Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  The greatest man of science, come to view me as a curiosity? Men like Raoul, spitting at me because my metal parts are unobtrusive enough that they don’t know to harangue me? Men like Jean, holding my heart in their hands but not realizing they have to pump it?

  I collapse; neither Eva nor Jean expects it. Jean doesn’t move fast enough. A fountain of red bursts from my wrist and I close my eyes.

  This is a fact: The one completely automatic organ is the heart. The brain can tell the lungs to stop breathing, the bladder to stop peeing, the stomach to stop grumbling. But any conscious effort to stop the heart is in vain. The heart is the closest thing to a machine of perpetual motion known to man.

  I hear voices around me, sense lights and shadows. My throat swallows when liquid is pushed into it. But I don’t open my eyes.

  I try hard to not recognize the voices. To imagine my visitors as less than human, less than animals, even. Mere dust that is beneath my attention. I know that if I pay attention to the voices, to the words they utter, I will know my fate. As long as I smell the tang of metal on the air, as long as I hear the squeaks of new parts getting tested for the first time, I know that I am safe. The Hôpital du Salut has no part in the Exposition.

  I try hard not to think, not to wonder. Not to dream. But it’s impossible not to; I seem to sleep all the time. I dream of rivers of red blood. After the first few times waking from this dream, I began to find it soothing. And every time my fist clenches around my metal heart, I remind myself to forget and forgive. Forget and forgive.

  I dream that lights are flashing, that people are screaming a foreign name over and over. My left hand is clenching, but there is no metal. Just flesh. My nails bite into my palms, drawing blood. My left arm is warm, probably from Dr. Suvi’s steam-powered heart pump. I sway, but do not fall, supported at the waist by a wide, padded circle. I feel like a doll propped up for display. The shouts are getting louder, but they’re strangely muffled.

  For the first time since the disastrous salon, I open my eyes.

  The dream was not a dream.

  I’m standing in a glass box, my hips supported by the padded circle, only some of my weight on my feet. Something presses into the center of my spine to keep my back above my waist, and my corset keeps my spine straight. My heart is not in my hand, nor anywhere in the box. I can hardly see beyond my four transparent walls; there are lights trained on my box from all directions. But I follow the flexible metal of my veins and arteries from my left wrist to a small window in the box.

  My heart is outside the box, cradled in the steam-powered pump. I examine all the walls, craning around as much as my supports allow, but I see no door. Eva wouldn’t have allowed that. Surely not. And our parents would have protested…Marie…and Dr. Suvi. Dr. Suvi would have told them it was for my benefit, surely. And they would trust him, once more, with my life. My head is light, and I wonder what the crowd would do if I fainted.

  A strident voice, one I know well, rouses me. A dual current of hope and fear surges through my mind, and I search for his face with my weakened eyes, which I realize have been closed for months. For I am in the Exposition Universelle.

  Representing science. Not sisterly love or human compassion. Just science.

  That voice again, and this time I can make out his words through my display box: “Monsieur Edison, if you would kindly step this way.”

  Edison. The name that pulled me from my stupor in the first place, the name that had been shouted on the lips of so many. I wish I could faint on command like some ladies seem able to do. Anything to keep these tears from falling. Edison really is here. He really will see me. And that voice of sunshine and lavender will make my introduction.

  I want to wail, to thrash against my constraints and demand to see Eva, our parents, even Dr. Suvi. Even Jean, who must be somewhere nearby. But I do none of these things, for my savior is standing in front of me. I cannot allow myself to miss a single word he utters.

  Raoul stops in front of my box, and I notice that there’s a velvet rope in front of it, keeping the masses from getting too close. He sees that I’m awake and turns away from me, to the frowning man next to him.

  “Monsieur Edison, allow me to present Mademoiselle Coraline Malsante.” He shouts for Edison’s benefit, but Edison shouts even louder when he cuts him off in fluent French.

  “I told you, boy, take me to Eiffel’s tower. I must speak to him about sending telegraphs from the top.”

  Raoul’s smile falters, then spreads wider. I’m willing him to say anything, anything to make Edison look at me. Just one glance, I’m sure that’s all the great inventor will need to decide to help.

  “Monsieur Eiffel and his tower will not be leaving anytime soon,” another voice says. Jean pushes through the crowd to appear on Edison’s other side. “And this young lady is a marvel not to be missed.”

  “That’s right,” Raoul says now that he has Edison’s attention once more. “You see that metal heart there, in the machine? That has replaced her real heart.” He goes on, explains my entire story at a shout. The reporters grouped behind them scribble furiously in their notebooks, gawking at me. I’m not here for them.

  Edison seems interested in my story now, his eyes following Raoul’s hand as he points at my heart, at my metal veins. I will Edison to meet my gaze, but he focuses instead on the box that surrounds me. His hair is messy, as if he forgot to comb it before leaving his bed, and his pale face is surprisingly clean-shaven. His expression is melancholy, and I dare to hope he’s moved by my imprisonment. There are stains on his vest, though his suit jacket covers most of them. His eyes drift from the top of my glass cage to the placard at my feet; from the band holding me by the hips to the steam-powered machine that contains my heart.

  Something flashes across his face, and his eyes light up. I lean forward, amazed despite my predicament that I just witnessed a flash of inspiration on the face of a genius. He realized how to make my heart electric. Or the inhumanity of keeping me on display. Either way, he’ll make a fuss and Raoul and Jean will have no choice but to let me out.

  “These lights,” Edison says. “Are they DC?”

  Raoul blinks. “Monsieur?”

  “What does it matter?” I cry. I want him to see me, not to think about electricity! I struggle to reach the glass with my right hand, but it’s too far away. “Look at my heart! Look! S’il vous plaît, monsieur, help me!”

  Edison points at the lights. “Those are electric lights, non? Direct current, I hope?”

  Raoul opens and closes his mouth, and the crowd starts to move behind him as reporters push one another in an attempt to hear the bumbling Exposition official’s answer. Jean takes one of Edison’s arms and says something in his ear, gesturing at Raoul with the other. They’re going to move on.

  “Monsieur Edison!” I scream. The glass muffles my voice. Edison can hardly hear Raoul or Jean, even when they shout practically in his ear. I have no hope of making my voice loud enough to be heard.

  They gnash from the door, the slavering parent-golems, offering wire hangers and arsenic cakes with grimy grins, teeth slid their heads, grunting their nicotine-paean in 4/4 time.

  They lurch and leer, sewing their fingertips to my mouth—

  Hush, child, hush.

  There are windows in their bellies, and in them I can see homunculi vomiting earthly delights onto the titanium floor. In them I can see the quantum zygote, the almost-me, the tiny machine might have been daughters echoing in and out of each other with quiet, regular clicks.

  Clockwork girl, shine and smile, polish the apples of your cheeks, we’ve company tonight.

  Mother is a machine. Father is a factory. He stamps out hundreds of tiny fathers a day from his bronze-age femur, two by two by two. Her tin breasts are bolted to a steel-drum chest; his hydraulic arms pump up and down on my rot-soft stomach, cut biscuit-daughters from my liver, from my kidneys: little pig-tailed pancreatic automata that scowl and weep and scowl and weep. And on nigh
ts when the moon is fat and yeasty as unbaked bread, Mother opens her ribs and tells me, tells me, with her mouth flapping open like a swinging door, to crawl inside, baby girl, crawl crawl crawl. Her wheedle-voice hisses, steamsighing, from a copper jaw, hinged with a platinum pin.

  See, saw, Margaery Daw, sold her bed and lay upon straw!

  She beckons into herself with eight-jointed hands. I am afraid to be inside Mother, whose window looks in but never out;

  I am afraid to be inside Mother, whose ribs are made from beaten spoons and the spittle of Spanish silversmiths;

  I am afraid to be inside Mother, whose doors slam hungry and grim. Her kettle-cry reverberates and conjugates the nursery-verb into she and I, she and I:

  Oh! One misty, moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather! There I met an old man, clothed all in leather!

  Father bangs on the womb-dead-door and she eats his electroplated thumbknuckles with slurping candy-smiles—I touch the back of her breasts and try to hear a code tapped out, a code mapped out on her steely lungs.

  Cilia, cilia, all this delicate lace! Mother is a machine, and I am empty space.

  I am wire, ash, and never a beanstalk floating out of my throat, sliding up to the Father-press, sliding up to the warehouse window. Mother pats her belly, full and warm. Mother slaps her chest-door shut and dances her bansheeshuffle, crouched and laughing:

  The cat’s in the cupboard and she can’t see!

  Here they come and here they are, the parent-golems with their eyes in their hair, and when I am let out, when I am let out of the steel-drum torso, the metal tans my skin gill-gray.

  Ask me, Father, ask me which biscuit-girl I will have for breakfast, which of my selves I shall eat while you chortle above my pretty sea-snail scalp and sew my skin to a stucco wall—which shall I have, the I that dresses for Christmas in syringes and horse hoof-glue, the I that slavers just like you?

  Ask me, Mother, ask me if I thirst to breathe the fluid of your cylinder-self, ask me if I leap to be closed in, folded in, tucked into you?

  Now I lay me down to sleep inside your engine-bones. And should I die before I wake, the clocks will eat their own.

  Ask me when you hem my hips, ask me when you thread my nose, ask me when you solder pilgrim’s palm to pilgrim’s palm, ask me when you hide me in your silver bowels if I would not rather have my own hands to eat?

  I see the moon, the moon sees me, bright as only the moon can be!

  Father is a factory. Mother is a machine. Father presses out my skin like a book—fifth edition, Coptic binding; out of his mouth drops copy, copy, copy. Mother pulls me back in until there is only one of her, and I am under the larynx, stitching the old electric umbilicus together with glabrous teeth.

  Stitch it up, and stitch it down, then I’ll give you half a crown!

  Push it in, Father, all this metal! Make it mine, my pure mercury, pour it cool and trickling into my marrow and I will wake up strong and shining, I will wake up new. Into your belly, Mother, in I go, and if there is enough wire and lead, I can make a merrily clanging creature, I can build a child like you.

  Mother is copper, Father is tin. But I am bone, but I am skin.

  Three days before Eliana Stein found the girl made from bronze, the stocky Botanist noted the passing of her twelfth year living in the Aremika Shaft, though she did not celebrate it. That was the kind of woman she was: pragmatic because she lived alone, modest because her vanity did not extend to her celebrating her own successes, and fatalistic, because surviving the passage of time, she believed, was an act of submission, not rebellion.

  The Shaft (so shortened by all who lived in it) was best described by what it was not: an immense absence of soil. On the yearly journeys Eliana made outside the Shaft and into the low, sprawling, ash-stained Aremika City that circled the Shaft, she told those few who asked that she could not describe the huge emptiness of the Shaft. Rather, she could only explain by its horrific absence. The Shaft, she said, was a deep, burnt scar and was like the woman who had lost an arm: you did not describe the missing limb to friends, but instead noted its loss, and the way in which that loss cast a shadow over the remaining parts of the individual, and rendered them out of harmony with the whole. That is what Eliana felt when she stood in the dark, endless, windy hole that dove through the Earth. The pressure of the disfigurement was always present in the hole: it was the walls, the ground, and the wide emptiness before her. She could feel it constantly, and knew if any part of the Shaft broke, that it would collapse and smother her. There would be nothing that she could do in that eventuality. Even the shifting collection of faint, glowing dots that were scattered farther up along the Shaft—the dots that signaled other Botanists who, like herself, wore the luminous clothing of the trade so not to be lost or forgotten by the Botanist Counters outside—even they were nothing against the deep wound that was the Shaft.

  For her part, Eliana felt it more than others Botanists did, because she had gone deeper than any other had. It had not been asked of her to do this, but she had chosen the depth through some yet fully self-explained reason. Still, without knowing the reason, she performed her job of monitoring the soil and helping it heal and grow in density and strength with the pellets that she planted. At her depth, the soil around her alternated between dark, brittle burns and thick, healing brown of varying types; but if she could have gone down farther, where there was less life and the soil was hard and brittle like tightly packed blocks of cinder, she would have. The Department of Botany had told her it was simply not safe to go beyond her depth, however, and that they could not lower the unit for her to live in or hook up a cable for her to leave, not until the soil farther up was stronger.

  On the day that Eliana found the girl made from bronze, thick black ash had fallen into the Shaft during the night. Smoke rose from the factories outside Aremika City daily, and it was perpetually in the sky and ground, but the ash was only thick enough to bother her when all these elements combined. When they did, the ash fell so prodigiously that when Eliana awoke, she found the pathway around her slim, bronze unit coated in black, and the pale fungi that grew across the walls and that served as the only natural light was dim beneath it.

  It was the ash, however, that led her to the girl.

  When Eliana stepped from the unit, she did so holding a thickheaded broom. A brass track ran around the Shaft’s circumference like a tarnished halo. Her unit was mounted on it, and from inside, a gear system allowed her to move manually along the track. However, at the moment, she walked, and swept the paths as she did. If she didn’t clean straight away, the ash would contaminate the soil and leave a horrid stink, especially because it took her a day to walk the circumference of the Shaft. She had no complaints, however, and dutifully followed the path that ran to a bronze plate that anchored a thick, taunt cable into the ground. The cable led up into the dark, joining hundreds of others that disappeared in thin lines up to the surface and the hint of a scabbed red sky that sat at the start of the Shaft. Through the cables, a Botanist received mail and food and, in a swaying, narrow bar that served as a chair, was raised out of the Shaft. Eliana had no mail, left the Shaft only once a year, and was not due a food drop for another two weeks, so it was only by her attention to the detail of sweeping that she found the girl, who had fallen next to the cable. The truth of it was, if the ash fall had not been so heavy, the girl might not have been found alive at all.

  But she was.

  The girl made from bronze, the Returned, because she was not a real girl, this artificial girl had a loud, irregular moan in her chest: a broken machine whine that announced itself in a grinding of gears. It was loud and troublesome to the woman who held her, and every now and then, it stopped, as if in death.

  When Eliana, holding the heavy, broken figure, first experienced the pause, she did indeed think of it as death, so long and final did the lack of life seem. She stepped to the uneven edge of her path in the Shaft, ready to release the body. To dump the refuse. But with
a ragged howl that gargled and coughed life back in a spasm through the girl’s body, her heart returned to its stuttering, moaning journey. Still holding her, Eliana watched as the girl’s eyes flickered open, met the Botanist’s, and then drifted shut.

  She was pretty, Eliana thought as she turned, and continued down the rough path, even now. It was a created beauty, however, for Eliana doubted that she had been born with such a cute face, and such smooth, white skin and large, dark eyes. The girl’s short black hair did not feel right against her skin, either: it was too dry, too hard to be real hair, even if it was tangled and dirty, and a patch on the back of her head had been torn away to reveal the bronze skull underneath. There were cuts down her pale face and neck and her clothing was torn, though neither cuts nor clothes showed sign of blood. Not all the Returned bled, however, and in this case, Eliana was pleased. The girl had lost her legs in the fall: they had splintered and broken upon landing, leaving a sharp, twisting mess of jagged bronze and internal silver and bronze wiring dangled out of her open thighs. Eliana had left a single, preserved foot back at the cable. There was no way to reattach it, and the girl weighed so much already that there was no point in bringing it. In addition to the loss of her legs, the girl had also lost her left hand. It had been torn off from just above the wrist, perhaps as she had grabbed at something, perhaps the cable that ran down to Eliana’s level, the cable that the girl frantically reached for as she fell, as the desperation forced her to struggle to touch it, to grab it, but where the speed of her decent—

  Well, who knew?

  A cold fluid from the girl was staining the Botanist’s hands, but Eliana ignored it. Worse had touched her hands in her life, but still, she hoped it was not urine. There was no smell to the girl, but Returned ate, drank, and pissed and shat, simulating the life that they had been born into, once, so it would only be a matter of time before the internal parts of her body began to fail if they were as broken as the external parts.