The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (64 page)

“Wait,” said Suicide.

She was standing with fingers spread, looking at the backs of her hands. I had to turn to see her, hating not having my 360 scope.

We went back to her. Under her skin the blades were trembling.

“Back up,” said Tintype, and she did. The movement stopped.

He studied the ground minutely. Meantime the voice went on.

Hatches soon. The others are dead.

Tintype was crouched on the ground. “How came you here?” he shouted suddenly. There was a pause while the whisper-speech stopped.

No one has asked in a long time.

Another pause.

I was … exiled? Yes. A punishment. Transported. From my home I was … thrown. Very far.

“Why?” I shouted, while Tintype grubbed in the dirt. Didn’t see why he had to do all the talking here.

There was something self-satisfied in the answer.
I bred where it was forbidden. Only the Matrix can breed the Central, but I won through, I did it. They feared me too much to disseminate, but exile me they did. They threw me to the cold worlds. But they could not stop my hatchings.

“Here,” Tintype pointed. If you looked close, you could see a faint line on the ground where the little bits of ore shifted in straight lines. He dug in his toe and made a furrow in the dust, perpendicular to our path.

“You can’t go beyond here, not with your blades,” he told Suicide. “The mag gets stronger each step, and they’ll rip out of your body. Do you understand?” She looked sullen but nodded. We went on and she squatted down, watching.

Because of the cold they fight inside me. They are all devoured, all but one. And he hatches.

We came to the ridge of rocks. And looked over.

Back Home, once, I saw the trap of an ant lion. Biggish sort of insects, they dig a hole, a funnel-shaped trap of loose soil, and ants and such who trip over it fall to the bottom where the ant lion lies buried.

This doodlebug’s crib circled wide – how wide I could not tell; the slope all chunks of loose ore. One, two miles down, perhaps, was a black dot. I squinted, missing my scope. It might have been a hole. A century of Parramatta pensioners scrabbling a month would be hard-put to dig such a thing. Two century of Botany convicts with hell-for-leather Squatters on their tails, perhaps.

The voice was very clear now.

I would be Matrix. I couldn’t wait. I should have killed Matrix when I had the chance.

Tintype knelt on the edge of the ridge and peered down. Hypnotic, all those rocks merging into something smooth-looking with that dot, harder to see than it should have been and the heat haze wavering. A long thin something – yellowbelly or fierce or maybe just a coppertail – scuttled past Tintype’s hand and he startled back and overcomped sideways. Before I could grab him he overbalanced and started sliding down that slope of tumbled ore. He struggled for purchase but there was none.

I threw myself belly-down, digging in with my toes and grabbing for his flailing hands.

“ ’Type! Superstar!” Suicide yelled from behind the barrier Tintype had toed in the sand. “ ’Star! Hold him!”

“Trying to,” I grunted, and the shadow of a smile shimmied over Tintype’s face. “Told you I wasn’t so smart. Don’t let her come across,” he said, maddening-calm with the long descent, that slope, that maw beneath him. Bloody rocks were wrong, too round, too slippery for what they were.

I could’ve killed them both, truly, yelling at me this and that while plowing in my knees and elbows and slipping in anyway.

Are you coming to me now?
The voice was curious.

Then something like the wind at my back and she had me around the waist, both her wrist-blades protruding enough to root in my leathers and poke my ribs, thank you very much. I looked back and she had her knee-blades planted deep, enough to hold all three of us for a while.

You may all come. See!

“Get back, Suicide!” yelled Tintype, never mind that I was hauling him inch by inch up the rubble, his feet clawing for toehold, now she had us anchored.

But she hung on, grim as death, and I thought at first it was dinkum and the mag was variable after all when she started to scream.

I heave-hoed hard as I could and sent Tintype rolling safe past the lip of the trap. Suicide was writhing in the red sand, gashes opening down her leathers where the blades were birthing, ripped from her flesh by the mag.

Tintype grabbed her feet, I took her shoulders and we tried to heave her past the barrier. But she was spasming now, her screams a thin, shrill tea-kettle sound. She thrashed like nothing human, and a blade shot out of her, neatly skinning half my thumb.

I hung on, but Tintype got a solid kick in the chest, sending him tumbling. Coated in red dust, he staggered back. I lost my grip, and Suicide dropped. The back blade shot from her, clattering down the slope. Then one tore out of the back of her hand.

Somehow Tintype scooped her up and went running for the barrier. I followed, dodging as her hardware zipped past my head.

At the barrier he almost fell, but we caught her between us, laid her down gently as we could.

Past the leathers I saw slabs of red flesh and mottled white bone. The tendons on the backs of her hand were exposed. Beneath, her leathers, my arms, were soaked.

Tintype cradled her, holding her head. Don’t do that, I thought automatically, but she didn’t struggle. She was panting quickly now, like a tired dingo.

“What?” said Tintype, bending over her.

“Hatching soon,” she said. “The barrier moons, all in pieces. So cold.”

She looked past Tintype, up at me. “I’m cold, ’Star.”

“Don’t,” said Tintype, but she was gone.

Tintype sat expressionless for a long time. In the twilight wind, the blood on my arms felt sticky and cold.

“Bollocks,” he said at last, quiet-like.

Nine years, I never heard him swear.

“Bollocks to them all.”

In a single movement, he got to his feet, Suicide in his arms. There was a terrible stillness about him.

He walked back to the pit and I trotted by his side.

“We need to get out of here, ’Type.”

He ignored me. At the lip of the slope he stopped, and I tried to take the body.

“Let me take her, ’Type. We’ll go back and find the mules.”

Tintype snarled at me, and I recoiled. He folded himself upon the lip, with her body across his lap.

“Go away, Superstar,” he said, deadvoiced. “Get as far away as you can.”

Suicide looked boneless across his knees, and her shorn head in the crook of his elbow looked like a tired doll.

A smooth click and I stared down the barrel of Tintype’s gun. Never knew he had a gun.

“Go, or I will shoot you, ’Star,” he said, but I was fair mazed. Celluloid, fine grained, a lovely piece, really. But how did he rate a gun, forbidden to pensioners? And where did he hide it all this time?

But then. He wasn’t really a pensioner, and hid everything from us.

Everything, even love.

Still, his voice was calm. “I’ll start with the shoulder, ’Star, then the legs. Move out while you can.”

I moved back slowly, crunching on the ore, then faster. Out of range, as I reckoned it, I stopped, and he put down the gun.

Methodically, he searched in his innumerable pockets. He took out something small, and square, and black, with a screen that glinted in the sun. Behind me and overhead, I heard the hum of gliders.

There were five of them, the same as those that crashed the Pinkertons. Tintype had something like a stylus and was manipulating something on the little black box.

I stifled the impulse to duck as the gliders hummed closer. Bollocks to them all.

Tintype, done with his fiddling about, held up the box and flashed it in the setting sun. The gliders were straight up by now, and I saw them adjust their course to center on Tintype.

He waited. He waited until they were very close.

Then he tossed the box in a beauteous parabola, arcing into the pit. The gliders, one two three four five, went straight down into the trap. He never looked round to watch them, still facing me.

The hum stopped, hiccupped like an angry insect.

And then.

A great flare, straight up like a pillar of fire. For a second I saw them both silhouetted stark black against the orange. Then the ash rained down. I did duck then; I groveled in the dirt. It was a long time before the roaring stopped.

I walked to the dimple where the pit had been, taking the sponges out of my ears. Nobody was saying anything. I was covered in red dust, half an inch thick: a creature of the Never-Never.

As far as I could see, mile upon mile of ore. And the milky sparkle of opal.

Reckoning-man and all, he had brought us to this.

Something moved, shifting chunks of earth with a clink and clank.

I decided to wait and see if it was human. But ’twasn’t. Tintype was gone, with Suicide, with the clients and their gliders, with Uluru buried deep in her exultation and despair.

Something tickled my brain, and I wondered if I’d missed a headmod.

Mother?

Wings it had, which made sense, didn’t it, if it was to fly between the stars? No head, but a mouth, serrated sharp, embedded in a stocky body. Nothing to compare this to: not ’roo, not goanna, not dingo, not man. Things like feet, too many, clawed like Suicide’s blades. Like her, a thing made to fight. It could’ve gutted me with a thought.

It looked at me, eyeless, sideways-like, and cawed.

I’m cold, mother.

I stepped closer and saw things like worms crawling over its body. Closer still and saw they were pinfeathers, growing fast before my eyes.

I’m hungry, mother.

Days away the Pinkertons roasted beneath the sun, and I had no thought but to lead it there, though my ’skins were all but dry and I’d never make it. It followed me patient for half a day and then must’ve nosed them out, for that mouth came out of that dreadful body and hooked me up by the leathers. I dangled like a puppy while its feet beat the ground and the ground went by in a blur of dust and opal.

It ate fast, if delicately. Thought it would eat me too, but I was too tired to run when it stepped, fussy-like, towards me.

But it only settled against me, tucking its terrible feet beneath, and went to sleep.

I thought about howsome my last sea voyage wasn’t half bad, and I’d rather like another.

“Well, little bird,” I whispered. “Shall we go to London to see the Queen?”

In glancing over my correspondence with Herr Marx, especially the letters written during the period in which he was struggling to complete his opus,
Capital
, even whilst I was remanded to the Victoria Mill of Ermen and Engels in Weaste to simultaneously betray the class I was born into and the class to which I’d dedicated my life, I was struck again by the sheer audacity of my plan. I’ve moved beyond political organizing or even investigations of natural philosophy and have used my family’s money and the labour of my workers – even now, after a lifetime of railing against the bourgeoisie, their peculiar logic limns my language – to encode my old friend’s thoughts in a way I hope will prove fruitful for the struggles to come.

I am a fox, ever hunted by agents of the state, but also by political rivals and even the occasional enthusiastic student intellectual
manqué
. For two weeks, I have been making a very public display of destroying my friend’s voluminous correspondence. The girls come in each day and carry letters and covers both in their aprons to the roof of the mill to burn them in a soot-stained metal drum. It’s a bit of a spectacle, especially as the girls wear cowls to avoid smoke inhalation and have rather pronounced limps as they walk the bulk of the letters along the roof, but we are ever attracted to spectacle, aren’t we? The strings of electrical lights in the petitbourgeois districts that twinkle all night, the iridescent skins of the dirigibles that litter the skies over The City like peculiar flying fish leaping from the ocean – they even appear overhead here in Manchester, much to the shock, and more recently, glee of the street urchins who shout and yawp whenever one passes under the clouds, and the only slightly more composed women on their way to squalid Deansgate market. A fortnight ago I took in a theatrical production, a local production of Mr Peake’s
Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein
, already a hoary old play given new life and revived, ironically enough, by recent innovations in electrified machine-works. How bright the lights, how stunning the arc of actual lightning, tamed and obedient, how thunderous the ovations and the crumbling of the glacial cliffs! All the bombast of German opera in a space no larger than a middle-class parlour. And yet, throughout the entire evening, the great and hulking monster never spoke.
Contra
Madame Shelley’s engaging novel, the “new Adam” never learns of philosophy, and the total of her excellent speeches of critique against the social institutions of her, and our, day are expurgated. Instead, the monster is ever an infant, given only to explosions of rage. Yet the audience, which contained a fair number of working-men who had managed to save or secure 5d. for “penny-stinker” seating, was enthralled. The play’s Christian morality, alien to the original novel, was spelled out as if on a slate for the audience, and the monster was rendered as nothing more than an artefact of unholy vice. But lights blazed, and living snow from coils of refrigeration fell from the ceiling, and spectacle won the day.

My burning of Marx’s letters is just such a spectacle – the true correspondence is secreted among a number of the safe houses I have acquired in Manchester and London. The girls on the rooftop are burning unmarked leaves, schoolboy doggerel, sketches and whatever else I have lying about. The police have infiltrated Victoria Mill, but all their agents are men, as the work of espionage is considered too vile for the gentler sex. So the men watch the girls come from my office with letters by the bushel and burn them, then report every lick of flame and wafting cinder to their superiors.