by Jeffrey Ford
Millicent interrupted Harrin’s tale and excused us. She took me by the arm and led me back into her office. She told her patient she would return in a moment and then shut the door. In a whisper, she said, “The green liquid initiating from the ear is the boundary between imagination and memory. The disease melts it, and even though you survive the fevers you can no longer distinguish between what has happened and what you have dreamed has happened or could have happened or should have. The Republic is going insane.”
I was speechless. She led me to the opposite door and out into the corridor. Before I left, she kissed me. In light of what I’d been told, the touch of her lips barely startled me. It took me the rest of the day to recover from that meeting. I canceled all of my appointments, locked myself in my office with a bottle of Fresnac, and tried to digest that feast of secrets.
I never really got beyond my first question: Why had Millicent told me? An act of love? A professional duty? Perhaps the Republic actually wanted me to know this information, since I am a physician, but they couldn’t officially announce it.
My first reaction was to flee the city, escape to where the cloud carriages rarely ventured, where the simply mechanical was still in full gear. But there were the patients, and I was a doctor. So I stayed in the city, ostensibly achieving nothing of medical value. Like my administration of the Margold, my decision to remain was more for me than any patient.
The plague spread and imagination bled into memory, which bled into imagination—hallucinations on the street, citizens locked in furious argument with themselves all over town, and the tales people told in response to the simplest questions were complex knots of wish fulfillment and nightmare. Then the Air Ferry driver remembered that to fly the giant vessel he was to ignore the list of posted protocols and flip buttons and depress levers at a whim. When the graceful, looming behemoth crashed in a fiery explosion into the city’s well-to-do section, wiping out a full third of the Republic’s politicos, not to mention a few hundred other citizens, I knew the end had come.
Many of those who had not yet lost their reason fled into the country and from what I’d heard formed small enclaves that kept all strangers at bay. For my part, I stayed with the sinking ship of state. Still tracking down and doing nothing for those few patients suffering from the onset symptoms of the disease.
Scores of workers remembered that their daily job was something other than what it had been in reality and set forth each day to meddle, renowned experts in delusion. Steam carriages crashed, a dozen a day, into storefronts, pedestrians, each other. A fellow, believing himself one of the gleaming characters at the Hot Air Opera, rushed up onstage and was cut to ribbons by the twirling metal edges of his new brethren. There was an accident in one of the factories on the eastern edge of town—an explosion—and then thick black smoke billowed out of its three stacks, blanketing the city in twilight at midday. The police, not quite knowing what to do, and some in their number as deranged as the deranged citizenry, resorted to violence. Shootings had drastically risen.
The gas of the streetlamps ran low and the city at night was profoundly black with a rare oasis of flickering light. I was scurrying along through the shadows back to my office from a critical case of fever—an old man on the verge of death who elicited a shot of Margold from me. As I’d administered it, his wife went on about a vacation they’d recently taken on a floating island powered by steam. I’d inquired if she’d had the fever and she stopped in her tale for a moment to nod.
I shivered again, thinking of her, and at that moment rounded a corner and nearly walked into Millicent. She seemed to have just been standing there, staring. The instant I realized it was her, a warmth spread quickly through me. It was I this time who initiated the kiss. She said my name and put her arms around me. This was why I’d stayed in the city.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked her.
“They’re after me, Lash,” she said. “Everybody even remotely involved with the government is being hunted down. There’s something in the collective imagination of those struck by the disease that makes them remember that the Republic is responsible for their low wages and grinding lives.”
“How many are after you?” I asked and looked quickly over my shoulder.
“All of them,” she said, covering her face with her hand. “I can tell you’ve not yet succumbed to the plague because you are not now wrapping your fingers around my throat. They caught the Quotidian of Health Care today and hanged him on the spot. I witnessed it as I fled.”
“Come with me. You can hide at my place,” I said. I walked with my arm around her and could feel her trembling.
At my quarters, I bled the radiators and made us tea. We sat at the table in my parlor. “We’re going to have to get out of the city,” I said. “In a little while, we’ll go out on the street and steal a steam carriage. Escape to the country. I’m sure they need doctors out among the sane.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said and covered my hand, resting on the table with her own.
“There’s no reason left here,” I said.
“I meant to remember to tell you this,” she said, taking a sip of tea. “About a week ago, I was summoned out one night on official business of the Republic. My superior sent me word that I was to go to a certain address and treat, using all my skill and by any means necessary, the woman of the house. The note led me to believe that this individual’s well-being was of the utmost importance to the Republic.”
“The president’s wife?” I asked.
“No, the address was down on the waterfront. A bad area and yet they offered me no escort. I was wary of everything that moved and made a noise. Situated in the middle of a street of grimy drinking establishments and houses of prostitution, I found the place. The structure had at one time been a bank. You could tell by the marble columns out front. There were cracks in its dome and weeds poked through everywhere, but there was a light on inside.
“I knocked on the door and it was answered by a young man in a security uniform, cap, badge, pistol at his side. I gave my name and my business. He showed me inside, and pointed down a hallway whose floor, ceiling, and walls were carpeted—a tunnel through a mandala design of flowers on a red background. Dizzy from it, I stepped into a large room where I saw a woman sitting on a divan. She wore a low-cut blue gown and had a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. Her hair was dark and abundant but disheveled. I introduced myself, and she told me to take a seat in a chair near her. I did. She chewed the tip of tortoiseshell for a brief period, and then said, ‘Let me introduce myself. I’m the Prisoner Queen.’ ”
My heart dropped at her words. I wanted to look in Millicent’s eyes to see if I could discern whether she’d contracted the plague in recent days and survived to now be mad, but I didn’t have the courage.
Although I tried to disguise my reaction, she must have felt me tremble slightly, because she immediately said, “Lash, believe me, I know how odd this sounds. I fully expected you not to believe me, but this really happened.” Only then did I look into her face, and she smiled.
“I believe you,” I said, “go on. I want to hear the rest.”
“What it came to,” said Millicent, “was she’d summoned me, not for any illness but to tell me what was about to happen.”
“Why you?” I asked.
“She said she admired earnest people. The Prisoner Queen told me that what we have been considering the most terrible part of the disease, the blending of memory and the imagination, is a good thing. ‘A force of nature,’ was how she put it. There’s disorganization and mayhem now, but apparently the new reality will take hold and the process will be repeated over centuries.”
“Interesting,” I said and slowly slid my hand out from under hers. “You know,” I said, rising, “I have to get a newspaper and read up on what’s been happening. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right back.” She nodded and took another sip of tea, appearing relaxed for the first time since I’d run into her.
The carriage was still there where I’d seen it, and I immediately set to starting it, lighting the pilot, pumping the lever next to the driver’s seat, igniting the gas to heat the tank of water. All of the gauges read near full, and when the thing actually started up after a fit of coughing that sounded like the bronchitis of the aged, I laughed even though my heart was broken.
I stopped for nothing but kept my foot on the pedal until I’d passed out beyond the city limits. The top was down and I could see the stars and the silhouettes of trees on either side of the road. In struggling to banish the image of Millicent from my mind, I hadn’t at first noticed a cloud of steam issuing from under the hood. I realized the carriage’s collision with the lamp must have cracked the tank or loosened a valve. I drove on, the steam wafting back over the windshield, enveloping my view.
The constant misty shower made me hot. I began to sweat, but I didn’t want to stop, knowing I might not get the carriage moving again. Some miles later, I began to get dizzy, and images flashed through my thoughts like lightning—a stone castle, an island, a garden of poisonous flowers spewing seed. “I’ve got to get out of the steam,” I said aloud to try to revive myself.
“The steam’s not going anywhere,” said the Prisoner Queen from the passenger seat. Her voluminous hair was neatly put up in an ornate headdress and her gown was decorated with gold thread. “Steam’s the new dream,” she said. “Right now I’m inventing a steam-powered space submarine to travel to the stars, a radiator brain whose exhaust is laughing gas, a steam pig that feeds a family of four for two weeks.” She slipped a hand behind my head, and after taking a toke from the tip of the tortoise shell, she leaned over, put her mouth to mine, and showed me the new reality.
A Note About “Dr. Lash Remembers”
I wrote this story for Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded anthology for Tachyon. Whenever I write a steampunk story, some reviewer, even if they like the story, inevitably mentions that it’s not really steampunk. Normal steampunk to me seems like a pretty musty genre. When I think of it, the image of a room crammed with old furniture comes to mind. Most stories in this subgenre focus on the anachronistic/futuristic technology. My steampunk stories are steampunk, whether the reviewers know it or not, it’s just that I’m focusing on the steam, not the junk that it animates. Steam is the new dream, baby. Actually, the Prisoner Queen appeared in a sequence of three dreams I had over a period of as many nights, and she definitely endorses the steam angle.
Daddy Longlegs of the Evening
It was said that when he was a small child, asleep in his bed one end-of-summer night, a spider crawled into his ear, traversed a maze of canals, eating slowly through membrane and organ, to discover the cavern of the skull. Then that spider burrowed in a spiral pattern through the electric gray cake of the brain, to the very center of it all, where it hollowed out a large nest for itself and reattached neural pathways with the thread of its web. It played the boy like a zither, plucking the silver strings of its own design, creating a music that directed both will and desire.
Before the invasion of his cranium, the child was said to have been quite a little cherub—big green eyes and a wave of golden hair, rosy cheeks, an infectious laugh. His parents couldn’t help showing him off at every opportunity and regaling passersby with a litany of his startling attributes, not the least of which was the ability to recite verbatim the bedtime stories read to him each night. Many a neighbor had been subjected to an oration of the entirety of “The Three Rum Runtkins.”
A change inside wrought a change outside, though, and, over the course of a few months, the boy’s eyes bulged and drained of all color, to become million-faceted buds of gleaming onyx. His legs and arms grew long and willowy, but his body stayed short with a small but pronounced potbelly, like an Adam’s apple in the otherwise slender throat that was his form. Although a fine down of thistle grew in patches across his back, arms, and thighs, he went bald, losing even brows and lashes. His flesh turned a pale gray, hinting at violet; his incisors grew to curving points and needed to be clipped and filed back like fingernails.
Horrified at the earliest of these changes, the boy’s parents had taken him, first, to the doctor’s, but when the medicine he was given did nothing but make him vomit and the symptoms became more bizarre, they took him to the clinic. The doctors there subjected him to a head scan. Photos from the process showed the intruder in negative, a tiny eight-legged phantom perched at the center of a dark, intricate web. It was determined that were they to remove the arachnid the boy could very possibly die. The creature had, for all intent and purpose, become his brain. The parents, confessing they feared for their lives, pleaded with the physicians to operate, but the ethical code forbade it and the family was sent home.
Not long after the trip to the clinic, the boy’s mother opened his bedroom door one morning and beheld him suspended in the eye of a silver web that filled the room from floor to ceiling. She meant to scream but the beautiful gleaming symmetry of what he’d made stunned her. She watched as he turned slowly round to face away, and then from a neat hole cut in the back of his trousers that she’d never noticed before came a sudden blast of webbing that smacked her in the face and covered half her body. The door slammed shut as she reeled backward, and this time she did scream, tearing madly at the shroud whose sticky threads seemed spun from marshmallow.
Unable to bear the boy’s presence any longer, his parents took him for a hike out into the forest. “I know a place where there are flies as big as poodles,” his father said and the boy drooled. They took him deep into the trees, marking the trail as they went, and somewhere miles in, next to a lake, they bedded down on pine needles. While he slept, they quietly rose, tiptoed away, and then once out of earshot, ran for their lives. They never saw the boy again. Although no one in town could blame them, including the constable, and they faced no charges for their actions, the memory of their fear burrowed in a spiral pattern to the center of their minds and played them like zithers for the rest of their days.
Fifteen years later and a hundred miles from where he’d been born, the boy appeared one evening at the height of summer, not a man but something else. A woman living in an apartment of an otherwise empty building on the east side of the city of Grindly woke suddenly and looked up.
“There was enough moonlight to see him clearly,” she said. “He hung above me, upside down, his hands and knees on the ceiling. He wore a jacket with short tails, and the long legs of his satin trousers were striped blue and red. I don’t know how that hat—a stovepipe style—stayed on, as it had no chin strap. His feet were in slippers. The moment I saw him, he looked directly into my eyes. It didn’t matter that he wore round, rose-colored glasses. Those evil blackberries that lurked behind still dazzled me. I screamed, he shrieked, and then he scuttled across the ceiling and out the open window. I heard him on the roof and then everything was silent.” The woman told her friends and her friends told their friends, and word that something bizarre had come to Grindly spread like disease.
The Gazette put out a double edition, a whole four pages, its entirety devoted to speculation concerning “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening,” a moniker invented by the editor-in-chief. The name stuck, and over the course of a few more days was shortened by the populace, first to Daddy Longlegs and then to simply Daddy. “Watch out for Daddy,” neighbors said as a salutation when they parted. Before people bedded down at night they practiced a ritual of checking closets and basements, the dark corners of attics and under beds, latching all windows and gathering crude weapons on their nightstands—a mallet, a wrench, a carving knife, a club.
After a few more sightings that he had scr
upulously arranged, allowing himself to be spotted crawling to the top of and then into a silent mill’s crumbling smokestack, or traversing the soot-ridden mosaic of God’s face on the inner dome of the railway station as the midnight train passed through, he was in their hearts and minds, and what was even more important to him, their dreams. Of course, he meant to drain the citizenry of Grindly of their bodily fluids, but first, to enhance nourishment, it needed to be filtered, flavored, by nightmare.
When there wasn’t a soul within the confines of the city wall who did not, in their dreams, flee, slow, heavy, and naked before him, or writhe in the coil of their blankets, mistaken in sleep for his web, he struck. It was deepest night when he entered the home of the haberdasher, Fremin, through the unlocked coal chute. The hinges on the iron door creaked a warning, but that noise merely became part of the dreams of the sleeping husband and wife as the triumphant laughter of Daddy Longlegs. They never woke when he bit them at the base of the skull. They never cried out as their fear-laden essence left them.
“Like old, worn luggage,” the newspaper said, describing the condition of the corpses discovered two days later. When the medics tried to move the haberdasher’s body to a stretcher, it split with a whisper like a dry husk and out of it poured thousands of tiny spiders. Police Inspector Kaufmann, the medics, the Fremins’ neighbors who were present, all ran out of the building, and the inspector gave orders for the place to be torched at once. As the fire raged, the crowd that had gathered belabored the inspector, Grindly’s sole lawman, with inquiries as to what he was prepared to do.
What Kaufmann was prepared to do was run, take the next train out of town for some shining new place free of rot and nightmares. The only thing preventing him was the fact that the train rarely stopped, but sped right through as if there really was no platform or station or city. “If I wait for that,” he thought, “we might all be dead by the time it arrives.” He turned to the citizens and said, “I’m going to hunt Daddy down and put a bullet in him.” Only the inspector knew that it would necessarily have to be “a bullet,” as he had only one left. Government supplies from the capital had dried up over a year earlier.