The Mammoth Book of Steampunk

by Sean Wallace

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Crumworth finally burst out. “Has no one taught this idiot basic thaumic theory?”

  “It could happen,” insisted the anatomist. “Aaris does have the thaumic reservoirs; the ones on the pass, the ones in the Mittelgeist valley—”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Doctor Brackett stirred cream into her coffee until it turned beige. “Yes, there are the reservoirs under the gun emplacements and elsewhere. But they’re the wrong kind. You couldn’t use them to power something like an air serpent.”

  All very sound science, of course, and the Mobility/Sufficiency Paradox was the basis of at least one Society lecture. I turned away to hide my smile, and caught a glimpse of Dieterich deliberately tapping his pipe with the careful concentration that meant he was thinking about something else.

  “It’s like the difference between a geothermic station and a boiler,” Crumworth went on. “One’s much more powerful than the other, but it’s no good if you’re too far away from the steam for it to power anything.”

  One of the Terranocta astronomers at the far end of the table nodded. “Is why no one give a shit about Aaris.”

  Several members of the party immediately busied themselves with their coffee. It didn’t take much to guess why, and as the person who’d handled most correspondence on this expedition, I didn’t have to guess. After all, no one noticed a valet, especially not if he was there to take care of simple administrative tasks as well, and if some codes were childishly easy to crack, that was hardly my fault.

  While the Royal Society’s ostensible reason for the expedition was to offer the hand of friendship and scientific enquiry to their poor isolated cousins, any idiot could see that it was also to assay whether air power could bypass the gun emplacements. Thaumic reservoirs might be useless for certain engineering methods, but that hardly made them worthless, as the Royal Society well knew.

  At least half of the party were spies (Brackett and Crumworth in particular, each from a rival faction in the same country, which explained their mutual antagonism and attraction), and I had my suspicions about the other half. To take the most cynical view, the ship was like any other diplomatic mission in that absolutely no one was as they seemed.

  As if perceiving my thoughts, Dieterich glanced up and met my gaze, and the trace of a smile creased the corners of his eyes. Yes, he was an exception to that. As was the Professora, though all of us had our reasons for being here – Dieterich for the Society, Lundqvist for the prestige, the spies for their countries, the non-spies for curiosity. As for me, I’d been valet to Dieterich for ten years, in general service for ten before that, and I was homesick.

  The sound of guns below us faded into the distance, as if the lull in our conversation had reached them as well. Two down, one to go, I counted. That was if the landscape hadn’t changed, if my memories of the pass still held true.

  The anatomist cleared his throat. “A serpent could—”

  “Oh, do shut up, Klaus,” Lundqvist snapped.

  What happened the day after was pretty much inescapably my fault, in both the immediately personal and the greater sense. We had passed the third emplacement in the very early hours, and while that had been a near thing – scuttlebutt had it that the charts had been wrong, and only the helmsman’s reflexes had saved us – the mood today was light, and the general consensus that we would clear the pass by noon.

  I served breakfast to those of the party who were awake by eight (Dieterich, one of the astronomers, and the immobile, sulking Professora), then made my way up to the observation deck, where I had no business being. It was not the safest place, even with the security of an andropter across my shoulders, but I hoped to catch a glimpse of Aaris before our mission began in earnest. The thaumaturges whose duty it was to keep the Regina airborne were changing shift, each moving into his or her mudra in what an ignorant man might have called clockwork regularity. I exchanged nods with those leaving their shifts and headed for the open-air viewing at the bow.

  The morning sun cast our shadow over the mountain slopes so that it seemed to leap ahead of us like a playful dog. A dozen ornamental lenses along the lower railing showed the landscape in picturesque facets. I risked adjusting my eyes to see ahead.

  Something twinkled on the high peaks that marked the last mountains of the Sterling Pass, and I focused on it just as the captain’s voice roared from the speaking tube. I had enough time to think, Ah, so they did get my report on the Society’s air capabilities, before I realized that the guns had already fired.

  The next few minutes were a confusion of pain and shrapnel. I was later to learn that the captain’s quick thinking had kept the Regina’s dirigible sacs from being punctured, but at the cost of both the observation deck and the forward hold. What struck me at the time, though, was a chunk of werglass from the lenses, followed by a broken segment of railing that pinned me to the deck. Splinters ground under my fingers as I scrabbled at the planks, first to keep from falling through the wreckage, then out of sheer agony as the railing dug deeper. A detachment borne partly of my nature and partly of my years of service told me that there had been substantial but not crippling damage to my internals, and that the low insistent sound I heard was not mechanical but one of the thaumaturges sobbing quietly as she attempted to keep the Regina aloft.

  There are times when detachment is not a virtue.

  With a rattling gasp, I reached down and pulled the railing from my side. Only blood followed it, and I yanked the remnants of my coat over the gap in a futile effort to hide the wound.

  The hatches from belowdecks slammed open. “Charles? Where’s Charles?” roared Dieterich, and I flattened myself against the boards, hoping to remain unnoticed. “There you are, man! A stretcher, quickly!”

  In short order I was bundled onto a stretcher and carried down to the lab, where Dieterich had me placed on the central table and my andropter unstrapped. The Society party’s pleas to have me taken to the ship’s sawbones were refuted with the quite accurate observation that he already had enough patients, and that furthermore no one was going to lay hands on Dieterich’s valet but Dieterich himself. Crumworth and Brackett exchanged glances at this, coming as usual to the wrong conclusion.

  Dieterich ordered everyone out, then turned on Professora Lundqvist, who observed the whole enterprise from her place by the door. “And you, too, madam!”

  “It will take you a full half-hour to attach me to a more convenient bulkhead,” she retorted. “Besides, I have more medical experience than you.”

  Dieterich muttered something about idiot disembodied brains thinking they knew everything, but he let her remain. “Hang on, Charles,” he said. “We’ll soon have you right as rain.”

  He paused, staring at the open wound in my side. I closed my eyes and cursed myself for ever having the idiot sense to join this expedition.

  “Lundqvist,” Dieterich said softly, “your phonograph, please.”

  The Professora acquiesced by extending the horn of her phonograph to the lock on the door and emitting a blast like an air-horn. Cries of dismay followed, and Dieterich kicked the door as he went to pull on sterile gloves. “No eavesdropping, you half-witted adjuncts!”

  He returned to my side and with a set of long tweezers removed one of the many separate pains from my side. “Well,” he said in a voice that barely carried to my ears, “do we need to discuss this?” And he held up the bloodied escapement that he had extracted.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t think so, sir,” I finally managed. “I expect you can infer the meaning of clockwork in your valet.”

  Dieterich reached for his pipe, realized he didn’t have it, and whuffled through his mustache instead. “That’s loyalty for you, eh, Lundqvist?” he said over his shoulder. “Man even ascribes this discovery to me. Very flattering.”

  “I suspected a while ago,” Lundqvist said quietly, turning her phonograph to face us. “When this expedition was first floated.”
<
br />   “Eight months past? Pah, woman, you only told me three weeks ago.”

  I stared at her. “How?” I choked, realizing a second later that I’d just confirmed her suspicions.

  “Your transmissions to Aaris. I monitor the radio transmissions from the Society – never mind why, Dieterich, suffice it to say that I had reason – and after some time I noticed your additions. Very well encrypted, by the way; I’m still impressed.”

  The thought came to mind that had I been only a little slower yesterday, I might have been rid of one of those who knew my secret. But the Professora, as usual, gave no indication of what she was thinking, and Dieterich only set the escapement in a sterile tray and began a search for the anesthetic. “Merged,” I said at last. “In Aaris we’re called merged citizens.”

  “Citizens, hm? Looks like the sociology department’s theory about rank anarchism in Aaris had some foundation.” Dieterich extracted another chunk of shrapnel, this one three-fourths of a gear from my recording array, nestled just below what passed for my ribs. “Charles, if I describe what I’m seeing here, can you tell me how to repair you?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I can, but—” I stopped, the full explanation of merged versus autonomous citizenry and the Aaris monarchic system trembling on my tongue. Had silence really been so intolerable these last years, so much that the first opportunity made me liable to spill all I knew? “If you extract the broken bits and stitch me up, I should be fine,” I told him.

  The Regina lurched beneath us. Dieterich caught the side of the table and cursed. “You’re self-repairing?” he asked as he righted himself, the tone of fascinated enquiry one I knew well.

  I couldn’t say I was happy about being the focus of that interest. “No, I heal up. There’s a difference. Sir.”

  “Thaumic reserves,” the Professora murmured. “Infused throughout living tissue – I did wonder, when I heard about the serpent, whether it was possible. We may have to revise our definition of thaumic self-sufficiency. Dieterich, you’ve missed a piece.”

  “I haven’t missed it; I was just about to get it.” Carefully, with hands more accustomed to steam engines, Dieterich pulled the last damaged scrap from underneath my internal cage and began sealing the wound with hemostatic staples. Each felt like a dull thump against my side, muffled by the anesthetic. “Springs, even … do you know, Charles, if word gets out that I have a clockwork valet, I’m never going to live it down.”

  “I suspect I won’t either, sir.” I took the pad of gauze he handed me and pressed it into place while he unwound a length of burdock-bandage. The pain eased to a dull ache. “What will you tell the captain?”

  “Nothing, I expect,” Lundqvist said, and Dieterich grunted assent. “What did your Aariscian counterparts ask you to do on this voyage, Charles? From our continued existence, I presume your purpose here wasn’t sabotage.”

  I closed my eyes again, then gritted my teeth and attempted to sit up. Dieterich had done a good job – as well he should, being an engineer of automata on a grander scale – and the edges no longer grated, though it was a toss-up whether I’d have recording capabilities again. One more rivet in the vault of my espionage career, I thought, and here was the last: “They didn’t tell me anything,” I croaked, eluding Dieterich’s offer of help. “They haven’t told me anything for fourteen years.”

  And there it was, the reason I’d come with Dieterich on this expedition when it would have been so easy to cry off: not just duty, not just homesickness, but the need to know what had happened in my absence. I covered my face, hiding how my eyes adjusted and readjusted, the lenses carrying away any trace of oily tears. I did not normally hide emotion, but I could at least hide this mechanical, Merged response.

  The Regina shuddered again, followed by a screech that sent shivers up to my medulla. Dieterich glanced upwards, pity temporarily forgotten. “That wasn’t a gun.” He stripped off his gloves. “Lundqvist, keep an eye on him.”

  “And how am I to do that?” Lundqvist asked as Dieterich unbarred the door and ran out. “Charles? Charles, do not go up there, you are not fit to be on your feet.”

  I might not be fit, but both my employer and my home were now up there. I yanked Dieterich’s greatcoat on over my bandages and followed.

  We had passed the last of the guns, truly the last this time, and the sunlight on the decks burned clear and free of dust. Just past the bow of the Regina, I caught a glimpse of Aaris’s green valleys.

  Between that and us hovered a knot of silver, endlessly twisting. Serpents, I thought first, and then as the red-cloaked riders on each came clear, Merged serpents.

  I had been a fool to think that the fourth set of guns would be the only addition to Aaris’s defenses.

  “Come no farther.” A serpent glided closer with the motion of a water-snake, and its rider turned in place to address us through a megaphone. “None may enter the Aaris Valley on pain of death.” Familiar words – the same that had been cut into the stone at the far end of the pass, to proclaim Aaris’s isolation to the world. The same that I had memorized as a Merged child. Here they were spoken, recited in a voice that bounced off the mountains.

  “We are a peaceful mission!” Dieterich yelled back, then cursed and repeated his words into the captain’s annunciator.

  The captain stalked past him to a locker by the helm. “You’d do better arguing with the graven warning,” she muttered.

  And indeed, the response was much the same as the cliff face would give: silent, anticipatory, the perpetual knotwork of the serpents writing a sigil of forbidding in the air. “Turn back now, or you will die,” the spokesman finished. I focused, and focused again, trying to see his face.

  Dieterich glanced at the captain. “If I tell you to turn back—”

  “Can’t. Not without going straight through them. The Regina’s got a shitty turning radius.” The captain yanked her annunciator from his hands. “We demand safe passage!”

  The rider did not answer, but raised one hand, and the pattern unraveled toward us. True to their nature, the serpents did not attack the dirigible sacs, but went for the shinier, more attractive target below: the ship itself. A gleaming gray ribbon spun past the remains of the observation deck, taking a substantial bite out of the woodwork and doing much greater damage with a last flail of its body in passing.

  “Small arms! Small arms!” The captain produced a crank-gun from the locker and took aim at the closest serpent. She tossed a second gun to Dieterich, who cursed the air blue but took it, leveling it at the rider instead.

  A second serpent undulated up to the very decks of the ship, knocking several ’nauts aside in its wake. Those who could handle a weapon ran to the lockers; I lurched out of the way, landed heavily on my wounded side, and cried out.

  At the rail, Dieterich turned – and the last flick of the serpent’s tail lashed out and knocked him over the railing.

  There was no outcry; the chaos was too great, and Dieterich not the only one to go over the side. The snap of andropters opening added a new, percussive voice to the tumult.

  I will not explain my actions then; certainly I knew that Dieterich’s andropter was in good condition, as I had tended to it only that morning. Nor did I have any fear for him in particular. Nor was I so foolish as to forget that my own andropter was back in the lab with Lundqvist, and so any slip on my part inevitably meant a fall that would not just kill me but reduce me to a splash on the rocks below. Still, some remnant of instinct propelled me forward despite better sense and burgeoning pain, and I ran to the railing.

  The serpent whose rider Dieterich had pulverized writhed near the bow, devoid of instructions and therefore meaning. I leapt onto the railing, crouched briefly to secure my balance, and flung myself at the beast, trusting in my Merged brain to calculate the proper angle.

  I caught the first set of fins and was dragged alongside the ship, long enough for me to force a hand into the soft tissue behind the fin and fumble about, searching for the controls
that had to be there. Merged pack animals had always had secondary controls near their braincases; surely this part of the design would not have changed.

  It had not. With one hand “plugged” into the serpent’s controls and one clinging to its fin, I wrenched the beast away from its attack on the Regina and followed the sound of Dieterich swearing at his andropter. It had opened enough to keep him from plummeting to his death but had the unfortunate side effect of wafting him directly toward the mouth of another serpent.

  I wrenched my serpent into a helical dive, wrapped my legs around the closest fin and stretched my arm out as we coasted past. My serpent smashed through the silk and framework of Dieterich’s andropter, and I caught Dieterich himself by the harness as the jolt briefly tossed him aside. My arm went numb with the shock, and the staples holding my wound shut tore apart, but it was enough: I used Dieterich’s momentum to swing him aboard, onto the serpent’s flat head and out of danger.

  Dieterich stared blankly at the sky for a moment, apparently having difficulty understanding that he was still alive. “Good show, Charles!” he croaked after a moment. “Very good show. You’ve got a knack for this.”

  I kept hold of his harness and didn’t answer. One slip, I thought, one simple yank on the harness and I’d have disposed of half the people who knew my Aariscian nature. And the only other led a fragile existence in an easily broken tank …

  It didn’t matter. Or it would have mattered, in another world, one where I was actually the spy I’d been built to be. I clung to the serpent’s head and whispered to it as I worked the controls, blood seeping through the bandage and slicking my side. “Forward. Take me to Aaris. Please.”