The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  “Is she awake, Master?”

  Behind the slender, fair man in the lab coat loomed Rocco’s black-clad bulk. He had lowered his hood to reveal his bald, egg-shaped head and cruel blue eyes. You’ll be glad to hear that I cowered.

  “Don’t be frightened, Miss . . .” Ernest said.

  I struggled to a seated position. I was briefly dizzy and nauseated, but I mastered myself. “I am Miss Grand. Vanessa Grand. And I demand to know who you are and where you have taken me, and for what purpose.”

  “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Grand. I am Dr Ernest Clive.” He seemed timid, even eager to please me. Unlike you, Ernest was ill-versed in the ways of love, hearts, and flowers and everything designed to trap a woman. I was trapped by Ernest, of course, but there was something honest about the arrangement. “I hope my assistant Rocco hasn’t mistreated you.”

  “Aside from drugging and abducting me, Rocco has been a perfect gentleman. However, I’m certain my fiancé and my father are looking for me. Is it money you’re after? I’m sure that can be arranged to everyone’s satisfaction.” A bit shakily, I scrambled to my feet and dusted off my green silk frock. “But really it would be best for all concerned if you allowed me simply to walk out of here . . .”

  And then I saw.

  The high ceiling with the skylight. The hospital bed equipped with straps and wires. The beakers bubbling with ruby and emerald liquids. The machinery softly chugging up and down. The flashes of electricity crackling in their circuits. The aquarium in which swam . . .

  I let out a gasp. Did you see them, Charles? The canaries that swam in the aquarium? The cage full of tropical fish that flew, their scales flashing blue and green and purple? Or were you too busy rescuing me to notice such wonders?

  “You needn’t be afraid, Miss Grand,” Ernest said.

  “Won’t do you any good, anyway,” Rocco remarked. “Dr Clive will do as he likes with you!”

  “Be quiet, you fool,” Ernest said.

  I was transfixed by the fish that seemed for all the world to breathe the air through their gills as they floated in their cage. “Dr Clive, how is this possible?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he muttered impatiently.

  I bridled. “Because I’m a woman?”

  “No, Miss Grand. Because no one does. I’m a genius, you see.” He lifted his chin and would not meet my gaze, as if to convey that genius was a proud and lonely lot.

  “All this is your handiwork? Dr Clive, it’s magnificent!” My heart pounded, but there was exhilaration mixed with the fright. In that moment, at least, I knew I was alive.

  “Ain’t you going to scream?” Rocco asked dejectedly. “Usually they scream. Even Miss Georgina screamed.”

  “Be silent!” Ernest said.

  “Who is Miss Georgina?” I asked. I wondered how many women they had brought to the laboratory, and for what purpose.

  “My fiancée,” Ernest murmured.

  “I see. Have I mentioned that I have one as well? He’ll be searching for me, you know,” I repeated.

  “Dr Clive don’t have no fiancée no more,” Rocco informed me.

  “Why? Did you . . . harm her?” I began to shiver.

  “Of course not,” Ernest said. “We were to be married until she saw – all this. I thought she’d be proud of her future husband’s work. Instead she was horrified. She called me mad. Then she married my rival.”

  All about us Ernest Clive’s work sparkled and flashed. “What a little idiot Miss Georgina must be,” I said.

  Ernest’s glasses had slipped down his nose. He pushed them back up and stared at me. “Miss Grand, do you truly think so?”

  Rocco shambled toward me, his big arms swinging. “Don’t listen to her, Master. She’s trying to talk her way ’round you.”

  I backed away from Rocco until the cold stone wall stopped me. “What do you mean to do to me?”

  When Ernest didn’t reply, Rocco volunteered. “Half woman, half butterfly. Well, wings on a woman, at any rate.”

  My eye fell on the bed with the straps, the electrodes. On a little table next to it glinted scalpels and other instruments. I hugged myself and felt the gooseflesh on my arms. “The women who screamed – was it because you tried this procedure on them?” Then I stopped shivering. I turned to Ernest. “I say, would I be able to fly?”

  Ernest gave a start. Clearly he wasn’t expecting such a response. Screams, yes, but not this.

  “Shall I prepare the electrodes, Master?” Rocco asked.

  Ernest appeared not to hear him. He kept staring at me as if I’d only just appeared in the room. Rocco repeated his question, and the doctor seemed to shake himself awake. “Prepare a room for Miss Grand, Rocco. She’s going to be our guest.”

  “But Master—”

  “Do as you’re told. The room nearest the front staircase on the second floor will be the most comfortable, I think.”

  Grumbling, Rocco trudged away.

  I placed my hand on Ernest’s arm. “You didn’t answer my question, Doctor,” I said. “Will I be able to fly?”

  Don’t look at me like that, Charles! When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a doctor like my favorite uncle Anthony, but that, of course, was impossible. I was pretty and clever and would make a good match someday. By the time I met you, I was already laughing the empty laugh of the dead. Oh, it was all amusing – the foxtrots and surreptitious kisses, and knowing that my blonde waves and trim figure gave me power over a handsome man – but with Ernest, I regained the ability to be surprised. Did you really think I wanted to be a society wife pouring out endless tea and listening to endless chatter about frocks and parties and engagements? Did you think I wanted my belly distended by a squirming creature growing within? Talk of being experimented upon! I tell you I wanted to fly.

  I was given a room in Ernest’s ancestral estate, full of secret passageways and crumbling staircases. I could have spent years exploring its recesses. At first he had to chase me ’round the laboratory, I was so eager to explore. “What does this one do?” I asked, my hand poised above a lever.

  He rushed to my side. “Don’t touch that lever! You’ll blow us all to kingdom come!”

  How I laughed! He gazed at me as if I were the one astonishing thing left in all creation. Then he caught me about the waist and kissed me.

  It’s true he had tried the experiment on a couple of the village girls, grafting wings on their backs and then removing them when he saw where he’d gone wrong. But there was minimal scarring, and Ernest erased the entire episode from the girls’ minds before he released them. (No, Charles, I do not believe he would have done the same to me.) He hadn’t dared take another girl from the village, lest suspicion fall on him and Rocco – hence Rocco’s trip to London in Ernest’s battered automobile, and my abduction.

  Once he got to know me, Ernest no longer wanted to go ahead with the experiment as planned. “I don’t want to cause you pain, my darling,” he said. “We’ll find another girl. You may assist in the procedure, if you like.”

  “I can endure the pain,” I told him. “Don’t you dare give another woman this privilege. I believe with all my heart that you can give me the gift of flight.”

  His eyes filled with tears, and he clasped my hand and told me he would prove himself worthy of my trust.

  How his long, deft fingers traced where the wings would be on my bare shoulder blades, making me shiver deliciously. The original wings had been gray and functional, but Ernest insisted on redesigning them to make them both beautiful and capable of sustaining longer, swifter flights. They were iridescent blue and orange, and they would have been my flesh and bone. Tucked beneath my clothes when I didn’t use them – rather like a penis, don’t you think? – but ready for me to unfurl, to fly bare-breasted and free. I even designed a chemise with slots in the back from which the wings could protrude, in case I wished to fly more modestly attired.

  I loved that Ernest wanted to improve upon the wings for me
, but it delayed the experiment. If only we had not delayed! It’s hard to believe I was with him for less than a month, we made so many plans. There’s an island – I won’t tell you where. We were going to live there and fill the place with such marvels. It would have been a second Eden, one in which the quest for knowledge went unpunished.

  The morning of the experiment, Ernest and I were elated, though our joy was tinged with fear. Even Rocco seemed touched by the magnitude of what we were about to attempt. He was quiet and solemn, respectfully averting his eyes from my partial nudity. Ernest had removed my wings from the refrigeration unit and placed them – I assume you didn’t notice them – on the long table beside the hospital bed on which I sat, the sheet draped around me. All seemed hushed and still, in spite of the crackling volts of power and the chugging of the machinery.

  Ernest and I exchanged a last, long look. Then he prepared the syringe, and I held out my arm. He bent to administer the injection, and I held my breath, waiting for the needle’s prick.

  When the shot rang out, at first I didn’t understand what had happened. Almost I thought it was part of the procedure, until I saw the shocked confusion in Ernest’s eyes. The syringe clattered to the floor, and Ernest fell.

  Then I saw you – my hero.

  When Rocco made for you with a snarl, I hoped he would wrest the weapon from your hand and exact vengeance. But alas, you are an excellent shot.

  I know you thought it womanly hysteria that made me struggle as you secured the sheet around me. You cared more for my modesty than for Ernest lying in his swiftly spreading blood, his face chalk white, eyes staring behind crooked spectacles, much less for Rocco dragging himself along the floor whimpering in pain. Hysteria, you thought, made me scream and kick and fight you as you slung me in your arms and carried me down the spiral staircase and outdoors. I would have run back to Ernest as soon as you set me on my feet, the mob of villagers with their rifles and scythes be damned – if not for the explosion.

  “It’s all over now,” you gloated, pulling me into an entirely unwanted embrace.

  You think I’m crazy, don’t you – that he was mad and infected me with his madness. Papa and Mama and my sisters and brothers understand me as little as you do. Mama begs me to be grateful for your “rescue”, to thank you for your pistol shot that laid waste to one of the greatest minds this world has known. I am lucky, she says, to be safely back in London, away from that dreadful place. She says that soon I will have forgotten everything that happened there, like a bad dream, and then you and I will marry! But I will never forgive you for dragging me away as he died on the laboratory floor, without me to hold his hand, to help him into the next world – a world, I trust, full of enough wonders to keep the most brilliant scientist happy. Here I remain, without even his creations to remember him by. Rocco must have pulled that lever, preferring death by his own hand to whatever fate others meant for him. I can’t say I blame him.

  Have no fear, I shan’t take my life. Ernest’s work was devoured by the conflagration – gone, the birds that swam and the fish that flew, all gone, my beautiful blue and orange wings – and I have not his genius, but I do have his daring. I shall learn to pilot an aeroplane. Laugh all you want, Charles, but there are women pilots in this world, and I mean to fly. Perhaps I will fly to our island, and then I will be free of the lot of you.

  This Evening’s Performance

  Genevieve Valentine

  I. Cast off Your Raincoat, Put on Your Dancing Shoes

  “Shit,” Emily said, as they pulled in to port. “They’ve lined up Dramatons to greet us.”

  Roger looked up. “They wouldn’t.”

  “Photographers everywhere,” she said, tugging at her coat. “An Ingénue, a Hero, a Femme Fatale, a Lothario, two Gentlemen – a thin model and a big one, I suppose they didn’t know your size, Roger. One Dame, of course. And she’s wearing my coat.”

  She pulled the curtain. “If they’re trying to discourage us, they’re making quite the argument.”

  Across the cabin, Peter checked his tie in the mirror and wrinkled his nose. “They want to compare? Let them. Roger, wear your gray coat. Emily, can you find something that doesn’t look like you’re trying so hard?”

  She looked down. “The point of this coat is that you look like you’re not trying.”

  “Or as though you’re about to molt,” Roger said, pocketing his libris and smoothing his shirt. “Which is preferable to making nice with Dramatons.”

  “It will pass,” said Peter. “There are always little phases.” He grinned over his shoulder on his way out, like a romance poster. “They won us the war; let them have their little triumph while people still love them. Come on.”

  After Peter was gone, Roger said, “Well, I’m not waiting. I’m throwing myself off the gangplank.”

  “Stop stealing the scene,” she said. She fastened the last button on his black morning jacket and turned to him. “How does it look?”

  It was big at her shoulders, small at her hips, and she wore it the way she carried off anything absurd. She was a good comedienne; during their first production of This Bright Affair, when Peter got sick and she’d had to play the randy near-sighted grandfather, Roger had broken at least once a night.

  “Like you’re not trying,” he said.

  Peter was waiting, brushing imaginary dust off his lapel.

  He took Emily’s arm with, “Break a leg, darling,” and Roger followed them down the plank to face the Dramatons.

  The worst thing about Dramatons, Roger thought as the press closed in, was how hard it was to hate them. He still managed, but it meant that he felt like a heel on top of everything else.

  Their deployment in the Great War saved thousands of lives. Peter and Roger got draft papers just before the first automaton regiment shipped out, but as it happened, they were clever; the draft was postponed, and postponed, and within six months the war was over.

  (When the automatons marched down Piccadilly, victorious, the whole troupe threw confetti and cheered until their throats were hoarse. Emily cried, denied it.)

  The automatons were decommissioned (treaties demanded), but the government knew better than to dismantle such toys. Now they were riveters and train conductors and porters. They had endurance to thresh fields, and dexterity to assemble car engines. (Watchmakers were safe; they weren’t as nimble as the hand of an artist.)

  An industry for the displaced sprung up overnight: automaton maintenance and modification.

  With the proper aesthetic mods, automatons were even decent on stage. It was only a dumb show with recordings piped through, but audiences had embraced worse performances.

  Every city in the Empire had a set, a gift from a beneficent government.

  They put actors out of business. Actors had put up a fight, but against changing tastes, there was only so much a troupe could do. One by one they caved; the Understudies were now creaking along, the last troupe that had existed before Dramatons.

  Not their fault, though, he thought; they were programmed to act and pose, and knew nothing else.

  Roger stood beside the thinner Gentleman, whose face was now a mask of dignified age. It turned to each camera as it flashed (it always knew which one was going to go off, of course; the mechanoid hearing).

  Emily was looking at the Femme Fatale as if it was about to sprout a second head.

  The Dramatons looked into the flashbulbs without blinking, smiling at the pivot points in their mouths. The Dame was more stoic than the rest, but her handler stood by in case she got too cool and needed adjusting.

  Peter winked and waggled his brows and did all the elasticface things Dramatons couldn’t. The cameras went wild for him. They always had; thirty years running, Peter had upstaged anything that got in his way.

  “Three weeks,” he told a reporter. “No two performances alike! It’ll be magic! Wait until you see these two on the stage! Humanity at its best.”

  Beside Roger, Emily shook hands with the Ingé
nue, allowed the Lothario to kiss her wrist.

  “Cheeky gentlemen in your line of work,” she told the Dame.

  After a pause, the Dame repeated, “A gentleman is merely a rascal, better-dressed.”

  It was from Vacationing in the Summer Palace, from the dullest scene in that whole dull play.

  Roger told Emily, “They’re no good for conversation, that’s their problem.”

  “Oh, my!” trilled the Ingénue, resting one hand on Peter’s chest. She went up on tiptoes to drop a kiss on his cheek, the clicks of her joints barely audible under the sound of the cameras.

  “Yes,” said Emily, “that’s their problem.”

  “Smile!” someone called, and a flashbulb went off.

  * * *

  The flat was shabbier than the last one had been, which had been shabbier than the last.

  Peter said too firmly, “This is close to the theater. Perfect for rehearsals.”

  Roger knew better than to answer.

  “We should talk about the run,” said Emily, closing the door after the porter. “I saw the newsstand. They’ve set up a romance with an Ingénue and Hero. Thirteen magazine covers.”

  Roger had wondered how long it would take for them to catch on to that facet of the business. “Is the romance just in London, or everywhere?”

  “I’m scared to look.”

  “You sound like Phil and Rose,” Peter muttered. “Why don’t you retire if you’re going to jump at every shadow?”

  It wasn’t jumping at shadows, it was common sense, but Peter had never understood the difference.

  Roger wondered how Emily had stayed married to him for so long; she was usually so ruthless about facing facts.

  Emily had married in a brown velvet suit. She pulled back her hair with a silver comb from Rose, and walked the aisle with nothing but a little brass orchid.