by Sean Wallace
After a while most of the spiderlings went off. Mot remained behind.
Didn’t hear you say anything before, Chancer observed over his saucer of milk. But I’m guessing you do have something to say.
Why are you asking? Mot replied. From what I hear you’re buying silk, not treasures.
I like silk, Chancer said slowly. The spiderling was direct, and he approved of that. But I like treasure more.
Mot’s eight eyes regarded Chancer’s two.
I know of a treasure, he said.
I thought so, said Chancer, and allowed his fangs to open in a grin. And you might need an airship to move it?
I might, Mot said, and his feelers moved in a spider’s grin, matching Chancer’s.
When Mot and Chancer left the milk den the triple-moonlets were waning in the sky. They walked on the sand, the canopy of the Web above them forming a lattice of light and shade on the ground.
They took off in darkness, the airship rising from the web the way a bee takes flight from a flower in search of new nectar. There was a quiet understanding between them that seemed to grow through the night and through the silent journey, flying low with the ship reflected in silver and gold in the water and the light of the moonlets.
Mot, who had never before been on an airship, took to it like a cat. He wove sails and ropes into the structure and hopped from place to place, hanging directly over the water, waving his feelers in the rushing air.
When dawn arose and the sun came low over the horizon like a giant flower opening its leaves, Mot wove two fine, strong threads that fell over the side and plummeted into the water below.
They fished from aboard the ship, hauling the strange fish of that lake into the air until they landed on the deck with a wet whack.
Later, Chancer left some of the fishmeat to dry and they roasted the rest, cooking it slowly over a small coal fire.
At night Chancer howled at the triple-moonlets, and Mot joined him in spider-song, so that the ship seemed engulfed in sound.
On the third day they spotted land.
They touched down on water, and Chancer threw in the anchor and watched it fall, and fall, until at last it caught. The waters were deep, but calm.
Before them was a small sandy beach, leading to a sheltered alcove, and an opening, a chink in the mountain. They explored the beach that day, Mot scuttling deeper and deeper into the cave, his feelers moving in excitement.
It smells right, he confirmed to Chancer as they built a fire on the beach and cooked a stew of fish, pungent with the handful of herbs Chancer had plucked inside the cave. They were silvery grey, long graceful stalks of a web-like plant, and they added a rich, earthy taste to the stew.
As they finished the meal a sense of calm fell on them. They looked at the water and it seemed to form a strange, alien face, moonlight and moonshade adding to the semblance of a figure that mouthed words at them without sound.
The face stretched and shrunk with the movement of the waves; then it flared into brilliance as the stars seemed to fall in a shower from the sky, trailing threads of light into the water that joined into a giant, glowing web that covered the horizon.
What is it? Chancer asked.
Mot didn’t answer. The strange face seemed somehow familiar, like a half-remembered dream. He didn’t answer, and Chancer didn’t ask again, and soon the night was dark again, and quiet, and they went to sleep.
The second day on shore they began to explore the caves. The deeper they went the hotter it became, and the walls grew a faint luminous fungus that seemed to them like arrows, always pointing down, down. Mot wove threads that marked their passage, trailing behind on the caves’ floor. They passed in darkness and in silence, through caverns of stone aged beyond the age of the dogs, beyond the age of the cats, beyond even the age of humans.
In one of the caverns they discovered a silken sac, carefully hidden in a small opening in the wall. The sac moved, as if hundreds of tiny bodies were moving inside. They left it alone.
In another they discovered the bodies of cats, dressed in strange, metallic armour. They lined the giant cavern from end to end, standing in rows, metal weapons raised. They passed through them slowly and with care; it seemed as if at any moment the silent battalion might rise and come back to life.
In yet another they discovered human relics, strange and unknowable. There were technological artefacts there, and Mot tagged each one carefully. They decided to try and take as many as was possible back to the ship.
They walked for four days, eating dried fish and drinking water from small, ice-cold pools where moisture glistened on the walls.
On the fifth day Mot stopped, and his feelers shuddered. He and Chancer advanced slowly, and were soon in a small cavern, dark and dry and with the smell of disuse about it, as if no living thing had been inside for thousands of years.
Yet living things had been there: moving with their feeble lights through the cave they found signs of this, a few tattered threads of silk: all that remained of Mot’s birth-sac.
Then Chancer’s light swept over something that reflected and refracted the light back into his eyes and he growled, and Mot hissed.
They had discovered a coffin. The giant glass structure rested in the wall as if embedded in it, like amber in rock. Inside a shape was visible, strange and frightening. They shone their light into the coffin and a face stared at them, and Chancer growled again and swore: it was the same face they had seen in the water, but now it was still, and as unmoving as stone.
Then Chancer touched the coffin, and the darkness exploded into a brilliance of light.
The cavern filled with light; Chancer and Mot shrunk back, and as they did the side of the coffin began to open, and the eyes inside came alive.
The light was like a web suffusing the rock, a net cast over the darkness. Ethereal sounds, a faint, strange music, filled the air. The creature in the coffin rose and stood on two legs, its eyes on the adventurers.
Words came out of its mouth, but they were incomprehensible to Mot and Chancer. As they watched, the lights dimmed and the monster in the glass remained in the centre of an evolving web of light rays, haloed and silent.
The web of lights shifted and changed; it seemed to them to resemble a vast circular shape beyond which was a giant ocean. It was as if they were somehow caught inside a representation in light and shade of their world, and where the monster stood was the centre. The web of light ebbed and pulsed, marking mountain ranges, lakes, shores, tundra, deserts, veldt, forests, caves. At the heart of it all stood the monster, two-eyed, two-legged, tall and pale. Its eyes were the colour of the sea at dusk.
Words came to them again, heard in the mind; the monster’s lips did not move.
A dog. And a spider? It sounded amused. What strange company to be awakened to.
What … what are you? Chancer demanded, made bold by despair.
The voice came to him, soft and caressing like a spider’s silk.
You must know what you were looking for, it observed. To have come all this way, here, to the secret heart of the world … what treasure were you seeking, that you seem so at a loss?
Human, Mot whispered. And – Human, the voice in his head agreed. It sounded regretful.
The web of light shifted again, and in its dancing the world faded and faces appeared: there were cats there, their faces and bodies changing from one cycle to the next; there were dogs, likewise changing, a fluid movement through immeasurable time; there were spiders, a multitude of differences, divers and climbers, rock-dwellers and tree-dwellers, large and small; there were Avians there, gliding through air and roosting in vast Nests at the tops of trees. Chancer growled as the faces of other creatures appeared; those known as the Green Menace, the creatures of the swamp unseen for centuries; that strange, alien being called the Forgotten Sea, that moved like a drop of molten silver atop the Great Ocean; and others, stranger still, some familiar but many more that neither he nor Mot had ever seen.
Y
ou thought I was the treasure, the voice said, and there was mute sadness in it. But I am only the guardian of a treasure, and one that you already possess.
The light shifted, faded. In the silence the sudden sound of marching startled them. As they turned, the battalion of armoured cats streamed into the cavern until they threatened to fill it and formed into a web of their own, with Chancer and Mot in its centre.
Go, whispered the voice. The creature seemed to abate, to lose its animation. It sat back into the coffin and the glass began to close over it without noise.
Go, children. There are treasures enough, and time …
The light withered and was gone. The cats had cleared a space to the entrance of the cavern.
Mot and Chancer looked at each other, two eyes regarding right.
They left the cavern in silence, and their thoughts were their own.
This is the story of Chancer and Mot, and of the treasure they discovered. They traversed the path they had come, the cats following them at a distance, and on the fourth day they emerged into light.
The sun shone over the lake. On the water, bobbing gently, was Chancer’s airship.
They took to the air that day, and as they flew over the lake Mot wove lines for them, and they fished in the light of the moonlets, and built a fire, and talked. Their subsequent journeys are a matter for other stories, and those are the stories that everyone knows: how they crossed the One Continent from one end to the other and how they went on, beyond the Great Ocean. There are stories that say they found the Forgotten Sea and dwelt for a time in the Isle of Wraiths; that they met and fought with the Frog Folk, the Green Menace of the swamplands; that they flew with the Avians on their inexplicable journeys across the world, and that they lived for a time in the Pole, a story made all the more fanciful by what it is said they found there.
They had discovered a treasure at the heart of the world and every day they spent it, in their exhilaration and in their joy at the world and their being alive in it.
This is the story of Chancer and Mot. And this is the ballad of the last human.
Acknowledgements
“Steampunk: Looking to the Future Through the Lens of the Past” © 2012 by Ekaterina Sedia. Original to this volume.
“Fixing Hanover” © 2008 by Jeff VanderMeer. Originally appeared in Extraordinary Engines. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Steam Dancer (1896)” © 2007 by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Originally appeared in Sirenia Digest. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Icebreaker” © 2012 by E. Catherine Tobler. Original to this volume.
“Tom Edison and His Amazing Telegraphic Harpoon” © 2008 by Joseph E. Lake Jr. Originally appeared in Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball” © 2010 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Clockwork Fairies” © 2010 by Cat Rambo. Originally appeared in Tor.com. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jala-ud-din Muhammad Akbar” © 2009 by Shweta Narayan. Originally appeared in Shimmer. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Prayers of Forges and Furnaces” © 2012 by Aliette de Bodard. Original to this volume.
“The Effluent Engine” © 2011 by N. K. Jemisin. Originally appeared in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi” © 2009 by Peter M. Ball. Originally appeared in Shimmer. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Armature of Flight” © 2010 by Sharon Mock. Originally appeared in Fantasy Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Anachronist’s Cookbook” © 2009 by Catherynne M. Valente. Originally appeared in Steampunk Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Numismatics in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu” © 2012 by Alex Dally MacFarlane. Original to this volume.
“Zeppelin City” © 2009 by Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick. Originally appeared in Tor.com. Reprinted by permission of the authors.
“The People’s Machine” © 2008 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally appeared in Sideways in Crime. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Hands That Feed” © 2011 by Matthew Kressel. Originally appeared in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Machine Maid” © 2008 by Margo Lanagan. Originally appeared in Extraordinary Engines. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“To Follow the Waves” © 2011 by Amal El-Mohtar. Originally appeared in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Clockmaker’s Requiem” © 2007 by Barth Anderson. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dr Lash Remembers” © 2010 by Jeffrey Ford. Originally appeared in Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Lady Witherspoon’s Solution” © 2008 by James Morrow. Originally appeared in Extraordinary Engines. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Reluctance” © 2010 by Cherie Priest. Originally appeared in The Living Dead 2. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Serpent in the Gears” © 2010 by Margaret Ronald. Originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois” © 2011 by Megan Arkenberg. Originally appeared in Fantasy Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum” © 2004 by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Originally appeared in All Star Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Clockwork Chickadee” © 2008 by Mary Robinette Kowal. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Cinderella Suicide” © 2006 by Samantha Henderson. Originally appeared in Strange Horizons. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Arbeitskraft” © 2012 by Nick Mamatas. Original to this volume.
“To Seek Her Fortune” © 2010 by Nicole Kornher-Stace. Originally appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 3. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Ballad of the Last Human” © 2012 by Lavie Tidhar. Original to this volume.
About the Contributors
Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone and The House of Discarded Dreams were published by Prime Books. Her next one, Heart of Iron, was published in 2011. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, Bewere the Night and Bloody Fabulous (forthcoming). Visit her at EkaterinaSedia.com.
Jeff VanderMeer’s books have made the year’s best lists of Publishers Weekly, LA Weekly, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many more, and he has won two World Fantasy Awards, an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship and Travel Grant, and, most recently, the Le Cafard Cosmique Award in France and the Tähtifantasia Award in Finland. He has also been a finalist, as writer or editor, for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, IHG Award, Philip K. Dick Award, Shirley Jackson Award and many others. He is the author of over 300 stories, and his short fiction has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Black Clock, Tor.com and Songs of the Dying Earth, among several other original and year’s best anthologies, and Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the award-winning author of nine novels, including Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds and, most recently, The Red Tree. She is a prolific short-fiction writer, and her stories have been collect
ed in Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, Wrong Things, To Charles Fort, With Love, Alabaster, A is For Alien and The Ammonite Violin & Others. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado – strange how that works out. Her fiction has appeared in, among others, Sci Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. For more visit ecatherine.com.
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2011 books are Endurance from Tor Books, along with paperback releases of two of his other titles. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a past winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.
Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed and Apex, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Teeth and more. She is a co-author of the forthcoming pop-culture book Geek Wisdom, and her non-fiction has appeared in publications such as Fantasy Magazine and Weird Tales. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her glvalentine.livejournal.com.
Cat Rambo lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Among the places her work has appeared are Asimov’s, Tor.com and Weird Tales. Her collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, was a 2010 Endeavour Award finalist.
Shweta Narayan was born in India and lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands and Scotland before moving to California. The Artificer bird was born in the story in this collection, and keeps turning back up; so far, in Realms of Fantasy, the Clockwork Phoenix 3 anthology and Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Shweta also has fiction online in Strange Horizons, and poetry in Goblin Fruit, Jabberwocky and Stone Telling. She was the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at the 2007 Clarion workshop and a finalist for the 2010 Nebula Award. She can be found online at shwetanarayan.org.