Part 1 (1/2)
Steampunk!
An anthology of fantastically rich and strange stories.
edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
Orphans use the puppet of a dead man to take control of their lives. A girl confronts the Grand Technomancer, Most Mighty Mechanician and Highest of the High Artificier Adepts. Another girl, who might be from another universe, stuns everyone when she pulls out her handmade Reality Gun.
Welcome to fourteen steampunk visions of the past, the future, and the not quite today.
Depending on whom you believe, steampunk has been exploding into the world for the last hundred years (thank you, Monsieur Jules Verne) or maybe the last twenty-five (when the term was first used by K. W. Jeter in a letter to Locus magazine). We have had fabulous fun working with this baker's dozen of authors, investigating some of the more fascinating nooks and crannies of the genre.
You'll find the requisite number of gaslit alleys, intrepid urchins, steam-powered machines, and technologies that never were. Those are the basic accoutrements that no self-respecting steampunk anthology could be without, but as we a.s.sembled the book (filing down this story here, finding the right solder to put these two ideas together there), we discovered that steampunk has gone far beyond these markers. The two Philips (Reeve and Pullman, respectively) brought moving cities and armored polar bears. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen brought nineteenth-century London to a halt. Cherie Priest introduced zombies (Boneshaker), Gail Carriger introduced vampires (Soulless), and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer brought it all together in Steampunk and Steampunk II.
Makers and artists have taken the romance and adventure of steampunk and remixed, reinvented, and remade the genre from whole cloth - and, yes, bra.s.s widgets. We've spent hours wandering through the online galleries on Etsy and Flickr, marveling at the clockwork insects, corsets, art, hats, gloves, canes, modded computers, and even a steampunk house (want!), and we love the DIY craftiness that keeps inspiring more decadent and more useful machines and toys.
The continuing reinterpretation of the steampunk idea made us ask the writers for stories that explored and expanded their own ideas of what steampunk could be. So we have a book of mad inventors, child mechanics, mysterious murderers, revolutionary motorists, steampunk fairies, and monopoly-breaking schoolgirls, whose stories are set in Canada, New Zealand, Wales, ancient Rome, future Australia, alternate California, and even the postapocalypse - everywhere except Victorian London.
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz'd,
And bra.s.s eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen . . . the kingdom of the sh.o.r.e,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate -
That Time will come and take my love away. . . .
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV.
Time is many things, her father told her. Time is a circle, and time is a great turning gear that cannot be stopped, and time is a river that carries away what you love.
When he said that, he looked at Rose's mother's portrait, hanging over their fireplace mantel. He had invented his time device only a few short months after she had died. It had always been one of his greatest regrets in life, though Rose sometimes wondered whether he could have invented it at all without the all-consuming power of grief to drive him. Most of his other inventions did not work nearly as well. The garden robot often digs up flowers instead of weeds. The mechanical cook can make only one kind of soup. And the talking dolls never tell Rose what she wants to hear.
”Do you think he's ever coming back?” says Ellen. She means Rose's father. She is the dark-haired talking doll, the saucy one. She likes to dance around the room, showing her ankles. She arranges the sugar cubes in the tea service to form rude words. ”Perhaps he has taken to drink. I hear that is common among soldiers.”
”Shush,” says Cordelia. Cordelia is the gentle doll, redheaded and quiet. ”Ladies should not speak of such things.” She turns to Rose. ”Would you like more tea?”
Rose accepts more tea, though it is now more like hot water flavored with a few leaves from the garden than real tea. She ran out of real tea months ago. There had been a time when food and tea and household goods were regularly delivered by the grocer's boy from the nearby town. It was weeks after he stopped coming that Rose got up the nerve to put on her bonnet, pick a few coins from the box on the mantel, and walk alone into town.
It was then that she realized why the grocer's boy had stopped coming.
The town was flattened. Great zigzagging cracks ran through the streets, steam still pouring out of them. Great sinkholes had opened in the ground, houses half tipped to the side.
She wondered how she hadn't heard the destruction, though her house is more than a mile away. But then, airs.h.i.+ps flew overhead almost every night, dropping incendiaries into the nearby forest, hoping to flush out spies and deserters. Perhaps she was simply used to it.
She reached the edge of one great pit and stared down into it. She could see the top of the church spire sticking up, nearly reaching the top of the sinkhole. All around was the smell of decay. She wondered if the townsfolk had taken refuge in the church when the Wyrms came - she'd seen pictures of Wyrm fighters before, enormous, riveted copper tubes covered with incendiary bombs. She decided that her father was right. Towns were dangerous places for young ladies on their own.
”We're very happy here, aren't we?” says Cordelia in her tinny doll's voice.
”Oh, yes,” says Rose, slos.h.i.+ng the tinted water in her cup. ”Very happy.”
When Rose was eight, her father bought her a white bunny rabbit as a pet. At first she took good care of it, stroking its long silky ears with her fingers, feeding it lettuce from her hands. One day while she held it in her arms like a baby, letting it nibble a carrot from her fingertips, it sank its teeth into her skin, not knowing where the carrot ended and Rose began. She screamed and dashed it to the floor. She was immediately sorry, but it was no use: the bunny was dead, and Rose was inconsolable.
That was when her father showed her the time device.
It has been almost six months since her father left and went to the war. Though she hasn't been marking the calendar, Rose can tell that she is outgrowing her dresses. They are too tight in the bosom now and too short. Not that it matters, when there is no one to see her.
She goes out to the garden in the morning to gather ingredients for the cook. The cook used to make all sorts of things, but now it is broken and it makes only soup - whatever you put in it comes out in a sort of thick gruel. The garden robot follows her - in fact, it does most of the work. It digs long, even furrows and plants the seeds; it crushes bugs and other pests. It uses its calipers to measure the vegetables and fruit for ripeness.
Sometimes, out in the garden, she sees smoke in the distance and hears zeppelins overhead. She finds other unusual things, marks of the war in the sky. Once she found a metal leg, torn off, lying among the carrots and vegetable marrows. She told the garden robot to get rid of it, and it dragged it away to the compost heap, leaving a trail of dark oil behind. Sometimes she finds dropped pamphlets, showing pictures of starving children or great metal hands crus.h.i.+ng innocent families, but the words are in a language she doesn't understand.
This time she finds a man. The garden robot notices him first, whistling in surprise like a teakettle. She nearly screams herself, it's been so long since she saw another living creature. He looks odd to her as she draws closer. He is collapsed among the rosebushes, one shoulder of his blue uniform - so he is on her side, not an enemy soldier - dark with blood. He is moaning, so she knows he isn't dead. The roses' thorns have scratched and torn at him, and his blood is the brightest, reddest thing she's seen in six months, much brighter than the roses.
”Bring him into the house,” she says to the garden robot. It clicks and whirs around him busily, but its calipers are sharp, and when it tries to close them around the soldier's wrist, he bleeds distressingly. He cries out, without opening his eyes. His face is very young and smooth, the skin almost translucent, his hair white-blond and fair. He is wearing an airs.h.i.+p crewman's goggles around his neck, and she wonders what battle in the sky he fell from and how far he had to fall.
Eventually she shoos the garden robot away and approaches the soldier carefully. He has an energy rifle strapped to his belt; she undoes it and gives it to the robot to dispose of. Then she sets about the task of freeing the soldier from the tangled briars. His skin is hot when she touches him, much hotter than she remembers human skin being. But maybe it's just been so long that she doesn't really recall.
She half drags, half carries the soldier up the stairs and into her father's bedroom. She hasn't been in there since he left, and despite the ministrations of the cleaning robots, the room has a dank, fusty smell. The heavy wooden furniture seems to loom over her, as if she had suddenly become very small, like Alice in the children's book. She gets him into the bed somehow and under the covers, using scissors to cut away the b.l.o.o.d.y parts of his uniform, baring his shoulder. He fights her weakly, like a kitten, as she does it, and she murmurs hush, and that it is for his own good.
There is a wound through the upper part of his shoulder. It is red and swollen and smells of infection. Dark-red lines radiate out from the puckered edges. Rose knows those lines mean death. She goes into her father's study and pulls down one of the boxes from the mantel. It is slippery, polished wood, and from the inside she can hear a chittering noise, as of birds.
Back upstairs the soldier is tossing in her father's bed, crying out unintelligible words. Rose wishes there were someone else with her, someone to hold him down as she opens the box and lets the mechanical leeches run over his body. The soldier screams and thrashes at them, but they cling tenaciously. They fasten on to the wound and the skin around it, their half-translucent coppery bodies swelling and darkening as one by one they fill with blood and fall to the side. When they are done, he is whimpering and clawing at himself. Rose sits down beside him on the bed and strokes his hair. ”There, there,” she says. ”There, there.”