Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (32 page)

"You must," ordered Ruane. "Tell me about the Stopper."

Ahfred looked up at her.

"I don't want . . . I don't want to remember," he whispered.

"Tell me," ordered Ruane. She raised the egg, and Ahfred remembered the pain in his ears.

"The Stopper was a sandgrain artifice that would hunt and destroy other sandgrain artifices," he said. He did not talk to Ruane, but rather to his own shaking hands. "But it was not wound tightly and would only tick on for minutes, so it could be deployed locally against inimical sandgrain artifices without danger of it . . . spreading."

"But clearly the Stopper did spread, across the world," said Ruane. "How did that happen?"

Ahfred sniffed. A clear fluid ran from one nostril and over his lip.

"There were delivery mechanisms," he whispered. "Older weapons. Clockwerk aerial torpedoes, carded to fly over all significant cities and towns, depositing the Stopper like a fall of dust."

"But why were these torpedoes launched?" asked Ruane. "That is —"

"What?" sniffled Ahfred.

"One of the things that has puzzled us," said Ruane quietly. "Continue."

"What was the question?" asked Ahfred. He couldn't remember what they had been talking about, and there was work to be done in the garden. "My roses, and there is weeding —"

"Why were the aerial torpedoes launched, and who ordered this action?" asked Ruane.

"What?" whispered Ahfred.

Ruane looked at the old man, at his vacant eyes and drooping mouth, and changed her question.

"Two keys were used to open the Ultimate Arsenal," said Ruane. "Whose keys?"

"Oh, I took Mosiah's key while she slept," said Ahfred. "And I had a capture cylinder of her voice, to play to the lock. It was much easier than I had thought."

"What did you do then?" asked Ruane, as easily as asking for a glass of water from a friend.

Ahfred wiped his nose. He had forgotten the stricture to be still.

"It took all night, but I did it," he said proudly. "I took the sample of the Stopper to the fabrication engine and redesigned it myself. I'm sure Stertour would have been amazed. Rewound, each artifice would last for months, not hours, and I gave it better cilia, so that it might travel so much more easily!"

Ahfred smiled at the thought of his technical triumph, utterly divorcing this pleasure from any other, more troubling, memories.

"From there, the engine made the necessary ammunition to arm the torpedoes. One thousand and sixteen silver ellipsoids, containing millions of lovely sandgrain artifices, all of them sliding along the magnetic tubes, into the torpedoes, so quietly—Then it took but a moment to turn the keys . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . and off they went into the sky —"

"Three keys?" asked Ruane.

"Yes, yes," said Ahfred testily. "Two keys to open the arsenal, three keys to use the weapons, as it has always been."

"So Distributor Kebediah was present?"

Ahfred looked out the doorway, past Ruane. There were many tasks in the garden, all of them requiring long hours of quiet, contemplative work. It would be best if he finished with this visitor quickly, so he could get back to work.

"Not at first," he said. "I had arranged for her to come. A state secret, I said, we must meet in the arsenal, and she came as we had arranged. Old comrades, old friends, she suspected nothing. I had a capture cylinder of her voice, too. I was completely prepared. I just needed her key."

"How did you get it?"

"The Stopper!" cackled Ahfred. He clapped his hands on his knees twice in great satisfaction. "Steam skeleton, sandgrain enhancement, she had it all. I had put the Stopper on her chair—"

Ahfred's face fell, and he folded his hands in his lap.

"It was horribly loud," he whispered. "The sound of the artifices fighting inside her, like animals, clawing and chewing, and her screaming, the boiler when the safety valve blew . . . it was unbearable, save that I had my helmet—"

He looked around and added, "Where is my helmet? It is loud here, now, all this talking, and your breath, it is like a bellows, all a-huffing and a-puffing—"

Ruane's face had set, hard and cold. When she spoke, her words came out with slow deliberation.

"How was it you were not affected by the Stopper?"

"Me?" asked Ahfred. "Everyone knows I have no clockwerk enhancement. Oh, no, I couldn't stand it, all that ticking inside me, that constant
tick ... tick... tick ...
It was bad enough around me, oh, yes, much too awful to have it inside."

"Why did you fire the torpedoes?" asked Ruane.

"Tell me who you are and I'll tell you," said Ahfred. "Then you may leave my presence, madam, and I shall return to my work . . . and my quiet."

"I am an investigator of what you termed the Rival Nation," said Ruane.

"But there is no Rival Nation," said Ahfred. "I remember that. We destroyed you all in the War of Accretion!"

"All here on Earth," said Ruane. The lines on her neck, that Ahfred had thought tattooes, opened to reveal a delicate layering of blue flukes, which shivered in contact with the air before the slits closed again. "You killed my grandparents, my great-uncles and great-aunts, and all my terrestrial kin. But not our future. Not my parents, not those of us in the far beyond, in the living ships. Long we prepared, myself since birth, readying ourselves to came back, to fight, to regain our ancestral lands and seas, to pit the creations of our minds against your clockwerk. But we found not an enemy, but a puzzle, the ruins of a once great, if misguided, civilization. And in seeking the answer to that puzzle, we have at last found you.
I
have found you."

"Bah!" said Ahfred. His voice grew softer as he went on, "I have no time for puzzles. I shall call my guards, assassin, and you will be . . . you will be . . ."

"Why did you fire the torpedoes?" asked Ruane. "Why did you use the Stopper? Why did you destroy your world?"

"The Stopper," said Ahfred. He shook his head, small sideways shakes, hardly moving his neck. "I had to do it. Nothing else would work, and it just kept getting worse and worse, every day —"

"What got worse?"

Ahfred stopped shaking his head and stood bolt upright, eyes starting, his back rigid, hands clapped to his ears. Froth spewed from between his clenched teeth and cascaded from his chin in pink bubbles, stained with blood from his bitten tongue.

"The noise!" he screamed. "The noise! A world of clockwerk, everybody and everything ticking, ticking, ticking, ticking —"

Suddenly the old man's eyes rolled back. His hands fell, but he remained upright for a moment, as if suspended by hidden wires, then fell forward and stretched out headlong on the floor. A gush of bright blood came from his ears, before slowing to a trickle.

It was quiet after the Grand Technomancer fell. Ruane could hear her own breathing and the swift pumping of her hearts.

It was a welcome sound, but not enough, not now. She went outside and took a message swift from her pocket, licking the bird to wake it before she sent it aloft. It would bring her companions soon.

In the meantime, she began to whistle an old, old song.

Luz could see the future, or at least her future. It looked just like the present. The Saturday market was slow. This early in the spring, the only produce for sale was green onions and early lettuce, which most of the people in town grew in their own kitchen gardens. Even the stalls selling jars of canned vegetables and preserves from last year weren't doing much business.

She sat in her family's stall, waiting for someone to stop and buy some of her grandmother's canned salsa. At seventeen, Luz had spent every Saturday morning she could remember doing the same thing, and unless the worst happened and she was drafted into Federal service when she turned eighteen, then she imagined she would be doing the same thing on all the Saturday mornings to come.

Her grandmother sat quietly beside her, knitting a cap for one of Luz's countless cousins. The old cigar box open at their feet had just a few more coins and Federal notes than had been there at first light, when they had rolled up the tarp and set out their jars of salsa and tomato sauce and last year's green beans.

Luz heard a clattering noise in the distance and idly glanced past the low buildings of the square to where the coal balloons were tethered just outside the town limits. Federal treaties with Localists, like the townspeople, kept the government's flying ornithopters from the sky above Lexington, but Feds observed the letters of their agreements, never their spirits. Clusters of canvas balloons strung with thick hemp hawsers hung in the colorless sky. A brass-winged orni-thopter had just landed in the ropes and clung there like a fly on a cow's tale. Someone below, out of sight, set a pulley to working, and skips full of coal began to rise up to feed the hungry machine.

If she did get drafted next year, at least there was a small chance she would fly in one of those machines, though it was more likely that she'd wind up working in the mines. Or, given all her father had taught her about tinkering and her mother about scavenging, she might wind up in the machine yards that were said to spread for hundreds of miles across the eastern states.

"There's better ways to fly," said her grandmother. Luz started and realized she had been staring at the ornithopter for several minutes. Her grandmother continued, "Like on that bicycle there you're always sneaking off to ride."

Luz nodded. "Or like your board when you were a girl, eh, abuela?" Unlike all of Luz's other relatives, her grandmother hadn't been born in Kentucky, but in California, so far away as to be a legend. Luz's abuela had seen an ocean; she had swum in it. Most fascinating of all to Luz, she had surfed it.

Before her grandmother could answer, Luz's brother Caleb brought his bike to a sliding stop next to the stall. He was two years younger than Luz, but six inches taller, all elbows and knees where Luz had already been all curves and muscles at that age. He had a wide grin on his usually somber face.

He had a sheet of gray paper rolled up and stuck in the waistband of his shorts, clearly a worksheet he'd pulled down from the post outside the community workhouse. Luz's grandmother smiled and said, "I suppose you're leaving early today, eh, Luza?"

Caleb nodded respectfully at his grandmother but spoke to Luz. "Invasive plant removal at Raven Run," he said. "They've got gloves and hand tools out there, so nothing to haul along. And we get four hours for travel time."

This was a good community service assignment. Raven Run was a nature preserve about fifteen miles away, on the limestone cliffs above the river. The old roads were still in decent shape in that end of the county, and there were some good hills along the way, especially if they took a route that went down to the river and back. Luz could make the ride straight to the preserve in forty minutes, and she wasn't even the strongest cyclist among her friends. They would have time to take a good long ride.

"How many slots?" asked Luz, heading around the back of the stall to her own bike.

"Four," said Caleb. "Um, Samuel was at the workhouse and already asked to come along. He's bringing one of his sisters."

Luz felt irritation pass over her face at the thought of Samuel and his hopeless crush on her. It wasn't that she didn't like him; it was just that he was like everything else in her life — known. Predictable. But she shrugged and said, "OK. Go round them up and meet me at the zero mile marker in ten minutes. I'm going down to the shop to top off the air in my tires."

The shop was the stall run by their father that served as the main bike shop in town. He fixed the post office's long-haul cargo bikes for free in exchange for good rates on bringing in parts from the coast, but he always insisted that his children —and his other customers —make an honest attempt at repair before they settled for replacement.

Luz rolled in and nodded at her father. He was talking as he worked on a customer's bike, running through his bottomless inventory of crazy stories about old races and bike equipment made from the same material they used to use to make spaceships. He had even been to see the Tour de France, back before when pretty much anybody could go overseas, even people who weren't rich or soldiers.

The customer made his escape while Luz was using a floor pump to air up her tires. When she looked up, her father was carefully routing a brake cable through an eyelet brazed on to the downtube of an old steel frame. He had his tongue between his teeth, concentrating, and greeted her with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

"Just needed some air," said Luz.

Papa finished with the cable. "Off for a ride?" he asked.

"Community service at Raven Run," she said. "With plenty of time padded into the assignment for us to go down to the river and back."

Papa laughed. "They should weight the time allowances on those assignment sheets according to youth and vitality," he said. "Y'all should have to spend the extra time doing whatever needs doing out there instead of doing hill sprints up from the ferry. They figure the travel time based on old slowpokes like me."