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

by Gardner Dozois

  “I . . . don’t think so,” I replied. “You, Giles, and James occupy the corners already.”

  “Wrong lovers, Leon. It’s you, me, and the Aeronaute.”

  “The Aeronaute?”

  “You love the Aeronaute because it’s genuine and it works. I love the Aeronaute because . . . ”

  She hesitated. Perhaps this was becoming too personal.

  “Because the Aeronaute is an accessory that any steampunk fashionista would die for?” I prompted.

  “At first, but not any more. Now it’s because the Aeronaute makes me real.”

  Suddenly I could see where she was coming from. The Aeronaute was dreams made solid. The Aeronaute very nearly changed history; it was a more powerful agent for change than the Napoleonic Wars. For me, power radiated from it. If Lucy Penderan had flown the Aeronaute instead of her father, what might the world look like today? For Louise, putting the Aeronaute back into history meant becoming part of history herself.

  The party was brought to an abrupt halt by Otto, who announced that the barn had been broken into. By the time I reached the barn, Giles was checking the aircraft for damage, the producer of The Aeronauteers was recording everything with a phone camera, and the security guards were shouting that it was a crime scene and that everyone should stay outside.

  “Otto stepped out for a romantic moment with one of the volunteers,” said Giles. “He saw lights in the barn and raised the alarm. I can’t see any damage to the Aeronaute, though.”

  “I can see a problem from here,” I said. “The lid of the fuel tank has been put back without being screwed down. Someone must have left in a hurry.”

  There was sand on the rim of the fuel tank.

  “I don’t understand why whoever it was did this,” said Giles as I detached the tank to clean it out. “The sabotage would have achieved nothing. This is the original Aeronaute. It’s not going to fly.”

  “He may have got the original mixed up with your flying mockup.”

  “Talk sense,” said Giles. “The mockup is in the tent outside.”

  “I wonder if he sabotaged both?”

  Giles hurried away to check the mockup, leaving me with the original Aeronaute. Up close, the sense of its brooding power made my head throb. It was like an avalanche about to fall, not dangerous because its fuel tank could explode, but for some more subtle reason. This was a machine that could have changed the world in 1852, yet it felt like it actually had.

  “The bastard!” shouted Giles, dashing back into the barn. “The mock-up’s got sand in its tank too. Someone’s trying to kill me.”

  “Sand in the tank would kill the engine before it was even warmed up.”

  “Someone who doesn’t know engines wouldn’t know that. It must have been James. That airhead fashion jock doesn’t understand anything that isn’t held together with buttons.”

  “Nobody likes competition.”

  “It’s sheer spite! James is out of the race. Louise is sick of him, he’s been acting like a tit. If I can prove that William Penderan’s design beat the Wright Brothers by half a century I’ll be a class-A hero. Heroes get the girls, steamgoth.”

  I doubted that James had done the sabotage. He had had a very crushed look during the party, and had probably given up on Louise already. Giles should not have been a suspect, because engine failure would have put him in danger, yet that danger would only last until he conveniently noticed a little sand on the side of the mockup’s fuel tank. Perhaps I was meant to be the suspect.

  Every series needs a climax, and the climax of The Aeronauteers was to be a glorious celebration of Victoriana. Hundreds of recreationists and BBC extras in costume converged on the estate, there to eat nineteenth-century food, dance to authentic bands playing period music, and play contemporary games. The camera crew was again in costume, with their video cameras disguised as the old glass plate variety. I had discarded my black jeans and black leather jacket for a top hat, black suit, and black coat. Tents and stalls covered the grounds, but a wide expanse of lawn to the east of the house was roped off for no apparent reason.

  The plan was that the fully restored Aeronaute would be rolled out and put on display, then Giles would take the mockup for a five-minute flight around the estate. The Aeronaute had not been outside the barn since it had crashed, so this was to be its first outing since 1852.

  There was only one anachronism. Actually there were eight anachronisms: one air safety inspector, one industrial safety inspector, and six police. Giles was posing for the cameras beside the repaired mockup when they arrived.

  “We have reason to believe that you intend to operate an aircraft that does not conform to safety standards, and which will endanger public safety,” the air safety inspector announced.

  “What do you mean?” demanded Giles. “This is private property.”

  “This is a public event on private property.”

  Tempers flared, hands were waved, and the spectators and cameras crowded around. I was of interest to nobody, so I was able to mingle with the crowd that was gathering, then back away. The takeoff road was being kept clear by security guards dressed in Crimean War uniforms. A backup camera crew had been stationed beside the road. All my suspicions were being confirmed.

  I made straight for the barn. It was locked, but a large piece of firewood applied to the side door with all the force that I could manage had it open in one hit.

  Louise was inside, wearing only dark brown tweed trousers and cloth slippers, and frozen in the act of putting on a white shirt with puffed sleeves. She was emaciated, as if close to starvation. In a medical sense, I suppose she really was starving. Her hair was plaited and coiled tightly at the back of her head, and of course the mesh goggles were on her forehead. Her mid-Victorian dress of green silk with black velvet patterning and navy blue fringing lay on the ground. Beside it were her laceup boots.

  “You guessed,” she said, then turned away to button up her shirt.

  “Not hard,” I replied. “You stopped sleeping with James. That was not because you fancied Giles or me, but because you had practically stopped eating, and had lost so much weight that you were afraid to be seen naked by anyone. Now why would you want to lose so much weight? Moral support for Giles?”

  “Bastard.”

  “What do you now weigh?”

  She snatched up a brown leather waistcoat. Buttoned up, it disguised the appalling condition of her breasts reasonably well.

  “Dressed like this, I weigh one twenty-one pounds,” she said.

  “You called the inspectors and police, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. It got Giles out of the way.”

  “While you fly the real Aeronaute.”

  “Yes.”

  “What Giles wants to do is borderline dangerous. What you intend to do is almost suicidal.”

  “And I suppose you want to stop me.”

  “No.”

  “No?” she exclaimed, then gave a smile that was all hope against despair. “Why not?”

  “Because I love beautiful working things, and the Aeronaute will not be truly beautiful until it flies. Do you know how to fly?”

  “No. In 1852 nobody did, so why should I? This has become 1852, and I am meant to be Lucy Penderan, flying the Aeronaute instead of her father.”

  Her words made sense as reenactment, but were devoid of common sense. On the other hand, I have never been very sensible either.

  “Best to stay clear until I get steam up,” I said. “When you get into the air, keep the engine on full throttle the whole time. Only power down when you want to land.”

  “Leon, about the landing—”

  “It will be on the roped-off lawn.”

  “You guessed?”

  “Yes. It’s a large, wide area, so wind drift will not matter. The grass will also slow you down quickly.”

  “How long have you known?” she asked, now taking me by the hand.

  “Quite some time. For James and Giles you were just somethin
g to be fought over, but I could see that you had dreams. Brave, noble, beautiful dreams.”

  She kissed me on the lips, and I hugged her starved body very gently.

  “Leon, when this is all over, I owe you a date,” she said.

  “I know a fantastic goth theater restaurant and bar. I’ll dress as Feelthy Pierre.”

  “And I’ll be sure to wear black.”

  There was clear and present danger from being anywhere near the Aeronaute when the engine was running. Louise stood well clear while I heated the fuel tank with a blowtorch to get pressure up. It was like having a smoke while sitting on a barrel of gunpowder. First I ignited the little tank flame, then opened the valve to the combustion chamber. The boiler flame caught with an alarming bang, then the steam pressure built up quickly. The propeller began to spin. The great thing about the quadricycle engine is that it is far quieter than an internal combustion engine. The sound was a pattering hiss, overlaid by the whirr of the propeller. I knelt behind the Aeronaute, holding it by the rear axle.

  “Open the doors, then get aboard!” I called.

  Louise pushed the barn’s doors open, then returned to the Aeronaute and lay down on the flight bench.

  “All good!” she called back. “Let go.”

  “Remember, full throttle until it’s time to land, and you only have fuel for a half-circle of the estate,” I warned. “Good luck.”

  The Aeronaute rolled out of the barn in near silence, but there was a ragged cheer as the people who had been watching Giles arguing with the inspectors realized that something far more entertaining had begun. The inspectors had a moment of indecision. There was the Aeronaute, but Giles was not on it, yet someone was on the pilot’s frame. As the Aeronaute turned onto the road, the inspectors and police suddenly broke off and ran after it, shouting and blowing whistles. I ran too.

  The crowd cheered the pursuing police and inspectors, thinking they were part of the show. Suddenly the Aeronaute rose into the air. Just like that. After all that fuss and anxiety over lift, drag, and power-to-weight ratios, it was up there, flying. It gained height steadily, then Louise put it into a shallow, wobbly turn. It was not fast, it was not efficient, and it was certainly not very stable, but there was absolutely no doubt that it could fly.

  All around me there was wild cheering. People in period costume swarmed onto the road, jumping up and down, clapping, pointing, and throwing hats into the air. There was not a soul on the airfield or in the surrounding countryside who was not cheering, with the exception of the inspectors and probably James and Giles. Suddenly Giles was standing before me.

  “You’ll never get away with this, steamgoth!” he shouted in my face. “You’re fired, as of now!”

  “Whatever, but meantime all those people are on the landing strip, you clown!” I shouted back. “You have to get them off or she can’t land.”

  Giles ran off, shouting orders. The six police understood crowd control, so they also focused on clearing the road. The inspectors joined them, and I was left alone. Louise was about three hundred feet up, executing a wide, leisurely turn.

  This was a machine that had changed a history that never was, this was the very first heavier-than-air flight. Louise did nothing fancy, she knew that she was on a technological tightrope. I looked at my fob watch. She had been running the engine for seven minutes, so she would have to come around for a landing very soon. Did she have a watch?

  A feeling of elation at having beaten impossible odds mingled with a strangely potent foreboding. Something was wrong, even though everything was fine. The Aeronaute was underpowered, unstable, and liable to explode in a ball of flames at any time, everything was against it, yet it was flying. Something ought to have gone catastrophically wrong, yet—impossibly—the Aeronaute was defying gravity and Louise was defying death.

  Of all those on the ground, I alone knew where she was going to land, so it was to the roped-off lawn that I now ran. Because the Aeronaute was virtually silent at a distance, I did not hear any change in sound as Louise throttled back. The distant black shape began to descend. I could barely force myself to watch. Landings are my worst nightmare; I hate them because so much can go wrong. Louise was coming down too fast, she needed a little more thrust to gain lift and slow her descent while increasing her forward speed a trifle, but she did not have the training or experience to know that.

  I was biting my knuckles, tasting blood, as the Aeronaute approached the lawn. The back wheels slammed down too hard, it bounced high, and I saw that Louise was only attached to the aircraft by the levers that she was gripping. There was a second bounce, then it was rolling along the grass, slowing, as I sprinted after it.

  “We did it!” she cried as I reached the Aeronaute. “You and I, we did it.”

  “That’s great, but get out, get clear!” I shouted. “I need to secure the fuel heater before it explodes.”

  Louise scrambled off the flight bench as I twisted valves to kill the tank and boiler flames, then I vented the pressurized fuel. Only now did I allow myself to admit that we had a major triumph on our hands. The Aeronaute had proved itself.

  I now glanced around, expecting to see the six police closing in, hoping to get another hug from Louise before we were arrested. Instead I saw dozens, hundreds of police in uniforms dripping with gilt, silver, and braid holding back thousands of cheering onlookers. What had been a Victoriana reenactment crowd only moments before had become a horde dressed in burgundy, brown and black leather, and silk, with a gleaming starscape of silver buttons and chains. Every woman’s waist was laced tightly, and every man had a top hat and a cane with a silver handle. Enormous cylinders like submarines encrusted with metal lace, latticework, and gantries floated in the sky above us, and metal humanoid figures at least fifty feet high loomed behind the crowds, with camera crews standing on observation platforms where the heads should have been.

  A few people were allowed past the police, people in top hats wearing dark blue calf coats encrusted with gold braid, and holding jeweled metal rods capped with woven copper wire and trailing coiled cables that ran to gleaming brass backpacks covered in filigree. They were all calling out to us as they hurried over.

  “Baroness Penderan, that was a brilliant reenactment.”

  “Masterful landing, baroness.”

  “Ladyship, were there any bad moments?”

  Louise, a baroness in her own right? Like everything else, this was clearly wrong. She was the daughter of a knight, but that was as far as it went. I glanced in the direction of the manor house. A new wing had been added, built mainly out of brass lattice and slabs of turquoise glass, all surmounted by green domes and fringed with silver lace.

  “The king and queen are watching, be so good as to wave to them,” said a woman wearing a golden helmet upon which crouched a winged lion. She also wore a violet cloak over gilt plate armor inlaid with vines, leaves, and flowers, and inset with garnets. Suddenly a word caught up with me. King? Until a few minutes ago, Britain did not have a king as well as a queen.

  We turned in the direction that the guardswoman indicated. At the edge of the lawn was a carriage of gilt, silver, and scarlet. There was a steam engine at one end, polished until its parts gleamed like mirrors. It was tended by a man in a black ankle coat and top hat . . . and goggles. Flanking it were guards, all wearing gilt armor and holding weapons that were mainly brass coils and bronze tubes mounted on rosewood stocks, apparently powered by spheres that glowed with a silvery light. There were steps at the middle of the carriage, and at the rear was an open cabin with a tiled roof fringed with gold tassels. Within the cabin was a couple dressed in matching white shirts with puffed sleeves, brown leather waistcoats, and goggles, presumably in honor of Louise. They were waving to us. Louise and I waved back.

  By now my mind was urging me to run away and hide, but I had the good sense to distract myself by draining the Aeronaute’s fuel from the hot tank and releasing the steam. Cameras like brass lanterns on articulated tentacles
stretched over the shoulders of the newscasters from their ornate backpacks to follow what I was doing, but I did my best to ignore them. I seemed to be known to everyone, and was probably in charge of the engine.

  “Doctor Chandler, how did the quadricycle engine bear up?” someone asked, and several people thrust their metallically organic microphones at me.

  Doctor? Try as I might I could not remember doing a Ph.D., yet that is not the sort of thing one easily forgets.

  “The engine’s performance was as flawless as her ladyship’s flying,” I responded.

  Giles arrived, and I discovered that he was now Sir Giles. Ignoring me, he began to tell the phalanx of surreal cameras and microphones about how good his restoration of the 1852 airframe had been.

  I found a leaflet on the grass, dropped by some onlooker. It explained that the Aeronaute had first flown in 1852, with Lucy Penderan at the controls. It had changed history. Once the principle of a steam-powered, heavier-than-air machine had been proved, dozens, hundreds, then thousands of progressively larger steam aircraft had been built. They had established air mail services, carried the first commercial airline passengers, and dropped bombs during the Crimean War.

  Now we are being herded together in front of the Aeronaute; Louise, Giles, myself, James, and the restoration team. Palace flunkeys are breathlessly briefing us about what we should and should not do when we are presented to the royal couple. After that, there will be a celebration, no doubt, and as a fellow celebrity I shall be able to speak with Louise. What to say? Perhaps it will be: You know, it’s probably all the excitement, but ever since you landed, I can’t remember getting my Ph.D. Do you remember being made a baroness? I am afraid to ask her, but ask her I shall.

  If she just laughs, well I can cope with having a psychosis, it’s very goth. What a strange delusion I had, living in a dream world in which Victorian style gave way to fantasies like Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modernism, Post-Modernism, and Minimalism.

  However, if she looks very fearful and asks to speak with me later, in private, then . . . then all along, back in our timestream, the Aeronaute had been the key to a different history, waiting for someone to turn it. If that history has become real, then Louise and I are the only people who remember one hundred and fifty years that never were.