Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  “It’s not my department,” I said, still staring.

  “Embodiment. Loss of self. It’s worst for the thaumaturges; there’s a reason most airships only keep them on short shifts. When you’re using your mind to control an entire airship, it’s easy to lose oneself in the body of the machine.” She flexed her each of her styli in turn, like an artist examining her hands. “It’s almost the opposite of what they tell anyone going through the acorporeal treatment.”

  Echo of flesh in machine, Chaff had said.

  “They’ve tried to transfer the human mind to automata, you know. Failed, repeatedly. You and I are as close as they’ll ever come to that, and my position is hardly enviable.” She chuckled, sadly. “But dying while linked isn’t yet fully understood. And now Fiddy…Fiddy believes he’s fallen in love with a ghost.”

  “An echo,” I said. And a sin? What was sin to machines?

  “Charles, I need you to do one more favor for me.”

  I adjusted my eyes back to normal, wincing at the pressure. “Professora, the Colonel has said we need to leave immediately.”

  “So we shall. This will only take a moment. And it will make the leaving easier.”

  The favor in question was simple enough: put down a ramp so that the Professora could finally reach the little pilot’s cabin where Phidias had been working. She waited in the salon, listening to the muffled cacophony as Phidias cut yet another section of undercarriage away, while I wrestled several fragments of benches into place and helped her wheel onto them.

  The cabin was the one part of the Chiaro that resembled any other air-ship: crammed with equipment, werglass consoles on swinging frames so that a quick pilot could shuffle between them when needed without bothering to consult the thaumaturges—the ones who must have been on the far side of the sealing door at the end of the chamber, I realized. Instinctively, I turned to the heavy chair built into the wall: the main throne, from which the pilot could run the whole dirigible in case of thaumaturgy failure. It was empty. “Raisa—she should be—”

  “Fiddy probably buried what was left,” Lundqvist said absently, turning over lenses. “If there was anything—it looks like the fire came through here, even if Fiddy’s been polishing it up.” She motioned to blackened, ashy marks on the werglass, the crazed and leaking lenses.

  Phidias’s blankets and foul-smelling clothes lay in a heap, swaddling shards and irregular blocks of werglass. “This can’t be his research,” I murmured. “I don’t think even the Colonel could draw anything from this.”

  “Which is why he kept Dieterich working on the larger pieces,” Lundqvist said over the growing din of Phidias’s work. “Poor Dieterich. He might play the hardened military man, but he’s too trusting.” Her lower stylus lifted disintegrating leather straps and dropped them again. “The werglass is useless, Charles. There is no hidden breakthrough.”

  “Then why stay?”

  The Professora hissed. “Charles, look.” She glided back half a pace. “This throne is not meant for proper thaumaturgy. No one in a meditative mudra could sit here. Nor would they need to be strapped in.”

  I got to my feet. “You think—”

  “There are scratches on the armpieces. Small, but present. And the neural tap—” Her stylus drew back, as if fearing contagion.

  I looked where she gestured. Near the top of the throne, where Raisa’s head would have rested, there should have been a werglass knob. Instead, a dull metal spike gleamed with tracings of glass. I shuddered at the sight of it.

  “That is anything but temporary, Charles. I always wondered how the Chiaro even got airborne—it was too big, you’d need dozens of thaumaturges on repeated shifts, not the six plus Raisa that the broadsheets lauded. And with the werglass—that would just make things worse, the thaumaturges would have been aware of the entire damned ship, not just the propulsion. Unless they weren’t kept on shifts. Unless they were irrevocably wired into the machine.”

  I adjusted my eyes to see the scratches better. Heroic sacrifice, Dieterich had said of the pantomime back home. But what worth was a forced sacrifice?

  The scratches on the throne became clearer, as did something else. The tarnish of fifty years’ disuse had been scraped away. “Professora, these scratches—”

  The constant clang of Phidias’s investigations suddenly turned deafening. I spun to see the airtight door opening, a cloud of dust—no, not dust, but smoke—

  I may have lost much that made me human, but my lungs are as weak as any man’s. I fell back, coughing, and only briefly caught a glimpse of Phidias, masked, raising a bent pipe and bringing it down across my temple.

  I woke to pressure across my chest and waist and outright pain at my extremities. My head ached, more from the smoke than the blow, and now my eyes refused to focus on even such a nearby thing as the straps holding my wrists in place. I started to struggle, then froze as a voice made it through the fog in my brain. “…simple enough,” Phidias said. “Cut away the dead weight, and the structure is still good.”

  A dull pain throbbed at the back of my neck, like a bruise but pressing, though I clearly remembered Phidias striking me on the temple. And besides, my hand looked wrong. I tried twitching my fingers. Nothing. And it looked… wizened, somehow. There was a smell in the air, like dried meat, like lizards in the sun....

  Phidias stalked past me, and I froze again, but he paid no attention to me. “Residual energy and pattern transfer did only so much, though. So as I said, I’m very glad you came.”

  The fog in my brain was clearing, enough that I could see that the hand I’d been concentrating on was a left hand, even though it was on my right. The pressure on my neck worsened, as if something were trying to push through my skull. I was hanging—no, not quite suspended, locked into a sitting position, as if I were a harvest effigy in a wicker chair, ready for the bonfire.

  At the far end of the room, the Professora’s tank had been nestled among dozens of werglass lenses on swinging frames—the pilot’s cabin, I thought, then rejected it, because these were in much better condition, unmarked by fire. Phidias moved between us, pacing, checking the panels as if he were beginning an experiment. Not Raisa’s cabin, then, and that was a relief of sorts....

  “There’s no saving her, Fiddy,” the Professora said at last.

  “You don’t know that.” He moved past me again, this time carrying a piece of machinery, too new to be the Chiaro’s. The motivational element from our little airship.

  “I meant the ship,” Lundqvist said tartly. “Raisa’s been dead for decades.”

  “She’s in the glass, Olga. She’s in the glass and I can bring her out.”

  He probably buried what was left, I heard the Professora say in memory, and reflexively jerked away. Leather stretched and tore, and I finally realized whose hand I’d been staring at, why the scratches on the throne in the pilot’s cabin had seemed fresh, what that dry-lizard smell was, and worse, worse—

  I was in another thaumaturge’s throne, the link jammed against the base of my neck. And to either side of me were the other members of Phidias’s salvage team, dead and desiccated, hanging in thrones of their own. The hand beside mine was twisted into a claw, still grasping futilely at the strap that held it in place.

  He hadn’t buried his team. He’d buried the original thaumaturges, and replaced them with his team. Residual energy and pattern transfer.

  I screamed, my voice giving way to the Merged cry I’d first used as a child, grating forth in a howl. At the other end of the chamber—the main thaumaturgy chamber, I realized, the place that had been sealed off—Phidias leapt up from beside the Professora. “What? He should be linked—”

  “Charles is a little different when it comes to these things,” the Professora said, her phonograph barely flattening the relief in her voice.

  That was one way to put it. Phidias must have tried to link me in, as he had with all the members of his team—maybe those who survived the crash, or maybe none had survived,
maybe he had linked them dead—but my Merged physiognomy did not mesh with Society thaumaturgy, the metal woven through my skull did not permit a full link, and I remained unlinked, if mildly concussed.

  I yanked at the straps on my wrists, and decades-old leather began to fray. Where was Dieterich? Struck down the same way? Linked already? The room seemed to lurch as I tore one hand free.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Phidias said. “All I need is you.”

  The Professora’s styli drew back. “Fiddy—”

  “You’re used to it,” he said. “You’ll be fine. And once I carry the glass out of here, I can find a way to bring her out too.” He took hold of the Professora’s upper stylus as if to shake hands, then jammed it into a socket on the console.

  A strangled noise—not a scream, nothing with as much thought behind it, but a horrible chattering cacophony of garbled phonemes—emerged first from her phonograph and then from the walls themselves.

  The strap on my left wrist snapped. A bang echoed my cry, loud as Phidias’s work in the struts. But the Professora’s scream went on, and the pounding continued, till I no longer knew what was in my head and what was real. I tore open the last strap and dropped to the floor, then rolled as the floor changed direction entirely.

  The entire room seemed to pulse in time with the clamor—from the closest wall, I realized, and saw the weathered steel dent inward. I stumbled forward, but Phidias stood between me and the Professora, one hand gently patting her tank as if to encourage a pack animal. “Professora!” I yelled.

  She didn’t answer, or couldn’t. But a rack of lenses swung forward, against the pull of gravity, and struck Phidias first across the jaw, then in the gut as he staggered back. A second lens flailed against him, shattering over his head, and the keening from every wall took on a harsher, furious note.

  The lenses continued to strike as I leapt over Phidias. I wrenched Lundqvist’s stylus from the socket, heedless of the damage I did to both. “Professora Lundqvist!” I shouted, peering at her sensor ring and the brain beyond. But the walls continued to keen, and Lundqvist’s phonograph remained silent.

  The closest wall dented and caved, tearing apart, and the noise cut off abruptly. Fresh air poured in, driving werglass splinters over me and revealing the rest of the Chiaro falling away around us. Chaff and Dieterich peered through the gap, clinging to what was left of the Chiaro’s structure. “Dammit, Charles, I told you we’d be taking off, but I meant in my ship!” Dieterich roared as Chaff tore the rest of the wall free as easily as I might tear paper.

  I was in no mood for wit. “The Professora,” I gasped, dragging her tank along—then stopped dead as I saw the mesa sinking below us. We were already six feet up and rising. “We can’t leave her—”

  Instead of answering me, Chaff leapt onto the Professora, knocking me aside. She pinned the Professora’s tank between her forelegs, as if she were a vessel to be borne, then tumbled back, out of the diminished compartment. Still clinging to the wall, Dieterich reached in and caught my sleeve. “Mind the fall, Charles, and don’t waste time!” he shouted, and leapt into the cloud of dust and splinters that hid Chaff and the Professora from view.

  Phidias moaned behind me, and I glanced back. The werglass still glimmered, but in every panel now, glowing unmistakably. I adjusted my eyes, heedless of Phidias’s presence, only to see a pattern blooming in the glass, fragmented and uncertain but present. But compared to the Professora, even to the machine in my own flesh, it was only a trace, an echo, swallowed up by the horror of the dead in that room.

  Phidias got to his feet, sobbing, reaching out first for the glimmer in the glass and then to the empty throne. “Phidias!” I called.

  He ignored me, clutching the arms of the throne, clinging to the frayed leather as he tried to fit himself where I had been, then throwing his head back—

  I turned and leapt. An unMerged man might have died in such a fall. But I was wholly Merged, wholly myself, with machinery as much a part of me as my brain, and I could trust those reflexes to minimize any damage. That didn’t keep it from hurting, though; I hit the ground, bearings shifting and tendons parting even as I rolled. I came to a halt at last, one ankle badly twisted and my nose and mouth full of gray earth.

  “Charles.” The Professora’s voice, weak but present. I turned to see her, still held by Chaff, her wheels askew and styli dangling useless, but her tank uncracked and marvelous brain unhurt. “Look.”

  I rolled over to see. The great arch of the Chiaro, those green-blue panes gleaming like cabochon gems, rose in a slow curve above the mesa. Below hung truncated fragments of the undercarriage: the pilot’s cabin alone. No, not alone—the ballroom as well, those endless werglass mirrors no doubt reflecting us in miniature. Raisa, Raisa, even the wind follows your steps....

  A gust of wind rattled across the ground, sending debris whirling past us—but above, the toll was greater. One by one at first, then more as the corroded bolts gave way, the bronze plates reduced to paper thinness by time and corrosion trembled. Like petals from some strange tree, they scattered to reveal only rusted mesh below.

  For a fraction of a second, even the air stilled, as if to preserve the Chiaro in place. A breeze reeking of hot tin and broken stone and the horrible mummified scent of the dead salvage team wrapped round us. Then, so slowly it was almost gentle, the Chiaro fell, this time shattering itself against the side of the mesa, crumbling against it till there was nothing left.

  We offered Chaff a lift off the mesa, but she rejected it. “The Path of the Earth should remain on the earth,” she said. “I have already sinned once by leaving it.”

  Though we were all glad she had done so, none of us was up to debating the philosophy of transgression with her. Instead, Dieterich shepherded us back to our little ship and took off, guiding us through what was left of the wind.

  “I followed Chaff at first,” he said finally. “Found the wreck of Phidias’s airship…it hadn’t been shot down at all. No, it looked like they’d tried to take off, only to crash again.” He let out a long breath. “That told me I needed to find you, and I’m just sorry it took so long.”

  “You could tell that just from the crash, sir?” It had looked like any other wreck to me.

  “I’m insulted you even need to ask, Charles.” He was silent a moment, then began patting his pockets, searching for his pipe. The airship lurched, and he stopped. “Lundqvist—”

  “I should be flattered,” she said quietly. “He thought enough of my intellect to let me be the linchpin of his plan to bring Raisa back.” She let out a long sigh—imitated it, I thought, clinging to human mannerisms as if to remind herself what she was. “I should be, but I’m not.”

  “It was an insane plan,” Dieterich grumbled.

  “Perhaps not, depending on which branch of theory you follow,” the Professora said, a little of her didactic nature reasserting itself. “If he were the man I taught, if he remembered anything of my lessons, then he would have linked himself in as a last effort. But that would have lasted just long enough to be part of the ship, to feel it come apart around him. If I wanted revenge, that would be it.”

  I thought of Phidias flinging his head back against the throne, felt the still-raw wound pulse at the back of my neck, and kept silent.

  “And if you didn’t?” Dieterich asked.

  “If I didn’t.” Her phonograph thrummed with another imitation of a sigh. “If I didn’t, I’d remember how it felt to be—be part of all that. Integrated, even imperfectly. I’m still not sure whether I struck him, or whether....” She caught herself, then began again. “I think if he linked, he found more than he expected.”

  “He did,” I said quietly. As had all of us. I put one hand to my forehead, feeling the pressure of lenses behind bone, the glimmer of life in both, the echo of machine in flesh.

  Below us, Chaff continued her trek across the mesa, cutting a new path. I watched her go as we descended, down into the lands far from Parch.

&nbs
p; The job didn’t start well for Cam. Sleepless and strung out, too long since his last high, he was marched into the presence of Duodiseus Gast. The gangster filled an antique wire frame chair, loose flesh sagging through the gaps, dressed only in a stained pair of shorts. The walls around him were lined with obsessively hoarded sketches, paintings, and sculptures. Cam’s eyes fell upon a tiny oil of St. Joachim with the shepherds, and he felt his pulse accelerate, that hollow hungry feeling rising inside.

  “You into icons, Maguire?” Gast asked, fingers drumming against an enormous thigh.

  Cam nodded. There was no point lying to Gast. He probably ran Cam’s suppliers.

  “I thought science soldiers stuck to amphetamines and unhealthy thoughts,” Gast said.

  “I was clean in those days.”

  Cam could feel himself stiffening into a posture of wary defense. Gast’s guards shifted away from the walls, hands reaching inside bulging jackets. The man himself only laughed.

  “Don’t worry, Maguire,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “No one here’s going to judge you. In fact, I have something for you.”

  A serving girl stepped out of the shadows, demure beneath her cloth cap, and held out a silver tray. In the center was a flat block of wood no bigger than Cam’s thumb. The varnish on its surface was old and cracked, but beneath it could be seen a bearded face in archaic oils.

  “St. Peter. One of a series of twelve.”

  Cam picked the icon up from the tray and carried it to a window, examining it in the brief sunlight before a pipe factory approached, plunging him into shadow. A hiss of scraping mortar filled the room as the two buildings pressed past each other.

  “A down payment,” Gast explained over the noise. “The remaining eleven to be paid on delivery.”

  Cam placed the picture in a pocket of his weathered jacket, then looked back at Gast.

  “What’s the job?”

  Gast stopped twiddling his thumbs and gave a small wave. Another servant girl approached. On her tray was a glass cube about eight inches across. Even by the muted light of electric bulbs, it sparkled with rare beauty. Bright points filled its internal space in smooth, flowing lines, etched in the glass as it was formed. They shimmered with fragile elegance, a glowing network that made Cam’s breath catch in his throat. Though abstract they embodied something substantial, a heartfelt joy toward which he might aspire.