A Midsummer Night's Steampunk

by Scott E. Tarbet

  Malieux turned to Shaka. “Your mistress believes you would rather be dead than have the tungsten carbide body, the hydraulic rams, and the strength of ten men. Would you rather be dead, Shaka? Would you rather I had left you on the battlefield to die with half your body shot away?”

  “No, Doctor,” the giant mech rumbled.

  “Hardly the proper question,” insisted Lakshmi. “Shaka, would you rather be here, in an English madhouse, assisting with these experimental vivisections, or would you rather be back on the veldt with your wife and children, your cattle, and the open sky?”

  The mech made no answer. Malieux laughed dismissively. “Shaka, you may go. I shall need nothing further this evening.” Without a word, the mighty mech turned on his heel and within a few strides had been swallowed by the darkness.

  “Lakshmi, there has never been another mind that approaches mine in capability as does yours. Together we could change the world, rid those truly capable of rational thought of the necessity of physical toil, and establish a worldwide meritocracy of the superior and deserving.”

  “And trample those who don’t meet your standards, Oberon?”

  “Rule them for their own good! Join me once more, and let us accomplish what the Fates have dictated is our due.”

  His voice dropped and he stepped toward her. “Together we refitted those first leper patients with new mechanical hands and feet, took them from begging in the gutters to earning their daily bread at their trades. I have taken the next step alone, creating men with the magnificent capabilities of industrial machines. But they retain their ability to disobey. Now we can take the next step, as you have learned to do: take the creatures of nature and make them mankind’s servants.”

  “Oberon, are you truly blind? No creature with the power of thought ought to be a slave to another.”

  “On the contrary, the power of thought is the ultimate manifestation of the law of claw and fang. The mighty in thought must take their rightful place as masters of the world.”

  “The mighty in thought? And by this you mean you?”

  “And you! Join me! Let us be man and wife again! Let us rule.”

  “Like you rule the poor wretches in the madhouse?”

  “Those ‘poor wretches’, as you call them, have lost or abandoned the power of thought. That is what makes the madhouse such a perfect medium for experimentation. At least they can contribute to the betterment of mankind.”

  Lakshmi sighed. “No, Oberon. I will never again do anything to further your fevered dreams. That hope is vain. One last time I plead with you: return my automaton and allow me to return home.”

  Malieux regarded her curiously. “Why do you care so much for this bauble?”

  “It is no bauble,” Lakshmi said. “You know I built it with Hermione. We worked on it together for years.”

  “Ah, yes,” murmured Malieux. “The beloved Hermione. The friend with whom no mere husband could ever compete.”

  “The friend who rejoiced with me when you and I were wed, and mourned with me when we went down such different paths.”

  “So the automaton is a mere memento.”

  “As you wish. I shan’t dispute it with you, Oberon.”

  “Well then, my dearest wife,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “I would be happy to return the amusing little memento. All I ask in return is that you share the secret of creating and controlling the micromechs. Share the knowledge, and you shall have the automaton forthwith.”

  Lakshmi’s face hardened. “Ah,” she breathed. “I see that I have succumbed to a stratagem. Jubal was mere bait. Be warned, then: I am not without resources. I will recover what is precious to me.”

  Malieux could not see how she signaled her transport, but the random dance of the fireflies became ordered, and began to form its vortex around her until she was once again entirely wreathed in light. The globe lifted from the ground and, more rapidly than before, disappeared beyond the trees.

  Without turning, Malieux spoke. “Shaka, send out the Enforcer mechs. All of them, save the two who guard the automaton. We must know where Lakshmi lays her head.”

  From close at hand, in the darkness beneath the trees, the mech answered, “Immediately, Doctor.”

  “Mind they are thoroughly cloaked, even though the night is so warm. We cannot risk having their existence known prematurely. There would be a public outcry, and the government would have no choice but to take action against me.”

  “As you wish, Doctor.”

  “Go yourself to the Golden Gear tomorrow, retrieve the parts I ordered from Switzerland, and ascertain if Lakshmi has been there. If she contacts anyone in London, it will be them, even though Hermione no longer lives. . . . And Shaka,” he continued thoughtfully, “bring me that automaton. Lakshmi did not travel four thousand miles to retrieve a mere trinket. There is more here than meets the eye.”

  ToC

  His life is strange; half on the shore

  And half upon the sea—

  Not quite a fish, and yet not quite

  The same as you and me.

  —The Fisherman, by Abbie Farwell Brown

  Chapter Three

  At the Oil Can

  Yellow light and merry singing spilled from the open pub door and flooded the narrow, cobbled alley which emptied onto Bethnal Green Road. The splash of light illuminated the black silhouette of an oil can that hung above the door and gave the establishment its name.

  Ensconced in a booth since the end of his shift at the clothing mill, Robin Starveling slumped over his pint, thoughts turned inward, far from sharing the general good cheer.

  The graying, sandy-haired man was a regular. But in any other pub—any pub that didn’t cater to mechanized working men like him—he would have stood out like a steam locomotive in a duchess’s parlor. He was broader by half than any non-mech, his shoulders replaced with the table of an industrial sewing machine.

  As he stared gloomily down at the pub table, his silvery-metallic left hand absently popped and threaded the bobbins in what had once been his left torso. At the same time, his flesh-and-bone right hand carried his pint to his mouth for a long draught.

  “Oy, mate!” a lean mech with an assortment of extra-long, needle-pointed steel fingers called from the door. He made a beeline for Robin’s booth, and mimed a slap at his friend’s flesh side.

  Starveling ducked.

  “Two for flinchin’, y’ big nancy!” Francis Flute knocked twice on his friend’s steel frame. “You know I wouldn’t bloody you, mate!” He laughed, settling onto the bench at Robin’s side with a resounding clank. “Pour me one.” His face split into a wide grin as he watched Starveling fill him a glass from the pitcher on the table.

  “You’re glum tonight,” Francis noted. “What ails you?”

  “Just wonderin’ about me daughter,” Robin muttered into his glass.

  “’Ere, now!” Flute said. “Ain’t no percentage in that. I’m sure she’s healthy and happy, wherever your wife has got off to.”

  He took a long pull that emptied half the glass. “Did you see Bottom out on the green?” he asked, determined to bring a note of cheer. “Git’s flying a kite! A kite! Dark of night, not a lick of wind to speak of, and he’s puffing that kite up as high as Nelson’s Column!”

  “Made a kite for me wee daughter,” Starveling muttered morosely as he downed the last of his pint. “Before I went off to the war. And come back like this.”

  “I hate it when you get down in the dumps,” his friend sighed, patting his shoulder. “Let me pour you another.”

  The workingman’s pub had been a fixture of the gritty, industrial neighborhood in the heart of cockney East London longer than its oldest inhabitants remembered. For generations the pub had limped along, hand to mouth, just like the denizens of its Bethnal Green neighborhood. Then, twenty years ago, the Army lads had begun to filter home from the Zulu War and the pub had changed forever.

  Collins, the burly and genial proprietor, had
smelled which way the wind blew. There was a new clientele to serve, and he was just the man to do it. Since that faraway war, more and more injured working men had been refitted—mechanized—with the tools of their trades. More imperial wars and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution provided a constant stream of newly injured working men and wounded veterans to be refitted. Mechs came to dominate the neighborhood, and the only pub that catered to them, the Oil Can, had thrived.

  Now, for the lads’ particular mix of tastes for lubricants both social and industrial, Collins served beers and ales alongside oils from light mineral to heavy crankcase. And a grease gun lay underneath the bar alongside the usual billy club.

  The oldest of the pub’s “mech” regulars had been the first to emerge from the Army hospital: those with missing legs. The replacement limbs were a marvel of the modern age, elaborate creations of brass gears and whirling counterbalances.

  Before long, Doctor Malieux, the Army medic who invented these wondrous new prosthetics, had seized on the idea of enhancing the men’s industrial capabilities. New customers appeared at the Oil Can with telescoping legs that made their owners taller. Lamplighters and glaziers simply rose to their work instead of climbing ladders. Soon afterward, mech brick masons rose up and down, laying more brick in a day than a non-mech mason could lay in a week.

  Next came the soldiers like Robin Starveling who, before the war, had been in Bethnal Green’s signature silk-weaving trade: the weavers, the tailors, the warehousemen, the porters. The hands of the weavers and tailors became needles and loom shuttles. Wheels gave speed to warehousemen and porters.

  And so the trend had progressed through the trades as time went on: carpenters and joiners had body parts replaced with hammers and saws. The ironmongers and blacksmiths, millwrights and machinists were given hammers and tongs and lathes and drills. They became so overwhelmingly industrialized that many of the men were more metal than flesh.

  And so it went until the Oil Can’s taproom on nearly any evening more resembled a mad genius inventor’s workshop than a public house.

  A ruddy-faced, barrel-chested man ducked through the door, carrying the shredded remains of a small, dirty-white kite. On his heels came a tall, ponderous man with a sheaf of papers clutched in the pair of heavy tongs that served as his left hand. A pneumatic sledgehammer had replaced his right.

  “’Ere’s Nick Bottom and Peter Quince, too!” Flute pointed out to Starveling. “Oy, mates! How are things at the forge today, then? Hot?” He laughed at his own joke. Nick and Peter were partners at the forge, Quince pounding and shaping the red-hot metal, Bottom using his bellows lungs to blow the coals white-hot. “What? Not even a smile? You gone deaf? That was funny, right there.”

  “Oh, we get it,” said Quince. “It just ain’t funny. You sit and weave all day and think nice thoughts. Me and Nick stands in the heat and the noise.”

  “Robin, can you fix thisss?” Bottom asked, throwing the fistful of shredded kite to the table. His last word came with a puff from his leather lungs, strong enough to scatter the bits of kite like New Year’s confetti. “I was puffing ever so gently.”

  Even as Starveling was shaking his head at the thought of sewing together the shreds, Flute, eying the fluttering debris, asked, “Why don’t I just make you a new one?” The frame of a small loom snapped forward from his chest, and he began a piece of fine, white silken fabric with green and pink stripes that grew quickly as his fingers flew. “Mind yourself with this one, Bottom. It’s very strong, but it’s light. You won’t have to blow hard at all. Just a breath.”

  “You’re a good mate, Flute!” Bottom sat and watched his friend weave, helping himself to the remains of the pitcher. He drained his glass, lifted the pitcher from the table, and signaled the barmaid for two more.

  “What news of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Gala, then?” Starveling asked glumly, pointing at the papers in Peter’s tongs. “They’ve turned us down, haven’t they? They’re not going to allow us to perform our little play at the palace, are they? What were we thinking?”

  “There’s news,” Peter said. “Tom, Snug,” he called to the other side of the room, “you need to hear this, too.” Tom Snout, the carpentry mech, and his best mate, Snug the Joiner, clanked over.

  “So,” said Quince, “the blokes at the palace was caught flat-footed that we would even ask to perform. They was so startled we might want to entertain the queen, they couldn’t think fast enough to say no.”

  “Still could,” Starveling muttered. “—say no, I mean.”

  “Not this time,” Peter said. “Next time I imagine they’ll have a ‘no mechs’ rule all ready to go. ‘So sorry, chaps, wot wot!’ ” He mimed holding a teacup aloft, pinky extended. “ ‘For the fully human only!’ ” He laughed his clanging, metal-on-metal laugh.

  “So, wait,” said Tom Snout. “Does this mean we get to perform, or no?”

  “Still no guarantee we’ll really get to perform. Others will be there hoping to be chosen,” Peter answered. “It will all depend on Her Majesty’s mood, which sort of entertainment she will choose that night. But of course we’re the best! We have Bottom, the great thespatorian, star of all our local theatricals! And the play is most wondrously tragical.”

  “And we shall be,” proclaimed Nick Bottom, gesturing broadly and enunciating each word with dramatic clarity, “the hit of the palace!”

  “Hooray!” Tom Snout bellowed. A young, fully human barmaid, brand new to her job, was so startled by his roar and his disconcertingly huge mouth full of glistening gouges and razor-sharp chisel teeth that, if Snug the Joiner hadn’t reached out quickly to steady her, she would have dropped the pair of pitchers she carried. With his help, she managed to maneuver them safely to the table.

  Snug had a lathe as one hand and an array of planes, squares, hammers, plumb bobs, and other joinery attachments available on the other—all clockwork, save for his neck and head of hair, still bright blond despite his age. He grinned at her, his delight at her bashful return smile dancing in his blue eyes. “You’ll get used to us, duck,” he said. “We hain’t so scary once you gets to know us.”

  “I hope so,” she said timidly. “You’re quite the lot.”

  Laughing, they watched her scurry away.

  “What will it be, this play?” Francis Flute’s fingers flew without pause as he spoke, the silk kite growing by the second. “A pirate’s tale? With a kidnapping?”

  “No pirates, I’m afraid,” Quince said, “but there is a hero, a lion, and a beautiful young maiden.”

  “A hero? I have a hero’s voice,” Bottom interrupted. “ ‘To be . . . or not to be . . . that—’ Wait . . . what play has a lion?”

  “It’s a most lamentable comedy, called Pyramus and Thisbe,” Quince answered. “Very old. Babylonian. All the swells knows it. There’s parts for us all—”

  “Read the cast, then,” interrupted Bottom, impatiently.

  “—so, let me read our cast,” Quince continued, unfazed. “If you’re feeling uncertain, say it now, for we’re to perform in three days.” He portentously caught the eye of each man, finally landing back on Bottom.

  “I know it well! A very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry one!” Bottom breathed.

  “You, Nick Bottom, our most experienced and excellent thespatorian, are to be Pyramus.”

  “Pyramus is in the title, so he has to be important. What is he? A valiant warrior, a king? A crusader?”

  “He is the most devoted of lovers who kills himself, very gallant, to be with his dearest love.”

  Bottom stood in a dramatic pose of deep thought, nodding, fingers to his lips. “I shall breathe life into it! I shall make the audience weep with anguish. Of course, I’m really cut out for the part of a tyrant, but this shall be a test of my skills as an actor. ‘The raging rocks and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison gates!’ ” he thundered. “ ‘And Phibbus’ car shall shine from far and make and mar the foolish Fates!’ ” He flourished a
n elaborate bow.

  “Well, that was lofty if I ever understood it!” Quince said. “Here now. Let’s see: Francis Flute, the weaver, you must portray Thisbe.”

  “What is Thisbe?” Flute asked eagerly. “A knight errant, a king in the autumn of his reign?”

  “Thisbe is the beautiful woman Pyramus loves so dearly.”

  “Oy!” Flute objected. “Come now, Quince! Don’t have me play a woman. I have a beard . . . well, the shadow of one. I shave every week. Nearly.”

  “Believe me, Francis, if there were female mechs, if we had a woman in our jolly group, she would be our Thisbe, be she plain as this old sock, Snug.”

  “Oy!” exclaimed Snug. “You’re a fine one to talk about being plain, you halibut!”

  Quince laughed. “But, Flute, men plays the female roles all the time. Always has. You’ll talk in a high, soft voice and we’ll get you a fan to cover your chin. It will work.”

  A squeak from the bellows turned everyone’s attention to Bottom, who said in a wee, small voice, “Let me play Thisbe, too!” His friends laughed.

  “Bottom, if all women looked like you, the human race would go extinct,” said Snug. Bottom looked offended and mimed adjusting a nonexistent brassiere and bustle.

  Quince consulted his list. “Robin Starveling, you must play Thisbe’s mother—and of course create costumes.” He paused. “Your daughter, Flute, will help.”

  “Hah!” snorted Snug. “Robin, you have an ugly daughter, mate.”

  “Shut it, you,” said Flute. Snug chortled.

  Quince went on, “Snout, you’re to be Pyramus’ father; myself, Thisbe’s father; and Snug, you’re to be our lion.”

  Snug’s grin disappeared. “A lion? Oh. I . . . are there many lines? I shan’t be able to remember many, mate.”

  “Nothing but roaring.”

  “Ah,” said Snug, his relief obvious. “And how will I remember when to roar?”