Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  “Madam,” the Empress rejoins, voice cracking. This is the closest to intimacy that they will ever achieve. “Help me, if you please.”

  Now that Ada is closer to the throne she can see it more clearly, and she almost rears away in her shuddering horror.

  A monstrosity, she thinks. Grotesque. And then, her repulsion giving way to curiosity: Is this really the fruit of my imagination? Did the architects construct this from my plans?

  The chair—it is a chair, not a throne, an electric chair as lethal as the one that tinkerer boy in Menlo Park has dreamed up so far across the western seas in the Occident—the chair is fitted to the Empress’s frame like a brace. There are iron valves, brass pipes, tubing that she cannot remember having specified in her diagrams.

  “I am not an anatomist!” she cries, before realizing the words have left her shriveled lips. “I cannot guarantee that this will accomplish anything, Your Majesty. And you will die,” she continues in her passion, “if not now, then eventually! That is the natural order of things. And His Majesty Guangxu will be emperor after you, and his children thereafter. And all shall be well, the kingdom shall be well, you can rest easy in heaven....”

  “Heresy,” snaps the Empress. “Control yourself, madam. This one will not be well if you shriek and squawk and continue to utter all these inauspicious delusions. You made a vow to us, and that is the end of it.”

  Under that piercing stare, Ada falters and feels the color come into her cheeks.

  “Lady Jin”—and the Empress’s tone softens, and she beckons Ada closer— “have I not told you that I respect you, for your intellect and your age, because you are my elder despite my rank?”

  That is truth. She has learnt so much from this woman two decades her junior, in the years she has spent at court.

  “You call me inscrutable,” the Empress said once, her fury icelike. “Have you never wondered what it meant? Have you never thought how it placed demands upon me, upon my people, to be open to the scrutiny of yours? I will be as inscrutable as I please, Lady Jin, because it shows I do not give in so easily to the diplomacy of gunboats asking me to open my soul.”

  “Lady Jin,” the Empress calls again. “I am begging you”—and that is not possible, the royal family does not beg—“I have kept you here so long and you are so close to winning your freedom. Can you obey one last order?”

  It is not a matter of can you, Ada realizes, but will you. Or must you. The most powerful woman in the world needs her help. And she needs to obey. She needs to be free.

  She has spent thirty-three years in this beautiful cage in the 紫 禁城.

  “Your Majesty.” Ada watches the Empress carefully because she will not stand to be gulled this one last time. “You said to me, when you were younger, ‘I am only a queen because my son is a powerful heir; you are only the queen of numbers because your father was a rich man.’ But that is a lie, Your Majesty. You are queen because you have made it so.”

  She lifts herself, slowly, painfully, with an effort, climbing the steps to the throne. If there were anyone else in the Great Hall, it would be treason, lèse majesté. Here and now, the Empress does not protest.

  “Are you sure you will do this?” Ada whispers, feeling faint.

  The Empress’s lip curls—iron matriarch to the end. “You are strangely squeamish today, Lady Jin.”

  “I do not feel well. I did not take my medication.” Ada is not lying.

  It is the final part of their arrangement. Every morning for thirty-three years, the Empress has sent a eunuch to her quarters with the lithium salts for her melancholia and the wheat grain for the crab in her belly. Until last week, when the messenger did not arrive, and Ada did not bother asking for him.

  “You will feel better soon,” the Empress promises. “As will I.”

  Ada wrenches the first plug into place.

  She sits on the floor of the Great Hall, peering through the dimness with tired, old-woman eyes. She can hear the spitting and wheezing and clank of the artificial respiration, and the rasp of a voice speaking to nobody in particular:

  “What the great men of the past could not accomplish…the First Emperor, dead of the mercury pills; the archer-god Hou Yi, whose wife was sacrificed to prevent his eternal tyranny; the Yongle Emperor, who would rather cull the treasure fleet of Zheng He in search of the elixir of life…what these men set out to do, who in the process failed and perished in the flesh as men are wont to do, I have achieved.”

  It makes Ada smile, pulls her mouth taut against her dry, wizened skin. Her gaze is fixed on the single phlegethon gas lamp hissing and burning in the bracket by the throne. She bites her lip as she watches it sputter, feeling the dull throbbing in her womb and her head, feeling her body crave the laudanum.

  Then the lamp goes out, and there is only a machine muttering, muttering through the dark.

  GLOSSARY

  : ding; a type of cauldron or vessel, used in antiquity.

  scribe-zhēng: the zheng is a keyboardlike string instrument;

  this is a reference to a typewriter analogue.

  : fanpiece.

  : aunt; a term of respect for an older woman.

  : the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest hall and

  the center of the Forbidden City.

  : Southeast Asia.

  : Empress Dowager Cixi.

  : the Chinese name for the Forbidden City.

  THE SKY LUZ rode under was a pale and hazy gray, its color burned away by sun and smoke years before she was born. Luz might have even called the sky white, but the zinc oxide sunscreen she and the others had dutifully spread over their skin was so stark against her brown arms and legs that there was no comparison.

  Her grandmother said that when she was a teenager in California, thousands of miles distant and decades and decades gone in the past, girls welcomed the sun and used its rays to burn themselves darker. Luz had asked if that meant the girls didn’t know about skin diseases and sun lesions and her grandmother had answered with one of the private gestures they shared. Hand to head, then hand to heart meant that knowing something and believing it weren’t the same thing.

  Right now, Luz couldn’t believe that tiny Priscilla was steadily pulling away from her on the long climb up from the ferry. She pushed harder on her bicycle’s pedals, trying to match the rhythm of the turning wheels to her rapid breathing. Still, the younger girl danced on ahead, standing on her pedals, apparently unaware that she was leaving Luz and the others behind.

  There were four of them out on their bikes, fifteen miles from town and taking their time getting to the upland field of strawberries they were scheduled to hoe free of weeds. Luz had sent her younger brother, Caleb, to the work hall with strict instructions to find something far from town. She’d been pleased when he brought back the slip listing a work site on the bluffs above the Kentucky River—far enough and different enough from town that she could pretend she was really travelling—but slightly annoyed that Sammy and Priscilla came trailing in after him.

  She liked Priscilla, but had assumed—mistakenly it turned out—that the young girl would slow them down. She liked Priscilla’s brother Sammy well enough, too, but he’d lately started liking her back in a way she just didn’t reciprocate. It made for some awkward talk when they went out on the same community service jobs.

  Not that there had been much call for talk on the long ride out, especially not as they finally crested the hill, breathing hard.

  Up ahead, Priscilla signaled a stop, and at first Luz thought she was finally tiring. But then the girl spoke.

  “Is that an engine?” Priscilla asked, eyes wide.

  Luz stopped beside her, struggling to slow her breath so she could hear the howling sound floating over the fields better. Hard to say how far away the noise was, but it was clearly in motion. And moving closer, fast.

  Caleb and Sammy stopped beside them and dismounted.

  “It is,” said Caleb, excitement in his voice. “Internal combustion, no
t too big.”

  Even though Caleb was the scholar of the group, Sammy couldn’t pass up an opportunity to try to impress Luz. “Not like on any of the Federal machines, though,” he said. “Not like anything I’ve ever heard.”

  Luz thought of the last time one of the great Army recruitment trucks had come through Lexington, grinding and belching and trumpeting its horn. It had been the previous autumn. Her parents had made her hide in one of the sheds behind the house, even though she was only sixteen and the Federals weren’t supposed to draft anyone younger than eighteen. She had stood behind a tidy stack of aluminum doors her mother had salvaged from the ghost suburbs south of town and listened to the engine closely.

  The Army engine had been a deeper sound than this, though whatever was approaching was not as high as the mosquito buzz of the little motors on the sheriff’s department chariots. If the deputies rode mosquitoes, then the Federals rode growling bears. This was something in between, a howling wolf.

  The noise dropped away briefly, stuttered, and then came back louder than ever.

  “Whatever it is, it just turned into the lane,” Luz told the others. She dismounted and waved for them all to move their bikes into the grassy verge to one side. They’d stopped at a point where the road was bound on either side by low, dry stone walls. A pair of curious chestnut quarter horses, fully biological, not the hissing mounts of Federal outriders, ambled over briefly, hopeful of treats, but they snorted and trotted away as the noise came closer.

  Suddenly, the sound blared as loud as anything Luz had ever heard and a… vehicle rounded the curve before them. Luz flashed on the automobile carcasses some people kept as tomato planters. She saw four wheels, a brace of 55 gallon drums, and a makeshift seat. The seat was occupied by a distracted-looking young man wrestling a steering wheel as the vehicle hurtled past them, forcing them to move even farther off the road.

  The vehicle fishtailed from side to side on the crumbling pavement, sputtering, and came to an abrupt halt when it took a hard left turn and hit the wall on the south side of the road. The top two layers of rock slid into the field as the noise died away.

  They all ran towards the crash. Luz could see now that the vehicle was a modified version of a hay wagon, sporting thick rubber tires and otherwise liberally outfitted with ancient automobile parts. The seat was a cane-bottomed rocker with the legs removed, screwed to the bed. The young man was strapped into the chair, with a dazed expression on his face.

  The huge metal engine that took up most of the wagon bed ticked.

  The young man, and Luz saw that he was younger than she had first thought, just a little older than her sixteen years, perhaps, blinked and looked at them. He had tightly curled black hair and green eyes.

  “I think…” he began, and trailed off, lips still moving, eyes still unfocussed. “I think I need to adjust the braking mechanism.”

  He claimed, unbelievably, that he was from North Carolina. Hundreds of miles away, the other side of mountains with collapsed tunnels and rivers with fallen bridges. In Luz’s experience, traffic from the east came into the Bluegrass along only two routes; down from the Ohio off boats from Pittsburgh, or along the Federal Highway through Huntington. Or by air, though the Federal flying machines were forbidden to land in Lexington by treaty.

  “No, no,” the driver said, piling the last rock back on top of the wall his machine had damaged. “I didn’t come over the mountains. I went south, first, then along the Gulf shore, then up the Natchez Trace through Alabama and middle Tennessee. The state government in Tennessee is pretty advanced. They’ve built pontoon bridges over all their rivers now.”

  Luz reached behind Fizz—that was the name he’d given—and made an adjustment to the slab of limestone he haphazardly dropped atop the wall. He’d accepted their offer to help him repair the fence, which was a good thing, because it was clear that he had no experience with dry stone work. For some reason, this made him seem even more foreign to Luz than his vehicle or his claim to have seen the ocean. Sammy had whispered his opinion that Fizz would have left the wall in disrepair if they hadn’t witnessed the crash, but Luz wasn’t ready to be that judgmental.

  Sammy was also more persistent in his questions than Luz thought was polite. “Well, then how did you cross the Kentucky River? And the Green and all the creeks you must have come to? We just came from the ferry and they would have mentioned you. And there’s no way the Federals would have let you bring that thing across any of their bridges.”

  “There’s more local bridges than you might think,” said Fizz, either completely missing the hostility in Sammy’s voice or ignoring it. “I only had to float Rudolf once. See the air compressor there? I can fill old inner tubes and lash them to the sides. That converts him into a raft good enough for the width of a creek, anyways.”

  Caleb was examining the vehicle. “There are a lot of bridges that aren’t on the Federal map,” he said, almost to himself. Then he asked, “Why do you call it Rudolf?”

  “Rudolf Diesel!” said Fizz, in a different, stranger accent than most of his speech. He seemed to think that answered Caleb’s question.

  Priscilla whispered, “He speaks German.” Luz found Priscilla’s instant and obvious crush on Fizz annoying.

  Fizz looked at the girls. “Sure he did,” he said, and smiled at Luz. “He was German. He probably spoke like eleven languages, not just English and Spanish. Everybody did back then. He designed this engine—or its ancestor, anyway.” He pointed to the cooling metal engine on his vehicle.

  “I hope you paid him for it,” said Sammy.

  “No, I remember,” said Caleb. “Diesel was one of the men who made the internal combustion engines.” A troubled expression crossed his face. “That’s from history. You shouldn’t tell people you named your car after him, Fizz.”

  Fizz wrinkled his nose and brow, scoffing. “Figures the only thing the Federals are consistent about are their interstate highway monopolies and their curriculum suggestions. Diesel wasn’t a bad guy! The 19TH century, which is when he invented this, only ended a couple of hundred years ago. Don’t you guys have grandparents? Don’t they talk about when everybody could go everywhere?”

  Some do, Luz thought. Aloud, she said, “Our abuela has been everywhere. She’s from Chiapas, and came here from California before the oil finally ran out.”

  “And we can go anywhere we like, anyway,” said Sammy. “We just like it here.”

  “But going places takes forever!” said Fizz. Then he finally seemed to notice the uncomfortable glances being shared between Caleb and Sammy. “Not that this isn’t a great place to be. The hemp seed oil Rudolf is burning for fuel right now is from around here someplace. Or it was. My tanks are about dry. That’s why I turned north when the Tennesseans wouldn’t trade me any.”

  Luz nodded. “Sure. The biggest oil press anywhere is over in Frankfort. Our uncles sell them most of their hemp. What have you got to trade that the Feds would want?”

  Fizz made the face again. “Eh, they’re not much for bartering with people like me.”

  “And who’s that?” asked Sammy. “Who are people like you?”

  Fizz looked them all up and down, deciding something.

  Then he said, “Revolutionaries.”

  “Revolting is more like it,” Sammy gasped. He and Luz were working very hard, barely turning the pedals of their bikes over in their lowest gears. Fizz had brought out some cords from the toolbox on his machine, and between them, he and Luz had figured out a way to rig a Y harness connecting the automobile’s front axle to the seatposts of hers and Sammy’s bikes. The others rode behind the automobile, hopping off to push on the hills.

  Except for Fizz, of course, who rode the machine the whole time, manning the steering wheel and chattering happily to curious Caleb and smitten Priscilla. Luz wished she could be back there. She had a thousand questions about the wider world.

  Fizz had insisted they take a little used, poorly surfaced route into town. He said he
wanted to approach the council of farmers and merchants who acted as the community council before they saw his machine. “I had trouble some places,” he said. “Farther south.”

  Now, as they hauled the stranger and his strange vehicle, they kept the fleet of canvas balloons anchored high above Lexington dead ahead. Federal government ornithopters were forbidden to land inside the town limits, but Kentucky was still the primary source for their fuel, so the brass-winged engines could usually be seen clinging to the netting below their coal-laden baskets, crawling and supping like the fruit bats that haunted the orchards ringing the town.

  Responding to Sammy, Luz asked, “What’s revolting?”

  He answered her with a question. “Do you know what we’re pulling? I’ll tell you. It’s a car. A private car.”

  Luz took her left hand off the handlebars long enough to point out a particularly deep pothole in the asphalt. Sammy acknowledged with a nod and they bore to the right.

  “Don’t be silly,” Luz continued after they’d negotiated the hole. “Cars ran on oil. Petroleum oil I mean.”

  But Luz had already noticed that a lot of the machine’s parts were similar to those she found when she went scrounging with her mother. The steering wheel, for one thing, was plastic, and plastic was the very first word in the list of nonrenewables she’d memorized in grade school. Luz was still five years away from the age when she would attain full citizenship, and thus be allowed to learn to read, but like most teenagers she had paid close enough attention when adults practiced that art to recognize a few words. One of the words stamped on Fizz’s machine was “transmission,” but she did not tell Sammy this.

  “Well, I guess he made a car that runs on hemp seed oil,” said Sammy. “Or somebody did, anyway.” Sammy doubted every part of Fizz’s story. “He probably stole it off the Federals.”

  Luz doubted that. The only vehicles she knew the Federals to use besides their Army trucks were bicycles, the coal-burning horses that patrolled the highways, and the ornithopters that patrolled the skies, their metal wings flapping like a hawk’s. Bikes and horses and ’thopters and trucks alike shared a sleek, machined design. Nothing at all like the haphazard jumble of Fizz’s “car.”