The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (46 page)

“What are you doing out here?” I asked her.

“They’re after me, Lash,” she said. “Everybody even remotely involved with the government is being hunted down. There’s something in the collective imagination of those struck by the disease that makes them remember that the Republic is responsible for their low wages and grinding lives.”

“How many are after you?” I asked and looked quickly over my shoulder.

“All of them,” she said, covering her face with her hand. “I can tell you’ve not yet succumbed to the Plague because you are not now wrapping your fingers around my throat. They caught the Quotidian of Health Care today and hanged him on the spot. I witnessed it as I fled.”

“Come with me. You can hide at my place,” I said. I walked with my arm around her and could feel her trembling.

At my quarters, I bled the radiators and made us tea. We sat at the table in my parlor. “We’re going to have to get out of the city,” I said. “In a little while, we’ll go out on the street and steal a steam carriage. Escape to the country. I’m sure they need doctors out among the sane.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said and covered my hand resting on the table with her own.

“There’s no reason left here,” I said.

“I meant to remember to tell you this,” she said, taking a sip of tea. “About a week ago, I was summoned out one night on official business of the Republic. My superior sent me word that I was to go to a certain address and treat, using all my skill and by any means necessary, the woman of the house. The note led me to believe that this individual’s well-being was of the utmost importance to the Republic.”

“The President’s wife?” I asked.

“No, the address was down on the waterfront. A bad area and yet they offered me no escort. I was wary of everything that moved and made a noise. Situated in the middle of a street of grimy drinking establishments and houses of prostitution, I found the place. The structure had at one time been a bank. You could tell by the marble columns out front. There were cracks in its dome and weeds poked through everywhere, but there was a light on inside.

“I knocked on the door and it was answered by a young man in a security uniform, cap, badge, pistol at his side. I gave my name and my business. He showed me inside, and pointed down a hallway whose floor, ceiling and walls were carpeted – a tunnel through a mandala design of flowers on a red background. Dizzy from it, I stepped into a large room where I saw a woman sitting on a divan. She wore a low-cut blue gown and had a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. Her hair was dark and abundant but disheveled. I introduced myself, and she told me to take a seat in a chair near her. I did. She chewed the tip of the tortoiseshell for a brief period, and then said, ‘Let me introduce myself. I’m the Prisoner Queen.’ ”

My heart dropped at her words. I wanted to look in Millicent’s eyes to see if I could discern whether she’d contracted the Plague in recent days and survived to now be mad, but I didn’t have the courage.

Although I tried to disguise my reaction, she must have felt me tremble slightly, because she immediately said, “Lash, believe me, I know how odd this sounds. I fully expected you not to believe me, but this really happened.” Only then did I look into her face, and she smiled.

“I believe you,” I said. “Go on. I want to hear the rest.”

“What it came to,” said Millicent, “was that she’d summoned me, not for any illness but to tell me what was about to happen.”

“Why you?” I asked.

“She said she admired earnest people. The Prisoner Queen told me that what we have been considering the most terrible part of the disease, the blending of memory and the imagination, is a good thing. ‘A force of nature’, was how she put it. There’s disorganization and mayhem now, but apparently the new reality will take hold and the process will be repeated over centuries.”

“Interesting,” I said and slowly slid my hand out from under hers. “You know,” I went on, rising, “I have to get a newspaper and read up on what’s been happening. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right back.” She nodded and took another sip of tea, appearing relaxed for the first time since I’d run into her.

I put on my hat and coat and left the apartment. Out on the street, I ran to the east, down two blocks and a turn south, where earlier that day I’d seen an abandoned steam carriage that had been piloted into a lamp-post. I remembered noticing that there really hadn’t been too much damage done to the vehicle.

The carriage was still there where I’d seen it, and I immediately set to starting it, lighting the pilot, pumping the lever next to the driver’s seat, igniting the gas to heat the tank of water. All of the gauges read near-full, and when the thing actually started up after a fit of coughing that sounded like the bronchitis of the aged, I laughed even though my heart was broken.

I stopped for nothing but kept my foot on the pedal until I’d passed beyond the city limit. The top was down and I could see the stars and the silhouettes of trees on either side of the road. In struggling to banish the image of Millicent from my mind, I hadn’t at first noticed a cloud of steam issuing from under the hood. I realized the carriage’s collision with the lamp must have cracked the tank or loosened a valve. I drove on, the steam wafting back over the windshield, enveloping my view.

The constant misty shower made me hot. I began to sweat, but I didn’t want to stop, knowing I might not get the carriage moving again. Some miles later, I began to get dizzy, and images flashed through my thoughts like lightning – a stone castle, an island, a garden of poisonous flowers spewing seed. “I’ve got to get out of the steam,” I said aloud to try to revive myself.

“The steam’s not going anywhere,” said the Prisoner Queen from the passenger seat. Her voluminous hair was neatly put up in an ornate headdress and her gown was decorated with gold thread. “Steam’s the new dream,” she said. “Right now I’m inventing a steam-powered space submarine to travel to the stars, a radiator brain whose exhaust is laughing gas, a steam pig that feeds a family of four for two weeks.” She slipped a hand behind my head, and after taking a toke from the tip of the tortoiseshell, she leaned over, put her mouth to mine, and showed me the new reality.

13 April 1899

Lat. 1°10’ S, Long. 71°42’ E

Might there still be on this watery ball of ours a
terra incognita
, an uncharted Eden just over the horizon, home to noble aborigines or perhaps even a lost civilization? A dubious hypothesis, at least on the face of it. This is the age of the surveyor’s sextant and the cartographer’s calipers. Our planet has been girded east to west and gridded pole to pole. And yet what sea captain these days does not dream of happening upon some obscure but cornucopian island? Naturally he will keep the coordinates to himself, so he can return in time accompanied by his faithful mate and favorite books, there to spend the rest of his life in blissful solitude.

Today I may have found such a world. Our mission to Ceylon being complete, with over a hundred specimens to show for our troubles, most notably a magnificent lavender butterfly with wings as large as a coquette’s fan and a green beetle of chitin so shiny that you can see your face in the carapace, we were steaming southbysouthwest for the Chagos Archipelago when a monsoon gathered behind us, persuading me to change course fifteen degrees. Two hours later the tempest passed, having filled our hold with brackish puddles though mercifully sparing our specimens, whereupon we found ourselves in view of a green, ragged mass unknown to any map in Her Majesty’s Navy, small enough to elude detection until this day, yet large enough for the watch to cry “Land, ho!” whilst the
Aldebaran
was yet two miles from the reef.

We came to a quiet cove. I dispatched an exploration party, led by Mr Bainbridge, to investigate the inlet. He reported back an hour ago, telling of bulbous fruits, scampering monkeys and tapestries of exotic blossoms. When the tide turns tomorrow morning, I shall go ashore myself, for I think it likely that the island harbors invertebrate species of the sort for which our sponsors pay handsomely. But right now I shall amuse myself in imagining what to call the atoll. I am not so vain as to stamp my own name on these untrammeled sands. My wife, however, is a person I esteem sufficiently to memorialize her on a scale commensurate with her wisdom and beauty. So here we lie but a single degree below the Line, at anchor off Lydia Isle, waiting for the cockatoos to sing the dawn into being.

14 April 1899

Lat. 1°10’ S, Long. 71°42’ E

The pen trembles in my hand. This has been a day unlike any in my twenty years at sea. Unless I miss my guess, Lydia Isle is home to a colony of beasts that science, for the best of reasons, once thought extinct.

It was our naturalist, Mr Chalmers, who first noticed the tribe. Passing me the glass, he quivered with an excitement unusual in this phlegmatic gentleman. I adjusted the focus and suddenly there he was: the colony’s most venturesome member, poking a simian head out from a cavern in the central ridge. Soon more such apemen appeared at the entrance to their rocky dosshouse, a dozen at least, poised on the knife-edge of their curiosity, uncertain whether to flee into their grotto or further scrutinize us with their deep watery eyes and wide sniffing nostrils.

We advanced, rifles at the ready. The apemen chattered, howled and finally retreated, but not before I got a sufficiently clear view to make a positive identification. Beetle brows, monumental noses, tentative chins, barrel chests – I have seen these features before, in an alcove of the British Museum devoted to artists’ impressions of a vanished creature that first came to light forty-three years ago in Germany’s Neander Valley. According to my
Skeffington’s Guide to Fossils of the Continent
, the quarrymen who unearthed the skeleton believed they’d found the remains of a bear, until the local schoolmaster, Johann Karl Fuhlrott, and a trained anatomist, Hermann Schaffhausen, determined that the bones spoke of prehistoric Europeans.

Fuhlrott and Schaffhausen had to amuse themselves with only a skullcap, femur, scapula, ilium and some ribs, but we have found a living, breathing remnant of the race. I can scarcely write the word legibly, so great is my excitement. Neanderthals!

16 April 1899

Lat. 1°10’ S, Long. 71°42’ E

Unless there dwells in the hearts of our Neanderthals a quality of cunning that their outward aspect belies, we need no longer go armed amongst them. They are docile as a herd of Cotswold sheep. Whenever my officers and I explore the cavern that shelters their community, they lurch back in fear and – if I’m not mistaken – a kind of religious awe.

It’s a heady feeling to be an object of worship, even when one’s idolaters are of a lower race. Such adoration, I’ll warrant, could become as addictive as a Chinaman’s pipe, and I hope to eschew its allure even as we continue to study these shaggy primitives.

How has so meek a people managed to survive into the present day? I would ascribe their prosperity to the extreme conviviality of their world. For food, they need merely pluck bananas and mangoes from the trees. When the monsoon arrives, they need but retreat into their cavern. If man-eating predators inhabit Lydia Isle, I have yet to see any.

Freed from the normal pressures that, by the theories of Mr Darwin, tend to drive a race toward either oblivion or adaptive transmutation, our Neanderthals have cultivated habits that prefigure the accomplishments of civilized peoples. Their speech is crude and thus far incomprehensible to me, all grunts and snorts and wheezes, and yet they employ it not only for ordinary communication but to entertain themselves with songs and chants. For their dancing rituals they fashion flutes from reeds, drums from logs and even a kind of rudimentary oboe from bamboo, making music under whose influence their swaying frames attain a certain elegance. Nor is the art of painting unknown on Lydia Isle. By torchlight we have beheld on the walls of their cavern adroit representations of the indigenous monkeys and birds.

But the fullest expression of the Neanderthals’ artistic sense is to be found in the cemetery that they maintain in an open field not far from their stone apartments. Whereas most of the graves are marked with simple cairns, a dozen mounds feature effigies wrought from wicker and daub, each doubtless representing the earthly form of the dear departed. The details of these funerary images are invariably male, a situation not remarkable in itself, as the tribe may regard the second sex as unworthy of commemoration. What perplexes Mr Chalmers and myself is that we have yet to come upon a single female of the race – or, for that matter, any infants. Might we find the Neanderthal wives and children cowering in the cavern’s deepest sanctum? Or did some devastating tropical plague visit Lydia Isle, taking with it the entire female gender, plus every generation of males save one?

17 April 1899

Lat. 1°10’ S, Long. 71°42’ E

This morning I made a friend. I named him Silver, after the lightning flash of fur that courses along his spine like an externalized backbone. It was Silver who made the initial gesture of amicability, presenting me with the gift of a flute. When I managed to pipe out a reasonable rendition of “Beautiful Dreamer”, he smiled broadly – yes, the aborigines can smile – and wrapped his leathery hand around mine.

I did not recoil from the gesture, but allowed Silver to lead me to a clearing in the jungle, where I beheld a solitary burial mound, decorated with a funerary effigy. Whilst I would never presume to plunder the grave, I must note that the British Museum would pay handsomely for this sculpture. The workmanship is skillful, and,
mirabile dictu
, the form is female. She wears a crown of flowers, from beneath which stream glorious tresses of grass. Incised on a lump of soft wood, the facial features are, in their own naive way, lovely.