Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

by Scott Andrews (Editor)

  It takes some coaching to lure the girl beyond The City Limits, but she is ecstatic as she ventures out above the green and blue smear of The Earth. They thrash their cardboard fins, inching farther into the abyss, flirting with the airy abyss which is the only respite from the numbing continuity of The City. Carneby hugs her, the adhesive tape along his forearms and shins sticking in the tangles of her hair.

  “I love you. I want to go away with you and never see The City again.”

  She giggles and hugs him back, pointing at a brown smear of river delta below.

  Carneby does not let her go. Not even when she pushes at his chest. Not even as the lifeguards blow their whistles and shout for the air swimmers to return. Not even as the wind picks up, ruffling their clothes. Not even as The City sinks slowly away from them like a cloud of brick and glass. Not even as the girl screams and pounds at his neck.

  Carneby does not look down at The Earth. He looks up at the blue expanse of sky and imagines the two of them wafting forever through the heavens, a balloon of arms, legs, and cardboard.

  The lifeguards hook them with gaffs and drag them back to The City. Neither he nor the girl look at each other for an entire day.

  ~ ~ ~

  For the next six days, The City will be unable to ignore the fact of perigee. They will hurdle toward the ground, building speed until the wind whistles through the buildings like the madness of death, and they will know that soon the perigee will wrench every bone and cell and tendon in their body. Perhaps this will be the time that the shaft sticks improperly, that The City trips and falls. Maybe this time they will fall too far and no one will survive. Maybe this time perigee will strain that weakest blood vessel in their heart or in their brain.

  The wind whistles around The City as it plummets, gaining velocity every moment. They are at the entrance to Colonel Channellocks Memorial Park, where they met, when Carneby has to restrain her to keep her from rushing out into the unprotected promenade. It is not uncommon during the descent for people to lose their grips while venturing close to The City Limits and have the wind buffet them into the sky.

  Some children have ventured a short ways onto the park balcony, tethering themselves to the railing with cords. They are throwing pieces of paper and scraps of bread over the edge and watching the wind carry them away. Intentionally removing anything from The City is one of the few things that will get you arrested. Nearly everything can be mended or recycled, but once something has passed beyond The City Limits, it is beyond recovery.

  Frantically she gestures, pointing down.

  “Yes. We’re falling. The deceleration starts tomorrow.” Carneby doesn’t want to think that far ahead. There is room on his perigee couch for only one. There are charity couches for squatters and the homeless, but they are of low quality and fill up quickly.

  She snorts in exasperation and takes him by the wrist. She leads him toward the middle of The City. They float down pedestrian passages like fish of the air, pushing off windowpanes and gutters filled with trickles of cloud mist.

  As they get closer to the interior, the neighborhoods grow seedier, the inhabitants more furtive and angry. Trash and filth covers the walls and floats in the air. Fat women in tissue dresses hang from their windows by their ankles, shouting drunken insults at passerby. Faint glimmers of sunlight percolate through the gaps between buildings, but its light is dirty and yellow.

  The poor neighborhoods suffer from a leeching of material. Over time they are gutted of plumbing and gas utilities, their pipes torn out and sold to wealthier neighborhoods. Anything of any value is scavenged, leaving skeletonized housing for those who cannot afford to relocate.

  They come to the broad metal wall of the central shaft, the rusty iron dotted with rivets. The girl runs her fingers over it, mumbling to herself.

  “This is the shaft,” Carneby says. “You shouldn’t mess with this. It’s against the law, darling.”

  “Ah!” she exclaims, and with her fingernails, she pries open a section of plating. Carneby leaps at her, visions of arrest and municipal catastrophe running through his head. He tries to restrain her from this sacrilegious vandalism of The City’s core, the very spine of everyone’s existence, but in his haste he reaches with the wrong hand. The impact of his wounded hand against her shoulder sends him reeling with nausea.

  She clucks at him, and he looks up from where he kneels, retching. The plate is open. He can see that it is a door, opening into a passage that leads to the center of the shaft.

  Carneby has never heard of such a thing.

  She clucks again, pulling him after her into the shaft. The door closes behind them, and they are in total darkness.

  After a moment he can hear a chorus of metallic pinging sounds. It sounds like a cross between the tinkling of wind chimes and the thrumming of a banjo string. Carneby can feel the girl search in his pockets and remove his lighter, but he makes no motion to help her. He is in awe at being inside the shaft, a place as mysterious and alluring as the moon.

  Light flares. The girl has lit a torch made from leather and a spear haft. Carneby supposes that she has come this way before, that this was her route into The City. There are now a hundred more questions he wants to ask her, but they are swept away by the sight which surrounds him.

  On either side of the passage, what he had thought were the walls, he now sees were springs, clusters of hundreds and thousands of springs of various sizes, shapes and colors. Some springs are small and made of shiny brass. Others are huge as utility poles and made of rusty iron. They are packed densely, each and every one strung from some point high above his head, out of sight in the shadows from the torch, and stretched taut, anchored somewhere beneath the floor of the passage. They drone. If it is a flow of air or temperature changes that disturbs them, or an amplification of vibrations from The City in general, Carneby cannot tell.

  Again she leads him deeper, the stretched springs at either side of their passage. They pass through a portal in four-foot steel and emerge into a vast open space. Carneby and the girl both yelp, twisting and scrabbling for handholds, but their momentum carries them clear, surrounded by an infinity of darkness above and below. They cling to each other in the absence of anything else, the torch with its globe of flame, spinning lazily nearby.

  Its light does not illuminate far, but Carneby has the sense that the inner shaft is hollow, stretching as far as he can see toward the top and the bottom of The City. A stairway without a railing twists about the inside of the space. If the girl had climbed that when she arrived, she either had no fear of heights or she was remarkably brave.

  They kiss as they tumble. After a seeming eternity, they collide with the far wall of the inner shaft, and the girl manages to snag a hold of the edge of the stairway. She smiles, triumphant in her familiarity with this place. Slyly she points her finger toward the base of The City, toward the bottom of the shaft.

  Hand in hand they launch themselves into the depths.

  They fall for hours. Occasionally they drift too far to one side and they have to alight on the spiraling stairs and leap again. The thought that deceleration might begin as they are suspended within this directionless abyss, terrifies Carneby. Their delicate freefall would last only as long as it took to collide with the bottom.

  Finally they see a ray of sunlight that plays across the floor of the shaft. When they hit, they spring for the light that spills from a door at the very foot of the stairway. The room is several times larger than Carneby’s apartment. There is an open balcony that screams with the wind of descent. And there are several perigee couches, lumpy with age.

  On the floor are the bodies of two men. They are dressed in leather like the girl. Their arms and legs are twisted. Perigee caught them standing up.

  The girl will not look at them, so with as much respect as he can manage, Carneby pushes the bodies out the balcony, where the wind carries them away like scraps of newspaper. He holds onto the doorframe and leans outside as far as he can to watc
h them disappear. A ways above he can see the crosspiece, where perhaps even now his friend Kellee is pushing his luck in an effort to observe the shaft.

  Below him the shaft seems to stretch forever, tapering into the knob, a blunt arrow poised to pierce The Earth. Carneby has never seen the ground like this, so unobstructed and huge. It occurs to him that although he has always known intellectually that The Earth was bigger than The City, he had never fully understood that fact until now.

  The deceleration begins that night, and with it comes the suffocating pressure of their own weight. Carneby and the girl make love in their suddenly awkward bodies in the great emptiness of the inner shaft. They are hungry and thirsty, so they lack the stamina of earlier efforts, but the sex drives the fear from Carneby’s mind.

  He has begun to feel panicky at the strangeness of it all. He doesn’t know where all this is leading and the uncertainty has driven him to tears. He feels chills and fevers from the infection on his hand. He knows it is only hours before he has to take the girl up on her offer of amputation, or die.

  ~ ~ ~

  Carneby wakes on a perigee couch. Already it is midafternoon, but he is uncertain of which day. He sweats with fever. From The City far above, he can hear the wail of the perigee sirens. The beginning of the great low point is only minutes away. The wind roars through the balcony, buffeting him even where he lies. Soon his weight will increase tenfold.

  He spots the girl in a nearby couch. From her determined expression, he can tell she has some understanding of what is coming, what she will have to endure. Carneby gives her a reassuring smile, which she returns hesitantly.

  Perigee slams him into the couch like a lead fist. He loses consciousness. Then cruelly he wakes. The fibers of his muscles feel like they are separating one by one. The skin of his face pulls back in a tight rictus. He cannot close his eyelids; the perigee peels them back into his head. The pain cannot be ignored. He can feel The City slowing, dropping to some giant, alien thing.

  The crushing force lasts minutes. Then it disappears with a sharp-edged finality.

  The girl rolls out of her couch. Carneby tries to warn her about the tricky lull between the descent and the ascent, that moment when you want to believe that it is over, when you drop your guard in hopefulness, right before the equally terrifying rebound begins. Many people have died trying to sneak to the bathroom during this lull.

  He croaks a warning at her, but she pulls him to the floor. They crawl together toward the balcony, still aching from perigee. The ledge of the balcony has no railing, so they can wiggle right to the edge and hang their nose over and see The Earth.

  Carneby almost vomits at the sight of it. The ground is far too close. He can see individual trees with his naked eye; the trees surround them and tower over them with smothering density. The ground has churned and squooshed beneath the shaft, like eggs beneath a spoon. Carneby can feel the heat and the wet of The Earth, can smell the moist rot of the forest. The churned ground has risen to touch the bottom of the balcony.

  The two of them struggle to their feet, leaning on each other for support.

  Suddenly, intuitively, Carneby understands why The City has been rebounding higher with every perigee. Standing there underneath The City’s massive bulk, beneath the tens of thousands of souls lying in their couches, he can almost sense the force that has paused The City at its lowest point, has primed the springs, tensed them measurably further. High above him, every man, woman, and child of The City has taken a breath in relief. They are stretching in their couches, they are sitting up and scratching their heads. With a hundred thousand tiny actions they have added to the kinetic energy of The City and played their own tiny part in its doom.

  In unison and without signal, Carneby and the girl step off.

  The balcony catapults upward, ripping off the back of Carneby’s shirt. He turns to watch the doorway fade into the extending column of iron.

  The City has been his mother, his master, his tormentor. Now it is gone, leaping away from him with relentless finality. It is a little like dying and a little like being born.

  The girl pulls at his hand, pulling him toward the green and the hugeness of the forest, laughing at his fear and his confusion. The forest is filled with the sounds of birds and large things crashing through unseen brush.

  The City shrinks into the sky.

  By the time the end of the shaft extricates itself from the sludge of The Earth, Carneby and the girl have long since lost themselves in the woods.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Matthew Bey writes and edits from Austin, Texas. His short stories have appeared in numerous publications, and he runs the sci-fi and humor zine Space Squid. His blog, Zombie Lapdance, can be found on RevolutionSF.com. There he brags about his accomplishments and describes all the weird things he puts in his mouth.

  KREISLER'S AUTOMATA

  Matthew David Surridge

  I.

  WHENEVER THEODORE SMILED AT ME I might almost have imagined him an angel. When he leered at me then in the hall of mirrors, on that day of October in the year 17—, I understood certain grim truths about angels previously obscure to me. “Tonight, Ernst,” he said, “you will take her; despoil her of her virtue, ravage her, leave her without a hope in the world. It is all arranged.”

  “No!” I cried. “It is monstrous!”

  He chuckled and led me through the array of glass. “The Prodigy will play before the court tonight at the palace of Count H—. You’ll watch the performance, then find your way to a certain bedchamber. Olympia shall be awaiting you therein. You’ll ask her a question of my devising. No more than that! Speak the words, she will be yours. Helpless.”

  I said nothing. “I know the greatness of your want,” he said. “I am your friend, am I not? I understand it all. Lust, desire; and then, she is beautiful.”

  “Yes,” I murmured. “Yes, she is.” I could not imagine her beauty, could not frame it in my mind; I was helpless before the question it implied, that same question Theodore now demanded of me and which I dared not answer—what would I not do, to touch that grace? We walked on, watching ourselves watching ourselves.

  The mirrored hall was the only entry to a wide fairground not far from the city of V—. A week before, the country field had been waste wilderness; then walls of iridescent metal had been raised, by whose agency none knew. A gatehouse was built in the center of the walls, and mirrors set within the gatehouse. Reports had spread that a fair was in preparation. Yesterday visitors had finally been allowed within the walls, following which the most peculiar rumors had spread, catching the imagination of polite society. Theodore and I had made the short walk to see the truth for ourselves, and to speak on weighty matters. “Do you know much of her history?” Theodore asked suddenly.

  I shook my head.

  “I have learned a fair piece, I think,” he said. “Some of her past. She has been a mystery since she came to court. But not to me. No longer to me.”

  Together, we exited the hall of mirrors.

  We confronted a clock-tower from which depended a banner bearing the words Kreisler’s Automata and the image of a black bird clutching a gear. Beyond was a clockwork city-in-miniature, its structures built not of masonry or timber, but of iron and copper and stained glass, jade and amber and turquoise; they glittered even in the dull grey light of day. The city’s inhabitants were automata: mechanical men and mechanical women, shaped like residents of all the far times and places of the globe. Wandering Turks, Chaldean astrologers, robed Confucian scholars—we set off walking among them, and they paid us no mind.

  “There is a crime in her past,” said Theodore.

  “I will not think evil of her,” I told him. He smiled.

  “As all men say of women they do not know well,” he observed. “But there it is. A thing dark enough that even to hint at it would bring about her expulsion from court. Therefore, merely a question put to her alone shall serve to establish your knowledge. Your dominance. And that is what you w
ish. Is it not?”

  I stared at the automata around us, very like living ensouled mortals, but also like waxworks, like mannequins, like ambulatory nutcrackers. Their flesh was brass, their eyes quartz, their expressions and fashions painted things. Mostly they were content to counterfeit the habits and motions of animal men, going about their business as normal townsfolk might, except that none of them spoke or made a sound; only, occasionally, one might see them pause, and tilt their heads, as though listening to a music too profound for human ears.

  “I cannot believe what you say of her,” I said at last. “About Olympia there is a glory which lives forever. A glory I wish I might. . . .”

  “That’s a fairy tale,” said Theodore. “Glory. What do you care for glory? You’re rich.”

  I could not immediately answer him. Yes, I was rich; but that was chance and birth. It seemed to me that there was more to be hoped for, to be won or known or dreamed of. And: “Olympia cannot be bought,” I said. “Therefore the value of my wealth is less than absolute.”

  Theodore laughed. “Do not say that she cannot be bought,” he told me. “Say only that you have not yet found her price. But it may be that I will be able to assist you in that.” I said nothing to this remark, suspecting a philosophical difference between him and I that was beyond my capability to enunciate.

  Some of the mechanicals we passed interacted with visitors in a limited fashion. Before a vast tournament-grounds where automated knights jousted, I played a game at chess with a black king; I lost badly, for lack of concentration. We passed the atelier of an artificial painter who was the very image of a master from the Italian Renaissance, and he offered to limn us, displaying for our edification works of his devising; the precision of their perspectives unnerved me. We walked through a bordello of fabricated queens, of Helen and Semiramis and Cleopatra and Beersheba, and observed their curious interactions; I was educated and saddened, and found myself imagining things I dared not dream of but desired still. The whole of the fair was marvelously strange, built with a craft beyond any science I knew. But I had heard so much in recent years of the progress of rationality and of understanding. Who could say what was to be defined as impossible?