Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  She couldn’t afford to stay, in any sense. “I was losing my own sanity.” So she arranged to have XY sent back to his family in Boston, although not before one liaison: “I left hoping that, soon, a microscopic group of cells might cling to the inside of my body.”

  Accompanied by Ms. Nagalakshmi, who had become a close friend, she made her way into the West, living like a nomad up and down the coast from Los Angeles to Big Sur. She retired from science for art and gained renown, under a different name, for her sculpture and writings. (Let us call her XX-New.) Tagging along, once XX had become visible again in the public eye, was a child she was careful never to let in on her secrets. But she kept as much as she could of papers, pictures, etc., and passed it all down—lost or forgotten until the death of my father a year ago (drinking/bar brawl), whereupon all of the material he found valueless yet had consigned to a safety deposit box became visible to me.

  Where the ostrich went, I don’t know—there are hints that it was melted down for scrap. It could have been disassembled into its separate parts and reassembled as a Model T or a mortar shell lobbed at the Germans or turned up in a submarine or a skyscraper’s girders in Chicago, or in a common bullet that lodged in the brains of two hillbillies simultaneously during an altercation I witnessed near the train tracks just a week ago. It’s impossible to tell. Maybe it’s lying next to the broken, almost oxidized remains of the mecha-elephant in a pit or quarry, and they tell each other the same decaying stories day after day.

  But when I say I am the Mecha-Ostrich, I mean that I am the Mecha-Ostrich. Having recovered also now the plans XX and XY left behind, and using money from a series of re-appropriations at various banks, it now exists, as my forebears might have imagined it, if in more diminutive, single-person form. It, the reality, not the many distortions, the terrible vitiations and the half-truths.

  Soon, your dead pixel lives will never be the same. Soon, you will know the power and the glory of the Mecha-Ostrich.

  How magnificent it is!

  How it mocks S!

  How it shines in the New Jersey sun!

  How I inhabit it!3

  ____________________

  1 From noted scholar Michael Ellsworth comes this additional information: “The Sanskrit word translated as ‘mechanical doll’ is ‘yantra-putrika,’ more literally translated as ‘(little) machine girl’—’yantra’ refers to any kind of device. The ‘Middle Country’ is Madhyadesa, corresponding to a region right around Uttar Pradesh in India in the period in question. There is a mechanical girl in the Mechanic and Artist episode of the Punyavantajataka, a Buddhist text (likely) written in Pali, translated into Sanskritized Prakrit, ‘proper’ Sanskrit, Old Gujarati, Tocharian, Tibetan, and Chinese. The version I originally came across was in Tocharian, likely written near Kucha in the Tarim Basin, along the Northern Silk Route around the 6th–8th c. CE. There are annotations from a later period referring to something odd that I can only translate as either ‘s’ or ‘snake’ with reference to the destruction of a mechanical girl acquired by an Indian trader from the Greeks—a ‘raid by snakes,’ which makes little sense even as some kind of odd joke.” – The Editors

  2 Although the text included by the Mecha-Ostrich from “The Railway War” is indeed correct, this particular translation comes from modern-day science fiction author Brian Stableford (with whose work the Mecha-Ostrich clearly is familiar—see the excerpt labeled Fig. 5 in the appendix), (cont. p.371) some question as to whether the Mecha-Ostrich had direct knowledge of this influence or indirect knowledge; for example, was XY read portions translated in impromptu fashion by the “two brains,” Shelley and Mary? The influence on XY of these two at times seems uncanny. — The Editors

  3 After several inquiries, we discovered that the return address on the Mecha-Ostrich’s package was for an apartment complex with the whimsical name of “Roaring Oak Springs,” in a New Jersey town that will remain nameless. The specific apartment had been vacant for over two years before the arrival of the current occupants, an unhelpful pair of Brookdale Community College students who appear to have had nothing to do with the sending of the package. Despite the threats of posters and further action in the above text, nothing further has been heard from “the Mecha-Ostrich, Steampunk Heretic.” – The Editors

  FIG 2. I have transcribed these sections of the July 1976 mimeographed Bulletin of New Hampshire Folklore & Miscellany, which itself exists only in people’s attics, there being no microfiche to rely upon, nor scanned-in electronic versions. These excerpts and fragments provide potent evidence of the mechanical elephant disaster that helped fuel XY’s Mecha-Ostrich research. It also provides evidence of the lengths to which the gutter press of the day would go to smear tinkers and other free-thinkers. Even the extent to which they allow Matthew Alcott Cheney to ramble on in his insanity should give any reasonable person the ammunition to doubt objectivity, and underscore the possibility of intervention by S. That these ramblings resemble those of XY in the mental hospital is beside the point.

  Confessions and Complaints of a True Man, as Related by Himself by Matthew Alcott Cheney (1823–1893)

  EDITOR’S NOTE: This manuscript was found in a tin box in a cellar hole in central New Hampshire in 1975. Few pages had survived the onslaught of time and weather, and those pages that did survive are brittle, stained, and worn. The handwriting is not always decipherable and the ink is often faded. We have reconstructed the manuscript here to the best of our ability, but this should not be considered a definitive transcription. We have also included further evidence from print publications of the period for your pleasure and instruction.

  from The New Hampshire Gazette, 7 July 1872:

  One of the most eminent men of the State of Massachusetts, Mr. James Raymond, was so distraught at the death of his elephant, Columbus, which received injuries from which he died, by the breaking of a bridge in South Adams, that Mr. Raymond commissioned the Boston engineer Wallace Tillinghast, Esq., to build for him a Mechanical Elephant that would be impervious to destruction. The creature, Pizarro, was immediately proclaimed a true Wonder of our epoch, one of the greatest MARVELS ever to result from the REASON of MAN.

  from the Manchester (N.H.) Union Democrat, 6 March 1873:

  A great tragedy occurred in this city, on the morning of the 4th instant. The particulars, as we understand them, are substantially as follows: The Great Mechanical Wonder known to all the world as the Elephant Pizarro suffered a prodigious seizure of its metal viscera, releasing much steam and smoke into the air, until which time the stout pins fastening its armor around the immense skeleton shot from their place like balls from a musket, injuring at least three persons in the crowd that had gathered to gawk at the Wonder. This was not the greatest of the tragedies, however, for the tumult of its intestines continued, and the pressure in the great creature’s abdomen was too much to be contained by its structure. Plates of white-hot metal burst into the crowd, maiming many a mother and child who, innocent, had come to see what Progress had wrought. The Mechanical Wonder wobbled and tottered and finally fell, and the rumble of the Earth was greater than that of ten cannons or the most terrifying thunder. Three deaths have been confirmed and more are expected, including the death of Miss Lucy Wellington Bishop of Lowell Street, a child of four years, who was crushed in the giant’s fall.

  from The Confessions and Complaints of a True Man, As Related By Himself, by Mr. Cheney, date unknown, handwriting often indecipherable:

  Progress! A Lie of the Mind which is buried at the City where it made its ruinous endeavors.

  The Caravan arrives and you inquire about the Scream, the Prisoned Demonian who rides atop the mechanical monstrosity itself, the Illusionist of Freedom who shepherds naught but suffering and death. Could but one true person stop amidst the carnage so much greater than ordinary pain and hardship—stop to raise a bloody shard, testament to being the Last True Man Alive—he, possessed suddenly of the Clarity of Extraordinary Strength that is the birthright of He Wh
o Knows Truthfulness—lifts the slab of Human Hubris and, from under the stifling lump, finds the Form that excess of Beauty makes ruinous—and the reflection of all Man’s Misdeeds lies there, crushed and shattered, destroyed—the Face of Innocence, THE CHILD THAT IS NO MORE.

  Such is our allegory. Such is the Tale of the Time in which we live. But to call what we have Living is to know not the meaning of that word.

  It is glaring to the Innocent Eye, the Light of our long-unlived Life, and in our era of Manufactured Bliss, when the mass of men are quiescent, their greatest Efforts given to the creating of Oblivion for themselves and others—in the world of these seers, it becomes the Blind Person to increase what is known by the sighted, or all Beauty and all Knowledge will die under the weight of an Elephant of our own making.

  It is weak, the Prisoned Limb; it is faint, the Breath long pent. But oh! The liquid eye, the pring of elastic strength, the reformed blush of Truth—I hold still to my Faith in Possibility, because in the heart of man lies the possibility of Rescue. Our time on this Earth is long, and we are not the only Beings upon it, though you would not know this to be the Truth were you to read the statements of the ilk of Tillinghasts. Nature’s Music still thrums, however quietly, in our heartchords.

  The Rescue Person will rise out of the heart of an Angel, if the individual has accepted the Work. The Scholars of Life especially are called, a certain self-culture, a complete development of character within an individual personality. Art, I especially believe, will speak these Efforts and paint Nature’s Notes. The person [missing two lines of text] this intended, that is presumed, [missing words] has indifference completely is not rejoicing, it has not owned excessively this. With private ease and compatibility of the achievement, the World attains worldly good, but the World as World does not need worldly good, for it has that inherent, but instead needs a Spiritual Good unknown to charlatans, spiritualists, illusionists, and mechanical engineers. As for the business of self-culture, there is no compromise which can achieve the desired harmony. Compromise is anathema to the Project. One either must do Truthful, Spiritual action, with full clarity of the Goal, or the Project is given up completely, and the Fate of a Child crushed beneath a Mechanical Marvel will be the Fate of us all, and one richly deserved.

  FIG. 4. Artist Shelley Vaughn (“Shelley Half-Brain”) account from her journal, acquired at great cost and with much delicacy, that includes her impressions of XX and XY. It sheds no further light on her true identity, despite giving more of a sense, no matter how unfair, of XY and of the commune. It also provides further documentation of the prevailing prejudice against and suppression of any vision of the future that might displease S., no matter how decorative rather than functional.

  27 July 18--, Monday

  As you will no doubt have noticed, due to the gobbets of ink uncharacteristically spattering too many of your preceding pages, Dear Diary, not to mention the ever-increasingly (and, I might add, uncommonly) illegible nature of the text scrawled thereupon, I have spent much of the interminable week-end working our Brain into a fizz with anticipation of Eudamien Fontenrose’s annual review of the Delaware Art Season in Blackwood’s Magazine. It is to be expected, though many a Creator of Art would deny their subscription to this truism, that an object intended for public consumption inspires in its creator a certain unquantifiable desire to be accepted; acknowledged as avant-garde; or, at least, worthy of inspiring future generations to feel inclined to manufacture further works in a similar vein.

  In this respect, I must admit, I had fancied our master-works of papier-mâché would be lauded by Fontenrose as the Next Big Things. (And, I implore you, explain to me how could they not? We selected only the finest strips of broadsheet-paper, each boasting the ramblings of our greatest Literary minds, to construct the eyes, ears, faces and torsos of our three-headed cats, our long-necked peacocks with their trumpet-feather tails, our exoskeletal arachnid gigantes; we fortified their fragile upper parts to iron strength with lashings of the most resilient horse-powder glue; then attached these fabrications to steam-driven lower halves, often with pick-axes or lawn-mowing blades or hedge-clippers for claws or paws, so that our steel-and-papier menagerie could simultaneously adorn and maintain the garden, proving, as all true Art should inevitably prove, to be both useful and beautiful.)

  Truth be told, such was my certainty in the commendation of our modest exhibit, and such my excitement to read Fontenrose’s acclamations, that the tension threatened to unhinge me; such was my agitation that I was coerced, as early as yesterday noon, into passing our Brain entirely into Mary’s care, either until I had managed a few hours’ unbroken rest or until my delirium deranged me completely—the former of these options, by the by, to both mine and Mary’s relief, occurred first and foremost. Thus, freshly wakened this morning, I paced, with no small amount of irritation, up and down the sycamore-lined drive which connects our commune with the hubbub of plebeian American life as I awaited the arrival of the (ever-tardy) news-paper delivery-man.

  The handsome Mr. --------- , our neighbor these past few years, wav’d at me from the landing of his ostentatious house. (You’ll remember I had requested his opinion, not too long past, on the most efficient means of powering a herd of mechanical rabbits and we reciprocated in helping him with his mechanical catfish; ever since, he has taken to greeting me as though we were friends, and, if I am honest, I would say he has formed an attachment to me; for whereas his wife is forever imprisoned by the whalebone stays of her corset, both Mary and I have forgone the discomfort of ours in favor of the loose cottons and diaphanous tulles that are much more suited to this country’s unpleasantly warm climate. In short, I fear he may fancy me; thus I have vowed to avoid him as much as humanly possible, if nothing else but for decorum’s sake.) Luckily, the pubescent, spotty-faced Mercury charged with winging news of our artistic success chose, at that instant, to land, as it were, on our doorstep; in so doing deferring any possibility of my returning Mr. ----------’s dubious greetings.

  Would that the bearer of Blackwood’s Magazine had been waylaid on his journey, thereby preserving me—for a little while longer—from suffering the grotesque effects of reading Fontenrose’s vulgar review.

  I will be brief, for fear of clouding our Brain with too much that is melancholy before it is once again Mary’s turn to wield it independently. Without putting too fine a point on it, our sculptures were pulled to the gutters by the weight of the reviewer’s clumsy pen; dubbed as novelties of conception where any connoisseur of Mechanical Art would rightly see them as the catalysts of a modern epoch of the craft. (Reluctant as I am to further his acquaintance, Mr.--------next door, is a fine example of just such a connoisseur, as he has, for more years than I can count, kept a tarpaulin-shielded behemoth in his back-yard which will, no doubt, prove to be a sculpture of immeasurable worth upon its unveiling.) At any rate, the execution of our pieces, to my mind flawless, was, in Fontenrose’s crossed-eyes, perceived as hurried and, in one instance, crude—O! I cannot bear to continue in this vein. How the standards by which Artistic merits are judged have fallen! If we must become bed-fellows with such troglodytes as this reviewer in order to achieve even a modicum of recognition, then sculptors will henceforward have to build not up to the heavens, but down to the level of Neanderthal public opinion, if our creations are to be at all noticed in the broadsheets.

  Art criticism has, this season, sunk to such abysmal depths that I am of a mind to turn my hand to challenging the likes of Fontenrose on his own preferred field of battle, namely, the printed page. After long hours studying the blatherings and idiocy of academical writings while laying the foundations of our innovative (crude!!) statues, I have become more than adept at counterfeiting the inanities inherent therein—

  Indeed, until anon, Dear Diary; I intend to unleash the seeds of a Cultural plague on Fontenrose’s publishing House, which, God willing, will bear fruit before his vitriolic pronouncements dissuade our fine Delaware artists from exhibiting ne
xt season; or worse, encourage them to adopt the habits of mediocrity he champions.

  FIG. 5 — Typical propaganda in fictional form making the production of steam technology synonymous with the necrotic arts—or further evidence, coming from an acclaimed translator of weird and uncanny texts, that the apparitions and strange weather converging on the house of XX and XY meant that the presence of S. crossed more boundaries than I might have guessed? Here, in this excerpt of a tale taken from The Innsmouth Heritage & Other Tales (1992), Edison has set up a strange invention to connect with the voices of the dead. But might they be something else entirely?

  Excerpt from “The Titan Unwrecked” by Brian Stableford

  The machine crackled and hummed. The pipes emitted eerie sounds, reminiscent of harp strings stirred by a wayward wind—but then the voices began to come through.

  They were voices—no one in the saloon could have any doubt about that—but it was quite impossible to distinguish what any one of them might be saying. There were thousands, perhaps millions, all attempting to speak at the same time, in every living language and at least as many that were no longer extant.