The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (2 page)

The question, of course, remains: what does it matter if we reimagine the past? Sure, it is nice to pretend that the wealth we’re enjoying now was not ill-gotten, but it doesn’t really help to right past wrongs. However, I would argue that by reimagining how things could’ve gone, we can hold up the mirror to our present, and by extension to our future. After all, if we cannot imagine a better past, how can we even begin to understand what we need to do today to build a more equitable, more sustainable, kinder future?

This book offers as many answers as there are writers – from Freidrich Engels building a Dialectical Engine and the mechanical-jawed factory girls of Nick Mamatas to the creation of Shweta Narayan’s mechanical bird to Catherynne M. Valente’s unapologetically punk approach to Victoriana, the possibilities are as boundless as their imaginations. All of these stories have one thing in common: while they may push the boundaries of what is commonly considered steampunk, they never waver in their interrogation of the human condition, and the ways in which our past shapes our future.

When Shyver can’t lift it from the sand, he brings me down from the village. It lies there on the beach, entangled in the seaweed, dull metal scoured by the sea, limpets and barnacles stuck to its torso. It’s been lost a long time, just like me. It smells like rust and oil still, but only a tantalizing hint.

“It’s good salvage, at least,” Shyver says. “Maybe more.”

“Or maybe less,” I reply. Salvage is the life’s blood of the village in the off-season, when the sea’s too rough for fishing. But I know from past experience, there’s no telling what the salvagers will want and what they’ll discard. They come from deep in the hill country abutting the sea cliffs, their needs only a glimmer in their savage eyes.

To Shyver, maybe the thing he’d found looks like a long box with a smaller box on top. To me, in the burnishing rasp of the afternoon sun, the last of the winter winds lashing against my face, it resembles a man whose limbs have been torn off. A man made of metal. It has lamps for eyes, although I have to squint hard to imagine there ever being an ember, a spark, of understanding. No expression defiles the broad pitted expanse of metal.

As soon as I see it, I call it “Hanover”, after a character I had seen in an old movie back when the projector still worked.

“Hanover?” Shyver says with a trace of contempt.

“Hanover never gave away what he thought,” I reply, as we drag it up the gravel track toward the village. Sandhaven, they call it, simply, and it’s carved into the side of cliffs that are sliding into the sea. I’ve lived there for almost six years, taking on odd jobs, assisting with salvage. They still know next to nothing about me, not really. They like me not for what I say or who I am, but for what I do: anything mechanical I can fix, or build something new from poor parts. Someone reliable in an isolated place where a faulty water pump can be devastating. That means something real. That means you don’t have to explain much.

“Hanover, whoever or whatever it is, has given up on more than thoughts,” Shyver says, showing surprising intuition. It means he’s already put a face on Hanover, too. “I think it’s from the Old Empire. I think it washed up from the Sunken City at the bottom of the sea.”

Everyone knows what Shyver thinks, about everything. Brown-haired, green-eyed, gawky, he’s lived in Sandhaven his whole life. He’s good with a boat, could navigate a cockleshell through a typhoon. He’ll never leave the village, but why should he? As far as he knows, everything he needs is here.

Beyond doubt, the remains of Hanover are heavy. I have difficulty keeping my grip on him, despite the rust. By the time we’ve made it to the courtyard at the center of Sandhaven, Shyver and I are breathing as hard as old men. We drop our burden with a combination of relief and self-conscious theatrics. By now, a crowd has gathered, and not just stray dogs and bored children.

First law of salvage: what is found must be brought before the community. Is it scrap? Should it be discarded? Can it be restored?

John Blake, council leader, all unkempt black beard, wide shoulders and watery turquoise eyes, stands there. So does Sarah, who leads the weavers, and the blacksmith Growder, and the ethereal captain of the fishing fleet: Lady Salt as she is called – she of the impossibly pale, soft skin, the blonde hair in a land that only sees the sun five months out of the year. Her eyes, ever-shifting, never settling – one is light blue and one is fierce green, as if to balance the sea between calm and roiling. She has tiny wrinkles in the corners of those eyes, and a wry smile beneath. If I remember little else, fault the eyes. We’ve been lovers the past three years, and if I ever fully understand her, I wonder if my love for her will vanish like the mist over the water at dawn.

With the fishing boats not launching for another week, a host of broad-faced fisher folk, joined by lesser lights and gossips, has gathered behind us. Even as the light fades: shadows of albatross and gull cutting across the horizon and the roofs of the low houses, huddled and glowing a deep gold and orange around the edges, framed by the graying sky.

Blake says, “Where?” He’s a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead.

“The beach, the cove,” Shyver says. Blake always reduces him to a similar terseness.

“What is it?”

This time, Blake looks at me, with a glare. I’m the fixer who solved their well problems the season before, who gets the most value for the village from what’s sold to the hill scavengers. But I’m also Lady Salt’s lover, who used to be his, and depending on the vagaries of his mood, I suffer more or less for it.

I see no harm in telling the truth as I know it, when I can. So much remains unsaid that extra lies exhaust me.

“It is part of a metal man,” I say.

A gasp from the more ignorant among the crowd. My Lady Salt just stares right through me. I know what she’s thinking: in scant days she’ll be on the open sea. Her vessel is as sleek and quick and buoyant as the water, and she likes to call it
Seeker
, or sometimes
Mist
, or even just
Cleave
. Salvage holds little interest for her.

But I can see the gears turning in Blake’s head. He thinks awhile before he says more. Even the blacksmith and the weaver, more for ceremony and obligation than their insight, seem to contemplate the rusted bucket before them.

A refurbished water pump keeps delivering from the aquifers; parts bartered to the hill people mean only milk and smoked meat for half a season. Still, Blake knows that the fishing has been less dependable the past few years, and that if we do not give the hill people something, they will not keep coming back.

“Fix it,” he says.

It’s not a question, although I try to treat it like one.

Later that night, I am with the Lady Salt, whose whispered name in these moments is Rebecca.

“Not a name men would follow,” she said to me once. “A landish name.”

In bed, she’s as shifting as the tides, beside me, on top and beneath. Her mouth is soft but firm, her tongue curling like a question mark across my body. She makes little cries that are so different from the orders she barks out shipboard that she might as well be a different person. We’re all different people, depending.

Rebecca can read. She has a few books from the hill people, taught herself with the help of an old man who remembered how. A couple of the books are even from the Empire – the New Empire, not the old. Sometimes I want to think she is not the Lady Salt, but the Lady Flight. That she wants to leave the village. That she seeks so much more. But I look into those eyes in the dimness of half-dawn, so close, so far, and realize she would never tell me, no matter how long I live here. Even in bed, there is a bit of Lady Salt in Rebecca.

When we are finished, lying in each other’s arms under the thick covers, her hair against my cheek, Rebecca asks me, “Is that thing from your world? Do you know what it is?”

I have told her a little about my past, where I came from – mostly bedtime stories when she cannot sleep, little fantasies of golden spires and a million thronging people, fables of something so utterly different from the village that it must exist only in a dream.
Once upon a time there was a foolish man. Once upon a time there was an Empire
. She tells me she doesn’t believe me, and there’s freedom in that. It’s a strange pillow talk that can be so grim.

I tell her the truth about Hanover: “It’s nothing like what I remember.” If it came from Empire, it came late, after I was already gone.

“Can you really fix it?” she asks.

I smile. “I can fix anything,” and I really believe it. If I want to, I can fix anything. I’m just not sure yet I want Hanover fixed, because I don’t know what he is.

But my hands can’t lie – they tremble to
have at it
, to explore, impatient for the task even then and there, in bed with Blake’s lost love.

I came from the same sea the Lady Salt loves. I came as salvage, and was fixed. Despite careful preparation, my vessel had been damaged first by a storm, and then a reef. Forced to the surface, I managed to escape into a raft just before my creation drowned. It was never meant for life above the waves, just as I was never meant for life below them. I washed up near the village, was found, and eventually accepted into their community; they did not sell me to the hill people.

I never meant to stay. I didn’t think I’d fled far enough. Even as I’d put distance between me and Empire, I’d set traps, put up decoys, sent out false rumors. I’d done all I could to escape that former life, and yet some nights, sleepless, restless, it feels as if I am just waiting to be found.

Even failure can be a kind of success, my father always said. But I still don’t know if I believe that.

Three days pass, and I’m still fixing Hanover, sometimes with help from Shyver, sometimes not. Shyver doesn’t have much else to do until the fishing fleet goes out, but that doesn’t mean he has to stay cooped up in a cluttered workshop with me. Not when, conveniently, the blacksmithy is next door, and with it the lovely daughter of Growder, who he adores.

Blake says he comes in to check my progress, but I think he comes to check on me. After the Lady Salt left him, he married another – a weaver – but she died in childbirth a year ago, and took the baby with her. Now Blake sees before him a different past: a life that might have been, with the Lady Salt at his side.

I can still remember the generous Blake, the humorous Blake who would stand on a table with a mug of beer made by the hill people and tell an amusing story about being lost at sea, poking fun at himself. But now, because he still loves her, there is only me to hate. Now there is just the brambly fence of his beard to hide him, and the pressure of his eyes, the pursed, thin lips.
If I were a different man. If I loved the Lady Salt less. If she wanted him
.

But instead it is him and me in the workroom, Hanover on the table, surrounded by an autopsy of gears and coils and congealed bits of metal long past their purpose. Hanover up close, over time, smells of sea grasses and brine along with the oil. I still do not know him. Or what he does. Or why he is here. I think I recognize some of it as the work of Empire, but I can’t be sure. Shyver still thinks Hanover is merely a sculpture from beneath the ocean. But no one makes a sculpture with so many moving parts.

“Make it work,” Blake says. “You’re the expert. Fix it.”

Expert?
I’m the only one with any knowledge in this area. For hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles.

“I’m trying,” I say. “But then what? We don’t know what it does.”

This is the central question, perhaps of my life. It is why I go slow with Hanover. My hands already know where most of the parts go. They know most of what is broken, and why.

“Fix it,” Blake says, “or at the next council meeting, I will ask that you be sent to live with the hill people for a time.”

There’s no disguising the self-hatred in his gaze. There’s no disguising that he’s serious.

“For a time? And what will that prove? Except to show I can live in caves with shepherds?” I almost want an answer.

Blake spits on the wooden floor. “No use to us, why should we feed you? House you …”

Even if I leave, she won’t go back to you.

“What if I fix it and all it does is blink? Or all it does is shed light, like a whale lamp? Or talk in nonsense rhymes? Or I fix it and it kills us all.”

“Don’t care,” Blake says. “Fix it.”

The cliffs around the village are low, like the shoulders of a slouching giant, and caulked with bird shit and white rock, veined through with dark green bramble. Tough, thick lizards scuttle through the branches. Tiny birds take shelter there, their dark eyes staring out from shadow. A smell almost like mint struggles through. Below is the cove where Shyver found Hanover.

Rebecca and I walk there, far enough beyond the village that we cannot be seen, and we talk. We find the old trails and follow them, sometimes silly, sometimes serious. We don’t need to be who we are in Sandhaven.

“Blake’s getting worse,” I tell her. “More paranoid. He’s jealous. He says he’ll exile me from the village if I don’t fix Hanover.”

“Then fix Hanover,” Rebecca says.

We are holding hands. Her palm is warm and sweaty in mine, but I don’t care. Every moment I’m with her feels like something I didn’t earn, wasn’t looking for, but don’t want to lose. Still, something in me rebels. It’s tiring to keep proving myself.

“I can do it,” I say. “I know I can. But …”

“Blake can’t exile you without the support of the council,” Lady Salt says. I know it’s her, not Rebecca, because of the tone, and the way her blue eye flashes when she looks at me. “But he can make life difficult if you give him cause.” A pause, a tightening of her grip. “He’s in mourning. You know it makes him not himself. But we need him. We need him back.”

A twinge as I wonder how she means that. But it’s true: Blake has led Sandhaven through good times and bad, made tough decisions and cared about the village.