The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (6 page)

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 God 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 shaggy-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 cushion 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, vanishing. 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 muffled whomp-thump sound underwater, the men only succeeded in hauling back catches of wriggling fish and a wholly random bioluminescent sea cucumber, 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 ship, 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 ship. “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 airships 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, assessing, 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 illustrator and thus usually covered in ink. Tonight was no exception. It looked as though he had been wrestling with the squid from that morning.

He had a sketch pad in his lap and a glance down showed me he had been hard at work capturing the beast we had seen in the waters. He had yet to color in the crest, though, and as Conor slid onto the bench beside me, Herbert looked up at us with watery blue eyes. He managed a tentative smile for us.

“Wasn’t it perfectly terrible?” he asked in a whisper. Thin, inked hands latched onto his sketch book, bringing it up to the table where he placed it over his bowl of soup. His fingers traced a path above the ink drawing, from the beast’s crest down its scaled belly, into fuming water. Herbert had a good way with his pencils and inks; the image was excellent indeed.

“Have you seen its like before?”

Herbert cleared his throat at my question, a man clearly more comfortable with drawing what he thought than speaking it.

“No,” he eventually said as other conversations around the table came to a close, making ours the chief form of entertainment. He cleared his throat again, fingers stroking his bow tie before he added, “It may well be an entirely new discovery.” He looked up, at those others at the table, seeming to challenge them to disagree.

No one did, not even Mr Plenty, who seemed as animated as the others when it came to discussing the creature.

“Entirely new!”

“Wholly discovered by … us!”

“Brown’s Lizard!”

“Brown’s Arctic Beast!”

“The Terror from the Icy Deep!”

Mr Herbert drew his sketch pad back onto his lap and returned to his soup as the conversation went on around us. I smiled thanks to Cook when he brought me soup and cod both, then looked at Conor.

“Wish Mr J. J. could have seen it,” Conor said around a hot hank of cod in his mouth.

My gloved fingers touched the lump of J. J.’s heart in my pocket.

“Oh, I think he did,” I said, and dipped a spoon into the golden soup before me.

After the meal, I slipped away largely unnoticed, being that the men were once more occupied with Mr Herbert’s drawings, and I being small and a woman, could easily vanish. Belowdecks, the conversation faded, consumed by the endless chug of the triple expansion engines. I was short enough that overhead pipes didn’t worry me, but at every hatch, I had to pause and take a large step up and over the lip which rose out of the floor. Captain Brown said that every compartment could be sealed in case of flooding, but I was of the idea that I wanted to be on the top deck in that instance. Getting the hell off the ship.

J. J.’s casket awaited me in an aft compartment, perched atop a collection of crates, lit by the flicker of one gaslamp above. Strange, Mr Plenty had written, how a man so beloved and wealthy would end up in a simple pine box. Natural, I said to him, for in life J. J. had not seen himself as being above anyone. Death would claim us all in the end.

“Hey-ho, big man,” I whispered and leaned back against the door to close it. It latched with a soft rasp of rubber against steel, and I didn’t turn the wheel to seal it tight, figuring we weren’t in imminent danger of flooding.

At some point, I knew this would get easier. Everyone told me it was so. People died every day. I was not the first to lose a loved one. All true, but I’d never had a husband before. Had never had a husband die. So amid what everyone else likely labeled “natural”, in this case I labeled “strange”. I also slotted it into the “never want to do again” category.

Here, in the privacy of the room, I tugged my gloves off and placed my hands against the smooth pine. I could feel the vibration of the engines clean through the wood, and pictured J. J. inside, wriggling.

I stood there for a long time. Simply standing. A thing I hadn’t done in years, being willingly still. Eventually, I took J. J.’s heart from my pocket and placed it atop the casket. It rolled a little with the motion of the ship, then finally settled into a place near his feet. Time seemed to slow here as
Icebreaker
moved further south. Time alone with J. J. and memory.

“Missus Brennan.”

I jerked at the sound of Mr Plenty’s voice behind me. My eye fell to the clockwork heart atop the casket, thrown into shadow as Mr Plenty moved deeper into the room. I wanted to reach for it, but it was too late. He had seen.

“That is … remarkable.”

My eyes met Mr Plenty’s over the foot of the casket, walking stick in hand. J. J.’s heart seemed to wink as the gaslight fell over it again. The gears were still, but for a moment, they seemed to move again. Wishful thinking.

When Mr Plenty moved toward the heart, I lunged for it. My hand closed around it before his could, and I drew the heart firmly away, leaving a long scratch across the pine lid. I half expected Plenty to leap over the casket in an effort to claim it.