Hot and Steamy

by Jean Rabe

  Zoe looked up at the glittering, nearly complete skeleton standing on a curtain-draped pedestal in the machine shop portion of Victor’s lab. “I–it’s beautiful.”

  “Yes,” Victor agreed. “She is.” He looked exhausted but, for the first time in weeks, pleased.

  “How long do you think the batteries will power it?”

  “As long as the generator has fuel.”

  “And if the fuel runs out?”

  Victor scratched his chin. “It depends on energy usage. These ion batteries are not like those powering the city’s motor vehicles. I’ve made considerable advances in energy storage since . . . during my seclusion.”

  A shadow of bitter memories flashed across his face, so she hugged him.

  “The experiment in the cabinet?” she asked.

  For a moment, his eyes widened with surprise, but then he merely nodded.

  “What’s the upper energy storage limit?”

  “Three years, perhaps,” he said, glancing toward the curtain-flanked cabinet. “Under optimal conditions, that’s the longest I’ve managed to . . .” He trailed off and looked away.

  Zoe smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “You know,” she said, cocking her head to get a different view of the automaton, “our machine does look like a girl.” All of the design adjustments they’d made to it the over the weeks had given the automaton the classic hourglass shape of a woman. “I hadn’t really noticed it until you said, ‘she.’ ”

  “Yes,” he replied thoughtfully. “I will call her Hella.”

  A chill ran down Zoe’s spine. “After your late wife.”

  Victor blushed. “It . . . It wouldn’t seem right to name it after you. I mean, we’re not even married.”

  Now Zoe blushed. “Are . . . are you asking me to. . . ?”

  Victor turned away suddenly. “No! I mean . . . not yet. I can’t. I can’t, until . . .”

  She bit her lip, and tears beaded at the corners of her eyes. “Until what?”

  He turned back and embraced her, crushing her body against his. “Not until we’re finished. Not until we know whether I’ve succeeded . . . or failed.”

  He felt hot, almost feverish, but she hugged him back, losing herself in the embrace. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’m sure it will all work. We’ll make it work.”

  “Victor?”

  Again, the bed next to her lay empty. Tonight, though, the moon was dark, and only shadows kept Zoe company. A strange, throbbing hum came from the other room.

  “Victor?” she said, getting up and pulling on her robe. “We can’t do this every night.” Anger and worry fighting within her, she threw open the laboratory door and strode inside. Then she stopped, frozen, her wide eyes glued to the far side of the room, where Victor worked.

  Every piece of equipment in the laboratory whined and hummed, harnessed in series, their power building to maximum capacity. The cabinet containing Victor’s battery experiment stood open. Inside, a strange battery, like a transparent Leyden jar, pulsed with eerie greenish light. It looked like the glow from a radium experiment Zoe had once seen in electro-mechanics class.

  Wires, like intricate networks of blood vessels, ran from the humming machines to both the body of the automaton and to the pulsing battery. A heavier wire, the thickness of Zoe’s thumb, ran from the battery directly to the machine’s head.

  “Just a moment longer,” Victor said to himself. “It won’t be long now, my darling.”

  “Victor!”

  He turned, madness blazing in his blue eyes. “Zoe!” he cried. “Get back.”

  She walked toward him.

  “Don’t come any closer!” He threw a big switch on a panel of circuitry next to the automaton.

  ZAM! Artificial lightning filled the room, arcing between automaton and generators and pulsing battery. The automaton bucked and shook, twitching like an insect on a collector’s pin.

  Before Zoe could process any of it, a stray bolt of electricity flashed out and hit her in the chest, knocking her off her feet.

  She skidded across the laboratory floor, crashed against the wall, and the world went dark and silent.

  “Zoe! Are you all right?” Victor’s voice. Not manic now, but sane, compassionate. “Get a wet towel, would you? Zoe, can you hear me?”

  How can I get you a wet towel when the whole world’s spinning? she wondered.

  Something damp mopped across her forehead.

  “Good. Now something to drink. There’s brandy in the kitchen cabinet—in the usual place.” A vague whirring sound, like distant machinery. Was the humming just in her head?

  “Zoe?”

  “I–I can hear you, Victor.” Slowly she opened her eyes. She was lying in her bed, Victor’s bed. Bright afternoon sunlight streamed through the big bedroom windows. Victor was swabbing her forehead with a cool, wet towel. He smiled at her.

  “Pretty bad shock you had.”

  “Yes, I . . . Victor, what happened?”

  “It worked!” he replied, somehow appearing both jubilant and sheepish.

  “It did?” she said, sitting up so fast her head hurt. Then the whole crazy scene of the night before came back to her. “Victor, what were you doing? What worked? Is the automaton—”

  Victor beamed. “She’s alive, Zoe. We did it!”

  “But we can’t have! We didn’t finish designing her brain. There’s nothing to run her control systems!”

  “We didn’t need a brain, Zoe, because we already had one.”

  Zoe’s guts twisted, and she suddenly felt terribly cold.

  “A soul, to be more precise—trapped in my experimental battery.”

  “Trapped since . . . since t–the accident.”

  Victor’s face remained radiant. “She has a body now, and she’s back!”

  Zoe turned away, tears springing to her eyes and running down her cheeks. “Oh . . . Victor!” She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to shut out the world, trying to shut down her brain.

  The bedroom door creaked open and soft, mechanical footfalls crossed to the bed.

  “The brandy, Victor,” said a woman’s voice. It was sweet, gentle, but it buzzed slightly, like the voice of a singer coming over the wireless.

  “Thank you. Here, Zoe, drink this. It will make you feel better.”

  Zoe felt a tumbler pressed into her hands. She put the glass to her lips and downed the whole thing, though she knew that—at this moment—nothing would make her feel better. Finally, when she’d drained all the liquor, she opened her eyes.

  Next to the bed, beside Victor, stood the automaton, all gleaming metal and softly whirring motors. She looked stunning. Perfect. Venus as a machine.

  “Zoe,” Victor said, “I’d like you to meet Hella. My wife.”

  The automaton regarded Zoe with shiny, metallic eyes. “Pleased to meet you,” the machine said. “My husband has told me about all you’ve done for us.”

  All? Zoe wondered. How . . . open-minded of you.

  Victor looked lovingly at Hella, and Zoe couldn’t help herself—even now, in the midst of all her pain and sorrow, the mechanic’s heart went out to him.

  “After the accident,” he said, “when Hella lay dying, I captured her soul in that special battery. I couldn’t tell if my experiment had worked, not until . . . not until last night, when I transferred her into the automaton. I couldn’t wait any longer, you see. Her energy was fading, but now . . . now Hella and I can finish our lives together.”

  The machine put her hand in his. “As we should have.”

  Victor gazed lovingly at her. “I know she’s not much to look at now, but once I’ve applied my artificial skin. . . .”

  “What about our dream?” Zoe asked. “A world without fear and death and drudgery?”

  “I’ve conquered death,” Victor said, a sheepish grin spreading across his face. “I think the rest can wait a little while longer.”

  The steamer-cab pulled up outside the Chapman-Challenger mansion, in one of the c
ity’s less-fashionable districts, and let Zoe out. She stared up at the crumbling stone and sagging Victorian roofline.

  It’s good to be home.

  “So the prodigal mechanic returns,” Armstrong said, appearing in the mansion’s door. He grabbed a pair of Zoe’s bags from the cab’s trunk and hefted them toward the front door. “I was beginning to wonder whether you’d ever grace us with your presence again.”

  Zoe punched him in the shoulder. “Nice to see you, too, y–you big lug!”

  Armstrong grinned at Zoe as Kit Chapman-Challenger strode out the entryway; she held the door open for her mechanic.

  “I hope you had a nice rest,” Kit said, “’cause I’ve booked us passage on a freighter to the Congo, day after tomorrow. An archaeobiologist’s work is never done!”

  “Give the kid a break, Kitty! She just got home.”

  “No,” Zoe said. “I need to work. Working would be good right now.” It would take a long time for the heartache to disappear completely, but, surrounded by her friends, the sorrow was already beginning to fade.

  The three of them walked together into the mansion’s foyer. Armstrong put the bags down next to the stairs that led to Zoe’s room and workshop.

  “You’ll be happy to know you made out like a bandit while you were away, working for Von Lang,” Kit said. “I drive a very hard bargain—if I do say so myself. Not only did you receive a great salary, but you also get a cut of any patents resulting from the work you did with him. And the small stipend I get for representing you will get us all the way to Africa—and back, hopefully.”

  “That’s great, CC. Really great.”

  Armstrong put one beefy arm around Zoe’s shoulder. “What’s the matter, kid? Did the project not work out the way Von Lang planned?”

  “No, things worked out exactly the way he planned. Just not the way I planned.”

  Kit arched one eyebrow. “Why? What happened?”

  Zoe took a deep breath and put one arm around Armstrong’s shoulder and the other around Kit’s. “Well, I helped Victor Von Lang piece together his heart’s desire, and, at the same time, managed to break my own heart.”

  “That sounds like it calls for a drink,” Armstrong suggested, heading for the liquor cabinet.

  Zoe sighed. “You can say that again. And Ray. . . ?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make mine a double.”

  LOVE COMES TO ABYSSAL CITY

  Tobias S. Buckell

  Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has published short stories in various magazines and anthologies. He has four novels published, including a bestselling novel set in the Halo videogame universe—Halo: The Cole Protocol. Visit him at www.tobiasbuckell.com.

  To be an ambassador meant to face outsiders, and Tia was well prepared for it. There was the overpowered, heavy, high-caliber pistol ever strapped to her right thigh. Sure, it was filigreed with brass and polished wood inlay, a gunsmith’s masterpiece, but it was still able to stop many threats in their tracks. A similarly crafted-but-functional blade swung from her hip. And then there was the flamethrower strapped to her back.

  This was not so much for threats, but for contraband and outside material forbidden in the Abyssal City.

  Today she’d taken the elevators up the edges of the ravine that split the ground all the way down to the hot, steamy streets a mile below. Overhead, tall, wrought-iron arches and glass ceilings spanned the top of the ravine, keeping life-giving air capped in. Up here, near the great airlocks, the air bit at her skin: cold and low enough on oxygen that you sometimes had to stop and pant to catch your breath.

  “Ambassador?” the Port Specialist asked, his long red robes swirling around the pair of emergency air tanks he wore on his back, his eyes hidden behind the silvered orbs of his rubber facemask. His voice was muffled and distant. “Are you ready?”

  “Proceed,” Tia ordered.

  Today they examined the long, segmented iron parts of a train that hissed inside the outer bays. The skin of the mechanical transporter cracked and, shifted, readjusting itself to pressurized air. From the platform she stood on, she surveyed the entire length of the quarantined contraption.

  It had thundered in, unannounced, on one of the many rails that crisscrossed the rocky, airless void of the planetary crust.

  It was a possible threat.

  “Time of arrival,” the Port Specialist intoned, and turned his back to her to grab the long levered handles of an Interface set into the wall. He pulled the right handles, pushed in the right pins, and created a card containing that data.

  “Length,” Tia called out. She bent her eyes to a small device mounted on the rim of a greening railing. “One quarter of a mile. One main motor unit. Three cabs. No markings. Black outer paint.”

  Behind her the Port Specialist clicked and clacked the information into more cards.

  A photograph was taken, and the plate shaved down to the same size as the cards and added.

  A phonograph was etched into wax of the sound of the idling motor that filled the cavernous bay.

  All this information was then put into a canister, which was put into a vacuum tube, which was then sucked into the city’s pipes. “The profile of the visiting machine has been submitted,” intoned the Port Specialist.

  “We wait for Society’s judgment,” replied Tia, and pulled up a chair. She sat and looked at the train, wondering what was inside.

  The reply came back up the tube fifteen minutes later. The Port Specialist retrieved the card.

  “What does Society say?” Tia asked.

  “There is a seventy percent threat level,” the Port Specialist said.

  “Time to send them on their way,” Tia said. “I will help you vent the bay.”

  But the Port Specialist was shaking his head. “The threat level is high, but the command on the card is to allow the visitors into the sandbox. Full containment protocol.”

  Tia groaned. “This is the worst possible timing. I had a party I was supposed to attend.”

  The Port Specialist shrugged and checked the straps on his air mask. He tightened them, as if imagining the possible danger of the train to be in the air around him, right this moment. “And I have a family to attend,” he said. “But we have a higher duty right now.”

  “I was going to be introduced to my cardmate,” Tia said. The first step on a young woman’s life outside her family home. The great machine had found the person best suited for her to spend the rest of her life with.

  It would disappoint her family and her friends that she would be stuck in lockdown in the sandbox with some foreign people waiting to make sure they cleared quarantine.

  The Port Specialist handed her the orders. “Verify the orders,” he said.

  Tia looked down at the markings, familiar with the patterns and colors after a lifetime of reading in Society Code.

  A large chance of danger.

  But they were to welcome in this threat.

  “Hand me an air mask and a spare bottle,” Tia sighed.

  The Port Specialist did so, and Tia buckled them on. She checked the silvered glasses on the eyeholes and patted down her body armor. She put in earplugs, pulled on leather gloves, and then connected a long hose to the base of her special gas mask.

  “Hello?” she said. “This is Tia.”

  The sounds and sights of what she saw would be communicated back through, and monitored by Port Control, with the aid of a significant part of Society’s processing power. Crankshafts and machinery deep in the lower levels of the city, powered by the steam created from pipes below even that, would apply the city’s hundreds of years of algorithms and calculations to her situation and determine what she would do next.

  And Port Control, really someone sitting in a darkened room in front of a series of flashing lights, would relay that to her.

  “This is Port Control, you are clear to engage,” ca
me the somewhat muffled reply from the speaking hose.

  Tia walked up to the train, stopping occasionally to yank the bulk of the hose along with her, and rapped on the side of the steel door.

  Pneumatics hissed and the door scraped open. Tia’s hand was on the butt of her gun as a man, clad in full rubber outer gear and wearing a mask much like hers stepped forward, a piece of parchment held out before him.

  He had a gun on his waist, and his hand on it as well. They approached each other like crabs, cautiously scuttling forward.

  Tia snatched the parchment, and they retreated away from each other. She read the parchment by holding it up where she could both read it, one handed, and keep an eye on the other man.

  Manifest: three passengers.

  Passenger one and two, loyal and vetted citizens of a chasm town two stops up along the track. Affiliation: Chasm Confederation.

  Passenger three was an unknown who had ridden down the track from places unknown. Affiliation: unknown.

  Tia reported this all back to Port Control.

  “Go ahead and let them in,” Port Control said.

  Tia nervously waved her assent at the man in rubber, and he turned around and waved the passengers out of the car.

  The first two, a husband and wife team with matching gold-plated lifemate cards dangling from their necks, were diplomats. They carried briefcases full of paper network protocols, and rode up and down the rail to pass on packets of information between the cities and towns. They stepped down, the tips of the tails of their bright red diplomat suits dragging on the ground slightly as they walked past.

  Tia bowed to them, somewhat clumsily in her gear.

  “What is the threat level?” the male diplomat asked.