The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (10 page)

The engine-shop shifted to airships as soon as they caught on, and I made 2,000 ribs before I ever set foot inside a balloon. It makes for a certain confidence going in, which carried me through, thank goodness – I had a hard time with it at first.

You have to be careful how deeply you breathe, so the oxygen filter doesn’t freeze up on you, and you have to make sure your air tube doesn’t get tangled in your tether, or your tether in someone else’s. You have to learn how to fling yourself along so that the tether ring slides with you along the spine, and how to hook your fingers quickly into the little holes in the ribs when you have to climb down. You have to learn to deal with the cold.

The sign language I picked up at once. We had that at the factory, too – signals for when we were too far apart or when it was too loud. I’m fond of it; you get used to talking through the masks, and they’re all good men in the air, but sometimes it’s nice just to keep the quiet.

Captain Carter was very kind those first few months; he was the only captain I’ve ever had who would make trips into the balloon from the Underneath just to see how we were getting along. Back then we were all in it together, all still learning how to handle these beautiful birds.

Captains now can hardly be bothered to leave their bridges, but not Carter. Carter knew how to tighten a bolt as fast as any airship man, and he’d float through and shake hands whenever we’d done something well. He had a way of speaking about the
Majesty
, like a poem sometimes – a clever man. I’ve tried to speak as he did, but there’s not much use for language when we’re just bottled up with one another. Once or twice I’ve seen something sharply, the way he might have seen it – just once or twice.

You won’t see his like again. He was of the old kind; he understood what it meant to love the sky like I do.

A patient in the profession of Zeppelin conducting has, after very few years of work, advanced Heliosis due to excessive and prolonged exposure to helium within the balloon of an airship. His limbs have grown in length and decreased in musculature, making it difficult for him to comfortably maneuver on the ground for long periods of time. Mild exercise, concurrent with the wearing of an oxygen mask to prevent hyperventilation, alleviates the symptoms in time but has no lasting effect without regular application, which is difficult for conductors to maintain while employed in their vessels.

Other side effects are phrenological. Skin tightens around the skull. Patient has noticeable growth in those parts of the head dedicated to Concentrativeness, Combativeness, Locality and Constructiveness. The areas of Amativeness, Form and Cautiousness are smaller than normal, though it is hard to say if these personality defects are the work of prolonged wearing of conductor’s masks or the temperament of the patient. I suspect that in this case time will have to reveal what is yet unknown.

The Zeppelin is without doubt Man’s greatest invention, and the brave men who labor in its depths are indispensable, but it behoves us to remember the story of Icarus and Daedalus; he should proceed wisely, who would proceed well.

The Captains’ Union set up the first Society for us, in London, and a year later in Paris.

They weren’t much more comfortable than the hospital rooms where they used to keep us landside, for safety, but of course it was more dignified. Soon we managed to organize ourselves and put together the Zeppelin Conductors’ Society, and we tithed our own wages for the dues to fix the buildings up a bit.

Now you can fly to any city with an airdock and know there’s a place for you to sleep where no one will look at you sidelong. You can get a private room, even, with a bath in the middle big enough to hold you; it’s horrid how long your limbs get when you’re in helium nine days in ten, and there’s not much dignity in trying to wash with your legs sticking two feet out of the bath.

And it’s good sense to have a place you can go straight away; regulars don’t like to see you wandering about, sometimes. Most times. I understand.

1. Do not panic; he is probably as wary of you as you are of him. He will pose no threat if not provoked.

2. Do not stare; scrutiny is vulgar.

3. Offer a small nod when you pass, as you would to another gentleman; it pleases them.

4. Avoid smaller streets between airship docks and the local Conductors’ Society. The conductor is, in general, a docile creature, but one can never be sure what effects the helium has had on his temperament.

1 January 1900

PARIS – Polaris was eclipsed last night: not by any cosmic rival, but by a man-made beauty. The
Laconia
, a Phoenix-class feat of British engineering that has become the envy of the world, never looked more beautiful than on its evening flight to Paris as we began a momentous New Year.

Captain Richard Marks, looking every inch the matinee hero, guided the ship safely through the night as the passengers within lit up the sky with conversation and music, accompanied by a champagne buffet. Miss Marie Dawlish, the English Lark, honored the company with a song which it is suspected struck the heart of a certain airship captain, who stepped away from the bridge in time for the performance. Though we at the
Daily
are not prognosticators, we believe that the coming year may be one of high romance for Captain Marks, who touched down back in London with a gentle landing, and no doubt a song in his heart.

The societies have the balls for each New Year, which is great fun. It’s ripping good food, and sometimes someone comes in a full evening suit and we can all have a laugh at them; it’s an expensive round of tailoring to wear just once a year. You know just by looking that those who dressed up had wanted to be captains and fallen short. Poor boys. I wouldn’t be a captain for all the gold in Araby, though perhaps when you’re young you don’t realize how proud and empty the captains end up.

You don’t meet a lot of ladies in the air, of course, and it’s what all the lads miss most. For the London Ball they always manage to find some with the money from the dues – sweet girls who don’t mind a chat. They have to be all right with sitting and talking. The Annual Gentlemen’s Ball isn’t much of a dance. The new conductors, the ones who have only stretched the first few inches, try a dance or two early on to give the musicians something to do. The rest of us have given in to gravity when we’re trapped on the ground. We catch up with old mates and wait for a chance to ask a girl upstairs, if we’re brave enough.

Sometimes we even get conductors in from other places – Russia, sometimes, or once from China. God, that was a night! What strange ideas they have about navigation! But he was built like an airship man, and from the red skin round his eyes we could tell he’d paid his dues in the helium, so we poured him some Scotch and made him welcome. If we aren’t kind to each other, who will be kind to us?

Your conductors deserve masks that are
SAFE, COMFORTABLE
and
STYLISH
. Orion has patented its unique India-Rubber polymer that is both flexible and airtight, ensuring the safest and most comfortable fit for your conductors. The oculars are green-tinted for sharper vision at night, and larger in diameter than any other brand, so conductors see more than ever before. Best of all, our filter-tank has an oxygen absorption rate of nearly 90 per cent – the best in the world!

Swiss-made, British-tested,
CONDUCTOR-APPROVED
.

Soar with confidence among the stars – aim always for
ORION
.

We were airside the last night of 1899, the night of the Gentlemen’s Ball.

We had been through a bad wind that day, and all of us were spread out tightening rivets on the ribs, signaling quietly back and forth. I don’t know what made Anderson agree to sign us on for the evening flight – he must have wanted the ball as much as the rest of us – and I was in a bit of a sulk, feeling like Cinderella. It was a cold night, cold even in the balloon, and I was wishing for nothing but a long bath and a long sleep.

Then Captain Marks shoved the woman into the balloon.

She was wearing a worn-out orange dress, and a worn-out shawl that fell away from her at once, and even as the captain clipped her to the line she hung limp, worn out all over. He’d been at her for a while.

I still don’t know where he found her, what they did to her, what she thought in the first moments as they carried her towards the balloon.

“Got some leftovers for you,” the captain shouted through his mask. “A little Gentlemen’s Ball for you brave boys. Enjoy!”

Then he was gone, spinning the lock shut behind him, closing us in with her.

I could feel the others hooking onto a rib or a spine, pushing off, hurrying over. The men in the aft might not have even seen it happen. I never asked them. Didn’t want to know.

I was closest to her, 50 feet, maybe. Through the mask I could see the buttons missing on the front of her dress, the little cuts in her fisted hands.

She wore a mask, too. Her hair was tangled in it.

She was terrified – shaking so hard that I worried her mask would come loose – but she didn’t scrabble at her belt: too clever for that, I suppose. I was worried for her – if you weren’t used to the helium it was painful to breathe for very long; she needed to get back Underneath. God only knew how long that second-rate mask would hold.

Even as Anderson hooked onto a spine to get to her she was shoving off – not to the locked porthole (there was no hope for her there), but straight out to the ribs, clawing at the stiff silk of the balloon.

We all scrambled for her.

I don’t know how she cut the silk – Bristol said it must have been a knife, but I can’t imagine they would have let her keep one. I think she must have used the hook of her little earring, which is the worst of it, somehow.

The balloon shuddered as the first rush of helium was sucked into the sky outside; she clenched one fist around the raw edge of the silk as she unhooked herself from the tether. The air caught her, dragging at her feet, and she grasped for purchase against the fabric. She cried out, but the mask swallowed the noise.

I was the closest; I pushed off.

The other conductors were shouting for her not to be foolish; they shouted that it was a misunderstanding, that she would be all right with us.

As I came closer I held out my hands to her so she could take hold, but she shrank back, kicking at me with one foot, the boot half-fastened.

My reflection was distorted in the round eyes of her mask – a spindly monster enveloping her in the half-dark, my endless arms struggling to pull her back in.

What else could she do?

She let go.

My sight lit up from the rush of oxygen, and in my view she was a flaming June in a bottle-green night, falling with her arms outstretched like a bird until she was too small to be seen, until every bright trace of her was gone.

For a moment no one moved, then the rails shuddered under us as the gills fanned out, and we slowed.

Anderson said, “We’re coming up on Paris.”

“Someone should tell them about the tear,” said Bristol.

“Patch it from here,” Anderson said. “We’ll wait until Vienna.”

In Vienna they assumed all conductors were lunatics, and they would ask no questions about a tear that only human hands could make.

I heard the first clangs of the anchor-hooks latching onto the outer hull of the Underneath before the church bells rang in the New Year. Beneath us, the passengers shouted “Hip, hip, hurrah! Hip, hip, hurrah!”

That was a sad year.

Once I was land-bound in Dover. The Conductors’ Society there is so small I don’t think ten men could fit in it. It wasn’t a bad city (I had no trouble with the regulars on my way from the dock), but it was so horribly hot and cramped that I went outside just to have enough room to stretch out my arms, even heavy as they were with the Earth pulling at them.

A Falcon-class passed overhead, and I looked up just as it crossed the harvest moon; for a moment the balloon was illuminated orange, and I could see the conductors skittering about inside of it like spiders or shadow puppets, like moths in a lamp.

I watched it until it had passed the moon and fallen dark again, the lamp extinguished.

It’s a glorious life, they say.

Mary the Irish girl let me in when I knocked at the door in my Sunday best, smelling of incense and evening fog. Gaslight flickered over the narrow hall. The mahogany banister’s curve gleamed with beeswax polish, and a rosewood hat rack and umbrella stand squatted to my left.

I nodded to Mary, taking off my top hat. Snuff and baking butter mingled with my own pomade to battle the smell of steel and sulfur from below.

“Don’t be startled, Mr. Claude, sir.”

Before I could speak, a whir of creatures surrounded me.

At first I thought them hummingbirds or large dragonflies. One hung poised before my eyes in a flutter of metallic skin and isinglass wings. Delicate gears spun in the wrist of a pinioned hand holding a needle-sharp sword. Desiree had created another marvel. Fairies: bee-winged, glittering like tinsel. Who would have dreamed such things, let alone made them real? Only Desiree.

Mary chattered, “They’re hers. They won’t harm ye. Only burglars and the like.”

She swatted at one hovering too close, its hair floating like candyfloss. Mary had been with the Southland household for three years now and was inured to scientific marvels. “I’ll tell her ladyship yer here.”

She left. I eyed the fairies that hung in the air around me. Despite Mary’s assurance, I did not know what they would do if I stepped forward. I had never witnessed clockwork creations so capable of independent movement.

Footsteps sounded downstairs, coming closer. Desiree appeared in the doorway that led to her basement workshop. A pair of protective lenses dangled around her neck and she wore gloves. Not the dainty kidskin gloves of fashionable women, but thick pig leather, to shield her clever brown fingers from sparks. One hand clutched a brass oval studded with tiny buttons.