The Mammoth Book of Steampunk

by Sean Wallace

  “Yessir.” The driver’s large sideburns rippled in the wind as he leapt out and strode past them.

  “What on earth is this about?” Gordon asked.

  “Observation, Mr Doyle. There is an urchin following us, and that same creature was outside the Colonial Museum when we last left it. Is it coincidence that the very same urchin following us now, and during the previous time I saw him, seemed to have one of these punch cards on his person?”

  “I would think not,” muttered Gordon.

  “Me neither.”

  Gordon looked around. “This is not a part of New Amsterdam for strangers to tarry in. Particularly ones in colorful capes such as yourself.”

  “Exactly the reason I chose it,” Ixtli said, scanning the crowds pushing against street vendors, people dodging carriages. A tram thundered by, ringing its bell furiously. He pointed a young man out to Gordon. “Call that one over. The one selling those rotten-looking apples.”

  “Boy!”

  The boy in question jogged over with the box of apples in front of his stomach, suspicion embedded in his glare. “What you want?”

  Gordon showed his badge and grabbed the boy before he could turn and run.

  Ixtli handed the boy a thick wad of paper money. “We have a job for you. That’s half what you’ll get if you succeed.”

  “It’d beat selling dodgy apples, you’ll make a couple weeks’ worth from us,” Gordon said, catching on. “And you don’t want me asking where you gone and got them from, now do you?”

  The struggling ceased. “What you wanting then?”

  “There’s a mangy sort following this vehicle – no, don’t look– and we want you to follow him in turn. No doubt he’ll spring off to inform someone of where we are when we reach our hotel. Follow him, but don’t let him see you. Find us back at the Waldorf Hotel. Ask for Doyle.”

  The boy tugged on his cap. “Yessir.”

  “And here is our driver,” Ixtli said. “Take the apples so the urchin suspects nothing.”

  Gordon did, and the driver, taking it all in his stride, just asked, “Shall I restart the cab, sirs?”

  “Yes, let’s move on.”

  The driver disappeared behind them. The cab shook as he climbed into his perch looking over the cab, and then the hansom jerked into motion. Ixtli settled back in.

  “Clever,” said Gordon.

  “If it works.” Ixtli looked down at the rotted apples. He was going to gibe Gordon about the hungry on the streets of New Amsterdam, and then decided to leave the man alone.

  “So now we retire to the hotel and wait.”

  “You told me this was a pursuit for the moderate and patient.”

  Gordon sighed.

  Their urchin showed up outside the hotel just as they were setting in to dine. Ixtli spotted the hotel doorman confronting the young boy as he maintained his need to see them right away.

  Ixtli and Gordon walked out to the street. “What do you have for us?”

  “I know where the boy went.” The urchin was still out of breath from his run.

  “Take us there!”

  “What about my money?”

  Ixtli felt around in his cape, pulled out enough for the cab fare, and looked at Gordon, who patted his pockets. “I left what I had on the table for the meal.”

  “We’ll get to a bank, but after you show us where the boy went.”

  “Dammit, I knew you was going to gyp me.”

  “Look at us, do we look like the sort to play games like that?” Gordon yelled.

  The boy looked him up and down. “I guess not,” he conceded. “But I’m going to get my money.” On that he was dead certain.

  They hailed a hansom. “East River Waterfront,” the boy said. They piled in, squeezing the boy between them. He reeked of sweat and body odor, and he grumbled about their lack of payment all the way.

  As the great East River Bridge loomed and they slowed, the boy crawled up to poke his head around to the back and guide the cabbie towards a set of large brick warehouses.

  HOLLERITH WAREHOUSING.

  “Hah,” Gordon said. “Nothing to fear from physiognomy indeed.”

  “Finesson could be innocent but unaware.” Ixtli jumped out of the hansom and paid the cabbie.

  Gordon agreed, and handed the driver a card he’d scribbled something on. “The constabulary will triple your usual if you hang around at the ready.”

  The driver nodded and accepted the promise of payment.

  “Look,” the boy said. “Be careful. The boys I followed was Constitutionalists. You don’t want to tangle with that lot.”

  “Thank you,” Ixtli patted him on the shoulder. “If we’re not back in fifteen minutes, call the police.”

  “Like hell,” the boy said.

  “They’ll pay you,” Gordon said.

  “I’ll consider it.”

  And then he was gone, watching them from the shadows. No doubt ready to rabbit off on a moment’s notice, but held there by the desire for his money.

  “So what are we looking for?” Gordon asked as they circled the building.

  “An easy opening,” Ixtli replied. There was a rumbling that seemed to permeate through the ground all around.

  “We don’t have a writ to enter.”

  “But I have diplomatic immunity.” Ixtli found a window that was loose, and with some persuading, forced it open. “Care to accompany me lest my life be threatened and an incident between our respective countries occurs?”

  Gordon licked his lips. “Damned if I do …”

  Ixtli waited for the second part of the sentence. None came, so he pulled himself up and over into the warehouse.

  Gordon scrabbled in after him. The warehouse was dark, shadows of pallets and crates looming all around them. Gordon took out an electric torch and clicked it on.

  The entire warehouse lit up, gaslamps all throughout springing up to full flame. A crowd of very serious-looking childlike faces started at them, and at their head, a giant of a man, a dockworker, reached with a long coil of loop.

  “Welcome to these United Peoples,” he growled. Ixtli stared at the long tattoo of a chopped-up snake on his left forearm. Don’t tread on me, it said.

  Ixtli doubted anyone would be able to, not with all that muscle.

  Three more dockworkers stepped forward, surrounding them.

  In short order both men were tied up, Gordon handcuffed with his own cuffs, despite both giving a brief struggle.

  “May I ask why we’re being detained?” Gordon asked. He had a purple bruise over his left eye, and Ixtli admired his cool in the situation. Ixtli himself considered a prayer to the gods.

  “You damn well know you was trespassing,” the giant of a man growled. “Don’t play coy, eh?”

  “Okay. So what are we waiting for?”

  “Who.”

  The three men melted aside, giving way to a man in a stovepipe hat and long tails. A craggy face regarded them both. This was interesting. They weren’t dead yet.

  “Mr Hollerith?” Ixtli asked.

  The man removed his hat and handed it over to an urchin. A stool was presented for him to sit on. “Justin Hollerith. Are you here to assassinate me?”

  “We’re here to find the killer of that boy at the Colonial Museum,” Gordon said.

  “Well huzzah,” Hollerith said. “You have found the killer.”

  Gordon tensed in his chair. “You?”

  Hollerith shook his head. He snapped his fingers and the mass of urchins shifted. A massive curtain slowly rolled aside to reveal a machine that made the one at Hollerith’s offices look like a toy.

  The entire warehouse was filled with rotating shafts that went on and on, and thousands of gears. Young boys ran from station to station with armloads of punch cards.

  That explained the vibrating floors and roads outside. Ixtli glanced around, wondering how it would be explained to his family that he had died, strapped to a chair in some dirty city up north.

  No honor
in this, he thought. None at all.

  “Here is your killer,” Hollerith said. “How do you plan on bringing it to justice?”

  Gordon shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Hollerith spread his arms wide to indicate the sheer presence of the machine. “You, Aztec, should know what we are going through right now.”

  “Indeed?” Ixtli perked up. The man was still talking, waiting for something, eager to prove … something. If they could keep him talking, then maybe there would be time for the boy outside to go for the police.

  If he did ever go. That was a gamble.

  “The tyrants and occupiers of our lands …” Hollerith got up and Ixtli tensed. “The colonies tried to rise once, to be crushed in their boots.”

  “You’re a dissident,” Gordon hissed.

  “Revolutionaries! Visionaries!” Hollerith stood up. “Gentlemen, what you see before you is the engine of a new future. The British boot will be forced back. This machine is the constitution of the new United States of America.”

  “The what?” Ixtli remembered that the boy had called these people constitutionalists.

  Now Hollerith paced in front of them. “A set of rules for governing us, fair, impartial and written by the people. The tyrants refused to let man rule himself, and so we’ve had to go underground. Slowly, building our ranks. We have citizens all throughout the thirteen colonies, waiting for their moment to rise up.”

  One of the dockworkers took out a punch card from the end of a station. “Mister Hollerith.” He handed it over.

  Hollerith glanced at the card. He blinked. “I hold here your future, gentlemen.”

  Ixtli looked at the complex pattern of holes. “Really? The machine dictates your actions?”

  “What is government but a set of programmed instructions we all agree upon? And in a democracy, it is blind, and her instructions carried out by men. This is no different.

  “The things that happen to us, we feed them into the computer, and it sorts its responses and hands them back to us on our cards, telling us how to serve it best. Judgements, foreign policies and now … war. It is our destiny, it always has been, to spill out throughout this country and claim it for ourselves. To spread from sea to sea. Already telegraph operators string throughout the thirteen, even through the Indian lands between us and the west coast, passing on and coordinating instructions with other constitutional machines running in parallel all throughout the land. The US will rise again.”

  “Manifest destiny, embodied within the unflinching intelligence of a computing machine,” Ixtli said.

  “You’ve heard of the theory? The machine decided that a diplomatic incident would be what we needed. It said to look out for anything resembling one, so that we could use that to gain recruits, and worry people about the threat of foreign murderers here in our city.”

  “That theory is that your race is somehow owed it all: the lands of the Mexica, the Indians, and what the British rule already,” said Ixtli. “Yes, I’ve heard this before. In Texcaco, yes, in the Mexica-Americas war. Many of your border men, out of the reach of the British, were prodded on by the Louisiana French by having that belief dangled before them. An ugly scene.”

  “This will be different.” Hollerith looked at the punch card. “I’m sorry, but as enemies of the state, you will not have a trial. You will be executed as spies. So says the Constitution.”

  “So says the Constitution,” murmured the hundreds in the warehouse.

  “You’ll be taken to a room, where ten blindfolded men with rifles will fire. The Constitution will randomly load a pair of guns. Take them away.”

  Gordon struggled again, but Ixtli remained calm. “Now you are killing harmless public servants in the name of your cause, just like any other group of dissidents.”

  Hollerith refused the bait. “I have sworn to protect the Constitution, gentlemen, from all its enemies. Your rhetoric will have little impact on me.”

  The three dockworkers moved in, and Ixtli walked with them through the rows of furiously spinning clockwork and blank government officials’ faces.

  They were forced into a tiny closet, and the door was barred shut.

  “Thanks for delaying them,” Gordon said, leaning against the wall.

  “I did what I could.” Ixtli moved around in the dark, trying to find out if there was anything useful, but the space had been cleared of everything.

  “When they find us dead, I imagine my heart will be cut out,” Gordon said. “And you will be dead nearby of a gunshot, maybe?”

  “It will stir up enmity, feed unity and a sense that they need to cohere against an outside force.”

  It wasn’t just his death, but the betrayal of his country. Ixtli kicked at the door in frustration.

  “Hey,” a familiar voice hissed. The door cracked open and in slipped the boy. He left the door ajar, the welcome light bringing their temporary cell out of the deep dark and into murkiness. “I knew you’d get yourselves in it deep and end up losing me my money.”

  “Did you call the police?” Gordon asked.

  “Police? No damn police. Just Slim Tim.”

  “Who’s Slim Tim?” Ixtli moved closer to the boy.

  “Who’s Slim Tim? he asks. Slim Tim is me!” Slim Tim sliced the ropes off.

  “And no one noticed you?” Gordon asked.

  Slim Tim shrugged. “They was busy with the lights.” He smiled, and then counted off his fingers. On the last one something boomed loudly and Slim Tim chuckled. Light flashed and danced brightly.

  Gordon pulled the last of his rope free. “Let’s make a break for it.”

  They glanced out of the closet. Nothing but people tending the machine.

  “Run,” Ixtli said.

  They skirted the dark walls, ducking and weaving around the dangerous moving parts of the living machine. The escape almost worked, but near the doors a man throwing switches paused, frowned, and shouted at them.

  The cry went up all throughout the warehouse, and the ten men with rifles ran through an aisle of machinery, blindfolds loose around their necks. “Stop!”

  “Only two of the guns will kill us,” Ixtli said. “Run for it, and whoever survives, get out to call the officials.”

  “Scatter,” Gordon said, and they did. All ten rifles fired, and Ixtli felt relief. Nothing had hit him, no bullets pinged, they were all blanks. He turned the corner with the other two before the second round, this one not loaded with blanks, could be fired.

  They burst out of the main doors, ran down the corners to where the hansom waited, and all three piled in, shouting, “Go, go, go!”

  “You pay me now,” Slim Tim said. “Very next thing.”

  Ixtli grabbed Slim Tim’s shoulders. “You’re damn right we pay you next.” He shook the boy. “You will make a small fortune tonight, Mr Tim, a small fortune.”

  Gordon met Ixtli the next morning at the airfield before he left and stuck his hand out. “Mr Ixtli, my thanks.”

  Ixtli regarded the offered hand. A strange custom. He took it carefully and finished the American ritual, a sign of respect for what they had both been through. “Did you get Hollerith?”

  Gordon shook his head. “They smashed the machine, and took their punch cards with them. We reduced their abilities significantly, though, thanks to you.”

  “Thanks to you.” Ixtli’s superiors would find this a fascinating tale. He wondered what they would do with the information. Computer-run governments and humans no better than automatons, run by small dots on a piece of paper.

  “What a barbarous idea, letting machines rule you.”

  Ixtli looked around. “What is a government but ideas that are set down on paper for rules, and then interpreted and run by individual human machines? Is it really that far-fetched?”

  “But cogs and wheels? We will find these people and their cards and burn them out.”

  Ixtli nodded, relieved. The Constitutionalists had taken all their punch cards with them. Good. “Of course
, that is the typical response of a nation. But Gordon, remember this: all ten of those weapons fired were blank, we were never hit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A government is the will of its people, and the will of Hollerith is twisted. He and his people want land, and revolution, and blood. Revenge against the British. Manifest destiny above all else.

  “But if the pure ideals of an idea were really input into a machine, maybe it fought back, Mr Doyle. Maybe it told all those soldiers to load blanks. And Hollerith indicated that maybe the machine hadn’t ordered that man’s death at the museum, but merely suggested they look for such an incident.”

  “Maybe,” Gordon said. “Maybe.”

  “Consider it, that the ideas are what is important. If you ever come to Tenochtitlan, make sure to visit.” Ixtli smiled. “Where the pursuit of truth reigns free, and all manner of theories live side by side, jostling each other.”

  They shook hands again, and then Gordon grabbed Ixtli’s shoulder.

  “I have a favor to ask: now that we have solved this crime and my men are looking for Hollerith, might I get your permission to send my notes and files to my brother? He fancies himself something of a writer and follows such things. Intrigue, and the sort.”

  “Of course,” Ixtli said. “What is your brother’s name?”

  “Arthur.”

  “Just make sure my name is changed,” Ixtli laughed. And with that last bit of business, the two men separated. Ixtli boarded the airship.

  Somewhere past French Louisiana and over tribal lands, Ixtli reached under his coat and pulled out a stack of punch cards. An insurrection, guided by machine, could be imminently useful.

  The basis of the computing machine’s rules could be corrupted, maybe even by telegraph commands, or a hidden series of codes activated by punch cards slipped in by an agent. An agent who had been called north by a special signal, thanks to a series of pre-programmed instructions.

  Ixtli’s world faced threats. Spanish to the south, English colonies and French to the north, and the intermediate and forever fickle tribal societies in the midlands. Tenochtitlan was always aware of the need to keep Europeans on their toes. Keeping the Europeans divided and fighting among themselves kept them from focusing their eyes on new land.