The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (70 page)

To my Shame, I have not been wholly Frank with You. I cannot Undo my Errors now, but I can, perhaps, patch up some few of the Holes that they have Rent between Us.

When we stole the Airship, I was but a Girl – a Working Girl of Twenty, with Engine Grease in her Hair and all over Bruises, Cuts and Scars from her own Labor. A Girl just Strong enough to stay aboard the Ship, give Birth to You, and there fight to Remain; but a Girl just Silly enough that when we Stopped outside a Town to Make Repairs, and a Traveling Circus joined our little Camp, and those of the Crew with a Spiritist Leaning asked the Circus Fortune-Teller to tell theirs, I went along.

What the Fortune-Teller told me was that our Airship would be Crippled by a Broadside with a Ship-of-the-Line and drift through Equatorial Waters, deadlocked as a Clipper on a Windless Sea, and that I would Perish of Starvation, along with most of the Crew – and my only Son.

It was in that Moment that I became the Person you have always Known me as. After a Life of Hardship, which until Then I had Accepted, I resolved that I would Fight – an unseen Enemy, and a Formidable One, and perhaps One who cannot be Defeated, it is True – but I could not leave you to that awful Fate, or to any of the Others, prescribed to me over the Years.

Because, as perhaps by now you will have Guessed, each Death that I was told was Mine – but it was not Mine Alone. I have seen you Shot, Drowned, Stabbed in an Alley, Run Down in the Street, Fallen off a Widow’s Walk, Shipwrecked, Hit by Lightning and Perished of Consumption in a Garret – and it haunted me. But what Haunts me more is this: would those Deaths have been Mine Alone if I had not Sought to Keep you Close? Will my Attempts to Rescue you lead you to your Doom instead?

Though I fear I shall never have the Courage to Say it to your Face, it is my one remaining Wish that you get out, get free of this, and live your Life as best you can – and perhaps, one Day, find it in your Heart to Forgive one Foolish Old Woman, who sought to Protect you by keeping you – by keeping Both of us – Encaged.

And now I am off to Deliver this Letter before I change my Mind. Lest I give the Crew Reason to think that a Woman who has Learned to Repair a Combustion Engine in Freefall or Shoot a Tiger between the Eyes at Ninety Paces is afraid of her own Son!

P.S. It turns out I am not as Brave as I had Hoped. It is Three Months since I Wrote this Letter. I will Show it to you this Evening, upon your Return from Treasure-Hunting with the Crew, and then likely Flee to my Room like a Child from a Strange Noise on the Stair.

The Lady Explorer’s son stared at the letter for some time – at the shakiness of the penmanship, the smudges from rereading, and the date at the top, some six years gone. Then he folded both letters back up together, put them back in place, and went to pack his things.

“The spirits sense resistance in your soul,” the medium said to the Lady Explorer, as the table rose and sank and the chandelier flared and dulled and the curtains snapped against the panes in a gale-force wind localized specifically to themselves. After giving the Lady Explorer ample opportunity to admire these phenomena, the medium took up the mirror in which she’d read the Lady Explorer’s death and swaddled it in black silk. “You’re like a ship fleeing a storm with no sails, no bearings, and no port to pursue. I have dealt with spirits that did not know or accept that they were dead. You seem not to know how to be, or accept being, alive.”

That evening, the Lady Explorer stood on her balcony, watching as the airship lurched, unmanned and blinded, up through the city’s widow’s weeds of coalsmoke toward its maid’s May-wreath of sun. Once it dwindled to a crow, a flake, a mote, she took herself back inside her newly rented rooms, threading her way between heaps of pelts and boards of butterflies and oddly fleshy potted flowers that would not survive the snow.

At her desk she sat, dipped her pen, and in rusty penmanship with a quavering hand began to write:

The Worlds within Us and without Us are the Same. In One as in the Other, We delude Ourselves that there are New Lands to discover, Virgin Territories awaiting Conquerors and Claimants, while in Truth there are only Lands to which We Ourselves have not been. Some Trepidation is natural, then, on the Final Approach to an Unfamiliar Landmass, looming with presumed Malevolence on a glittering Horizon …

Perhaps the airship would find itself a new batch of disheartened, wanderlustish souls to keep it company. Perhaps it would return for her, or for her son. Perhaps it would be grappled down by scavengers, flayed for parts, before it reached the sea. Or perhaps it would fly on, uncrewed and uncommanded, flaunting for the ghost-ship-hunters and the tall-tale-tellers and what children did not flee its shadow when it spread its wings against the sun – until the years dissolved it as they dissolved her, and it fell in clinker from its perch of air.

Her head grew heavy, and her pen stopped. As she dropped down into sleep she found herself smiling as she replayed in her mind how she’d returned to the airship from the medium’s that afternoon to find that her son was gone, the thread she always kept tucked in the edge of the false panel in the wainscoting was on the floor, and on her pillow was a sheet of paper.

It was one of the recruitment broadsides the
Swan
’s crew had been passing around town, featuring a woodblocked airship folding her wings against her hull to stoop upon some hapless prey or other on a placid sea.

When she turned it over, penciled on the back she found the note.

I have seen Sunday-Shoes and Governesses, and I prefer the Sky.

This is the story of the dog Chancer, who was an adventurer and a philosopher and an occasional thief. Chancer had an airship he had liberated from merchant cats, and he was making his way across the One Continent, stopping at kennel towns and Nests, trading human relics and information and whatever else he was able to carry.

The winds and a carelessness about his choice of direction led him to the heart of the One Continent, beyond the lands of the cats and the lands of the dogs, into the heartlands where the spiders lived.

He landed his feline airship at a Web town called Ur, and began trading for silk. Chancer reckoned he’d landed himself in riches: spider-silk was rare and valuable, and here he was, by chance and luck, in the heart of the Webs. All he knew, or thought he knew, was that he was going to get rich.

Instead he met Mot.

This is the moment Mot hatched: from a silk sac hidden underground, somewhere safe and secret and forgotten. The sac opened; silk ripped. And a thousand spiderlings came scuttling out into the world. Mot remembered only flashes of that time, tiny slivers of information: a sense of immense dimensions, the glint of light on glass. And something through the glass, something strange and scary. A monster locked away, out of sight.

When the spiderlings came out of the sac they scattered in all directions. Mot, guided only by the desire to go up, followed an ancient route out of the caverns and into daylight. What he saw when he emerged was the colour blue: it lay in dazzling brightness before him, a giant, blue world bordered by a sky that mirrored it. He wove a cocoon and got into it, and he floated on the blue world until he reached the outskirts of a Web, touching the water, and climbed out and onto the Web.

That Web was the city of Ur, which sat like a diamond in the heart of all the Webs, and Mot was adopted into it, just as all his siblings were in their turn adopted by the Web communities they had each found. Spiders were born in secrecy and made their own way in life.

Since that first moment out of the cave Mot had loved the water, and most of all travelling. He hung out at the dockside of Ur, where the Web touched the water and where silken rafts and boats carried passengers and lit the skyline with gaily coloured lamps. When he grew up enough he too ferried passengers and cargo; for a time he joined a group of treasure seekers who dived into the lake in search of human artefacts.

That was how he first met Chancer.

Chancer had spent two weeks in the Web town and he was getting ready to leave. He liked the spiders he met, who were friendly and polite but also quite unsure of what to do about a dog in their midst. He could have bought enough silk to leave and go back to the lands of the dogs and become prosperous, but he didn’t; he hung out in the dockside milk dens and listened to gossip, and talked to people.

He was sitting there the night Mot came in with a gang of his friends, and he allowed them to satisfy their curiosity about his presence with good grace.

So you’re treasure hunters, are you? he said at last. Ever find anything worth having?

The spiderlings were competing with each other about their best finds. All kinds of obscure human relics, the purpose of which no one in fact knew, were mentioned. Chancer nodded and watched.

After a while most of the spiderlings went off. Mot remained behind.

Didn’t hear you say anything before, Chancer observed over his saucer of milk. But I’m guessing you do have something to say.

Why are you asking? Mot replied. From what I hear you’re buying silk, not treasures.

I like silk, Chancer said slowly. The spiderling was direct, and he approved of that. But I like treasure more.

Mot’s eight eyes regarded Chancer’s two.

I know of a treasure, he said.

I thought so, said Chancer, and allowed his fangs to open in a grin. And you might need an airship to move it?

I might, Mot said, and his feelers moved in a spider’s grin, matching Chancer’s.

When Mot and Chancer left the milk den the triple-moonlets were waning in the sky. They walked on the sand, the canopy of the Web above them forming a lattice of light and shade on the ground.

They took off in darkness, the airship rising from the web the way a bee takes flight from a flower in search of new nectar. There was a quiet understanding between them that seemed to grow through the night and through the silent journey, flying low with the ship reflected in silver and gold in the water and the light of the moonlets.

Mot, who had never before been on an airship, took to it like a cat. He wove sails and ropes into the structure and hopped from place to place, hanging directly over the water, waving his feelers in the rushing air.

When dawn arose and the sun came low over the horizon like a giant flower opening its leaves, Mot wove two fine, strong threads that fell over the side and plummeted into the water below.

They fished from aboard the ship, hauling the strange fish of that lake into the air until they landed on the deck with a wet whack.

Later, Chancer left some of the fishmeat to dry and they roasted the rest, cooking it slowly over a small coal fire.

At night Chancer howled at the triple-moonlets, and Mot joined him in spider-song, so that the ship seemed engulfed in sound.

On the third day they spotted land.

They touched down on water, and Chancer threw in the anchor and watched it fall, and fall, until at last it caught. The waters were deep, but calm.

Before them was a small sandy beach, leading to a sheltered alcove, and an opening, a chink in the mountain. They explored the beach that day, Mot scuttling deeper and deeper into the cave, his feelers moving in excitement.

It smells right, he confirmed to Chancer as they built a fire on the beach and cooked a stew of fish, pungent with the handful of herbs Chancer had plucked inside the cave. They were silvery grey, long graceful stalks of a web-like plant, and they added a rich, earthy taste to the stew.

As they finished the meal a sense of calm fell on them. They looked at the water and it seemed to form a strange, alien face, moonlight and moonshade adding to the semblance of a figure that mouthed words at them without sound.

The face stretched and shrunk with the movement of the waves; then it flared into brilliance as the stars seemed to fall in a shower from the sky, trailing threads of light into the water that joined into a giant, glowing web that covered the horizon.

What is it? Chancer asked.

Mot didn’t answer. The strange face seemed somehow familiar, like a half-remembered dream. He didn’t answer, and Chancer didn’t ask again, and soon the night was dark again, and quiet, and they went to sleep.

The second day on shore they began to explore the caves. The deeper they went the hotter it became, and the walls grew a faint luminous fungus that seemed to them like arrows, always pointing down, down. Mot wove threads that marked their passage, trailing behind on the caves’ floor. They passed in darkness and in silence, through caverns of stone aged beyond the age of the dogs, beyond the age of the cats, beyond even the age of humans.

In one of the caverns they discovered a silken sac, carefully hidden in a small opening in the wall. The sac moved, as if hundreds of tiny bodies were moving inside. They left it alone.

In another they discovered the bodies of cats, dressed in strange, metallic armour. They lined the giant cavern from end to end, standing in rows, metal weapons raised. They passed through them slowly and with care; it seemed as if at any moment the silent battalion might rise and come back to life.

In yet another they discovered human relics, strange and unknowable. There were technological artefacts there, and Mot tagged each one carefully. They decided to try and take as many as was possible back to the ship.

They walked for four days, eating dried fish and drinking water from small, ice-cold pools where moisture glistened on the walls.

On the fifth day Mot stopped, and his feelers shuddered. He and Chancer advanced slowly, and were soon in a small cavern, dark and dry and with the smell of disuse about it, as if no living thing had been inside for thousands of years.

Yet living things had been there: moving with their feeble lights through the cave they found signs of this, a few tattered threads of silk: all that remained of Mot’s birth-sac.

Then Chancer’s light swept over something that reflected and refracted the light back into his eyes and he growled, and Mot hissed.