The Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Part 2

The music rises and falls, like the seas of gra.s.s rustling to themselves out beyond the edges of the city, and the delicate mechanisms of her prosthetics clank and hum and whine. And Missouri weaves herself through this landscape of sound with the easy dexterity of p.r.o.nghorn antelope and deer fleeing the jaws of wolves or the hunters' rifles, the long haunches and fleet paws of jackrabbits running out before a wildfire. For this moment, she is lost, and, for this moment, she wishes never to be found again. Soon, the air has begun to smell of the steam leaking from the exhaust ports in her leg and arm, an oily, hot sort of aroma that is as sweet to Missouri Banks as rosewater or honeysuckle blossoms. She closes her eyes the one she was born with and the one from San Francisco and feels no shame whatsoever at the lazy stares of the opium smokers. The piston rods in her left leg pump something more alive than blood, and the flywheels turn on their axels. She is muscle and skin, steel and artifice. She is the woman who was once a filthy, ragged guttersnipe, and she is Madam Ling's special attraction, a wondrous child of Terpsich.o.r.e and Industry. Once she overheard the piano player whispering to the Irishman, and he said, "You'd think she emerged outta her momma's womb like that," and then there was a joke about s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g automata. But, however it might have been meant, she took it as praise and confirmation.

Too soon the music ends, leaving her gasping and breathless, dripping sweat and an iridescent sheen of lubricant onto the boards, and she must sit in her room backstage and wait out another hour before her next dance.

And after the mechanic has washed away the day's share of grime and they're finished with their modest supper of apple pie and beans with thick slices of bacon, after his evening cigar and her cup of strong black Indian tea, after all the little habits and rituals of their nights together are done, he follows her to bed. The mechanic sits down and the springs squeak like stepped-on mice; he leans back against the tarnished bra.s.s headboard, smiling his easy, disarming smile while she undresses. When she slips the stocking off her right leg, he sees the gauze bandage wrapped about her knee, and his smile fades to concern.

"Here," he says. "What's that? What happened there?" and he points at her leg.

"It's nothing," she tells him. "It's nothing much."

"That seems an awful lot of dressing for nothing much. Did you fall?"

"I didn't fall," she replies. "I never fall."

"Of course not," he says. "Only us mere mortal folk fall. Of course you didn't fall. So what is it? It ain't the latest G.o.dd.a.m.n fas.h.i.+on."

Missouri drapes her stocking across the footboard, which is also bra.s.s, and turns her head to frown at him over her shoulder.

"A burn," she says, "that's all. One of Madam Ling's girls patched it for me. It's nothing to worry over."

"How bad a burn?"

"I said it's nothing, didn't I?"

"You did," says the mechanic and nods his head, looking not the least bit convinced. "But that secondary sliding valve's leaking again, and that's what did it. Am I right?"

Missouri turns back to her bandaged knee, wis.h.i.+ng that there'd been some way to hide it from him, because she doesn't feel like him fussing over her tonight. "It doesn't hurt much at all. Madam Ling had a salve-"

"Haven't I been telling you that seal needs to be replaced?"

"I know you have."

"Well, you just stay in tomorrow, and I'll take that leg with me to the shop, get it fixed up tip-top again. Have it back before you know it."

"It's fine. I already patched it. It'll hold."

"Until the next time," he says, and she knows well enough from the tone of his voice that he doesn't want to argue with her about this, that he's losing patience. "You go and let that valve blow out, and you'll be needing a good deal more doctoring than a c.h.i.n.k wh.o.r.e can provide. There's a lot of pressure builds up inside those pistons. You know that, Missouri."

"Yeah, I know that," she says.

"Sometimes you don't act like you know it."

"I can't stay in tomorrow. But I'll let you take it the next day, I swear. I'll stay in Thursday, and you can take my leg then."

"Thursday," the mechanic grumbles. "And so I just gotta keep my fingers crossed until then?"

"It'll be fine," she tells him again, trying to sound rea.s.suring and reasonable, trying not to let the bright rind of panic show in her voice. "I won't push so hard. I'll stick to the slow dances."

And then a long and disagreeable sort of silence settles over the room, and for a time she sits there at the edge of the bed, staring at both her legs, at injured meat and treacherous, unreliable metal. Machines break down, she thinks, and the flesh is weak. Ain't nothing yet conjured by G.o.d nor man won't go and turn against you, sooner or later. Missouri sighs and lightly presses a porcelain thumb to the artificial leg's green release switch; there's a series of dull clicks and pops as it comes free of the bolts set directly into her pelvic bones.

"I'll stay in tomorrow," she says and sets her left leg into its stand near the foot of their bed. "I'll send word to Madam Ling. She'll understand."

When the mechanic doesn't tell her that it's really for the best, when he doesn't say anything at all, she looks and sees he's dozed off sitting up, still wearing his trousers and suspenders and unders.h.i.+rt. "You," she says quietly, then reaches for the release switch on her right arm.

When she feels his hands on her, Missouri thinks at first that this is only some new direction her dream has taken, the rambling dream of her father's medicine wagon and of buffalo, of rutted roads and a flaxen Nebraska sky filled with flocks of automatic birds chirping arias from La traviata. But there's something substantial about the pale light of the waxing moon falling though the open window and the way the curtains move in the midnight breeze that convinces her she's awake. Then he kisses her, and one hand wanders down across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and stomach and lingers in the unruly thatch of hair between her legs.

"Unless maybe you got something better to be doing," he mutters in her ear.

"Well, now that you mention it, I was dreaming," she tells him, "before you woke me up," and the mechanic laughs.

"Then maybe I should let you get back to it," but when he starts to take his hand away from her privy parts, she takes hold of it and rubs his fingertips across her l.a.b.i.a.

"So, what exactly were you dreaming about that's got you in such a cooperative mood, Miss Missouri Banks?" he asks and kisses her again, the dark stubble on his cheeks scratching at her face.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" she says.

"I figure that's likely why I enquired."

His face is washed in the soft blue-green glow of her San Francisco eye, which switched on as soon as she awoke, and times like this it's hard not to imagine all the ways her life might have gone but didn't, how very unlikely it was that it would go this way, instead. And she starts to tell him the truth, her dream of being a little girl and all the manufactured birds, the s.h.a.ggy herds of bison, and how her father kept insisting he should give up peddling his herbs and remedies and settle down somewhere. But at the last minute, and for no particular reason, she changes her mind, and Missouri tells him another dream, just something she makes up off the top of her sleep-blurred head.

"You might not like it," she says.

"Might not," he agrees. "Then again, you never know," and the first joint of an index finger slips inside her.

"Then again," she whispers, and so she tells him a dream she's never dreamt. How there was a terrible fire and before it was over and done with, the flames had claimed half the city, there where the gra.s.s ends and the mountains start. And at first, she tells him, it was an awful, awful dream, because she was trapped in the boarding house when it burned, and she could see him down on the street, calling for her, but, try as they may, they could not reach each other.

"Why you want to go and have a dream like that for?" he asks.

"You wanted to hear it. Now shut up and listen."

So he does as he's bidden, and she describes to him seeing an enormous airs.h.i.+p hovering above the flames, spewing its load of water and sand into the ravenous inferno.

"There might have been a dragon," she says. "Or it might have only been started by lightning."

"A dragon," he replies, working his finger in a little deeper. "Yes, I think it must definitely have been a dragon. They're so ill-tempered this time of year."

"Shut up. This is my dream," she tells him, even though it isn't. "I almost died, so much of me got burned away, and they had me scattered about in pieces in the charity hospital. But you went right to work, putting me back together again. You worked night and day at the shop, making me a pretty metal face and a tin heart, and you built my b.r.e.a.s.t.s-"

"-from sterling silver," he says. "And your nipples I fas.h.i.+oned from pure gold."

"And just how the Sam h.e.l.l did you know that?" she grins. Then Missouri reaches down and moves his hand, slowly pulling his finger out of her. Before he can protest, she's laid his palm over the four bare bolts where her leg fits on. He smiles and licks at her nipples, then grips one of the bolts and gives it a very slight tug.

"Well, while you were sleeping," he says, "I made a small window in your skull, only just large enough that I can see inside. So, no more secrets. But don't you fret. I expect your hair will hide it quite completely. Madam Ling will never even notice, and nary a Chinaman will steal a glimpse of your sweet, darling brain."

"Why, I never even felt a thing."

"I was very careful not to wake you."

"Until you did."

And then the talk is done, without either of them acknowledging that the time has come, and there's no more of her fiery, undreamt dreams or his glib comebacks. There's only the mechanic's busy, eager hands upon her, only her belly pressed against his, the grind of their hips after he has entered her, his fingertips lingering at the sensitive bolts where her prosthetics attach. She likes that best of all, that faint electric tingle, and she knows he knows, though she has never had to tell him so. Outside and far away, she thinks she hears an owl, but there are no owls in the city.

And when she wakes again, the boarding-house room is filled with the dusty light of a summer morning. The mechanic is gone, and he's taken her leg with him. Her crutches are leaned against the wall near her side of the bed. She stares at them for a while, wondering how long it has been since the last time she had to use them, then deciding it doesn't really matter, because however long it's been, it hasn't been long enough. There's a note, too, on her nightstand, and the mechanic says not to worry about Madam Ling, that he'll send one of the boys from the foundry down to the Asian Quarter with the news. Take it easy, he says. Let that burn heal. Burns can be bad. Burns can scar, if you don't look after them.

When the clanging steeple bells of St Margaret of Castello's have rung nine o'clock, she shuts her eyes and thinks about going back to sleep. St Margaret, she recalls, is a patron saint of the crippled, an Italian woman who was born blind and hunchbacked, lame and malformed. Missouri envies the men and women who take comfort in those bells, who find in their tolling more than the time of day. She has never believed in the Catholic G.o.d or any other sort, unless perhaps it was some capricious heathen deity a.s.signed to watch over starving, maggot-ridden guttersnipes. She imagines what form that G.o.d might a.s.sume, and it is a far more fearsome thing than any hunchbacked crone. A wolf, she thinks. Yes, an enormous black wolf or coyote, perhaps all ribs and mange and a distended, empty belly, crooked ivory fangs and burning eyes like smoldering embers glimpsed through a cast-iron grate. That would be her G.o.d, if ever she had been blessed with such a thing. Her mother had come from Presbyterian stock somewhere back in Virginia, but her father believed in nothing more powerful than the hand of man, and he was not about to have his child's head filled up with Protestant superst.i.tion and nonsense, not in a modern age of science and enlightenment.

Missouri opens her eyes again, her green eye all cornea and iris, aqueous and vitreous humors and the ersatz one designed for her in San Francisco. The crutches are still right there, near enough that she could reach out and touch them. They have good sheepskin padding and the vulcanized rubber tips have pivots and are filled with some shock-absorbing gelatinous substance, the name of which she has been told and cannot recall. The mechanic ordered them for her specially from a company in some faraway Prussian city, and she knows they cost more than he could rightly afford, but she hates them anyway. And lying on the sweat-damp sheets, smelling the hazy morning air rustling the gingham curtains, she wonders if she built a little shrine to the wolf G.o.d of all collier guttersnipes, if maybe he would come in the night and take the crutches away so she would never have to see them again.

"It's not that simple, Missouri," she says aloud, and she thinks that those could have been her father's words, if the theosophists are right and the dead might ever speak through the mouths of the living.

"Leave me alone, old man," she says and sits up. "Go back to the grave you yearned for, and leave me be."

Her arm is waiting for her at the foot of the bed, right where she left it the night before, reclining in its cradle, next to the empty s.p.a.ce her leg ought to occupy. And the hot breeze through the window, the street- and coal-smoke-scented breeze, causes the sc.r.a.p of paper tacked up by her vanity mirror to flutter against the wall. Her proverb, her precious stolen sc.r.a.p of Shakespeare. What's past is prologue.

Missouri Banks considers how she can keep herself busy until the mechanic comes back to her a torn s.h.i.+rtsleeve that needs mending, and she's no slouch with a needle and thread. Her good stockings could use a rinsing. The dressing on her leg should be changed, and Madam Ling saw to it that she had a small tin of the pungent salve to reapply when Missouri changed the bandages. Easily half a dozen such mundane tasks, any woman's work, any woman who is not a dancer, and nothing that won't wait until the bells of St Margaret's ring ten or eleven. And so she watches the window, the sunlight and flapping gingham, and it isn't difficult to call up with almost perfect clarity the piano and the guzheng and the Irishman thumping his bodhran, the exotic, festive trill of the xiao. And with the music swelling loudly inside her skull, she can then recall the dance. And she is not a cripple in need of patron saints or a guttersnipe praying to black wolf G.o.ds, but Madam Ling's specialty, the steam- and blood-powered gem of the Nine Dragons. She moves across the boards, and men watch her with dark and drowsy eyes as she pirouettes and prances through grey opium clouds.

Icebreaker.

E. Catherine Tobler.

I have set out again.

Icebreaker steams south, across waters so cold that every day we see more of the floating, sun-bright daggers of ice which Captain Brown calls icebergs. These great islands of ice grow larger the farther south we travel, but Icebreaker shows no concern. She was built true to her name, fixed with a sharp metal prow which Brown says will slice through any ice that should dare get close enough. Above this metal dagger of a prow perches a strange figurehead, an angel of sorts, with wings of ripped metal. In her chest, a maze of cogs that may once have turned, but in this iced air have frozen solid. This apparatus caught my attention because I carried something similar in my own pocket: J. J. Brennan's heart.

These days, everyone wanted to live forever, but even a clockwork heart eventually winds down, as was the case with J. J.'s. I think of the scandal if anyone knew artificially prolonging life? Unheard of! What dark magic moved such things? They believed him dead of a heart attack, but truth be told, J. J. would have died years ago without Dr. Varley's Extraordinary Clockwork Heart. Small, it fit easily within my gloved hand, closed around it even now.

"Murrie," he said to me as his heart slowed, "take me south when you go. Burn me on the big ice."

And so it was that J. J.'s body rested in the hold below, and one Mr Plenty of the Daily News lurked, determined to capture this story for the world, though as I had told him, it was a wholly private affair, between me and J. J. and G.o.d above. We'll see if he gets that quote right.

Mr Plenty shadowed me. It no longer mattered to the press that I was a dwarfess, oh no though the outcry when such a fine, upstanding inventor as J. J. married a woman like me is well remembered. How much grander a story it was that I stood now as Brennan's widow, stricken with grief and pain, and leaving the known world for that which few had seen, let alone survived the Antarctic. Doing it on his final bidding, they said, though J. J. knew of my love of travel, knew I wanted to see the big ice years before now. We wanted to explore, hunt, record.

"Miss Muriel?"

A familiar nudge at my side, from a wrist attached to a grubby hand, drew my gaze from the ice, to the only other person on board who was my size. Conor Westerfield, nine years old and a former stowaway, peered up at me from beyond his goggles and hooded parka, offering a length of cooked squid. Rippling its way along a bamboo skewer, the squid was still so hot from Cook's fry pan, steam rose in the morning chill. I released my hold on J. J.'s clockwork heart to take the squid from the boy. Conor grinned up at me, the color of his eyes still hidden behind his goggles.

"Eat fast, Miss Muriel," he said and shoved his own squid into his mouth. He hissed, for it must've burned his tongue, but he chewed without cessation, yellowed teeth working like a frenzied machine, rending the hot, salted squid in no time.

I didn't inhale my squid quite so fast, so still held the skewer with half its tentacles intact when Cook burst from the galley, hollering about a squid theft. Hence Conor's warning about eating it fast. All the better to consume the evidence.

"Going t'tan his hide ... that's all ... just a little There you are!" Cook leveled a surprisingly clean finger in Conor's s.h.a.ggy-headed direction. "And!" The finger moved toward my squid.

My eyes narrowed behind my own goggles. "Come now, Cook," I say, "you know squid is better when it's fresh hot." I lifted the skewer and took a bite, sliding the meat free with my teeth before chewing with a satisfied grin. "Let the boy be."

Before he could let Conor be, though, Icebreaker gave a terrible heave, as if she meant to come clear out of the water. We were thrown backwards to the deck, to find ourselves staring at the bright blue sky above, as one might see lying in one's own backyard on a summer day. But it wasn't a backyard we found ourselves in, it was the southernmost sea of this world, a strange place indeed.

Brown's shouts carried back to us, but I made neither head nor tail of them. Conor's head had struck the deck and he lay terribly still while all around us the Icebreaker continued to heave and shudder. The very metal around us groaned, like something horrific was ripping into and through it. Had we struck ice? Was Icebreaker sinking?

I clambered to my knees and crawled to Conor's side, opening my parka to strip the sweater from around my waist and cus.h.i.+on his head. His eyes fluttered open, a glimpse of green behind goggle lenses and then gone, and he moaned my name before falling to silence once more. Still, his cheeks looked better, flushed with color now and not pale as they had been moments before.

A glance upward showed me deck hands running every which way, including Cook, who had been enlisted to grab what looked like the bomb lance. Was it a whale, then, that had hit the Icebreaker? Down here in these icy waters?

"Miss Muriel, look! Look!"

I found Conor at the rail without warning, bouncing back as only a nine-year-old can. His hands flailed, pointing to something in the water. I fisted a hand into my sweater, grabbing it before I joined him there. The boy seemed no worse at present for the knock on his head, unless the thing in the water was a great dream shared by us both had I hit my head?

It was no whale, this thing in the water. With flesh that was scaled and leathery, and a head that bore a broad scarlet crest, this creature was like nothing I had seen. This was chiefly the reason so many had come on this voyage to see what they never had, to explore this untamed and icy wilderness, to learn what it contained. And here was a creature, unknown to us, and screaming. How I wished J. J. were here to see it. I clutched his heart in my pocket, and stared at the thing.

What thrashed in the water could not possibly be real, yet Cook hefted the bomb lance to his shoulder and fired, so he saw it, too. The lance wobbled in the air, flipping end over end before its sharp iron head pierced that broad, bright crest. A magnificent cry filled the world part shriek, part howl and the beast flung itself wildly away from the Icebreaker, which resulted in it ripping the lance free. Blood as bright as the crest itself spread in the foamed, agitated water as the creature turned and sank, vanis.h.i.+ng. Abruptly, all was calm.

We all stood there like fools for a moment, gaping. Surely the scene called for such behavior, and then Brown and Cook and the others scrambled into motion, Brown calling for the nets to be shot in an attempt to catch the lizard. Mr Plenty came out from behind a cask, his linen suit quite rumpled indeed, and set his goggles to rights, before resuming scribbling on his notepad. His hand looked shaky at best, walking stick tucked under his arm.

While the nets did indeed fire, with their customary m.u.f.fled whomp-thump sound underwater, the men only succeeded in hauling back catches of wriggling fish and a wholly random bioluminescent sea cuc.u.mber, which was quickly deemed suspicious and likely poisonous. No lizard beast. Cook kept the cod and tossed the others back, muttering as he went back to the galley. Squid theft, giant sea lizards and an unexpected bounty for supper. Cook's morning had been busy.

"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh," he said, and the hatch snapped shut behind him.

"Miss Muriel?"

I looked at Conor and smoothed a hand over his head, fingers seeking the goose egg that was sure to be there. He gave a little wince, but didn't pull back.

"Ever seen anything like that?" he asked. When he spoke, I could see that he'd bitten his lip. The lower lip was swollen, with a bright blotch of red against the pink.

I shook my head at his question, and looked back out over the waters as Icebreaker continued through them. A little splash here and there against the bergs which huddled off the rail, but there was no sign of the lizard, nor of any such beasts. Against the far horizon, I could see the faint outline of another s.h.i.+p, but at this distance, all seemed calm there, too.

"Can't say that I have," I replied, and looked back to the boy beside me.

"You've traveled a lot, though," he said, rummaging in his vest, withdrawing an empty, broken squid skewer. He tossed it over the side of the s.h.i.+p. "Nothing like that?"

I had traveled a lot, much more than most women in my time. But then, most women didn't have a husband like J. J. Brennan, a man who agreed that women should climb mountains, fly airs.h.i.+ps and explore the world if they so wanted. I looked out over the cold waters again, suddenly lonely for that big, old man. The rest of my days without him? That idea often hit me at the strangest times. Most other times, it seemed he was just in the other room, out of sight. I slid my hand back into my pocket, fingers curling around his clockwork heart.

"No, nothing like that."

Conor held the silence a moment, then piped up. "Never seen anything like me before, either, huh?"

I grinned, sharp and bright as Icebreaker slid out of the shadow of a berg and into clearer water. "Nothing like you in all my years," I had to admit, for it was true.

The adults on board Icebreaker had a propensity to treat me more like a child, owing to my size, whereas Conor, an actual child, treated me as the adult I was. He and I walked into the mess hall for dinner that evening, Conor's arm outstretched for my gloved hand to rest upon, and while he wore a jacket, it had seen better days, and too many mice in recent weeks, so we made for a curious enough pair.

Mr Plenty's eyes snapped to me, a.s.sessing, looking for any crack he might widen into a complete story. I stayed close to him, though, focused on my young escort.

"It rather smells like fried cod in here, Mr Westerfield," I said, looking at the collection of men gathered round the table. Fried cod, yes, but I saw bowls of golden soup scattered about the table as well.

"It rather smells like unwashed men, Missus Brennan," he confided in a whisper that could have been a dozen times softer, truth be told.

I cleared my throat and sat on the first empty stretch of bench I came to, next to one Mr Herbert, who was an ill.u.s.trator and thus usually covered in ink. Tonight was no exception. It looked as though he had been wrestling with the squid from that morning.