“We are about to be intercepted,” he said, as a high-pitched tintinnabulation increased in volume. “They say that collection is a painless process. However, should you desire, I will fight them alongside you...?”
He left the question hanging in the air.
She held his hand in hers, feeling the pseudo-pulse of Fluid 7A MagneSangue through his arterial corridors. The noise was getting louder now; wind rocked the vintage automobile and sought its way through every crevice in glass and steel.
“How long do we have?” he asked.
“A minute. Maybe less.” She didn’t know what she expected: a glimmer of fear, a surge of adrenaline, but he only blinked as processors shifted, calculated…
Counted down.
There wasn’t enough of him left to feel anything; not fear, not remorse. Even the offer to stand and fight was born out of ages-old algorithms designed to simulate fight-or-flight responses. They did have to protect themselves, their documentation, until the appropriate representative arrived to collect. The offer was a hollow one, an echo of shades past, of times when they’d stood back-to-back, swords in hand and pistols drawn. Perhaps somewhere, buried deep inside him, a blanked cylinder retained enough information to recall the time they’d fought their way out of the Citadella atop Gellért Hill.
Hard to forget Budapest, even without the cannon fire aimed our direction and a hundred foot-soldiers dogging us to the border.
They were both different people then.
Corentine brought his hand to her cheek, wishing desperately that it smelled of gunpowder, cologne, blood, sweat, shit, anything. But there were only thin traces of the alloys that comprised his entire being.
The portal was fully open now. Less than twenty seconds remained.
Her words spoke themselves. “Do you still love me?”
They both heard the last glass bead fall, pinging in his chest as he answered, “Yes.”
Sound category: A child’s marble dancing down the hot pavement, Brooklyn, Summer, 1909.
Corentine left Interrogation Room #14 with the barest of sighs. An arduous process, trying to explain the destruction of her pocket watch, first to her immediate supervisors and then the Review Board. Harder still to explain the total destruction of #1-17B’s brass cylinders. One hundred fifty years of documentation lost. Such a thing had not happened in the entire history of the Company.
A freak accident, of course. Memory modules had never before suffered such an explosion, forceful enough to destroy a Retriever’s fingers. A pristine track record and exemplary conduct in a thousand improbably difficult situations had also bought her quite a lot of benefit of the doubt.
—brass cylinders comprised of older alloys and therefore vulnerable during the Shift.
Possible sabotage implanted by #1-17b.
The Retriever did her best to preserve the materials and suffered the loss of her hands.
Please fill out Requisitions Order 57-TP. The cost of a replacement timepiece will be docked from your wages.
Recommendation: 30 days leave with pay and secondary-level review after release from the Medical Center.
The attachment points for her replacement hands were nearly healed, but the scar on her chest would take longer. Corentine’s new heart skipped a beat, unaccustomed as yet to its new surroundings. Perhaps a step backwards into sloppy humanity, but it would have been a waste to leave it there.
The last message, the one he couldn’t read, had spewed forth from his frontal lobe as Doctor Gillenheimer’s Weighted Miniature Artificial Morality Tabulator, Mark III shut him down for exceeding acceptable limits for falsehoods:
“I kept my heart, because it was not mine to give away. It’s always belonged to you.”
Such a funny word, “always.”
I’ll always count off the seconds until we meet in the next world, my love. Corentine nodded, then adjusted the ribbon-bow in her hair, the one that reminded everyone who met her of a blood-flower in full bloom.
Flying Fish “Prometheus” (A Fantasy of the Future)
Vilhelm Bergsøe
VILHELM BERGSØE (1835-1911) was a Danish author, zoologist, and numismatist. In 1862, he went to Messina in Italy to study the fauna of the Mediterranean. He made observations of swordfish parasites and after his return to Denmark published a monograph about them. As a result of his continuous use of a microscope, he contracted a serious eye infection and went temporarily blind, and was forced to give up his career as a naturalist. Bergsoe then devoted himself to writing both fiction and nonfiction, mostly by means of dictation. As for the story, “Flying Fish Prometheus” was apparently inspired when Bergsoe was invited to attend the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 much the same way his hero in the story was invited to that of the Panama Canal in 1969. Due to illness, he was unable to make the journey, but he did have a look at the ship’s tiny cabins and his imagination provided the rest. “Prometheus” was his only venture into Jules Verne—style science fiction, and it was originally published in a Danish newspaper in 1870. Although the story has been reprinted a number of times since, from 1876 to almost the present, it has remained little-known outside Denmark. As far as anyone can tell, it has never been translated into English until now.
TANANARIVA, 19 NOVEMBER 1969
MY DEAR OLD friend, You must be a little surprised to receive a letter from Madagascar, written in the tropical heat on Bishop King’s shady veranda—but that’s the way things change in this world now! In our day, one must not be surprised any more. If you are, it just shows that you aren’t keeping up with the times.
Do you recall our last meeting in Frederiksberg Park, after it had been converted to those wonderful Persian gardens? I remember it as though it were yesterday, that incomparable evening when we sat on the palace pavilion’s flat roof and enjoyed our nicotine-cigarettes to the sounds of Avanti’s Steam Orchestra. I can clearly see the old philistine who was thrown out by the Amazon singers because he dared pollute the air with his cigar, an old-fashioned Portorico, and I can still taste the beer, that foaming San Francisco you were so liberal as to treat me.
Much has changed since that time, but then it was an entire year ago. You are now sitting in Sukkertoppen as Managing Director of the Greenland silver mines, and I have finally won out over the resistance to my underwater tunnel across the strait between Copenhagen with Malmö mounted by the scientific society and the old fogies from the extremely antiquated polytechnic school.
In April, we had reached the island of Saltholm and began to go down into its limestone. With the help of Wooley’s Ultramarine Dynamite, we were boring at a rate of a hundred meters per day so that after two weeks we had already gone well past the island’s old forts. Those precious old remnants from a vanished era had been especially dear to the hearts of the old gentlemen, and there was an actual storm raised in The Daily Locomotive and The Kinetic News-Pump, which tend to retail all kinds of nonsense. In particular, they harbored the childish fear that the fort under which the tunnel had been dug would be shaken down by the sixth through train passing daily between Copenhagen and Malmö. Even if that happened, it still wouldn’t mean anything since the forts have long been obsolete. One need only remember that a diamond-hard Arrow Projectile, fired with a small charge of nitroglycerin from one of Billingates’ Revolver-Cannons, has penetrated granite walls twenty feet thick, and a single grenade-bomb filled with common dynamite would blow those forts’ walls apart like eggshells. A few articles in The Truth-Sunbeam, in which I pointedly made this clear, were enough to put an end to all the alarm.
As I have learned, the Sailors’ Relief Fund, whose fortunes had increased so much during the Anglo-American War, is now in the process of buying the two forts. The honest old sea-dogs want to build a rest home in the midst of their own element, and the government will get back one of the millions it sank into the forts. As far as the undermined fort is concerned, it has of course found a use as well. The leading butter and fat products company has acquired a concessio
n to build a steam butter-churning operation there, and it will pay the tunnel company half a percent of its profits in return for the latter’s obligation to maintain the advantageous vibration.
I had gotten thus far in my efforts when I received a cable telegram from my old friend, the mining-explosives expert Joseph Spring in New Orleans, which completely confirmed the long-standing reports of a wonderful discovery that he had made. Major Spring, who, as you know, is the living spirit of the North American Explosion Society, has devoted all of his time since the war to producing an explosive with effects even greater than that of Wooley’s Ultramarine Dynamite, and he had at last succeeded.
A promise that I have given him, and which I must consider binding until further notice, forbids me to go into more detail about this substance’s composition. I can only disclose that its effects are so destructive that it is not possible, even microscopically, to show what became of the atoms of a twenty-cubic-meter granite block. The same goes for those of two pyrotechnicians who perished during the experiment, disappearing so completely that the Great Western Life Insurance Company considers them to be still alive and as a consequence refuses to pay the respective widows their policies. Since, as is also the case with Ultramarine Dynamite, the force of the explosion only applies in a downwards direction, it is possible that the atoms of both the granite block and the unfortunate victims have been driven so deep into the Earth’s crust that no one will ever be able to get them out again.
However that may be, this new explosive has given Spring a truly inspired idea. That is, he has calculated that if detonated all at once, a two million hundredweight of this new explosive would strike the Earth such a blow that it would be driven out of its hitherto regular course and into a new solar system. Unfortunately, the cost of the new material is still too high to consider producing it in such large quantities, and the charming experiment of wandering from solar system to solar system by means of explosive thrusts must be postponed until the expense of overhead can be reduced.
But soon Spring saw another use for his remarkable explosive, which not without reason he has named Keraunobolite, or “Lightningite.” Unlike with us, an invention never lies fallow in North America, and eight days before it was made public, a large corporation was already formed in New Orleans for steam excavation and explosive boring with a potential capital of 200 million dollars. The project was to dig through the Isthmus of Panama in a period of eight months to a depth of two hundred feet so the American Empire’s largest Monitors and Fort-Destroyers could pass through. All the earlier plans that had suffered an unfortunate delay due to the conquest of South America and England’s humiliation were scrapped, and instead of Green’s proposed route, which would make the canal wind along the San Juan River and through Lake Nicaragua, Spring proposed one that perfectly fit his energetic character. During the stormy debate at the meeting held in New Orleans, he seized the map that had been hung up for orientation, and used his horsewhip to tear a gash through it that cut the Isthmus from Darien to the great ocean.
“This is how the canal will go!” he exclaimed in his stentorian voice, and those forceful words spread like wildfire through the masses and silenced every objection. Work on what was jokingly called the “Horsewhip Canal” began as soon as the next day, and the results that Spring obtained have been no less than magnificent.
It occurs to me that it is now just a hundred years since the de Lesseps Canal was opened at Suez, and I remember reading in some old newspapers at the public library about the fuss made over that insignificant trifle. As I recall, de Lesseps spent sixteen years on an enterprise on which Sesostris, Necho, and the Ptolemies had done a great deal of preliminary work, and that in a land where there are no masses of solid rock. Spring had now been exactly eight months on his canal, which was significantly shorter but on the other hand required breaking through some not inconsiderable mountains. Of course, the technical means had improved enormously since de Lesseps’ time, but Spring’s canal was still no walk in the park. The low, swampy coastland at the bend by Darien was dug out in two months by the usual centripetal steam excavator. The highlands, on the other hand, were literally torn apart for a stretch of sixteen English miles by the Keraunobolite, which was laid in a single strip across the mountains and then detonated. The first attempt resulted in a trench three feet deep and sixteen feet wide. After eight more detonations, the work was so far advanced that the steam excavator could do the rest. It brought to life the old legend of Thor, who smashed mountains with his hammer Mjølnir—but this Mjølnir had cost the company more than 100 million dollars.
On the 15th of November, I received another cablegram from my American friend, informing me that the canal would be opened on the 20th in the presence of the leading European engineers, geologists, and naturalists, and so he was inviting me. Since I had a special connection to the great cable system on the tunnel company’s account and had installed it in my house, I immediately replied that I would come with the first regular flying mail ship that left from Hamburg; but it was doubtful whether I would reach the Isthmus in time because of autumn storms and the short amount of time I had been given.
That very same evening, I received a telepistle in which he stated that none of the usual flying mail ships could reach the Canal in the allotted time, and that he would not have invited me had he not had a conference with the American Ministry of Flight and as a result was now so fortunate as to be able to place a special and quite splendid means of transportation at my disposal. Three weeks before, the American government had launched the newly constructed Flying Fish Prometheus, which had been much discussed in our newspapers, on its first around-the-world journey. Thus I had an excellent opportunity not just to reach my desired destination safely and quickly, but also to acquaint myself with a design originated by that aeronautic genius, Professor Swallow of Alabama. It far excelled the Albatross ships built in England, to say nothing of the Air-Castles we use but which are completely obsolete. The speed of the latter is certainly very considerable but they have always been characterized by highly irregular flight.
At the same time I received this dispatch, our Atmosphere Ministry was informed that the Flying Fish Prometheus, commanded by Captain Bird, had touched down in the Sea of Azov on the 14th. It would fly on to Copenhagen as early as the 16th, or perhaps Koge Bay instead if it turned out that the seabed at the Kallebod beach was not deep enough for it to take off again.
Fortunately, it is not necessary to take very much along on an aerial journey, and I therefore provided myself not with gold but just with American currency, which was especially appropriate since its value had lately shown a pronounced tendency to rise. Outfitted with this and an aerometer, a spyglass, and a notebook in my breast pocket, I steamed away by train that same evening to Koge Bay. According to expert opinion, that would be the body of water where the Prometheus would most likely have to touch down due to its distinctive method of taking flight.
When one is setting out on an aerial journey to the Isthmus of Panama, a trip by train to Koge is of no great significance. Still, it gave me pause when the signal whistle blew and the express train began to move. This was the first time that I would travel across the Atlantic Ocean by air, and not only that but in a machine whose means of locomotion was quite unusual. I didn’t feel any fear—my previous journeys by air to Paris and London had proceeded happily—but I am not ashamed to admit that at the last moment, mostly for my family’s sake, I insured my life as well as the more essential of my limbs with the Great Transatlantic Life and Limb Insurance Company.
At nine o’clock in the evening I reached Koge, which had just been electrically illuminated for the first time—an arc lamp at the end of each street. After a light supper in the hotel, I visited the new cemetery for Copenhagen and environs, where the Chief Cremator, Hr. Dodenkopf, was so kind as to show me around personally, and where I inspected the new apparatus for the rapid combustion of corpses in compressed oxygen.
Nonetheless
, I shall not lose myself in digressions about a procedure that unfortunately has been all too long in coming. Instead, I shall proceed immediately to a description of my journey, which will perhaps interest you, since being so isolated where you are, you have not had the opportunity to keep track of the inventions that in the last ten years have followed one after another in rapid succession, and which have culminated in the Prometheus, one of the most ingenious and well-designed machines anyone has ever seen.
As you know, people had been extremely occupied throughout the 19th Century with solving the problem of a solid body’s controlled movement through the air. I can so easily put myself in these men’s thought patterns. It was inevitable, once the steam engine and the telegraph had been invented, that there would be some fools or other who were especially irritated by being forced to crawl on the ground at the bottom of the air ocean while they observed bats, birds, and even the most hideous insects cheerfully soar above it. But the 19th Century was stuck fast in an error from which we in the 20th have fortunately managed to free ourselves.
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Page 40