Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (5 page)

"This is the Enigma Temporal Suspension Apparatus," Colleen told me.

"What's it do?"

"What it did was suspend time. You aim the Enigma Apparatus at something, say, a train," she said, allowing a smirk. "And an energy field envelops the entire thing, slowing down time inside to a crawl. It doesn't last long, seven minutes at the outside. But it's enough for us to climb aboard and be about our business."

"What business is that?" I asked, my eyes still on the Enigma.

Robbing trains and airships," Amanda Harper said, and spat out a plug of tobacco. She were short, with wheat-colored hair that hung straight to her middle back.

"We're reminders that people shouldn't feel too smug. That what you think you own, you don't. That life can change just like that.

Fadwa snapped her fingers.

Colleen opened up the watch face. There were gears upon gears, the most intricate I ever seen, more like metal lacework than parts. They'd been pretty burned and bent up. Tiny flares of light tried to catch but died before they could spark. Right in the center were a teardrop-shaped glass vial. A blue serum dripped inside.

"Pretty, isn't she?" Colleen purred.

"How do you know it's a she?" I said, echoing Agent Meeks.

"Oh, it's a she, all right. Under all those shiny parts is a heart of caged tears."

"We didn't make this world, Addie. It don't play fair. But that don't mean we have to lie down," Josephine said.

Colleen put the Enigma Apparatus in my hands, and a rush of excitement come over me when I felt all that cold metal. "Can you fix her?" she asked.

I clicked a small piece into place. Something shifted inside me. "Ma'am, I'm sure gonna try."

Colleen clapped a hand on my shoulder — they all did — and it might as well have been a brand. I'd just become one of the Glory Girls. When night come, I rolled up a tiny note, tucked it into the beak of a mechanical pigeon, and sent it back to the chief to let him know I were in.

Master Crawford taught me about getting inside the clockworks, that you have to shut out the distractions till it's just you and the gears and you can hear the smooth click and tick like a baby's first breath. You can give lovers their moonrises off the Argonaut Peninsula or the wonder of a seeding ship with its silos pumping steam into the clouds, bringing on rain. To me, ain't nothing more beautiful than the order of parts. It's a world you can make run right.

"There's some speculators what say time is as much an illusion as the Promised Land," Master Crawford told me once, when we was working, "and that if you want to find God, you must master time. Manipulate it. Get rid of the days and minutes, the measurements of our eventual end."

I didn't quite cotton to what Master Crawford were saying. But that weren't unusual. "Well, sir, I wouldn't let the Right Reverend Jackson hear you talk like that."

"The Right Reverend Jackson don't listen to me, so I reckon I'm safe." He winked, and in the magnifying glass, his eye was huge. "I saw it in a vision when they dipped me into the Pitch. I hadn't even whiskers and already I knew time was but another frontier to conquer. There'll come a messenger to deliver us, to impress upon us that our minds are the machines we must dismantle and rebuild in order to grasp the infinite."

"If'n you say so, sir. But I don't see what that has to do with Widow Jenkins's cuckoo clock."

He patted my shoulder like a grandpappy might. "Quite right, Miss Addie. Quite right. Now. See if you can find an instrument with the slanted tip——"

We got to working again, but Master Crawford's words had set my mind a-whirring with strange new thoughts. What if there were a way to best time, to crawl inside the ticks and tocks of it and press against it with both hands, stretching out the measures? Could you slide backward and forward, undo a day that had already been, or see what was comin' around the blind curve of the future? What if there weren't nothing ahead, nothing but a darkness as thick and forever seeming as your time under the Pitch? What if there weren't no One God at all and a body were only owing to herself, and none of it— the catechisms, the baptisms, the rules to keep you safe — none of it meant a dadburned thing? That set me a-shiver, and I made myself say my prayers of confession and absolution silently, to remind myself that there were a One God with a plan for me and the infinite, a One God who held time in His hands, and it weren't for the likes of me to know. I prayed myself into a kind of believing again and promised myself I wouldn't think more on such thoughts. Instead, I concentrated on the fit of gears. The bird pushed through the doors of the Widow Jenkins's clock and give us a cuckoo.

Master Crawford beamed. "You're a right good watchmaker, Miss Addie. Better than I were at your age. The pupil will best the master soon enough, I reckon," he said, and I felt a sense of pride, though I knew that were a sin.

The night Mam took sick, Master Crawford let me harness up his horse to ride for the doctor. Our two moons shone as bright as a bridegroom's pearled buttons. The wind come up cold, slapping my cheeks to chapped red squares by the time I reached the miners' camp. Outside the bunkhouses, the guards sat on empty ale barrels, playing cards and rolling dice. There were a doc in the camp, and I went to him, begged on my knees. I told him how we'd buried Baby Alice the week before, and now here was our mam, our rock and our refuge, burning up with the fever, her fingers already slate tipped with bad blood, and wouldn't he please, please come back with me?

He didn't even put down his whiskey. "Nothing you can do 'cept stay out of its way, young lady."

"But it's my mam!" I cried.

"I'm sorry," the doc said, and offered me a drink. In the camp, there were shouting. Somebody'd come up snake eyes.

It were Master Crawford give me the Poppy for Mam. "I was saving this for the End Times, like the Right Reverend Jackson said. But I'm an old man, and your mother needs it a sight more than I do."

I stared at the red-and-black cube in my palm. I had half a mind to swallow it down myself, live out the rest of my days on some colony in my mind. But then I were scared I'd be trapped in a forever night of nothingness, and me the only livin' thing.

I fed Mam a little to ease her passage and put the rest in my pocket. Then I lit the kerosene lamp and kept watch through the night. She never said nothing, but curled in on herself till she lay whorled against the bed linens like a fossil in the rock. I heard Master Crawford died during the winter. Died in his sleep in the pale workroom, under a blanket of down. 'Tweren't the fever or his heart or his veins tightening up.

It were just that his time had run out.

Over the next few weeks, I learnt a lot about the Glory Girls. Josephine and her sister Bernadette had run away from the working fields. The overseer's bullet found Bernadette 'fore they even reached the mountains, but Josephine got away, and now she wore a thread from her sister's dress woven into her coarse braids as a reminder. She could set a broken bone as easily as she cooked a pan of corn bread, said it were about the same difference to her.

When Amanda's uncle got too friendly in the night, she found refuge doing hard labor in the shipyards. She'd spent long hours there and knew how to find the vulnerable spot in all that steel, the place where the Enigma could take hold and do its work. She were able to find timetables, too, so the girls would know which trains to hit and when.

Fadwa were a crack shot who'd honed her skills picking off the scorpions that roamed the cracked dirt outside the tents where she lived with her family in the refugee camps. The authorities took her pap to who knows where. Dysentery took the rest of her family.

That left Colleen. She'd been a debutante with fancy ball gowns, a governess, and a private coach. Her daddy were a speculator what had invented the Enigma Apparatus. He were also an anarchist, and when he tried to blow up the Parliament, that were the end of the gowns and the governess. They arrested her daddy for treason. 'Fore they could collect Colleen, she took the Enigma and fled on the next airship.

I felt a might sorry for all of them when I heard their tales. It were an awful feeling to have nobody. We had that in common, and I had a mind to come clean, tell them who I were and stop lying. But I had a job to do. At first, I done like Chief Coolidge told me, stalling on the repairs while trying to sniff out details from the Glory Girls and their next robbery. But they wasn't trusting me with that yet, and I figured it couldn't hurt to know more about the Enigma Apparatus. Besides, my pride were on the line, and I figured I'd better make good on my reputation as a girl what could fix things. Soon I were hunched over that device, from rooster crow till long after the moons scarred the skin of the sky. I'd figured out most of the gears, but them sputters of light around the serum vial vexed me.

"Simple windup won't do. Near as I can tell, she needs a jolt to get her going," I said after I'd been at her for a good three weeks with not much to show for it.

Amanda looked up from the barrel where she was washing Fadwa's long black hair. "Mercy, where would we find us somethin' like 'at?"

I thought for a bit, rubbing my thumb over the old Poppy square in my pocket. "I think a blue nettle might could do it."

"What's that?" asked Josephine.

"It's a kind of flower with a little bit of lightning inside. They grow in a orchard back to New Canaan."

"But that's on Believer land."

"Believers is all at the river for baptism time," I said. "Besides, I know where to go."

"Guess we best go picking, then." Amanda said. Giggling, she poured a bucket of cold water all over Fadwa, who pulled her gun so fast I thought I saw sparks.

John Barks's family hadn't been Believers. His mam and pap died in an airship fight off the western coast when he were fourteen. The Right Reverend Jackson and his wife took John in and started teaching him the Ways of the One Bible. You'd think that an orphan left to fend for himself on a planet where even the dust tries to choke you might have a score to settle with the One God. But not John Barks. Where most of us believed 'cause we were told to or afraid not to or just out of habit, he believed with his entire self. "I'm a free man," he'd say. "And I'll believe what I want." I couldn't rightly argue with that.

For two years, I'd watched John Barks grow from a sapling of a boy to a fine young man with muscles that strained the seams of the prayer shirts Mrs. Jackson sewed for him. He had a head of black hair what could rival a gentleman's boots for shine. Becky Threadkill swore he'd take her to wife, said she'd seen it in her vision under the Pitch. Half a dozen other girls swore the same till the Right Reverend were forced to spend the next Sunday cautioning against the sin of sharing your visions.

But it were me John Barks said "Mornin' " to when I went to fetch water, and me he asked to tutor him in the Scriptures. It were me he asked to tell him about being baptized in the Holy Pitch when he turned sixteen.

Every spring, the Believers of the End of Days walked the five miles to the River Pitch and set down their tents to await the baptism day. Most of us got dipped when we reached thirteen and done all our catechisms. They dressed you in the robes and slipped the tiniest petal tip of Poppy under your tongue to quiet your fear, slow your breathing, and keep you still. It stole into your bloodstream and weighted your bones like stones sewn into the lining of your skin. I remember Mam telling me not to be scared, that it were just like getting in a thick bath.

"Just lay real still, Addie-loo," she cooed, stroking the eucalyptus balm over my eyes to keep the Pitch blindness out. "When you're calm, the One God'll show you a vision, your purpose in this life."

"Yes'm."

"But first you have to face the darkness. There'll come a time when you want to fight it, but don't. Just let it cover you. It'll be over before you know it. Promise me you won't fight."

"Promise."

"That's my good girl."

The catechisms said that once you lay in the Pitch and come up again, you came up newborn, your sin purged and left behind you in the thick black tar, like an impression in the mud. That's what they said, anyway. But you never knew what would come bubbling up inside you while you was under. You had to last a full minute with the oily darkness moving over you like a coffin lid, closing out the world. Even a world as damned as this one is better than the weight of nothingness the Pitch smothers you in. All sense of time and place is lost in that river. The Believers say it give you a taste of what could become of your immortal soul if you don't turn to the One God and prepare for the End Times. When you come up outta that river, your damnation sliding down your body like a syrupy shed skin, you fall on your knees and say thanks to your Maker for that breath of hot, dusty air. It makes Believers, the Right Reverend Jackson says. No one wants to spend eternity in such a place as that.

Once you was done, the priests gave you your first real taste of Poppy to seal your covenant with the One God. Miracles and wonders played across your eyes then, reminders of His mercy and goodness. Master Crawford muttered that it weren't proof of nothing 'cept folks' willingness to be hornswaggled. But nobody paid him any mind.

I told John Barks all of this the week before his baptism while we were walking in the orchard.

"They say that when you take your first taste of Poppy, your legs go all prickle bones and your tongue numbs like a snowcake feast and stars explode behind your eyes, making new flowers against the closed dark-velvet stage curtains of your retina, letting you know the One God's show's about to get under way," John said, bustin' with excitement.

"Well, the Poppy is right strong," I said.

"And did you feel the One God sure and true then, Addie?"

"I reckon."

We'd stopped under a blue nettle tree in full bloom, the glasslike, bell-shaped blossoms pulsing with small bursts of lightning. The air was sharp. Overhead, the seeding ships pierced the dark-red cloud blanket, trying to bring on rain. John Barks's arm brushed mine and I colored. We were s'posed to keep a respectful distance, as if the One God's mam walked between us.