The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (69 page)

“From a long way off we saw you. We saw a woman who escaped the slow grind of a wretched death only to become obsessed with it, stalking it as any starving hunter stalks his prey, and wasting as acutely every time it flees his snares. A grail quest, a fool’s errand, a dog chasing its tail, and yet she persists. Before we tell her fate, we would comprehend her folly.”

The Lady Explorer glanced over, but her son was sitting with arms crossed, gazing back at her with defiance. She sighed.

“When we built the airship,” she began, “one of my tasks was to hold the tray of wires and electrodes when the master engineer connected her controls up to her heart. I could barely hold it still. I couldn’t feel my hands. The calluses from stitching wings – every night I’d go home and touch my stomach, where the baby grew” – a sidelong glance at her son, who flinched away, embarrassed – “and every day I felt it less and less. As if he was slowly disappearing. Or I was.”

She flexed her fingers, staring as though she expected to parse sudden revelations from the caked grime of her gloves.

“And so all the workers bided their time until the airship was completed? Tell us, were the first whispers of rebellion yours?”

She almost laughed full in their faces, remembering how near she’d come to pissing herself when the shooting began. How another worker had thrust a gun into her hands and she’d stared at it, aware only in a vague sense of how it fired. How she’d hidden under the workbench with her belly to the wall, so the bullets couldn’t reach the baby without passing through her first. How she’d stayed there until the sounds of shooting turned to scavenging as the workers loaded up the ship they’d won with anything they’d found to hand, and she was dragged out by the apron-belt and tossed aboard, a spoil amid spoils.

What she said was: “The airship’s switchboard was full of dials and toggles – the only intermediary between the captain’s will and the ship’s. I watched the engineer set each piece into place and wondered whether somewhere inside me there was a switchboard just like hers, with dials to show all my potential fears, potential loves, potential deaths. Who knows what becomes of us in the other world? Why might we not have a choice? Might it not be that each time my death is told, that that dial stops, and where it stops becomes the truth? And if I reject the death it tells, maybe I can start the dial spinning once again.”

“Until it stops.”

“When someone tells a death I can accept, I’ll
let
it stop. I’ll keep on searching until someone does.”

The girls eyed her closely. “But what the ivy tells us,” they said, “so shall be.”

“That’s what you all say. You tea-leaf-readers, card-turners, guts-scryers, hedgewitches, table-tappers, you’re all the same. So far I should’ve been shot, drowned, stabbed in an alley, run down in the street, fallen off a widow’s walk, been shipwrecked, hit by lightning, and perished of consumption in a garret. And yet I am here and asking.”

Once they’d given her her death on a folded slip of paper and she had gone her way, the ivy-girls went hooded out into the rain, watching the airship shake the water off its back like a dog, bank hard, and vanish oversea.

“Lies of omission are still lies,” said one mouth, while the other one said: “She really ought to tell that boy the truth.”

In the land of blue ice and red lichen, the Lady Explorer bartered half of the phosphorous matches, a foxfur waistcoat, the least mildewed of the down quilts and the airship’s rudder for her death.

The whaler had been stranded on the ice shelf some twenty-odd years when the airship touched down and hailed her – more as a formality than anything: she was tatter-sailed, barnacle-encrusted, glazed with ice, and the Lady Explorer half expected to see
Mary Celeste
or
Flying Dutchman
emblazoned on her stern. What was there, however, was a palimpsest of christenings: something unintelligible overpainted with
Lydia
in what looked like long-dried blood.

Someone’s sweetheart, the Lady Explorer in the wan scraps of her worldliness surmised. Some woman out of widow’s weeds two decades gone, and taking solace where she may. She wished her well.

For half an hour, the airship’s crew signaled to the
Lydia
with flags and phosphorus flares while the Lady Explorer checked the navigational instruments against five different maps and shook her head at each of them in turn. At last, the Lady Explorer in a white rage and the crew jubilant, they readied the salvage gear.

Just as a few of the men were beginning to swing grappling hooks over their heads, and others to cheer them on, the engine-tender spotted a group of figures approaching across the shelf, each dragging two or three frozen ringed seals behind him, bound together by the hind flippers in strings like sun-dried fish she had seen once in a market on the bone-white shore of a blood-warm sea.

Later, over the last of the airship’s Darjeeling, they sat around the
Lydia
’s reeking tryworks, the earthbound ship’s crew and the winged one’s, and the
Lydia
’s bosun read the Lady Explorer’s death in the swirling oil of the trypot.

When the bosun whispered what he’d seen into her ear, the Lady Explorer set down her tea, clambered down onto the ice shelf, and began to walk. Slowly, faltering: her legs leaked strength like water through cupped hands these days, and her joints screamed every time a foot shot sideways on the ice.

“She’ll come back,” the bosun told the Lady Explorer’s son when he hissed a curse and stood, brow creased with equal parts concern for her frailty and anger at her stubbornness, to follow. “They always do.”

“How will she find her way?”

“The ghosts’ll show her. Old flensing trails.” The bosun pointed out across the shelf, where, some half-mile inward from the
Lydia
’s berth of ice, a vast red stain bled up out of the endless white like overdilute watercolor paint. It spread, growing tendrils that stretched out in turn and doubled back and looked, as the Lady Explorer’s son’s field binoculars and the last late light informed him, very like the wakes of bloody booted footprints tacking back and forth around the suggestion of some hulking shape he could not see.

“What did you tell her?” he asked at length.

The bosun’s eyes went misty. “That she’d go out in a blaze of glory in a dogfight with a man-o’-war, all hands lost, and she’d plummet from the sky like Lucifer aflame.”

The Lady Explorer’s son sighed.

“Well, what d’you want me to have said? It’s what I
saw
.”

“I don’t know. Something.” He tipped his head back, watching as the first pale stars came out. “She’s like an old man sleeping in his coffin to get used to the idea. I wish one of you would tell her something that would make her send it off for kindling and get back in her goddamned bed.”

“Nothing wrong with preparing to greet the spirits on the far side of the river,” said the bosun primly, picking tea leaves from his teeth with a whalebone pin.

“Not unless when you do greet them,” the Lady Explorer’s son retorted, “you find you have
nothing at all to say
.”

Returning along a strange red path she hadn’t noticed on her journey out across the shelf, the Lady Explorer found the
Lydia
’s crew trying to force the airship’s rudder to fit where the
Lydia
’s once was and the airship’s crew strapping a new rudder in place with an elaborate harness that put her in mind of a spiderweb. The harness was seal-sinew and her son had carved the rudder from a single block of ice with the tools they’d salvaged from the factory.

“Almost pieced back together,” the grinning bosun told her as she passed the
Lydia
. “Patched the hole in her hull with some pitch off a merchantman gone astray a few years back. A few dozen more seals, and we’ll have enough skin for a sail.”

Her nerves were still raw from mediating the barter for the rudder, and her heart still kicked her every time she recalled how her son had come to her aid against their crew and vowed to get the ship back in the air, and though she’d tried ten times since then to catch his eye and smile, he had never looked her way.

Coming round from the prow, somewhat stung at her son’s apparent scorn, it nettled her to discover that, for her part, she could not quite meet the gleaming violet placidity of the airship’s regard. She made a shy-eyed gesture at the makeshift rudder, then held up her bad hand for the benefit of the airship’s compound gaze. “Now,” she said, finally hazarding its stare, her face unfathomable, “we’re even.”

The new rudder took them eleven degrees south before it began to melt. When it had shrunk from the size of an outhouse to that of a steamer trunk, then a tabletop and a sawblade, the airship’s crew set her down on the water and took shifts paddling with whalebone oars, following their collective guesswork of unfamiliar constellations south.

Four days’ cruising from its landing, a hunting pod of orcas surfaced around the airship and chaperoned it straight to landfall some six hundred miles on. During this leg of the journey, great clumps of kelp and cairns of fish were given to appear on deck, always at night, always when nobody stood watch, and by no agency that anyone on board could later rationally explain.

In the land of grey houses and grey streets, the Lady Explorer bartered the greatcoat off her back, the machete and flensing knife from her belt, the copper honeycombs and amethystine glass of the airship’s compound eyes, the compass round her neck, the rainwater cistern and the shorn iron-grey length of her hair for her death.

She tired quickly here. She told herself it was the sullied air, the oppressive angle of the light, the smell of dust and gin and desiccated violets coming off the flocked wallpaper of the medium’s salon. But her hands were veined and mottled, her memory and bladder failed as often as they held, and she did not believe her own lies.

She flew a ghost ship now. The crew had pooled what they had gained and kept over the years to purchase a retrofitted washbasin of an airship from the shipyard outside town, which they’d (somewhat amusingly, she thought) renamed the
Swan
. They would break the bottle on her bow within the week, and then she would take wing.

Her own airship, or what was left of it, rested in the yards, lonely as a boat in drydock, while she and her son paced the warren of its rooms like restive ghosts themselves.

In what her quest had not ransacked from the captain’s quarters of the airship, the Lady Explorer’s son sat her down on a rotten chaise and took her hands, more to pin her in place when he stared her down than from any outward tenderness.

Reflected in her dulling eyes he saw a figure trapped as if down a well and glaring out at the world it could not reach. With mild shock he realized that it was himself.

He forced his gaze back to her. “Look at you,” he sneered. “Have your damnable dials stopped yet? You’ve one foot in the grave already, and what do you have to show for it? Has it never crossed your mind that none of your precious mountebanks can tell your fate any better than I can? Look here, at the scuffing on my boot. There –
that
looks like a swarm of bees, and
there
’s the river you jump into, trying to escape them. These pebbles stuck in the mud on the sole signify the rocks you forgot you had in your pockets, and sadly you drowned.” He paused, trying to collect himself. “You look me in the eye and tell me that this …” He gestured at the room, once fine, now as though ravened at and left for dead; and at her, once strong-armed and sharp-eyed, now rotting like a windfall full of wasps; and at himself. “That any of this was worth it.”

She eyed him very closely. “Do you honestly think that this – that any of this – has ever been about
me
?”

Not waiting for an answer, she shook her hands free of him and left.

In her absence, he took a deep breath, counted to ten, let it out slowly, and when this failed to have any noticeable effect on his level of serenity, he took four long strides across the room and swept a shelf full of framed daguerrotypes and conch shells and hurricane lamps to the floor. For a moment the crash appeared to satisfy him. He half turned. Then spun on his heel and punched the wall.

From the wall came a whirring and a series of reproachful clicks, and then a panel in the wainscoting slid free, releasing a bloom of mildew and two folded sheets of paper. Both were yellowed with age and buttery soft with rereading.

The softer and older-looking of the two he recognized. The words were centered on the page in a clump, outlined by a long-armed globular shape, which, in turn, was flanked by smaller outriding shapes. A few squiggles off to either side of the central mass suggested waves.

Mama,

Because you always have your Nose in your Book of Maps, I will Hide this Letter there, Disguised as a Map. If you are reading this, I have Tricked you, and I am Sorry, so please do not be Angry.

I met some Boys and Girls on the Beach yesterday, when you told me to Go Play while the Grown-Ups Sold some Things at the Docks. I tried to Play with Them, but they laughed at me and kicked Sand on my Trouser-Legs. They said that Real Boys and Girls live in Houses and have Pet Cats and Sunday-Shoes and Governesses. They did not Believe that I could live in the Sky and still be a Real Boy. One bigger Boy said that I must be a Gull-Boy or a Crow-Boy and my Mother a Bird. I struck him in the Nose. It bled. A lot.

Still I think I should like to Live in a House. I do not know what Sunday-Shoes or Governesses are, but I did like to Play with Jacob’s Cat, before we had to Put her in the Stew.

P.S. I am also Sorry that I spilled your Ink, but I needed a Shape to draw my Coastline from. I told you that little Cora did it. That was a Lie. Please do not be Angry about that too.

The other was unfamiliar.

My darling Child,

Oh! I cannot Call you so anymore, can I, for you are a Grown Man now and I an Old Woman, and much like a Madwoman in an Attic, I fear, as far as our Fellows are Concerned. I do not doubt your Sentiments toward me are similar. Well do I deserve Them!