The Steampunk Trilogy

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Don’t ztruggle! It’s der only vay!”

  To his utmost horror, Agassiz felt a warm mouth pressed to his buttock. There was much sucking, interspersed with spitting. At last, he was allowed to stand.

  Dottie was rinsing her mouth with water. Her small blade, bearing Agassiz’s blood, lay on the deck.

  Agassiz nearly swooned. When he saw Lizzie looking on wide-eyed, his humiliation was complete.

  “Dot dart vas full of der venom of der horned snake, Louie. If Dottie hadn’t moved zo qvick, you’d be dead now!”

  Endeavoring to retain the smallest semblance of dignity, Agassiz stooped to pull his pants up. Striving to fasten them, he found all the buttons popped. Plenty of sewing for Jane. . . . Someone handed him a length of rope, which he clumsily employed. To Cezar, he said, “I almost wish I were.”

  During this incident, the Bibb had continued to advance on the sorcerer’s ship. Evidently realizing that he could not halt the Bibb single-handedly, T’guzeri had abandoned his blowpipe and picked up the fetiche. He began now to chant harsh syllables of mystic import, an invocation to unseen deities.

  “Vee must ztop him before he can finish!”

  Captain Davis addressed his crew. “Prepare the grapples and cock your pistols, men. We’re going to board!”

  Within seconds, the clipper was warped to the other ship. The attackers hurled themselves over.

  The Marbleheaders had grouped themselves around the sorcerer, offering their bodies as a sacrifice to permit him to complete his spell. Although more heavily armed, the men of the Bibb found the Marbleheaders no mean opponents. The fighting was fierce and bloody.

  At last, though, the Deep Ones were all dispatched, and the invaders advanced on the sorcerer.

  With a shout, T’guzeri uttered a final throat-twisting vocable and managed to toss the fetiche overboard, before being collared by the sailors.

  The small splash was followed by another, larger sound. From the Bibb, Agassiz watched as Dottie surfaced with the fetiche under one arm. She swam to the Marblehead vessel and was helped aboard.

  Eager to contemplate the fetiche, Agassiz clambered over, followed by Cezar, Stormfield, and others.

  A drenched and dripping Dottie proudly held up her mother’s relic.

  There is a family of marine creatures known as the sea slugs: order, Nudibranchia; class, Gastropoda; subclass, Opisthobranchia. These fringed and limbless, horned and squishy creatures are studded with many curious excresences called cerata. Variously colored, with intricate fringes, folds and convolutions, they prowl through waters warm and cold, twisting their boneless bodies with alien agility.

  Saartjie Baartmann’s quim with its curtain of shame and attached portions, swimming in its dacka tea, resembled nothing so much as one of these sea slugs: specifically, the Maned Nudibranch, Aeolidia papillosa.

  Agassiz moved to examine the relic that had cost him so much effort.

  “Stop right there!”

  All eyes swivelled to Kosciuszko. The anarchist held a round bomb with a long dangling sizzling fuse.

  “I’ll take the fetiche, if you please.”

  Furious, Agassiz accused, “But you promised—”

  “Only as long as I was on your vessel. And now I’m on another, which I hereby commandeer in the name of liberation movements everywhere. Back on board your own ship. And don’t attempt to follow me, or I’ll destroy the fetiche! I go now to ignite a conflagration in a Europe ripe for revolution, the likes of which the world has never seen!”

  Now Captain Stormfield spoke up over the anarchist’s fanfaronade. “Ye danged lying scalliwag! You’re not half the man your pappy was!”

  Kosciuszko looked astounded. “You knew my father?”

  “Aye, didn’t he and I fight side by side at Saratoga?”

  “How old are you?”

  “One hundred and twenty-eight, and I can still lick a tad like ye!”

  Kosciuszko lowered the sputtering bomb, tears in his eyes. “I never even saw Dad more than twice. He was always off fighting someplace. Mom and I really missed him. To meet someone who actually knew him—”

  Stormfield sidled up to the weeping anarchist and put an arm around his shoulder. “There, there, lad—”

  “For God’s sake,” shouted Agassiz, “someone put that bomb out!”

  Before anyone could act, there came another interruption.

  The sea began to boil and heave off the stern of the Marblehead vessel.

  “Not another submersible,” groaned Agassiz.

  Whatever deity T’guzeri had sought to invoke saw fit now to grant Agassiz’s desires. The cause of the disturbance was not another submersible. At least not one of human design.

  A head big as a locomotive emerged from the water. It was slope-browed and covered with sleek mottled skin. Its eyes were big as cartwheels. Weeds hung from its open jaws.

  The head was supported by a neck thick as one of the Corinthian columns of the Central Congregational Church on Winter Street. The neck pushed the head up, up, up, into the night sky, till it towered steeple-high.

  Following the neck was a barnacle-covered body twice as long as the U.S.S. Bibb.

  The surviving wounded Deep Ones—including T’guzeri, who squirmed in the grip of a beefy sailor—began to sing out the creature’s name.

  “Dagon! Dagon! Dagon!”

  In 1796, long before Agassiz had been born, his mentor, Georges Cuvier, had been summoned to the gypsum quarries of Montmartre. The workers there had unearthed bones of such a size that they could only belong to a species of elephant larger than any extant. After examining the find, Cuvier announced the bones to be those of an antediluvian animal which had been destroyed in some kind of catastrophe. Over the next five years, he had been called upon to examine many other fossils, including the giant Maestricht jaws brought back from Germany by the army of revolutionary France.

  Agassiz himself had seen many of these dusty bones during his apprenticeship to Cuvier.

  Thus the cool-headed Swiss naturalist was the first to recognize the creature looming before him, though its bones were clothed in substantial flesh.

  “This is no supernatural monster, men! It’s only an extinct fish-lizard, an Icthyosaurus!”

  “It doesn’t look very extinct to me,” muttered Cezar weakly.

  Captain Davis added his voice to Agassiz’s. “Give it all you’ve got, boys!”

  Cannons boomed from the Bibb. Melville’s harpoon flew unerringly through the air. A volley of arrows took wing from Chief Snapping Turtle’s bow. Small-arms fire resounded. Finally, Kosciuszko’s bomb arced through the air, to burst impotently against the monster’s neck.

  The Icthyosaurus was as little affected as if the assault had consisted of so many peas. It swung its huge head back and forth searchingly.

  Now Maurice stepped forward, out of the crowd.

  “All you imperialists know is force. Let me attempt tp reason with the creature. Ahoy, creature! I represent the proletariat—”

  Seemingly attracted by the whiney voice of the socialist, the Icthyosaurus dropped its head down to peer at him.

  “You see—”

  In the blink of an eye, the horrid beast swallowed Maurice Desor.

  The rest of the humans were frozen. They waited in stunned silence for the Icthyosaurus to consume them all, smash their ship, or both.

  Dottie moved toward the fish-lizard. She bore the fetiche high.

  “Down, down, Dagon! Cthulhu commands it! Back to your vasty deeps! Sleep for eons yet to come!”

  The monster reared back like a frightened puppy. Then it dove, sending up a wave that rocked the two ships almost to the point of swamping them. Men tumbled about like skittles.

  Slowly they picked themselves up as the ships stopped rocking. It took a moment for the fact that they had be
en spared to dawn on everyone. But when it did, they let out a vibrant cheer.

  “Hip, hip, hurray for the Hottentot! Three cheers for Dottie! Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah!”

  Hardened sailors were crying. Dogberry was hugging Chief Snapping Turtle. Pourtales, Burckhardt, Girard and Sonrel had formed a chorus line and were kicking their legs like music-hall queens. Kosciuszko and Stormfield were dancing a jig. Cezar had his arms around the humbly smiling Dottie, who miraculously clutched the unbroken fetiche between them.

  Now Lizzie appeared, and threw herself into Agassiz’s arms.

  “Oh, Louis, you were magnificent!”

  She began to kiss him over and over again.

  Edward Desor approached. He alone remained aloof from the celebrations. He spoke numbly to Agassiz.

  “You and you alone were responsible for my cousin’s death. You will pay for this, Agass. Yes, you will pay.”

  Agassiz tugged at his falling pants and started to reply curtly. He stopped. He could not find it in himself to worry about Desor’s threat. Of course the man could make trouble for him. But what could compare to the ordeal he had undergone? With his future wife in his arms, and knowlege of the Cosmogonic Locus secure, his future—and the future of creationism—looked bright.

  But Agassiz could not forsee that even now a man named Charles Darwin was at work on a book called The Origin of Species, a book which would forever link man and animal, yoke white to black, through Civil War and beyond, and replace Agassiz’s beloved creationism with a disgusting notion called “evolution,” rendering Agassiz in his old age a cranky, outmoded, derided fossil himself.

  In fact, Agassiz’s oracular ability did not even extend as far as his wedding night, April 25, 1850, a night when his timid second wife would turn to him and say:

  “Louis, I—I have a small feminine abnormality you should know about.”

  “Nonsense, Lizzie dear. You are the perfect woman.”

  “No, dear, I’m a little different from most women. I have a kind of birth defect. I never knew the name for it until a few years ago. I’m still rather ashamed to use the common term. Perhaps if I whispered the Latin—”

  “Go ahead, dear. And then we’ll get to bed.”

  “It’s—it’s called sinus pudoris.”

  And they never did have any children.

  WALT AND EMILY

  1

  “MORNING MEANS JUST RISK—TO THE LOVER”

  ON THE MORNING of May 1, 1860, Miss Emily Dickinson, the self-styled “Belle of Amherst,” awoke feeling uncannily perturbed; so disconcerted by nocturnal phantoms and their ineffable residue of bewildered prescience, in fact, that, sliding quietly out of bed so as not to awaken Carlo, who yet snored canine-wise at the foot of the four-poster, she padded barefoot in her white gown across the rush matting of her flower-papered bedroom to her small cherry-wood table (its surface a mere eighteen inches square, yet easily encompassing the Universe Entire) whereon she daily wrestled with her painful and ecstatic poems, and, pausing not even to sit, dashed off these lines:

  Dying! Dying in the night!

  Won’t somebody bring the light

  So I can see which way to go

  Into the everlasting snow?;

  upon the completion of which, feeling somewhat relieved yet still faintly palsied of soul, Emily crossed to the single window set in the western wall of her corner bedroom in the upper floor of The Homestead (two southern windows looked out across Main Street), and, flinging back the shutters of the open window for a revivifying glimpse of her bee-ornamented garden and the next-door household known as The Evergreens, where dwelled her beloved brother Austin and his wife Sue, she was treated instead to the barely credible sight—which imprinted itself now and forever on her retinas like the last earthly patterns seen by a dying man—of a huge hairy bearded barbarian, utterly and shamelessly naked save for a black floppy wide-brimmed hat, giving himself a bath on her gem-bright grassy lawn.

  Emily’s heart filled with a mob of feelings no Inner Police could suppress.

  The intruder had apparently taken no notice of the movement at the upper story of The Homestead he was so brashly profaning. He seemed utterly intent—in an almost devotional way—on laving his muscled and bulky form, using a cake of soap, a rag and the contents of the rain-barrel set immediately below Emily’s window. His simple clothing piled beside him, his voyager’s hat perched ludicrously atop his flowing gray-streaked locks, the stranger proceeded unconcernedly with his ablutions, as if he were alone in the midst of some Kansas prairie.

  With his manly toes digging into the soil, he soaped his calves, he soaped his thighs—he soaped his reproductive organs! Emily blanched at the heretofore unrevealed sight of that manly portion, queer feelings thrilling every nerve. Reminding herself of her White Election, she raised her eyes with no little effort from that nether generative region.

  The giant had moved on to scrub his masculine chest and arms, these latter plainly the well-formed thews of a laborer. Emily wondered if this could be some ignorant new hired man, employed by Father before his departure, who, having wandered from his quarters in their barn, now washed himself yokel-style in public . . .

  All be-lathered, the giant paused now. He lifted his frothed arms up toward the new sun, as if in welcome to a brother. Then, shattering the matitutinal stillness (and whatever remained of Emily’s composure!), he loudly declaimed, “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of every man hearty and clean! Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest!”

  This wild unexpected outburst was too much for Emily. She sank to the windowsill in a half-swoon, the sudden fragrance of a few premature lilacs wafting to her and filling her nostrils with sweetness.

  In so doing, she knocked over a basket perched on the ledge. Secured by a long string, it was the vehicle by which she dropped sweetmeats to the neighborhood children on those days she felt incapable of leaving her room.

  Emily watched the basket fall. It seemed to tumble down with unnatural slowness, taking an Awful Hushed Eternity to drop through the lambent spring atmosphere.

  At last, however, it reached the end of its tether, bouncing several times with diminishing vigor, and Time resumed its wonted flow.

  The madman’s attention was at last caught. He turned and gazed upward, fixing Emily with his deep gray eyes, set beneath craggy brows. Doffing his hat and bowing, he launched into a strangely metered utterance.

  “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, she hides handsome and richly drest at the blinds of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah, the homeliest of them is beautiful to her!”

  Indignation replaced embarrassment in Emily. She straightened her back and summoned up her voice.

  “If you attempt some peculiar kind of poesy, sir, be advised that it is more effective when delivered by a clothed bard! And I’ll have you know that my age is nigh unto thirty, not twenty-eight!”

  And with that Emily slammed the shutters on the naked man.

  Trembling with rage and frustration, Emily rushed downstairs, her long auburn hair still sleep-dissolute.

  In the kitchen, she found her younger sister Lavinia peeping through the dimity curtains at the bather, who was now rinsing himself heartily with buckets of water from the rain-barrel.

  “Vinnie!”

  Emily’s sister jumped. “Emily! Have you seen him too?”

  “Of course I have. How could I possibly have missed such a spectacle? My eyesight is bad, I confess, but not that poor. I only pray that Mother hasn’t witnessed this horrid invasion. You know her health isn’t up to snuff, and I can hardly imagine how she’d react. Vinnie, what are we to do? If only Father were here! One of us must
run and fetch the sheriff, Vinnie, and I fear it must be you.”

  Lavinia regarded her sister with a look of disbelief. “Fetch the sheriff? Why, whatever for?”

  Emily returned an equal measure of incredulity. “Is it not as plain as the spots on a tiger-lily? To arrest this jay bird-naked trespasser, of course!”

  “Oh, I see. You’re not aware then.”

  “Aware of what?”

  “This gentleman and his party are guests of our brother. I assume that our Hercules has wandered over from The Evergreens, although why he should feel the need for such an exhibition, I cannot say.”

  From outside came the lusty chanting of the bather, along with the plashing of water. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself! And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you!”

  Emily shook her head. “Tish, what doggerel!” Returning her attention to her sister, she counterposed a question.

  “Even granted his status as Austin’s guest, why should we exempt him from the most basic laws of civility?”

  Lavinia’s eyes grew wide. “You really do not recognize who he is?”

  “Should I have? He was hardly wearing any badges, nor could I see a carte de visite on his person.”

  “Oh, Emily, can’t you ever be serious? Even a little housebound dormouse like you must have heard of the scandalous Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass. Why, the first edition was so shocking, Mister Whittier felt compelled to burn it! And rumor has it that the Boston firm of Thayer and Eldridge are to publish a new edition this very year! That’s one reason, I understand, why this ‘son of Mannahatta,’ as he styles himself, is visiting our New England. But there is another, more secret reason—or so Austin hints.”

  Emily fell weak-kneed into a ladderback chair. She hardly heard Vinnie’s peroration. All she could think was:

  At last, He has come.

  2

  “DEATH IS THE SUPPLE SUITOR”

  INTO THE TRUNDLE-BASKET Emily lay the sweet dead children, row by row.

  Foxgloves, turks-head lilies, pansies, columbines, the early rose. All her darlings fell to her merciless shears, weeping their glaucous tears.