A Midsummer Night's Steampunk

by Scott E. Tarbet

  ToC

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee

  Agreed to have a battle;

  For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

  Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

  Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

  As black as a tar-barrel;

  Which frightened both the heroes so,

  They quite forgot their quarrel.

  —Nursery Rhyme

  Chapter Seven

  On Barmy Green

  “Right, then. Bring it in and set it on the workbench.”

  Deep inside the vine-covered walls of the Bethnal Green madhouse, insulated in his laboratory against the omnipresent screams and moans of his ‘paid guests,’ Doctor Oberon Malieux directed two burly, nearly identical, brown-shirted mech Enforcers. Between them, they carried a long, heavy box of polished teak, its brass fittings gleaming. On its front were three interlocking gears, one of brass, one of silver, the uppermost golden, and a brass plate bearing the inscription, ‘Jubal’.

  The mechs stood at attention, awaiting instructions. Malieux waved them away. “Stand over there.” In the process of an attempted military about-face, one stepped on the other, earning him a sharp elbow and a muttered, “Git!”

  “Silence!” snapped Malieux. “You beef wits know better than to speak in my presence. Another lapse like that, and you’ll both be back among your fellow slobbering buffoons, sans your improvements.” Both knuckled their forelocks and, glaring hatred at each other, stood at attention against the wall.

  Shaka stepped forward and unlatched the box. The heavy lid opened smoothly and silently. Malieux reached in, lifted out his wife’s precious automaton, and seated it atop its box.

  Jubal was built to resemble a small man. It glittered and glistened in the lamplight, brass, copper, and silver parts exquisitely fitted and polished to a lustrous shine. Through the latticework of its chest, a number of gems could be seen in the densely packed maze of clockwork, at its heart the largest: a triangular blue rough-cut diamond the size of a goose’s egg.

  “A pretty thing, this automaton,” Malieux mused to Shaka. “Elegant. A marvel of mechanical engineering. My wife and that Spiegel woman must have been working on it for years.”

  “Aye, Doctor,” rumbled the mech, “but what does it do?”

  It sat unmoving.

  Malieux ignored the question. “Hmmm . . . Jewels in the movements of its clockwork worth the equivalent of five of the heavy battleships the Kaiser struggles to finance. Three of the largest blue diamonds known to exist. And my darling wife is so thoughtless of expense that she lavishes them on the building of a trinket for the queen.”

  “How can that be?” asked Shaka. “How did she come by such stones?”

  “Her family owns what were once the most fabulous diamond mines in the world. Her father, the Maharaja of Golkonda, hoards a trove unequaled anywhere.

  “The clockwork is much more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever built—not as strong as what I built for you, certainly, but so packed into such a small frame! Only thirty-six inches high, weighing only seventy pounds.”

  “A child?” said Shaka. “A boy child?”

  “The cranial dimension is wrong for a child,” corrected the doctor. “In all dimensions, da Vinci’s perfect Vitruvian Man. A toy fit for the emperor, certainly.”

  “What is this name, ‘Jubal’?” asked Shaka.

  “From the Bible. Jubal is the father of musicians.”

  Shaka pondered this. “I journeyed all the way to India to steal a music box?”

  “Perhaps. It may be nothing more than an elaborate instrument intended as a gift for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The mythical Jubal is where the term ‘jubilee’ comes from—the kind of wordplay Lakshmi enjoys. But knowing Lakshmi and Hermione, it is likely to be—and do—much more.”

  Shaka held up a gleaming steel winding key, its square barrel the size of a man’s thumb, its wide top ornately filigreed. “This was in a separate slot in the box.”

  Malieux quickly took the key and gingerly inserted it into the lower of two matching slots in the automaton’s back, one between its shoulders, another at its hips. He paused. “Lakshmi certainly values this thing far beyond the sum of its parts. I thought merely to demand her attention, secure her cooperation. I did not expect her to pursue this thing halfway around the world.”

  He twisted the key, frowned. No movement. He twisted harder without effect, removed the key, examined it, examined the slot. “Not a keyhole,” he decided. He tried the upper opening, where the key fit snugly and exactly, just as it had in the first. “Ah! Very stiff, but it moves.” He leaned into it and managed a half revolution. There was a muted internal click, and Malieux stepped back.

  The automaton’s metal eyelids fluttered slowly, sleepily, its diamond eyes the identical cerulean blue of the one at its heart. The eye stones, unlike the heart, were cut for brilliance. They glittered and shone, even in the low light. Slowly, ‘Jubal’ stood, the whir and tick of its clockwork barely audible.

  “Ah!” breathed Malieux. “Vitruvian Man. See?” Jubal slowly unfolded into the familiar pose, arms outspread, palms to the front. An aura of expectation hung palpable in the air.

  When Malieux reached out a tentative finger and touched one of the proffered palms, Jubal spoke in a pleasantly modulated tenor voice:

  “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

  And look upon myself and curse my fate,

  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

  Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

  Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

  With what I most enjoy contented least;

  Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

  Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

  (Like to the lark at break of day arising

  From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

  For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

  “Poetry,” said Shaka.

  “Shakespeare,” sniffed Malieux. “Sentimental drivel.” He scribbled in a notebook, then touched the other palm. He was startled by chords, as if from a pianoforte, of a Tchaikovsky waltz. The sweeping, swirling melody filled the air until Malieux, impatient, touched the hand again and the music stopped. “Drivel and more drivel. Surely it must do more.”

  “It recites and it plays music most beautifully,” said Shaka. “Surely that is a gift fit for the queen.”

  “A bauble. If it were merely from Ernst and Hermione Spiegel, reciting and playing would indeed be quite impressive. As a gift from Lakshmi Malieux, the greatest mechanical inventor of the age, no. Not enough. There must be more. We must be thorough and scientific: every possible point of control must be tried, and the results recorded. We must find out what this thing is intended to do.”

  ~*~*~*~*~

  Two hours later, Malieux had manipulated the limbs, torso, head, and neck of the automaton in every way he could imagine, and had learned nothing more than how to switch through a large collection of poetry and a considerable collection of pianoforte compositions from great composers.

  He had just sat down at his desk with his notebook to document his findings when the door to the laboratory flew open and a tiny, filthy, barefoot woman in a stained nightdress burst in, her wild mat of graying hair far down her back. She stood staring across the room at Jubal. “Music!” she cried. “Music!”

  Barely looking up from his notes, Malieux called to Shaka, “Mad Marie has slipped her shackles again. Kindly remove her before she disturbs me further.”

  Shaka was in the room quickly, the two Enforcers close on his heels. “No, Marie, you must not touch. Come away, dear.” With a cry, she rushed to where Jubal stood, putting the workbench between her and the mechs. She stood starin
g and pointing.

  “Remove her before she damages something!” Malieux snapped.

  She reached out and took Jubal’s hands in hers. With agility belying his great size, Shaka leapt to the bench and attempted to lift Jubal out of her grasp.

  “Damnation!” spat Malieux. He motioned the Enforcers over. “Use your sticks if she won’t let go.”

  The Enforcers ran around either side of the bench and grasped the patient roughly by the arms and hair. Inured to the pain by madness and her lifetime of confinement, she struggled and kicked. Even as Shaka lifted Jubal higher over her head and the Enforcers pulled her back and down, she clung tenaciously to the automaton’s hands.

  Shaka continued to lift until Jubal was eye to eye with the two Enforcers. Exasperated, one of the Enforcers fetched the woman a clout to the side of the head. She slid toward the floor, and in the process, accidentally slapped Jubal’s palms together. Instantly, a lightning flash of blue light filled the laboratory.

  Marie and the Enforcers collapsed in a heap. She leapt to her feet and scurried from the room. The Enforcers were quite unconscious. Jubal was inert—all sound of clockwork had ceased.

  ~*~*~*~*~

  “If only I dared disassemble the blasted thing!” Malieux exclaimed, examining Jubal closely. “But there are far too many fittings, too many fine adjustments. I simply do not know enough.”

  Kneeling over the Enforcers, Shaka reported, “They seem to be sleeping peacefully, none the worse for wear.”

  Malieux could scarcely have cared less. “Perhaps it will improve their sour dispositions,” he remarked. “It could hardly hurt.”

  “Doctor . . .” Shaka prompted. Malieux turned. In the doorway stood a dour, balding man.

  “Baron von Lyncker! What an unexpected surprise!”

  General Moriz von Lyncker strode into the laboratory with the air of a senior military commander surveying the scene of a recent, bloody skirmish. He pointed at the two unconscious Enforcers and raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Malieux.

  “Merely aftereffects of some of the experimentation I have undertaken on the automaton captured from His Imperial Majesty’s enemies.”

  “What progress?” Von Lyncker asked, his English exact, but heavily accented.

  “I have ascertained that despite outward appearances, the automaton is indeed a weapon, capable at the very least of disabling grown men.”

  “And how did it do this?”

  “With a flash of light. From its eyes.”

  “Light?”

  “Yes, Baron. It is apparently some sort of beam weapon.”

  “A beam weapon! How very . . . Jules Verne!”

  Malieux laughed. “Indeed, sir! And like Verne’s Captain Nemo, I have here in the bowels of my own Nautilus a fine wine cellar. Would you care for a glass of an outstanding claret I have recently discovered?” He led the way into the adjoining office.

  As they exited the laboratory, the baron gestured at the two fallen mechs. “What of them?”

  “Stunned, merely, I believe. In any case, a worthwhile sacrifice. Plenty more where those two came from. We have hundreds of mad paupers here whom no one will miss or mourn.” He showed the baron to a deeply padded maroon leather club chair, and poured him a glass of claret. The baron sipped appreciatively.

  “What was special about these two?”

  “Nothing. Chosen more or less at random from our many aggressive, vicious, criminally insane. Cigar?”

  “Thank you. And you’re certain no one will report them missing?”

  “Completely certain. No personal ties, or I wouldn’t be using them.”

  “We have heard of crusaders in some of your English political circles who seek the reform of mental institutions.”

  “Have no fear, Baron. This hospital has carried on, right where it stands, never turning a paying patient away, for nearly two hundred years. Vastly profitable the entire time, and a ready source of experimental subjects for research. It has stood through wars, the rise and fall of kings, and more than one wave of crusading reformers.”

  Von Lyncker chuckled appreciatively.

  “In the end, the public—and the politicians who pander to them in these degenerate democracies—tire very quickly of hearing about ‘abuses’ in insane asylums. After all, these places exist so that society may store the mad, idiots, and misshapen out of sight and out of mind.”

  The baron nodded, satisfied. “And you are progressing on securing the cooperation of Frau Malieux? Kaiser Wilhelm is most anxious that she be persuaded. There are new rumors from our spies in India and South Asia that she has accomplished remarkable things with the violent insane.”

  “Baron, as a man of science, I am most skeptical of such claims. But if there is a germ of truth in them, I shall soon know. My wife has traveled here from India, exceeding my expectations when I snatched this automaton. I have spoken with her, and have high hopes that the seeds of future success have been planted.”

  “Doctor, it is vital that you press ahead with all the resources at your command. The army of mech soldiers you propose to build for the Kaiser will be entirely useless without the means to bend them to his will. Your Enforcers are just the beginning.”

  Shaka’s low rumble came from the laboratory. “Doctor, you should see this.” Malieux hurried to the door.

  The Enforcers had awakened. Not only this: someone had keyed Jubal to play his default Sleeping Beauty Waltz. And the Enforcers were dancing. Tenderly. Holding each other close, gazing into one another’s eyes.

  ToC

  I told you before ’twas a stormy night

  When these two little kittens began to fight;

  The old woman seized her sweeping broom,

  And swept the two kittens right out of the room.

  —Two Little Kittens, by Anonymous (circa 1880)

  Chapter Eight

  The Three Queens

  Ladies-in-waiting, maids, footmen, and grooms fluttered around Her Royal Highness, Victoria, the Dowager Empress Frederick of the German Empire, and the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of England. They were as anxious, she observed aloud, as hens.

  The flutter was occasioned by her sudden announcement that, on this visit to her homeland for her mother’s Diamond Jubilee, she would ride to the hounds on one of the Duke of Beaufort’s famous fox hunts here at Badminton House. Only the most senior among the retainers could remember the last time she had done such a thing—not since the death of her husband, Kaiser Frederick, and the ascension of her son, Kaiser Wilhelm.

  All had assumed that this long-announced trip to the duke’s sprawling estate in the south Gloucestershire countryside was merely a social expedition. Although the horse had been brought across the Channel aboard Her Majesty’s massive steam yacht, and with the rest of her traveling household on the railroad train, her decision to actually ride it caught them all by surprise. No one had considered him anything more than a decorative and ostentatious accessory.

  To their further surprise, as soon as she was mounted on her fine gray Oldenburg gelding, Graymalkin, she instructed that her retinue leave her to her ride and give her privacy. This excited mutterings and no little consternation. No one alongside in case of a spook or a bolt? Unheard of! But her instructions were firm. One older, taciturn groom was assigned to follow well behind. Her Majesty was not to be disturbed.

  However, no one felt entitled to interdict the Master of the Hunt as he rode up to where Her Majesty sat quietly observing the orchestrated whirlwind of activity that was the preparation for the hunt. Captain Henry Adelbert Wellington FitzRoy Somerset, Marquess of Worchester, resplendent in the crimson ‘pinks’ of the Master of the Hunt, doffed his cap. “Your Majesty.”

  “Gracious, Beau,” exclaimed the empress. “Look how gray your beard has gotten since I saw you last. Are we truly grown so old?” She extended her hand, and he rode close and bowed over it.

  “The years sit lighter on Your Majesty than upon me, I’m afraid,” he answered. “I s
wear you have not aged a day.”

  “Gallant as ever, my friend. The beard is positively . . . Edwardian,” she chuckled. “So like the Crown Prince’s. Even when we were children, you idolized him. Now, please call me Vicky, as you did when we were young.”

  “Back when you were merely the Princess Royal, hadn’t yet married one Kaiser and borne another, and we chased tennis balls around the Great Room of Badminton when it rained?”

  “Exactly so. Not like when we invented the silly game that is such a rage. Now, just like this beautiful horse, I am mostly trotted out for ceremonial occasions, to demonstrate to the world that Kaiser Wilhelm has a human side. I’d rather be playing badminton.”

  “Vicky, no one who truly knows you makes the mistake of underestimating you. Your son may, but Her Majesty, your mother, certainly does not.”

  “Beau, I am truly grateful that my mother has such a capable, knowledgeable, and temperate military adjutant as yourself. Far be it from me to hope that you are delayed in coming into your inheritance, but I hope your father the duke lives long and prospers so that you may continue to serve my mother and the British Empire.”

  Somerset smiled. “I would be most happy if my father outlived me. He joys in his retirement, the management of his estates. I enjoy active service to Her Majesty.”

  Vicky shook her head. “My son has not been so fortunate in his advisors as has my mother.”

  “Your Majesty is too kind,” said Somerset.

  “Truly,” said Vicky. “He had the terrible ill fortune of falling under the influence of awful, militaristic Teutonic tutors. He has turned his back on the lessons of his childhood, and fixes his mind on national glory.”

  Somerset nodded sadly. “Not on the good of his people, and certainly not the good of all the peoples of Europe.”

  “What saddens me most is that he casts about for anyone to blame for his failings other than himself—the English, the Jews, even the Chinese.”