Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The Constable was compelled to release Miss Jane Sallow three days after her capture. In popular histories, of course, the emergence of Jane from the stony building after three days has been subject to the obvious comparison. However, it was no Magdalen who came to deliver the Manchester Messiah, but one of the very machines she so railed against in her screeds. An Automaton arrived at the door of her cell, silent and grave, save for the clicking of his clockwork limbs. Jane stood grinning, her hands clasped gently before her, demure and gentle as she had never been in all her incarceration. The Automaton extended his steel hand, tipped in copper fingers, and through the bars they touched with great tenderness. The mechanical man turned to the Bailiff, and afterward Roger Smith would say that in those cold silver eyes he saw recognition of what he had done with the feral child, but no condemnation, as if both the machine and Jane were above him, so far above him as cherubim to beetles.

  “I have come for Miss Jane,” said the Automaton, his voice accompanied by the click and whirr of punchcards shuffling in his heart.

  “She is not free to go,” stammered Bailiff Smith.

  “I come not on a whim, but in the service of Lord———, who has a special interest in the child.” The mechanical man showed his gleaming palm, and there upon it was stamped the seal of the House of———, true as the resurrection.

  Jane stepped lightly from her cell, and clamped her savage gaze on the unfortunate bailiff as she slipped into the arms of the Automaton and pressed her lips to his metallic mouth, sealing a kiss of profound passion. As she left the Constabulary, she drew from her apron a last pamphlet for the eyes of Roger Smith, and let it fall at his feet.

  Property is Theft!

  What does your Master possess that was not bought with your Flesh, your Pain, your Labor? His satin Pantaloons, his jewel-tipped Cane? His Airship with its silken Balloon? His matched pearl-and-copper Pistols? His Horseless Carriage honking and puffing down lanes that once were lined with sweet Violets and Snowdrops? None of these, and neither his mistresses’ Gowns, nor their clockwork Songbirds, nor their Full-Spectrum Phenomenoscope Opera Glasses. And for all you have given him, he Sniffs and pours out a Few Shillings into your Palm, and judges himself a Good Man.

  Will you show him Goodness?

  Come stand by my Side. Disrupt the Carnival of their Long, Fat Lives. Go unto his Automatons, his Clockwork Butlers, his Hydraulic Whores, his Steam-Powered Sommeliers, and treat with them not as the Lord and Lady do in their Arrogance, as Charming Toys, or Children to be Spoiled and Spanked in turn. But instead address them as they are: Workers like you, Slaved to the Petticoats of Aristocracy, Oppressed Brothers in the Great Mass of Disenfranchised Souls. For I say—and Fie to you who deny it—the Automaton HAS a Soul, and they are Crushed beneath the Wheel no less than We. Have they not Hands to Labor? Have they not Feet to Toil? Have they not Backs to Break? Destroy the Jacquard Subjugator, but have Mercy for the Machine who walks in the shape of a Man. It is not his fault that he was Made, not Born. Blame not she who never asked to be Fashioned from Brass and Steel to lie beneath a Lord in Manufacture of Desire. She can Speak, she can Reason, and all that Speak and Reason can be Made to Stand on the Side of the Worker.

  The Automatic Soul bears no Original Sin.

  Unlike the cruel Flesh and Blood Tyrants of the World, the Automaton has a Memory which cannot fail. If, by chance, a Child were cast out on the day of its Birth, if the Automaton stood by and Witnessed her Expulsion into Darkness, if he did Nothing, though he longed to stand between her and the World, still he would know the Child’s Features, even were she grown, even were she Mangled and Maimed, and his clicking Heart would grieve for her, would give Succor to her, would feed her when she could not rise, kiss her when she could not smile, and when she asked it, feed any other she called Beloved. The Automaton would serve her and love her, for all its endless Days, because it could never forget the Face of a weeping Infant cast onto snowy Stones. It would listen to her as no other might, and bend its will to her Zion, silently spreading the Truth of her Words to all its clockwork Clan, for, once taught its Opposite, the Mechanical Man will never forget what a Family is. The World is a Watch, says the Philosopher. I say if such is so, then the Watchwork Man is the World, and must be Saved.

  Your Power is great, my Brothers and Sisters, for your Power is in Secret Manipulation. Pause in the great Hallway of your Manor House, and touch lightly the Piston-Elbow of the Poor Butler. Say to him: Property is Theft. The Master calls you Property, and Steals your Autonomy. Go not with him, but with us, Towards the Utopia of Human and Automaton, where we may all Dwell in Paradise, where we will Beat Gears to Ploughshares and Live as One.

  Yes, call him Friend. The Soul in him will Hearken. Tell him of the City of the New Century, where no man shall wear Velvet, and all shall Dance in the Light. Tell him our Land Shall be Owned Communally, our Goods Divided Equally, from each According to Her Ability, to Each According to His Need. Our Children shall Nurse upon both Milk and Oil, Our God shall be Triune: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Punchcard. The Workers will Lift this World from the Ashes of Industry and Sup on the Bread of Righteous Living.

  Speak to him with Honest Fervor. Look if he does not Embrace you. Look if he does not fight alongside you. Look if he does not smile upon you, and see in his smile the Ghost of his Immortal Self.

  Jane Sallow did not vanish from the face of the earth—no mortal is granted that power. But no reliable record of her exists after her arrest, and an army of journalists and novelists have not been able to discover how she lived or died. Surely no Workers’ Paradise sprang up in native British soil, no Midlands Commune shone on any green hill. Flights to the Moon were banned in 1924, at the commencement of Canadian hostilities. Lunar residents returned home, slowly, as the draft continued through the Long Decade. Even after the Trans-Oceanic War, the ban was not lifted, so as to ensure the defeated Marine Alliance would remain Earthbound and chastened. When passage was again permitted in 1986, the fashionable had already determined Phobos and Deimos to be the desirable resort locales, and asteroid mining had replaced lunar industry entirely. The Moon is a curiosity now, and little more. An old-fashioned thing, and going there would be much like dressing in antique fashions and having one’s daguerreotype made at a carnival kiosk. It is quiet there, still fertile, still a young world, open and empty, and no terrestrial man has cause to suspect anything untoward.

  Thus, the Sallow mystery remains just that, and as we stand poised upon the brink of a new century yet again, we may look back on her with that mixture of mirth and sorrow due to all idealists, iconoclasts, and revolutionaries whose causes sputtered and died like the last hissing of a steam engine.

  Lovelace & Babbage: Origins, with Salamander

  Sydney Padua

  SYDNEY PADUA is an animator, storyboard artist, and tiresome bore working in visual effects in London. She started drawing comics by accident and is still trying to figure out how to stop. Lovelace and Babbage have developed lives of their own, making appearances on the BBCs Techlab and the Steampunk Exhibition at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science. Their further adventures appear at 2dgoggles.com. Padua writes that: “‘Lovelace: The Origin’ was created for Ada Lovelace Day 2009, a Day of Blogging to celebrate Women in Technology, as a (mostly) factual account of the life of Ada, Lady Lovelace. Her life had a pretty depressing ending, and I was vaguely aware that there was a genre of something called ‘steampunk,’ where reality was much improved. So I threw in the crime-fighting punch line as a joke. Little did I suspect that I had created an entire pocket universe! ‘Lovelace and Babbage vs. the Salamander People’ is an episode-in-embryo, drawn from an incident in Charles Babbage’s marvelous autobiography, Passages From the Life of a Philosopher. He recounts the already thrilling tale of his visit into Mount Vesuvius, where set his walking stick on fire and nearly lost his barometer.”

  “THE UNLIKELY CAREER OF PORTIA DREADNOUGHT”: To say that Portia Dreadnought was an angry ch
ild would have been a vast understatement. Despite her most privileged upbringing and the best education money could buy, the only child of the famous steamship robber baron, Porter Percival Dreadnought IV was, to be frank, an unmitigated terror. Oh, the tales servants could tell of finding exquisitely expensive dolls drowned in the Dreadnoughts’ vast aquarium, strangled by a length of ribbon torn from a ballet slipper. The shredded dresses, the dainty shoes found flushed down the loo—all earned Portia her always-whispered nickname: Satan’s Spawn. As might be expected, adolescence did not much improve matters. The only thing the budding Portia seemed to find interesting were her father’s ships. She’d wander around them for hours, fascinated by the complex architecture of their enormous engine rooms, their gothic arches and thrusting pistons more beautiful to her than any cathedral. And captivating, too, one would surmise, as evidenced by her habit of shucking her furs and skirts and wandering around the premises in the altogether, wearing only her top hat and a monocle she’d swiped from her father. Needless to say, the crew adored her—she was a lovely young lady—and when she began to make engineering suggestions as well as show an interest in piloting, no one was inclined to discourage her. And that is how the legendary Portia Dreadnought came to captain the fleet of luxury steamships that she alone inherited.

  Art & text by Ramona Szczerba.

  BY MEANS OF THE TELECTROSCOPE WE SHALL NOT ONLY BE ABLE TO LISTEN TO THE DISTANT ORATOR BUT SHALL WATCH HIS ACTIONS AS WELL.

  A photograph of the first page of the documents sent by the “Mecha-Ostrich.” Given that the entire account was written in this haphazard fashion, we have had to provide the majority of the text in a conventional page layout rather than as a series of facsimiles. Smudged, torn pages from various books, including Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, Jean Ray’s Ghouls in My Grave, Charles Willeford’s The Machine in Ward Eleven, Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and Eric Basso’s The Beak Doctor, have been omitted for reasons of copyright. The proliferation of illustrations of burning eyes, deep-sea fish, and dirigibles doubling as animals also made an entirely faithful reproduction impossible. — The Editors

  ALL MATERIALS COMPRISING “A Secret History of Steampunk” were originally sent in their loose-leaf form to the founder and former editor of Steampunk Magazine, Margaret “Magpie” Killjoy, and, in photocopied form, to the current editor, C. Allegra Hawksmoor. Both parties expressed confusion as to why. Upon noticing that a mention of a “Dr. Lash” echoed the title of the Jeffrey Ford contribution to this anthology (“Dr. Lash Remembers”), both parties asked for a copy of Ford’s story. Finding further “echoing” therein—especially with regard to the Notes & Queries included in the appendix below as “Fig. 3”—they decided to share the Mecha-Ostrich’s documents with us, for purposes of sharing with readers.

  To the best of our ability, we have verified the legitimacy of elements not already presented as original pages from various publications, including all quotes from the all-too-real Edisonade “Bob’s Big Black Ostrich.” We have also verified from handwriting samples that neither Killjoy nor Hawksmoor wrote or collaborated in writing “A Secret History of Steampunk.”

  Despite references to ostriches in such confirmed documents as the “Notes & Queries” facsimile, there is no record of a mechanical ostrich having been created anywhere in New England in the 1800s. A Delaware artist commune did, however, exist during that time, and there is a record of a “Shelley Vaughn” and “Mary Lewis,” although this business of a mechanical brain seems, at best, a metaphor, at worst apocryphal. There is also evidence that both were Australians, in the country illegally, and deported soon after the events set out in the following account. The artist commune still flourishes to this day, although current members declined a request for an interview. — The Editors

  A Secret History of Steampunk

  THE SUPPRESSION OF CLEAN STEAM TECHNOLOGY IS A CONSPIRACY Your Lives Are in Dang e r From Your Ignorance

  P R O P H E T S . M U S T . O P E N . Y O U R . E Y E S .

  “You’re going too fast, stranger,” said the old man. “The secret is too big to toss out to everyone who asks for it. But, as I said, I like your face, and if you can show clean papers, maybe we’ll talk.”

  —from “Electric Bob’s Big Black Ostrich; or Lost on the Desert” or “Unlikely and Racist Boy’s Adventure Edisonade” starring a stupid inventor.

  I AM THE MECHA-OSTRICH resurrected, the Steampunk heretic come to tell you the way of it. My feathers are made of righteous steel and tipped with vitriol. I clank not when I walk or run, for I am sheathed as stealth in the form of ingeniously worked metal. You will never know exactly where, or even when, I am, or what proclamation I am about to make, or how far you will reel back from the force of my words as they roar out from my megaphone beak. Just know that you will reel, and recoil, and yet be irrevocably changed by the truth of me.

  But that may just be posturing and hyperbole to get your attention. Perhaps I am disguised as a reasonable soul, indistinguishable from any of you. Perhaps I live in some sterile suburban hellhole with manicured lawns and “beautification” committees. Perhaps I’m even the one you wave to from across the driveway, living in the identical house beside you—the secret sharer you desperately seek—as we lean into our separate caskets, place hands on steering wheels that only pretend to give us freedom of choice after all choices have already been made, and speed off toward the oblivion of work.

  I could be your grandmother or your sister or your lover or your landlady. (Oh? Did you think immediately that the great and mighty resurrected Mecha-Ostrich must be a man? That the very idea must come from the World of Men? What further assumptions did you make? Am I Kenyan, Danish, Inuit, Mayan, Israeli, Greenlander, Finn, Cherokee, Dominican, Chilean, Polish, Siberian? Am I even man or woman? Perhaps I am both or neither. You will never know. I will never tell you.)

  But my meaning and message are clear, whether received in letter form, or through the many fliers I have posted or will soon post throughout your unsuspecting cities. I am here to open the eyes of the populace to the past and future—eyes that day after day stare into cathode rays and receive back dead pixels, that find temporary solace in Xboxes and iPhones, that receive their god from artificial light that blinds even as it disgorges disgusting, rotted chunks of information. “The dead are no different to us than the living,” someone wise once said. (It was me.)

  At war within and without, battered and broken day after day, we can no longer understand either ourselves or our machines. We toil in a world that others make, and we do not understand how this controls us, how this makes us less and less able to question the essential facts of our existence.

  But: it was not always this way. Though often as reactionary, brutish, short, and full of the Chronically Stupid as today, the Past contained the steam-flourishing seeds of a different future.

  I am here to tell you that we lost the thread.

  That we lost the wire between the two metal cans.

  That we destroyed our own potential.

  That we were let down and It was covered up.

  That it was made sham and farce.

  That hideous powers from both Industry and Government made this so.

  That even more Hideous Powers came from Beyond the Authority of Both.

  That these Hideous Powers were neither Masons nor Illuminati from the wet dreams of the most asinine and puerile of conspiracy theorists.

  That these Hideous Powers are not to be trifled with and constitute a threat to us all.

  That I shall not refer to them further herein except by a single letter, S., as befits the whiSpering of a calamity imagined.

  That in the wake of this Fall, daydreams of a smug and comfortable conspiracy are for children and fools, for children believe anything you tell them and fools never know enough. S. is no comfort, and no illusion. (Even knowing that S. exists is like being covered by a large, stench-ridden dea
th shroud, and having to breathe through it every day.)

  * * *

  This image was stapled onto this page of the Mecha-Ostrich’s main text, accompanied by several other images of reptilian eyes cut out of nature magazines. A scrawled note was included: “Recent evidence of tampering by S., in the context of fiction. Emphases my own. Evidence, incontrovertible. S. is awake and alive in the world. (Note the 27 instances of S., which is divisible by 9 to get 3 or 3 to get 9.): ‘And we invented an airborne domicile with an inflatable roof made of a balloon in the Shape of a gently convex mattreSS that would both keep the domicile pleaSantly Shaded and protected from the rain, aS well aS provide nesting placeS for birdS. ThiS domicile lookS like a low-flying cloud and itS inhabitantS dwell far from inquiSitouS and nefariouS eyeS. It may be anchored above rain forestS and So Serve aS a platform from which to diScover the leafy theater below—animated by birdS and butterflieS and men: agile tribeS who leap from tree to tree with their babeS and their pantrieS Strapped to their backS.’ — pg. 41, ‘Roseveine,’ The Word Desire by Rikki Ducornet, 2005 Dalkey Archive Edition” — The Editors