Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures

by Sean Wallace

  In the lamp’s honeyed light Daisy regarded her expectantly.

  How to start? Not, Lisette felt sure, with their personal concerns: not the too-insistent memories evoked by Everfair’s sights and sounds and scents; not the reasons for Lisette’s apparent abandonment of the country they had helped to found – which of course she had continued to serve, but never mind that now . . . or perhaps it would be best, after all . . .

  “I’ve been . . .” Hesitatingly, Lisette chronicled the labors her travels as an actress had disguised: the training received from Matty, then the lessons of her own invention. The clandestine calls on Russian and Italian diplomats. The cipher she and Fwendi had devised, based on the girl’s half-forgotten native tongue. The periodic reports made to Jackie – painful, but necessary. And how she had continued gathering intelligence since his death.

  “So. He told me he’d seen you more than once. Not why.” The keen eyes were turned away. Lisette couldn’t see whether they sorrowed. Would that have helped, though? She’d only want to know who they sorrowed for.

  The rest of her obligations, she reminded herself. Take care of those and she would be at liberty . . . “The French, British, and Russians offer us the lands between Kalemie, Lubumbashi, and Dilolo – an approximate triangle.”

  “German territory, isn’t it?” As Lisette had expected, Daisy took her position as the Mote’s poet seriously. In that capacity she must hold in her awareness all Everfair’s concerns, then present the Mote with her peculiar view of them.

  “It is German,” Lisette affirmed. “And they would establish embassies, accord us complete diplomatic recognition.”

  Daisy nodded. “But what do they ask for all that?”

  Lisette heaved a sigh. “Much.” She enumerated each item on her fingers. “They would like access to our minerals, our expertise with airships. Our rubber.”

  “But we have no rubber! Or hardly any. All right. What else?”

  “A staging area for the campaign against Cameroon. A blind eye turned toward breaching the neutrality principles of the Berlin Conference in any and all African colonies.” She switched hands. “Our medicines – our antimalarials, especially.”

  A snort of disbelief. “They’ll have difficulty abiding by the proper administration protocols.” Daisy assumed an expression of annoyed superiority. “‘A load of superstitious nonsense!’ I know the attitude; I doubt they’ll get any good out of that proviso.

  “You haven’t mentioned—”

  “Soldiers. Yes. And mechanics. And bearers.”

  Daisy gasped. “No! We could not.”

  “As you say.”

  “The Blacks – these politicians want to make slaves of them, to repeat Leopold’s cruelties anew, to—No.”

  Slaves of “them”, thought Lisette. Not of “us”. Yet, not of “you”, either. “Them”. But she said nothing.

  Daisy was silent, too, though only for a bit. Then: “You met also with the Germans?”

  Lisette nodded. “Yes. They also would like Everfair to commit to fight upon their side. We could declare ourselves neutral, outwardly, and in return for supplies and aid in transportation we would receive—” she breathed a soft huff of laughter “—the same territory as we would from the Entente.”

  Daisy laughed, too. “Well, neither has a legitimate claim, though I suppose theirs is more generally accepted.”

  “And in exchange the Germans and Allies require the same materials and expertise as do the French and Entente.”

  Lisette leaned forward to impart the information Daisy would desire most. “Interestingly, the Governor of Tanzania is for real peace. At least upon this continent – he has no influence on European events. What his Fatherland proposes he agrees to, for his domain and ours as well. Sans treaty violations and soldiers.”

  Daisy rose to her feet. “Well then, do we truly need to discuss how I ought to present these offers? Peace or war? Freedom or bondage? Promises broken or promises kept? Our answer is obvious.” She lifted a hand to rake her curls; catching her fingers on the ribbon restraining them, she tugged at it impatiently.

  Almost against her will Lisette rose also and reached to help her. The knot persisted. “Sit,” she told Daisy, as if the other woman were a child or a dog, and found herself dragged back down onto the bed in arms irresistible, smelling as before of lime and sweet herbs.

  “Cherie, cherie, do you want me again . . . still . . .”

  Why else had she come so far? With her teeth Lisette renewed her attack upon the stupid ribbon and at last it loosened and dropped to the counterpane. The sandals were off in a trice, and Daisy’s gown was just as easy to remove. Underneath it, time had treated her body kindly – kindlier even than the drying sun and wind had treated her tender face.

  Lisette’s turn. All her faults would be visible – how well she knew them, and how professionally she took them into account. But what use caution here and now? She stripped – tossed her blouse at the abandoned chair, snaked out of her skirt where she lay, shoving it aside to the floor. Lifting her chemise—

  “No. Stop. Let me – please?”

  She felt her arms drift to her sides. With a mother’s solicitude, Daisy divested Lisette of the last of her defenses: stockings and slippers, silk and leather and lace. And then skin touched skin: no hindrance. Only unsparing pleasure and unremitting happiness.

  Rattling metal. It woke her. The bed was crowded – ah, but with Daisy, not Rima. Lisette settled closer to her back, but that noise – again! Louder – she turned her head toward the source.

  In her room’s door the handle shook. “Lisette?” Rima’s urgent voice. “Lisette! You oughta open this.”

  Behind her the bed dipped and rustled as Daisy shifted. Rolling to lie flat, she met Lisette’s eyes with a frown barely discernible in the room’s dimness.

  Bam! The door shook in its frame. “Lisette! Lemme in! Fwendi ain’t been to our room at all last night and I—”

  Furious, Lisette jumped to the floor, but Daisy sat up, reaching to restrain her. “Wait.” She donned her gown and Lisette saw her wisdom. She called to Rima, who was still haranguing her from outside, and assumed her own peignoir before turning the suddenly subdued door’s handle.

  “Awww . . .” Rima hovered in the entranceway. “I apologize. I didn’t know y’all was sleepin together.”

  Of course she had. “Nonsense. But what’s this about Fwendi? What time is it?” Lisette spared a glance for the shades, which showed light around their edges. Morning.

  “It’s around six thirty, seven.”

  Up again so early. Mother of god. “And you saw her when? Have you informed the Washingtons?” She gestured for Rima to come in. The passageway was empty. She closed the door and once more locked it.

  They had supped together – Lisette could not recall on what, but that made no difference. At the appointed hour she had excused herself from the verandah and gone to her room, to be joined by Daisy after a suitable interval.

  “It was my night for a bath,” said Rima. “So I left ’em together and didn’t think nothin’ of havin’ a couple hours to myself up there since she woulda waited for me to be finished. And then I come over all relaxed and I lain down on the blankets and next you know, here I am.”

  Blessedly, the Washingtons had not yet been told. There was a simple answer to the mystery.

  But at Matty’s door Lisette’s discreet scratching elicited no response. She opened it. The room was empty, the bed undisturbed. She entered, and Rima followed her unsolicited. “So they’s together?”

  Ignoring her, Lisette looked for a note of explanation. The washstand bore only toiletry items. On a spindly-legged table was a stack of three books. Pegs supported a nightshirt and dressing gown, and a coat she couldn’t remember him wearing. Not his favorite. A Gladstone bag sat behind the bed’s head. Lisette didn’t examine its contents; its presence alone argued that Matty had not departed. The other belongings supported the bag’s assertion.

  T
he top book purported to be sermons on the virtues of national pride, an unlikely selection given Matty’s tastes. The second, more understandable, related to chivalrous legends of the British Isles. The third appeared to have been bound blank. Drawings and sketches filled its pages.

  “You would have appeared rather fetching in that little number,” said Daisy, peering over Lisette’s shoulder. She had entered the room also. The “little number” in question was an abbreviated grass skirt wisping away mid-thigh, worn in this fanciful representation with a brief bodice – really, no more than a brassiere – made of orchids.

  “It needed modification to render it practical for the stage,” she replied, shutting the covers. Matty’s head was ever in the clouds . . . “What do you look at so intently, Rima?”

  “Nothin’ but another a them airships comin’ here every day.” The actress turned from the window, letting go of the curtain. Could Matty, that dreamer, could he possibly have schemed to depart undetected? Thus the display of a brush set, a razor—

  Lisette paused only to clothe herself presentably before dashing across town once again to the mooring platform, Rima and Daisy in her train. To think that she had suspected Rima, the Washingtons even, of spying upon her – and not him.

  Scrambling up the steps, she groaned at her idiocy. Matty need not even travel far to collapse the negotiations’ secrecy. There was a wireless in Bukavu, only 300 kilometers east. Though why hadn’t he sent a message when they passed through on their way here?

  The platform was deserted. All activity concentrated itself in the field’s far end, on the warehouse’s loading dock. Lisette hesitated, unsure what next to do. Daisy continued toward the workers – comrades of hers, perhaps.

  The newly arrived dirigible loomed overhead, a dark eminence. Not the Okondo but its brother vessel, she believed: the older and bulkier Mbuza.

  “You wanna tell me what you think is goin’ on?” asked Rima.

  Lisette had treated the girl unfairly – though was this sufficient reason to trust her now? “I’m sorry, but to do that is impossible – unless I were to kill you afterwards. Affairs of state.”

  She scanned the people carrying parcels into the warehouse and saw no sign of Matty from where she stood. She walked closer. Daisy spoke Zande with a man of lesser height than the others. When Lisette questioned him, he kept smiling while managing to look worried. “We don’t expect passengers, no,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be too much trouble to accommodate them, if they are ready immediately?”

  “Thank you. We’ll see, it may not be necessary.” Could this man be a foreign agent also? Would Lisette need an excuse to search the gondola for herself? But that would mean the whole crew was in on the deception.

  The warehouse was of bricks, built tall to retain coolness, and painted in intricate designs. Lisette passed through its open iron gates to a dark interior three times her height. Five-meter arches pierced its walls, admitting the morning’s every breeze.

  “Look for Matty here. And Fwendi,” she added, remembering Rima’s original concern. Could he have made the girl his hostage? She sent Daisy to search above the loose-planked ceiling and split the ground floor with the American.

  Gray bundles rested in numbered racks, redolent of chocolate. She passed a column of baskets pungent with the odors of spices which clamored at each other over thinner, subtler aromas: tea and milled ores. She gazed up and down the branching aisles and saw no one till she returned to where the women and men of the Mbuza were unloading their cargo. They paused momentarily in their work, but she waved off their help.

  In the opposite corner she found Rima peering doubtfully into a cask of palm oil. “If either of them is in there, they are dead,” said Lisette, settling the cask’s lid firmly in place.

  “So you figure they alive?”

  Fwendi knew well how to take care of herself, and Matty was much the shorter of the two—

  “Lisette!” Daisy walked toward them quickly, almost running. “I—Come. Please—quietly? Please. Ekibondo was right; I’d have missed this if he hadn’t told me where to look.” She whispered the words, leading them away from where a ladder clung to the west wall, away from all the walls, to the building’s center. Here bricks had been set in the tamped-earth floor. They formed a rectangle filled with irregular diamond shapes. At its center gaped a large golden hole.

  Lisette knelt and peered down into a room brimming with light. Slowly, as her eyes adjusted, the glow resolved into bales of glittering hay interspersed with splintered glimpses of something else, a shining substance – glass?

  “They bring it down from the Ruwenzori Mountains and store it underneath, here – there’s a larger entrance outside—”

  “Bring what down from the Ruwenzoris? Store what underneath?” asked Lisette, struggling to comprehend the scene before her – below her.

  “Ice,” said Rima. “They keepin’ it frozen in the ground and then ship it over to Kisangani and where people need it. You and me seen the same thing up north in America, ice cut in winter for usin’ in the summer.”

  Lisette wondered what any of this had to do with Matty and Fwendi’s absence. Then she saw them off to the room’s left, stretched out on a bank of the yellow hay, wrapped in a single blanket. They were sleeping. Fwendi’s brass arm reflected the light of the lamp hanging on a post at their heads – no sleeve covered the join between her brown skin and the metal levers, screws, pumps and pistons. As Lisette looked down, enthralled, the covering slid further off to reveal the girl’s shoulder, ribs and strong, scarred back. With half-conscious fingers she stroked Matty’s smooth-shaven cheek before reaching for the blanket, which eluded her several times. To make sure she caught it, Fwendi opened her eyes, and saw them watching.

  Lisette blushed. “’Jour,” she said, managing to sound casual, as if encountering Fwendi on her way to breakfast. In response she received the most extraordinarily joyous grin.

  The covering for this revealing hole must be nearby. Lisette lifted her dazzled eyes to search for it in the dark there above.

  “You are awake, my darling?” With feelings of extreme awkwardness Lisette heard Matty address Fwendi in quite intimate terms. Evidently, he had no idea at first of his audience. Daisy held one edge of a large wooden square in her hands. She tilted it forward. Rima leapt to help. The two of them lowered it over the hole and scraped it into place.

  “Who—” asked Matty, cut off mid-question.

  “I agree we ought to keep this affair quiet,” whispered Daisy, as though Lisette had said as much. “Of course I wouldn’t dream of speaking of it, or showing anyone else. Only you – I wanted you to see proof. Now how can we prevent a scandal?” She rose from her knees with enviable grace. “We’ll discuss it between us, privately.”

  Rima assisted Lisette to stand, squeezing her hand tightly a second before she let it loose. “Without them? Ain’t you think they got somethin’ to say?”

  “No, you’re right. The way down—That trapdoor’s only so one may lift out a block or two at a time, but according to Ekibondo the real door’s outside.”

  To the building’s north they found the ice cellar’s entrance, disguised by a low hill. As Rima put her hand on the latch of the double doors set in its side they were already opening. Out stepped Matty, shirt collar slightly askew, one telltale end of a grass stem caught in his tousled hair. “Good – you received my message.” He looked pointedly at Rima.

  “I did?”

  “Moving the rehearsal.” The Scotsman’s face reddened. He was surprisingly bad at this considering his career. “Didn’t realize the dock would be so busy,” he lied again, and turned to Daisy. “Glad to see you, too.” Another lie. “This way.”

  The dirt ramp was short and shallow, ending in a stone-floored room that didn’t look like the one into which Lisette had inadvertently spied. It was wide yet not deep, and would not have reached the warehouse’s center. It ended in a wall bristling with palm fronds, their points stabbing outward.


  Fwendi greeted them as she slipped between two posts framing a gloom in which Lisette could distinguish nothing – not with the lantern Fwendi carried glaring at her. She was more neatly clothed than Matty, having had, Lisette supposed, more time to arrange herself.

  Matty opened his jacket – to which a few yellowed strands still clung – and removed a sheaf of papers. Flipping hurriedly through them, he divided them into three groups. “Fwendi will read the lines of Grandmother Elephant, and I will do the other animal ambassadors.”

  “They’s more animal ambassadors? From other realms, like the elephants?”

  “The action takes place after what was the play’s last scene – Wendi-La and the other children are celebrating their victory over the monsters; their parents miraculously restored, you know, the elephants joyfully dancing. Then representatives of these other magical lands approach – The Realms of the Giraffes, the Lions, the Crocodiles. Asking for help against the monsters now invading their homelands.”

  Lisette thought she saw what Matty attempted. Listening to the stirringly martial tone of Wendi-La’s new speech she was sure. If this coda in which their national heroine pledged war against others’ enemies influenced the Mote more deeply than the pleas Daisy would make on the behalf of true neutrality, Matty’s German friends would triumph.

  Lisette tried to ascertain if her Frenchness affected her view of such an outcome as undesirable. She couldn’t decide. However, she reminded herself, it was not as if she were advocating for the Entente.

  “Now you climb up on the jail roof – will one of you bring out some hay bales for her to stand on?” Matty had forgotten where he was, who was with him, all but the world of make-believe. Lisette left, but not to fetch him his precious hay. Let Fwendi handle the properties – she loved the man. Evidently.

  Above ground, warmth stroked her face lightly, a promise of overpowering heat later in the day. She paused at the ramp’s top to wait for Daisy, who seemed to have also chosen to abandon Matty to this ruse of a rehearsal.