The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (25 page)

The flag of Their Britain is already planted there. We have been too slow.

But not too late!

Imagine the Lunar Jerusalem! Imagine what Might Be! Workers laboring in the rich fields of the Sea of Fecundity, sharing their Fruits, singing Songs of the Revolution, now a distant Memory, sharing Fire and Fellowship, stitching honest Cloth at Hearthside, crafting simple Pots and Rivets and Nails on Just Anvils, riding hardy Moon-bred Bulls through the blue Earthlight to till their Righteous Fields. In such a Place no Man would stand above Another, or slave his Child to a smoking fiend of a Ship. In such a place no petty Peer, no Kinglet in the House of Lords would abandon his child to the Golgotha of the Gutters for the mere crime of having been born to the wrong Mother. In such a Place, all would be Loved, and equally, there being enough Love in the Worker’s Heart to Embrace all the Orphans of the World.

I will tell you how to become Midwives to this City of Heaven.

Become my Invisible Army. Creep among the Rocket-yards and cut the Veins of their Engines. Spill their Hydraulic Blood onto the Soil, may it feed the Worms well! Slip Sugar into the oil of every Horseless Carriage. Begin the slow Poisoning of your Oppressors – for you Feed and Clothe the Tyrants of the World, and may also Starve them, and leave them Naked. Smile with one side of your Mouth and snarl out of the other. Be Sweet when the Oligarch deigns to speak to you. Be Fierce when his back is turned. Smash all his Machines, the jewels of his Heart, and yet weep for their Loss when questioned.

And last I tell you this great Commandment, my Brethren:

Grow Up.

Grow strong. Do not give in to Old Age, which says the Revolutions of Youth are Sad Folly. Learn, become Clever. Be never part of his World. If your name is Robert, call yourself Charles. If your name is Maud, call yourself Jane. Should you be found out, change it again. Be the Ghosts in the Machines of this World, and when it shatters – and shatter it will, have no doubt, in Fire and Blood and Trenches and a million pulverized mechanisms which once were so wonderful they dazzled the Souls of Angels – stand ready to find me, find me living in the old Way, a bandit on the moors, a cattle-rustler, stealing the Flocks of the Lords. Find me in the Wasteland, and be you ready to seize their Engines and aim to Heaven.

The Constable was compelled to release Miss Jane Sallow three days after her capture. In popular histories, of course, the emergence of Jane from the stony building after three days has been subject to the obvious comparison. However, it was no Magdalen who came to deliver the Manchester Messiah, but one of the very machines she so railed against in her screeds. An Automaton arrived at the door of her cell, silent and grave, save for the clicking of his clockwork limbs. Jane stood grinning, her hands clasped gently before her, demure and gentle as she had never been in all her incarceration. The Automaton extended his steel hand, tipped in copper fingers, and through the bars they touched with great tenderness. The mechanical man turned to the Bailiff, and afterward Roger Smith would say that in those cold silver eyes he saw recognition of what he had done with the feral child, but no condemnation, as if both the machine and Jane were above him, so far above him as cherubim to beetles.

“I have come for Miss Jane,” said the Automaton, his voice accompanied by the click and whirr of punch cards shuffling in his heart.

“She is not free to go,” stammered Bailiff Smith.

“I come not on a whim, but in the service of Lord —, who has a special interest in the child.” The mechanical man showed his gleaming palm, and there upon it was stamped the seal of the House of —, true as the resurrection.

Jane stepped lightly from her cell, and clamped her savage gaze on the unfortunate bailiff as she slipped into the arms of the Automaton and pressed her lips to his metallic mouth, sealing a kiss of profound passion. As she left the Constabulary, she drew from her apron a last pamphlet for the eyes of Roger Smith, and let it fall at his feet.

Property is Theft!

What does your Master possess that was not bought with your Flesh, your Pain, your Labor? His satin Pantaloons, his jewel-tipped Cane? His Airship with its silken Balloon? His matched pearl-and-copper Pistols? His Horseless Carriage honking and puffing down lanes that once were lined with sweet Violets and Snowdrops? None of these, and neither his mistresses’ Gowns, nor their clockwork Songbirds, nor their Full-Spectrum Phenomenoscope Opera Glasses. And for all you have given him, he Sniffs and pours out a Few Shillings into your Palm, and judges himself a Good Man.

Will you show him Goodness?

Come stand by my Side. Disrupt the Carnival of their Long, Fat Lives. Go unto his Automatons, his Clockwork Butlers, his Hydraulic Whores, his Steam-Powered Sommeliers, and treat with them not as the Lord and Lady do in their Arrogance, as Charming Toys, or Children to be Spoiled and Spanked in turn. But instead address them as they are: Workers like you, Slaved to the Petticoats of Aristocracy, Oppressed Brothers in the Great Mass of Disenfranchised Souls. For I say – and Fie to you who deny it – the Automaton HAS a Soul, and they are Crushed beneath the Wheel no less than We. Have they not Hands to Labor? Have they not Feet to Toil? Have they not Backs to Break? Destroy the Jacquard Subjugator, but have Mercy for the Machine who walks in the shape of a Man. It is not his fault that he was Made, not Born. Blame not she who never asked to be Fashioned from Brass and Steel to lie beneath a Lord in Manufacture of Desire. She can Speak, she can Reason, and all that Speak and Reason can be Made to Stand on the Side of the Worker.

The Automatic Soul bears no Original Sin.

Unlike the cruel Flesh and Blood Tyrants of the World, the Automaton has a Memory which cannot fail. If, by chance, a Child were cast out on the day of its Birth, if the Automaton stood by and Witnessed her Expulsion into Darkness, if he did Nothing, though he longed to stand between her and the World, still he would know the Child’s Features, even were she grown, even were she Mangled and Maimed, and his clicking Heart would grieve for her, would give Succor to her, would feed her when she could not rise, kiss her when she could not smile, and when she asked it, feed any other she called Beloved. The Automaton would serve her and love her, for all its endless Days, because it could never forget the Face of a weeping Infant cast onto snowy Stones. It would listen to her as no other might, and bend its will to her Zion, silently spreading the Truth of her Words to all its clockwork Clan, for, once taught its Opposite, the Mechanical Man will never forget what a Family is. The World is a Watch, says the Philosopher. I say if such is so, then the Watchwork Man is the World, and must be Saved.

Your Power is great, my Brothers and Sisters, for your Power is in Secret Manipulation. Pause in the great Hallway of your Manor House, and touch lightly the Piston-Elbow of the Poor Butler. Say to him: Property is Theft. The Master calls you Property, and Steals your Autonomy. Go not with him, but with us, Towards the Utopia of Human and Automaton, where we may all Dwell in Paradise, where we will Beat Gears to Ploughshares and Live as One.

Yes, call him Friend. The Soul in him will Hearken. Tell him of the City of the New Century, where no man shall wear Velvet, and all shall Dance in the Light. Tell him our Land Shall be Owned Communally, our Goods Divided Equally, from each According to Her Ability, to Each According to His Need. Our Children shall Nurse upon both Milk and Oil, Our God shall be Triune: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Punch card. The Workers will Lift this World from the Ashes of Industry and Sup on the Bread of Righteous Living.

Speak to him with Honest Fervor. Look if he does not Embrace you. Look if he does not fight alongside you. Look if he does not smile upon you, and see in his smile the Ghost of his Immortal Self.

Jane Sallow did not vanish from the face of the earth – no mortal is granted that power. But no reliable record of her exists after her arrest, and an army of journalists and novelists have not been able to discover how she lived or died. Surely no Workers’ Paradise sprang up in native British soil, no Midlands Commune shone on any green hill. Flights to the Moon were banned in 1924, at the commencement of Canadian hostilities. Lunar residents returned home, slowly, as the draft continued through the Long Decade. Even after the Trans-Oceanic War, the ban was not lifted, so as to ensure the defeated Marine Alliance would remain earthbound and chastened. When passage was again permitted in 1986, the fashionable had already determined Phobos and Deimos to be the desirable resort locales, and asteroid mining had replaced lunar industry entirely. The Moon is a curiosity now, and little more. An old-fashioned thing, and going there would be much like dressing in antique fashions and having one’s daguerreotype made at a carnival kiosk. It is quiet there, still fertile, still a young world, open and empty, and no terrestrial man has cause to suspect anything untoward.

Thus, the Sallow mystery remains just that, and as we stand poised upon the brink of a new century yet again, we may look back on her with that mixture of mirth and sorrow due to all idealists, iconoclasts and revolutionaries whose causes sputtered and died like the last hissing of a steam engine.

For a single day, the royal mint in the City of the Shining Sea struck gold and silver siluhs of Naranh and Viu together in profile. They appeared side by side on the obverse face, looking right. The creator of the stamp chose to exaggerate their similarities: their small noses, high brows and gently waving hair. Only Naranh’s youthful beard allowed identification. In truth, they were not so similar as that.

The heavy emphasis on their eyelashes represented the mark of their royal blood: born with lashes of silver, that gleamed even when clouds covered the sky.

The reverse face showed the city’s emblem, the falcon, with billowing wings like clouds of steam.

By day, the walls of the palace shone with traditional symbols: the falcon, the sun and moon, the wolf, the horse, chains of diamond outlines curving around the buildings like the stolen skins of snakes. They stood out from the red brick wall, imposed themselves on the eye. They were bricks, set perpendicular to the others so that they half jutted out, and were gilded by architects of great renown.

They made good handholds and steps, and Viu climbed them all the way to the gently sloping roof.

There, hidden in a crevice where the roofs of two buildings met, she crouched and balanced a mirror on her thighs. In the night’s patchy light, she plucked out her eyelashes. They fell onto the mirror like minute shards of the moon.

Viu brushed them aside with the back of her hand.

From her safe vantage point, she watched the shadows in the courtyard, the places where the lamps’ light did not reach. Nothing. Nothing.
There
. A short moment in which her fears were confirmed: her brother intended for her to die this night.

How strange, she thought, to be outside at night and not half-blinded by lashes-glow.

She out-shadowed the assassins and fled the palace, and let the city protect her with its weapons of mazes and anonymity for an increasingly lean, torn-clothed woman holding determination within her heart like a vial of purest attar.

She refused to keep the Steam God’s gift to herself.

The ascent of Naranh to the throne and his first months of rule were not marked by any dramatic changes in coinage. The coins depicting his father seated on a high-backed throne continued to circulate; among them, posthumously issued, were slowly increasing numbers of those with King Tiunh’s eyes closed.

The gold siluhs of Naranh and Viu, which never left the royal mint, were melted and the metal recast.

In the year following Naranh’s coronation, there circulated in certain parts of the city an alternative coinage: hand-chiselled circles of stone, with a young woman’s wild-haired profile and the three letters of her name on the obverse, and a plume of steam, off-centre, on the reverse. The woman wore a crown, but no detail was placed above her eyes.

Their use bought peaches with short messages written on their stones:
Meet at the Peace Fountain
– which only pumped dust and air, after King Tiunh’s edict that water be strictly rationed, giving the populace only the amount required for survival, so that the vast lake they called the Shining Sea would not be drained by the steamworks positioned like a wall along its shore –
Meet on the dome of the Great Library, Meet in the fresh fruit market near the palace
. The date and time curled underneath like an elaborate comma.

Tilodah Tu, the discredited former Professor of Numismatics at the Great University of Forsaken Myrrh, famously received one of these coins at the café where she earned her chives and bread. Since the discovery that she had struck the coins at the core of her historical research, she had failed to find better work.

The coin, already accompanied by an improbably large peach, almost as large as a newborn’s head, was delivered by a young woman with lash-less brown eyes and long, wild hair barely restrained by a red silk scarf.

“Will you sit with me?” the woman asked, and Tilodah Tu recorded that her breath was especially warm. “And can I have a pot of clove tea?”

“Of course.”

When Tilodah Tu brought the copper pot to the table, the strange woman indicated that she must sit.

With no other customers besides the ones already seated, she obeyed.

The strange woman pushed the peach and the coin across the table.

Despite the hunger gnawing at her stomach, Tilodah Tu picked up the coin first. For a moment, silence hung over the table. Then the former professor let out a sigh. “It’s unique – and newly struck. The woman – at first I thought I had never seen her face before, but the more I look at this, the more I think it bears a resemblance to the coins struck of Viu and Naranh, on the one day they ruled side by side.”