by Stephen Hunt
At this, his escort broke into giggles and he rested his polished boots up on the seat in front, prompting an angry glance back from its occupant.
‘Go on, man,’ whispered the commodore, willing his friend to ignore the most persistent of his scientific antagonists.
Coppertracks began. ‘I am before you, seeking your indulgence to reveal the findings of my latest research. Research that has been aided by my fellows back in the Steammen Free State.’
That drew a murmur of appreciation from the assembled scientists. If King Steam was backing Coppertracks’ endeavours, then there was as like to be something of note to be heard here this day. The people of the Steammen Free State held to their secrets fast, and getting direct aid from the monarch of the kingdom of the metal was often like pulling teeth.
‘As you may be aware,’ said Coppertracks, ‘the home of my people in the mountains of the Mechancian Spine is both cold and high, constructed at an altitude beyond that of any Jackelian city.’
‘A geography lesson,’ interrupted Lord Rooksby, his voice carrying from the back of the hall. ‘Capital stuff.’
‘A geography,’ explained Coppertracks, ‘which means the procession of the stars and bodies celestial above us can be viewed without hindrance, without the smogs and rains of Jackals. A geography most conducive to astronomical observation, which is why—’ Coppertracks paused to wave his iron hands excitedly, ‘King Steam sponsored the construction of a new observatory in my homeland, equipped with the latest astronomical apparatus, some of which I myself had the honour of designing.’
Commodore Black grinned to himself and nudged Molly back. So, the old steamer had made good use of his visit to the Free State last summer after all. Lord Rooksby was frowning in his seat. This wasn’t the way things were meant to be going at all. It was all running far too smoothly for his adversary.
‘This apparatus has allowed my people to peer deeper into the celestial void than ever before,’ said Coppertracks. ‘To observe the celestial bodies that accompany our own world’s procession around the sun at greater clarities than previously thought possible.’
That drew a few dark mutters from the crowd. Coppertracks was taking the side of the radical argument that said that the Earth orbited the sun, rather than the sun and other bodies paying due homage to their home by orbiting the Earth at the centre of all things.
‘Not decided, not decided,’ groused a few dissenters.
‘Well,’ called out Lord Rooksby. ‘It appears you’ve already got the support of your great King Steam, so what do you need the aid of mere softbodies like us for?’
‘Dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks, raising the amplification on his voicebox, ‘I am here, among other things, to share the wonders of the universe with you. For instance, many of us have speculated that the number of celestial bodies that share our world’s procession around the sun is uncommonly high at forty-six. This new apparatus will help us discover—’
‘Discover what?’ boomed Lord Rooksby. ‘Are we mere astrologers now, or noble leaders of science? Have you, sir, uncovered any new comets with which to unsettle the great unwashed masses?’
This drew a peal of laughter from the crowd. Ashby’s Comet just two months gone, had left a trail of broken-in windows and broken-up riots when various factions in the capital had sought to make mischief out of the auguries of ill fortune said to arrive with the crimson harbinger of doom.
Lord Rooksby nodded sagely, as if he exposed a great truth this day. ‘If I wish my fortune to be read in the stars, I have a gypsy caravan that calls at my house in the shires each summer. Maybe the gypsies can sharpen your wits while they sharpen my knives, old steamer!’
‘This is science,’ protested Coppertracks. ‘Science of the deepest sort. There is much our neighbouring celestial bodies have to teach us about our own home.’ He motioned to the commodore and the hulking u-boatman advanced to the next slide, an image of a fiery red circle captured bright against the darkness of the face of night.
‘Behold, Celibra, a world – I believe – of inferno temperatures. This is a celestial body fixed at a distance from the sun almost identical to that of our own world, yet in composition and temperament it seems to be radically different from the systems of life we are familiar with here on Earth, a world that is almost certainly uninhabitable.’ The next slide in the rotation clicked forward. ‘Now this is an image of our moon: observe the tinges of green we have picked up beneath the cloud cover – could it be that the lunar surface has forests as dense as any found in the jungles of Liongeli?’
‘Cheese!’ laughed Lord Rooksby. ‘Obviously it is nothing but green gas rising from the finest cheese.’
There was more laughter from the audience.
The commodore shook his head in annoyance. Coppertracks was leading the audience in too fast – ploughing ahead at ramming speed. He should have been revealing his findings at a rate of knots the scientists’ conservative bent could more readily absorb and adjust to. The crowd were not, for the main, steammen who could share new information between themselves with a joining of cables and the implicit trust that came from such networking. They were minds of slow meat that needed wheedling and convincing.
‘Let us gaze next, my colleagues in science, towards our world’s nearest neighbour in the dark, cold void: Kaliban.’
The red world came onto the screen, the light from the magic lantern catching the swirl of smoke from mumbleweed pipes as several of the assembly lit up. Coppertracks waved an iron hand at the screen. ‘Long linked in song and saga to various gods of war, instead, in reality we find a dead, dry world of crimson dunes and – perhaps – something else.’
The commodore advanced to the next slide, a high-magnification view of the celestial body.
‘The shooting stars lighting up our skies of late have not all been debris from the tail of Ashby’s Comet. I have traced some of the rocky projectiles back to what I think must be volcanic eruptions on the surface of Kaliban. And see what else I discovered during my explorations. Observe the fine splintering of lines you can see across the celestial sphere’s surface. I have analysed the geometry of these lines and come to the conclusion that they are artificial in nature.’
A hush fell over the crowd.
‘Yes, artificial. I believe these lines are a series of canals, vaster and far more sophisticated than the waterways of our own Jackals. A universal transport system that may once have rivalled the timetables of the merchant marine of the Royal Aerostatical Navy in its ability to transport cargoes and people around their world.’
‘Poppycock,’ said Lord Rooksby. ‘You see a splintering of rock fissures and detect the hand of intelligence behind it! I have never heard such arrant nonsense. It is well known that you share the roof of your home with an author of celestial fiction, one Molly Templar, whom I see has accompanied you here tonight. I believe you have spent too much time pondering her last tome of facile writings rather than upon serious scientific investigations.’
Molly made to leap up from their projecting lantern, but the commodore pulled her back.
‘I’m going to go up there and shove my last tome of facile writings down his smug, grinning—’
‘Leave him be, lass,’ whispered the commodore. ‘Or at least, let’s be leaving the long-haired popinjay until later. A fight in here is what he wants, anything to embarrass our old steamer in front of his fellow scientists.’
She saw enough reason in the commodore’s words to shrug off his hands and sit down.
‘Nonsense is it?’ retorted Coppertracks, pointing an iron hand at Lord Rooksby. ‘Then by my cogs, how do you explain this?’ Commodore Black advanced to the next slide, an amorphous grey mass whose peripheries were tinged with red.
‘Sir, I do not even know what that unsightly mess you have so kindly brought before us is.’
‘That is because you do not have access to the transaction engines of the Steammen Free State,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Some of the most advanced th
inking engines of their kind in the world. When the geometries and shadow lines are resolved and cleaned using the power of our transaction engines, we see instead…’
The commodore shook his head. That was a terrible mistake, reminding the Jackelian audience that their civil service’s great engine rooms beneath Greenhall had a rival high in the mountains of Mechancia – a rival with steam-driven thinking machines that made their own transaction engines look like wind-up toys sold over the counter at Gattie and Pierce.
‘…this!’
The commodore advanced to the next slide, the image of a stone-carved face filling the screen, a scale written across it indicating that the face was three hundred miles across in width, four hundred from neck to skullcap.
Coppertracks continued over the hush of the crowd. ‘This incredible carving is clearly humanoid – the features of the race of man, or something close to it. An artefact on a scale more massive than any we have attempted here on Earth.’
‘Clearly, sir,’ shouted Lord Rooksby, ‘you have taken leave of your senses. Give me but a lump of coal from your boiler’s furnace and I will whittle you a shape as pleasing to the eye with my penknife.’ Another member of the audience lifted a piece of coke from the boiler bin of the steamman sitting next to him and tossed it towards Lord Rooksby. The aristocratic scientist seized it and raised it towards the ceiling. ‘Behold, damsons and gentlemen of the Royal Society – I give you the miraculous face of the great Pharaoh of Kaliban. Give me but a hundred years of erosion, a real-box camera and the poorly written plot of a penny dreadful, and I shall carve for you an entirely new branch of science – and for my next trick I will find you the face of the Man on the moon and send an airship to converse with the ice angels of the coldtime.’
The crowd followed Lord Rooksby’s lead and began to bray Coppertracks down in annoyance.
‘You fools,’ cried Coppertracks, pointing to the image on the screen. ‘Can you not see the evidence before your eyes? There was once life on Kaliban, life capable of constructing canal works and carving vast effigies from their mountains.’
‘Celestial fiction, sir,’ hooted Lord Rooksby, sensing that now was the time to steer events towards the projects favoured by his own lickspittles. ‘This is pure celestial fiction.’
‘Life!’ called Coppertracks, beseeching the massed ranks of the Royal Society. ‘Life that might be able to converse with us, if we would but make the effort.’
A low wailing echoed about the assembly chamber now, Coppertracks struggling to be heard over the eerie heckling. ‘My proposal is to build a colossal transmitter capable of receiving and generating vibrations across the void. We have already seen that the vicinity of our sun is blessed with an uncommonly large quantity of celestial bodies, many that would appear to be candidates for bearing life.’
The commodore dropped the next slide down in front of the assembly, but it was too late, the scientists had become a mob. A piece of coal was thrown towards the screen, an explosion of black soot impacting the image of Coppertracks’ proposed large-scale transmitter schematics.
‘Give him the shoulder,’ someone hissed.
‘Ah, no,’ wheezed the commodore behind his magic lantern. ‘Not the high shoulder. Not poor Coppertracks.’ He glanced around the room, trying to see who would do it first.
Would they?
It was too late. The mob of scientists had eagerly taken up the cry and at the other end of the hall the first boffin was already being boosted onto the shoulders of a colleague. Across the seats, the smaller, lighter members of the Royal Society were mounting the shoulders of their fellows, pointing and shaking their fists angrily at the steamman presenter. The energy under Coppertracks’ skull fizzed in disappointment and shame. In all the years of his long scientific career in Jackals he had never been given the high shoulder before. All scientists stood on the shoulders of giants when they undertook their solemn investigations, but now they were doing it to him, standing on the shoulders of those more worthy than the steamman, looking beyond his work. Coppertracks’ proposal had not even been judged valuable enough to come under the gaze of his colleagues’ scrutiny.
Commodore Black glanced furiously up towards the smirking Lord Rooksby, who was now pretending to pay attention to his two blonde dollymops rather than enjoying the moment of his adversary’s discomfort.
By Lord Tridentscale’s beard, thought the commodore, it didn’t take too much to work out who had prepared the others in the assembly to arrange this ritual howling down of his friend. Well, two could play at ambushes. The commodore’s eyes narrowed. There were a lot of dark lanes in the capital where an alley cat of Lord Rooksby’s reputation could run into a masked thug and come away from the fisticuffs with a few lumps and bruises and the silk shirt ripped off his blessed back.
Coppertracks was collecting his papers and speaking notes, gathering them up before the light hail of garbage being tossed in his direction grew into a storm. Commodore Black swept up the slides into the pocket of his greatcoat then sprinted up onto the stage with Molly and helped hustle the steamman off.
‘This is an outrage,’ spluttered Coppertracks, his voicebox a-tremble. ‘I show them hard scientific proof and they dare to throw coal at me! I should call on the Steamo Loas and ask Zaka of the Cylinders to shake the walls of this assembly down upon them.’
‘Let the spirits of your blessed ancestors rest in peace,’ said the commodore. ‘Those rascals and stuffed shirts are not worth the oil you’d need to shed to call your gods down. You’ve got all the discoveries of your people’s new observatory to take up your time, and you secured that without this crew of scoundrels’ help.’
‘Let’s get off the stage,’ said Molly, ducking a projectile, ‘Quick.’
They disappeared behind the curtain, a soggy ham roll bouncing off the back of the commodore’s naval greatcoat.
‘I simply don’t believe it,’ said Coppertracks. ‘If I had not seen the evidence of their disgraceful misbehaviour with my own vision plate … ’
Commodore Black led the two of them along a corridor and to the exit, ignoring the jeers of the crowd from the other side of the curtain. The commodore closed the door to the stage, cutting off the din of the mob. ‘Ah, your science is a fine thing indeed, but for all your years living in Jackals, your understanding of the nature of a hall full of your rivals is still a little shaky.’
The Royal Society organizer came up to them, leading the next presenter who was pushing a handcart stacked high with chemical spheres. ‘Well, that went, umm, well.’
Commodore Black smiled at the organizer, then slapped the chemist on the back of his tweed waistcoat. ‘Hear them cheering, lad? We’ve warmed them up for you good and proper. But no thanks now, we must be on our way.’
Molly didn’t look as if she was finding it as easy to put on a brave face. ‘All that time you spent putting your presentation together, old steamer, I’m so sorry.’
‘It is not beholden upon you to apologize for those louts’ behaviour,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The Jackelian Royal Society is obviously not the institution it once was.’
‘I’m going to wait here for Lord Rooksby to leave,’ growled Molly, ‘and when he stumbles out into the street with those two dollymops he had hanging off his arm, they can watch me break his fingers and—’
‘I really would not see you sink to the level of that softbody scoundrel on my account,’ interrupted Coppertracks. ‘And I believe the police still have a caution outstanding against your citizen record from your altercation with the last poor author you believed was plagiarizing your work. Please, let us retreat without creating any more gossip for the news sheets.’
Outside, the thick, marble-clad walls of the society’s headquarters muffled the noise of the harsh reception they had been given. There was a lone hansom cab waiting up the street, a single dark horse clicking its hooves in boredom. Commodore Black waved his swagger stick towards the cabbie and the driver flicked the reins to start the two-wheel
ed carriage rattling forward.
Coppertracks’ twin treads carried him towards the lane, every movement of his polished silver plates heavy with dejection. The commodore didn’t add to the steamman’s woes by referring to the proving tower Coppertracks had already constructed inside the orchard back at Tock House. That had already diverted enough of the coins from their finances without any degree of success being returned in the steamman’s direction.
A thin slick of rain had fallen during the presentation, the drizzle still tinged crimson even now, weeks after Ashby’s Comet had passed through the wet Jackelian skies. Also braving the day’s showers was a Broken Circle cultist labouring under the weight of a wooden placard proclaiming the final hours of the world. He was from a splinter group of the mainstream church that believed the cycle of existence could be broken, a belief that, in the commodore’s humble opinion, rather went against the central thrust of their church-without-gods. There had been many more of his ilk parading the streets as the comet passed; but they had thankfully grown scarce when, as usual, the world had not ended. What did they do, the commodore wondered, in the years between centennial celebrations, the years that were dry of comets and dark signs in the sky? Why, they bothered him and his friends, of course. As usual, the cultist seemed curiously attracted by the pull of Molly’s gravity.
‘It’s not too late,’ cried the would-be prophet, his beard tinged crimson from standing in the rain too long.
‘It is for you, lad,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Your boat sailed from port a long time ago, I think.’
The madman ignored the aging u-boat officer and reserved his spittle for Molly. It was as if he understood there was something special about her. ‘The portents, are you blind to the portents in the heavens? A rain of blood on the blessed land of Jackals, our green hills and valleys soaked with it. It is the age of the Broken Circle.’