Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

“We can take it with us,” he says. “Please. Ayar can carry it.”

  “No time to be careful,” she says. “No spare fuel to carry it.”

  Panadrome feels his body is falling to pieces.

  “But look at it!”

  There are tears in her eyes.

  “They’re coming,” Boss says. “We have to go.”

  But she doesn’t move.

  Even Elena has turned in the doorway to watch, Elena who has never waited.

  He looks at the piano as if he could lay hands on it and bring it to life.

  Far away come the familiar sounds of a mob.

  In another lifetime, someone might come to this house to take refuge from the winter. They might find the piano, and kneel, and play.

  But someone is coming now, axe in hand and looking for kindling, and they might not even take the blanket off before they start their work.

  Boss hasn’t moved. He realizes this is the illusion of choice; Boss has given her order.

  (He doesn’t look at Elena. She gave him the match; there is no question what she would do at the castle precipice, on the verge of being found out.)

  When he strikes the match against his palm, his silver fingers do not tremble; he does not feel the fire.

  The whole house has caught by the time the last truck is on the road.

  Panadrome looks out the grimy window as the fire snakes the ivy, races across the rafters.

  He imagines he can see the piano through a gaping window, long past the point he knows it’s gone.

  (He ran as soon as he dropped the match inside, and the fire caught. Some things he can, barely, stand; the sound of piano wires snapping is not one.)

  Boss sits beside him without speaking.

  In their view, the house turns into a hearth, into a lit match, into nothing.

  They pass the thin, pale lamp of some other city, far away, but Boss doesn’t give the signal, and so no one turns. The trucks rattle over the rocky ground.

  It’s almost a metronome, he thinks as if from some other life; phantom oranges rest in the upturned nests of his palms as he presses his fingers to the keys as long as he can before they fall.

  Finally they escape the very last of the city light, and there’s nothing left but the sky, silent and cold and spotted with stars.

  (Panadrome hasn’t missed the stars; he’s not an adventurer, by nature.)

  “Stop,” says Boss, and the Circus stops.

  The hills that bordered the École Aéronautique were covered in long grass, and as they dipped to the sea the blades dispersed through the tawny sand, which in turn fingered out into gray water. The foliage that covered the slopes was still bright with new growth. Three or four hundred meters away, a small flock of éoles grazed. They were among the smallest of the flying beasts, but each was at least the size of a full-grown bull, and the green grass was stripped when they fed.

  Claire halted clumsily beside him. It seemed to him every step she took was an invitation to crumple, and he feared she would lose her footing and tumble over the drop-off. Ian Chance fought the urge to slip a hand under her elbow to steady her.

  General Adair was right. The éoles would have to go. Yet Ian smiled as he watched them; an éole was the first flying beast he had broken by his own hand and flown over the neat russet-and-green rectangles of his father’s farm in Lancashire, and he had a fondness for the breed.

  Some hopped from bush to hillock, arching the wide stretch of their batlike wings to catch the breeze. Ian could hear the gentle chug of the éoles’ engines, and behind that the constant sough of the water. Spring was warming into summer, and the nascent heat in the breeze reminded him of the Saharan winter, although so near the sea the air was not as dry.

  Thready white steam rose over the flock, forming white puffs that glowed crisp against the blue sky. Save for the steam, the sky was cloudless: the smooth, even cerulean of a medieval painting. If he squinted against the light reflecting off the waters of the Channel, Ian could see the white rise that was Dover.

  That last time he had been to England, London was still in mourning for Queen Victoria. He remembered a length of tattered black ribbon tied high on a lamppost, fluttering in the breeze. At the time he had wondered if the same breeze traveled the Channel that season to hold the flying beasts aloft in their migration north.

  This morning, when he’d seen Claire waiting for him outside the old dormitories at the flying school beside Calais, a bright splash of checkered red against the gray, weathered wood, he’d felt shy, and delighted too. To see her again brought back a familiar warmth in his belly, a memory of days where the breeze blew warm or cool according to the season until it became a thing of the bones and the body grew attuned to the fine sea spray or yeasty pollen that the wind carried and offered, constantly.

  Ian lived by the wind then, breaking in the hardy little éoles until the once-wild creatures could be flown in intricate formation. He tamed the calm, aloof dunne monos until they’d take decomposed iron from his hand. At night he and Claire would curl around each other under her duvet in the women’s quarters; she rated her own room in part because those in command of the Air Corps decided, in their lopsided way, that she outranked the nurses. No one disputed her right: Claire rose long before dawn broke, to catch the chance of seeing a blériot over the Channel as the sun rose, and the nurses needed their sleep. Besides, her family had owned the land before her drunken grandfather, broke from trying to harness wild éoles to harsher work than they were formed for, sold it to a government seeking a place to make use of the flying beasts that ranged this coast time out of mind.

  She stood straight as she watched for him outside the dormitory, and for a moment he allowed himself to think it wouldn’t be so bad, that the reports of her injuries were exaggerated and that she had recovered. He was out of the car the Corps Aéronautique had sent before Plantard, a sunburned boy that looked barely old enough to drive, could open the door. Then she moved. Her limbs twisted painfully and her shoulders humped, and she dragged one foot behind her. He felt disappointment like a blow to the stomach and then the slow burn of contempt at his own cowardice.

  She didn’t show him that she saw it, unless it was in the amused curve of her lips when he bent to embrace her.

  “Plantard will take your bags to quarters,” she whispered, nodded at the boy. “Come with me to the cliffs.”

  One of the éoles reared on its back wheel at their approach, spreading its ungraceful wings and spinning its propeller: a dominant male, getting their scent. The flock stopped grazing for a second, and the low hum of their engines quickened as they readied for the signal to take off. When the male remained in place they relaxed and returned to pulling at the green foliage, hungry from their long postwinter flight from Africa. He wondered how the tang of leftover winter felt on their sand-scored wings. If he could walk among them, could he smell the baked-bread smell of the Egyptian air on their leathers? Would he find the compass shape of the Bat d’Af brand beneath the strut of a mount gone feral?

  General Adair’s orders went ’round and ’round in Ian’s head like a cylinder recording.

  “If a breeding program’s to work, Chance, we’ll need all the local resources,” the General had said. “That means the feral flocks will have to be diverted—or culled. You’ll need to make that happen before we ship the stock in.”

  Ian knew the little éoles had no place in the Corps’ breeding program, based as it was on the calm, sturdy dunne monos and the powerful wright flyers—the American pair of Roosevelt-bred flying beasts Taft had sent as a gift to Whitehall.

  “There might be room for an avion or two,” Ian replied. “They’re quick and clever—look much like the éoles but sturdier.”

  Adair had flashed him a look. The North African sun had burnt the Frenchman’s skin until he was ruddy even in the cool of the evening. In his time he’d flown dunne monos and antoinettes, back when one did so at the risk of seeming eccentric, before the military knew what do w
ith the Air Corps. Now war loomed with Germany and Italy, and the old corpsman was recalled to make a war machine out of men and flying beasts.

  “I’ll leave it to you,” he told Ian. “None of our people knows what we’ll need on the African lines, and you’ve stewed in Algiers long enough so you’re not so offensively English. Your only weakness is sentimentality. The éoles must go. And the blériot, any that remain. They are intractable, unpredictable.”

  Four years since Claire had netted a rogue blériot and ridden it over the shore of Calais; four years since it tumbled her onto the rocks.

  “Wakeman will meet you at the school.”

  Adair’s voice brought him back to himself: he’d been looking at the horizon, when the setting sun bled across the desert sands, but seeing the gray sea of the channel.

  “Wakeman?”

  He’d met the hunter once in Egypt; they’d never met in England, although both were bred in Lancashire. He remembered a man tanned brown where Adair was burnt, almost past middle age but with a predator’s lean body and a killer’s blue eye.

  “The British are sending him to help with the culling.” Adair’s tone defied him to object. Ian shrugged. The General was right: the wrights and dunnes would need the grazing.

  “He’ll never get that blériot, though,” he muttered under his breath.

  It had taken three weeks for Claire to trap the blériot, setting wire snares in the low foliage that rimmed the northeast cliffs between the school and Boulongesur-Mer. One morning, with the low clouds beating a constant, needle-spray mist against the tents and cottage of the camp, they spotted something thrashing in the distance and Claire ran across the hillocks to it, hair unbound across her shoulders and sodden in the drizzle. Ian followed after and heard her laugh before he saw they’d caught a young avion, half adult size, its twin propellers buzzing indignantly as it jerked against the wire, bouncing up and down in the gray bushes.

  Claire freed its forewheel from the wire with a few practiced flicks of her wrist and steadied its wing until it was able to take off across the dull flat water, the whirr of its engine scolding them until it faded in the distance. She watched it fondly, looping the trap wire between her fingers absently before bending to reset it, the wire high enough to snare the wheels but too low to foul or snap the struts.

  “You do love them,” he told her, watching the back of her drizzle-wet head as she adjusted the wire, and she cocked her head sideways, not looking at him but listening, always listening, as if not only English but any human speech was foreign to her, and took a fraction of a second to understand.

  “Tomorrow I’ll set it somewhere else,” she said, as if he had not spoken. “He’s not coming back here.”

  But she was wrong, because midafternoon, when the clouds had burned off and the fresh-broke avions had just been penned, there was a shout and a stableboy ran to the ramps, waving his cap wildly, looking for Mam’selle. They ran together to the site, and Claire laughed out loud at the sight of the beast bucking against the ropes, the beautiful curve of its graceful wings, so simple and functional compared to the bat-winged éoles and avions, its powerful engine buzzing furiously.

  She didn’t intend to ride it—not even Claire was that foolhardy. She only meant to mount it for a minute or so, to get the creature used to her weight. The boys had sunk the stakes deep on either side of the great taut, silken wings, and the ropes should have held. She approached it cautiously, clucking in the way one clucks instinctively at a skittish horse, one arm upraised to protect her face.

  “Be careful, Claire,” he called. She waved a hand at him without turning around. It leaned away from her as far as the ropes would allow.

  Claire patted the blériot’s quivering side for a long time, speaking to it in the low calming monotone she always used with the half-broke flying beasts. The angry buzz quieted. She closed her hand around the struts, then released them, then grasped them again, until the blériot no longer flinched when she did so.

  Finally she took a firm grip and slung herself into the rigging. The blériot lurched forward instantly, threatening to tumble tail over propeller, but the ropes held and Claire rode out each buck with a casual roll backward and the ease of long experience.

  Ian realized he’d been biting the inside of his cheek with the tension. Gingerly he tongued the raw spot and wished Claire would come back.

  “That’s enough for now,” he called, and she turned to him and seemed about to shout out, perhaps to bring her another length of rope. Then, with a powerful lurch, the creature pulled half the stakes out of wet ground soaked by several mornings’ worth of rain. Claire hung on desperately as the beast rocked the other way, dislodging the remainder of the stakes.

  Ian ran, the wet grass lashing at his ankles. The flying beast heaved its body off the ground, and, unaccustomed to a human’s weight, came to ground again, its wheels gouging the muddy soil. The great wings flexed, the engine hummed, and it rose again, wavering and heavy-bodied as a summer beetle. The lowermost struts were even with Ian’s face by the time he reached it and it was gaining altitude. Claire was stretched facedown in the structure, and he caught a glimpse of her gray eyes, wide with alarm. Desperate, he reached and leaped, catching hold of a muddy wheel with both hands.

  The blériot lurched closer to the cliff and dipped sharply down, cumbered with their combined weight.

  “Let go!” Claire shouted. “It’s too much—it’s going to crash!”

  Stubbornly he held on to the slippery wheel, his fingers cramping. He felt his toes drag against the ground. The blériot managed to lift, wavering over the edge of the cliff, and Ian had a brief, dizzying view of rock and white seafoam.

  “Damn you, let go!” Claire barked.

  The beast tipped back over solid ground and dipped again. Ian’s hands were a red blaze of pain.

  It was going to crash. He would have to trust that Claire could control it. Gritting his teeth, he forced his cramped fingers open and fell, rolling on the sodden ground with an impact that drove the air from his lungs.

  Free of his weight, the blériot rose again, heading for the sea. Ian rolled to his belly and watched, breathing painfully. For a few seconds the flying beast straightened and flew sure toward the horizon. Then one wing dipped and sideslipped.

  Ian watched with impotent horror while a gray shape separated from the body of the blériot, suspended an impossible few seconds clinging to a wing, and then as the creature tipped dangerously, sidewise fell, plunging feet first, arms outstretched, to the rocks below. The curve of Claire’s body as she fell seemed to have a control, an intent to it, as if she saw what was beneath her and was calculating how best to angle her limbs. Her silk scarf rippled up as the rest of her plummeted like Icarus. The blériot above her slipped sideways, descending as if it could scoop her out of the air.

  Although he never took his eyes off her, Ian never remembered seeing the moment of impact, only that one instant she was falling and the next she was sprawled on the black wet boulders semisubmerged in the tide, legs trailing in the black water like a mermaid’s tail.

  “Is the avion with the flock?”

  Claire’s voice had graveled with the years, and although her English was sure as it was before, her accent was stronger. Maybe no one spoke English to her after he left. Her English was better than his French, so that’s what they spoke, during the day and during the night.

  Ian glanced at Claire’s profile: all horizontal lines—sun-bleached wheaten hair pushed aside by the insistent breeze and squint lines carved at the corner of her eye as she stared at the flock she must have seen a hundred times. Since the accident the strong planes of her face had softened, and the skin of her neck was loose. Ian wondered if he would notice it as much had he not been a coward, if he had stayed as she had stayed.

  He looked back at the flying beasts, peering beneath his palm, and yes, there in the middle, rooting with the rest, an avion. Its bat-wings arched over its fellows and it bore a double propelle
r, but it didn’t seem interested in contending with the éole male for dominance.

  “The others don’t mind?” he asked.

  “No. He’s been flying with them for years.”

  “Perhaps he’s lonely.” Avions, never the most numerous of the flying beasts, were almost extinct in the wild.

  “Perhaps.”

  From that fall they thought she would die, and even the unsentimental Corps Aéronautique considered it cruel to take her away from her grandfather’s land and the flying beasts she loved. But she survived and healed, even if she healed crooked. She lived at the École Aéronautique as a patient and then a ground instructor, teaching boys like Eugène Plantard to fly and die and find glory on the shores of Europe and the sands of the Empty Quarter.

  In a world of automobiles and great ships few had use for the flying beasts, and for a time the École was all but abandoned. There was Claire, and the skeleton staff, and a couple of private students. But war was looming and soon it would teem with trainee flyboys, and Corps staff, and flying beasts. Not caught and broke from the wild flocks but bred for war, as the Italians and Germans were breeding the taube beasts with their dovelike, agile wings to carry more and move faster.

  The locals should be happy with the business the work of the Corps would bring. The mines were failing and fewer rich tourists came. The burgeoning war would be profitable, and no one had to think yet of the death from the sky that a race of flying beasts bred for war would bring.

  Four years since he had fled her to Memphis, to Gazuul and farther south, where the flying beasts bred huge and wild and he caught and broke them for rich men, for the Corps Aéronautique, and for His Majesty’s Airborne Calvary. Craven, he had never come back until now.

  He told himself it was because he didn’t want to see the woman he loved for her strength and her dexterity live crippled, but it was a lie. It was because most who fell as Claire had fallen died, and death was a gentle sleep. But Claire was living testimony to what could be done to the fragile construct of sinew, skin, and bone that made a human.