The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (24 page)

Long Live the Levelution!

Come, Brothers and Sisters of the Undercity, invisible Insects scurrying along the brass Baseboards of the Master’s House! Do as your nature compels you! Chew! Gnaw! Tear! Bite! When your Lord descends from on high to present to you your Replacement, gleaming in Copper and Teak, do not simply Bow your Head and agree that the Programmable Home Tailor and its unholy Kin are your Superiors in Every Way. Do not accept the Whirring of its Punch cards as your new Hymns, do not Marvel at the perfect, soulless Cloth it spits out like some dumb Golem! Instead, while your Master sleeps, seize Implements and Smash that clicking, gear-spangled Beast of Magog, Rend it Cog from Cog! It is Your Self you will Preserve by this Wanton Leveling, and your Master’s overstuffed Pride you will deflate! Fear not for your Souls, my Brethren! It is No Crime to destroy the Devil! And I say the Devil Dwells in those Devices that Grind and Cut and Crush and Hiss. Nay, they do not weave Thread, but Sinew and Blood and Bone, and of These they make a Cloth of Infamy, which shrouds Mankind in Sin.

To Those who would call me Anarchist, Daemon, Commune-ist, I shriek to the Heavens: Call your Selves Happy now? Happier yet than those who Toil in honest Labor, who feel the Earth in their Fists, who Drink of the Fountains of Fraternity? Does that Jacquard-Cloak warm you more than your Mother’s Own Stitching? No! Yet you would put your Mother in Chains for the sake of your Master’s Economy! Your sweet Mother labors in foul Factories conceived in Hell, in Fire and Black Iron. Her tears Moisten your Bread, her sweat Salts your Meat, and still you turn from her, and like Peter Deny her Once, Twice, Three times. The Science of Rich Men does not Elevate all Mankind, but only Them Selves, for they need not Break their Backs on the Rack of Industry, but merely Sip their Tea and watch us die for their Enrichment.

Brothers and Sisters, Stand with me. We who are the Slaves of those in velvet Waistcoats and Golden Goggles, we who wash their mechanized Clothes, polish their Floors, rear their Wailing Brats, cook their Lavish Suppers – it is in our Power to Level the Unequal World that raises them above us. Crush their Dread Devices! Level their Palaces of Infernal Science! Take my Hand – for there is a Poker Clutched therein, and with it we will Stoke the Flames of Righteous Action, and the Steam of OUR virtuous Engines will Expel every Slavemaster in England.

In her statement, Jane claimed to be an orphan. The Constable noted a resemblance to a certain elderly member of Parliament well known for his dalliances in Bengal Street, but the shape of a nose is no evidence, and he could not be sure. She was too well spoken to be a gutter worm, he would later tell the pulp novelists who fastened onto Sallow as their Manchester Pimpernel. Her features, he would insist, were too fine for the lower classes to own. And Jane wept copiously as she told of her mother, scalded to death in a trainyard explosion, and her father, rotted of syphilis. The Constable snorted. If truly she were a Parliamentarian’s bastard and no orphan, at the least half that lie would one day be true – God save the souls of all lecherous legislators.

Jane refused to give up the other pickpocket-pamphleteers or the author of the offending literature, even when Bailiff Smith gripped her by the hair and whirled her about to press himself against her tattered bustle. She howled like a wolf-child in heat, but in the police offices concerned with urban annoyances such as pickpockets, shoplifting and children, there is little enough help for the anti-social orphan bellowing out the injustice of the world. Her face turned to the cell wall, she growled: “I have been a whore before now, and will be again, but my cunt is all you can have of me, never my soul, nor the souls of my brothers and sisters in servitude.”

When he lifted her skirt, papers plastered her thighs, their loud ink leaving echoes on her skin.

Break the Bonds of Masculine Tyranny!

Is this not a marvelous World we live in? Such Wonders manifest, every day, before our Eyes, as though Britain were a Circus, and we dumb Children awed by Elephants. The New Century is upon us, and All things are Possible! Like Gods in their Workshops Men with Wild Hair churn out Miracles: Phonographs and Telegraphs and Seismographs and Thermographs, Oscilloscopes and Paleoscopes and Chronoscopes and Clioscopes to Spy even upon the Music of the Spheres. Why, the Duke of Cornwall toured Mars but last week in a Patented Rolinsingham Vacuum-Locked Carriage! In every Madman’s hands are Implements of Modernity, to Calculate, to Estimate, to Fornicate, to Decimate. The Earth is a great golden Watch, and it is Polished to Perfection by the Minds of our Grand Age.

How wonderful is this world – for the Men who Made it.

Yet still Women struggle against the Foe of Simple Laundry, burning their Flesh with Lye and going Blind from Fumes so that their Dandy-Lords may have silk Cravats for another Meeting of the Astronomical Society Fellows. Yet still Woman dies in Childbirth more often than she Lives. Yet still the Working of a House occupies all her Hours, till she is no more than a Husk, a Ghost, an Angel in the House for true – for the Dead are Angels, and hers is Death in Life.

How fine are all those Scopes and Graphs – how well they free Men from labor!

What, no such Succor for the Fairer Sex?

Where is the mahogany-handled Meta-Static Auto-Womb? The Copper-Valved Hydro-Electric Textile Processor? The Clockwork Home, which requires its Mistress simply to Wind it each Morn? I see none of these things, yet more Airships launch by the Hour, and the Streets are littered with Steam-Wagons smashed into Lamp-Posts by some Baronet’s careless Son. I see none of them, yet brass Guns shine atop automated Turrets, ready to Slaughter with Cheer.

Rise up, Children of Mary and Eve!

You have not the Vote, but you have Fists! How can they Dare take the Whole World for their own and still call you Wicked? They are not your Betters, only Bullies with Sticks. Deny them your Breast to Suckle, your Arm to Labor, your Womb to Fill! As you might Poison a Rich Stew, Sprinkle their Children with Knowledge of their Fathers’ Hypocrisy! Let him clean his Cravat with a Chronoscope!

Rise up Maids and Cooks, Nurses and School-Mistresses, Prostitutes and Grocer-Wives! There shall be a Revolution of Flower-Sellers in our Lifetimes!

Jane Sallow shewed herself no modest maiden. Bailiff Smith reported her a wildcat, snarling and biting at him, all the while laughing and moaning like one possessed. When he had spent, she kissed him, and then spat upon him. He ran from her as from the devil.

No matter her parentage, some slim documentation of Jane’s previous life resides in the logs of the HMS
Galatea
, an airship captained by the Prince Consort himself – and even so, Jane is a common name. A child such as her can be counted upon to lie. Miss Sallow claimed to be but five years of age at the time of her indenture, and worked in the bowels of the ship – little hands are certainly useful in the delicate pipework and mechanisms of airships. The prisoner was even so brazen as to demand three years’ retroactive military pay at the rank of Specialist from the Constabulary, who of course could not help her, even if they had wished to aid such a wanton horror of a girl. (It is true that the
Galatea
was involved in exercises in the Crimea during the period in question, but exercises are not a war, no matter what the courts at Yalta might say.)

Bailiff Smith, being as honorable as one might hope such a brute to be, took the prisoner’s clothes to be cleaned the morning after their dalliance. In her shoes were more pamphlets, folded small and compact beneath her heel.

Death and Fire to All Airships And Their Captains!

Look up, ye Downtrodden! Look up into the great, flawless Sky. Those are not Clouds, but silk Balloons in Every Color, striped Lurid and Gay. We grind our Bones to Dust in the Streets, but above us Zeppelins soar on perfumed Winds, and fine Folk in Leather, Feathers and Buckled Boots sip Champagne from Crystal, staring down at us with brass Spyglasses, making Wagers on which of us will Perish next.

Even the sons of the most Strident Workers, the great Thinkers and Laborers in the Mines of Freedom dream of Captaining Airships. A fine Life, full of Adventure and Diverse Swashbuckling! Each Boy wants a Salinger Photo-Pistol of his own, longs to feel the Weight of all that sheer golden Death securely in his palm.

But an Airship is no more than a Floating Engine of Oppression, and all that Champagne and Crystal and Leather is Borne upon the Backs of those very Boys – and yes, Girls, even Maids too Young to mop a Floor – who Longed so to Fly.

What you do not see are the Children who wind the Gearworks, stoke the Fires, load the Aerial Bombardments, pack Powder and scrape Bird Offal from the Engines. Children who release the glittering Ordnance that shatters the Earth below. You do not see their bruised Bodies, their broken Knuckles, their lost Limbs. You do not hear the cry of the ruined Innocent over the roar of the great shining Zeppelin. There is not Room enough for their Pipe Organs and Scientifick Equipment and Casks of Rum and also a belowdecks Crew – so Children, small and clever as they are, are surely drafted. No need to pay them, what could they buy? And if a Child should be crushed in the Pistons, if a Child should faint from Hunger, if a Child should be seized with Despair, well, they simply fall from the Sky like little Angels, and the Gala abovedecks need not even pause.

Ask not after the Maids who serve that Champagne. Aristocracy is no Guarantor of Virtue.

Come, my small Army. My gentle Family of the Air. Do not simply serve out your Time. Block the pipes, grind the Gears. Keep your Ships grounded. Shred those Balloons with a Laugh in your Heart. Do not let them use up your Youth without a Price! Be like unto Determined Locusts – invisible until too late, Devouring All!

After the Great War, some few Manchester spinsters and retired barristers came forward and admitted their involvement in the pickpocketers’ activities of the summer of ’72. It seemed unlikely that they would be punished, they said – the world had other concerns than what they had done as children. Their story caused a minor media frenzy, such as media frenzies were in 1919.

Who wrote them? cried the public.

Jane wrote them, the spinsters answered. Of course she wrote them. Who else?

Why did you follow her? demanded the newspapermen.

She told us a new world was coming, the barristers answered. We believed her. And she was right – but it was not the world she thought.

Where are the rest of you? asked the novelists.

Look up, said the lot of them, and grinned in the way that mad old folk do, so that the public and the newspapermen and the novelists laughed and shook their heads.

The Honorable Charles Galloway, who admitted to pickpocketing and pamphleteering when he worked as a newspaperboy in Manchester, gave an extensive interview to a certain popular novelist who went on to write
Queen of Bengal Street
, a salacious version of Jane’s life. Galloway grew up rather a successful businessman for one of such humble beginnings.

“We were starving,” he said. “She found us food. She fed us and cradled us in her arms and while we ate bread from her fingers she told us of a new city and a new earth, just like in the Bible. It’s powerful stuff, it goes to your head, even if your head isn’t addled by hunger and this beautiful girl with torn stockings whispering in your ear while she dangles salvation in the form of a hank of ham just out of your reach. We worshipped her. We would have done anything for her. And you know, it wasn’t a lie, anything she said. I thought about those pamphlets a lot during the war. Stinking in the mud and rain and urine, I remembered what she said about the science of rich men. She knew how it all worked long before I did. Back in those days, all those wonderful machines seemed so innocent. But not to her. She lost her fingers in a textile mill, and her sight in one eye on the
Galatea
– didn’t you know? Oh, she was entirely blind in her right eye. The sun seared off the Captain’s medals and stung her, and she never quite recovered. The eye was a little milky, I remember, but I thought that made her even more beautiful. Romantic. Like a pirate’s eye-patch.”

The novelist asked if Mr Galloway was sorry that the revolution Jane preached never came. Charles chewed the stem of his pipe and frowned.

“Well, if you say it didn’t, it didn’t. I suppose you’re the expert.”

It was from the Galloway library that further pamphlets were recovered and reprinted widely.

The Moon Belongs to Us!

They already own the Earth, and eagerly they soil it! Where is left for us, the Salt of the City, those few of us to whom the Future truly belongs? Look up, I say again. Look up. Does she not shine for you? See you not the face of a new Mother, free of her chains, dancing weightless in a field of lunar poppies?

The Moon is Our Birthright!

But already they scheme to rob us, as they have always robbed us, to make themselves richer, more powerful, to pile still yet more Crowns on their Heads. It is a Year and more since Lady Lovelace’s Engine carried the Earl of Dunlop to the Sea of Tranquillity – our Homestead! Our Workers’ Zion! – and you may be sure the most useful thing he did there was to powder his wig with moon-dust. How the steam-trail of his rocket streaked the sky like a Dragon heralding Ragnarok! Among you, my Brothers and Sisters, I looked to Heaven and my Anger burned. Is there any World not theirs to squat upon and gorge upon and chortle in their Gluttony?