Making History

by Rick Wilber

  “In a moment,” Elizabeth says. “We were lucky for the commotion.”

  I am beginning to be able to see. It is a storage room, full of abandoned things. The woman holding my arm is older. There are some broken chairs and a stool. She sits me in the chair. Is Elizabeth some kind of adventuress?

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “We are friends,” Elizabeth says. “We will help you get to your sister.”

  I don’t believe them. I will end up in New Orleans. Elizabeth is some kind of adventuress.

  After a moment the door opens and this time it is Michael with a young man. “This is Andrew,” he says.

  A man? What do they want with a man? That is what stops me from saying, “Run!” Andrew is blinded by the change in light, and I can see the astonishment working on his face, the way it must be working on mine. “What is this?” he asks.

  “You are with Friends,” Michael says, and maybe he has said it differently than Elizabeth, or maybe it is just that this time I have had the wit to hear it.

  “Quakers?” Andrew says. “Abolitionists?”

  Michael smiles. I can see his teeth white in the darkness. “Just Friends,” he says.

  Abolitionists. Crazy people who steal slaves to set them free. Have they come to kidnap us? We are recalcitrant southerners, I have never heard of Quakers seeking revenge, but everyone knows the Abolitionists are crazy and they are liable to do anything.

  “We’ll have to wait here until they begin to move people out, it will be evening before we can leave,” says the older woman.

  I am so frightened; I just want to be home. Maybe I should try to break free and run out to the platform. There are northern soldiers out there. Would they protect me? And then what, go to a fort in Oklahoma?

  The older woman asks Michael how they could get past the guards so early and he tells her about the madwoman. A “refugee,” he calls her.

  “They’ll just take her back,” Elizabeth says, sighing.

  Take her back - do they mean that she really came from Oklahoma? They talk about how bad it will be this winter. Michael says there are Wisconsin Indians resettled down there, but they’ve got no food, and they’ve been starving on government handouts for a couple years. Now there will be more people. They’re not prepared for winter.

  There can’t have been much handout during the war. It was hard enough to feed the armies.

  They explain to Andrew and to me that we will sneak out of the train station this evening, after dark. We will spend a day with a Quaker family in St. Louis, and then they will send us on to the next family. And so we will be passed hand to hand, like a bucket in a brigade, until we get to our families.

  They call it the underground railroad.

  But we are slave owners.

  “Wrong is wrong,” says Elizabeth. “Some of us can’t stand and watch people starve.”

  “But only two out of the whole train,” Andrew says.

  Michael sighs.

  The old woman nods. “It isn’t right.”

  Elizabeth picked me because my mother died. If my mother had not died, I would be out there, on my way to starve with the rest of them.

  I can’t help it, but I start to cry. I should not profit from my mother’s death. I should have kept her safe.

  “Hush, now,” says Elizabeth. “Hush, you’ll be okay.”

  “It’s not right,” I whisper. I’m trying not to be loud, we mustn’t be discovered.

  “What, child?”

  “You shouldn’t have picked me,” I say. But I am crying so hard I don’t think they can understand me. Elizabeth strokes my hair and wipes my face. It may be the last time someone will do these things for me. My sister has three children of her own, and she won’t need another child. I’ll have to work hard to make up my keep.

  There are blankets there and we lie down on the hard floor, all except Michael, who sits in a chair and sleeps. I sleep this time with fewer dreams. But when I wake up, although I can’t remember what they were, I have the feeling that I have been dreaming restless dreams.

  The stars are bright when we finally creep out of the station. A night full of stars. The stars will be the same in Tennessee. The platform is empty, the train and the people are gone. The Lincoln Train has gone back south while we slept, to take more people out of Mississippi.

  “Will you come back and save more people?” I ask Elizabeth.

  The stars are a banner behind her quiet head. “We will save what we can,” she says.

  It isn’t fair that I was picked. “I want to help,” I tell her.

  She is silent for a moment. “We only work with our own,” she says. There is something in her voice that has not been there before. A sharpness.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “There are no slavers in our ranks,” she says and her voice is cold.

  I feel as if I have had a fever; tired, but clear of mind. I have never walked so far and not walked beyond a town. The streets of St. Louis are empty. There are few lights. Far off a woman is singing, and her voice is clear and carries easily in the night. A beautiful voice.

  “Elizabeth,” Michael says, “she is just a girl.”

  “She needs to know,” Elizabeth says.

  “Why did you save me then?” I ask.

  “One does not fight evil with evil,” Elizabeth says.

  “I’m not evil!” I say.

  But no one answers.

  Eileen Gunn’s short stories are frequently nominated for the top awards in the field, and she won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 2004. Her collection Stable Strategies and Others (2004, Tachyon) was shortlisted for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Michael Swanwick is one of the premier writers in the field and has, among his many awards, five Hugo Awards for his short fiction. In this story, these two outstanding authors posit a steampunk-styled past that takes the reader on a brilliant and dizzying ride through politics, society, and aerial combat.

  Radio Jones came dancing down the slidewalks. She jumped from the express to a local, then spun about and raced backwards, dumping speed so she could cut across the slower lanes two and three at a time. She hopped off at the mouth of an alley, glanced up in time to see a Zeppelin disappear behind a glass-domed skyscraper, and stepped through a metal door left open to vent the heat from the furnaces within.

  The glass-blowers looked up from their work as she entered the hot shop. They greeted her cheerily:

  “Hey, Radio!”

  “Jonesy!”

  “You invented a robot girlfriend for me yet?”

  The shop foreman lumbered forward, smiling. “Got a box of spec tubes for you, under the bench there.”

  “Thanks, Mackie.” Radio dug through the pockets of her patched leather greatcoat and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Hey, listen, I want you to do me up an estimate for these here vacuum tubes.”

  Mack studied the list. “Looks to be pretty straightforward. None of your usual experimental trash. How many do you need - one of each?”

  “I was thinking more like a hundred.”

  “What?” Mack’s shaggy black eyebrows met in a scowl. “You planning to win big betting on the Reds?”

  “Not me, I’m a Whites fan all the way. Naw, I was kinda hoping you’d gimme credit. I came up with something real hot.”

  “You finally built that girlfriend for Rico?”

  The workmen all laughed.

  “No, c’mon, I’m serious here.” She lowered her voice. “I invented a universal radio receiver. Not fixed-frequency - tunable! It’ll receive any broadcast on the radio spectrum. Twist the dial, there you are. With this baby, you can listen in on every conversation in the big game, if you want.”

  Mack whistled. “There might be a lot of interest in a device like that.”

  “Funny thing, I was thinking exactly that myself.” Radio grinned. “So waddaya say?”

  “I say-” Mack spun around to face the glass-blowers, who were
all listening intently, and bellowed, “Get back to work!” Then, in a normal voice, “Tell you what. Set me up a demo, and if your gizmo works the way you say it does, maybe I’ll invest in it. I’ve got the materials to build it, and access to the retailers. Something like this could move twenty, maybe thirty units a day, during the games.”

  “Hey! Great! The game starts when? Noon, right? I’ll bring my prototype over, and we can listen to the players talking to each other.” She darted toward the door.

  “Wait.” Mack ponderously made his way into his office. He extracted a five-dollar bill from the lockbox and returned, holding it extended before him. “For the option. You agree not to sell any shares in this without me seeing this doohickey first.”

  “Oh, Mackie, you’re the greatest!” She bounced up on her toes to kiss his cheek. Then, stuffing the bill into the hip pocket of her jeans, she bounded away.

  Fat Edna’s was only three blocks distant. She was inside and on a stool before the door jangled shut behind her. “Morning, Edna!” The neon light she’d rigged up over the bar was, she noted with satisfaction, still working. Nice and quiet, hardly any buzz to it at all. “Gimme a big plate of scrambled eggs and pastrami, with a beer on the side.”

  The bartender eyed her skeptically. “Let’s see your money first.”

  With elaborate nonchalance, Radio laid the bill flat on the counter before her. Edna picked it up, held it to the light, then slowly counted out four ones and eighty-five cents change. She put a glass under the tap and called over her shoulder, “Wreck a crowd, with sliced dick!” She pulled the beer, slid the glass across the counter, and said, “Out in a minute.”

  “Edna, there is nobody in the world less satisfying to show off in front of than you. You still got that package I left here?”

  Wordlessly, Edna took a canvas-wrapped object from under the bar and set it before her.

  “Thanks.” Radio unwrapped her prototype. It was bench-work stuff - just tubes, resistors and capacitors in a metal frame. No housing, no circuit tracer lights, and a tuner she had to turn with a pair of needle-nose pliers. But it was going to make her rich. She set about double-checking all the connectors. “Hey, plug this in for me, willya?”

  Edna folded her arms and looked at her.

  Radio sighed, dug in her pockets again, and slapped a nickel on the bar. Edna took the cord and plugged it into the outlet under the neon light. With a faint hum, the tubes came to life.

  “That thing’s not gonna blow up, is it?” Edna asked dubiously.

  “Naw.” Radio took a pair of needle-nose pliers out of her greatcoat pocket and began casting about for a strong signal. “Most it’s gonna do is electrocute you, maybe set fire to the building. But it’s not gonna explode. You been watching too many.”

  ***

  Amelia Spindizzy came swooping down out of the sun like a suicidal angel, all rage and mirth. The rotor of her autogyro whined and snarled with the speed of her dive. Then she throttled up and the blades bit deep into the air and pulled her out, barely forty feet from the ground. Laughing, she lifted the nose of her bird to skim the top of one skywalk, banked left to dip under a second, and then right to hop-frog a third. Her machine shuddered and rattled as she bounced it off the compression effects of the air around the skyscrapers to steal that tiny morsel of extra lift, breaking every rule in the book and not giving a damn.

  The red light on Radio 2 flashed angrily. One-handed, she yanked the jacks to her headset from Radio 3, the set connecting her to the referee, and plugged into her comptroller’s set. “Yah?”

  The flat, emotionless, and eerily artificial voice of Naked Brain XB-29 cut through the static. “Amelia, what are you doing?”

  “Just wanted to get your attention. I’m going to cut through the elbow between Ninetieth and Ninety-First Avenues. Plot me an Eszterhazy, will you?”

  “Computing.” Almost as an afterthought, the Naked Brain said, “You realize this is extremely dangerous.”

  “Nothing’s dangerous enough for me,” Amelia muttered, too quietly for the microphone to pick up. “Not by half.”

  The sporting rag Obey the Brain! had termed her “half in love with easeful death,” but it was not easeful death that Amelia Spindizzy sought. It was the inevitable, difficult death of an impossible skill tenaciously mastered but necessarily insufficient to the challenge - a hard-fought battle for life, lost just as the hand reached for victory and closed around empty air. A mischance that conferred deniability, like a medal of honor, on her struggle for oblivion, as she twisted and fell in gloriously tragic heroism.

  So far, she hadn’t achieved it.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love being alive (at least some of the time). She loved dominating the air currents in her great titanium whirligig. She loved especially the slow turning in an ever-widening gyre, scanning for the opposition with an exquisite patience only a sigh short of boredom, and then the thrill as she spotted him, a minuscule speck in an ocean of sky. Loved the way her body flushed with adrenalin as she drove her machine up into the sun, searching for that sweet blind spot where the prey, her machine, and that great atomic furnace were all in a line. Loved most of all the instant of stillness before she struck.

  It felt like being born all over again.

  For Amelia, the Game was more than a game, because necessarily there would come a time when the coordination, strength, and precision demanded by her fierce and fragile machine would prove to be more than she could provide, a day when all the sky would gather its powers to break her will and force her into the ultimate submission. It would happen. She had faith. Until then, though, she strove only to live at the outer edge of her skills, to fly and to play the Game as gloriously as any human could to the astonishment of the unfortunate earth-bound classes. And of the Naked Brains who could only float, ponderously, in their glass tanks, in their Zeppelins.

  “Calculations complete.”

  “You have my position?”

  Cameras swiveled from the tops of nearby buildings, tracking her. “Yes.”

  Now she’d achieved maximum height again.

  “I’m going in.”

  Straight for the alley-mouth she flew. Sitting upright in the thorax of her flying machine, rudder pedals at her feet, stick controls to the left and right, she let inertia push her back into the seat like a great hand. Eight-foot-long titanium blades extended in a circle, with her at the center like the heart of a flower. This was no easy machine to fly. It combined the delicacy of flight with the physical demands of operating a mechanical thresher.

  “Pull level on my count. Three . . . Two . . . Now.”

  It took all her strength to bully her machine properly while the g-forces tried to shove her away from the controls. She was flying straight and true toward Dempster Alley, a street that was only feet wider than the diameter of her autogyro’s blades, so fine a margin of error that she’d be docked a month’s pay if the Naked Brains saw what she was up to.

  “Shift angle of blades on my mark and rudder on my second mark. Three . . . Two . . . Mark. And . . . Rudder.”

  Tilted forty-five degrees, she roared down the alley, her prop wash rattling the windows and filling them with pale, astonished faces. At the intersection, she shifted pitch and kicked rudder, flipping her gyro over so that it canted forty-five degrees the other way (the engine coughed and almost stalled, then roared back to life again) and hammered down Bernoulli Lane (a sixty-degree turn here where the streets crossed at an odd angle) and so out onto Ninety-First. A perfect Eszterhazy! Five months ago, a hypercubed committee of half the Naked Brains in the metropolis had declared that such a maneuver couldn’t be done. But one brave pilot had proved otherwise in an aeroplane, and Amelia had determined she could do no less in a gyro.

  “Bank left. Stabilize. Climb for height. Remove safeties from your bombs.”

  Amelia Spindizzy obeyed and then, glancing backwards, forwards, and to both sides, saw a small cruciform mote ahead and below, flying low over the avenue
. Grabbing her glasses, she scanned the wing insignia. She could barely believe her luck - it was the Big E himself! And she had a clear run at him.

  The autogyro hit a patch of bumpy air, and Amelia snatched up the sticks to regain control. The motor changed pitch, the prop hummed, the rotor blades cut the air. Her machine was bucking now, veering into the scrap zone, and in danger of going out of control. She fought to get it back on an even keel, straightened it out, and swung into a tight arc.

  Man, this was the life!

  She wove and spun above the city streets as throngs of onlookers watched the warm-up hijinks from the tall buildings and curving skywalks. They shouted encouragement at her. “Don’t let ‘er drop, Amelia!” “Take the bum down, Millie!” “Spin ‘im around, Spindizzy!” Bloodthirsty bastards. Her public. Screaming bloody murder and perfectly capable of chucking a beer bottle at her if they thought she wasn’t performing up to par. Times like these she almost loved ‘em.

  She hated being called Millie, though.

  ***

  Working the pedals, moving the sticks, dancing to the silent jazz of turbulence in the air around her, she was Josephine Baker, she was Cab Calloway, she was the epitome of grace and wit and intelligence in the service of entertainment. The crowd went wild as she caught a heavy gust of wind and went skidding sideways toward the city’s treasured Gaudi skyscraper.

  When she had brought everything under control and the autogyro was flying evenly again, Amelia looked down.

  For a miracle, he was still there, still unaware of her, flying low in a warm-up run and placing flour bombs with fastidious precision, one by one.

  She throttled up and focused all her attention on her foe, the greatest flyer of his generation and her own, patently at her mercy if she could first rid herself of the payload. Her engine screamed in fury, and she screamed with it. “XB! Next five intersections! Gimme the count.”

  “At your height, there is a risk of hitting spectators.”

  “I’m too good for that and you know it! Gimme the count.”

  “Three . . . Two . . . Now. Six . . . Five . . .”