Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

by Scott Andrews (Editor)

  But no one knows for sure how much of the story is true and how much is an apocryphal legend told to schoolchildren.

  ~ ~ ~

  Carneby stays awake all night thinking about the girl. When he arrives at work the next morning, his wounded hand feels swollen and throbbing. He stumbles blearily into the main collection. His supervisor, noticing that Carneby is fifteen minutes early, makes a note in the logbook. Habitual enthusiasm for one’s work can attract critical attention in The City.

  The library is The City’s memory and history and collective character. The shelves of the main collection stand almost thirty-stories tall and coil in a spiral about the main shaft. The number of volumes it contains are beyond reckoning.

  Long before the memory of any living librarian, the number of books unshelved by the forces of perigee began to outnumber the quantity of books the librarians could catalog during The City’s ascent. Now the thirty stories of shelves are bare. Heaping mounds of books fill the narrow spiral aisle; twisting in dusty chaos toward the center of the library. At one time they had been ordered chronologically, with the volumes pre-dating the construction of The City at the heart of the spiral. Now it is a single scree of paper. In any cycle of ascent and descent, the librarians reshelve no more than the last four years. For that moment of time, for that span of history, before the archival amnesia of perigee, The City’s memory is clear.

  They had put in a request with the comptroller for straps, or retaining boards of some sort, to keep the books from being knocked loose at perigee, but the library had low priority on the material-allocation budget. The librarians expended all their political capital maintaining their jobs and preventing the recycling of the books into fire-lighters and plywood.

  Carneby sits near the jumble of books at the very outside of the spiral. He has developed a system whereby the reshelving takes half the time as previously. The first book he picks up is called “An Argument in Favor of a Homogenized Hegemony.” He has had to reshelve this very book at least twelve times. It weighs at least fifteen pounds. No one has ever asked for this book. Quite likely no one else in the city knows it exists, or even cares. He hefts it in his good hand and hurls it into the main collection. It enters the darkness behind mountains of dusty volumes, followed shortly by a thud and the flutter of a papery avalanche.

  Six other librarians look up from their work. They blink with the indifference of accomplished academics, before returning to their silent labor.

  “I’m though with this nonsense! It’s all pointless and circular and weird!” Carneby actually stomps his feet. Only one of the other librarians bothers to acknowledge him this time.

  Carneby had once scaled deep into the library, into the darkness where no torch or candle was permitted, where the slightest spark could ignite a papery inferno that would consume The City like a match head; braving the shifting jumble which threatened to collapse further and trap him beyond the help of his colleagues. It was something every new boy at the library had to try at least once.

  The old-timers tolerated the risk, knowing that the unsatiated curiosity would prove far more treacherous than any danger of passage. He carried back a small, red book that dated from well before the memory of anyone living, or even the rumor of anyone who had ever lived. When he got back to the library entrance, he thumbed through it eagerly, hoping to discover forgotten secrets and black arts. In queerly archaic script the book described how to lay bathroom tile.

  He does not think of this, but he thinks of the girl as he storms out of the library, out of the musty futility. A cloud envelopes The City, so the air is clammy and cold; an alien and hostile feeling. Rather than a cathartic release, he has an overwhelming feeling of helplessness. With no job or income, he would soon lose the apartment he had worked all his life to attain. He would have to move down to one of the dormitories or the squatter ducts.

  ~ ~ ~

  He decides to tell his friend Kellee about the strange girl. Kellee had once worked for The City as an engineer. Often he had come to the library, seeking almanac data and old records. Several times he scaled deep into the library spiral, breaking his arm in the process.

  The City had fired him for speaking openly about his theory that The City rebounded higher on every ascent. That the length of the apogee-perigee cycle steadily increased could not be disputed, but most engineers agreed that The City merely covered more distance with every hop; or possibly that the boundings conformed to some greater cycle that would soon ebb.

  Kellee had calculated that The City would someday bound off The Earth completely. He had spent his life’s fortune publishing his results as a paid advertisement in the Daily Metropolitan, but few citizens could be bothered to think about threats that far in the future.

  Ruined and disillusioned, he had moved to the undercity, to live with the cryptic possum people and spend his last days close to the shaft mechanisms that would decide The City’s fate.

  When Carneby lowers himself through the hatch into the undercity, he has to use his belt to hold himself to the ladder. His wounded hand can no longer grip with any sort of strength. He begins to question his decision not to purchase medical treatment.

  The undercity grows from the shaft like lichen on a tree. The terraces of whicker and sod break off frequently, but they are constantly rebuilt and replaced by the inventive inhabitants. These agricultural patches provide the bulk of The City’s food. Scrupulous scavengers salvage the trickles of sewage that drizzle down from The City proper, diverting it into whicker gardens. Because sewage—that perfect fertilizer and irrigant—is so plentiful, they fight for light, occasionally placing reflectors of aluminum foil above a rival’s garden, diverting the sunshine onto their own crops. The feuds over light grow violent at times, the loser inevitably fertilizing the gardens of his enemy.

  Carneby picks his way down a catwalk that spirals down the shaft. All around him the possum people work their harvests, hanging on booms and the edges of acre-sized baskets. Whenever they pass him on the walkway, these strange people with their short, furry bodies, bulbous snouts, and spherical hairdos, nod and greet him in their nonsense language, “Swaller dollar cauliflower,” or the ones with a more somber mood would say, “Harum scarum, five alarum bung-a-loo.”

  No one knew if they were descendants of the possums who lived in the sewers and stormdrains, or if they were a separate race of people who had evolved to look possumish over time.

  It takes two hours to descend the shaft and arrive at Kellee’s hut at the very bottom of the inhabited city. His ramshackle hut of whicker and cardboard dangles only a few feet above the crosspiece, the narrow plateau that stretches from two opposite sides of the shaft and effectively blocks view of the compression shaft that propels the city. On some of his visits, Carneby has caught Kellee hanging off the edge of the crosspiece by a cord tied around his waist, mournfully regarding the shaft and the knob far down at the end. He has not yet been suicidal enough to attempt this during perigee, but Carneby suspects that it is only a matter of time before curiosity and perigee-stress dementia persuade his friend to give it a try.

  Carneby knocks on the door of corrugated cardboard and Kellee answers, looking incrementally more haggard than previously. Much of his clothes from his period of affluence have torn, the ragged parts patched with tissue in the fashion of the possum people. Stubble and deep wrinkles mar Kellee’s face, but he brightens like a child when he sees Carneby.

  “My old friend! You have come to visit me. Come in, and I’ll make tea.”

  The old engineer putters about his hovel, putting a fire-hardened gourd over a brazier of pigeon guano. Carneby flops into a sling of hemp fibers and the entire hut sways. Only a dozen cords anchored in rivets on the shaft prevent Kellee’s home from dropping to the crosspiece and rolling over the edge like an abandoned bird nest.

  Carneby tells his friend about meeting the strange girl at Colonel Channellocks Memorial Park and quitting his job at the city library.

  “This
is very interesting, Carneby. I draw the same conclusions you do. It is impossible that she came from The City. But it is equally impossible that she came from outside.”

  “You’ve gone further into the library than anyone. Have you encountered anything that would explain her? Anything about the construction of The City that we don’t know?”

  Kellee shakes his gray head. “In all my explorations of the inner library, I never found anything of interest. Maybe there are no records of the construction. Most likely the records still exist, voluminously perhaps, but nevertheless are lost to us in the chaos of the inner stacks.” He fixes Carneby with old and weary eyes. “You must find this girl. She is worth more than a dozen libraries. Find her, and we will know more about the nature of The City than anyone in generations. We will know what The City is.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Carneby spends the rest of the day combing The City, climbing all the levels and promenades, scaling the tallest towers, plumbing the deepest storage lockers, and visiting every district. Although he has spent his whole life in wandering The City, he finds many streets and plazas that he has never seen before. There is an alley in the Washerwoman District where the sky is obscured by clotheslines; it makes him feel like he’s standing beneath a storm of butterflies. He sees an amphitheater built above an open cistern where hobbyists compete with paper boats, and audiences of lazy housewives jeer at the sopping-wet losers. He meets a man who sells wax models of The City on the street. The devices are no bigger than Carneby’s hand, and they hop about the sidewalk like a swarm of one-legged rats. He witnesses a bicycle race that rushes from the very top of The City to the lowest public level, the participants zooming past in a blur of yellows and blues.

  It is a futile quest, and he knows this. The City has a glut of people, enough to bury any one person under its sea of humanity.

  ~ ~ ~

  On the third day after perigee he attends the Freefall Foy. The celebration of the beginning of ballistic trajectory has always been held in the Upper Mall, the highest public space in The City, a long stretch of lawn and sculpture and fountain bounded by the most prestigious institutions in the community. The City Hall sits at the far end of the mall, faced by the Municipal Reserve Building, where they hoard billions of paper pfenigs against the possibility of economic collapse. Hemp netting stretches from one roof to another, forming a protective ceiling over the mall.

  Carneby attempts a relatively anonymous position within the crowd. He can see the main stage from where he stands. The Mayor sits there with his full ceremonial garb; the sashes, the medals, and the scarlet robes. About him are the municipal engineers, smug and pompous as any politician. They have predicted the moment of parabolic flight with micro-second precision, making trigonometric sightings off the stars, the moon, and passing land features. They have rigged a silver ball to rise on a pole and explode into confetti.

  The crowd grows tense and silent as seconds of acceleration remain. Children crouch, preparing to leap just as The City ceases to push against their feet.

  As much as he is caught in the mood, Carneby hates this part.

  The silver ball explodes.

  The City drops away beneath his shoes.

  Confetti and children fly everywhere. There is a cheer and a scream of hooplah. The first children drift into the netted ceiling, bouncing back giggling or hanging in space, waiting for their friends to leap up to them.

  For all the practice the citizens of The City have with freefall, there is some vomit; some a result of being stoned, drunk, or tripping, but most comes from the nausea of weightlessness, of having all perspective and orientation whisked away, of having the fluids and organs of your body spring into strange new configurations. Although The City spends as much time in parabolic freefall as it does under acceleration, the body grows accustomed to the tug-of-war between gravity and the shaft.

  For most, freefall is a time for drink and drugs. It is a time to forget and relax and celebrate being alive. Work is next to impossible while nothing stays put where you stick it, where your papers and projects can float out the window and never be seen again.

  The Freefall Foy has become a three-dimensional turmoil of flying bodies. Strangers meet, colliding forty feet above the mall, and exchange frotteuristic gropes before tumbling their separate ways.

  Carneby spots her then. She clings to the sculpted crotch of a urinating fountain, the water of which floats in undulating orbs all about her. She is screaming in mortal terror, the only human being at the foy who has never experienced this before, who has had no idea what to expect. Her locks of tangled hair float about her face like a nest of snakes. She is unbelievably beautiful.

  He kicks toward her, cradling his wounded hand against his stomach. Now that he has lost his job, he can not even afford the rental of a chair in the hospital waiting room, let alone proper treatment. Red streaks twist up his forearm, following the paths of his gnarled veins.

  She flinches as he snags onto an arm of the sculpted fountain, but fear prevents her from releasing into the tumult of bodies and levitating bubbles of water.

  Carneby smiles, an expression he has practiced little, attempting reassurance. “I saw you, at the park the other day. I’ve been trying to find you.”

  She clenches the sculpture’s thighs in her own, brandishing her stone weapon. It is blackly obsidian, its edge a ragged collection of glistening chips; as sharp and deadly as broken glass. Her warning shout terrifies Carneby, as much by its suggestion of meaning as its patent nonsense.

  He shows his wounded hand to her and her eyes widen in recognition. With pantomimed motions he shows her the rope guiderails that line the paths of the Upper Mall for the express purpose of imposing a pedestrian order for those overwhelmed by the impropriety of freefall.

  She follows him hesitantly until he buys her a rat- and possum-meat hotdog from a street vender, the cart tethered ten feet above the sidewalk for dramatic effect. With the gestured suggestion of more food, she returns to his apartment with him. After the next perigee, the landlord will come by and demand rent payment that Carneby cannot pay, but until that time, the space is his. The two of them have barely enough room to stand side by side, even considering the freefall-utilized space near the low ceiling.

  Carneby settles the strange girl into his perigee couch, the voluminous stuffing of which nearly swallows her whole. He putters about the countertop which serves as his kitchen, fixing her a meal of pigeon eggs and grits. As the lidded frypan boils above a flame of sewer gas, the girl’s stomach rumbles, the first recognizable sound she has made.

  “Where are you from? Why are you dressed like that?” He tries to communicate by pointing as she shovels food into her mouth. If it is possible, she is even less intelligible as she eats. Flecks of grits fly out of her mouth and orbit the tiny room as she tells an involved story about her leather skirt. Carneby is so frustrated he wants to pound on the walls until the neighbors call the cops.

  “Are you just an idiot? Is that why you can’t say anything? Are you too stupid?” Carneby is startled to discover that he is shouting.

  The girl bawls. The tears pour out of her eyes, forming goggle-like globules that stick to her eyelashes. In remorse, Carneby holds her shoulders and strokes the tangles of hair that have never seen a comb, crooning words of comfort that make no more sense than hers. She buries her face in his neck, and they finally find a common ground of communication. Her lips kiss the tender skin of his clavicle. He brushes away her hair and nibbles at her earlobe, tasting it with the very tip of his tongue.

  As their hands and feet search the other’s body, they lose their grip on the couch and float free inside the room. She pulls off her leather tunic and skirt; the huge flaps of untreated skin, torn in one piece from some monstrous animal that Carneby could not begin to imagine, hang empty in the air, suggesting the shape of a larger and more threatening enigma.

  The girl terrifies and frustrates Carneby. But more than that, he is drawn to her in an explosi
ve mixture of curiosity and desire.

  They make love in his room, their naked thighs entwined against the freefall. The neighbors pound on the walls, but Carneby and the girl continue their noisy outbursts at intervals throughout the night.

  ~ ~ ~

  For the next several days he shows her The City, avoiding the expensive attractions and the more rambunctious partiers. They see the Flumebustle Museum of Art and its collection of perigee-mangled paintings and statues. They see the market district where breeders sell every variety of pigeon imaginable, from bright red pigeons, to fighting pigeons with knives tied to their feet, to pigeons that mumble scraps of love poetry to themselves.

  The girl learns the names of a few common objects but nothing of significance. She can point at a food vendor and say “hotdog,” but she cannot tell Carneby where she came from, or even understand the question, which he puts to her a dozen times a day.

  Carneby’s hand begins to smell bad. He does not have the courage to unwrap the bandage and see what might be underneath. The girl holds his hand by the wrist for hours, cooing sympathetically. At least once she takes out her stone knife and clearly offers to amputate.

  They attend the Apogee Swim, that moment at the height of The City’s arc when the air is becalmed. It is the only time when it is safe to venture beyond The City Limits, if only for a few minutes. Lifeguards perch on short towers along a promenade, equipped with lanyard whistles and padded gaffs tied to the ends of lariats. With serious eyes they watch over the citizens who swim into the great void with flippers and paddles made of cardboard and tape.

  The swimmers are intoxicated with their vices of choice as well as the altitude anoxia, the result of the thin air at the top of The City’s bound. Kellee told Carneby once that if The City bounds much higher, every single citizen will suffocate in the atmospheric kill-zone.