The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (61 page)

Regrettably, I knew nothing of flying airship-longboats, whose controls, it happens, are of a remarkably poor design.

One would imagine that the principal steering element could be moved in the direction that one wishes the craft to go; instead, just the opposite is the case. Then, too, one would expect these brawny and unrefined airmen to use controls lending themselves to rough usage; instead, it seems an exceedingly fine hand is required.

Thus, rather than steadying the craft, I achieved the opposite.

Not only were Sarasvati and the pilot flung out the cabin door, but I myself was thrown through it, just managing to catch with both hands a metal protuberance in the hatchway’s base. My feet swung freely over the void.

I looked up in time to see the Raja’s limp body come sliding towards me like a missile.

I fear that I hesitated too long in deciding whether to dodge or catch my almost-employer. At the last minute courage won out, and I flung one arm around his chest as he struck me.

This dislodged my grip, and the two of us fell from the airship.

In an extremity of terror, I let go the prince, and clawed wildly at nothing.

I slammed into the body of the pirate who hung, poisoned by Shakuntala’s needle, from the airship’s tether. I slid along him, and finally caught myself at his feet.

As I clung there, shaking miserably, I watched Prem Ramasson tumble through the air, and I cursed myself for having caused the very tragedies I had endeavored to avoid, like a figure in an Athenian tragedy. But such tragedies proceed from some essential flaw in their heroes – some illustrative hubris, some damning vice. Searching my own character and actions, I could find only that I had endeavored to make do, as well as I could, in situations for which I was ill-prepared. Is that not the fate of any of us, confronting life and its vagaries?

Was my tale, then, an absurd and tragic farce? Was its lesson one merely of ignominy and despair?

Or perhaps – as my shadow-protagonist might imagine – there was no tale, no teller – perhaps the dramatic and sensational events I had endured were part of no story at all, but brute and silent facts of Matter.

From above, Shakuntala Sitasdottir dove in her glider. It was folded like a spear, and she swept past the prince in seconds. Nimbly, she flung open the glider’s wings, sweeping up to the falling Raja, and rolling the glider, took him into her embrace.

Thus encumbered – she must have secured him somehow – she dove again (chasing her sister, I imagine) and disappeared in a bank of cloud.

A flock of brass-colored Wisdom Gulls, arriving from the Aryan war-city, flew around the pirates’ launch. They entered its empty cabin, glanced at me and the poisoned pirate to whom I clung, and departed.

I climbed up the body to sit upon its shoulders, a much more comfortable position. There, clinging to the tether and shivering, I rested.

The
Hiawatha MacCool
, black smoke guttering from one side of her, climbed higher and higher into the sky, pursued by the Aryan war-boat. The sun was setting, limning the clouds with gold and pink and violet. The war-city, terrible and glorious, sailed slowly by, under my feet, its shadow an island of darkness in the sunset’s gold-glitter on the waters of the lake beneath.

Some distance to the east, where the sky was already darkening to a rich cobalt, the Aryan war-boat which Melko had successfully struck was bathed in white fire. After a while, the inner hull must have been breached, for the fire went out, extinguished by escaping helium, and the zeppelin plummeted.

Above me, the propeller hummed, driving my launch in the same small circle again and again.

I hoped that I had saved the prince after all. I hoped Shakuntala had saved her sister, and that the three of them would find refuge with the Thanes.

My shadow-protagonist had given me a gift; it was the logic of his world that had led me to discover the war-city’s threat. Did this mean his philosophy was the correct one?

Yet the events that followed were so dramatic and contrived – precisely as if I inhabited a pulp romance. Perhaps he was writing my story, as I wrote his; perhaps, with the comfortable life I had given him, he longed to lose himself in uncomfortable escapades of this sort. In that case, we both of us lived in a world designed, a world of story, full of meaning.

But perhaps I had framed the question wrong. Perhaps the division between Mind and Matter is itself illusory; perhaps Randomness, Pattern and Plan are all but stories we tell about the inchoate and unknowable world which fills the darkness beyond the thin circle illumed by reason’s light. Perhaps it is foolish to ask if I or the protagonist of my world-without-zeppelins story is the more real. Each of us is flesh, a buzzing swarm of atoms; yet each of us also a tale contained in the pages of the other’s notebook. We are bodies. But we are also the stories we tell about each other. Perhaps not knowing is enough.

Maybe it is not a matter of discovering the correct philosophy. Maybe the desire that burns behind this question is the desire to be real. And which is more real – a clod of dirt unnoticed at your feet, or a hero in a legend?

And maybe behind the desire to be real is simply wanting to be known.

To be held.

The first stars glittered against the fading blue. I was in the bosom of the Queen of Heaven. My fingers and toes were getting numb – soon frostbite would set in. I recited the prayer the ancient heretical Rabbis would say before death, which begins, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One”.

Then I began to climb the tether.

The clockwork chickadee was not as pretty as the nightingale. But she did not mind. She pecked the floor when she was wound, looking for invisible bugs. And when she was not wound, she cocked her head and glared at the sparrow, whom she loathed with every tooth on every gear in her pressed-tin body.

The sparrow could fly.

He took no pains to conceal his contempt for those who could not. When his mechanism spun him around and around overhead, he twittered – not even a proper song – to call attention to his flight. Chickadee kept her head down when she could so as not to give him the satisfaction of her notice. It was clear to her that any bird could fly if only they were attached to a string like him. The flight, of which he was so proud, was not even an integral part of his clockwork. A wind-up engine hanging from the chandelier spun him in circles while he merely flapped his wings. Chickadee could do as much. And so she thought until she hatched an idea to show that Sparrow was not so very special.

It happened, one day, that Chickadee and Sparrow were shelved next to one another.

Sparrow, who lay tilted on his belly as his feet were only painted on, said, “How limiting the view is from here. Why, when I am flying I can see everything.”

“Not everything, I’ll warrant,” said Chickadee. “Have you seen what is written underneath the table? Do you know how the silver marble got behind the potted fern, or where the missing wind-up key is?”

Sparrow flicked his wing at her. “Why should I care about such things when I can see the ceiling above and the plaster cherubs upon it. I can see the shelves below us and the mechanical menagerie upon it, even including the clockwork scarab and his lotus. I can see the fireplace, which shares the wall with us, none of which are visible from here nor to you.”

“But I have seen all of these things as I have been carried to and from the shelf. In addition the boy has played with me at the fountain outside.”

“What fountain?”

“Ah! Can you not see the courtyard fountain when you fly?” Chickadee hopped a step closer to him. “Such a pity.”

“Bah – why should I care about any of this?”

“For no reason today,” said Chickadee. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

“What is written underneath the table?” Sparrow called as he swung in his orbit about the room, wings clicking against his side with each downstroke.

Chickadee pecked at the floor and shifted a cog to change her direction toward the table. “The address of Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski.”

“Bah. Why should I care about them?”

“Because they are master clockworkers. They can reset cogs to create movements you would not think possible.”

“I have all the movement I need. They can offer me nothing.”

“You might change your mind.” Chickadee passed under the edge of the table. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

Above the table, Sparrow’s gears ground audibly in frustration.

Chickadee cocked her head to look up at the yellow slip of paper glued to the underside of the table. Its type was still crisp though the paper itself threatened to peel away. She scanned the corners of the room for movement. In the shadows by the fireplace, a live mouse caught her gaze. He winked.

“How did the silver marble get behind the potted fern?” Sparrow asked as he lay on the shelf.

“It fell out of the boy’s game and rolled across the floor to where I was pecking the ground. I waited but no one seemed to notice that it was gone, nor did they notice me, so I put my beak against it and pushed it behind the potted fern.”

“You did? You stole from the boy?” Sparrow clicked his wings shut. “I find that hard to believe.”

“You may not, today,” Chickadee said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

She cocked her head to look away from him and to the corner where the live mouse now hid. The mouse put his forepaw on the silver marble and rolled it away from the potted fern. Chickadee felt the tension in her spring and tried to calculate how many revolutions of movement it still offered her. She thought it would suffice.

“Where is the missing wind-up key?” Sparrow hung from his line, waiting for the boy to wind him again.

“The live mouse has it.” Chickadee hopped forward and pecked at another invisible crumb, but did not waste the movement needed to look at Sparrow.

“What would a live mouse need with a wind-up key?”

“He does not need it,” said Chickadee. “But I do have need of it and he is in my service.”

All the gears in the room stopped for a moment as the other clockwork animals paused to listen. Even the nightingale stopped her song. In the sudden cessation of ticking, sound from the greater world outside crept in, bringing the babble of the fountain in the courtyard, the laughter of the boy, the purr of automobiles and from the far distance, the faint pealing of a clock.

“I suppose you would have us believe that he winds you?” said Sparrow.

“Not yet. Perhaps today.” She continued pecking the floor.

After a moment of nothing happening, the other animals returned to their tasks save for the sparrow. He hung from his line and beat his wings against his side.

“Ha! I see him. I see the live mouse behind the potted fern. You could too if you could fly.”

“I have no need.” Chickadee felt her clockwork beginning to slow. “Live Mouse!” she called. “It is time to fulfill our bargain.”

The silence came again as the other animals stopped to listen. Into this quiet came a peculiar scraping rattle and then the live mouse emerged from behind the potted fern with the missing wind-up key tied in his tail.

“What is he doing?” Sparrow squawked.

Chickadee bent to peck the ground so slowly she thought she might never touch it. A gear clicked forward and she tapped the floor. “Do you really need me to tell you that?”

Above her, Sparrow dangled on his line. “Live Mouse! Whatever she has promised you, I can give you also, only wind my flying mechanism.”

The live mouse twirled his whiskers and kept walking toward Chickadee. “Well now. That’s a real interesting proposition. How about a silver marble?”

“There is one behind the potted fern.”

“Not nomore.”

“Then a crystal from the chandelier.”

The live mouse wrinkled his nose. “If’n I can climb the chandelier to wind ya, then I reckon I can reach a crystal for myself.”

“I must have something you want.”

With the key paused by Chickadee’s side, the live mouse said, “That might be so.”

The live mouse set the tip of the key down like a cane and folded his paws over it. Settling back on his haunches, he tipped his head up to study Sparrow. “How ’bout you give me one of your wings?”

Sparrow squawked.

“You ain’t got no need of ’em to fly, that right?” The live mouse looked down and idly twisted the key on the floor, as if he were winding the room. “Prob’ly make you spin round faster, like one of them zeppelin thingamabobs. Whazzat called? Air-o-dyenamic.”

“A bird cannot fly without wings.”

“Now you and I both know that ain’t so. A live bird can’t fly without wings, but you’re a clockwork bird.”

“What would a live mouse know about clockworks?”

The live mouse laughed. “Ain’t you never heard of Hickory, Dickory and Dock? We mice have a long history with clockworks. Looking at you, I figure you won’t miss a wing none and without it dragging, you ought to be able to go faster and your windings would last you longer. Whaddya say? Wouldn’t it be a mite sight nicer to fly without having to wait for the boy to come back?”

“What would you do with my wing?”

“That,” the live mouse smiled, showing his sharp incisors, “is between me and Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski. So do we have a deal?”

“I will have to consider the matter.”

“Suit yourself.” The live mouse lifted the key and put the tip in Chickadee’s winding mechanism.

“Wait!” Sparrow flicked his wings as if anxious to be rid of them. “Yes, yes you may have my left wing, only wind me now. A bird is meant to fly.”

“All righty, then.”

Chickadee turned her head with painful slowness. “Now, Live Mouse, you and I have an agreement.”

“That we did and we do, but nothing in it says I can’t have another master.”

“That may well be, but the wind-up key belongs to me.”

“I reckon that’s true. Sorry, Sparrow. Looks as if I can’t help you none.” The live mouse sighed. “And I surely did want me one of them wings.”

Once again, he lifted the key to Chickadee’s side. Above them, Sparrow let out a squeal of metal. “Wait! Chickadee, there must be something I can offer you. You are going on a journey, yes? From here, I can tell you if any dangers lie on your route.”