Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  “The Company has a reason for everything, Mendoza.”

  We came within earshot of the house, so conversation ended. There were three big dogs in the yard before the door. One slept undisturbed, but two put up their heads and began to growl. We set down the trunk: I opened it and from the close-packed contents managed to prize out the Hush Unit. The bigger of the dogs got to his feet, preparing to bark.

  I switched on the unit. Good dog, what a sleepy doggie, he fell over with a woof and did not move again. The other dog dropped his head on his paws. Dog Number Three would not wake at all now, nor would any of the occupants of the house, not while the Hush Field was being generated.

  I carried the unit up to the house and left it by the dogs, Mendoza dragging the trunk after me. We removed the box of golden altar vessels and set off up the hill with it.

  The amazing mutated vine was pretty sorry-looking now, with most of its branches clipped off in the attempt to appease Mendoza. I hoped to God their well-meaning efforts hadn’t killed it. Mendoza must have been thinking the same thing, but she just shrugged grimly. We began to dig.

  We made a neat hole, small but very deep, just behind the trunk and angled slightly under it. There was no way to hide our disturbance of the earth, but fortunately the ground had already been so spaded up and trampled over that our work shouldn’t be that obvious.

  “How deep does this have to be?” I panted when we had gone about six feet and I was in the bottom passing spadefuls up to Mendoza.

  “Not much deeper; I’d like it buried well below the root ball.” She leaned in and peered.

  “Well, how deep is that?” Before she could reply my spade hit something with a metallic clank. We halted. Mendoza giggled nervously.

  “Jesus, don’t tell me there’s already buried treasure down there!”

  I scraped a little with the spade. “There’s something like a hook,” I said. “And something else.” I got the spade under it and launched it up out of the hole with one good heave. The whole mass fell on the other side of the dirt heap, out of my view. “It looked kind of round,” I remarked.

  “It looks kind of like a hat—” Mendoza told me cautiously, bending down and turning it over. Abruptly she yelled and danced back from it. I scrambled up out of the hole to see what was going on.

  It was a hat, all right, or what was left of it; one of the hard-cured leather kind Spain had issued to her soldiers in the latter half of the last century. I remembered seeing them on the presidio personnel. Beside the hat, where my spade-toss had dislodged it, was the head that had been wearing it. Only a brown skull now, the eyes blind with black earth. Close to it was the hilt of a sword, the metallic thing I’d hit.

  “Oh, gross!” Mendoza wrung her hands.

  “Alas, poor Yorick,” was all I could think of to say.

  “Oh, God, how disgusting. Is the rest of him down there?”

  I peered down into the hole. I could see a jawbone and pieces of what might have been cavalry boots. “Looks like it, I’m afraid.”

  “What do you suppose he’s doing down there?” Mendoza fretted, from behind the handkerchief she had clapped over her mouth and nose.

  “Not a damn thing nowadays,” I guessed, doing a quick scan of the bones. “Take it easy: no pathogens left. This guy’s been dead a long time.”

  “Sixty years, by any chance?” Mendoza’s voice sharpened.

  “They must have planted him with the grapevine,” I agreed. In the thoughtful silence that followed I began to snicker. I couldn’t help myself. I leaned back and had myself a nice sprawling guffaw.

  “I fail to see what’s so amusing,” said Mendoza.

  “Sorry. Sorry. I was just wondering: do you suppose you could cause a favorable mutation in something by planting a dead Spaniard under it?”

  “Of course not, you idiot, not unless his sword was radioactive or something.”

  “No, of course not. What about those little wild yeast spores in the bloom on the grapes, though? You think they might be influenced somehow by the close proximity of a gentleman of Old Castile?”

  “What are you talking about?” Mendoza took a step closer.

  “This isn’t a cancer cure, you know.” I waved my hand at the vinestock, black against the stars. “I found out why the Company is so eager to get hold of your Favorable Mutation, kid. This is the grape that makes Black Elysium.”

  “The dessert wine?” Mendoza cried.

  “The very expensive dessert wine. The hallucinogenic controlled substance dessert wine. The absinthe of the 24th century. The one the Company holds the patent on. That stuff. Yeah.”

  Stunned silence from my fellow immortal creature. I went on:

  “I was just thinking, you know, about all those decadent technocrats sitting around in the Future getting bombed on an elixir produced from…”

  “So it gets discovered here, in 1844,” said Mendoza at last. “It isn’t a genetically engineered cultivar at all. And the wild spores somehow came from…?”

  “But nobody else will ever know the truth, because we’re removing every trace of this vine from the knowledge of mortal men, see?” I explained. “Root and branch

  and all.”

  “I’d sure better get that bonus,” Mendoza reflected.

  “Don’t push your luck. You aren’t supposed to know.” I took my shovel and clambered back into the hole. “Come on, let’s get the rest of him out of here. The show must go on.”

  Two hours later there was a tidy heap of brown bones and rusted steel moldering away in a new hiding place, and a tidy sum in gold plate occupying the former burial site. We filled in the hole, set up the rest of the equipment we’d brought, tested it, camouflaged it, turned it on and hurried away back down the canyon to the Mission, taking the Hush Unit with us. I made it in time for Matins.

  * * * *

  News travels fast in a small town. By nine there were Indians, and some of the Gentes de Razon too, running in from all directions to tell us that the Blessed Virgin had appeared in the Kasmalis’ garden. Even if I hadn’t known already, I would have been tipped off by the fact that old Maria Concepcion did not show up for morning Mass.

  By the time we got up there, the Bishop and I and all my fellow friars and Mendoza, a cloud of dust hung above the dirt track from all the traffic. The Kasmalis’ tomatoes and corn had been trampled by the milling crowd. People ran everywhere, waving pieces of grapevine; the other plants had been stripped as bare as the special one. The rancheros watched from horseback, or urged their mounts closer across the careful beds of peppers and beans.

  Around the one vine, the family had formed a tight circle. Some of them watched Emidio and Salvador, who were digging frantically, already about five feet down in the hole; others stared unblinking at the floating image of the Virgin of Guadalupe who smiled upon them from midair above the vine. She was complete in every detail, nicely three-dimensional and accompanied by heavenly music. Actually it was a long tape loop of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which nobody would recognize because it hadn’t been composed yet.

  “Little Father!” One of the wives caught me by my robe. “It’s the Mother of God! She told us to dig up the vine, she said there was treasure buried underneath!”

  “Has she told you anything else?” I inquired, making the Sign of the Cross. My brother friars were falling to their knees in raptures, beginning to sing the Ave Maria; the Bishop was sobbing.

  “No, not since this morning,” the wife told me. “Only the beautiful music has gone on and on.”

  Emidio looked up and noticed me for the first time. He stopped shoveling for a moment, staring at me, and a look of dark speculation crossed his face. Then his shovel was moving again, clearing away the earth, and more earth, and more earth.

  At my side, Mendoza turned away her face in disgust. But I was watching the old couple, who stood a little way back from the rest of the family. They clung to each other in mute terror and had no eyes for t
he smiling Virgin. It was the bottom of the ever-deepening hole they watched, as birds watch a snake.

  And I watched them. Old Diego was bent and toothless now, but sixty years ago he’d had teeth, all right; sixty years ago his race hadn’t yet learned never to fight back against its conquerors. Maria Concepcion, what had she been sixty years ago when those vines were planted? Not a dried-up shuffling old thing back then. She might have been a beauty, and maybe a careless beauty.

  The old bones and the rusting steel could have told you, sixty years ago. Had he been a handsome young captain with smooth ways, or just a soldier who took what he wanted? Whatever he’d been, or done, he’d wound up buried under that vine, and only Diego and Maria knew he was there. All those years, through the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he’d been there. Diego never coming to Mass because of a sin he couldn’t confess. Maria never missing Mass, praying for someone.

  Maybe that was the way it had happened. Nobody would ever tell the story, I was fairly sure. But it was clear that Diego and Maria, alone of all those watching, did not expect to see treasure come out of that hole in the ground.

  So when the first glint of gold appeared, and then the chalice and altar plate were brought up, their old faces were a study in confusion.

  “The treasure!” cried Salvador. “Look!”

  And the rancheros spurred their horses through the crowd to get a better look, lashing the Indians out of the way; but I touched the remote hidden in my sleeve and the Blessed Virgin spoke, in a voice as sweet and immortal as a synthesizer:

  “This, my beloved children, is the altar plate that was lost from the church at San Carlos Borromeo, long ago in the time of the pirates. My Beloved Son has caused it to be found here as a sign to you all that ALL SINS ARE FORGIVEN!”

  I touched the remote again and the Holy Apparition winked out like a soap bubble, and the beautiful music fell silent.

  Old Diego pushed his way forward to the hole and looked in. There was nothing else there in the hole now, nothing at all. Maria came timidly to his side and she looked in too. They remained there staring a long time, unnoticed by the mass of the crowd, who were watching the dispute that had already erupted over the gold.

  The Bishop had pounced on it like a duck on a June bug, as they say, asserting the right of Holy Mother Church to her lost property. Emidio and Salvador had let it be snatched from them with hard patient smiles. One of the Gentes de Razon actually got off his horse to tell the Bishop that the true provenance of the items had to be decided by the authorities in Mexico City, and until they could be contacted the treasure had better be kept under lock and key at the Alcalde’s house. Blessed Virgin? Yes, there had seemed to be an apparition of some kind; but then again, perhaps it had been a trick of the light.

  The argument moved away down the hill— the Bishop had a good grip on the gold and kept walking with it, so almost everyone had to follow him. I went to stand beside Diego and Maria, in the ruins of their garden.

  “She forgave us,” whispered Diego.

  “A great weight of sin has been lifted from you today, my children,” I told them. “Rejoice, for Christ loves you both. Come to the church with me now and I will celebrate a special Mass in your honor.”

  I led them away with me, one on either arm. Unseen behind us, Mendoza advanced on the uprooted and forgotten vine with a face like a lioness kept from her prey.

  * * * *

  Well, the old couple made out all right, anyway. I saw to it that they got new grapevines and food from the Mission supplies to tide the family over until their garden recovered. Within a couple of years they passed away, one after the other, and were buried reasonably near one another in the consecrated ground of the Mission cemetery, in which respect they were luckier than the unknown captain from Castile, or wherever he’d come from.

  They never got the golden treasure, but being Indians there had never been any question that they would. Their descendants lived on and multiplied in the area, doing particularly well after the coming of the Yankees, who (to the mortification of the Gentes de Razon) couldn’t tell an Indian from a Spanish Mexican and lumped them all together under the common designation of Greaser, treating one no worse than the other.

  Actually I never kept track of what happened to the gold. The title dispute dragged on for years, I think, with the friars swearing there had been a miracle and the rancheros swearing there hadn’t been. The gold may have been returned to Carmel, or it may have gone to Mexico City, or it may have gone into a trunk underneath the Alcalde’s bed. I didn’t care; it was all faked Company-issue reproductions anyway. The Bishop died and the Yankees came and were the new conquerors, and maybe nothing ever did get resolved either way.

  But Mendoza got her damned vine and her bonus, so she was as happy as she ever is. The Company got its patent on Black Elysium secured. I lived on at the Mission for years and years before (apparently) dying of venerable old age and (apparently) being buried in the same cemetery as Diego and Maria. God forgave us all, I guess, and I moved on to less pleasant work.

  Sometimes, when I’m in that part of the world, I stop in as a tourist and check out my grave. It’s the nicest of the many I’ve had, except maybe for that crypt in Hollywood. Well, well; life goes on.

  Mine does anyway.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1997 by Dell Magazines.

  STEAMPUNK, by Burgsbee L. Hobbs

  How might the past have looked had its “future” occurred before it was supposed to? This is the theoretical space inhabited by Steampunk, an intertextual, interdisciplinary movement that is, at once, an aesthetic, a Science-Fiction (SF) and Fantasy subgenre, and the basis for a thriving subculture. Steampunk fiction, a fantastical reimagining of the historical Victorian and Edwardian eras (1837–1910) foments an aesthetic that depicts how a pre-Great War, nineteenth century world may have appeared if “a few key technologies been developed further” and a good bit earlier (Guizzo 48). Steampunk is a neologism (Veale 58) that denotes a burgeoning subgenre of Science Fiction (SF), itself a subgenre of Speculative Fiction, and a near-relative of the well-established SF subgenre known as Alternate History. Because the background and setting of narratives in this category can be characterized as a stylized marriage between contemporary nanotechnology (Dawdy)—in the retro-tech form of steam-power and clockwork—and a revival of Victoriana (Perschon 181), i.e., accoutrements and objets d’art from the Victorian epoch, the core concepts of Steampunk have been likened to a more recent movement in academia known as “Neo-Victorianism” (Llewellyn 172).

  Since Steampunk technofantasies represent a fabricated world of pseudoscience that is neither, as James Gunn has suggested, “the world of the here and now” nor even a one of “the there and then” but rather a “fantastic world of unfamiliar events or developments” (6) it is justly cast as SF. The irony that the nineteenth-century setting of Steampunk, a contemporary subgenre, coincides with the actual nineteenth-century timeframe that scholars such as M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas associate with the emergence of modern SF “in an identifiable form” (6) should not be ignored. To the degree that Steampunk seems to fulfill a romantic longing for a continuation of the Victorian period zeitgeist, it should be equally recognized as a creative revisitation of the SF genre’s genesis in the form of a “reboot.” In the sense that Steampunk constitutes, as is suggested by Andrew M. Gordon elsewhere in this anthology, a speculative “superhistory” that reconceives history by positing “a change in the past,” rather than in the future, it can also find common ground with the Alternate History and Alternate Universe/Reality subgenres. Most importantly, however, is the particular appeal to pathos that Steampunk tries to establish with its audience. That is, that necessary “sense of wonder” first described by SF historian Sam Moscowitz (Knight 8) for which this anthology is aptly named.

  Underlying many Steampunk narratives, on the authority of John Clute, is the influence of Charles Dickens (1812–70). Dickens’s frequ
ently revisited “vision of a labyrinthine, subaqueous London as moronic inferno” surfaces as the same landscape used in “Gaslight Romances,” one of a number of Fantasy subgenres related to Steampunk (895). The late imperialistic and industrial age ethos of Steampunk pays a notable measure of tribute to both Jules Verne (1828–1905) and H. G. Wells (1866–1945), two later European writers who are virtually canonized by the SF community for their legacies as pioneers in the field. Their respective SF protogenres Les Voyages Extraordinaires and Scientific Romances represent a fin-de-siècle paradigm shift that attempts to put lingering enlightenment ideals to rest and modernistic thought to the fore. In a 2007 article for Steampunk Magazine, critic Cory Gross suggested that Steampunk incarnations reeking of stereotypical Victorian sentimentalities demonstrate the influence of Verne while ones that critique society using a more Marxian lens, such as the very magazine he writes for, are inspired by Wells (55). In fact, the dovish “Victorian Socialism” that Wells wrote about (152), is one of the characteristics that differentiates the Steampunk vision from Italian playwright Filippo Marinetti’s (1876–1944) more fascist-leaning and hawkish Futurism movement (1909–18), the name of which is often misappropriated in Steampunk subtitles, e.g. a 2010 art exhibition in San Diego California used the problematic word for its Steampunk: Vintage Futurism (Oceanside) as has a recent book by Korero titled Steampunk: Victorian Futurism (March 2011).

  In both the historical Victorian era (1837–1901) and the anachronistic, pseudo-historical world of Steampunk, mechanical novelties continue to be manufactured with clunky gears and cogwheels while a prophetic eye is aimed toward the engineering possibilities of electromagnetism. The technological spaces explored in Steampunk narratives reflect, for the most part, an atomic-free zone in a pre-postmodern atmosphere. In a twenty-first century world traumatized by genocide, i.e., the Holocaust, international terrorism, and a fear of planetary annihilation by either nuclear war or global warming, the Victorian era, even with its faults, seems relatively innocent by comparison and that may be part of its unique appeal.