by Dave Freer
“We should be able to reduce the charge to unlawful use of company property,” said the lawyer. “You returned it in good order to a railway employee.”
“But I stole it. I had to.”
He looked at her over the top of his glasses. “Never admit to committing a crime, young lady.”
“I did it.”
“I can’t defend you if you plead guilty.”
“Well then it’s guilty that I am,” she snapped, knowing that she was getting more Irish as she got madder.
“You’ll end up with a criminal record,” squawked the lawyer.
Her father patted her shoulder. “I hear they used to send you to Australia if you had one of those.”
The magistrate hadn’t been quite as understanding as the one Mrs. Darlington had had. Mind you, he had admitted that her actions had had extremely desirable results, and as her father said, the poor fellow would have been lynched if he’d tried to throw the book at her. But the fine for unlawful use seemed a fair enough thing. After all, she had done it. And they didn’t put her in jail.
There was a knock at the door. It was Tim, looking polished and nervous. He was scared of her father.
Ha. He didn’t know he had to be scared of both of her parents. Clara had cheerfully eavesdropped on their plans for Tim. It was all right. She’d see he did precisely what he wanted to do, not what they planned. They were talking of education, not submarines. And the future was still a far-off place. She had ideas of her own that they weren’t going to like either.
She ran to meet him, to kiss him on the doorstep, before Daddy and Mother came. It had been days since she last saw him. They only had an hour before the ceremony. And then he would be away a week with the Cuttlefish before they all went to Port Lincoln for Lieutenant Ambrose’s wedding to his Sally, with just about every crewman from the Cuttlefish in attendance.
Sometimes it took having thought that someone must be dead to make you realize what they were worth, she thought, hugging him again.
Tim found his second bite at Westralia quite different from the first. People knew who he was now. The newspapers had had a full day of it. The Westralians might welcome a submarine, however, the people who saved Sheba, they were heroes. And yes, there were still the ones who turned away and ignored him. But there were the ones who now went out of their way to make him feel welcome, too. And he realized that just as he was changing the way he saw them, and their country, he was doing the same to them.
Westralia was Clara’s home now…not Cuttlefish. Tim had had a sudden realization that being a part of something never went away, it just sort of moved around you. And the crew, too, changed. Lieutenant Ambrose was even talking about staying here now. He’d been offered the captaincy of a Westralian submarine. That would be…different.
On the other hand, it might also be good, too.
One could change the way one felt about things, even Westralia and the desert. Lampy had asked him and Jack and Clara and her mother to come out when he’d laid his uncle to rest. And Tim had realized, as he’d stood there on that red sand and was welcomed to the place, formally, that he’d put a piece of himself into Westralia, too. It would always be a part of him, and he of it.
In the late afternoon, the Westralian southern cross flag fluttered above the parade ground of the Westralian Mounted Police. There were, Lampy realized, a lot of people watching. He’d never had boots that had been worth polishing before. This pair he had polished until they were nearly like mirrors, even though he was only wearing one. He still had a cast on the other leg. Every brass button, too, had been polished to perfection. He could have shaved with the ironed creases on those breeches. He buffed the dingo badge on the slouch hat a last time. Sergeant Tom Morgan came along and boosted him up onto the saddle, and Constable Lampy Green rode into the parade ground with the rest of the troop. Sixteen WMP men had been in Sheba when the British raid happened, or had taken part in the Dajarra battle, and were all due to receive their honors for it. The Westralian Mounted Police had come out of that engagement proud, and very much more respected than when it went in.
Without moving his head, Lampy let his eyes take in the crowd. There was young Tim…with the girl. Eh. The boy must be a year younger than he was. There was Jack and his missus, Jack smiling and waving. Lampy nearly forgot himself and waved back. Linda and her parents…and Ned Pascoe standing next to them. There were Cuttlefish crewmen. Couple of blokes from that power station they’d ridden to. That manager bloke, Sid, had come all the way down for this. It was good to have them there.
But it was the rest of the crowd that Lampy realized was really important. About half of the people were blackfellers. They’d come to see this ceremony. This honor.
“And for exceptional courage and in recognition of the honor he brought to the Westralian Mounted Police, Constable Green…”
They said big things that washed over him like the sea. Lampy Green knew he wasn’t standing there just for Lampy Green, though.
He’d been talked into this by Sergeant Morgan and Jack. And finding Uncle Jake’s body, with a bullet lodged in his spine, a bullet which could be matched to a gun.
Jack was right. He needed to do this. And he could and would. It was a heavy load, but he didn’t carry it alone, or just for himself.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Billabong—usually a cut-off oxbow lake. A body of water that remains after the river has dried up.
Boobinch—an emu caller, made from a hollow piece of wood.
Boong—an insulting term for a native Australian, which was in use in earlier years.
Coolamon—a shallow, curved-sided container, usually longer than wide, for gathering food.
Dingo—Australian wild dogs.
Flying wing—in the sense used in Steam Mole, a tail-less, fixed-wing aircraft, deriving some lift from the wing shape and some from lighter-than-air gasbags in the wing.
Goolibah—(aka coolabah, coolibah) Eucaluptus coolabah, a eucalyptus tree.
Perente—(aka perentie) Varanus giganteus, a large monitor lizard or goanna, a favorite food for desert aboriginal peoples.
Magnetic termites—a kind of termite whose mounds always align north-south
Min-min lights—mysterious lights, possibly an optical illusion, or fata morgana, seen particularly in the Australian Channel Country.
Mound springs—tumulus mounds formed where water from the Australian great artesian basin comes to the surface.
Paperbark—trees or shrubs of the genus Melaleuca, with a bark that is like many sheets of paper. Has antifungal and antibacterial properties.
Pituri—a substance made from the dry leaves of plants of the genus Duboisia, used in traditional aboriginal medicine as an analgesic.
Termite way/run—a covered railway tunnel in which the clankers (cable-trains) are hauled, keeping them cool
Tucker—food. Bush tucker is food from the wild and can include insect grubs, fruit, and seeds. It takes knowledge and skill to live off it.
Scout steam mole—A smaller drilling machine intended for surface travel, with endless tracks, rather like a tank or bulldozer.
Sheba—A very wealthy mine, producing lead, copper, sliver, and zinc. In our world, Mount Isa.
Steam mole—A tunnel-drilling machine intended to build termite runs.
WMP—Westralian Mounted Police
Westralia—A rebel republic set up in the western two-thirds of Australia when the British Empire retreated to the eastern seaboard. Encompassing the our-world states of Western Australia, Northern Territory, the western half of Queensland, and South Australia as far as the Spencer Gulf. Parts of Victoria and New South Wales on the west are disputed lands.
ON THE WAY THE STEAM MOLE WORKS, AND WHY
I’ve always preferred science fiction that could possibly work. The science of the Cuttlefish and Steam Mole universe is supposed to be just that—science that took a different turn.
You may have noticed that temperatures are always given
“in the shade.” In a hotter world, shade is going to be even more important. The mineral wealth of central Australia is not going to be possible to get to without that shade. It’s not a new problem, and the opal mining settlement of Coober Pedy shows a solution. The people live underground. In Steam Mole’s Australia there are whole cities underground and the methods of using architecture to cool them is well advanced. It’s something we don’t really do in our world, which could save a lot of energy.
Termites—also called white ants—help to provide the Westralians with a way to overcome the heat. Termites are very temperature sensitive and cannot really cope with more than minimal exposure to sunlight. Yet the desert and semidesert have huge colonies of them. In particular, the magnetic termites (amitermes) build high north-south mounds going down into deep “basements” with a complicated arrangement of vents and tunnels to allow the mound to stay both cooler by day and warmer by night than the desert. Termites also build “termite runs”—little mud-roofed passages up trees and across places where the sun would kill them. The rail system for the mines in the hot heart of Australia is based on this. The steam moles cut a shallow groove, with gentle gradients and few turns along the highest ground. The groove is roofed over, becoming a true tunnel in places because trains do not perform well on steep gradients.
A steam mole is a rail-mounted tunneling machine. In front there are concentric discs of spinning cutters, making a cone that cuts and pours the fine-cut material (fill) back onto conveyors. The fill goes to the carriages behind the mole, and some material is used in building the shoring that stops the shallow tunnel from collapsing. Some of it will go into a roof if the groove is very shallow.
Of course, a round drill cuts a round hole. And that means either it is a very big round hole, or you cut two of them or…well, you have one line and trains can’t go both ways at once. Or…you could use the top half on a hanging rail going one way, and the bottom half on a pair of rails going the other way. This works particularly well if your carriages are not trains, but cable cars, pulled on an endless loop of steel cable. After all, when one side of the cable is pulling a carriage north, the other side of the cable loop is coming south. In a world run on coal, that is how the Westralians have got around the problem of clean air in the tunnels. A steam engine down there would soon make the air unbreathable. So they have power stations every twenty miles. Each powers a cable loop ten miles to either side of it and blows cool night air into the tunnels.
This is fine once you have made the tunnel, but the steam mole must take its power with it, and a long air hose, too. It must be as airtight as a submarine, because the new tunnel will be so full of coal smoke that the air inside would be unbreathable.
There is a smaller version of the mole, too, a scout intended to travel on endless tracks (like a tank or a bulldozer) and able to travel, without rails, over rough terrain to drill, sample, and prepare the path for the steam mole to follow.
ON ALTERNATE HISTORY
Alternate history is a form of “what if.” It’s not wish fulfillment or pure imagination, it’s logically taking “what if” to a plausible conclusion. We really don’t understand space and time very well. Perhaps there really are universes where your mother never met your father and you do not exist. And maybe that universe isn’t all that different from this one. Or perhaps your not being there changes everything. Perhaps every chance or choice has its own universe. There are two ways of thinking about what happens then. If you believe individuals don’t matter, then things gradually go back to being the same in both universes. If you believe individuals change things…well, then the farther you get from that point, the more the two universes are different.
I see it like a pebble dropped in a pond, with ripples of “what if” changes going out from the original choice or breakpoint. The more time passes, the more things are different, because we’re built on the past. Some things will happen no matter what. The day will still take the same number of hours, people will still experiment with machines, and they will find the same things…but at different times. The Cuttlefish and Steam Mole universe diverged about fifty-five years before the stories. To see something positive in two world wars, they forced a lot of scientific and mechanical development. They also caused huge social changes, as women went to do what was considered “men’s work” and did it perfectly well. It mixed people of different cultures and races, too, breaking down the walls between them. This has not happened to the same extent in the Cuttlefish and Steam Mole universe. The catastrophe of the Melt has frozen social evolution at where it was in 1935, and even then it was twenty years behind ours. Racism is alive and well. Women “know their place.” This is why terms used, and attitudes reflected by, the characters in these books are not what they are now, or even acceptable in the here and now. The point is not to offend; this is not a universe that I daydream of living in. It is to take “what if” to what could possibly have happened. There are other possibilities…infinite ones. If you don’t agree with mine, or you think it impossible…please write your own. I believe it helps to see where we’ve come from and where we still want to go.
A SHORT-SHORT HISTORY OF THE ALTERNATE TIMELINE FOR CUTTLEFISH AND THE STEAM MOLE
Most alternate-history stories revolve around a battle coming out differently or a famous general dying—about military events changing the world. However, wars are not the only things that have changed or can change our world. Scientific discovery has done so far more often than wars. One chemical discovery in the early 1900s changed our world in so many ways it’s almost unrecognizable. That invention was the synthesis of ammonia.
Almost all modern industry and commerce rests on this: from computers to farming, from explosives to the paint on fishing boats. These days the Haber-Bosch process is as ordinary as a coffee pot, but when the method was developed, it involved working at pressures several orders of magnitude higher than had ever been achieved. And the leading expert of the day said it was impossible. This discovery changed wars forever, changed who controlled the world, prevented more than half the world’s population from starving to death…No war, no general, no president ever had this big an effect on the world.
Cuttlefish’s history branches off not as a result of a general changing his mind or being killed, or a battle going differently, but with a simple premarital argument in 1898. Dr. Clara Immerwahr (a brilliant chemist and a very unusual woman for her time; she was the first female doctorate from the University of Breslau) had an argument about the purpose of science with her intended, Dr. Fritz Haber (something that would happen in the marriage and result in her untimely death in our timeline). As a result, she broke off the engagement. In this alternate history, her family, one of the leading Jewish families in Breslau, felt this a disgrace and sent her off to visit relations in England. In our timeline, Clara Immerwahr married Fritz Haber, remained in Germany, and her contribution to the synthesis of ammonia is unknown, although we do know she translated her husband’s papers into English.
We do know it was an unhappy marriage, as Fritz expected this brilliant woman just to stay home and be a housewife, and the two of them disagreed about science and what it should be used for. Clara believed strongly that the purpose of science was to make the world a better place, and not for war. Fritz was a German nationalist and wanted science to help Germany, the kaiser, and German military might.
In the end, during World War One, Fritz was the driving force behind German poison-gas warfare. His wife found this abhorrent, and they argued. Her death was recorded as suicide—with his service revolver.
It is notable that Fritz’s chemistry thereafter did not show the genius displayed in the synthesis of ammonia. In the Cuttlefish and Steam Mole timeline, Clara Immerwahr never returned to Germany, married happily in Cambridge, had a daughter in 1907, and took a different direction within chemistry, working on fabric dyes. Cloth dyeing, then, was an enormously important part of British industry, with huge fabric mills exporting across the wo
rld. Many dyes, like indigo, were very expensive and had to be collected from natural sources.
Fritz Haber never recovered from this blow. He began drinking too much and changed his direction from working on the synthesis of ammonia to the extraction of gold from seawater (a direction he took anyway, after the apparent suicide—well, death—of Clara). In our timeline, other continental scientists were working on ammonia, or rather nitrate synthesis, but they were somewhat behind Haber and using different, more energy-expensive methods. The Haber-Bosch process was up and running by 1911, and able to supply the German war machine with feedstock for the manufacture of nitrates. This was not true in the Cuttlefish and Steam Mole timeline. The British Empire controlled access to the main natural supply of nitrates in the world (the Chilean caliches deposits), and World War I was a very short, damp squib (as it would have been without artificial ammonia synthesis).
Despite their use of the Birkeland-Eyde process (a way of making artificial nitrates), the Central Powers, having badly hurt Russia, began to run out of munitions after four months—at which point it became a race between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Germans to see who could reach a peace treaty first, knowing that would be to their advantage. In our timeline, World War I dragged on until 1918 with terrible loss of life and much hatred. The cost of reparations for it—a huge bill handed to the losers, especially Germany—planted the seeds for the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II.
In Cuttlefish’s timeline, the Austro-Hungarian Empire won that race and suffered a minor breakup of its territory. The Turks found the cave-in fraught with uprisings and lost much of their empire to the French and English, or to the rise of independent states.
Germany…The British Empire was determined to see it did not threaten them again. This meant breaking it up into states again and getting rid of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The “agreement” was to say he’d had a mental breakdown, which would allow him to “retire” gracefully. However, his abdication would have made his sons rulers, and the British Empire was having no more of that. So the remaining German states were placed under the regency of Adolf Schaumburg-Lippe. This minor German prince, with his vivacious, very pro-British wife Viktoria (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria) was so adroit at reconciliation and in dealing with the German High Command that a Royalist uprising by Wilhelm II’s sons was successfully put down. France, however, seized the moment to invade a small German principality. Thanks to Prince Adolf—and especially to his wife—the British Empire intervened on the side of their historic ally, Germany, in the process mending many fences. The result of this was an arranged marriage between Edward VIII of the United Kingdom (who in our timeline married Wallis Simpson in 1937 and had to abdicate to do so) and the daughter of Prince Adolf and Princess Viktoria (in our timeline their only child was stillborn), Princess Alexandria, in 1916. And thus a new Imperial line was founded, in which the German Empire and British Empire largely became one. Russia still had something of a revolution—but the Mensheviks won. France, having alienated Britain, found itself mired in colonial wars. And the world had no synthetic ammonia, and the British Empire, dominant in coal, saw to it that coal, not these newfangled oil-derived fuels, stayed dominant. The Windsor-Schaumburg-Lippe family controlled vast coalfields—and had the means to slap punitive taxes on oil and control and tax the shipping of it.
