Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  He saluted and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We’re reading about you in school,” she said.

  “Sit down, I’ll tell you anything you need to know.”

  She pulled out a chair and sat at his table. Pushing her long brown hair behind her ears, she said, “What about all the killing?”

  “Everybody wants to know about the killing,” he said. “They should ask themselves.”

  “On the Steppes of Patience, how many Harvang did you, yourself, kill?”

  “My internal calculator couldn’t keep up with the slaughter. I’ll just say, ‘Many.’”

  “What was your favorite weapon?” she asked.

  “I’m going to show it to you, right now,” he said, and his face began changing. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and brought forth a small-caliber ray gun wrapped in a white handkerchief. He laid the weapon on the table, the cloth draped over it. “Pick it up,” he said.

  He stared at her and she stared back, and after it was all over, she’d told friends that his blue pupils had begun to spin like pinwheels and his lips rippled. She lifted the gun.

  “Put your finger on the trigger,” he said.

  She did.

  “I want you to aim it right between my eyes and pull the trigger.”

  She took aim with both hands, stretching her arms out across the table.

  “Now!” he yelled, and it startled her.

  She set the gun down, pushed back her chair, and walked away.

  It took the general two weeks before he could find someone he could convince to shoot him, and this was only after he offered payment. The seventh expression meant nothing to the man who’d promised to do the job. What he was after, he said, were the three shrunken Harvang heads the general had kept as souvenirs of certain battles. They’d sell for a fortune on the black market. After the deal was struck, the general asked the man, “Did you see that face I had on a little while ago?”

  “I think I know what you mean,” said the man.

  “How would you describe it?” asked the general.

  The man laughed. “I don’t know. That face? You looked like you might have just crapped your pants. Look, your famous expressions, the pride of an era, no one cares about that stuff anymore. Bring me the heads.”

  The next night, the general hid the illegal shrunken heads beneath an old overcoat and arrived at the appointed hour at an abandoned pier on the south side of town. The wind was high and the water lapped at the edges of the planks. The man soon appeared. The general removed the string of heads from beneath his coat and threw them at the man’s feet.

  “I’ve brought a ray gun for you to use,” said the general, and reached for the weapon in his jacket pocket.

  “I brought my own,” said the man and drew out a magnum-class beam pistol. He took careful aim, and the general noticed that the long barrel of the gun was centered on his own throat and not his forehead.

  In the instant before the man pulled the trigger, the general’s strategy centers realized that the plot was to sever his head and harvest his intelligence node—"The Knot.” He lunged, drill bits whirring. The man fired the weapon and the blast beam disintegrated three-quarters of the general’s neck. The internal command had already been given, though, so with head flopping to the side, the robot general charged forward—one drill bit skewered the heart and the other plunged in at the left ear. The man screamed and dropped the gun, and then the general drilled until he himself dropped. When he hit the dock what was left of his neck snapped and his head came free of his body. It rolled across the planks, perched at the edge for a moment, and then a gust of wind pushed it into the sea.

  The general’s body was salvaged and dismantled, its mechanical wizardry deconstructed. From the electric information stored in the ganglia of the robotic wiring system it was discovered that the general’s initial directive was “To Serve the People.” As for his head, it should be operational for another thousand years, its pupils spinning, its lips rippling without a moment of peace in the cold darkness beneath the waves. There, “The Knot,” no doubt out of a programmed impulse for self-preservation, is confabulating intricate dreams of victory.

  Abraham Stoker’s Journal

  —From the archives of the Bureau of Secret Intelligence, Pall Mall, London, Classified Ultra, for Head of Bureau Eyes Only—

  Bucharest—

  I had finally arrived at this city, with darkness gathering, casting upon the city a most unfavourable appearance. Having checked into my hotel I drank a glass of strong Romanian wine, accompanied by bear steak, which I am told they bring from the mountains at great expense. I had not enquired as for the recipe.

  I am sitting in my room, watching the dance of gas light over the city. Tomorrow I set off for the mountains, and as I write this I am filled with trepidation. I have decided to maintain this record of my mission. In the event anything were to happen to me, this journal may yet make its way, somehow, back to London.

  Let me, therefore, record how I came to be at this barbarous and remote country, and the sorry torturous route by which I came to my current predicament.

  My name is Abraham Stoker, called Abe by some, Bram by others. I am a theatrical manager, having worked for the great actor Henry Irving for many years as his personal assistant, and, on his behalf, as manager of the Lyceum Theatre in Covent Garden.

  I am not a bad man, nor am I a traitor.

  Nevertheless, it was in the summer of 18— that I became an unwitting assistant to a grand conspiracy against our lizardine masters, and one which I was helpless to prevent.

  It had begun as a great triumph for my theatrical career. Due to a fight between the great librettist W. S. Gilbert and his long-time manager, Richard D’Oyly Carte, over—of all things—a carpet, I had managed to lure Gilbert and his collaborator, the composer Arthur Sullivan, to my own theatre from D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy. We were to stage their latest work, titled The Pirates of the Carib Sea, a rousing tale of adventure and peril. The first part, and forgive me if I digress, describes our lizardine masters’ awakening on Caliban’s Island, their journey with that foul explorer Amerigo Vespucci back to the British isle, their overthrowing of our human rulers and their assumption of the throne—a historical tale set to song in the manner only G&S could possibly do it.

  In the second part, we encounter the mythical pirate Wyvern, the oneeyed royal lizard who—if the stories in the London Illustrated News can be believed—had abandoned his responsibilities to his race, the royal Les Lezards, to assume the life of a blood-thirsty pirate operating in the Carib Sea, between Vespuccia and the lands of the Mexica and Aztecs, and preying on the very trade ships of his own Everlasting Empire, under her royal highness Queen Victoria, the lizard-queen.

  Irving himself played—with great success, I might add!—the notorious pirate, assuming a lizard costume of some magnificence, while young Beerbohm Tree played his boatswain, Mr. Spoons, the bald, scarred, enormous human who is—so they say—Wyvern’s right-handman.

  It was at that time that a man came to see me in my office. He was a foreigner, and did not look wealthy or, indeed, distinguished.

  “My name,” he told me, “is Karl May.”

  “A German?” I said, and he nodded. “I represent certain…interests in Germany,” he told me. “A very powerful man wishes to attend the opening night of your new show.”

  “Then I shall be glad to sell him a ticket,” I said, regarding the man— clearly a conman or low-life criminal of some sort—with distaste. “You may make the arrangements at the box office. Good day to you, sir.”

  Yet this May, if that was even his real name, did not move. Instead, leaving me speechless, he closed and then locked the door to my office, from the inside, leaving me stranded in there with him. Before I could rise the man pulled out a weapon, an ornate handgun of enormous size, which he proceeded to wave threateningly.

  “This man,” he said, “is a very public man. Much attention is paid to his every m
ove. Moreover, to compound our—” our, he said!—“problem, this man must meet another very public man, and the two cannot be seen to have ever met or discussed…whatever it is they need to discuss.”

  This talk of men meeting men in secret reminded me of my friend Oscar Wilde, whom I had known in my student days in Dublin and who had once been the suitor of my wife, Florence. “I do not see how I can help you,” I said, stiffly—for it does not do to show fear before a foreigner, albeit one with a gun in his hand.

  “Oh, but you can!” this Karl May said to me. “And moreover, you will be amply compensated for your efforts—” and with that, to my amazement, this seeming charlatan pulled out a small, yet heavy-looking bag, and threw it on my desk. I reached for it, drawing the string, and out poured a heap of gold coins, all bearing the portrait—rather than of our own dear lizard-queen—of the rather more foreboding one of the German Kaiser.

  “Plenty more where that came from,” said this fellow, with a smirk on his face.

  I did not move to touch the money. “What would you have me do?” I said.

  “The theatre,” he said, “is like life. We look at the stage and are spell-bound by it, the scenery convinces us of its reality, the players move and speak their parts and, when it’s done, we leave. And yet, what happens to make the stage, to move its players, is not done in the limelight. It is done behind the scenes.”

  “Yes?” I said, growing ever more irritated with the man’s manner. “You wish to teach me my job, perhaps?”

  “My dear fellow!” he said, with a laugh. “Far from it. I merely wished to illustrate a point—”

  “Then get to it, for my time is short,” I said, and at that his smile dropped and the gun pointed straight at my heart and he cocked it. “Your time,” he said, in a soft, menacing voice, “could be made to be even shorter.”

  I must admit that, at that, my knees may have shaken a little. I am not a violent man, and am not used to the vile things desperate men are prepared to do. I therefore sat back down in my chair, and let him explain and, when he had finished, I have to admit I felt a sigh of relief escape me, for it did not seem at all such a dreadful proposition and they were willing to compensate me generously besides.

  “You may as well know,” Karl May said to me, “the name of the person I represent. It is Alfred Krupp.”

  “The industrialist?”

  May nodded solemnly. “But what,” I gasped, “could he be wanting in my theatre?”

  For I have heard of Krupp, of course, the undisputed king of the armaments trade, the creator of the monstrous canon they called Krupp’s Baby, which was said to be able to shoot its payload all the way beyond the atmosphere and into space…a recluse, a genius, a man with his own army, a man with no title and yet one which, it was rumoured, was virtually the ruler of all Germany…

  A man who had not been seen for many a year, in public.

  “Fool,” Karl May said. “My lord Krupp has no interest in your pitiful theatre, nor in the singing and dancing of effeminate Englishmen.”

  “I am Irish, if you don’t mind,” I said. “There really is no need to be so rude—” and May laughed. “Rest your mind at ease, Irishman” he said. “My master wishes only to meet certain…interested parties. Behind, as it were, the scenes.”

  “Which parties?” I said. “For surely I would need to know in order to prepare—”

  “All in good time!” Karl May said. “All in good time.”

  Buşteni—

  This is a small mountain village near to my destination. I had taken the train this morning with no difficulty, yet was told the track terminated before my destination, which is the city of Braşov, nestled, so I am told, in a beautiful valley within the Carpathian Mountains.

  This region is called Transylvania, and a wild and remote land it is indeed. The train journey lasted some hours, in relative comfort, the train filled with dour Romanian peasants, shifty-looking gypsies, Székelys and Magyars and all other manner of the strange people of this region. Also on board the train were chickens, with their legs tied together to prevent their escaping, and sacks of potatoes and other produce, and children, and a goat. Also on board the train were army officers of the Austro-Hungarian empire of which this was but a remote and rather dismal outpost, with nary a pastry or decent cup of coffee to be seen.

  I had wondered at the transportation of such military personnel, and noticed them looking rather sharply in my direction. Nevertheless I was not disturbed and was in fact regarded with respect the couple of times we had occasion to cross each other in passing.

  The train’s passage was impressive to me, the mountains at first looming overhead, then—as the train rose up from the plains on which sat Bucharest— they rose on either side of the tracks, and it felt as though we were entering another world, of dark forests and unexplored lands, and I fancied I heard, if only in the distance, the howl of wolves, sending a delicious shiver down my spine.

  But you did not ask me for a travel guide! Let me be brief. The train terminated, after some hours, at a station in the middle of a field. It was a most curious thing. I could see the tracks leading onwards—presumably to Braşov— but we could not go on. The train halted within these hastily erected buildings, lit by weak gas lamps planted in the dirt, and all—peasants and chickens and soldiers and gypsies and goat—disembarked, including this Irishman.

  At this nameless station waited coaches and carts—the peasants and local people to the carts, the soldiers and more well-to-do visitors to the coaches. I stood there in some bewilderment, when I was taken aside by the military officer who seemed to be in charge of that platoon. “You are going—there?” he said, and motioned with his head towards the distance, where I assumed this Braşov lay.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “To visit…him?”

  I nodded at that, feeling a pang of apprehension at the thought.

  The officer nodded as if that had settled matters, and shouted orders in the barbarous tongue of his people. Almost immediately a coach had been found for me, its passengers emptied out, and I was placed with all due reverence into the empty compartment. “You will go to Buşteni this night,” the officer said, “it is too late now to go further.” Again he spoke to the driver, who gave me a sour look but daren’t refuse, and so we took off in a hurry, the horses running down a narrow mountain path that led upwards, and at last to a small village, or what passes for a town in these parts, which was indeed called Buşteni, or something like it, and had beautiful wooden houses, a church, and a small inn, where I had aligned and where I am currently sat, writing this to you, while dining on a rather acceptable goulash.

  I do not wish to labour details of what took place following that scoundrel Karl May’s visit to my office at the Lyceum. You know as well as I what had happened, you had suspected long before you had approached me, three months ago, in order to recruit me to this desperate mission.

  The facts are as they stand. To an outside eye, nothing had happened but that Herr Krupp, on a rare visit to England, went, one night, to the theatre— and so did any number of other personages, including, if I remember rightly, yourself, Mr. Holmes.

  The Queen herself was there, in the Royal Box, stately as ever, with her forked tongue hissing out every so often, to snap a fly out of the air. I remember the prince regent did not come but Victoria’s favourite, that dashing Harry Flashman, the popular Hero of Jalalabad, was beside her. So were many foreign dignitaries and many of the city’s leading figures, from our now-Prime-Minister Mrs. Beeton, my friend and former rival Oscar Wilde, the famed scientists Jekyll and Moreau (before the one’s suspicious death and the other’s exile to the South Seas), the Lord Byron automaton (always a gentleman), Rudolf Rassendyll of Zenda, and many, many others. Your brother, the consulting detective, was there, if I recall rightly, Mr. Holmes.

  It was a packed night—sold out, in fact, and I had been kept off my feet, running hither and yon, trying to ensure our success, and all the while…<
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  All the while, behind the scenes, things were afoot.

  I was aware of movement, of strangers coming and going in silence, of that German villain Karl May (I had found out much later the man was not only a convicted criminal but worse, a dime novel hack) following me like a shadow, of a tense anticipation that had nothing to do with the play.

  There are secret passageways inside every theatre, and the Lyceum is no exception. It has basements and sub-basements, a crypt (from when it was a church), narrow passageways, false doors, shifting scenery—it is a theatre, Mr. Holmes!

  It was a game of boxes, Mr. Holmes. As I told you when you found me, three months ago, listening to me as if you already knew. How Herr Krupp appeared to be in the box when in fact it was a cut-out in the shadows; how he went through the false wall and into the passageway between the walls, and down, to the crypt, now our props room.

  And the others.

  For I had been unfortunate enough to see them.

  Buşteni—

  A letter had arrived for me in the morning. A dark baruch-landau had stopped outside the inn, a great hulking machine, steam-driven, the stoker standing behind while the driver sat in front, in between their respective positions a wide carriage for the transport of passengers or cargo.

  The driver had disembarked—I watched him from my window—and what a curious being he was!

  I had seen his like before, though seldom enough. Like the vehicle he was driving, he was huge, a mountain of a man, and a shiver of apprehension ran down my spine.

  He would have been human, once upon a time.

  “What are they?” I had asked Karl May. The play was going on above our heads, but I could not concentrate, I was filled with a terrible tension as we prepared for the summit—as May called it—down below, in the bowels of the theatre. The they I was referring to were beings of a similar size and disposition to the driver now sitting in the inn’s dining room, awaiting my pleasure.