The Mammoth Book of Steampunk

by Sean Wallace

  She remembered the tools in her hands, her skirt in her hands, the gun in her hands, and was ashamed.

  The boy peering out from behind her hip looked up at her, one hand fisted in the sailcloth of her slapdash trousers, gauging the tension radiating off her. One good startle from fleeing back into the jungle, or perhaps into the sea.

  The Lady Explorer gathered herself. Well, I did not come here to gawk at the sights like a schoolgirl at a cathedral. I came here for answers. Before it’s too late.

  She said, “I assure you, I did nothing of the—”

  “That contraption up there tells me different.”

  Bewildered, the Lady Explorer looked over her shoulder to follow the witch’s gaze up and up to where the airship perched with its improbable delicacy on the lip of the caldera. As she watched, it roused and settled, preening like a nesting hen the size of a four-story brownstone with bat wings and rose windows for eyes. She blinked and looked again and it was still.

  Water. She needed water. And she’d eaten nothing but the hardtack pilfered from that scuttled pirate outrider for the best part of a week. Nor slept: the last scraps of dried meat and fruit she’d squirreled in the boy’s bunk, then sat at the door daylong, nightlong, rifle in her lap. The crew would mutiny, and soon, she guessed, but hadn’t chanced her yet. If she had to cut off her arm and roast it over the combustion engine, the boy at least would eat.

  She steeled herself. Her chignon had exploded in the heat; sodden squid-arms of it slapped her face, her eyes. Irritably she shoved it back, drew herself up, set her shoulders and her jaw to hide her apprehension. She’d not come this far to be toy for some rootwitch, regardless of what she knew.

  She affected the disdainful drawl the foreman used to use, days when she’d beg early leave from the factory with a migraine from the eyestrain of the close work, or a roiling in her guts while her womb built a person even as her hands built a ship. “Is that so? I see you two are great friends already. What else does it—”

  “It remembers the place where it was born,” the witch interrupted, her voice gone dreamy like a child’s half-asleep, like some seer’s in some cave. The Lady Explorer snapped to attention, for she had heard that tone of voice before. “It smelled of grease and sweat and metal there. Men and women hunched at benches, piecing up its bones, its skin. It came awake like a whale rising from the dark depths of the sea. When they set its heart in place, the joy leapt up in it, flew out of it like lightning: the discharge of it killed three men. Just fried them where they stood, like a basketful of eels. The smell—” She chuckled. “You should see your face. It remembers the taste of you, as well. Blood and bone.”

  Before the Lady Explorer could react, the witch seized her bad hand, held it up so that the empty finger of her glove fell slack.

  Instantly the sense memory flooded her, despite the intervening years: a stab of panic as her hand caught in the struts, a snag, a drawing-in. The other workers’ shouts. A sharp wet crunch.

  She jerked her arm away.

  “It says it never meant to hurt you.”

  She still felt that finger sometimes, or its ghost. Hoisting the boy to her shoulders. Hacking through brush. Burying her people. Unburying other ones. Sighting down the rifle’s length. It still knocked her aim just out of true, if she permitted it, which she did not. Only by pulling well more than her weight on the crew’s endless expeditions would she maintain their fragile tolerance of her own infrequent ones, and she’d be damned before she showed those bastards any weakness.

  “If you know all that, then you know why I’m here. I didn’t come to fence with witches.”

  “Did you not?” Her face cracked along its faultlines into a quiet smile. “A pity.”

  As the barter was brought down from the airship and the Lady Explorer disappeared inside the witch’s little house, the boy drew cities in the white sand with a stick, shell-fragments for carriages and leaf-spines for streets. By now he was good at waiting. It took much longer to make a city than to have a card revealed to you, even if it was a fortune-telling card, as his mama had explained; an answering card. A card that tells you secrets. He couldn’t count high enough yet to know how many secrets his mama must’ve been told by now. A great many, he was sure. He imagined her as a mama-shaped penny-candy jar, each secret a bright sweet bauble nestled behind the cold glass of her skin.

  He picked the biggest shell-carriage up and marked it with a charcoal from his pocket: one messy-haired smiling face that was his mama, one smaller smiling face that was himself. Turning, he tossed the shell into the sea and watched as it skipped four times and sank. He knew from his mama’s stories that there were cities down there too.

  When the Lady Explorer emerged from the little house she looked paler, greyer, older; lighter and heavier at once. But her arms were still strong when she picked him up and swung him. “It’s time to go,” she said, and he rode her shoulders back into the treeline. When the jungle shut its curtains at their backs the sun went out like a lamp, so that when he closed his eyes against his mama’s hair, the wet sweet smell of rot was all he knew.

  The vast dark stingray of the airship stirred and lifted, and as it rose above the canopy the Lady Explorer held her son up to one of its eye-windows so that he could wave goodbye to where they’d been. Offshore, a thrashing in the water caught her eye, which her fieldglass soon revealed as a pod of dolphins harrying a shark. My sins, she thought, and smiled grimly down at them; my sins.

  II

  In the land of silver trees and golden fruit, the Lady Explorer bartered a case of tawny port, the captain’s quarters’ folding screen and rolltop desk, a filigreed sterling tea service and the airship’s only drop glider for her death.

  “What’s the vintage on that port?” the scientist enquired, almost before the Lady Explorer, her son and two of the airship’s roustabouts had unpacked all the crates. Still breathless from the climb to the laboratory, the Lady Explorer stuck a hand in blind and rifled the excelsior. It had gone damp with the temperature shift to the glass, and the bottle that she grabbed was cold to the touch and slippery. She hefted it and squinted: half because her eyes betrayed her, half to hide the twinge her back gave as it straightened. She couldn’t help conflating her bones with the airship’s bones: each joint gradually tarnishing, gradually grinding down from shiny brass to verdigris.

  “Eighteen … sixty-six,” she read aloud, and improvised: “A fine year for the—”

  “You wouldn’t know a fine year if it bit you in the leg,” the scientist sneered. “The not particularly well-turned leg, I don’t doubt. Just look at you. Bristling at me like a mad dog. Your stance – your hands – you’re utterly transparent. Rings on your fingers and engine grease under your nails. That corset’s the only thing keeping your spine from snapping under the weight of that vast empty skull. Feigning at quality, madam, suits you ill.”

  Hating herself for it, she dropped his gaze. Snickering at her discomfiture, he crouched beside the crates, and as he did so a light glanced off his ankle, catching her eye. From there, a slender silver chain ran a few yards to the leg of a long table laden with flasks and beakers and the disassembled skeletons of automata. The table, she now noticed, was bolted into the floor. The skin where the chain had bitten was greenish and suppurating.

  When she looked back, the scientist was staring out a window no wider or longer than her forearm at where the airship waited, quiescent, mantling a lane flanked with marching rows of pomegranate trees.

  The look on his face reminded her of the look on her own, back when it was someone else’s airship and she and fifty others were working themselves half dead to build it.

  The sudden sympathy she found she felt slowed her reaction to a staring inutility when, beside her, her son drew a long pistol and brought it to bear between the scientist’s eyes.

  “Speak to my mother in that way again,” he said airily, “and you’ll be scraping that smug look off the wall.”

  “I suppose,”
said the scientist, “I may as well be charitable. That” – he pointed at the crates – “is utter swill, but I can take it off your hands. Perhaps it will serve to degrease the hydraulic fittings. Now then. Shall we get this over with?”

  Long accustomed to this dance, her son left the laboratory before being asked to, ushered the roustabouts before him, and had the grace not to slam the door at his back. Nonetheless his gut clenched with the certainty he’d seen the scientist – who was readying some vibrant fluid in a crucible that was a clockwork raven’s head, over a flame that was its heart – cast him an ugly smirk as he went out. His mother was occupied in inspecting a half-clockwork, half-organic specimen, which bobbed in its pickling jar amid threads of its own flesh and flakes of its own rust. She’d seen nothing.

  The three men sat in the hall (he counted himself a man now, for his voice had nearly stopped cracking – ah, now that was an embarrassment he wouldn’t miss!) and gambled rifle-cartridges and chores and coins upon a weathered pair of ivory dice that lived in the pocket of one of the roustabouts, the story behind the acquisition of which was subject to its keeper’s whim. Today he’d cut them from the belly of a black wolf in a pinewood by a lake, along with an ell of scorched red velvet, a flintlock pistol and a mismatched scattering of bones.

  “Three scapulae and five clavicles,” he pronounced grandly, “but no mandibles or frontal plates at all!”

  At this point the Lady Explorer’s son knew the roustabout had been practicing his reading with the Lady Explorer’s medical journals again (while tempering his learnings on human anatomy with a blithe disregard of the respective sizes of a wolf’s mouth and stomach) and immediately decided to outgrow his long-lived fear of the roustabout’s yarns.

  The dice had earned him a week free of maintenance duties and a tidy heap of coins – round, ringed, hexagonal, octagonal, brass, copper, silver, lead – by the time his mother emerged from the laboratory, flushed with agitation and worrying at a sleeve. When she forced a smile and reached a hand down to help him up, he did not quite disdain to take it.

  Most of the coins he left on the floor in a sudden fit of apathy. His favorite only, which he’d been palming as a good luck charm throughout the game, he pocketed. Its reverse was obliterated but its obverse bore the likeness of a very young girl with cornsheaves in her hair beneath a coronet of seven-pointed stars. The tears she wept looked oddly dark.

  Leaving, he could not help but notice the utter silence from beyond the laboratory door. He cast a furtive glance over his mother but could discern no bloodstains on the skin or cloth or hair of her. Besides, he reassured himself, he would have heard the shot.

  III

  In the land of violet storms and crimson seas, the Lady Explorer bartered the spare canvas for the airship’s wings, five phials of laudanum, the last kilo of salt and the auxiliary power supply for her death.

  Her eyesight failed her in the rain, so her son read out the water-warped, mold-furred tavern sign to her: The Rotting Shark.

  He hoped she also could not see the look of surprise, half-tender, half-annoyed, that he found himself wearing at this admission of her mortality. Up till now he had fancied her close kin to the automata: ageless so long as her clockwork was wound or her engine was fed.

  For a moment he looked as though he was about to speak. Then, noticing her utter absorption in the door, he sighed and fiddled with his cuff instead.

  The noises from within the building were what they’d by now come to expect of such places: drunken shouting, and below it, lower-keyed tones from what cardsharps and cutpurses and gunslingers took delicate advantage of that drunkenness. Someone wauled a marching song from one war or another on a flute. A crash as of a flung chair followed, and the music stopped.

  In a moment, two men stumbled out the door, bearing up a dead-weight third who bled heavily from one temple.

  “This time I stay with you,” the Lady Explorer’s son informed her.

  She looked away over the rumpled crinolines of meadowland, lying as if discarded at the trackless flyblown foot of seven gangrene-colored hills. As she watched, a dark bird stooped and hammered down on something unseen in a stubbled field.

  Then she shrugged and shouldered through the door.

  A figure hailed them at once from a far table; they crossed the room and sat. The shape across from them was hooded, but the voice had been a girl’s. When she pulled the hood back, the Lady Explorer’s son nearly shouted in alarm.

  The girl was two girls, bound together as in the cases of some twins he’d seen in the medical journals – but by some kind of ivy, not by flesh. Green tendrils had grown through the trunks and necks and heads of both, binding them together like a corset, hip to temple. A thick finger of ivy had crooked itself through one girl’s eye, just missing the other’s where it threaded through her socket, squashing the eyeball sideways but not quite bursting it.

  “We were expecting you,” the ivy-girls said, their voices tightly harmonized and not unpleasant. The Lady Explorer’s son wondered by what perverse whim of nature the ivy’s tithe had been no greater – and no less – than a certain fraction of their loveliness. The Lady Explorer wondered whether they’d ever been able to climb, or dance, or run, or keep a secret.

  “From a long way off we saw you. We saw a woman who escaped the slow grind of a wretched death only to become obsessed with it, stalking it as any starving hunter stalks his prey, and wasting as acutely every time it flees his snares. A grail quest, a fool’s errand, a dog chasing its tail, and yet she persists. Before we tell her fate, we would comprehend her folly.”

  The Lady Explorer glanced over, but her son was sitting with arms crossed, gazing back at her with defiance. She sighed.

  “When we built the airship,” she began, “one of my tasks was to hold the tray of wires and electrodes when the master engineer connected her controls up to her heart. I could barely hold it still. I couldn’t feel my hands. The calluses from stitching wings – every night I’d go home and touch my stomach, where the baby grew” – a sidelong glance at her son, who flinched away, embarrassed – “and every day I felt it less and less. As if he was slowly disappearing. Or I was.”

  She flexed her fingers, staring as though she expected to parse sudden revelations from the caked grime of her gloves.

  “And so all the workers bided their time until the airship was completed? Tell us, were the first whispers of rebellion yours?”

  She almost laughed full in their faces, remembering how near she’d come to pissing herself when the shooting began. How another worker had thrust a gun into her hands and she’d stared at it, aware only in a vague sense of how it fired. How she’d hidden under the workbench with her belly to the wall, so the bullets couldn’t reach the baby without passing through her first. How she’d stayed there until the sounds of shooting turned to scavenging as the workers loaded up the ship they’d won with anything they’d found to hand, and she was dragged out by the apron-belt and tossed aboard, a spoil amid spoils.

  What she said was: “The airship’s switchboard was full of dials and toggles – the only intermediary between the captain’s will and the ship’s. I watched the engineer set each piece into place and wondered whether somewhere inside me there was a switchboard just like hers, with dials to show all my potential fears, potential loves, potential deaths. Who knows what becomes of us in the other world? Why might we not have a choice? Might it not be that each time my death is told, that that dial stops, and where it stops becomes the truth? And if I reject the death it tells, maybe I can start the dial spinning once again.”

  “Until it stops.”

  “When someone tells a death I can accept, I’ll let it stop. I’ll keep on searching until someone does.”

  The girls eyed her closely. “But what the ivy tells us,” they said, “so shall be.”

  “That’s what you all say. You tea-leaf-readers, card-turners, guts-scryers, hedgewitches, table-tappers, you’re all the same. So far I should’ve
been shot, drowned, stabbed in an alley, run down in the street, fallen off a widow’s walk, been shipwrecked, hit by lightning, and perished of consumption in a garret. And yet I am here and asking.”

  Once they’d given her her death on a folded slip of paper and she had gone her way, the ivy-girls went hooded out into the rain, watching the airship shake the water off its back like a dog, bank hard, and vanish oversea.

  “Lies of omission are still lies,” said one mouth, while the other one said: “She really ought to tell that boy the truth.”

  IV

  In the land of blue ice and red lichen, the Lady Explorer bartered half of the phosphorous matches, a foxfur waistcoat, the least mildewed of the down quilts and the airship’s rudder for her death.

  The whaler had been stranded on the ice shelf some twenty-odd years when the airship touched down and hailed her – more as a formality than anything: she was tatter-sailed, barnacle-encrusted, glazed with ice, and the Lady Explorer half expected to see Mary Celeste or Flying Dutchman emblazoned on her stern. What was there, however, was a palimpsest of christenings: something unintelligible overpainted with Lydia in what looked like long-dried blood.

  Someone’s sweetheart, the Lady Explorer in the wan scraps of her worldliness surmised. Some woman out of widow’s weeds two decades gone, and taking solace where she may. She wished her well.

  For half an hour, the airship’s crew signaled to the Lydia with flags and phosphorus flares while the Lady Explorer checked the navigational instruments against five different maps and shook her head at each of them in turn. At last, the Lady Explorer in a white rage and the crew jubilant, they readied the salvage gear.

  Just as a few of the men were beginning to swing grappling hooks over their heads, and others to cheer them on, the engine-tender spotted a group of figures approaching across the shelf, each dragging two or three frozen ringed seals behind him, bound together by the hind flippers in strings like sun-dried fish she had seen once in a market on the bone-white shore of a blood-warm sea.