Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

by Scott Andrews (Editor)

  ~ ~ ~

  This is what we remember: before the battle—before the smoke and the spattered blood, before the deaths—Atl and Chimalli sit by the camplight, playing patolli on a board old enough to have seen the War of Independence. They’re arguing about the score—Atl is accusing Chimalli of cheating, and Chimalli says nothing, only laughs and laughs without being able to stop. Atl takes everything much too seriously, and Chimalli enjoys making him lose his calm.

  They’re young and carefree, so innocent it hurts us—to think of Atl, falling under the red light of the rising sun; of Chimalli, pierced by an enemy’s bayonet; of the corpses aligned in the morgue like so much flesh for barter.

  But we remember: our curse, our gift, our blessing; our only reason for existing.

  ~ ~ ~

  Our eyes are open—staring at the ceiling of Nezahual’s workshop. Our chests ache, burning like a thousand suns.

  We are not dead.

  Slowly, one by one, we rise—and the quetzal dislodges a pair of bleeding hands resting over its chest.

  Nezahual. You’re hurt, we think—but it’s more than that.

  It’s not only his hands that bleed—and no matter how hard we look, we cannot see a heartbeat anywhere. His chest does not rise; his veins do not pulse in his body. Metal parts are embedded everywhere in his flesh: the remnants of the storm that he could not weather.

  We are covered in blood—blood which cannot be our own. We still live—a thing which cannot be.

  “Come,” whispers Tonatiuh.

  He stands in the doorway of the workshop, limned by the rising sun—metal lungs and metal hands, and a pulsing metal heart. “There is nothing left. Come.” His hands are wide open—the clawed hands which broke us open, which tore our hearts from our chests.

  “Why should we?”

  “There is nothing left,” Tonatiuh whispers.

  “Acamapixtli—” He is lying on the ground, just behind Tonatiuh, we see: his heart still beats, albeit weakly. We struggle against an onslaught of memory—against images of warriors laughing at each other, sounds of bullets shattering flesh, the strong animal smell of blood pooling into the dark earth.

  “Do you truly think he will make a difference?” Tonatiuh asks. “There will always be dreamers, even among the warriors. But nothing can change. The world must go on. Come.”

  There is nothing left.

  But we know one thing: Nezahual died, and it was not for nothing. If Acamapixtli could not make a difference, somehow Nezahual could. Somehow. . . .

  “It wasn’t Acamapixtli,” we whisper, staring at the god’s outstretched hands. “It was never Acamapixtli—it was what Nezahual made in his workshop.”

  Tonatiuh doesn’t answer. His perfect, flawless face is devoid of expression. But his heart—his heart of steel and wires—beats faster than it should.

  Mech-birds. Beings of metal and copper, kept alive by heart’s blood—and, even after the blood was gone, kept alive by the remnants of the ritual that gave us birth, by the memories that crowd within us—the spirits of the dead keening in our mind like a mourning lament.

  “You fear us,” we whisper, rising in the air.

  “I am the sun,” Tonatiuh says, arrogantly. “Why should I fear birds that have no hearts?”

  “You fear us,” we whisper, coming closer to him—stained with Nezahual’s dying blood.

  His claws prick us, plunge deep into our chests.

  But there is nothing there. No vial, nothing that can be grasped or broken anymore. “You are right,” we say. “We have no hearts.”

  “Will you defy me?” Tonatiuh asks, gesturing with his metal hands.

  Visions rise—of bodies, rotting in the heat of the marshes—of torn-out limbs and charred dirigibles—of Atl, endlessly falling into death.

  But we have seen them. We have fought them, night after night.

  We are not Nezahual. War does not own us; and neither does blood; neither do the gods.

  We do not stop.

  “I am the sun,” Tonatiuh whispers. “You cannot touch me.”

  “No,” we say. “But you cannot touch us, either.”

  We fly out, into the brightness of the courtyard—straight through Tonatiuh, who makes a strangled gasp before vanishing into a hundred sparkles—the sunlight, playing on the stone rim; the fountain whispering once more its endless song.

  Oh, Nezahual.

  We would weep—if we had hearts, if we had blood. But we have neither, and the world refuses to fold itself away from us, and grief refuses itself to us.

  A shuffling sound, from behind—Acamapixtli drags himself out of the workshop on tottering legs, bleeding from a thousand cuts—staring at us as if we held the answers. “Nezahual. . . .”

  “He’s gone,” we say, and his bloodied hands clench. We wish for tears, for anger, for anything to alleviate the growing emptiness in our chests.

  Acamapixtli smiles, bitterly. “All for nothing. I should have known. You can’t cheat the gods.”

  We say nothing. We stand, unmoving, in the courtyard—watching the sunlight sparkle and dissolve in the water of the fountain until everything blurs out of focus.

  ~ ~ ~

  This is what we see: a flock of copper birds speaking to the assembled crowd—of machines, of arched bridges and trains over steel tracks, of the dream that should have been Nezahual’s.

  This is what we see: a city where buildings rise from the bloodless earth, high enough to pierce the heavens; a city where, once a year, a procession of grave people in cotton clothes walks through the marketplaces and the plazas of bronze. We see them make their slow way to the old war cemeteries and lay offerings of grass on the graves of long-dead warriors; we see an entire nation mourning its slaughtered children under the warm light of the silenced sun.

  This is what we wished for.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a computer engineer. Her short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, and multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including in the Beneath Ceaseless Skies ebook anthologies The Best of BCS, Year One and Year Two. Her first novel, Servant of the Underworld, was released by Angry Robot/Harper Collins in January 2010. She has been a Writers of the Future winner and a Campbell Award finalist. Visit www.aliettedebodard.com for more information.

  THE MANUFACTORY

  Dru Pagliassotti

  IT WAS THE THIRD GRAVE I’d cracked that night and the third twitcher I’d found inside. The little girl was curled up in a tight ball, thumb in her toothless mouth. Her shaven head was bloody where the wires had been ripped away, and her lips were covered with sores. I crouched over the broken lid, rope and hook in hand, and nearly pissed myself when her eyes snapped open. I couldn’t tell if their glitter was light from my lantern or a leftover galvanic charge still dancing through wires too deeply embedded to remove.

  Swearing, I wormed my hand through the cracked coffin lid and pressed my fingers under her chin, just to make sure.

  No pulse. Just—twitching.

  I snatched my hand back, snagging my coat cuff on the broken wood and ripping it.

  Only a few hours to dawn, and I’d run out of graves. Discouraged, I climbed out of the hole and started shovelling the dirt back into place.

  I didn’t have to; I could have walked away and left the factorymen’s substitution to horrify the sexton the next morning. But I fancy myself a professional, and anyway it didn’t seem right to leave the little girl’s dead face bared to the cold. I tamped down the earth next to the wooden marker that said Edwin Lafferty and laid his wilted bouquet back on the grave, even though Lafferty’s body was long gone. Then I tossed my sack of tools over the cemetery wall and climbed out.

  Almost dawn, and I was empty-handed again.

  ~ ~ ~

  Home was a cellar shared with a dozen others. My Bet lay motionless on the cot. Lizzie perched next to her on a broken-cornered crate, her finished piecework in a bas
ket beneath her dangling feet. Her pale young cheeks were pinched with hunger and her eyes bloodshot from squinting at a needle all night, but hope brightened her expression as I pushed aside the ragged curtain. I shook my head and the hope faded. She dropped her gaze back to her dying mother’s face.

  ~ ~ ~

  In the old days, a resurrection man could make eighteen, twenty guineas off a big one; half a year’s wages for a few hours of dirty work. Harvesting the crop meant taking a few risks, but it was easy enough for a steady man who did his research and kept himself sober, and anatomists always needed fresh bodies to dissect. And if we dug up a not-so-fresh body, well, wigmakers and dentists pay well for human hair and teeth. We’d lived well then, Bet and me, and we’d planned to give our baby girl everything she wanted.

  But then the Anatomy Act passed and the demand for bodies plummeted. All of a sudden, medical schools could legally pick and choose from any of the corpses in the prisons and workhouses, and sack’em’up men were left scrounging for a living. Some nights I’d travelled from hospital to hospital, peddling corpses three for one. Those had been hard times.

  Then, a year later, that Prussian galvanist discovered vitae, and times got even harder.

  At first we thought it was a miracle. Newspapers ran headlines promising universal immortality. But, of course, “universal” was an exaggeration. The Living Contract Act makes it legal for any consenting adult to sell his vitae to a licensed manufactory, but only the poor are desperate enough to trade their lives for a few guineas in a paltry leather purse.

  As for us exhumation men, we figured we’d get rich once corpses became rare and valuable resources again, but we hadn’t counted on competing with the factorymen.

  The factorymen—thugs with black coats and soulless eyes and pockets crammed with banknotes. While we scrabble in the dirt in the middle of the night, the factorymen simply bribe mortuary workers and deacons to look the other way, snatching fresh corpses out of their coffins in broad daylight and stowing twitchers in their place. The twitchers get buried, the fresh corpses take their place on the manufactories’ inventory lists, and nobody finds out that vitae harvesting isn’t always. . . clean.

  Except us resurrection men.

  It’s getting harder and harder to find a grave that hasn’t been pillaged by the factorymen first. And twitchers are worthless. I took one to a hospital once, and the night porter recoiled like he’d seen the devil himself. We can’t even harvest their parts. The manufactories shave their applicants as a matter of course, and although the regular manufactory dead keep their teeth, twitchers’ ivories are always missing. Waste not, want not, the factorymen must figure. Nobody was going to see the manufactories’ embarrassments, after all, and some denture makers pay two guineas for a full set of teeth.

  Seems like the only ones who die intact anymore are the rich—when they die at all. And the rich keep locks on their tombs and guards at their cemetery gates.

  ~ ~ ~

  I leaned over my wife’s cot and laid an ear against her chest. Her breath was shallow and rasping. I’d heard the sound before, back when I’d worked in a hospital, before I’d lost my job and taken up exhumation.

  She was dying.

  Last week, before she’d slipped into unconsciousness, Bet had begged me to sell her to the manufactories and use the money to take care of Lizzie. But I couldn’t bring myself to sell the woman I loved. I figured I’d get the money my own way.

  I’d failed them both.

  Grief squeezed my heart and I knelt, holding her hand and resting my head against the edge of the cot. Tears stung my eyes. Behind me, Lizzie gasped.

  “Papa—is she—”

  “No! No, sweetheart, not yet.”

  Lizzie abandoned her crate and knelt next to me. I hugged her, furious at myself for frightening her.

  She was so tiny, so delicate; ten years old and already working all day and all night. If I didn’t get her out of this cellar soon, I was afraid she’d turn to faster, more lucrative work on the street, like some of the other girls.

  “I think we should pray now,” I whispered in her hair.

  ~ ~ ~

  Some sack’em’up men had started spending their nights at the opium dens and gin houses, where men stumble and fall and aren’t the sort likely to be missed. The medical schools had stopped asking questions; a burker didn’t even have to roll his kills in the dirt anymore to pass it off as grave goods. But I wouldn’t do it. I’d been raised by God-fearing parents, and I wouldn’t risk my immortal soul with murder.

  Yet I couldn’t help looking around as I trudged to the parish church. It was almost dawn, but the narrow streets teemed with millers and mumpers, gipsies and molls, opium fiends and everyday drunkards.

  Any one of them would bring in two or three guineas apiece, burked and delivered to the right night porter.

  I shook the thought out of my head, sickened.

  Better to sell myself to the manufactories. I hadn’t eaten lately, but it didn’t show much, not yet. I’d still fetch a good price; maybe even six guineas.

  Six guineas would be enough to send Lizzie out to the country. There were still good places there, I’d heard, where the air and the water were clean and a pretty girl could find herself an honest husband. Where people didn’t have to sell themselves to the Black Works to make ends meet.

  A man is given twenty-four hours to settle his affairs after he signs a Living Contract. I’d seen them, the living dead, guarded by factorymen as they paid off their debts and gave what remained to their sobbing wives and children.

  I wondered how many more useless graves I would have to open before I became one of them.

  I reached the church and tightened my fist around the coins I’d been saving. They were just enough to buy Bet a parson’s blessing and a pauper’s funeral. If I’d had any success last night. . . but all I’d found were twitchers.

  The damnable thing was, I knew that as soon as Lizzie and I left the pauper’s field, a factoryman would steal Bet’s body and bury it in the manufactories’ cemeteries under some poor, discarded twitcher’s name. She’d end up with a nicer plot than I could give her, but that didn’t make it right.

  A man should know where his wife is buried.

  It was with such heavy thoughts that my eyes fell upon the handbill posted by the church door. The Society for the Abolishment of Vitae Collection was organising a protest march on the Millside manufactory that afternoon, to be led by the assistant curate of the very church before me.

  I stared at the bill a moment, then straightened my shoulders and pushed open the door.

  It seemed I had more to discuss with the reverend than Bet’s burial.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Millside Street life manufactory loomed over the neighbourhood, its high brick walls topped with three-pronged iron spikes polished to a razor shine. Its iron gates had closed early; supervisors have little to do when all the workers are comatose. A discreet sign over the gates stated Millside Collection Station. Application Hours: 8 a.m. - 3 p.m. It didn’t mention what was collected, or how, or why, or what kind of people might want to apply.

  The manufactories aren’t supposed to accept applicants as young as the twitcher I’d found last night, but children vanish all the time in the city, and maybe dying in a manufactory is better than dying in a brothel. Lucky for them she’d ended up a twitcher, though. The quiet dead are transported by rail to special industrial cemeteries outside the city, and questions might be asked if too many children showed up on the manufactories’ burial pallets.

  I sometimes wondered how many other secrets the factorymen hid in those coffins, besides the twitchers.

  The Reverend Ian Brant rattled the Millside manufactory’s iron gate and shouted. Behind him, our numbers were growing in that mysterious but inexorable process that turns marches into mobs. Finally, a labourer with thick arms and scarred fists lumbered to the front with a crowbar.

  “I’ll get their attention,” he growled. The re
st of us fell back as he hoisted the bar over his head and brought it down on the padlock chain—four times, five, and then the links snapped.

  We surged into the muddy brick courtyard with shouts and cheers. There wasn’t much to see; the manufactory windows were all boarded up and three closed doors lined the nearest wall. A small sign on one of them said Applicants Here.

  I imagined I could hear a low, crackling hum emanating from the sinister building’s dark walls.

  Somebody pried up a brick and threw it at the windows. It hit the planks with a dull thump, then fell back to the ground and broke. A few more bricks flew, but the thud of stone on wood wasn’t as satisfying as the clean shatter of glass, and the sport soon wore thin. The afternoon shadows grew longer, clawing their way across the manufactory courtyard, and the crowd’s enthusiasm began to fade into uncertainty and discouragement.

  My gaze met the Reverend Brant’s across the courtyard, and I knew we were thinking the same thing: something had to happen soon, or nerves would break at the first clack of a charley’s rattle. For a moment I expected that we’d give up and leave, and I felt disappointment mingled with relief, like a man prevented at the last moment from doing something dangerous and irrevocable.

  Then one of the manufactory doors opened.

  “Here, what’s this, then?” a voice demanded. “Reverend? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Why, hullo, Samuel. Now, listen; it’s come down to this,” Brant said, stepping forward. The crowd shifted closer around him. “Whether you let us in or we crack this place ourselves, we’ve come to send the factorymen a message: godly folk won’t put up with this infernal trade any longer. You’ll want to stand back now, Sam, and stay out of our way.”

  “C’mon, Reverend, you know I can’t do that,” the watchman whined, standing in the doorway and shuffling his heavy, scuffed boots. “I got me a job here and a family to support.”

  I saw what needed doing and stepped forward. The watchman anticipated me and rocked backward as my fist collided with his jaw, letting himself tumble. I pushed open the door and stepped through, crouching next to him.