Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  Ying and the Lee family were clustered underneath as a rope ladder was lowered toward them.

  “Bells!” the boy hollered, waving frantically. We ran to join them.

  “Captain!” came a shout from above. A young woman—a girl, really—was perched dangerously on the edge of the ship, an ankle hooked around one of the ropes anchoring the ship’s balloon to its wooden frame as she lowered our salvation. “The cannons are running low on charge—hurry!”

  Bells tapped everybody on the head in turn. “I grant you all asylum on board the Discordia,” he said perfunctorily.

  “Now come on!” and he started ascending the rope ladder.

  The deck of the Discordia seemed to be engulfed in chaos, but perhaps that was the fault of the mad wind, the powerful back draft created by the airship’s giant thrusting propellers blasting higher off from the ground. The ladder-girl leapt off the ship’s edge and landed securely on deck.

  “I’m going below in case we get followed,” she said, before she vanished down a hatch in a flourish of linen and leather.

  The first mate stood straight as a rod at his station, hands firmly on the wheel as he kept the ship steady. His glance toward Ying and me was narroweyed and squinty. I could not tell if it was due to suspicion or the wind that was cutting into everything, making it hard to speak or listen or think. Bells clapped his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Come on, Howie, let us get away from this blasted place.”

  The first mate nodded. “Engines at maximum, captain!” he shouted over the commotion. “Everybody hold on to something.”

  Behind us the main rotor kicked into action with a massive roar. Howie spun the wheel and the ship swung away from the ground in a huge, sweeping arc.

  Bells ran toward the ship’s prow. “Sarah may need help with the cannons,” he hollered, gesturing in the direction of the hatch the ladder-girl had vanished through.

  “I’ll go,” Ying said, and she too vanished into the darkness of the hold.

  Bells jumped up onto the prow, seized one of the ropes, and leaned forward as far as he could. I joined him and looked downward. The ground was rapidly receding into darkness, swallowed whole by the night. A report from the ship’s electrical cannons threw the ground below into sharp white light and shadow, revealing the slow tiny dots that were the Imperial Guard marching out from the Palace. Firing batteries smoked on the hillside, having been reduced to smoldering ash by Discordia’s cannons.

  “It does not appear that we are being pursued,” I said.

  “Mmm,” Bells mused. “It must be chaos down there, Lord Louis being temporarily incapacitated and all.”

  I considered him as he stood on the prow of his ship.

  He should have been triumphant yet all I sensed from him was an air of calm contemplation.

  “Lord Louis called you James,” I said.

  “Did he, now?”

  “Is that your real name?”

  “Real or not, what does it matter? It is not the name I go by these days.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I suspected this. You are a royal, are you not?”

  Bells rubbed his chin. “I suppose I must have been,” he said playfully. “But that was such a long time ago, another lifetime.”

  I nodded. That explained a great deal about him to me, even as it explained nothing.

  Our eyes met and an indefinable warmth passed between us. Then Bells leaned forward as if to kiss me. I held up a hand to stop him. “I apologize if I have given you the wrong impression,” I said. “But I am not interested in pursuing a romantic relationship. I have everything I want in Ying.”

  He laughed, unperturbed by this. “It was worth a try at least.” Then he sighed, taking one of his signature turns in conversation. “I broke William’s neck in all the excitement. I will have to make myself a new instrument.” He leapt off the prow of the ship and landed on the deck.

  “Where do we go now?” I asked after him, looking out at the horizon. Clear of clouds, the sky was filled with stars from one end of the horizon to the other. I imagined I could see the shapes of the Riau Islands in the distance. I had not been home in so long.

  Bells looked thoughtful. “We’ll have to lie low for a while, I suppose. There are some friendly ports in Indochina that may be willing to shelter us. A time to catch up with old friends and make new ones!”

  He seemed cheered by the prospect. Then he winked.

  “Fret not; we will be back soon enough.”

  The hatch opened in the deck and Ying and the ladder-girl emerged. Sarah, Bells had said her name was. Ying gazed at our surroundings, taking in the sudden calm filled with the deep hum of Discordia’s engines. I went to her side.

  “Are you feeling all right?” I asked, slipping a hand around her waist.

  “I’ve never felt better,” she said with a smile and leaned her head against my shoulder.

  I took a first look at our sudden and unexpected new home: across the deck of the ship sprawled large crates, discarded bicycle parts, stacked rolls of engineering plans, and contraptions of metal gearing. The first mate was shouting instructions to members of the Lee family, who evidently had some familiarity with the ship. The young man ran down a flight of steps, flung open a door, and yelled something into the engine room. The two Lee children were already running across the deck, shrieking and chasing each other, clearly enjoying their newfound freedom. It was chaos, pure and wonderful.

  Bells leaned against a long, tall crate and grinned.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sovereign State of Discordia.”

  In his later years, when he spoke, a faint whirring came from his lower jaw. His mouth opened and closed rhythmically, accurately, displaying a full set of human teeth gleaned from fallen comrades and the stitched tube of plush leather that was his tongue. The metal mustache and eyebrows were ridiculously fake, but the eyes were the most beautiful glass facsimiles, creamy white with irises like dark blue flowers. Instead of hair, his scalp was sandpaper.

  He wore his uniform still, even the peaked cap with the old emblem of the Galaxy Corps embroidered in gold. He creaked when he walked, piston compressions and the click of a warped flywheel whispering within his trousers. Alternating current droned from a faulty fuse in his solar plexus, and occasionally, mostly on wet days, sparks wreathed his head like a halo of bright gnats. He smoked a pipe, and before turning each page of a newspaper, he’d bring his chrome index finger to his dry rubber slit of a mouth as if he were moistening its tip.

  His countenance, made of an astounding, pliable, nonflammable, blast-beam resistant, self-healing, rubber alloy, was supposedly sculpted in homage to the dashing looks of Rendel Sassoon, star of the acclaimed film epic, For God and Country. Not everyone saw the likeness, and Sassoon himself, a devout pacifist who was well along in years when the general took his first steps out of the laboratory, sued for defamation of character. But once the video started coming back from the front, visions of slaughter more powerful than any celluloid fantasy, mutilated Harvang corpses stacked to the sky, the old actor donned a flag pin on his lapel and did a series of war-bond television commercials of which the most prominent feature was his nervous smile.

  It’s a sad fact that currently most young people aren’t aware of the historic incidents that led to our war with the Harvang and the necessity of the Robot General. They couldn’t tell you a thing about our early discoveries of atmosphere and biological life on our planet’s sizeable satellite, or about the initial fleet that went to lay claim to it. Our discovery of the existence of the Harvang was perhaps the most astonishing news in the history of humanity. They protested our explorations as an invasion, even though we offered technological and moral advancements. A confluence of intersecting events led to an unavoidable massacre of an entire village of the brutes, which in turn led to a massacre of our expeditionary force. They used our ships to invade us, landing here in Snow Country and in the swamps south of Central City.

  It was said about his time on
the battlefield that if the general were human he’d have been labeled “merciless,” but, as it was, his robot nature mitigated this assessment instead to that he was simply “without mercy.” At the edge of a pitched battle he’d set up a folding chair and sit down to watch the action, pipe in hand and a thermos of thick, black oil nearby. He’d yell through a bull-horn, strategic orders interspersed with exhortations of “Onward, you sacks of blood!” Should his troops lose the upper hand in the melee, the general would stand, set his pipe and drink on the ground next to his chair, remove his leather jacket, hand it to his assistant, roll up his sleeves, cock his hat back, and dash onto the battlefield, running at top robot speed.

  Historians, engineers, and AI researchers of more recent years have been nonplused as to why the general’s creators gave him such limited and primitive battle enhancements. There were rays and particle beams at that point in history and they could have outfitted him like a tank, but their art required subtlety. Barbed, spinning drill bits whirled out from the center of his knuckles on each hand. At the first hint of danger, razor blades protruded from the toes of his boots. He also belched poison, feathered darts from his open mouth, but his most spectacular device was a rocket built into his hindquarters that when activated shot a blast of fire that made him airborne for ten seconds.

  It was supposedly a sight the Harvang dreaded, to see him land behind their lines, knuckle spikes whirling, belching death, trousers smoldering. They had a name for him in Harvang, Kokulafugok, which roughly translated as “Fire in the Hole.” He’d leave a trail of carnage through their ranks, only stopping briefly to remove the hair tangling his drill bits.

  His movements were graceful and precise. He could calculate ahead of his opponent, dodge blast beams, bend backward, touch his head upon the ground to avoid a spray of shrapnel, and then spring back up into a razor-toed kick, lopping off a Harvang’s sex and drilling him through the throat. Never tiring, always perfectly balanced and accurate, his intuition was dictated by a random number generator.

  He killed like a force of nature, an extension of the universe. Hacked by axe blades or shot with arrows to his head, when his business was done, he’d retire to his tent and send for one of the Harvang females. The screams of his prisoner echoed through the camp and were more frightening to his troops than combat. On the following morning he would emerge, his dents completely healed, and give orders to have the carcass removed from his quarters.

  During the war, he was popular with the people back home. They admired his hand-to-hand combat, his antique nature, his unwillingness to care about the reasons for war. He was voted the celebrity most men would want to have a beer with and most women would desire for a brief sexual liaison. When informed as to the results of this poll, his only response was “But are they ready to die for me?”

  Everywhere, in the schools, the post offices, the public libraries, there were posters of him in battle-action poses amid a pile of dead or dying Harvang that read: Let’s Drill Out A Victory! The Corps was constantly transporting him from the front lines of Snow Country or the Moon back to Central City in order to make appearances supporting the war. His speeches invariably contained this line: The Harvang are a filthy species. At the end of his talks, his face would turn the colors of the flag and there were few who refused to salute. Occasionally, he’d blast off the podium and dive headlong into the crowd, which would catch his falling body and, hand over hand, return him to the stage.

  In his final campaign, he was blown to pieces by a blast from a beam cannon the Harvang had stolen from his arsenal. An entire regiment of ours was ambushed in Snow Country between the steep walls of an enormous glacier—the Battle of the Ice Chute. His strategies were impossibly complex but all inexorably led to a frontal assault, a stirring charge straight into the mouth of Death. It was a common belief among his troops that who’d ever initially programmed him had never been to war. Only after his defeat did the experts claim his tactics were daft, riddled with hubris spawned by faulty AI. His case became, for a time, a thread of the damning argument that artificial intelligence, merely the human impression of intelligence, was, in reality, artificial ignorance. It was then that robot production moved decidedly toward the organic.

  After the Harvang had been routed by reinforcements, and the Corps eventually began burying the remains of those who’d perished in the battle for Snow Country, the general’s head was discovered amid the frozen carnage. When the soldier who found it lifted it up from beneath the stiffened trunk of a human body, the eyes opened, the jaw moved, and the weak, crackling command of “Kill them all!” sputtered forth.

  The Corps decided to rebuild him as a museum piece for public-relations purposes, but the budget was limited. Most of his parts, discovered strewn across the battlefield, could be salvaged and a few new ones were fashioned from cheaper materials to replace what was missing. Still, those who rebuilt the general were not the craftsmen his creators were—techniques had been lost to time. There was no longer the patience in robot design for aping the human. A few sectors of his artificial brain had been damaged, but there wasn’t a technician alive who could repair his intelligence node, a ball of wiring so complex its design had been dubbed “The Knot.”

  The Corps used him for fund-raising events and rode him around in an open car at veterans’ parades. The only group that ever paid attention to him, though, was the parents of the sons and daughters who’d died under his command. As it turned out, there were thousands of them. Along a parade route they’d pelt him with old fruit and dog shit, to which he’d calmly warn, “Incoming.”

  It didn’t take the Corps long to realize he was a liability, but because he possessed consciousness, though it be man-made, the law disallowed his being simply turned off. Instead, he was retired and set up in a nice apartment at the center of a small town, where he drew his sizeable pension and history of combat bonus.

  An inauspicious ending to a historic career, but in the beginning, at the general’s creation, when the Harvang had invaded in the south and were only miles outside Central City, he was a promising savior. His artificial intelligence was considered a miracle of Science, his construction, the greatest engineering feat of the human race. And the standard by which all this was judged was the fact that his face could make seven different expressions. Everyone agreed it was proof of the robot builder’s exemplary art. Before the general, the most that had ever been attempted was three.

  The first six of these expressions were slight variations on the theme of “determination.” Righteousness, Willfulness, Obstinacy, Eagerness, Grimness 1 and 2 were the terms his makers had given them. The facial formation of the six had a lot to do with the area around the mouth, subtly different clenchings of the jaw, a straightness in the lips. The eyes were widened for all six, the nostrils flared. For Grimness 2, steam shot from his ears.

  When he wasn’t at war, he switched between Righteousness and Obstinacy. He’d lost Eagerness to a Harvang blade. It was at the Battle of Boolang Crater that the general was cut across the cheek, all the way through to his internal mechanism. After two days of leaking oil through the side of his face, the outer wound healed, but the wiring that caused the fourth expression had been irreparably severed.

  There is speculation, based primarily on hearsay, that there was also an eighth expression, one that had not been built into him but that had manifested of its own accord through the self-advancement of the AI. Scientists claimed it highly unlikely, but Ms. Jeranda Blesh claimed she’d seen it. During a three-month leave, his only respite in the entire war, she’d lived with him in a chalet in the Grintun Mountains. A few years before she died of a Harvang venereal disease, she appeared on a late-night television talk show. She was pale and bloated, giddy with alcohol, but she divulged the secrets of her sex life with the general.

  She mentioned the smooth chrome member with fins, the spicy oil, the relentless precision of his pistons. “Sometimes, right when things were about to explode,” she said, “he’d m
ake a face I’d never seen any other times. It wasn’t a smile, but more like calm, a moment of peace. It wouldn’t last long, though, cause then he’d lose control of everything, shoot a rocket blast out his backside and fly off me into the wall.” The host of the show straightened his tie and said, “That’s what I call ‘drilling out a victory.’”

  It was the seventh expression that was the general’s secret, though. That certain configuration of his face reserved for combat. It was the reason he was not tricked out with guns or rockets. The general was an excellent killing machine, but how many could he kill alone? Only when he had armies ready to move at his will could he defeat the Harvang. The seventh expression was a look that enchanted his young troops and made them savage extensions of his determination. Outmanned, outgunned, outmaneuvered, outflanked, it didn’t matter. One glance from him, and they’d charge, beam rifles blazing, to their inevitable deaths. They’d line up in ranks before a battle and he’d review the troops, focusing that imposing stare on each soldier. It was rare that a young recruit would be unaffected by the seventh expression’s powerful suggestion, understand that the mission at hand was sheer madness, and protest. The general had no time for deserters. With lightening quickness, he’d draw his beam pistol and burn a sudden hole in the complainant’s forehead.

  In an old government document, “A Report to the Committee on Oblique Renderings Z-333-678AR,” released since the Harvang war, there was testimony from the general’s creators to the fact that the seventh expression was a blend of the look of a hungry child, the gaze of an angry bull, and the stern countenance of God. The report records that the creators were questioned as to how they came up with the countenance of God, and their famous response was “We used a mirror.”

  There was a single instance when the general employed the seventh expression after the war. It was only a few years ago, the day after it was announced that we would negotiate a treaty with the Harvang and attempt to live in peace and prosperity. He left his apartment and hobbled across the street to the coffee shop on the corner. Once there, he ordered a twenty-four-ounce Magjypt black, and sat in the corner, pretending to read the newspaper. Eventually, a girl of sixteen approached him and asked if he was the robot general.