Beneath Ceaseless Skies #61

by Ronald, Margaret

  Issue #61 • Jan. 27, 2011

  “Recapitulation in Steam,” by Margaret Ronald

  “Mamafield,” by Corie Ralston

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  RECAPITULATION IN STEAM

  by Margaret Ronald

  Someone was whistling the Lament from Amicaldo’s Dying Queen. Izzy turned his face to the sound and winced as something rough grazed his cheek.

  “He’s up,” a man said nearby.

  “Zen?” Izzy mumbled. “Zen, the secondary line didn’t get checked....” He sat up, pulling a heavy, damp cloth from his eyes, and squinted at the two men standing over him.

  The older gave him a searching, worried look. “How’s tha? Tha looks burnt as Quint here after a sunny day,” he added, nodding to the big pale man beside him.

  “I’m fine,” Izzy said, swinging his feet off the cot and trying to blink away the persistent pinkish cast to his vision. “The compressor coils. That’s where the leak was, wasn’t it?” He remembered climbing down into the main ore distillation chamber, going to the secondary vapor line on a hunch, hearing a tremulous hiss....

  This place wasn’t the distillation chamber, and it certainly wasn’t any part of the thaumic steam processing plant. The wide, high-ceilinged room seemed more of a gymnasium or congregation hall, chilly in the way of such spaces, large enough to hold two or three of the distillation chambers. But whatever its original purpose, it had been repurposed to something resembling a cut-rate barracks: two dozen cots, flimsy cloth walls hung up as boundaries, even tables set as if for a charity dinner.

  A boom shook the floor, sending plaster dust drifting down, and Izzy turned to see a four-legged trundler settle across the main doors, blocking them. That’s a riot control automaton, he thought, from the Royal Society detachment guards. But Zen said this town was too small for a regular Society presence...

  “Zen,” he whispered, looking for one darker face like his own among the Northern workers, one particular blue dress—

  There. Standing at the far edge of the hall, still in the “official first visit” dress that she claimed to hate, was Zenobia. She’d donned goggles, though; and that heavy toolbelt, the one that usually came out after the first visit, now pulled her skirt askew. “Zen!” he called, and she looked up, clipboard in hand. Instead of smiling, though, she turned to the man beside her and swapped clipboards. “Zen, what’s the situation?”

  “The situation?” She pulled her goggles down so that they hung around her neck, setting free a new round of frizz in her hair. The man beside her gave Izzy a nervous glance, then departed, clipboard under his arm. Zen crossed the floor to him, her shoes echoing against the tiles. “The situation is—”

  She stopped, looking past him, and a man’s shrill scream echoed through the hall. Izzy spun to see a man in shirtsleeves stumble back from the cots, holding what looked like flares in either hand. But when he turned, there were no flares—his hands were glowing, burning with an eerie brilliance that consumed nothing. The man scraped at his fingers, trying to peel off the thaumic fire, red shadows flickering over his terrified face, and screamed again. Two Society guards hurried to his side and dragged him away by the elbows, careful not to touch the fire.

  Zen exhaled slowly. “The situation is just what we were sent to prevent,” she said, her unruffled calm jarring after such a display. “A massive vapor leak between the ore compressor and the distillation coil. Infusion vectors everywhere—there was so much thaumic vapor in the room it’s a wonder you, anyone, made it out alive. That man’s the least of it; I’ve shut the whole plant down until we can begin repairs.”

  A clerk staggered up to her, groaning under the weight of a Pearson and Stoddard Portative Heating Unit. Zen pointed to the center of the cordoned-off space, and he lurched away to drop the heater on the floor.

  Izzy exhaled, glancing after the Society guards and the poor infused worker. “Right. Well, it can’t be helped now. You set up the testing procedures for the men caught in the blast—judging by that demonstration, it looks like we’ve already got dangerous levels of infusion—and I’ll take a look at the compressor to see what needs to be done.”

  “No, Izzy. You won’t.” Zen sighed, handed off the clipboard to another clerk and ran both hands over her head, temporarily smoothing back her tight curls. “Don’t you remember? You caught the vapor blast full in the face. You’re in quarantine too.”

  Disbelief fought with embarrassment, and Izzy found himself speechless.

  Zen’s brows drew together. “Looks like you got away with only a mild burn,” she said, raising one hand to his face. “It must sting.”

  “It’s fine—Zen, quarantine? I can’t be in quarantine, I don’t have time—” He stopped. “I have tickets for the opera.”

  The heating unit started up with a sinus-trembling whine, and Zen shook her head. “It’ll have to wait. Unless,” she added, settling her goggles back into place and taking up her clipboard, “you can prove that you can’t work magic.”

  * * *

  Arguments didn’t work—this was Zen, after all, and while Izzy might be the head of the inspection team, she was the backbone. It didn’t help that she was right. Thaumic quarantine wasn’t like disease quarantine; the cordon wasn’t in place to prevent an outbreak, since only direct exposure could cause infusion. Instead, it was for the direct safety of others: you couldn’t let people out of quarantine until you could be sure that they were not a danger to their friends and family. Even in the first days of practical thaumics, when the ore compression system had just been invented, people knew not to expose themselves to infusion unless they wanted to end up like the legendarily insane alchemages.

  “It’s depressing, though,” Izzy complained over the Society-provided dinner. “I mean, you’d think we’d come far enough that we could control the effect thaumic infusions have on people.”

  “There’s no point,” Quint told him around a mouthful of peas. The big man wouldn’t need thaumic wonderworking to break Izzy’s spine, and the way he looked at everybody made it seem like he was measuring the right amount of force to do just that. It didn’t help that he’d hung a derisive nickname on Izzy for the waistcoat he’d been wearing. “‘Sides, Weskit, this en’t so bad. So we get a little time off, so what?”

  “It’s bad economics,” Izzy said, and Quint rolled his eyes. “One leak, and the Society’s stuck paying for this, this two-week vacation.” He picked at his food, trying to ignore the persistent whine from the heater. “I’m supposed to be presenting a paper on a related subject in a month,” he muttered. “Lower Kingdom Thaumic Perception and Decontamination Protocol... now I might have to reconsider my thesis.”

  “Ooo, a paper, Weskit.”

  “Let eh alone, Quint.” Frank, the old man who’d seen to Izzy when he first woke up, leaned over and snatched up a roll from Quint’s plate. Frank’s skin was the color and texture of weathered bronze, and he’d already polished off two plates of the dull food. “Eh’s trying.”

  Quint shook his head. “Why bother? Papers don’t make a difference—t’ore makes machines go, t’ore makes men mad.”

  “Not always,” the processing plant’s clerk, Peabody, said from the far end of the table. The little man had been the one to escort Izzy to the secondary compressor, and though he hadn’t been as close to the leak, he’d been close enough. “According to history, the alchemages were sometimes able to balance the infusion between power and madness.”

  Izzy looked up at that. “Yes! Like in Tutivillus—you know the Amicaldo opera?”

  Quint snorted. Peabody shook his head
, still carefully separating every scrap of green from his potatoes. “If you mean that pseudonymous dreck people are always caterwauling in the streets, yes,” he said with a curled lip, raising his voice to carry over the drone from the heater. “Personally, I prefer my music a bit more cerebral and devoid of manufactured mystery. This ‘Amicaldo’ wouldn’t be more than a hack if the Capitol Opera hadn’t tried to make such a big deal out of his identity.”

  “Manufactured—” Izzy sighed and turned to Frank. “You know Amicaldo’s work. You were whistling the Beggar’s Aria before.”

  “Was I, now?” His face wrinkled into a smile like a gnarled tree root, then contorted as a wracking wet cough shook him. Quint thumped him on the back until he could answer. “Aye, was, suppose,” he wheezed at last. “Tha’s right. Tutiwhatsit, ‘s the one with the old man, the one what was a magic and retired, ay?”

  “Yes! And he always balanced the thaumic infusions so that he never lost control, only he knew if he did it once more he’d go mad—” Izzy hummed the Tower’s Reprieve theme, from the scene where Tutivillus gave up any chance of his own sanity in order to save the village that had sheltered him and the girl who had come to love him. Frank hesitated, then joined in after a moment with a “dee da dee dee” instead of words. Quint grimaced and took his plate back to the washup tub.

  Izzy savored his memory of the music, remembering the anguish of that moment, the way the orchestra had seemed to cower away from the tenor’s voice. After the show, he’d stayed in line at the box office waiting to buy the last available tickets for a repeat performance... the tickets that were now useless in his hotel room. “I was supposed to go see that, two nights from now.”

  Frank picked up his plate. “Don’t tha worry. I’ve worked here ought forty-some years, and been through more of these than can count. Tha’ll get through, or tha’ll break and go to tox, and then tha’ll be out and clean.” He patted Izzy on the shoulder, leaning on him a little more as he got to his feet. ‘Sides, ‘s better food than my landlady can cook, eh?” He chuckled, the laugh turning into another coughing fit, and headed to the washup.

  Izzy poked at the last of his food, then winced as the heater’s drone rose into yet another squeal. He reached for his watch, then realized he’d left it in the hotel with the tickets, and sighed.

  * * *

  They slept on cots lined up in two rows, with sheets pinned up between for a modicum of privacy. Izzy stayed up writing out what he remembered of the accident and listing potential fixes for the compressor coil, but put out the lantern when Quint muttered something about extinguishing it with “Weskit’s” face. He’d run out of his scrap paper, anyway.

  Between the snores from every side, the constant whine of the malfunctioning heater, and the chill resulting from that malfunction, he didn’t expect to sleep. But exhaustion had a stronger grip on him than he realized, and without quite realizing it, he sank into sleep—until a brilliant green flare washed over him, jolting him awake. Forgetting he wasn’t in a hotel bed, he jerked upright and rolled off the cot.

  “Peace,” Frank’s voice said somewhere to his left. “Peace, ‘s over now.”

  “What? What’s over?” Izzy pushed himself up, trying to see. A flickering light like the reflection of moonlight on the ocean cascaded over the hall, and through it shadows darted like knife-edged fish—Society guards, he realized a little late, moving between him and the light. A gentle roar and boom heralded the trundler automaton’s actions: settling down again, after whatever it had done to contain someone.

  “Nehemiah—yer don’t know him, he’s from the maintenance div—he had a nightmare,” Quint said from the other side of him. Izzy turned to look, but the cloth wall was still and opaque. Somehow he doubted Quint had even bothered to sit up. “Bad one. They found him two inches above ‘s bed and glowing. Got to him before he did any damage, but he’s off to detox.”

  “He’ll be all right?” Izzy had read through thaumic decontamination procedures, of course, but they were a different thing on the page.

  “Wouldn’t know,” Frank said cheerfully. “I’ve ‘scaped it so far.”

  “Lucky yer,” Quint rumbled from the far side of the cloth. “Man wasn’t meant to be that clean, ‘s all I’ll say. Always afraid they’ll decide it’s quicker just to run us all through ‘t, just in case.”

  “They won’t.” That was the main reason he and the other inspection teams had jobs: prevention was better than decontamination, certainly from a cost-benefit standpoint. Antithaum was devilishly expensive to manufacture, and while the Society kept a reserve, they were stingy with it unless a clear danger was present. “Maybe I should fake it, so I can get out of here sooner.”

  Quint laughed again, that derisive chuckle Izzy was starting to hate. “Didn’t know yeh liked the hosepipe, Weskit.”

  Frank made a “ssst!” noise, and the cloth wall on his side billowed. “If tha’s serious, tha’s a fool. Go to sleep—’s better come morning.”

  Izzy sighed and sat back on his cot. Quint was already rumbling in something close to a snore, and the heater’s screech seemed even louder after that disruption. Izzy lay staring at the recesses of the ceiling, all possibility of sleep gone, then finally sighed and rummaged through his clothes for the vise grip and clamp he always carried. Thus equipped, he got up and made his way to the damnable heater.

  * * *

  “Oh, Isidore.” Zenobia stood over him in what he’d jokingly referred to as her “industry clothes,” the same blue waistcoat, only now over a men’s shirt and trousers. “What are you doing?”

  Izzy looked up, blinking, from the makeshift workbench he’d constructed out of two chairs and a plank. The left side of his face itched from where he’d fallen asleep against the plank, and he rubbed it absently. “Oh. Morning, Zen. I figured out why this thing made so much noise.” He held up the offending part. “Rotator was out of alignment. Should work fine now, though the feedback vent is a little unstable.”

  She sighed and took the broken rotator. “One, you shouldn’t even have those tools. Two, what on earth made you decide to stay up all night fixing it?”

  Izzy started to protest that he hadn’t been up all night, but she took his hand and pulled him up to his feet. “I couldn’t sleep,” he admitted.

  Zen gazed at him for a long moment, then shook her head. “Well, since you’re up, we might as well start with you.”

  She led him into one of the smaller rooms off the great hall, took a sample of his blood, and then to his surprise did not hand him off to the Society guardsmen. Standard procedure involved one-on-one testing; Izzy knew that much, although he was now wishing he’d learned more beforehand. What he wasn’t expecting was that Zen would undertake his testing personally.

  “All right, Izzy,” she said, setting an oil lamp and a mug on the table between them. The mug steamed and smelled of bitterleaf tea; the sort of thing she drank in the evenings when they were on assignment together. The scent brought back memories of late train rides with Zen in the seat across from him, a hotflask in her hand and the file spread out across her lap, and abruptly Izzy felt very homesick. “You know the drill for first-level test procedures. Light the lamp.”

  “That’s it? Purely voluntary?”

  “At this stage, and unless the blood test shows anomalies, yes.” She pulled her goggles up, then nodded to someone outside the door. Abruptly the overhead light flickered and went out, leaving them in the meager light through the grill in the door—then, as someone draped a cloth over that, complete darkness. “But we do give you incentive to light it.”

  “Zen, I don’t even know where it is.”

  There was a clunk and a slosh as Zen moved her mug. Something brushed the back of his hand, and he jumped before realizing it was Zen, guiding his hands to the center of the table and arranging his fingers around the base of the lamp. “There. Give it a try, at least.”

  He concentrated on the wick of the lamp, the oil inside, trying to think sparky th
oughts. Nothing. He ran through the chemical formulas for combustion in his head, tried to convert them into something dynamic, but if whatever thaumic residue was left in him had the power to light a lamp, then it wasn’t understanding chemical formulas. It didn’t help that the touch of Zen’s callused fingers on his was uncomfortably distracting. “You can see,” he said finally.

  “Werglass lenses. Don’t think about me. Think about the lamp.”

  Easy for her to say. “For the love of... Zen, this is pointless. I have twelve different fixes for the compressor coil, but I need to see the actual equipment before I can pinpoint which will be most effective. I need to be back at my work, not stuck playing cards and—and holding hands in the dark.” She laughed, no more than a breath, not unkindly. “You could fudge the records a little, couldn’t you?”

  Zen drew her hands away as if he’d hurt her. “No. Not here, certainly. Not since Villie Bardeen caught a nasty infusion at High Point and went home and immolated her family.”

  Izzy looked up, searching for her face even in the dark. “That happened here? I thought the Bardeen incident took place further north.”

  “We are in the north, Izzy. It was in the file,” she added, only the lightest note of rebuke in her voice. “You never do read those ahead of time.”

  “Well, there’s always plenty of time in the hotel on our down hours. I mean, what else am I going to do?”

  “What else, indeed. Now, light the damn lamp, will you, Izzy?”

  * * *

  Three hours of darkness resulted in nothing but a headache and a worrying awareness of how, once they were back in the light, the collar of Zen’s shirt exposed the fine lines of her clavicle. She took his tools, but in a burst of either pity or encouragement, gave him a sheaf of fresh paper so that he wouldn’t be reduced to drawing plans for the new coils on old napkins.

  The card game was still going by the time he returned, and this time he accepted Frank’s offer to join. The old man was not the best partner for a game, though, since he had the habit of continually whistling, especially when he got good cards. After a few hands, though, Izzy thought he could see the pattern in it, and began whistling back: a few lines of The Man in the Tower for a run of cards, the Swan Boy’s plea if he needed more help, Beata’s surprisingly peppy death song for a hand that was no good whatsoever. Frank, after a moment’s consternation, revealed his few remaining teeth in a grin and responded in kind.