The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (30 page)

And, as he lifted it up, he cried out in horror. The light revealed a mocking gargoyle of a man: filthy, grey-skinned, dressed in rags, with running sores on his misshapen face and only three fingers on the hand that mockingly held up a flashing rectangle of reflective tape.

“It’s the bolshy,” the creature said to nobody in particular.

“I thought he was a menshevik,” said a second voice.

“Naw, he’s a tvardokhlebnik,” said a third. “A pathetic nibbler at the leavings of others.”

“My brothers!” Rudy cried in mingled terror and elation. His torch slid from monstrous face to monstrous face. A throng of grotesques confronted him. These were the broken hulks of men, horribly disfigured by industrial accidents, disease and bathtub gin, creatures who had been driven into the darkness not by poverty alone but also by the reflexive stares of those who had previously been their fellows and compeers. Rudy’s revulsion turned to an enormous and terrible sense of pity. “You have lured me here for some purpose, I presume. Well … here I am. Tell me what is so important that you must play these games with me.”

“Kid gets right to the point.”

“He’s got a good mind.”

“No sense of humor, though. Heard him speak once.”

Swallowing back his fear, Rudy said, “Now you are laughing at me. Comrades! These are desperate times. We should not be at each other’s throats, but rather working together for the common good.”

“He’s got
that
right.”

“Toldya he had a good mind.”

One of the largest of the men seized Rudy’s jacket in his malformed hand, lifting him effortlessly off his feet. “Listen, pal. Somebody got something important to tell ya.” He shook Rudy for emphasis. “So you’re gonna go peacefully, all right? Don’t do nothing stupid. Remember who lives here and can see in the dark and who don’t and can’t. Got that?”

“Brother! Yes! Of course!”

“Good.” The titan let Rudy drop to the floor. “Open ’er up, boys.” Shadowy figures pushed an indistinct pile of boxes and empty barrels away from a steel-clad door. “In there.”

Rudy went through the door.

It closed behind him. He could hear the crates and barrels being pushed back into place.

He was in a laboratory. Even though it was only sparsely lit, Rudy could see tables crowded with huge jars that were linked by glass tubes and entwined in electrical cables. Things sizzled and bubbled. The air stank of ozone and burnt sulfur.

In the center of the room, illuminated by a single incandescent bulb dangling from the ceiling, was a glass tank a good twenty feet long. In its murky interior a huge form moved listlessly, filling it almost entirely – a single enormous sturgeon. Rudy was no sentimentalist, but it seemed to him that the great fish, unable to swim or even turn about in its cramped confines – indeed, unable to do much of anything save slowly move its fins in order to keep afloat and flutter its gills to breathe – must lead a grim and terrible existence.

Cables snaked from the tank to a nearby clutter of electrical devices, but he paid them no particular notice. His attention was drawn to a woman standing before the aquarium. Her lab smock seemed to glow in the gloom.

She had clearly been waiting for him, as without preamble she said, “I am Professor Anna Pavlova.” Her face was old and drawn; her eyes blazed with passionate intensity. “You have probably never heard of me, but—”

“Of course I know of you, Professor Pavlova!” Rudy babbled. “You are one of the greatest inventors of all time! The monorail! Citywide steam heat! You made the Naked Brains possible. The masses idolize you.”

“Pah!” Professor Pavlova made a dismissive chopping gesture with her right hand. “I am but a scientist, nothing more nor less. All that matters is that when I was young I worked on the Naked Brain Project. Those were brave days indeed. All the best thinkers of our generation – politicians, artists, engineers – lined up to surrender their bodies in order to put their minds at the service of the people. I would have done so myself, were I not needed to monitor and fine-tune the nutrient systems. We were Utopians then! I am sure that not a one of them was influenced by the possibility that as Naked Brains they would live forever. Not a one! We wished only to serve.” She sighed.

“Your idealism is commendable, comrade scientist,” Rudy said. “Yet it is my unhappy duty to inform you that the Council of Naked Brains no longer serves the people’s interests. They—”

“It is worse than you think!”
Professor Pavlova snapped. “For many years I was part of the inner circle of functionaries serving the Brains. I saw … many things. Things that made me wonder, and then doubt. Quietly, I began my own research. But the scientific journals rejected my papers. Lab books disappeared. Data were altered. There came a day when none of the Naked Brains – who had been my friends, remember! – would respond to my messages, or even, when I went to them in person, deign to speak to me.

“I am no naive innocent. I knew what that meant: the Fist would shortly be coming for me.

“So I went underground. I befriended the people here, whose bodies are damaged but whose minds remain free and flexible, and together we smuggled in enough equipment to continue my work. I tapped into the city’s electric and gas lines. I performed miracles of improvisation and bricolage. At first I was hindered by my lack of access to the objects of my study. But then my new friends helped me liberate Old Teddy” – she patted the side of the fish tank – “from a pet shop where he was kept as a curiosity. Teddy was the key. He told me everything I needed to know.”

Rudy interrupted the onslaught of words. “This fish
told
you things?”

“Yes.” The scientist picked up a wired metal dish from the lab bench. “Teddy is very, very old, you see. When he was first placed in that tank, he was quite small, a wild creature caught for food but spared the frying pan to be put on display.” She adjusted cables that ran from the silver dish to an electrical device on the bench. “That was many years ago, of course, long before you or I were born. Sturgeon can outlive humans, and Teddy has slowly grown into what you see before you.” Other cables ran from the device into the tank. Rudy saw that they had been implanted directly into the sturgeon’s brain. One golden-grey eye swiveled in the creature’s whiskered, impassive head to look at him. Involuntarily, he shuddered. It was just a fish, he thought. It wished him no ill.

“Have you ever wondered what thoughts pass through a fish’s brain?” With a grim smile that was almost a leer, the scientist thrust the silver dish at Rudy. “Place this cap on your head – and you will know.”

More than almost anything, Rudy wanted
not
to put on the cap. Yet more than anything at all, he wanted to do his duty to his fellow beings, both human and fish. This woman might well be mad: she certainly did not act like any woman he had ever met. The device might well kill him or damage his brain. Yet to refuse it would be to give up on the adventure entirely, to admit that he was not the man for the job.

Rudy reached out and took the silver cap.

He placed it upon his head.

Savage homicidal rage filled him. Rudy hated everything that lived, without degree or distinction. All the universe was odious to him. If he could, he would murder everyone outside his tank, devour their eggs and destroy their nests. Like a fire, this hatred engulfed him, burning all to nothing, leaving only a dark cinder of self at his core.

With a cry of rage, Rudy snatched the silver cap from his head and flung it away. Professor Pavlova caught it, as if she had been expecting his reaction. Horrified, he turned on her. “They hate us! The very fish hate us!” He could feel the sturgeon’s deadly anger burning into his back, and this filled him with shame and self-loathing, even though he knew he did not personally deserve it. All humans deserved it, though, he thought. All humans supported the idea of putting fish in tanks. Those who did not were branded eccentrics and their viewpoint dismissed without a hearing.

“This is a terrible invention! It does not reveal the universal brotherhood natural among disparate species entwined in the Great Web of Life – quite the opposite, in fact!” He despaired of putting his feelings into words. “What it reveals may be the truth, but is it a truth that we really need to know?”

Professor Pavlova smiled mirthlessly. “You understand so well the inequalities in human intercourse and the effect they have on the human psyche. And now! Now, for the first time, you understand some measure of what a fish feels and thinks. Provided it has been kept immobile and without stimulation for so many years it is no longer sane.” She glanced over at Old Teddy with pity. “A fish longs only for cold water, for food, for distances to swim, and for a place to lay its eggs or spread its milt. We humans have kept Teddy in a tank for over a century.”

Then she looked at Rudy with almost the same expression. “Imagine how much worse it would be for a human being, used to sunshine on his face, the feel of a lover’s hand, the soft sounds an infant makes when it is happy, to find himself – even if of his own volition – nothing more than a Naked Brain afloat in amniotic fluid. Sans touch, sans taste, sans smell, sans sound, sans sight, sans everything. You have felt the fish’s hatred. Imagine how much stronger must be the man’s.” Her eyes glittered with a cold fire. “I have suspected this for years, and now that I have experienced Teddy’s mind – now
I know.
” She sliced her hand outward, as if with a knife, to emphasize the depth of her knowledge, and its force. “The Naked Brains are all mad. They hate us and they will work tirelessly for our destruction.”

“This is what I have been saying all along,” Rudy gasped. “I have been trying to engage—”

Pavlova interrupted him. “The time for theorizing and yammering and pamphleteering is over. You were brought here because I have a message and I need a messenger. The time has come for action. Tell your superiors. Tell the world. The Naked Brains must be destroyed.”

A sense of determination flooded Rudy’s being. This was what all his life had been leading up to. This was his moment of destiny.

Which made it particularly ironic that it was at that very moment that the Fist smashed in the door of the laboratory.

Radio Jones had punched a hole in the center of a sheet of paper and taped it to the casing of her all-frequencies receiver with the tuner knob at the center, so she could mark the location of each transceiver set she found. The tuner had a range of two hundred ten degrees, which covered the entire spectrum of the communications band. So she eyeballed it into quarters and then tenths, to give a rough idea how things were laid out. It would be better to rank them by electromagnetic frequency, but she didn’t have the time to work all that out, and anyway, though she would never admit this out loud, she was just a little weak on the theoretics. Radio was more a vacuum-tube-and-solder-gun kind of girl.

Right now the paper was heavily marked right in the center of the dial, from ninety to one-sixty degrees. There were dozens of flier-Brain pairs, and she’d put a mark by each one, and identified a good quarter of them – including, she was particularly pleased to see, all the big guys: Eszterhazy, Spindizzy, Blockhead O’Brien, Stackerlee Brown. When there wasn’t any room for more names, Radio went exploring into the rest of the spectrum, moving out from the center by incremental degrees.

So, because she wasn’t listening to the players, Radio missed the beginning of the massacre. It was only when she realized that everybody in Edna’s had rushed out into the street that she looked up from her chore and saw the aeroplanes falling and autogyros spinning out of control. She went to the window just in time to hear a universal gasp as a Zeppelin exploded in the sky overhead. Reflected flames glowed red on the uplifted faces.

“Holy cow!” Radio ran back to her set and twisted her dial back toward the center.

“…
Warinowski,”
a Naked Brain was saying dispassionately.
“Juric-Kocik. Bai. Gevers …”

A human voice impatiently broke in on the recitation. “What about Spindizzy? She’s worth more than the rest of them put together. Did she set off her bomb?”

“No.”
A long pause.
“Maybe she disarmed it.”

“If that’s the case, she’ll be gunning for me.” The human voice was horribly, horribly familiar. “Plot her vectors, tell me where she is, and I’ll take care of her.”

“Oh, no,” Radio said. “It can’t be.”

“What is your current situation?”

“My rockets are primed and ready, and I’ve got a clear line of sight straight down Archer Road, from Franklin all the way to the bend.”

“Stay your course. We will direct Amelia Spindizzy onto Archer Road, headed south, away from you. When you see her clear the Frank Lloyd Wright Tower, count three and fire.”

“Roger,” the rocket-assassin said. Now there was no doubt at all in Radio’s mind. She knew that voice. She knew the killer.

And she knew what she had to do.

Amelia Spindizzy’s ears rang from the force of the blast, and she could feel in the joystick an arrhythmic throb. Where had the missile come from that had caused the explosion? What had happened to Eszterhazy? She was sure she had not accidentally pressed the red button on the joystick, so he should be fine, if he had evaded the blast. Hyperalert, Amelia detected an almost invisible scratch in the air, tracing the trajectory of a second rocket, and braced herself for another shock.

When it came, she was ready for it. This time she rode, with her whole body, the great twisting thrusts that came from the rotor, much as she would ride a stallion or, she imagined, a man. The blades sliced the air and the autogyro shook, but she forced her will on the powerful machine, which had until this instant been her partner, not her opponent, and overmastered it.

It might be true that you never see the missile that kills you. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t be killed by a missile you could see. Amelia needed to get out of the line of fire – a third missile might err on the side of accuracy. She banked sharply down into Archer Road, past the speakeasy and the storefront church, and pulled a brisk half-Eszterhazy into an alley next to a skeleton of iron girders with a banner reading FUTURE HOME OF BLACK STAR LINE SHIPPING & NAVIGATION. All that raw iron would block her comptroller’s radio signal, but that hardly mattered now. At third-floor level, slowing to the speed of a running man, she crept, as it were, back to where she would see what was happening over the Great Square.