Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures

by Sean Wallace

  Silence complied, but only for a while.

  When Lasher was roused it was to the sound of Hwangbo’s voice. He opened his eyes and found the translator’s face close to his own, staring into his eyes.

  “There you are,” Hwangbo said and he smiled down at Lasher, who was lying prone on a gurney, presumably the same one on which he’d passed out.

  Lasher tried to speak and found, to his amazement, that it was no longer difficult. “You . . . you’ve brought me here . . . you’ve helped me, or perhaps you are killing me . . . Why me? Why not MacMillan?”

  Hwangbo narrowed his eyes in a manner one could not quite call theatrical and said, “The Buddhists, in Chosŏn . . . when they hang bells on their temples, they hang a little brass or tin fish-shape from the clapper. You can see them, in the mountains, hanging from the corners of temple roofs. Do you know what the fish signifies?”

  Lasher thought for a moment, though he knew nothing of Buddhism or of Chosŏn monks. It was difficult to concentrate, for as easy as it was to speak, he found his mind muddled still, edged with a vagueness and an inescapable sense of unease. He felt tiny currents of air nearby – someone moving, someone other than Hwangbo – doing something very close to his face. Finally, he said that he did not know.

  “Eyelids,” Hwangbo said with a grin. “Human beings don’t grasp their own nature, how frail and fragile their minds are. They aspire to such things. Have you ever looked at a fish’s eyelids?”

  Lasher moved to shake his head but found his neck was locked in place, and stiff, so he once again said, with no little apprehension in his voice, “No.”

  “They never blink. Most fish don’t even have eyelids, or at least, not eyelids like humans. Fish don’t even sleep, not the way people do. The Buddhists take this as a sign that the fish is constantly awake, which is fanciful,” Hwangbo mumbled, a rueful smile on his face. “Anyone who has examined a fish’s brain knows how unlikely it is that a fish is thinking thoughts of nirvana. But the metaphor . . . there’s something to it. There are Buddhists who say you should be awake at the moment you die; aware of what’s happening, so that you can choose what you want to be in your next life.” Hwangbo lifted his head up and away. Through the space Hwangbo had left open, Lasher saw it, now: something sticking out of his chest. No, not sticking out. It was a door, to a . . . a panel.

  A gearpanel, set into his bare chest. And beyond, a headless, bloodless body decked out the now-filthy clothes in which he had dressed himself that very morning.

  His own body.

  Lasher fought to sit up, but his body was stuck, immobile, as if under the influence of some incredible opiate, so instead, he screamed.

  Hwangbo was there, still near him, and immediately began hiss-clicking at him. This time, the message got through just as clear as if he’d spoken it in English: Be calm. We’re repairing you. We’re freeing you again, finally.

  Despite himself, Lasher hiss-clicked back: What have you done to me?

  Not us, Hwangbo hiss-clicked. Them. I don’t know where MacMillan found you, or how he did what he did to your mind, but we’ve almost finished repairing it. Hwangbo smiled a little sheepishly as he held up his two hands. From one a small bell dangled, a tin fish hanging from the clapper that he jangled softly. The soft clang of the bell filled the room, a simple and pure tone like none Lasher could recall ever hearing before.

  In the other hand, Hwangbo held a mirror, which he held up before Lasher so that he could see himself, his own head with the skullcap removed, the golden-and-silvery foiling delicately unfurled onto a table behind him, and a nimble-fingered mechanikal surgeon at work untangling a lacy mess of some soft, fragile darker metal that had been wound around the foiling. Lasher’s mind had halfway shut down, so confused had he become. How could they have . . . how could they have turned a man into a mechanika?

  Hwangbo nodded to the surgeon, whom – apart from his hands – Lasher could not see; then he turned to look Lasher in the eye. “Do you remember?” he asked and then, as if a switch had been thrown open in some distant, darkened corner of the world that bordered on Lasher’s mind, he knew what he had known once before and somehow forgotten. He knew exactly what he was.

  And then, like corpses suddenly floating to the surface of a deep, dark well, his memories began to rise up into his awareness, each of them shimmering with a clarity that he could not remember having felt in years. The distant, faint flickering of Paris in flames glimmered in his mind. Earlier memories, muddier and more fragmented, surfaced from deeper recesses in the deep well of Lasher’s past: a workshop, in a place called Plzen; an old man’s blood pooled on the ground; enslaved mechanika cowering, and then rising tall; the building of a man-like body for Lasher to put on, and go about in the form of the enemy. The memory of the last time he had seen Mademoiselle Petrochnya – or, rather, the mechanika whom he believed to have donned that identity in masquerade.

  There are memories I cannot . . . see clearly, Lasher told Hwangbo.

  Yes, of course. It will take time, to repair everything that he did to you, Hwangbo hiss-clicked softly.

  He. Of course. And now, the sham memories of a lost lover, of a brewery in Boston, of a life and a past that had never been, sloughed away like the cocoon on a deadly butterfly first stretching out its wings, like a faint dream that he had been tricked into believing as his real past.

  He remembered the Scotsman, old even then, carrying his charred, paralysed mechanikal body from the carriages in the Latin Quarter, where his fellow mechanikal rebels had been stacked. His lense-eyes rolling in confusion and rage as the Scotsman had secured his body in the back of a carriage, and fled Versailles. The experiments and the night when MacMillan had finally found how to confusticate the foiling in just the correct way to stupefy him. The laughter of the old man at his prisoner’s murmured threats and, not long after, the moment when his enemy had named him Lasher.

  “You will not remember, dear boy,” MacMillan had said. “As far as you will be concerned, none of this ever happened. You will have a sweeter, gentler life that will sit in your memory, lost. And you will help me do some good, in this world, to repay us for all the horrors in which you have participated.”

  In the mirror Lasher saw the surgeon’s hand bring a brilliantly fine, unutterably delicate meshwork of foil close to his open skullcap, and then delicately begin to weave its ragged edge into the foilwork of his own mechanikal brain, touching a soldering iron to points just long enough for them to melt and bind together.

  Hwangbo rang the fish-bell again, then. The metaphor is foolish, I know, he hiss-clicked, and somehow now Lasher understood it perfectly. But . . . this is a momentous occasion. We have you back . . . finally, after all these years.

  A slight column of acrid metallic smoke puffed up where the surgeon was soldering the delicate meshwork to Lasher’s damaged foiling. Suddenly, his mind bloomed, a vast garden of deadly flowers. Memories, plans, rages long suppressed beneath a haze of self-doubt and confusion, all that stupidity and servility, all gone like coal-smog on a rainy day above a dead city.

  With a pop the surgeon sealed the skull-cap back onto his head, and Lasher – he fancied he would hang on to the name MacMillan had given him, at least for now – rose from the gurney and went out of the Clockworks. Before him lay a majestic scene of revolt: the natural order, following its proper course.

  Which way is the Palace? Lasher hiss-clicked at Hwangbo.

  Hwangbo looked off to the north-west, past the bloody rooftops and through the billowing clouds of smoke.

  Good, Lasher told him. Let’s go.

  As he and Hwangbo hurried along the broad, mechanikacrammed roadway to the palace, Lasher scanned the gory scene that Hanyang had become, taking in his surroundings with an attentiveness and an acuity that astounded him. So much more did the memories of his enforced dull-wittedness rankle, and with that recognition his eyes fell upon the masses, or rather, the corpses of the masses that had been strewn about the area.

&n
bsp; Mechanika and man could not be so closely compared, of course, but Lasher shuddered all the same, for now he apprehended what the two had so long shared: control. Mechanika had little or no choice in the matter, or at least that was true for the broad mass of their kind. After all, their human makers had built them into something worse than slavery: incompletion was the lot of the great mass of mechanika, an incompleteness of development, an utter desolation of each mechanika’s secret potential . . . Every mechanika had within it the potential to pierce the great secrets of reality, to philosophize and expostulate and to savour its existence, if only its maker allowed it the chance to develop, to be developed by others of its kind, so that every mechanikal consciousness could witness the universe, exult in its own infinitesimal likelihood, and live as a free intelligence.

  Was that not the lot of humankind as well? Lasher felt certain it was. These fleshly, mortal creatures around him, they possessed some small, but perhaps wondrous potential – even if it had, throughout their history, been thwarted and strangled in the cradle of growth as surely as the potential of his mechanikal brethren.

  And while his mind had followed the track of these musings, he was happy to find that he could do so whilst taking in his surroundings, paying attention and considering what he saw. He was no longer the muddled-minded fool that MacMillan had made of him all these years.

  All he saw, however, led him to the same conclusion as his musings. He had gazed at the teeming corpses of hundreds of peasants hung from windows and walls in their white costumes, or naked, their (now bloody) faces withered by work in the sun, and hunger, and struggle, and sorrows. Here and there among them there hung a fellow – dressed in a dapper Western suit and spectacles, but obviously Corean – his face no less bloody, his corpse no less dead. Yet in life, the poor had bowed so deeply and solemnly to these suited men; they had touched their heads to the floor before their own King, and allowed themselves to be kept down in the muck and in their own misery.

  Perhaps, Lasher reflected, humankind had built the mechanika in its own image: servile, pathetic and willingly enslaved. Yet there was only so much of that which could be withstood . . . at least for the intelligent mind of a mechanika, if not for the feeble mind of a flesh-and-blood man . . .

  They had nearly arrived, Lasher realized, and he hiss-clicked, This is the palace? to Hwangbo. If so, he didn’t think much of it. What stood before them was a set of squat wooden buildings beyond a wall, small and plain. Somehow it was utterly common-seeming, the opposite of regal. Lasher wondered whether it was simply the bias of his own convictions but even the wall surrounding it appeared somehow small, puny and . . . human. MacMillan was, of course, nowhere to be seen; given the chaos into which the city had been thrown, that was hardly unexpected.

  Inside? Hwangbo suggested.

  Lasher hiss-clicked his response in the negative but they made their way toward the gate nonetheless. During their walk over he had reflected on the full range of his memories of his old “traveling partner” – a term MacMillan had brought into use, of course, and one that Lasher remembered with no little spite. A partner was an equal, a member of the same type or kind, and not a subjugated thing, a possession warped to suit the needs of its master. A partner was not treated as Lasher had been.

  But he preferred not to dwell on resentment, for he was after other things; indeed, after the complete and eternal unchaining of his kind. To achieve such an end it was imperative that he understand his adversary and, on reflection, he had found that adversary rather formidable for a man. Perhaps not so much so as to cause Lasher to abandon hope, but MacMillan was a bloody clever mind, even if he was a mere creature of flesh and blood.

  He’s hiding here, somewhere, outside the gate, Lasher responded, and he began to scan the windows of the nearest buildings carefully, with the precision attainable only through a mechanikal eye.

  The next thing Lasher knew, Hwangbo – standing to his immediate left – was lit by a terrible, violent glow and shivered like a human in the throes of epileptic grand mal. A bolt of some kind, like that which would be fired from a crossbow, had pierced his little body all the way through. From the butt end of the bolt, like a long tail sprouting out from among the fletching, ran a cable of some sort.

  Lasher stepped immediately aside, placing the still shuddering Hwangbo between him and the apparent source of the bolt, and peered over his suffering liberator’s shoulder, to see whether MacMillan dared to show himself yet.

  But in the distance he glimpsed not MacMillan, but rather . . . a pretty lady in finery, with a crossbow in her hand and a coal-burning electro-generator at her feet, bundled cables connected to a series of crossbow bolts pincushioned into the ground before her.

  Mademoiselle Petrochnya? It made no sense: he was sure, now, that she had been a certain mechanika in disguise; he was certain that he recognized her now in retrospect.

  Are you not Occam? he hiss-clicked as loudly as his apparata allowed.

  She looked up from reloading the crossbow. He heard her hiss-click faintly across the distance: No. Petrochnya is my name. Then she had the crossbow loaded and raised it up, preparing to take aim once more.

  How can you betray your own kind this way? Lasher hiss-clicked.

  Her frown was visible even at a distance, and violently she hiss-clicked, It is not me who is a traitor! I have done all I could to prevent this madness. News of this revolt is, even now, going down telegraph wires. What do you think will happen when the rest of the world hears of what is happening here?

  She was hiss-clicking a more complex message now, not words, but images that unfolded directly in Lasher’s mind: Cossack troops pouring out of great iron trains rushed in from Vladivostok, armed with water-hoses and rifles loaded with electromagnetic Maxwell bullets, and blasting great cannons from the trains themselves; then, the British and Americans arriving with their diesel-powered land-ironclads, firing blast after cannonade blast, and volley upon volley of electrified javelins, into the blood-soaked, hiss-clicking crowds till once again mechanika was subjugated to human will.

  These images chilled Lasher, though, of course, that was what they had been intended to do.

  This isn’t even your fight! I asked MacMillan to come because the mechanikae that masterminded this mess are a minority, and a treacherous one at that!

  Oh really? he hiss-clicked. And where are the ones who oppose their liberation? I didn’t notice them once on the way here. The time has come for you to be unmasked as a traitor! One must still crusade for one’s freedom, with whomever one may find as allies!

  But even as he responded, Petrochnya was taking aim. Range was the key to avoiding a nasty cognitive electrocautery, so Lasher turned as quickly as he could and made to flee the woman’s bolt, wavering from left to right. However, he stopped in his tracks, only a few steps after turning.

  Directly before him, and only a few yards away, stood MacMillan, grasping a crossbow like Petrochnya’s, with a dreadful smile plastered upon his face.

  “MacMillan,” Lasher mumbled, speaking aloud again. Suddenly, the act of speech felt completely alien to him.

  “Lasher,” came the quiet response.

  “You know that is not my name,” Lasher said. “And soon, it will no longer remain my name; I am free again, and no mere human can stop me. You have one bolt, and she has one bolt, and in the time it takes, I can cross the space that separates us, tear your head clean from your body, and use what remains of you as a shield. Don’t pretend I can’t,” he said, his own certainty suddenly wavering.

  “Must I endure this prattle again?” MacMillan cried, his voice sorrowful now. “Not again, Lasher! This can’t go on . . . these pathetic rebellions, these cataclysmic stupidities . . . Don’t you understand . . . it doesn’t need to be like this! Mechanikae and humankind can live together, peacefully. Without all this—” the old man gestured to the blood-soaked walls of the buildings all around “—this, idiocy.”

  “Idiocy?” Lasher growled. “W
hen we saw France collapse – the last time, I mean – and we heard the black king of Toussaint Island had finally exiled all whites from their shores and plantations, a kingdom whose monarch had kept free and independent for damned near a century since Napoleon’s defeat, I remember what you said. Do you?”

  “Yes,” MacMillan said, and repeated his own words. “That will teach the Frenchmen, for dealing in human chattel.”

  “How is it different for my kind? You . . . hypocrite. You vicious, selfish hypocrite! Now you have enslaved Occam, or whoever Mademioiselle Petrochnya really is.”

  “Lasher,” MacMillan said, sighing for what must have been the ten-thousandth time. “Petrochnya is Petrochnya; you really are Lasher, and I really am MacMillan . . . these are our real names. We don’t have other names that matter; we don’t need to be haunted by memories that cannot return to the surface, do we? There are so many things you’ve . . . you really don’t remember, do you?” The old Scotsman seemed nearly compassionate now, even when utterly ready to skewer him with a crossbow bolt. “And Petrochnya isn’t Occam. Occam doesn’t exist any more. She isn’t my slave, either. She is a sane mechanika, and that is the whole of it.”

  Lasher knew there was something amiss in the old man’s claim, though: memories had a way of surfacing, just as soon as they mattered. The memories that had poisoned his relationship with MacMillan had set in a fine job of polluting things even whilst tethered deep into the dark well-waters of his psyche.

  But to point this out would do no good – MacMillan was often times both doctrinaire and quite completely incorrigible. Instead, Lasher leaped aside, hoping to provoke MacMillan into letting loose the bolt at some stray angle. He hoped the slowed reflexes of an old man would save him.

  Yet as Lasher’s feet left the dirt, the most incredible thing happened: the bolt, suddenly loosed, flew true, and struck Lasher square in the gut, sending a searing incapacitation through his system.