Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures

by Sean Wallace

  The imagery of “Dane Faraday, Man of Justice” still rolling in his thoughts, Chabane tried to imagine a world in which James Clark Ross had never returned from the south seas with a broken automaton, in which Ringgold had never discovered prometheum, in which the modern age knew nothing of the forgotten Antediluvian civilization. Perhaps in such a world, there would now be an Electricity exhibit instead of a Prometheum one, with Tom Edison’s dynamos at center stage. And perhaps instead of an Automata building, one devoted to some other industry, metal-working perhaps, or mining. But then, in a world in which the United States Army lacked prometheic tanks, perhaps they wouldn’t have been able to subdue the southern insurrection, and the Union might have split in two over the question of slavery. Perhaps there might not be a Columbian Exhibition at all.

  What Chabane couldn’t decide was whether such a world would be better, or worse, than the one he knew.

  By the time Chabane returned to the Algerian concession, the sun had long since set, and the fourth prayer of the day, Maghrib, had been completed. Now the troupe was breaking their Ramadan fast. Even the non-observant among them, like Chabane, usually had the good graces not to eat and drink in front of the others while the sun was shining in the holy month. Fast or not, though, Chabane knew that a fair number of the performers, once their meals were done, would slip off and drink spirits, perhaps swapping Algerian wines for the “firewater” favored by Cody’s Indians. Perhaps tonight, instead of trying to stop them, Chabane just might join them.

  The stranger sat among the Algerians, in his lap a plate of food, untouched. He had been cleaned up, his wounds bandaged, and dressed in a suit of borrowed clothes. He was awake, but unspeaking, and it was unclear what, if any, tongue he comprehended. He simply sat, watching the others silently, his expression mingling confusion and interest.

  “Keep your distance, amin,” Papa Ganon said, as Chabane crouched down beside the man. “My hand brushed his bare skin while we were dressing him, and I got the shock of my life. He’s like a walking thundercloud, this one.”

  Chabane nodded, and kept his hands at his sides. In the soft white glow of the prometheic lights overhead, Chabane examined the stranger closely. His coloration, what little of it could be seen beneath the bandages, cuts, and scars, was somehow . . . off. His skin was a darker shade than his light hair would suggest, the little hairs on the backs of his hands darker than his feathery eyebrows. And his features seemed mismatched, his nose too long and narrow, his mouth a wide slash in his face, his over-large ears too low on his head.

  “What will we do with him?” Dihya asked, coming to stand beside Ganon. Taninna came with her, staring hard at the stranger’s disfigured face, as though trying to find something hidden there.

  Chabane thought about tradition, about the past and the future. He remembered the superstitions he’d been taught as a child, and the story-papers’ fantastic futures into which he’d fled.

  In many ways, the future promised by Jules Verne had arrived, but not in the way the young Adherbal Aït Chabaâne had imagined. But the future that young Mezian now dreamed of, the future promised in Nikola Tesla’s colorful stories? They would never arrive. That wasn’t tomorrow, but was yesterday’s tomorrow. The world of Dane Faraday would never arrive, with its heavier-than-air craft, and wireless communications connecting distant nations, and incandescent lights dangling from wires, and massive dynamos. A world of phosphorescent gas tubes on lampposts, and power lines criss-crossing the countryside, and antennas atop every house picking symphonies out of the air. Of men and women of all races and nationalities, each measured by their conduct and their character, not by their language or the color of their skin.

  Chabane thought about the frisson he’d felt on flipping through Tesla’s story, the familiar thrill of boundless potential. But he realized now it wasn’t a hope for a new world to come, but a kind of nostalgia for a future that could never be. He thought about the dead man in the blood-covered shack in the Machinery building, so committed to a particular view of yesterday’s tomorrow that he had been willing to commit horrible acts to get back to it, whatever the cost.

  “Amin?” Dihya repeated, seeing Chabane lost in thought. “What will we do with the stranger?”

  Chabane took a deep breath, and sighed. He had tried to escape tradition before, and now knew he never would. “We do what our grandmothers would have us do. No stranger who comes into the village for aid can ever be turned away.”

  Maybe it wasn’t all of the tomorrows that mattered, Chabane realized. Maybe what was truly important was preserving the past, and working for a better today. Perhaps that was the only real way to choose what kind of future we will inhabit.

  But Taninna was right, Chabane knew, looking back to the silent man sitting in the cool glow of the prometheic light. The stranger did have Salla’s eyes.

  The Canary of Candletown

  C. S. E. Cooney

  God, if You had but the moon

  Stuck in Your cap for a lamp

  Even You’d tire of it soon

  Down in the dark and the damp

  Louis Untermeyer

  “Caliban in the Coal Mines”

  They say the Operators of Candletown were once men. This one got his face half melted in a firedamp explosion. That one got both his legs broken in a shaft collapse. That one lost an arm to gangrene.

  Oh, they were given the choice, all right. Live on as cripples, no longer able to work like whole men, those younger, hardier, luckier. Or take Candletown Company’s offer. Get that ghost arm replaced by mech, chased in silver, fifty times as strong and five times as versatile. Cover that inelastic mess of scars with a mask of stainless steel, hammered into an eternally triumphant smile, worked crystal glowing in that empty socket like an all-seeing star.

  Little by little, the other parts of the man begin to malfunction. Bit by bit, bone by bone, his parts are replaced by company parts, paid for by the company, a debt no man can hope to repay, until the man is no man at all, but twenty feet tall, spider-limbed, braced and gauntleted, padded and shocked, veined in wires and many-armed as Shiva, whose footsteps echo in the ground of Candletown, all the way down to the black seams of anthracite, clean-burning and diamond-hard, buried deep in the dirt. Here is an Operator.

  The Operators of Candletown are its guardians. They are the law, and the law is coal. This is the century of steam. No height too high, no depth too distant, no horizon unpursued. The world runs on fume and fire. Whoever holds the fire owns the aluminum dragons of the sky, the iron serpents of the earth, the steel-plated leviathans of the sea.

  Operators are born men the way Candletown was born a spit-on-the-ground tent colony. Now Candletown burns as bright as any palace. Now its most wrecked and lame stalk the perimeters with the footsteps of gods.

  The girl was born eighth in a family of miners too weary to want her. She lived. She lived and ate and shat. What wailing she did went mostly unattended. After six or so years by no one’s counting, she was brought to the breakers of Candletown and put to the sorting belt.

  She stood with one-eyed oldsters, bent-backed widows, the one-footed gimps who had opted out of the Operators’ Guild and were thus doubly reviled, and with the other children, too. She graded the lumps disgorged from the bowels of Candletown’s three mines: Crow’s Maw, Hell’s Well and the Inkpot. She straddled troughs and picked slate from coal. She did this for four years until she was pulled from the belt and sent down to the ventilation traps.

  Deep in dank and darkness, the girl squatted, picker turned trapper brat, tongue-dumb and numb-eyed.

  Seven years passed in this near-perpetual midnight. She opened and shut the traps that drove the wind through and the firedamp away. Her youth spooled out in solitude, silence broken only when the mule drivers rolled through, with their coal carts and their lunch pails and their hats smeared with the burning grease called sunshine. Their songs were almost robust enough to scare off the rats, but never for long. The world above her work
ed on, but she rarely ascended except to sleep.

  Four years as a trapper, two as a mule girl, two as a miner’s laborer. Time moved, and at the age of eighteen, she did not know what it was to be clean. Time moved, measured in thin hymns floating from the company church as she slept through the Sabbath. Time moved, and the girl did not know the color of her eyes, or the sum of her years, or the sound of her own voice.

  The miners called her Little Silence – until she began to cough. Then, shrugging, they took even that name away.

  Bitterly, she barely understood she missed it.

  And then the girl met Dagomar Wunderlich.

  Candletown straddles the Kanawha River, dangling filthy feet in two counties. It possesses the only post office for twenty miles. Besides the colliery and the Operators’ offices, it boasts three saloons, a church and a company store. There is also a paper mill, a gristmill, a barbershop, an apothecary, a stable, and a cemetery.

  This cemetery is Candeltown’s original burial ground, where the very first drifters and migrants had been wrapped cavalierly in canvas and dumped. Now every worker gets a good pine box, stamped with the triple-flame logo – company issue. The cemetery is nearly full.

  Time to extend the borders. Push out, like pioneers. These are the bones from which steam rises. This is the fuel that stokes the world.

  Superintendent Tiberius McRae knocked once on the door, a blow like a stick of sweaty dynamite carelessly handled. On receiving no answer, he stumped in. He had one good leg and one mech. His coat was brown, with tails like a gentleman’s, and his pocket watch told the phases of a mother-of-pearl moon.

  In the middle of the bedroom he stopped and looked around. Nothing special. A hundred rooms just like it, though this one was emptier than most: the skeletons of two bunk beds, bare of mattresses; one shelf with nothing on it; one trunk and its rusted padlock; one lone twig chair, hobble-footed, listing in a corner.

  Hers was the only bedroll, gray with grime and tattered at the edges, spread out on the hurly-bed she’d slept in since forever.

  It was Sunday, her rightful day, and the girl (no longer named Little Silence) would not stir for the Super if he kicked her and howled that the roof had caught fire. Instead, she peered through the soot-beaded bars of her lashes and breathed in hollow whistles so that McRae might think she slept.

  “Like I said.” McRae turned his brash red head and spoke over his shoulder. “Dead to the world. That’s how it takes the young ones, Sundays. Come on in.”

  Footsteps. The thump of tools and baggage on the floor.

  “Your choice of bunk. Rent’s five dollars a month.”

  “You are joking. For this ramshackle paradise?” The newcomer was a woman, a foreigner. Her voice was deep, incredulous, maybe more educated than most.

  “Biggest in the house!” McRae retorted. “Used to sleep eleven. Just you and her now. Nothing but the best for our miners.”

  “I see. Luxury indeed.”

  “You’re not aiming to give me trouble now, Wunderlich?”

  “Trouble, sir?”

  “You heard me.”

  McRae’s voice had got the grit in it. Two ways this could go. One had Operators at the other end. The girl shivered under her blanket.

  The Super began to pace. The thump of his boot was nothing to the near silent impact of his mech leg.

  “Wunderlich, I know you come to Candletown with a history. Don’t we all? But I also know that people change. Hell, I’m walking proof.” A metallic smack as he slapped leg. “In Candletown, we all start clean. Now, we need certified miners – no question. Whatever else you’ve been, you’re that, with the papers to prove it. We’re willing to overlook the rest. Question you gotta ask yourself, Wunderlich, is, How many companies can say the same? I’m thinking it’s a pretty finite list.”

  He stopped pacing. The girl held her breath and dared crack open her eyelashes another millimeter.

  “If Candletown hospitality ain’t good enough for you, Wunderlich, the road’s thatta way. I see by your boots, you’ve come a spell already.”

  Wunderlich held his gaze a moment, then bowed her head. She gestured to the girl, who sealed her lashes once again.

  “This . . . She is to be my laborer?”

  “Yeah.” The grit faded, replaced by a grin. All affability now. An avuncular fondness, even. McRae had known the girl all eighteen years she’d been alive.

  “Don’t look like much, does she, snoring like the dead down there. But she’s a steady monkey. Her old man trained her up from wean. Great worker. Knows the mines in and out – even Hell’s Well, which we tapped out a few years back. Hauls like a hunchbacked Hercules. She’s strong, too, in that wiry way: outlived most of her sibs already. Let’s see.” McRae scratched an angry scar near his right ear. “Eldest boy died in a slide last year. Two taken by spring typhoid back in ’68. Three married and moved off. One of ’em bled out in childbirth. Can’t think what happened to the others. Too many to track.” His voice swelled with pride of ownership. “I’ve got over three hundred families under my care these days and almost three dozen Operators. Candletown keeps growing.”

  “And you, like a father to them.”

  If the faintest note of provocation underlay the respectful murmur, McRae pretended not to notice. The girl no longer named Little Silence made no twitch. She’d never heard McRae spoken to like that. Like a child who didn’t know better but who should.

  “Father? Nah, not me.” McRae laughed ruefully. “I’m not even a shareholder. But I won’t say as how Candletown ain’t like one big dirty family. That’s why I paired you up with this one. Her ma finally kicked it last month. Caught the consumption some three years back. Toughed it out this long, but winter did for her. Then her old man got so drunk at the wake, he went and mistook the C&O rail for his pillow. Fucking mess. Anyway, he’d been her miner, too, so she needs another.”

  The newcomer’s “Ah” conveyed sympathy but no surprise.

  “You want my opinion,” said McRae, lowering his voice to a mere threat of thunder, “that one teethed on too many candle stubs as a bairn. Soft, see? And stunted. Never learned to talk. And anyway, she’s got the cough. Could be from her ma. Could be from all those years sunk in the Inkpot. We all take a turn below. Some of us rise.”

  He hesitated. The newcomer said nothing. The claws of McRae’s mechfoot tapped nervously, scratching at the floorboards as if remembering the limb lost to the Crow’s Maw mine, a fine feast for the regiments of rats big as boxcars that lived there. McRae frowned down, stilled the tapping.

  From behind the determined shutters of her lids, the girl no longer named Little Silence felt the blue blaze of his highland eyes upon her. She kept herself slack. She let herself wheeze.

  “The room is spacious and supplies every need,” Wunderlich murmured. “I’m sure I’ll be comfortable here, Superintendent. Rent is due the first of the month?”

  “Yes . . . Yes,” he said more firmly, and nodded. “All right, Wunderlich. Glad to have you on board. Get yourself settled. Report to the Inkpot, nice and early.”

  “No later than dawn. Danke, Superintendent.”

  “Right.” McRae stumped out again.

  Wunderlich neither followed him out to explore the dubious daytime entertainments of Candletown, nor set about unpacking. Her footsteps, politer than McRae’s, padded over to the window, where the light came in greyly through a permanent dust stain. She sighed a bar of song in her foreign tongue (German, thought the girl no longer named Little Silence; there were several German families in Candletown) and then said, in a voice low and clear, as if certain of being overheard at any decibel, “My lamp is my sun, and all my days are nights.”

  The phrase was like a secret, just between them. The girl knew that Wunderlich knew she was awake. She rolled over onto her back. Curiosity tickled her tear ducts, urging her lashes open. Not quite yet, though. She was not quite ready.

  As if encouraged by the girl’s movement, Wunderlich settled
on the floor near her bedroll. The girl could feel her there, smell her, now that the oil and iron and flesh-seared scent of McRae was fading. Wunderlich smelled like the open road and a shirt worn close to the skin that had gone too many weeks without washing.

  The sounds of rummaging. A lockbox unclicking. A key winding. A light whirring.

  Only when she felt the prick of tiny claws upon her skin did the girl no longer named Little Silence open her eyes.

  A bird, no larger than a wren, perched upon her chest. It strutted up. It paraded down. It ruffled its silver-chased feathers and flirted its filigreed tail. It turned its enamel head around and around on a neck as yellow-vivid as daffodils. Upon its chest, like a badge of pride, was embedded a most delicate and cunning clock. From within, the faintest air of a lullaby. The bird was like a jewel pacing her blackened nightshirt. It was like a messenger from heaven.

  The girl smiled, and Wunderlich smiled in answer.

  “I brought it across the ocean. It was a farewell present from my old friends. It is now a hello present to my new friend. Es ist ein Kanarienvogel. Like you.”

  And just like that, Kanarien had a name again.

  * * *

  Do not think, because of all its dead, that Candletown is dying. Candletown refuels itself. Pass any company house. Press your ear to the clapboard. Listen at the window. You might hear the creak of a rocking cradle, the hoarse lullabies of a miner’s wife:

  Hush-a-bye, baby

  Now don’t make a sound

  Or the mech-men’ll take you

  Right down to the ground

  Six arms of iron

  With talons of gold

  They’ll snatch you from sleeping