IGMS Issue 32 (15 page)

"You wouldn't dare," the pale one growled.

From behind, Ardam sensed movement. A glance told him weapons had been raised. He knew what the Nemek were thinking but he couldn't see which way the Mayor's blasters were pointing. Would the Mayor side with the pale one simply because they were of the same Family, or did he put greater value on his friendship with Ardam?

A friendship that was built on peace.

"You're right, I would not." Ardam said. "Children are far too important to harm." He stepped forward until he was directly in front of the pale one, a hand's breadth separating their torsos. "Don't you see that is the reason for everything I have done?" Ardam filled his throat pouch and released his anger in one brief, roaring bellow. The pale one's eyes went wide and he staggered back with no roar of his own.

"Ardam is right." The Mayor's voice boomed from a short distance behind. "We should have moved when we were first told that children were at stake. What hubris let us think that Cranther seedlings are less important than our own families?"

Ardam knew then that the blasters were not pointed at his back. The relief was small amidst the growing hostility but he was glad his friend had found his strength.

"Shaw, are you really going to let these
aliens
take our homes away?" the pale one said.

"A strange sentiment considering they have acted far more humanely than you." Mayor Shaw glared at the pale one and their eyes locked.

"We will do what's right. And I have a feeling that Ardam and his Family will still be willing to help us relocate. We will survive, and we will do it with a collectively clean conscience. Let's get to work people."

Slowly the crowd shifted. The Mayor's supporters restarted work immediately. The rebellious group grumbled amongst themselves with a few continuing arguments, but finally conceded and spread out to help.

Through all of this, the seedlings pushed upward. Structures buckled even as their young stalks bent. Some would be deformed from their struggle. Though now that their Paramount was deformed, maybe the Family would be more understanding.

The Mayor stepped alongside Ardam and helped him release the wall of a small structure. They looked at each other.

"Was I correct in telling my people that you would be willing to help?"

Ardam looked across the town at the mass of two-legs and Cranthers working together. The rebellious ones had not picked up the task of saving his seedlings eagerly and that had not set well within his hearts. But now they worked with as much vigor as the rest. Ardam supposed that after children and Family, the protection of one's home would be important to a stationary culture. Then his eyes fell on the pale one on the far end of town, refusing to help, and Ardam still felt anger toward him.

"We will help all except that one. I do not want him near my Family or the seedlings."

The Mayor's mouth opened but no sound came out. His eyes widened and Ardam felt this expression as surprise. Finally he spoke.

"What am I supposed to do with him? I can't cast him out, he doesn't know how to survive here alone. None of us do."

"The Nemek have a place for exiles and those requiring discipline. They will take him."

Surprise deepened to shock. Ardam could feel the beginning of bitterness from his friend. He reached over and loosened the next piece of wall.

"They'll kill him," the Mayor said.

"They might."

"Ardam," the Mayor paused, his eyes sliding down to where Ardam's arms used to be. "I know what he did was awful, but you've got to understand, he believed he was protecting us. The Captain is a warrior. He acted in the only way he knew how."

Ardam removed the wall and tossed it into the pile. A line of two-legs and Nemek passed the piece down moving it beyond the border of the breeding grounds into the hands of those that were organizing the pieces. He considered the Mayor's argument.

"If one of the Nemek attacked against orders, I would not hesitate to offer the warrior's life to compensate for the offense."

"Ardam, we've worked so hard at peace, don't let the Captain's blood taint that."

"My blood has already tainted that." Ardam stopped work and faced the Mayor. "My friend, he maimed me, and would have killed me. That is not something I can easily forget. What would you have me do with him?"

The Mayor stammered. "Let us imprison him. We'll build a cage and guard it and feed him. We'll keep him away from your Family."

"Until one of his supporters sets him free. No. He must go with the Nemek." Ardam ended with a huff though he didn't know if the Mayor understood the finality of the phrase.

"But what about his son? He has no mother. Will you send him to the Nemek, too?"

This argument always returned to the children. Ardam could not declare the importance of children and then punish an innocent child for his father's mistakes.

"The south has a more agreeable climate year-round. In two seasons I will lead you and your Family where you can choose a territory in which to re-establish your town." Ardam chuffed on the compromise he was about to make. "The pale one will stay with the Nemek until then. When we part ways, I will release him to you. That is my final word."

The pale one's punishment would not be as harsh as Ardam would like, but his friendship with the Mayor was more important than revenge. And while he would tell them not to kill him, the Nemek would make the pale one work hard and contribute to the community. Maybe he could learn how to get along in the greater Family.

"You are harder than you seem, Ardam. You preach peace but demand it with power."

Ardam could not read all of the emotion behind the statement, but he knew the Mayor was not entirely happy.

"I prefer peace, but I will always take care of my Family," Ardam said.

Nearby a seedling squirmed. Ardam stepped over and tried to reach toward it with arms he didn't have. In his mind he cringed and corrected the movement. The stalk rose thick and strong above Ardam's knee. Large broad leaves enfolded the little Cranther within. His toes and the top of his head peeked out of the encapsulation. It would be a few days before any of them were ready to be fully born.

Mayor Toumani Shaw stepped over and knelt next to the seedling. With the gentlest touch he peeled back the leaf to get a glimpse of the seedling's face. He slept peacefully, all four eyes closed; the seedling had no idea the chaos that surrounded its birth. The Mayor leaned down and inhaled deeply the scent of the child. He sighed, then nodded and Ardam felt the Mayor's mood soften.

"They are incredible, Ardam. You had every reason to fight for them."

Ardam looked at his Family and at the two-legs and thought about the bloodshed they had avoided.

"And even more reason not to."

James P. Blaylock is certainly one of the pioneers of Steampunk. Whether he invented it or not is under discussion in this interview. He was in any case born in 1950 and is noted for decidedly strange, often humorous novels such as
The Elfin Ship, The Stone Giant, The Digging Leviathan, Lord Kelvin's Engine, Zeuglodon, The Last Coin, The Paper Grail, All the Bells on Earth, Knights of the Cornerstone,
etc. He won the World Fantasy Award for the story "Paper Dragons" in 1986 and "Thirteen Phantasms" in 1997.

SCHWEITZER
: So, did you and Tim Powers invent Steampunk? Did you have any conscious awareness of doing so, or was it just something in the air?

BLAYLOCK
: This is a complicated question, as are all questions of origin, I suppose. Certainly K.W. Jeter has to be included with Tim Powers and I when it comes to inventing Steampunk. K.W. was a great instigator in those days, and it was K.W. who suggested to Powers and I that we read Henry Mayhew's brilliant
London Labor and the London Poor
, a book that functioned in its way as much of the inspiration for my novel
Homunculus
. That being said, many SF readers could point out that Michael Moorcock and Keith Roberts and possibly other writers had already written books that today would be regarded as Steampunk.

When I wrote my first Steampunk stories I hadn't read those books and didn't know they existed. I had spent some time in front of the television watching
The Wild Wild West
, which I very much enjoyed, but I didn't at all associate it with what I was writing at the time. It was a western, after all, and not at all the world I wanted to inhabit as a writer, which was 19
^th
century Europe, primarily England. Not all influences are conscious, however, and certainly
The Wild Wild West
appealed to me for Steampunkish reasons that I didn't bother to define at the time, partly because Steampunk as such didn't exist. I'd been infected with a regard for 19
^th
century science, language, and trappings by reading Verne and Wells and Conan Doyle as a kid, and later on by dredging myself in Stevenson. I was bowled over when I was around eleven years old, give or take, and first saw
The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
and
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.
Those films are quintessential Steampunk, and for me were monumental influences.

When I wrote "The Ape-box Affair" (my first Steampunk story, although K.W. wouldn't coin the term "Steampunk" for another 10 years), I was bingeing on both Stevenson and P.G. Wodehouse, and was caught up in the language and atmosphere of those bygone days -- a literary bent I'd been on for the past several years at the university, where I'd read as much 18
^th
and 19
^th
century literature as I could get my hands on, as did Tim. In short, I was primed to write Steampunk, and so were Tim and K.W., and we found ourselves hanging out together in Orange and Santa Ana in the 1970s, talking about our own writing, recommending books to each other, etc., and what came out of it was this early crop of stories and novels by the three of us, all with what came to be regarded as Steampunk sensibilities.

Because of those publications, the three of us came to be regarded as the progenitors of Steampunk: we didn't regard ourselves as such until Steampunk had caught on, so to speak, and was developing the characteristics of the phenomenon that it became. I was amused when the term came into existence, but my understanding of it as a phenomenon (nice word) was clarified in the very early 90s, when I was invited to attend a Steampunk conference put on by the University of Bologna's Department of Utopian and Dystopian Studies, one day of which was dedicated to my work. Certainly they're a scholarly crowd, and certainly they considered the three of us to have invented the thing; I make it a point never to argue with scholars from high-toned universities. So . . . did we "invent" Steampunk? Something like that, although certainly we were standing on the shoulders of giants, whether we were aware of it or not.

SCHWEITZER
: How did you feel when it came back in recent years, having transformed itself into a social phenomenon and generated a second wave of literature?

BLAYLOCK
: I was quite happy when it blew up, so to speak, in recent years. I had written my last Steampunk novel in the early 90s, and had no idea of writing anything more in that vein (nor any idea of not writing more). Some few years back I read a nifty collection of stories by James Norman Hall, titled
Doctor Dogbody's Leg
, which reminded me of how much fun I'd had writing Steampunk. I asked Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press whether he was interested in my writing a series of lengthy Steampunk novellas (or short novels) and he said that he was. I set out to write what became
The Ebb Tide
. The inspiration for the book had little or nothing to do with the growing phenomenon of contemporary Steampunk; it had everything to do with my reading
Doctor Dogbody's Leg
. So my second wave of Steampunk stories was coincidental with the cultural phenomenon, and I'll write the stuff when the craze has faded, given that I haven't lost my taste for it.

Given that I first fell for the stuff as a ten-year-old when I checked
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
out of the Stanton Free Library, the charm of the literature in one form or another has lasted me over fifty years. I doubt I'll abandon it any time soon. Even so, I'm happy to be suddenly living in a world in which editors actively want to buy Steampunk stories. I had more fun writing
The Aylesford Skull
, my most recent Steampunk novel, than I had writing anything else in recent memory, or so it seems to me now. I've got a new publisher for it -- Titan Books -- which is hearteningly enthusiastic about the novel and about Steampunk in general. So -- speaking of the phenomenon that is Steampunk -- it makes me quite happy. I love the whole idea of it. Despite the proliferation of Steampunk junk, the best of it is literally wonderful. If I stepped out of the house this morning and discovered that the general population was dressed in morning coats and beaver hats and crinoline, I'd have a wide smile on my face (although I'd still be wearing jeans and a flannel shirt; it was a gaudy era, and I'm not a gaudy kind of guy).