts, made to live next to other outcasts, even though only a fool thinks that a parrot is automatically delighted to share her roost with a mechanical nightingale. (Still, it was so.)
XY had escaped a Harvard he couldn’t comprehend because, as my father (dirt farmer/bag) once said before I ran away the third and final time—train-hopped from Zembla to Seattle, as an unknowing tip of the top hat to my steamy forebears, sending provocation back in the form of scary photos hinting at future catastrophe—he “ just wanted to make stuff from other things. Just wanted to make stuff, break stuff, and fix stuff.”
As for XX, she’d fled a rigid liberal education at a “girls college” as she called it scornfully, where “the idea of truly studying science was like a red ‘S’ [foreknowledge?! — MO] emblazoned upon my blouse.” To someone with the nuts-and-bolts of applied science tattooed into her skin in patterns of rust and coal dust—her father owned a foundry to which she had frequent access—this situation was intolerable. She’d always delighted in playing where other children might have recoiled in fear, and this wouldn’t change even after she’d grown up.
Both had gained their scientific knowledge largely by dint of rigorous self-study. Each had notebooks filled with dead leaves and live ideas, obscure diagrams and daydreams of the ideal future. Neither fit in anywhere else. They had met, legend had it, hunting for parts in a junkyard at midnight; kissed over the mangled ruins of a locomotive engine; consummated amid a bed of dark green moss riddled through with the nuts and bolts of a thousand girders.
Included with this image, a typed note from the Mecha-Ostrich: “From a popular Serbian comic strip (1992—2003), the title of which roughly translates as ‘American Tinker under the Influence of Absinthe,’ about a crazed inventor, drawn by artist Ivica Stevanovic. In this frame the unnamed inventor is taking a wrench to a half-mechanical Sasquatch in its molting phase. Although not visible, the Sasquatch has a pilot’s license (thus the altitude mask), and thruster aft in lieu of the normal parachute for emergencies. Several members of the artist commune were Yugoslavian, and some were known to visit relatives back in Europe—evidence that stories about XY were circulated abroad, at which point they mutated almost beyond recognition. This image, created so long after XY’s time, appears to have been modeled after Abraham Lincoln and cannot hope to match descriptions of XY from the period, which noted his partial Apache heritage. (You will not be given even a caricature of a likeness of XX for fear you might recognize her.)” — The Editors
Their self-study became, for a time, the study of each other. The journals are full of their observations, most too steamy to be related here. “Tiny almost translucent ears,” XY marvels. “Huge cock,” XX notes, with parenthetical “good endurance.” “Can listen to my soliloquies for ages and ages without falling asleep,” XX also notes. “Could listen to her talk forever,” XY confirms a day later.
In light of their self-discoveries, it hardly mattered that their house on the edge of town was old and rattling, and half-tore itself apart in times of storm. At least it was big, three stories, and they had inherited wall-to-wall-to-ceiling shelves of books, along with a spacious if neglected basement and backyard.
Within weeks, they had turned that basement, that backyard, into the foundation of a tinker’s shop, and used the money from repairing the townsfolk’s machines, large and small (but mostly small), to fund their own inquiries into matters of a scientific nature. In addition to repairs, they made “all manner of Thing” that could be quietly sold to private citizens without calling too much attention to the wildness of their expertise. From the fragments of journal entries that have come into my possession, these items included primitive toasters, calculators, and mechanical backhoes. (Who knows? The crisp burn of their joyously infernal operations may still kiss the air with atoms more than a century later.)
XX was always the brains of the operation, and XY was something else entirely. XX was patient and wise by all accounts, and fully as supersaturated with imagination as her partner, but XY had some other impulse—a madness?—that she didn’t possess but could harness, even as it exasperated her and then in turn saddened him, because, as he put it, “I can’t help myself, even as I can see it happening.” It was from this union that they created, eventually, not just my great-great grandmother, but also their greatest invention: the original Mecha-Ostrich, in both the rounded steel of its original reality and in my turbulent presence so many years later to speak for them and all the others who have been silenced by S.
Out of the exile forced upon them came, for a time, success and happiness. For five years, their business flourished, and they reached a level of camaraderie with the members of the commune that made them happy, as if there had been a missing piece to their lives that only others could provide. But then one day a grateful bank teller from the town gifted XY with what he believed was a considerate present: a recent edition of the New York Five Cent Library that included “Electric Bob’s Big Black Ostrich, Or, Lost on the Desert,” a pulp adventure by the author of the previous Electric Bob. It was the normal racist claptrap of an era, all wrapped up in the innocence of a boy’s adventure, featuring off-the-cuff references to “a dozen big greasy Mojave warriors” and Mexican “Greasers,” along with classic lines of dialogue like “Take that n——— giant first.”
But what caught XY’s eye amongst all the maddening, saddening evidence of all-too-common stupidity and intolerance were the descriptions of how the inane Electric Bob and his cohorts came to create a mechanical ostrich. I say inane because the premise of this pointless yarn is that Electric Bob can’t cross a desert without the help of an invention. “We must make something in which we can cross the desert,” Electric Bob says, conveniently ignoring such timeless inventions as pack mules and feet connected to working legs. His suggestion of an airship is deep-sixed by his pal Inyo Bill who quickly exclaims, “No, sir! No flying machine for me! Not for all the gold between here and the day of judgment!” Despite it being many decades before the advent of mind-warping and brain-destroying TV, the immediate conclusion is to build a mechanical ostrich instead:
The cover of the New York Five Cent Library volume that includes the Edisonade reference
d by the Mecha-Ostrich, not included in the materials sent to the past and present editors of Steampunk Magazine. The story dates from August 26, 1893. — The Editors
“Now, if we could only ride one of them,” said old Inyo Bill, pointing with his pipe toward a number of ostriches on an adjoining farm which the two men were passing in their walk. “A big ostrich could carry us among the rocks, and across the sand at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and not mind the snakes, or lack of water, and—”
“Good!” cried Electric Bob, slapping his old friend on the shoulder. “You have solved the problem, Inyo. We will have an ostrich big enough to carry us both to the Pegleg mine. It is just the thing!”
“There ain’t an ostrich alive could do it,” said the old man, with a puzzled look.
“Well, we will build one that will run by electric power,” said Bob, smiling.
After XY had gotten over his shock—recorded emphatically in his journal—that ostriches had been introduced to the United States, he soon found himself fascinated by the mechanical version, which the two men enter by quickly running “up a wire ladder that hung down from under one wing.” (This method of entry seems vastly superior to the undignified “hindquarters portal” developed by the French for their modern, Verne-inspired mechanical elephant in Nantes.)
Of the bird itself, the author writes:
The ostrich towered thirty feet in the air to the top of his great head. The center of the body was twenty feet from the ground, the neck was about eight feet long.
The black male taken as a model had been faithfully copied, in appearance and proportions, and when completed the gigantic machine standing there in the orange grove was to all outward appearance a mammoth ostrich.
“It will cause great excitement wherever we go,” said Inyo. “People will think it a real old rooster.”
“That will be great,” says Bob, because nothing screams “desert travel” like a huge, heavy, black ostrich whose every footstep will shift and settle and dislocate sand.
But there is a catch. Inyo points out that causing all of that attention might lead to getting shot at. Bob reassures his sidekick that the ostrich will be able to withstand anything up to and possibly including cannon fire (much like the smaller model in my garage), but brings Inyo into the machine to show off its weaponry:
“Well,” said Bob, “to begin, you know the legs are of fine wrought steel and hollow, the body is of thin plate steel lined with hardwood to protect us from the heat out there, and the wings and tail are of aluminum, light, graceful, and bullet-proof.
“The power is furnished by powerful storage batteries placed in the body just between the thighs of the bird, and are capable of giving us a speed of from twenty to forty miles an hour—depending on the nature of the ground we travel over.
“Here are a water tank, storage places for provisions, ammunition, etc., and here is our machine gun... [which] consists of an enlarged revolver cylinder, holding twenty-five Winchester rifle cartridges, and a short, heavy barrel, and is fired by turning this crank—this way.”
At which point Electric Bob’s oafish partner says of the ingenious addition of a camera, “Why, you can kill [Native Americans] with the gun and photograph ‘em with this machine at the same time, can’t we?”
All of this left XY cold and wondering at the “casual yet specific cruelty of humanity.” Nor did he thrill to the heretical prospect of using electricity to power the beast. But the basic idea—the creation of a mechanical ostrich—raised a specter of a monumental challenge in XY’s head, the hint of a possible future peeking through a door of light. It made small, or so he thought, his own plans by dint of its sheer audacity.
To XX the idea would have simply been amusing, a “fancy or whimsy of the kind that used to incite pillow talk after a day of more serious endeavors.” Left to her own infernal devices, she would have returned to work in the basement on their crude attempts at a superconductor or perpetual motion machine, or her re-creation of the steam-powered automated sliding glass doors first invented by the Egyptians.
Each of these projects they had described to others as a kind of declaration of love for one another, but these were not just acts of fidelity and faith. They were acts of solidarity with people they had never met or corresponded with, like Tesla and all of the other mad geniuses that used to roam the earth and now are kept in self-imposed cages in the basements of top-secret corporate facilities, fated to produce assembly-line plastic vomit for the masses. (Nor did they have children at that point; indeed, XX was working on an external, steam-powered incubator, as she had no wish to halt her research.)
But XY was not XX and XX was not XY. After seeing the ostrich description, he cross-referenced it to his research into Vaucanson’s famous mechanical ibis from the 1700s—and became convinced not only that he could create what he called a “Mecha-Ostrich,” but that it would be an extraordinary invention for people to ride around in, “powered by friendly and proven steam.”
The mention of Vaucanson’s ibis is significant given the intricacy of this famous automaton. The mechanical bird was built by a French engineer named Jacques de Vaucanson in the 1730s, although some credit it to Russian inventor Vladimir Gvozdev. The ibis had a weight inside connected to over a thousand moving parts. Vaucanson, by trial and error, made these parts move together to give an illusion of life. The ibis even had a rubber tube for its digestive tract. The ibis and other automata made Vaucanson famous and he traveled for many years exhibiting his ibis and other machines around Europe. Although he collected honors for his work, he also collected scorn from those who believed he had employed infernal means to create his ibis. Most of his creations were destroyed in a fire a year after Vaucanson died, but in 1805 the famed poet Goethe spotted the miraculous ibis in the collection of an Austrian antiques enthusiast. Shortly thereafter, the Austrian died and the collections were auctioned off to a certain “Baron Sampson Sardonicus” to pay his debts. The ibis has not been seen since. Even in 1805, Goethe had reported that the ibis looked mangy and had “digestive problems.” Strange sounds came from inside the automata, and it is likely it ceased to function shortly after 1806. Vaucanson’s relatives have often claimed that the ibis was Vaucanson’s most prized possession and that he believed it held the key to solving several scientific mysteries. — The Editors
XX, as might be expected, lodged many wise and timely objections to this new course of action—not least of which was the mangled evidence provided by their New Hampshire neighbors some decades earlier: a tinker-created mechanical elephant gone awry. Not only had the elephant hideously malfunctioned, but a self-proclaimed “mad prophet of New Hampshire,” who had caught the fancy of the local newspapers, spent much of his remaining time on this good Earth railing against science, usually in the context of his apocalyptic visions of the metal beast. (“A Science of Morality hangs on people’s Actions, as well as the effect they achieve on our fellow-men, in a narrower or wider range. Let us not encourage each other to continue a worship of the monotonous material world, the world of the Inhuman and Automatic?.” See the appendix for more.)
But XY ignored all of this, for he was in the grip of a powerful and all-encompassing vision. This vision, according to an entry XX made in her journal, “overtook him to such a great degree that it was like a hot air balloon he was blowing up in our research basement, slowly taking up all of the space, crowding out everything I wanted to work on. Eventually, I gave up and decided to help him, because then it would all be over much sooner, and I could get back to more important work. Besides, when obsessed he was very compelling, and that was...attractive...”
Attraction aside, it appears that XY had hooked XX on the idea of automata in general, through the agency of commune member and sculptor Pozukuddi Nagalakshmi. In XX’s journal, around this time, the following note has been scrawled across the back of a page: “According to S&M and Ms. Nagalakshmi, ‘in former times there was a certain artist in the Middle Country. To enrich himself he
went on his business from the Middle Country to the country of the Greeks. There he stopped at the house of a mechanic. A mechanical doll was made by the latter and placed in his room to serve him. She washed his feet and stood by. As she was leaving he spoke to her. She stood in silence. He thought: Surely she has been sent to me as a servant. Seizing her by the hand, he began to drag her towards him, whereupon she became a heap of chains.’”1
For months afterwards, XX would tease XY by saying, “Drag me, and I’ll become a heap of chains.”‘ “More likely she’ll take the chains to me if I’m not careful, and I’ll have earned it!” XY wrote at one point. Perhaps there was a blade of truth in amongst the teasing, but they had achieved enough singleness of purpose to embark on their adventure...except that it wasn’t nearly as easy as fiction. In the Edisonade, Electric Bob studies real ostriches, creates diagrams of his mechanical spin-off in just three days, and sends it all to a “Chicago factory,” guaranteeing that the vacation-vehicle-slash-death-wielding-machine “shall be done within six weeks.” A few days later a telegram informs Electric Bob that “his wonderful machine was being constructed as rapidly as possible,” and a month after that “boxes containing the wonderful invention” arrive in San Bernardino and “three experienced machinists from the Southern Pacific Railway shops” help put together the ostrich.
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Page 46
