The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  I opened the door to a couple dressed in matching brown ankle coats and wearing motoring goggles on their foreheads. I am six feet tall, yet they were both tall enough to look down at me. The woman gleamed with silver jewelry, mostly in the shape of electroplated cog wheels, dials, and piping.

  “Are you Leon Chandler?” she asked, giving me an overwhelmingly broad smile.

  Her eyes were large, intense and just a little sly. They did not match her smile. I held up the photos.

  “Yes, and you must be Louise Penderan,” I replied.

  She nodded. “That’s me, and this is my partner, James Jamison.”

  James Jamison managed to sneer while smiling, then slowly, reluctantly, extended his hand. I registered the slight, ignored his hand, and gestured up the stairs.

  “Won’t you come in?” I said, moving aside.

  My flat is above a shop, but it is quite large. I showed them into the living room, where they paused to look around. Their eyes lingered on the model steam engines that were on the bookshelves, and mantelpiece, and were crowded into the display cases and crystal cabinet.

  “Did you build all these?” asked James, making the question sound like an accusation.

  “Yes, I specialize in steam engines by the pioneers: Newcombe, Papin, Heron, Trevithick, Watt, and so on. They all work.”

  “Yet you dress in black and have a signed Alice Cooper poster on the wall,” he observed.

  “Cool music.”

  “Your furniture and all your walls are black.”

  “Black is relaxing.”

  “So you’re a goth?”

  “You may have noticed the sign on the door: SteamGoth Models.”

  I like to keep people guessing. Those who are too cool for school think that all steamheads wear anoraks and stand about on railway platforms spotting trains. After surviving a childhood of ridicule and bullying because I made models instead of playing online games, I had opted to dress cool, make models, and generally be a bit peculiar as an adult.

  “Your models are quite beautiful,” said Louise, who was caressing the boiler of a Newcombe engine with an ochre fingernail cut to a talon shape.

  “It’s just a hobby, but it pays.”

  “We actually need a professional,” said James, rather abruptly.

  Suddenly I had their measure. James was abrasive, but Louise followed him with praise. I was being conditioned to be sympathetic to her. She wanted something from me, something related to the wreck in the barn. I decided to force the issue.

  “Well then, you might as well leave,” I said, gesturing to the stairs.

  James had actually reached the stairs before he realized that Louise was not with him. There was a hostile exchange of glances between the two of them.

  “Perhaps James expressed himself a little awkwardly,” she said. “We need a professional, and you are perfect.”

  James capitulated. Now I knew who had paid for the Daimler.

  While I rather like the theory of steampunk fashion, I keep my distance from it. I prefer cogwheels to turn each other, not just be on display. I think that nothing is truly beautiful unless it works. For my real job I customize engines for an ultralight aircraft company, and my flat contains not a single painting or decorative vase. My Alice Cooper poster once advertised something, so it passed my functionality test. It was Dad who made me this way. He had bought an old Mini Minor a year before I was born, and a quarter of a century later the little car was still scattered all over his garage floor, supposedly being restored. From a lifetime of watching him obsessively wipe, oil, and polish parts that were never reassembled, I had developed a love of things that actually do something.

  I spread the photos out on the coffee table and we seated ourselves around them.

  “What do you think of the Aeronaute?” Louise asked.

  I had decided that the aircraft was a modern steampunk sculpture, something from a pretend history. I dislike sculptures; they are form without function.

  “It looks like some retro steam-powered aircraft that never was,” I replied, already thinking about what to have for dinner, and wondering if a well-crafted insult might send them storming off down the stairs.

  “The date stamped into the engine is 1852.”

  That was a shock. My pulse quickened as I picked up the photos and looked at them more closely. The engine was very lightly built, and the Aeronaute’s frame was all thin spars, wire, and wicker. Even a moderate wind would demolish it, but on a calm day it just might have struggled into the air.

  I began to trawl my memories for steam aircraft. The Besler brothers had flown a steam-powered biplane in 1933, and the first balloon propelled by a steam engine had flown in 1852. Steam engines are external combustion machines, so they have low power-to-weight ratios. They are not ideal for aviation, but neither are they out of the question.

  The Aeronaute might not be a hoax, I realized. Aviation history might have to be rewritten. The temptation to babble hysterically was almost overwhelming, but I forced my voice to remain level and spoke slowly.

  “Where were these photos taken?” I asked.

  “On my family’s estate, in Kent,” said Louise.

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  I arrived at the estate the very next morning, riding my black Vespa. One of the groundsmen told me to be off or he would call the police.

  “Let me guess,” I said as I removed my helmet. “Louise Penderan’s boyfriend told you to chase away any visitors wearing black.”

  He pointed to the gate and opened his mouth to shout—then apparently realized that what I had just said was true, and remembered who was paying his wages. Without another word he went into the house, then Louise came out and welcomed me. She was now wearing black overalls, a bandolier of chrome-plated tools, and a technogoth hairpin-screwdriver. Without her high-heeled laceup boots she was barely my height. James followed her, dressed in immaculate Belle Epoch motoring gear and looking unhappy.

  The barn where the Aeronaute had been kept for over a century and a half was in a field behind the house.

  “My family knew about it for generations, but they treated it as a bit of a joke,” she explained as we crossed the field. “Nobody ever bothered to tell me, because I think countryside stuff is only for driving past, you know? James and I came here yesterday to check if the barn was okay for our big steampunk wedding reception.”

  “We’re getting married!” declared James, like a sentry challenging an intruder.

  “I can hardly believe the Aeronaute’s condition,” I said. “After a hundred and fifty years of corrosion, dry rot, and borers, it ought to be a pile of rust and sawdust.”

  “The daughter of the man who probably built it, Lucy Penderan, was obsessed about preserving it in memory of him. A family tradition of looking after it had developed by the time she died in 1920. The field hands give it a new coat of wax every year at midsummer.”

  The doors of the barn had been pushed wide open, and the aura of something that had changed the world was so strong that I began to tremble. I walked in slowly, feeling like an astronaut taking his first steps on the moon. As I got closer I saw that the Aeronaute’s wreckage really was in remarkably good condition, given its age. The engine and broken airframe were preserved under coats of wax, and the silk on the wings had become like waxed cardboard.

  Weight was not an issue for nineteenth-century steam engines, because they powered big things like trains, ships, or machinery in factories. By contrast, the Aeronaute’s engine had not an ounce of excess weight. The fuel was oil sprayed into a furnace chamber to heat a coil boiler, and the steam was recycled through an air-cooled condenser. What alarmed me was that the fuel tank was heated by a naked flame, so that the oil would spray out under pressure. That saved the weight of a pump but increased the danger of an explosion.

  “Could it have flown?” asked Louise after I had spent some minutes pacing around it with my mouth open.

  “By modern safe
ty standards it’s an unexploded bomb,” I said, tapping at the fuel tank. “That said . . . yes, perhaps.”

  “Could it be repaired and flown?”

  “Restoration, no problem,” I replied, then shrugged and shook my head.

  “So you don’t think it can fly?”

  “It’s bound to be grossly underpowered for its weight, but with a long enough takeoff run and a very light pilot, it just might get above stall speed.”

  “You mean fly?”

  “Yes. For a few minutes.”

  “Why only minutes?” asked James, desperate to disagree with me about anything.

  “Extra fuel is extra weight. Carry enough fuel for a long flight and it would be too heavy to get off the ground.”

  “But it can definitely fly?” asked Louise.

  “Possibly, not definitely. Until the engine is restored and tested, we won’t know if it’s powerful enough to be useful. The Aeronaute may be a failed experiment, even if it’s genuine.”

  The manor house was a mixture of Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian architecture, with a few more modern enhancements that had probably not been cleared with English Heritage. Coffee was served to us by a Romanian maid. Louise’s parents had the easygoing manner of people who were so rich that they did not have to prove anything to anyone.

  “Firstly, who built the Aeronaute?” I asked once introductions and pleasantries were out of the way.

  “Nobody knows,” said her father. “The estate registers show that our farm workers have painted it with wax every year since mid-1852. That was just after William Penderan died in a riding accident, so my money is on William.”

  “The date is far too early,” I began, then paused and thought about it. “Actually, perhaps not. William Henson designed his Aerial Steam Carriage in 1843, and John Stringfellow flew a steam-powered model in 1848. George Cayley built a glider in 1853, and his coachman flew it over Brompton Dale.”

  “So the Aeronaute’s age is not, er, impossible?”

  “1852 is not only possible, it’s unnervingly likely. That was an exciting decade for British aviation.”

  “Just think, all these years and we never knew,” he said with a sigh.

  “Another question,” I said, turning to Louise. “Why me?”

  “I found you with Google. You build historical steam engines and work for an ultralight aircraft company. The combination seemed perfect.”

  I already knew the answer to my third question, but I asked it anyway.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “How much would you charge to restore the Aeronaute?”

  How much would I charge? I very nearly burst out laughing. It was more like how much would I pay to be allowed to work on it.

  “I can do the engine,” I said, struggling to sound cool. “That would not cost much, but the woodwork and fabric will need specialist restorers and materials.”

  “So you can’t help?” asked James eagerly.

  “Oh, I can help,” I said as I took out my phone. “The director of Ultralights Unlimited has had experience restoring World War One fighters. I’ll give him a call now.”

  Giles Gibson made the journey from London to Kent on his vintage BSA motorbike in less than an hour. James’s reaction upon meeting him was one of instant hatred. Giles not only wore period motoring gear, he was a real pilot. He made things worse by complimenting Louise on her neoindustrial outfit, while ignoring what James was wearing.

  Our inspection took about an hour. The Aeronaute had been in storage for a century and a half, so in spite of nearly thirteen dozen coatings of hot wax, even some of the undamaged wood needed replacing. The wax had saved the engine from corrosion, however.

  “Well, steamgoth, how long before we have steam?” Giles asked, tapping the engine with a knuckle.

  “The engine will have to be stripped down, checked for damage, cleaned, and reassembled. With big-budget help, a few weeks.”

  “Hey, I run Ultralights Unlimited, not NASA. Big-budget help is not an option.”

  “No, it’s our first option.”

  Giles blinked at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is Britain, Giles. Once word gets out that a genuine mid-Victorian, steam-powered aircraft has been discovered, there’ll be a queue of steam-heads stretching from Kent to London, all volunteering to work on it.”

  “Could it fly?” asked Louise.

  “It’s underpowered, overweight, and aerodynamically unstable,” said Giles.

  “Is that a no?”

  “It’s a don’t know. While we’re restoring the Aeronaute, we can find out by running computer simulations, then build a full-scale mockup with a petrol engine. If the mockup can take off, we have a yes.”

  “You can use the barn,” said her father eagerly.

  “But what about the wedding reception?” exclaimed James.

  “We haven’t fixed a date for that yet,” said Louise, to Giles rather than James.

  “Man, we’ll need to work hard and fast, or this could be like Stonehenge,” said Giles. “You know, left as a glorious ruin, not restored. There’s always going to be heritage airheads who want that.”

  “That’s terrible!” exclaimed Louise.

  “I’m right with you,” said Giles, putting an arm around her shoulders and gesturing to the aircraft. “Leaving Stonehenge like it is just glorifies what some frigging vandal did in the past. I’ve worked on World War One fighters. Try to patch an original bullet hole and some tosser will scream that it’s historically significant.”

  “So what are you suggesting to us?” asked James, hastily grasping Louise by the hand.

  “I’ll call the workshop and get my staff to drop everything and drive down here with the truck and some equipment. While they’re on the road, Leon and I will start marking the woodwork and wire that needs replacing.”

  A strange tug-of-war for Louise had developed between James and Giles. I picked up a roll of masking tape and deliberately tagged an undamaged spar.

  “No, no, steamgoth, only tag what I point to,” said Giles, releasing Louise and hurrying over.

  I had the engine into the back of the Ultralights Unlimited truck by midafternoon, and away to the London workshop that very night. The dozen restoration volunteers that I had phoned were already waiting outside. I did not have the heart to send them away until morning, so we carried the engine inside and spent the next two hours cleaning off the grubby coating of wax with a steam jet. My fingers tingled every time I touched the engine, so much so that I had to wear gloves to work on it. At midnight we were ready for the first test. Very gently, I grasped the crankshaft and applied pressure. It turned smoothly; it had not been damaged by the crash. The cheering went on for a very long time.

  In the days that followed we stripped the engine down to the very nuts and bolts, recording every detail with a video camera. We cleaned each part until it gleamed, then made laser scans for my components database. Only the leather seals and washers had perished, and my assistants made the replacements with more love and tenderness than when they had made their wedding vows.

  Louise was waiting outside my flat in a late-model BMW when I got home one evening. This time she was dressed in black lace under a black leather coat, and wore high-heel boots. She seemed angry yet vulnerable all at once, as she invited me to the café over the road. Here she explained that the BBC had contacted her about the Aeronaute. We never discovered the source of the leak, but someone probably spoke too loudly in some pub, and someone listening then pitched an idea to an executive at Channel 4.

  “They want to run it as a reality doco,” she concluded.

  “I’ve done work for television,” I said. “Camera crews mean light stands, reflectors, first and second cameras, multiple takes of spontaneous incidents, staged arguments to raise the dramatic tension, makeup artists and hair stylists. Allow that circus into our workshop and you can triple the restoration schedule.”

  “But Leon, we need t
hem. They can keep the Heritage people off our backs.”

  “So Heritage knows?”

  “Yes, but the BBC is on our side. You’re a big deal for them.”

  “Me? A big deal?”

  “All of us. Instead of technerds in t-shirts and jeans, the producer has seriously cool people in great clothes doing a sensational restoration. You’re the goth engineer, Giles is the dashing steampunk pilot, I’m the glam girl patroness, and James is . . .”

  Her hesitation said more than words.

  “James is?” I asked innocently.

  “James has studied costume design and history, and he’s a very well-paid model. In steampunk costuming circles he’s also a big name, but he can’t help with the Aeronaute. It’s causing him issues.”

  That all made sense. Louise was from a rich family with old money, and she liked to dress retro. She was a sensational catch for someone like James. Enter Giles, who not only dressed retro, but could restore the Aeronaute and probably fly a mockup. James was arm candy. Giles was genuinely heroic arm candy.

  “So what do we do about the BBC?” I asked.

  “The camera crew only needs to be there when you’re doing something important. That way nobody has much time wasted.”

  “Who decides what’s important?”

  “You do.”

  I agreed. The cat was out of the bag, so we had to be nice to the cat. There was one more question.

  “Do you feel a bit strange when you are near the Aeronaute?”

  Louise’s head snapped around at once. “Why do you ask?”

  Why, not what, I thought. That’s significant, she does feel something.

  “I’ve got to confess, I get an odd feeling from it, like it’s haunted. I was wondering if Lucy Penderan got that feeling too, and that’s why she went to so much trouble to preserve it.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Louise tersely, but her tone said otherwise.

  We had to dismantle the partly reassembled engine, then put it back together for the cameras while pretending to talk spontaneously. Louise played the role of an anxious client being briefed by me, the suave engineer. She wore enough pewter cogwheels to build a dozen or so clocks, along with fishnet gloves, and a magnifier on a brass chain. However, her lipstick had morphed from wholesome steampunk scarlet to goth black.