Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Darwin flinched at that. “Well, it’s true there has been no serious Christian heresy since Martin Luther was burned by the Inquisition—”

  “If only you had not been so afraid of the sky! But then,” he said, smiling, “our sky always did contain one treasure yours did not.”

  Jenny was growing annoyed with the Inca’s patronising treatment of Darwin, a decent man. She said now, “Commander, even before we sailed you dropped hints about some wonder in the sky we knew nothing about.”

  As his translator murmured in his ear, Atahualpa looked at her in surprise.

  Darwin murmured, “Mademoiselle Cook, please—”

  “If you’re so superior, maybe you should stop playing games, and show us this wonder—if it exists at all!”

  Dreamer shook his head. “Oh, Jenny. Just wait and see.”

  The officers were glaring. But Atahualpa held up an indulgent hand. “I will not punish bravery, Mademoiselle Cook, and you are brave, if foolish with it. We like to keep our great surprise from our European passengers—call it an experiment—your first reaction is always worth relishing. We were going to wait until the end of the meal, but—Pachacuti, will you see to the roof?”

  Wiping his lips on a cloth, one of the officers got up from the table and went to the wall, where a small panel of buttons had been fixed. With a whir of smooth motors the roof slid back.

  Fresh salt air, a little cold, billowed over the diners. Jenny looked up. In an otherwise black sky, a slim crescent moon hung directly over her head. She had the sense that the moon was tilted on its side—a measure of how far she had travelled around the curve of the world, in just a few days aboard this ship.

  Atahualpa smiled, curious, perhaps cruel. “Never mind the moon, Mademoiselle Cook. Look that way.” He pointed south.

  She stood. And there, clearly visible over the lip of the roof, something was suspended in the sky. Not the sun or moon, not a planet—something entirely different. It was a disc of light, a swirl, with a brilliant point at its centre, and a ragged spiral glow all around it. It was the emblem she had observed on the navigational displays, but far more delicate—a sculpture of light, hanging in the sky.

  “Oh,” she gasped, awed, terrified. “It’s beautiful.”

  Beside her, Archbishop Darwin muttered prayers and crossed himself.

  She felt Dreamer’s hand take hers. “I wanted to tell you,” he murmured. “They forbade me…”

  Atahualpa watched them. “What do you think you are seeing?”

  Darwin said, “It looks like a hole in the sky. Into which all light is draining.”

  “No. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It is the source of all light.”

  “And that is how you navigate,” Jenny said. “By the cloud—you could pick on the point of light at the centre, and measure your position on a curving Earth from that. This is your treasure—a beacon in the sky.”

  “You’re an insightful young woman. It is only recently, in fact, that with our far-seers—another technology you lack—we have been able to resolve those spiral streams to reveal their true nature.”

  “Which is?”

  “The cloud is a sea of suns, Mademoiselle. Billions upon billions of suns, so far away they look like droplets in mist.”

  The Inca sky-scientists believed that the cloud was in fact a kind of factory of suns; the sun and its planets couldn’t have formed in the black void across which they travelled.

  “As to how we ended up here—some believe that it was a chance encounter between our sun and another. If they come close, you see, suns attract each other. Our sun was flung out of the sea, northwards, generally speaking, off into the void. The encounter damaged the system itself; the inner planets and Earth were left in their neat circles, but the outer planets were flung onto their looping orbits. All this is entirely explicable by the laws of motion developed by Yupanqui and others.” Atahualpa lifted his finely chiselled face to the milky light of the spiral. “This was billions of years back, when the world was young. Just as well; life was too primitive to have been extinguished by the tides and earthquakes. But what a sight it would have been then, the sea of suns huge in the sky, if there had been eyes to see it—!”

  There was a commotion outside the stateroom. “Let me go!” somebody yelled in Frankish. “Let me go!”

  An officer went to the door. Alphonse was dragged in, with two burly Inca holding his arms. His nose was bloodied, his face powder smeared, his powdered wig askew, but he was furious, defiant.

  Archbishop Darwin bustled to the side of his charge. “This is an outrage. He is a prince of the empire!”

  To a nod from the commander, Alphonse was released. He stood there massaging bruised arms. And he stared up at the spiral in the sky.

  “Sir, we found him in the farspeaker room,” said one of the guards. “He was tampering with the equipment.” For the guests, this was slowly translated from the Quechua.

  But Alphonse interrupted the translation. He said in Frankish, “Yes, I was in your farspeaker room, Atahualpa. Yes, I understand Quechua better than you thought, don’t I? And I wasn’t ‘tampering’ with the equipment. I was sending a message to my father. Even now, I imagine, his guards will be closing in on the Orb you planted in Saint Paul’s—and those elsewhere.”

  Darwin stared at him. “Your royal highness, I’ve no idea what is happening here—why you would be so discourteous to our hosts.”

  “Discourteous?” He glared at Atahualpa. “Ask him, then. Ask him what a sun-bomb is.”

  Atahualpa stared back stonily.

  Dreamer came forward. “Tell him the truth, Inca. He knows most of it anyhow.” And one by one the other representatives of the Inca’s subject races, in their beads and feathers, stepped forward to stand with Dreamer.

  And so Atahualpa yielded. A “sun-bomb” was a weapon small enough to fit into one of the Inca’s Orbs of the Unblinking Eye, yet powerful enough to flatten a city—a weapon that harnessed the power of the sun itself.

  Jenny was shocked. “We welcomed you, in Londres. Why would you plant such a thing in our city?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Alphonse answered. “Because these all-conquering Inca can’t cow Franks and Germans and Ottomans with a pretty silver ship as they did these others, or you Anglais.”

  Atahualpa said, “A war of conquest would be long and bloody, though the outcome would be beyond doubt. We thought that if the sun-bombs were planted, so that your cities were held hostage—if one of them was detonated for a demonstration, if a backward provincial city was sacrificed—”

  “Like Londres,” said Jenny, appalled.

  “And then,” Alphonse said, “you would use your farspeakers to speak to the emperors and state your demands. Well, it’s not going to happen, Inca. Looks like it will be bloody after all, doesn’t it?”

  Darwin touched his shoulder. “You have done your empire a great service today, Prince Alphonse. But war is not yet inevitable, between the people of the north and the south. Perhaps this will be a turning point in our relationship. Let us hope that wiser counsels prevail.”

  “We’ll see,” Alphonse said, staring at Atahualpa. “We’ll see.”

  Servants bustled in, to clear dishes and set another course. The normality after the confrontation was bewildering.

  Slowly tensions eased.

  Jenny impulsively grabbed Dreamer’s arm. They walked away from the rest.

  She stared up at the sea of suns. “If we are all lost in this gulf, we ought to learn to get along.”

  Dreamer grunted. “You convince the emperors. I will speak to the Inca.”

  She imagined Earth swimming in light. “Dreamer—will we ever sail back to the sea of suns, back to where we came from?”

  “Well, you never know,” he said. “But the sea is further away than you imagine, I think. I don’t think you and I will live to see it.”

  Jenny said impulsively, “Our children might.”

  “Yes. Our children might. Come o
n. Let’s get this wretched dinner over with.”

  The stateroom roof slid closed, hiding the sea of suns from their sight.

  The Steam Dancer (1896)

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  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 collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, Wrongs Things, To Charles Fort, With Love, Alabaster, A Is for Alien, and The Ammonite Violin & Others. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Of her story, she writes, “I’m honestly not sure what, exactly, served as the primary inspiration for ‘The Steam Dancer (1896).’ It’s easier for me to see the influences at work here than to recall what triggered the story. It was written during June 2007, and was the first of the stories I’ve set in my alternate-history Denver, Colorado, which I’ve named Cherry Creek. I know I was wanting to write a story that would work as science fiction and also as a western. It’s one of those rare instances where the title occurred to me before I began work on the piece, which is always nice.”

  1

  MISSOURI BANKS LIVES in the great smoky city at the edge of the mountains, here where the endless yellow prairie laps gently with grassy waves and locust tides at the exposed bones of the world jutting suddenly up towards the western sky. She was not born here, but came to the city long ago, when she was still only a small child and her father traveled from town to town in one of Edison’s electric wagons selling his herbs and medicinals, his stinking poultices and elixirs. This is the city where her mother grew suddenly ill with miner’s fever and where all her father’s liniments and ministrations could not restore his wife’s failing health or spare her life. In his grief, he drank a vial of either antimony or arsenic a few days after the funeral, leaving his only daughter and only child to fend for herself. And so, she grew up here, an orphan, one of a thousand or so dispossessed urchins with sooty bare feet and sooty faces, filching coal with sooty hands to stay warm in winter, clothed in rags, and eating what could be found in trash barrels and what could be begged or stolen.

  But these things are only her past, and she has a bit of paper torn from a lending-library book of old plays which reads What’s past is prologue, which she tacked up on the wall near her dressing mirror in the room she shares with the mechanic. Whenever the weight of Missouri’s past begins to press in upon her, she reads those words aloud to herself, once or twice or however many times is required, and usually it makes her feel at least a little better. It has been years since she was alone and on the streets. She has the mechanic, and he loves her, and most of the time she believes that she loves him, as well.

  He found her when she was nineteen, living in a shanty on the edge of the colliers’ slum, hiding away in among the spoil piles and the rusting ruin of junked steam shovels and hydraulic pumps and bent bore-drill heads. He was out looking for salvage, and salvage is what he found, finding her when he lifted a broad sheet of corrugated tin, uncovering the squalid burrow where she lay slowly dying on a filthy mattress. She’d been badly bitten during a swarm of red-bellied bloatflies, and now the hungry white maggots were doing their work. It was not an uncommon fate for the likes of Missouri Banks, those caught out in the open during the spring swarms, those without safe houses to hide inside until the voracious flies had come and gone, moving on to bedevil other towns and cities and farms. By the time the mechanic chanced upon her, Missouri’s left leg, along with her right hand and forearm, was gangrenous, seething with the larvae. Her left eye was a pulpy, painful boil, and he carried her to the charity hospital on Arapahoe where he paid the surgeons who meticulously picked out the parasites and sliced away the rotten flesh and finally performed the necessary amputations. Afterwards, the mechanic nursed her back to health, and when she was well enough, he fashioned for her a new leg and a new arm. The eye was entirely beyond his expertise, but he knew a Chinaman in San Francisco who did nothing but eyes and ears, and it happened that the Chinaman owed the mechanic a favour. And in this way was Missouri Banks made whole again, after a fashion, and the mechanic took her as his lover and then as his wife, and they found a better, roomier room in an upscale boardinghouse near the Seventh Avenue irrigation works.

  And today, which is the seventh day of July, she settles onto the little bench in front of the dressing-table mirror and reads aloud to herself the shred of paper.

  “What’s past is prologue,” she says, and then sits looking at her face and the artificial eye and listening to the oppressive drone of cicadas outside the open window. The mechanic has promised that someday he will read her The Tempest by William Shakespeare, which he says is where the line was taken from. She can read it herself, she’s told him, because she isn’t illiterate. But the truth is she’d much prefer to hear him read, breathing out the words in his rough, soothing voice, and often he does read to her in the evenings.

  She thinks that she has grown to be a very beautiful woman, and sometimes she believes the parts she wasn’t born with have only served to make her that much more so and not any the less. Missouri smiles and gazes back at her reflection, admiring the high cheekbones and full lips (which were her mother’s before her), the glistening beads of sweat on her chin and forehead and upper lip, the way her left eye pulses with a soft turquoise radiance. Afternoon light glints off the galvanized plating of her mechanical arm, the sculpted steel rods and struts, the well-oiled wheels and cogs, all the rivets and welds and perfectly fitted joints. For now, it hangs heavy and limp at her side, because she hasn’t yet cranked its tiny double-acting Trevithick engine. There’s only the noise of the cicadas and the traffic down on the street and the faint, familiar, comforting chug of her leg.

  Other women are only whole, she thinks. Other women are only born, not made. I have been crafted.

  With her living left hand, Missouri wipes some of the sweat from her face and then turns towards the small electric fan perched on the chifforobe. It hardly does more than stir the muggy summer air about, and she thinks how good it would be to go back to bed. How good to spend the whole damned day lying naked on cool sheets, dozing and dreaming and waiting for the mechanic to come home from the foundry. But she dances at Madam Ling’s place four days a week, and today is one of those days, so soon she’ll have to get dressed and start her arm, then make her way to the trolley and on down to the Asian Quarter. The mechanic didn’t want her to work, but she told him she owed him a great debt and it would be far kinder of him to allow her to repay it. And, being kind, he knew she was telling the truth. Sometimes, he even comes down to see, to sit among the Coolies and the pungent clouds of opium smoke and watch her on the stage.

  2

  The shrewd old woman known in the city only as Madam Ling made the long crossing to America sometime in 1861, shortly after the end of the Second Opium War. Missouri has heard that she garnered a tidy fortune from smuggling and piracy, and maybe a bit of murder, too, but that she found Hong Kong considerably less amenable to her business ventures after the treaty that ended the war and legalized the import of opium to China. She came ashore in San Francisco and followed the railroads and airships east across the Rockies, and when she reached the city at the edge of the prairie, she went no farther. She opened a saloon and whorehouse, the Nine Dragons, on a muddy, unnamed thoroughfare, and the mechanic has explained to Missouri that in China nine is considered a very lucky number. The Nine Dragons is wedged in between a hotel and a gambling house, and no matter the time of day or night seems always just as busy. Madam Ling never wants for trade.

  Missouri always undresses behind the curtain, before she takes the stage, and so presents herself to the sleepy-eyed men wearing only a fringed shawl of vermilion silk, her corset and sheer muslin shift, her white linen pantalettes. The shawl was a gift from Madam Ling, who told her in broken English that it came all the way from Beijing. Madam Ling of the Nine Dragons is not renowned
for her generosity towards white women, or much of anyone else, and Missouri knows the gift was a reward for the men who come here just to watch her. She does not have many belongings, but she treasures the shawl as one of her most prized possessions and keeps it safe in a cedar chest at the foot of the bed she shares with the mechanic, and it always smells of the camphor-soaked cotton balls she uses to keep the moths at bay.

  There is no applause, but she knows that most eyes have turned her way now. She stands sweating in the flickering gaslight glow, the open flames that ring the small stage, and listens to the men muttering in Mandarin amongst themselves and laying down mahjong tiles and sucking at their pipes. And then her music begins, the negro piano player and the woman who plucks so proficiently at a guzheng’s twenty-five strings, the thin man at his xiao flute, and the burly Irishman who keeps the beat on a goatskin bodhran and always takes his pay in Chinese whores. The smoky air fills with a peculiar, jangling rendition of the final aria of Verdi’s La Traviata, because Madam Ling is a great admirer of Italian opera. The four musicians huddle together, occupying the space that has been set aside especially for them, crammed between the bar and the stage, and Missouri breathes in deeply, taking her cues as much from the reliable metronome rhythms of the engines that drive her metal leg and arm as from the music.