by Sean Wallace
Are you coming to me now? The voice was curious.
Then something like the wind at my back and she had me around the waist, both her wrist-blades protruding enough to root in my leathers and poke my ribs, thank you very much. I looked back and she had her knee-blades planted deep, enough to hold all three of us for a while.
You may all come. See!
“Get back, Suicide!” yelled Tintype, never mind that I was hauling him inch by inch up the rubble, his feet clawing for toehold, now she had us anchored.
But she hung on, grim as death, and I thought at first it was dinkum and the mag was variable after all when she started to scream.
I heave-hoed hard as I could and sent Tintype rolling safe past the lip of the trap. Suicide was writhing in the red sand, gashes opening down her leathers where the blades were birthing, ripped from her flesh by the mag.
Tintype grabbed her feet, I took her shoulders and we tried to heave her past the barrier. But she was spasming now, her screams a thin, shrill tea-kettle sound. She thrashed like nothing human, and a blade shot out of her, neatly skinning half my thumb.
I hung on, but Tintype got a solid kick in the chest, sending him tumbling. Coated in red dust, he staggered back. I lost my grip, and Suicide dropped. The back blade shot from her, clattering down the slope. Then one tore out of the back of her hand.
Somehow Tintype scooped her up and went running for the barrier. I followed, dodging as her hardware zipped past my head.
At the barrier he almost fell, but we caught her between us, laid her down gently as we could.
Past the leathers I saw slabs of red flesh and mottled white bone. The tendons on the backs of her hand were exposed. Beneath, her leathers, my arms, were soaked.
Tintype cradled her, holding her head. Don’t do that, I thought automatically, but she didn’t struggle. She was panting quickly now, like a tired dingo.
“What?” said Tintype, bending over her.
“Hatching soon,” she said. “The barrier moons, all in pieces. So cold.”
She looked past Tintype, up at me. “I’m cold, ’Star.”
“Don’t,” said Tintype, but she was gone.
Tintype sat expressionless for a long time. In the twilight wind, the blood on my arms felt sticky and cold.
“Bollocks,” he said at last, quiet-like.
Nine years, I never heard him swear.
“Bollocks to them all.”
In a single movement, he got to his feet, Suicide in his arms. There was a terrible stillness about him.
He walked back to the pit and I trotted by his side.
“We need to get out of here, ’Type.”
He ignored me. At the lip of the slope he stopped, and I tried to take the body.
“Let me take her, ’Type. We’ll go back and find the mules.”
Tintype snarled at me, and I recoiled. He folded himself upon the lip, with her body across his lap.
“Go away, Superstar,” he said, deadvoiced. “Get as far away as you can.”
Suicide looked boneless across his knees, and her shorn head in the crook of his elbow looked like a tired doll.
A smooth click and I stared down the barrel of Tintype’s gun. Never knew he had a gun.
“Go, or I will shoot you, ’Star,” he said, but I was fair mazed. Celluloid, fine grained, a lovely piece, really. But how did he rate a gun, forbidden to pensioners? And where did he hide it all this time?
But then. He wasn’t really a pensioner, and hid everything from us.
Everything, even love.
Still, his voice was calm. “I’ll start with the shoulder, ’Star, then the legs. Move out while you can.”
I moved back slowly, crunching on the ore, then faster. Out of range, as I reckoned it, I stopped, and he put down the gun.
Methodically, he searched in his innumerable pockets. He took out something small, and square, and black, with a screen that glinted in the sun. Behind me and overhead, I heard the hum of gliders.
There were five of them, the same as those that crashed the Pinkertons. Tintype had something like a stylus and was manipulating something on the little black box.
I stifled the impulse to duck as the gliders hummed closer. Bollocks to them all.
Tintype, done with his fiddling about, held up the box and flashed it in the setting sun. The gliders were straight up by now, and I saw them adjust their course to center on Tintype.
He waited. He waited until they were very close.
Then he tossed the box in a beauteous parabola, arcing into the pit. The gliders, one two three four five, went straight down into the trap. He never looked round to watch them, still facing me.
The hum stopped, hiccupped like an angry insect.
And then.
A great flare, straight up like a pillar of fire. For a second I saw them both silhouetted stark black against the orange. Then the ash rained down. I did duck then; I groveled in the dirt. It was a long time before the roaring stopped.
I walked to the dimple where the pit had been, taking the sponges out of my ears. Nobody was saying anything. I was covered in red dust, half an inch thick: a creature of the Never-Never.
As far as I could see, mile upon mile of ore. And the milky sparkle of opal.
Reckoning-man and all, he had brought us to this.
Something moved, shifting chunks of earth with a clink and clank.
I decided to wait and see if it was human. But ’twasn’t. Tintype was gone, with Suicide, with the clients and their gliders, with Uluru buried deep in her exultation and despair.
Something tickled my brain, and I wondered if I’d missed a headmod.
Mother?
Wings it had, which made sense, didn’t it, if it was to fly between the stars? No head, but a mouth, serrated sharp, embedded in a stocky body. Nothing to compare this to: not ’roo, not goanna, not dingo, not man. Things like feet, too many, clawed like Suicide’s blades. Like her, a thing made to fight. It could’ve gutted me with a thought.
It looked at me, eyeless, sideways-like, and cawed.
I’m cold, mother.
I stepped closer and saw things like worms crawling over its body. Closer still and saw they were pinfeathers, growing fast before my eyes.
I’m hungry, mother.
Days away the Pinkertons roasted beneath the sun, and I had no thought but to lead it there, though my ’skins were all but dry and I’d never make it. It followed me patient for half a day and then must’ve nosed them out, for that mouth came out of that dreadful body and hooked me up by the leathers. I dangled like a puppy while its feet beat the ground and the ground went by in a blur of dust and opal.
It ate fast, if delicately. Thought it would eat me too, but I was too tired to run when it stepped, fussy-like, towards me.
But it only settled against me, tucking its terrible feet beneath, and went to sleep.
I thought about howsome my last sea voyage wasn’t half bad, and I’d rather like another.
“Well, little bird,” I whispered. “Shall we go to London to see the Queen?”
Arbeitskraft
Nick Mamatas
1. The Transformation Problem
In glancing over my correspondence with Herr Marx, especially the letters written during the period in which he was struggling to complete his opus, Capital, even whilst I was remanded to the Victoria Mill of Ermen and Engels in Weaste to simultaneously betray the class I was born into and the class to which I’d dedicated my life, I was struck again by the sheer audacity of my plan. I’ve moved beyond political organizing or even investigations of natural philosophy and have used my family’s money and the labour of my workers – even now, after a lifetime of railing against the bourgeoisie, their peculiar logic limns my language – to encode my old friend’s thoughts in a way I hope will prove fruitful for the struggles to come.
I am a fox, ever hunted by agents of the state, but also by political rivals and even the occasional enthusiastic student intellectual m
anqué. For two weeks, I have been making a very public display of destroying my friend’s voluminous correspondence. The girls come in each day and carry letters and covers both in their aprons to the roof of the mill to burn them in a soot-stained metal drum. It’s a bit of a spectacle, especially as the girls wear cowls to avoid smoke inhalation and have rather pronounced limps as they walk the bulk of the letters along the roof, but we are ever attracted to spectacle, aren’t we? The strings of electrical lights in the petitbourgeois districts that twinkle all night, the iridescent skins of the dirigibles that litter the skies over The City like peculiar flying fish leaping from the ocean – they even appear overhead here in Manchester, much to the shock, and more recently, glee of the street urchins who shout and yawp whenever one passes under the clouds, and the only slightly more composed women on their way to squalid Deansgate market. A fortnight ago I took in a theatrical production, a local production of Mr Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, already a hoary old play given new life and revived, ironically enough, by recent innovations in electrified machine-works. How bright the lights, how stunning the arc of actual lightning, tamed and obedient, how thunderous the ovations and the crumbling of the glacial cliffs! All the bombast of German opera in a space no larger than a middle-class parlour. And yet, throughout the entire evening, the great and hulking monster never spoke. Contra Madame Shelley’s engaging novel, the “new Adam” never learns of philosophy, and the total of her excellent speeches of critique against the social institutions of her, and our, day are expurgated. Instead, the monster is ever an infant, given only to explosions of rage. Yet the audience, which contained a fair number of working-men who had managed to save or secure 5d. for “penny-stinker” seating, was enthralled. The play’s Christian morality, alien to the original novel, was spelled out as if on a slate for the audience, and the monster was rendered as nothing more than an artefact of unholy vice. But lights blazed, and living snow from coils of refrigeration fell from the ceiling, and spectacle won the day.
My burning of Marx’s letters is just such a spectacle – the true correspondence is secreted among a number of the safe houses I have acquired in Manchester and London. The girls on the rooftop are burning unmarked leaves, schoolboy doggerel, sketches and whatever else I have lying about. The police have infiltrated Victoria Mill, but all their agents are men, as the work of espionage is considered too vile for the gentler sex. So the men watch the girls come from my office with letters by the bushel and burn them, then report every lick of flame and wafting cinder to their superiors.
My brief digression regarding the Frankenstein play is apposite, not only as it has to do with spectacle but with my current operation at Victoria Mill. Surely, Reader, you are familiar with Mr Babbage’s remarkable Difference Engine, perfected in 1822 – a year prior to the first production of Mr Peake’s theatrical adaptation of Frankenstein – given the remarkable changes to the political economy that took place in the years after its introduction. How did we put it, back in the heady 1840s? “Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?” That was just the beginning. Ever more I was reminded not of my old work with Marx, but of Samuel Butler’s prose fancy “Erewhon – the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants – is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.”
With the rise of the Difference Engine and the subsequent rationalization of market calculations, the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary aspect continued unabated. Steam-navigation took to the air; railways gave way to horseless carriages; electric telegraphs to instantaneous wireless aethereal communications; the development of applied volcanization to radically increase the amount of arable land, and to tame the great prize of Africa, the creation of automata for all but the basest of labour … ah, if only Marx were still here. That, I say to myself each morning upon rising. If only Marx were still here! The stockholders demand to know why I have not automated my factory, as though the clanking stovepipe limbs of the steam-workers aren’t just more dead labour! As though Arbeitskraft – labour-power – is not the source of all value! If only Marx were still here! And he’d say to me, Freddie, perhaps we were wrong. Then he’d laugh and say, I’m just having some fun with you.
But we were not wrong. The internal contradictions of capitalism have not peacefully resolved themselves; the proletariat still may become the new revolutionary class, even as steam-worker builds steam-worker under the guidance of Difference Engine No. 53. The politico-economic chasm between bourgeoisie and proletarian has grown ever wider, despite the best efforts of the Fabian Society and other gradualists to improve the position of the working class vis-à-vis their esteemed – and en-steamed, if you would forgive the pun – rulers. The Difference Engine is a device of formal logic, limited by the size of its gearwork and the tensile strength of the metals used in its construction. What I propose is a device of dialectical logic, a repurposing of the looms, a recording of unity of conflicts and opposites drawn on the finest of threads to pull innumerable switches, based on a linguistic programme derived from the correspondence of my comrade-in-arms.
I am negating the negation, transforming my factory into a massive Dialectical Engine that replicates not the arithmetical operations of an abacus but the cogitations of a human brain. I am rebuilding Karl Marx on the factory floor, repurposing the looms of the factory to create punch-cloths of over a thousand columns, and I will speak to my friend again.
2. The Little Match Girls
Under the arch-lights of Fairfield Road I saw them, on my last trip to The City. The evening’s amusement had been invigorating if empty, a fine meal had been consumed immediately thereafter, and a digestif imbibed. I’d dismissed my London driver for the evening, for a cross-town constitutional. I’d catch the late airship, I thought. Match girls, leaving their shift in groups, though I could hardly tell them from steam-workers at first, given their awkward gaits; and the gleam of metal under the lights, so like the monster in the play, caught my eye.
Steam-workers still have trouble with the finest work – the construction of Difference Engine gears is skilled labour performed by a well-remunerated aristocracy of working-men. High-quality cotton garments and bedclothes too are the remit of proletarians of the flesh, thus Victoria Mill. But there are commodities whose production still requires living labour not because of the precision needed to create the item, but due to the danger of the job. The production of white phosphorous matches is one of these. The matchsticks are too slim for steam-worker claws, which are limited to a trio of pincers on the All-Purpose models, and to less refined appendages – sledges, sharp blades – on Special-Purpose models. Furthermore, the aluminium outer skin, or shell, of the steam-worker tends to heat up to the point of combusting certain compounds, or even plain foolscap. So the Bryant and May factory in Bow, London retained young girls, ages fourteen and up, to perform the work.
The stories in The Link and other reformist periodicals are well known. Twelve-hour days for wages of 4s. a week, though it’s a lucky girl who isn’t fined for tardiness, who doesn’t suffer deductions for having dirty feet, for dropping matches from her frame, for allowing the machines to falter rather than sacrifice her fingers to them. The girls eat their bread and butter – most can afford more only rarely, and then it’s marmalade – on the line, leading to ingestion of white phosphorous. And there are the many cases of “phossy jaw” – swollen gums, foul breath, and some physicians even claimed that the jawbones of the afflicted would glow, like a candle shaded by a leaf of onionskin paper. I saw the gleaming of these girls’ jaws as I passed and swore to myself. They were too young for phossy jaw; it takes years for the dep
osition of phosphorous to build. But as they passed me by, I saw the truth.
Their jaws had all been removed, a typical intervention for the disease, and they’d been replaced with prostheses. All the girls, most of whom were likely plain before their transformations, were now half-man half-machine, monstrosities! I couldn’t help but accost them.
“Girls! Pardon me!” There were four of them; the tallest was perhaps fully mature, and the rest were mere children. They stopped, obedient. I realized that their metallic jaws, which gleamed so brightly under the new electrical streetlamps, might not be functional and I was flushed with concern. Had I humiliated them?
The youngest-seeming opened her mouth and said in a voice that had a greater similarity to the product of a phonographic cylinder than a human throat, “Buy Bryant and May matchsticks, sir.”
“Oh no, I don’t need any matchsticks. I simply—”
“Buy Bryant and May matchsticks, sir,” she said again. Two of the others – the middle girls – lifted their hands and presented boxes of matchsticks for my perusal. One of those girls had two silvery digits where a thumb and forefinger had presumably once been. They were cleverly designed to articulate on the knuckles, and through some mechanism occulted to me did move in a lifelike way.
“Are any of you girls capable of independent speech?” The trio looked to the tallest girl, who nodded solemnly and said, “I.” She struggled with the word, as though it were unfamiliar. “My Bryant and May mandible,” she continued, “I was given it by … Bryant and May … long ago.”
“So, with some struggle, you are able to compel speech of your own?”
“Buy … but Bryant and May match … made it hard,” the girl said. Her eyes gleamed nearly as brightly as her metallic jaw.
The smallest of the four started suddenly, then turned her head, looking past her compatriots. “Buy!” she said hurriedly, almost rudely. She grabbed the oldest girl’s hand and tried to pull her away from our conversation. I followed her eyes and saw the telltale plume of a police wagon rounding the corner. Lacking any choice, I ran with the girls to the end of the street and then turned a corner.