The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  “Oversees, this is Coanda, now back in command of the cosmoship Luceafarul. I sent the exact coordinates of my position. Please recalculate my flight-path. I have twelve minutes to dial in the new calculations.”

  He heard the cry of relief from Marcela. Then as she spread the news, Henri could tell Marcela was crying.

  Henri fed the new calculations into the flight board as he received them.

  T-bot’s arm shot up and struck Bot-2 in the head, sending Henri reeling. The phantom pain was so intense that Henri was sure something had broken inside Bot-2’s neck. But T-bot, instead of attacking again, hesitated and looked at the photo.

  Henri raised Bot-2’s arm to parry. “Oversees, send a reset signal to T-bot and switch it to its primary brain, now!”

  T-bot scored another agonizing strike against Henri, then it was half-standing, magnetizing and trying to grab Bot-2’s head, but it couldn’t quite manage to synchronize the movement of its hands with Henri’s dodge. The time lag saved Henri again.

  Henri shoved T-bot back into its pod, keeping its head toward the front window, eyes aligned with Tiberiu’s photo.

  “Look at yourself. You are Tibi. Tibi is you,” he sent through the channel, hoping the self-image of the real T-bot was still in there somewhere, fighting Ilie’s presence.

  T-bot remained unmoving in the pod. Henri released his grip and checked the flight board. Five minutes left. He continued his litany while he dialed in the new course corrections. “You’re Tibi, Tibi is you.”

  He felt something ram into him, forcing him from the flight board.

  Henri fought to breathe against the crescendo of pain in his chest. He had to stay conscious.

  “Come on, T-bot!” Henri shouted through the channel. “It’s time we showed the world this beautiful dream. It’s time we make this world a better one.”

  T-bot faltered, its impulses likely at war: Ilie in its sub-brain versus the core persona in the primary.

  Henri fought the urge to weep. He’d failed them all. Again. So close and he still couldn’t make it to the finish line, just like in Paris when his jet plane had crashed and his investors had abandoned him. “I’m sorry, Tibi. I’m destined to fail. I haven’t been a very good mentor.”

  T-bot’s hands froze.

  Henri didn’t lose a second. He pushed the inert T-bot away, returned to his pod, and started punching buttons and spinning dials to execute the final course corrections.

  The last digit, the last click of the dial.

  Blackness cut his vision. That was it – the fall over the horizon. Exhaustion pulled him under and he lost consciousness.

  Henri squinted from the sunlight filling the room. He kicked away his blanket. Why was he in his bedroom in the Brasov Orbit Launching Center? Wasn’t he supposed to be on a mission? He jumped out of bed.

  “Easy now, Henri.” Tiberiu entered the room.

  “Tibi!” Henri hugged his friend. “You’re fine?”

  “I’m good. I was waiting for you to wake up.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Almost eighteen hours.”

  “Oh, my God, the Luceafarul! I lost it, didn’t I?”

  Tiberiu laughed and hugged him again. “You saved it, old man. You saved it. Come on, get dressed and come down. We’ve got one last thing to do before you retire.”

  “Eighteen hours, but that means . . .” murmured Henri with a shiver.

  “Yes, we’ve reached the Moon’s orbit. We’re there.” Tiberiu smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you to do us the honor of landing the first bot on the Moon.”

  Everybody, from fawning politicians to anxious investors, gathered in front of the Navibot Sphere. And, for the first time, Grigore had allowed journalists with their cameras and super-iconoscopes within the facility. They were all eagerly awaiting Henri and Tiberiu to presence into their bots on the Luceafarul and land them on the Moon.

  “Did you get Ilie?” Henri said under his breath to Grigore.

  “Ilie and two English spies. We got everything under control and into the morning papers,” Grigore whispered in his ear. He then spoke aloud for the journalists. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here today to witness the most extraordinary event yet in human history, the first landing on the Moon. Do us all a favor, Mr Coanda and Mr Avician – land the damn thing on the Moon and make history.” He shook their hands.

  Henri nodded. “It is time for us all to forget greed. To forge peace. To fly to the stars.”

  Applause erupted as he and Tiberiu entered inside the Sphere. The team strapped them into their harnesses and prepared their helmets and injections.

  Bulbs ignited like drumming strikes of lightning, leaving a fleeting flash blindness in Henri’s eyes before a cosmo-jockey lowered the connect-helmet over his head. He felt a slight pain in his neck as the syringe injected the cerebralizing serum into his bloodstream, but he welcomed it.

  Henri awakened inside Bot-2, back inside the Luceafarul’s navigation room. Tiberiu had reclaimed T-bot, now freed from enemy control.

  The Moon’s surface was just beneath them, a stone’s throw away.

  Act of Extermination

  Cirilo S. Lemos (Translated by Christopher Kastensmidt)

  The Killer and His Boy

  Jeronimo Trovao rolled up the Adventure Magazine like a straw and smashed a fly which slogged through the cake on the table. After an entire night of studying escape routes, blueprints, and the complex assembly scheme of an Enfield, he was too tired to do anything beyond collapsing into the armchair. He wasn’t going to spend more energy trying to understand what the hell a time warp was.

  Outside, the city was in motion, a cacophony that mixed factory whistles; the roar of automobiles; the light hum of the dirigibles crossing the clouds of smoke on their way to Estação Centro do Brasil; the crude, unintelligible murmur of port workers on the other side of the street. Familiar noises, authentic background music to which anyone who wished to live in a metropolis like Rio de Janeiro had to get used to. Many couldn’t. When his eyelids closed, he was thinking of the story of the miner who, coming with his family from a tiny, rural community, couldn’t stand the endless clamor and bustle of the big city. He shot himself through the heart and left a note asking to be buried in his hometown. That was a long time ago. Six or seven years. But it stayed in Jeronimo’s memory as an example of how a man could be devoured by that jungle of reinforced concrete and lakes of gasoline. He thought to himself that even those who got used to that type of life had their own share of insanity.

  Like himself. Every once in a while, Jeronimo Trovao was visited by a Saint.

  He had been too shocked to do anything besides breathe and feel his heart tighten – although he’d never confess that, not even to the Saint – when she arrived limping over the arid ground, her head covered by a very blue veil and parts of her belly shamefully bare, coming, as she herself would say, from hyperspace, where the Saints live. He didn’t know that that meant, but he had no alternative except to accept her sanctity. The smell of the Lord emanated from her through a thorn-filled heart, a strong and ferrous perfume which cleaned the motor smoke from the air. Not even to her, who was a Saint and, therefore, possessed a soul, would he confess the terror which took hold of him upon seeing her in that land filled with people, just as he would never say how much he adored seeing her appear from the distance like a mirage.

  She appeared shortly after the Adventure Magazine was tossed in a random corner. She carried her halo beneath one arm, her sacred heart dripping blood. She had no smile when she stopped in front of the armchair, her skin slightly grayed by the dying light which entered through the window. She extended a hand to him, gazing at him with Nancy Carroll-painted eyes. He kissed the hand respectfully, but without ceremony.

  You are but a dream of Anthony of the Desert, she said. The voice was a hoarse swish. He sleeps now to have the strength to resist the demons for one more day.

  “I’m not a dream. I’m a man.” Jer
onimo’s replay lacked conviction.

  He is out there at this moment, sleeping. Sheltered in this dream to rest before the battle against the next hoard. You can’t let the Desert arrive.

  “I’m not a dream,” he repeated. He felt the tiny hand rise to his face and he felt himself flooded by her golden eyes.

  You’re a killer, Dream-Man.

  He shivered. The words sounded like a judgment, the confirmation of a fate carved in stone, unalterable. He heard dry explosions coming from somewhere. At the same instant, he perceived he was no longer sleeping.

  Someone was beating on the bedroom window.

  Jeronimo went to the dresser. Below yesterday’s edition of The Integralist Monitor lay a loaded 96 Mauser. He grabbed it and moved slowly toward the window. Back to the wall, he tried to make out anything through the gaps in the Persian blinds. He saw nothing. He turned to the window on the other side. He saw nothing there beyond the faded sun that had begun to draw stripes over the room’s dirty rug.

  He was certain he’d heard something. Maybe his head was mixing pieces of dreams with reality. He raised the pistol barrel almost to his chin. With a quick movement, he opened the blinds. The gray day took half the room by storm; a pigeon, dirty with oil, fled. He stooped over the parapet to observe the alley three floors below. The only thing there were the grimy longshoremen taking a shortcut to Rodrigues Alves Avenue, and a web of lines drying clothes in the hot steam which rose from the storm drains. Above, in the gap between the buildings where it was possible to see the sky, a dirigible penetrated a column of clouds. He was about to return to the armchair when the bathroom door opened noisily. The squat figure which stepped out came face to face with the 96 Mauser.

  “Why didn’t you use the door?” Jeronimo recognized his son the moment he crossed the threshold. Even so, the gun remained leveled. “I’m having a very strange day. I could have blown your brains onto the wall behind you.”

  Deuteronomio Trovao (shorted to Nomio, by his own choosing) was barely fourteen years old. He wore a soot-stained shirt, pants made from a thick fabric, and soldering glasses raised up on his head. He wanted to look like one of the air raiders from one or two decades past, but that was the best he could do with the change he earned from his father.

  “I thought I was being followed,” he stuttered, undecided whether to lower his arms or keep them raised like a fool.

  “Did you do like we agreed?”

  “Yes, sir. Two taxis in different directions, then the streetcar.”

  Jeronimo lowered the pistol.

  “Next time, use the door.”

  Killer. Carved in stone. Unalterable fate.

  He lay the gun on the chair’s arm. He gestured vaguely to the boy.

  “Have you eaten anything?”

  “No.”

  “There’s coffee and cake on the table. The coffee is burned and the cake fallen.”

  Nomio filled a cup, took a sip, and made a face.

  “It’s terrible.”

  “I warned you.”

  The kid ate three big pieces of the corn cake while trying not to look at his father. He knew the gravity of those lines forming on his forehead. Something was bothering him, and it wasn’t the fact he’d come in through the bathroom window. The best thing to do on these occasions was to leave him in peace and pretend not to have noticed anything. Maybe his father was becoming sluggish. He knew too well what happened to sluggards in that field. They ended up in a swamp with a bullet between the eyes, rotting among the crabs. He wiped the crumbs from the corner of his mouth and ripped the paper which covered the crumpled tailcoat.

  “I need to return it by Friday. There’s a brown stain on the trousers, but it was the only one I could find in my size. I got a nice discount.”

  “It’ll do.”

  “And the car?”

  “Outside,” was all Jeronimo Trovao said before turning away.

  Nomio’s smile couldn’t be bigger.

  License to Groan

  General Protasio Vargas always knew that his place was among great men. Surrounded by busts and canvases which portrayed the lineage of the Portuguese kings, he felt at home. Not just at home, in fact: he felt greater. A strong man, with the will and vigor to save a nation from the centrifugal forces which had begun to undermine the Empire’s rule.

  That was more than could be said about the human ruin which carried the crown on his head. The old man dozed in one of the chairs, a thread of saliva running from the edge of his mouth. Even in the heat, he wore velvet-lined pajamas and covered his head with some kind of knit cap. Every once in a while, his head would dip until his chin touched his chest. He would jump, snort, and right himself, only to start all over again. A man seated in front of him enjoyed the scene, sipping at a glass of liquor.

  His Majesty, Dom Pedro Augusto of Saxe-Coburg, third sovereign of the Brazilian Empire, and his principal minister and lawyer, Artur Bernardes, Baron of Viçosa.

  To Protasio Vargas, the scene illustrated the national political panorama: a debilitated old man who drooled in his own beard and flattering dandies fearlessly snapping up new titles wherever they could find them.

  The Emperor’s rooms in Petropolis were more austere than those of the palace at Quinta da Boa Vista. There was a huge mahogany bed, a small desk, some chairs near the window which looked out over the garden and a fireplace that the recent, excessive heat – even there, at the top of the sierra – had turned into nothing more than part of the decoration. On top of a console table, a radio played a melody from the Gray Noble orchestra, right beside one of the mechanical maids which had become fashionable among rich people. A crib completed the room’s furnishings, which caused the General a type of surprise that was difficult to disguise.

  “Just the man we wanted to see,” said Artur Bernardes, getting up.

  Vargas bent before the Emperor and kissed his hand. The monarch awoke with surprise, mumbled something and cleaned the back of his hands on the pajamas.

  “It’s the medicine.” Bernardes smiled at Vargas’s embarrassment. “His Majesty had another one of his fits.”

  “I understand,” replied Vargas, shaking his hand.

  Fits, he thought. A great euphemism for the schizophrenic outbreaks which afflicted Dom Pedro III with increasing frequency. The Emperor had been caught having heated discussions with the Empress, deceased more than fifteen years, or on occasion discussing with invisible interlocutors the advances in Nazi astronautics. Most of the time, the cases were covered up, but murmurs had begun to spread beyond the Court. Opposition papers unleashed ironic notes among the theatrical articles which propagated the idea that there would be no fourth reign. Vargas heard some of the stories told in the Military Club, like the one that the Monarch’s constant trips to Europe in his youth were actually for treatments by a certain doctor named Freud. But seeing with his own eyes his fragile state was, in a certain way, a deception.

  “I have an important subject to treat with His Majesty.”

  With effort, the Emperor raised his dim eyes. He wanted to say something, but Bernardes anticipated him: “It’s good that you’ve come, General. We also have an important subject to treat with you. You spared us the trouble of sending a messenger to your house.”

  “The messenger would have been a National Guard recruit, of course.”

  The minister motioned Vargas to make himself comfortable in one of the chairs.

  “You military men are incapable of rising above these institutional jests? It’s not polite to speak to the Emperor and his principal minister looking down at them, General. Sit with us. We’re admiring a fine, genipapo liquor.” He filled only two glassed, one for himself and the other for Vargas. “To your health, Majesty.”

  “In the Army we aren’t in the habit of forgetting ‘institutional jests’, Mr Minister-President. Not while we have the National Guard and its farmer-colonels receiving money for their gaudy projects while we barely have enough to feed our soldiers.”

  �
��Those farmer-colonels, as you insist on calling them, are what have kept the Empire united since 1870, General. It was the strength and support of these men that permitted a tranquil turn of the century for the institutions of this country.”

  “Without a doubt. We who died on the Paraguayan Gran Chaco and were poisoned by toxic gases in the Great War had nothing to do with that. The legitimate guardians of this country are the heroic landowners interested in protecting their unending source of income.”

  “Your family was one of the first to benefit from those advantages, don’t forget,” jabbed Bernardes, watching Dom Pedro III from the corner of his eye. “The Vargas family were quite satisfied upon receiving from the Court all that heavy machinery for their farms.”

  “My grandparents just upheld the law. The British forced the old regents to take our slaves in exchange for machines imported from Manchester to perform the heavy field work. The skies of the land where I was born became a big oil spot, the industrial English became even richer, and the Empire gained an absurd quantity of Negroes walking around loose.

  “You’re talking like a Communist.”

  “No, I’m talking like a history enthusiast. I’m a soldier, and my preoccupation is for my country.”

  The Emperor had a coughing fit so violent that it took both Vargas and Bernardes to support him.

  “Not even here does one escape this insufferable smell of smoke,” said the minister. “Should I call Dr Pena?”

  The Emperor didn’t respond. He asked to see the boy. Bernardes rang a bell. A black woman entered holding a baby.

  “Come see, Vargas,” whispered the Emperor, his chest rasping. “Your future sovereign.”

  To the General’s surprise, the child was absolutely normal. No trace of the genetic deformities of which his informants at the Balisario Pena Laboratory had informed him. He looked at Dom Pedro’s face, then again at the baby. The old man’s features were easily recognizable in the boy. As improbable as it seemed, the Emperor had fathered the prince of which he had been incapable of producing for the last fifty years.