Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Part 31

Grow strong. Do not give in to Old Age, which says the Revolutions of Youth are Sad Folly. Learn, become Clever. Be never part of his World. If your name is Robert, call yourself Charles. If your name is Maud, call yourself Jane. Should you be found out, change it again. Be the Ghosts in the Machines of this World, and when it shatters-and shatter it will, have no doubt, in Fire and Blood and Trenches and a million pulverized mechanisms which once were so wonderful they dazzled the Souls of Angels-stand ready to find me, find me living in the old Way, a bandit on the moors, a cattle-rustler, stealing the Flocks of the Lords. Find me in the Wasteland, and be you ready to seize their Engines and aim to Heaven.

The Constable was compelled to release Miss Jane Sallow three days after her capture. In popular histories, of course, the emergence of Jane from the stony building after three days has been subject to the obvious comparison. However, it was no Magdalen who came to deliver the Manchester Messiah, but one of the very machines she so railed against in her screeds. An Automaton arrived at the door of her cell, silent and grave, save for the clicking of his clockwork limbs. Jane stood grinning, her hands clasped gently before her, demure and gentle as she had never been in all her incarceration. The Automaton extended his steel hand, tipped in copper fingers, and through the bars they touched with great tenderness. The mechanical man turned to the Bailiff, and afterward Roger Smith would say that in those cold silver eyes he saw recognition of what he had done with the feral child, but no condemnation, as if both the machine and Jane were above him, so far above him as cherubim to beetles.

"I have come for Miss Jane," said the Automaton, his voice accompanied by the click and whirr of punchcards shuffling in his heart.

"She is not free to go," stammered Bailiff Smith.

"I come not on a whim, but in the service of Lord---, who has a special interest in the child." The mechanical man showed his gleaming palm, and there upon it was stamped the seal of the House of---, true as the resurrection.

Jane stepped lightly from her cell, and clamped her savage gaze on the unfortunate bailiff as she slipped into the arms of the Automaton and pressed her lips to his metallic mouth, sealing a kiss of profound pa.s.sion. As she left the Constabulary, she drew from her ap.r.o.n a last pamphlet for the eyes of Roger Smith, and let it fall at his feet.

Property is Theft!

What does your Master possess that was not bought with your Flesh, your Pain, your Labor? His satin Pantaloons, his jewel-tipped Cane? His Airship with its silken Balloon? His matched pearl-and-copper Pistols? His Horseless Carriage honking and puffing down lanes that once were lined with sweet Violets and Snowdrops? None of these, and neither his mistresses' Gowns, nor their clockwork Songbirds, nor their Full-Spectrum Phenomenoscope Opera Gla.s.ses. And for all you have given him, he Sniffs and pours out a Few Shillings into your Palm, and judges himself a Good Man.

Will you show him Goodness?

Come stand by my Side. Disrupt the Carnival of their Long, Fat Lives. Go unto his Automatons, his Clockwork Butlers, his Hydraulic Wh.o.r.es, his Steam-Powered Sommeliers, and treat with them not as the Lord and Lady do in their Arrogance, as Charming Toys, or Children to be Spoiled and Spanked in turn. But instead address them as they are: Workers like you, Slaved to the Petticoats of Aristocracy, Oppressed Brothers in the Great Ma.s.s of Disenfranchised Souls. For I say-and Fie to you who deny it-the Automaton HAS a Soul, and they are Crushed beneath the Wheel no less than We. Have they not Hands to Labor? Have they not Feet to Toil? Have they not Backs to Break? Destroy the Jacquard Subjugator, but have Mercy for the Machine who walks in the shape of a Man. It is not his fault that he was Made, not Born. Blame not she who never asked to be Fashioned from Bra.s.s and Steel to lie beneath a Lord in Manufacture of Desire. She can Speak, she can Reason, and all that Speak and Reason can be Made to Stand on the Side of the Worker.

The Automatic Soul bears no Original Sin.

Unlike the cruel Flesh and Blood Tyrants of the World, the Automaton has a Memory which cannot fail. If, by chance, a Child were cast out on the day of its Birth, if the Automaton stood by and Witnessed her Expulsion into Darkness, if he did Nothing, though he longed to stand between her and the World, still he would know the Child's Features, even were she grown, even were she Mangled and Maimed, and his clicking Heart would grieve for her, would give Succor to her, would feed her when she could not rise, kiss her when she could not smile, and when she asked it, feed any other she called Beloved. The Automaton would serve her and love her, for all its endless Days, because it could never forget the Face of a weeping Infant cast onto snowy Stones. It would listen to her as no other might, and bend its will to her Zion, silently spreading the Truth of her Words to all its clockwork Clan, for, once taught its Opposite, the Mechanical Man will never forget what a Family is. The World is a Watch, says the Philosopher. I say if such is so, then the Watchwork Man is the World, and must be Saved.

Your Power is great, my Brothers and Sisters, for your Power is in Secret Manipulation. Pause in the great Hallway of your Manor House, and touch lightly the Piston-Elbow of the Poor Butler. Say to him: Property is Theft. The Master calls you Property, and Steals your Autonomy. Go not with him, but with us, Towards the Utopia of Human and Automaton, where we may all Dwell in Paradise, where we will Beat Gears to Ploughshares and Live as One.

Yes, call him Friend. The Soul in him will Hearken. Tell him of the City of the New Century, where no man shall wear Velvet, and all shall Dance in the Light. Tell him our Land Shall be Owned Communally, our Goods Divided Equally, from each According to Her Ability, to Each According to His Need. Our Children shall Nurse upon both Milk and Oil, Our G.o.d shall be Triune: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Punchcard. The Workers will Lift this World from the Ashes of Industry and Sup on the Bread of Righteous Living.

Speak to him with Honest Fervor. Look if he does not Embrace you. Look if he does not fight alongside you. Look if he does not smile upon you, and see in his smile the Ghost of his Immortal Self.

Jane Sallow did not vanish from the face of the earth-no mortal is granted that power. But no reliable record of her exists after her arrest, and an army of journalists and novelists have not been able to discover how she lived or died. Surely no Workers' Paradise sprang up in native British soil, no Midlands Commune shone on any green hill. Flights to the Moon were banned in 1924, at the commencement of Canadian hostilities. Lunar residents returned home, slowly, as the draft continued through the Long Decade. Even after the Trans-Oceanic War, the ban was not lifted, so as to ensure the defeated Marine Alliance would remain Earthbound and chastened. When pa.s.sage was again permitted in 1986, the fashionable had already determined Phobos and Deimos to be the desirable resort locales, and asteroid mining had replaced lunar industry entirely. The Moon is a curiosity now, and little more. An old-fashioned thing, and going there would be much like dressing in antique fashions and having one's daguerreotype made at a carnival kiosk. It is quiet there, still fertile, still a young world, open and empty, and no terrestrial man has cause to suspect anything untoward.

Thus, the Sallow mystery remains just that, and as we stand poised upon the brink of a new century yet again, we may look back on her with that mixture of mirth and sorrow due to all idealists, iconoclasts, and revolutionaries whose causes sputtered and died like the last hissing of a steam engine.

Lovelace & Babbage: Origins, with Salamander.

Sydney Padua.

SYDNEY PADUA is an animator, storyboard artist, and tiresome bore working in visual effects in London. She started drawing comics by accident and is still trying to figure out how to stop. Lovelace and Babbage have developed lives of their own, making appearances on the BBCs Techlab and the Steampunk Exhibition at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science. Their further adventures appear at 2dgoggles.com. Padua writes that: "'Lovelace: The Origin' was created for Ada Lovelace Day 2009, a Day of Blogging to celebrate Women in Technology, as a (mostly) factual account of the life of Ada, Lady Lovelace. Her life had a pretty depressing ending, and I was vaguely aware that there was a genre of something called 'steampunk,' where reality was much improved. So I threw in the crime-fighting punch line as a joke. Little did I suspect that I had created an entire pocket universe! 'Lovelace and Babbage vs. the Salamander People' is an episode-in-embryo, drawn from an incident in Charles Babbage's marvelous autobiography, Pa.s.sages From the Life of a Philosopher. He recounts the already thrilling tale of his visit into Mount Vesuvius, where set his walking stick on fire and nearly lost his barometer."

"THE UNLIKELY CAREER OF PORTIA DREADNOUGHT": To say that Portia Dreadnought was an angry child would have been a vast understatement. Despite her most privileged upbringing and the best education money could buy, the only child of the famous steamship robber baron, Porter Percival Dreadnought IV was, to be frank, an unmitigated terror. Oh, the tales servants could tell of finding exquisitely expensive dolls drowned in the Dreadnoughts' vast aquarium, strangled by a length of ribbon torn from a ballet slipper. The shredded dresses, the dainty shoes found flushed down the loo-all earned Portia her always-whispered nickname: Satan's Sp.a.w.n. As might be expected, adolescence did not much improve matters. The only thing the budding Portia seemed to find interesting were her father's ships. She'd wander around them for hours, fascinated by the complex architecture of their enormous engine rooms, their gothic arches and thrusting pistons more beautiful to her than any cathedral. And captivating, too, one would surmise, as evidenced by her habit of shucking her furs and skirts and wandering around the premises in the altogether, wearing only her top hat and a monocle she'd swiped from her father. Needless to say, the crew adored her-she was a lovely young lady-and when she began to make engineering suggestions as well as show an interest in piloting, no one was inclined to discourage her. And that is how the legendary Portia Dreadnought came to captain the fleet of luxury steamships that she alone inherited.

Art & text by Ramona Szczerba.

BY MEANS OF THE TELECTROSCOPE WE SHALL NOT ONLY BE ABLE TO LISTEN TO THE DISTANT ORATOR BUT SHALL WATCH HIS ACTIONS AS WELL.

A photograph of the first page of the doc.u.ments sent by the "Mecha-Ostrich." Given that the entire account was written in this haphazard fashion, we have had to provide the majority of the text in a conventional page layout rather than as a series of facsimiles. Smudged, torn pages from various books, including Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, J. R. R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, Jean Ray's Ghouls in My Grave, Charles Willeford's The Machine in Ward Eleven, Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and Eric Ba.s.so's The Beak Doctor, have been omitted for reasons of copyright. The proliferation of ill.u.s.trations of burning eyes, deep-sea fish, and dirigibles doubling as animals also made an entirely faithful reproduction impossible. - The Editors ALL MATERIALS COMPRISING "A Secret History of Steampunk" were originally sent in their loose-leaf form to the founder and former editor of Steampunk Magazine, Margaret "Magpie" Killjoy, and, in photocopied form, to the current editor, C. Allegra Hawksmoor. Both parties expressed confusion as to why. Upon noticing that a mention of a "Dr. Lash" echoed the t.i.tle of the Jeffrey Ford contribution to this anthology ("Dr. Lash Remembers"), both parties asked for a copy of Ford's story. Finding further "echoing" therein-especially with regard to the Notes & Queries included in the appendix below as "Fig. 3"-they decided to share the Mecha-Ostrich's doc.u.ments with us, for purposes of sharing with readers.

To the best of our ability, we have verified the legitimacy of elements not already presented as original pages from various publications, including all quotes from the all-too-real Edisonade "Bob's Big Black Ostrich." We have also verified from handwriting samples that neither Killjoy nor Hawksmoor wrote or collaborated in writing "A Secret History of Steampunk."

Despite references to ostriches in such confirmed doc.u.ments as the "Notes & Queries" facsimile, there is no record of a mechanical ostrich having been created anywhere in New England in the 1800s. A Delaware artist commune did, however, exist during that time, and there is a record of a "Sh.e.l.ley Vaughn" and "Mary Lewis," although this business of a mechanical brain seems, at best, a metaphor, at worst apocryphal. There is also evidence that both were Australians, in the country illegally, and deported soon after the events set out in the following account. The artist commune still flourishes to this day, although current members declined a request for an interview. - The Editors

A Secret History of Steampunk.

THE SUPPRESSION OF CLEAN STEAM TECHNOLOGY IS A CONSPIRACY Your Lives Are in Dang e r From Your Ignorance.

P R O P H E T S . M U S T . O P E N . Y O U R . E Y E S .

"You're going too fast, stranger," said the old man. "The secret is too big to toss out to everyone who asks for it. But, as I said, I like your face, and if you can show clean papers, maybe we'll talk."

-from "Electric Bob's Big Black Ostrich; or Lost on the Desert" or "Unlikely and Racist Boy's Adventure Edisonade" starring a stupid inventor.

I AM THE MECHA-OSTRICH resurrected, the Steampunk heretic come to tell you the way of it. My feathers are made of righteous steel and tipped with vitriol. I clank not when I walk or run, for I am sheathed as stealth in the form of ingeniously worked metal. You will never know exactly where, or even when, I am, or what proclamation I am about to make, or how far you will reel back from the force of my words as they roar out from my megaphone beak. Just know that you will reel, and recoil, and yet be irrevocably changed by the truth of me.

But that may just be posturing and hyperbole to get your attention. Perhaps I am disguised as a reasonable soul, indistinguishable from any of you. Perhaps I live in some sterile suburban h.e.l.lhole with manicured lawns and "beautification" committees. Perhaps I'm even the one you wave to from across the driveway, living in the identical house beside you-the secret sharer you desperately seek-as we lean into our separate caskets, place hands on steering wheels that only pretend to give us freedom of choice after all choices have already been made, and speed off toward the oblivion of work.

I could be your grandmother or your sister or your lover or your landlady. (Oh? Did you think immediately that the great and mighty resurrected Mecha-Ostrich must be a man? That the very idea must come from the World of Men? What further a.s.sumptions did you make? Am I Kenyan, Danish, Inuit, Mayan, Israeli, Greenlander, Finn, Cherokee, Dominican, Chilean, Polish, Siberian? Am I even man or woman? Perhaps I am both or neither. You will never know. I will never tell you.) But my meaning and message are clear, whether received in letter form, or through the many fliers I have posted or will soon post throughout your unsuspecting cities. I am here to open the eyes of the populace to the past and future-eyes that day after day stare into cathode rays and receive back dead pixels, that find temporary solace in Xboxes and iPhones, that receive their G.o.d from artificial light that blinds even as it disgorges disgusting, rotted chunks of information. "The dead are no different to us than the living," someone wise once said. (It was me.) At war within and without, battered and broken day after day, we can no longer understand either ourselves or our machines. We toil in a world that others make, and we do not understand how this controls us, how this makes us less and less able to question the essential facts of our existence.

But: it was not always this way. Though often as reactionary, brutish, short, and full of the Chronically Stupid as today, the Past contained the steam-flourishing seeds of a different future.

I am here to tell you that we lost the thread.

That we lost the wire between the two metal cans.

That we destroyed our own potential.

That we were let down and It was covered up.

That it was made sham and farce.

That hideous powers from both Industry and Government made this so.

That even more Hideous Powers came from Beyond the Authority of Both.

That these Hideous Powers were neither Masons nor Illuminati from the wet dreams of the most asinine and puerile of conspiracy theorists.

That these Hideous Powers are not to be trifled with and const.i.tute a threat to us all.

That I shall not refer to them further herein except by a single letter, S., as befits the whiSpering of a calamity imagined.

That in the wake of this Fall, daydreams of a smug and comfortable conspiracy are for children and fools, for children believe anything you tell them and fools never know enough. S. is no comfort, and no illusion. (Even knowing that S. exists is like being covered by a large, stench-ridden death shroud, and having to breathe through it every day.)

This image was stapled onto this page of the Mecha-Ostrich's main text, accompanied by several other images of reptilian eyes cut out of nature magazines. A scrawled note was included: "Recent evidence of tampering by S., in the context of fiction. Emphases my own. Evidence, incontrovertible. S. is awake and alive in the world. (Note the 27 instances of S., which is divisible by 9 to get 3 or 3 to get 9.): 'And we invented an airborne domicile with an inflatable roof made of a balloon in the Shape of a gently convex mattreSS that would both keep the domicile pleaSantly Shaded and protected from the rain, aS well aS provide nesting placeS for birdS. ThiS domicile lookS like a low-flying cloud and itS inhabitantS dwell far from inquiSitouS and nefariouS eyeS. It may be anch.o.r.ed above rain forestS and So Serve aS a platform from which to diScover the leafy theater below-animated by birdS and b.u.t.terflieS and men: agile tribeS who leap from tree to tree with their babeS and their pantrieS Strapped to their backS.' - pg. 41, 'Roseveine,' The Word Desire by Rikki Ducornet, 2005 Dalkey Archive Edition" - The Editors How do I know this truth? In part, I have always known because it is in my bones. But also because I have come into possession of information about my remote forebears, my great-great grandmother and grandfather (am I adopted? I'll never tell), whom I shall call here simply XX and XY, to protect their memory from S. and the agents of Fascism.

My story, then, is the story of XX and XY. They lived in New England at the end of the 1800s, perhaps in Delaware and perhaps somewhere else. They lived in a big, ancestral house on the edge of a town that shall remain nameless, the house a boundary or buffer between that town and an artist commune that had sprung up despite resistance from the town's more solid citizenry (read: people with lemons stuck up their a.s.ses).

These were the scourges of the time: the proto-hippies, proto-environmentalists, the proto-free thinkers. Their innocence and their trust created one of those bubbles of understanding that cannot but eventually pop: blind to race, religion, and cla.s.s, they worked together and apart as children of the same dream. In their backyards, bungalows, and loft s.p.a.ces, women and men alike, gay and straight, native and foreign, black and white and all-mixed-together, toiled to transform the landscape. They erected huge canvases and metal sculptures, created art across forms, aided by an anonymous benefactor referred to only as "the Prisoner Queen" and rumored to be the widow of a "famous nudist." In all ways, they engaged in behavior that is like the smell of b.l.o.o.d.y flesh unto wolves to S. and His Great Eye.

XX and XY's location on the cusp of this site composed (and composted) of great industry, of the heresy of true equality, came as the result of an inheritance from XY's side of the family, which wanted nothing more than for XY to be made a memory, a ghost, a nothing. The break had occurred, according to the journals, a year earlier, and they were now outcasts, made to live next to other outcasts, even though only a fool thinks that a parrot is automatically delighted to share her roost with a mechanical nightingale. (Still, it was so.) XY had escaped a Harvard he couldn't comprehend because, as my father (dirt farmer/bag) once said before I ran away the third and final time-train-hopped from Zembla to Seattle, as an unknowing tip of the top hat to my steamy forebears, sending provocation back in the form of scary photos hinting at future catastrophe-he " just wanted to make stuff from other things. Just wanted to make stuff, break stuff, and fix stuff."

As for XX, she'd fled a rigid liberal education at a "girls college" as she called it scornfully, where "the idea of truly studying science was like a red 'S' [foreknowledge?! - MO] emblazoned upon my blouse." To someone with the nuts-and-bolts of applied science tattooed into her skin in patterns of rust and coal dust-her father owned a foundry to which she had frequent access-this situation was intolerable. She'd always delighted in playing where other children might have recoiled in fear, and this wouldn't change even after she'd grown up.

Both had gained their scientific knowledge largely by dint of rigorous self-study. Each had notebooks filled with dead leaves and live ideas, obscure diagrams and daydreams of the ideal future. Neither fit in anywhere else. They had met, legend had it, hunting for parts in a junkyard at midnight; kissed over the mangled ruins of a locomotive engine; consummated amid a bed of dark green moss riddled through with the nuts and bolts of a thousand girders.

Included with this image, a typed note from the Mecha-Ostrich: "From a popular Serbian comic strip (1992-2003), the t.i.tle of which roughly translates as 'American Tinker under the Influence of Absinthe,' about a crazed inventor, drawn by artist Ivica Stevanovic. In this frame the unnamed inventor is taking a wrench to a half-mechanical Sasquatch in its molting phase. Although not visible, the Sasquatch has a pilot's license (thus the alt.i.tude mask), and thruster aft in lieu of the normal parachute for emergencies. Several members of the artist commune were Yugoslavian, and some were known to visit relatives back in Europe-evidence that stories about XY were circulated abroad, at which point they mutated almost beyond recognition. This image, created so long after XY's time, appears to have been modeled after Abraham Lincoln and cannot hope to match descriptions of XY from the period, which noted his partial Apache heritage. (You will not be given even a caricature of a likeness of XX for fear you might recognize her.)" - The Editors Their self-study became, for a time, the study of each other. The journals are full of their observations, most too steamy to be related here. "Tiny almost translucent ears," XY marvels. "Huge c.o.c.k," XX notes, with parenthetical "good endurance." "Can listen to my soliloquies for ages and ages without falling asleep," XX also notes. "Could listen to her talk forever," XY confirms a day later.

In light of their self-discoveries, it hardly mattered that their house on the edge of town was old and rattling, and half-tore itself apart in times of storm. At least it was big, three stories, and they had inherited wall-to-wall-to-ceiling shelves of books, along with a s.p.a.cious if neglected bas.e.m.e.nt and backyard.

Within weeks, they had turned that bas.e.m.e.nt, that backyard, into the foundation of a tinker's shop, and used the money from repairing the townsfolk's machines, large and small (but mostly small), to fund their own inquiries into matters of a scientific nature. In addition to repairs, they made "all manner of Thing" that could be quietly sold to private citizens without calling too much attention to the wildness of their expertise. From the fragments of journal entries that have come into my possession, these items included primitive toasters, calculators, and mechanical backhoes. (Who knows? The crisp burn of their joyously infernal operations may still kiss the air with atoms more than a century later.) XX was always the brains of the operation, and XY was something else entirely. XX was patient and wise by all accounts, and fully as supersaturated with imagination as her partner, but XY had some other impulse-a madness?-that she didn't possess but could harness, even as it exasperated her and then in turn saddened him, because, as he put it, "I can't help myself, even as I can see it happening." It was from this union that they created, eventually, not just my great-great grandmother, but also their greatest invention: the original Mecha-Ostrich, in both the rounded steel of its original reality and in my turbulent presence so many years later to speak for them and all the others who have been silenced by S.

Out of the exile forced upon them came, for a time, success and happiness. For five years, their business flourished, and they reached a level of camaraderie with the members of the commune that made them happy, as if there had been a missing piece to their lives that only others could provide. But then one day a grateful bank teller from the town gifted XY with what he believed was a considerate present: a recent edition of the New York Five Cent Library that included "Electric Bob's Big Black Ostrich, Or, Lost on the Desert," a pulp adventure by the author of the previous Electric Bob. It was the normal racist claptrap of an era, all wrapped up in the innocence of a boy's adventure, featuring off-the-cuff references to "a dozen big greasy Mojave warriors" and Mexican "Greasers," along with cla.s.sic lines of dialogue like "Take that n--- giant first."

But what caught XY's eye amongst all the maddening, saddening evidence of all-too-common stupidity and intolerance were the descriptions of how the inane Electric Bob and his cohorts came to create a mechanical ostrich. I say inane because the premise of this pointless yarn is that Electric Bob can't cross a desert without the help of an invention. "We must make something in which we can cross the desert," Electric Bob says, conveniently ignoring such timeless inventions as pack mules and feet connected to working legs. His suggestion of an airship is deep-sixed by his pal Inyo Bill who quickly exclaims, "No, sir! No flying machine for me! Not for all the gold between here and the day of judgment!" Despite it being many decades before the advent of mind-warping and brain-destroying TV, the immediate conclusion is to build a mechanical ostrich instead: The cover of the New York Five Cent Library volume that includes the Edisonade referenced by the Mecha-Ostrich, not included in the materials sent to the past and present editors of Steampunk Magazine. The story dates from August 26, 1893. - The Editors "Now, if we could only ride one of them," said old Inyo Bill, pointing with his pipe toward a number of ostriches on an adjoining farm which the two men were pa.s.sing in their walk. "A big ostrich could carry us among the rocks, and across the sand at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and not mind the snakes, or lack of water, and-"

"Good!" cried Electric Bob, slapping his old friend on the shoulder. "You have solved the problem, Inyo. We will have an ostrich big enough to carry us both to the Pegleg mine. It is just the thing!"

"There ain't an ostrich alive could do it," said the old man, with a puzzled look.

"Well, we will build one that will run by electric power," said Bob, smiling.

After XY had gotten over his shock-recorded emphatically in his journal-that ostriches had been introduced to the United States, he soon found himself fascinated by the mechanical version, which the two men enter by quickly running "up a wire ladder that hung down from under one wing." (This method of entry seems vastly superior to the undignified "hindquarters portal" developed by the French for their modern, Verne-inspired mechanical elephant in Nantes.) Of the bird itself, the author writes: The ostrich towered thirty feet in the air to the top of his great head. The center of the body was twenty feet from the ground, the neck was about eight feet long.

The black male taken as a model had been faithfully copied, in appearance and proportions, and when completed the gigantic machine standing there in the orange grove was to all outward appearance a mammoth ostrich.

"It will cause great excitement wherever we go," said Inyo. "People will think it a real old rooster."

"That will be great," says Bob, because nothing screams "desert travel" like a huge, heavy, black ostrich whose every footstep will shift and settle and dislocate sand.

But there is a catch. Inyo points out that causing all of that attention might lead to getting shot at. Bob rea.s.sures his sidekick that the ostrich will be able to withstand anything up to and possibly including cannon fire (much like the smaller model in my garage), but brings Inyo into the machine to show off its weaponry: "Well," said Bob, "to begin, you know the legs are of fine wrought steel and hollow, the body is of thin plate steel lined with hardwood to protect us from the heat out there, and the wings and tail are of aluminum, light, graceful, and bullet-proof.

"The power is furnished by powerful storage batteries placed in the body just between the thighs of the bird, and are capable of giving us a speed of from twenty to forty miles an hour-depending on the nature of the ground we travel over.

"Here are a water tank, storage places for provisions, ammunition, etc., and here is our machine gun... [which] consists of an enlarged revolver cylinder, holding twenty-five Winchester rifle cartridges, and a short, heavy barrel, and is fired by turning this crank-this way."

At which point Electric Bob's oafish partner says of the ingenious addition of a camera, "Why, you can kill [Native Americans] with the gun and photograph 'em with this machine at the same time, can't we?"

All of this left XY cold and wondering at the "casual yet specific cruelty of humanity." Nor did he thrill to the heretical prospect of using electricity to power the beast. But the basic idea-the creation of a mechanical ostrich-raised a specter of a monumental challenge in XY's head, the hint of a possible future peeking through a door of light. It made small, or so he thought, his own plans by dint of its sheer audacity.

To XX the idea would have simply been amusing, a "fancy or whimsy of the kind that used to incite pillow talk after a day of more serious endeavors." Left to her own infernal devices, she would have returned to work in the bas.e.m.e.nt on their crude attempts at a superconductor or perpetual motion machine, or her re-creation of the steam-powered automated sliding gla.s.s doors first invented by the Egyptians.

Each of these projects they had described to others as a kind of declaration of love for one another, but these were not just acts of fidelity and faith. They were acts of solidarity with people they had never met or corresponded with, like Tesla and all of the other mad geniuses that used to roam the earth and now are kept in self-imposed cages in the bas.e.m.e.nts of top-secret corporate facilities, fated to produce a.s.sembly-line plastic vomit for the ma.s.ses. (Nor did they have children at that point; indeed, XX was working on an external, steam-powered incubator, as she had no wish to halt her research.) But XY was not XX and XX was not XY. After seeing the ostrich description, he cross-referenced it to his research into Vaucanson's famous mechanical ibis from the 1700s-and became convinced not only that he could create what he called a "Mecha-Ostrich," but that it would be an extraordinary invention for people to ride around in, "powered by friendly and proven steam."

The mention of Vaucanson's ibis is significant given the intricacy of this famous automaton. The mechanical bird was built by a French engineer named Jacques de Vaucanson in the 1730s, although some credit it to Russian inventor Vladimir Gvozdev. The ibis had a weight inside connected to over a thousand moving parts. Vaucanson, by trial and error, made these parts move together to give an illusion of life. The ibis even had a rubber tube for its digestive tract. The ibis and other automata made Vaucanson famous and he traveled for many years exhibiting his ibis and other machines around Europe. Although he collected honors for his work, he also collected scorn from those who believed he had employed infernal means to create his ibis. Most of his creations were destroyed in a fire a year after Vaucanson died, but in 1805 the famed poet Goethe spotted the miraculous ibis in the collection of an Austrian antiques enthusiast. Shortly thereafter, the Austrian died and the collections were auctioned off to a certain "Baron Sampson Sardonicus" to pay his debts. The ibis has not been seen since. Even in 1805, Goethe had reported that the ibis looked mangy and had "digestive problems." Strange sounds came from inside the automata, and it is likely it ceased to function shortly after 1806. Vaucanson's relatives have often claimed that the ibis was Vaucanson's most prized possession and that he believed it held the key to solving several scientific mysteries. - The Editors XX, as might be expected, lodged many wise and timely objections to this new course of action-not least of which was the mangled evidence provided by their New Hampshire neighbors some decades earlier: a tinker-created mechanical elephant gone awry. Not only had the elephant hideously malfunctioned, but a self-proclaimed "mad prophet of New Hampshire," who had caught the fancy of the local newspapers, spent much of his remaining time on this good Earth railing against science, usually in the context of his apocalyptic visions of the metal beast. ("A Science of Morality hangs on people's Actions, as well as the effect they achieve on our fellow-men, in a narrower or wider range. Let us not encourage each other to continue a worship of the monotonous material world, the world of the Inhuman and Automatic?." See the appendix for more.) But XY ignored all of this, for he was in the grip of a powerful and all-encompa.s.sing vision. This vision, according to an entry XX made in her journal, "overtook him to such a great degree that it was like a hot air balloon he was blowing up in our research bas.e.m.e.nt, slowly taking up all of the s.p.a.ce, crowding out everything I wanted to work on. Eventually, I gave up and decided to help him, because then it would all be over much sooner, and I could get back to more important work. Besides, when obsessed he was very compelling, and that was...attractive..."

Attraction aside, it appears that XY had hooked XX on the idea of automata in general, through the agency of commune member and sculptor Pozukuddi Nagalakshmi. In XX's journal, around this time, the following note has been scrawled across the back of a page: "According to S&M and Ms. Nagalakshmi, 'in former times there was a certain artist in the Middle Country. To enrich himself he went on his business from the Middle Country to the country of the Greeks. There he stopped at the house of a mechanic. A mechanical doll was made by the latter and placed in his room to serve him. She washed his feet and stood by. As she was leaving he spoke to her. She stood in silence. He thought: Surely she has been sent to me as a servant. Seizing her by the hand, he began to drag her towards him, whereupon she became a heap of chains.'"1 For months afterwards, XX would tease XY by saying, "Drag me, and I'll become a heap of chains."' "More likely she'll take the chains to me if I'm not careful, and I'll have earned it!" XY wrote at one point. Perhaps there was a blade of truth in amongst the teasing, but they had achieved enough singleness of purpose to embark on their adventure...except that it wasn't nearly as easy as fiction. In the Edisonade, Electric Bob studies real ostriches, creates diagrams of his mechanical spin-off in just three days, and sends it all to a "Chicago factory," guaranteeing that the vacation-vehicle-slash-death-wielding-machine "shall be done within six weeks." A few days later a telegram informs Electric Bob that "his wonderful machine was being constructed as rapidly as possible," and a month after that "boxes containing the wonderful invention" arrive in San Bernardino and "three experienced machinists from the Southern Pacific Railway shops" help put together the ostrich.

Like all of the other ridiculous parts of the story, which include an encounter with a lion in the desert, this proved false for XY and XX. Finding the materials alone took six months. Not a sc.r.a.p heap or rail yard in all of New England was neglected by XY, now in the full grip of his bliss. It took three months of working on the schematics to confirm that the Mecha-Ostrich could indeed be powered by steam rather than electricity.

There were also distractions caused by other sources, as when two members of the artist commune, Sh.e.l.ley Vaughn and Mary Lewis-whom XY called sarcastically "the two brains"; their names more and more appear to be aliases for the construction of a plot I cannot quite see the outlines of-caught wind of the project from a comment let slip by Nagalakshmi at a dinner party. Vaughn and Lewis, as XX put it, "proceeded to fill my husband's head with nonsense about a text ent.i.tled The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul by Albert Robida, which they claimed, erroneously, set out exemplary examples of various steam inventions, a confusion I would charitably put down to the difference between scientist and raconteur."

Evidence of this conversation comes in the form of pages torn from a book and shoved into XY's journal from that period. The pages have a header indicating a subt.i.tle of "The Railway War-S&M" and reference an idea that XY spent a month considering for his Mecha-Ostrich before abandoning: "As the operations of the siege dragged on, the German scientist conceived the idea of adapting the cannons on the ramparts into high-pressure music machines to entertain the troops. To the sounds of this powerful orchestra they danced every evening in the covered trenches, and the soldiers were able to forget the fatigue of the siege in the delight of a rapid polka or a languorous waltz, sheltered from the chloroform bombs." Perhaps XY had so fallen under the spell of the commune that he thought any practical invention must include some form of artistic expression-that "even a common toaster should play the Star Spangled Banner," as XX sarcastically put it.

More useful as inspiration but no less distracting or ultimately useless was an example of what XY interpreted as the potential to adapt an animal form to a machine purpose: "Disdaining henceforth the railway war and ba.n.a.l siege warfare, Farandoul wanted to inaugurate submarine warfare! The fish-rich coasts of Nicaragua had furnished first cla.s.s auxiliaries: fish of the swordfish family, light, swift-moving and easy to tame, which, once provided with a special harness, became excellent mounts for a corps of submarine cavalry."2 With Sh.e.l.ley Another addition to the main narrative, glued on top of other pages, consisted of this image, with note: "The doc.u.ments I found among XY's things included this snippet by an unnamed Brazilian member of the artist ( initials 'FF'), a kind of early retro-futuristic fiction XY attributed to 'the influence of XX upon him, for I have no time to talk to anyone while being so busy with the Mecha-Ostrich, and she is more in need of conversation than I. She talked briefly of ill.u.s.trating this man's visions, but then my own project again usurped her efforts.' This is all I can find of FF's work in amongst the papers: The Cogsmiths had arrived on Dover by 1809, after years of tribulations crossing Europe in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. It was not of their will to do so. Neither of their master. They had to resort to everything they had learned in years in the Frankenstein Laboratories in Geneva if they wanted to survive. While their master was to be acclaimed worldwide as the Father of the Mechanical Brains, the Cogsmiths would be considered the fathers and mothers of what came to be called then by popular press and workers as the Infernal Devices-nothing more than our modern 'smart machines': contraptions that, if not possessing intellects as the 'descendants' of Frankenstein's automaton-the long-gone Machinekind of sad memory-were at least capable of executing several tasks without the aid of their human owners and handlers. Even with all their expertise, however, the Cogsmiths could not fix their master's greatest creation. The metal, steam-powered automaton, which the former apprentices (now masters themselves, forged in the fires of many conflagrations) had to be dismantle in order to carry with them incognito in their travels, was so battered that they thought it would never work again."

- The Editors Vaughn's and Mary Lewis's help as metal-workers-they had previously created ingenious wind-up mechanical rabbits-the weedy backyard became for a time strewn with tiny mechanical catfish that lurched along on their pectoral fins and blew smoke out of the tops of their heads, and opened and closed their mouths as if perpetually hungry.

XY's monomania often allowed for distractions, so long as those distractions somehow seemed pertinent. But work on the main goal was also interrupted by XY's insistence on tracking down the remains of the mechanical elephant that had gone bust, because he felt it would be useful in working out the kinks in the ostrich, whose "mournful cannon" poked out during this period from its "half-a.s.sembled but n.o.ble chest." Yes, XY had decided to reproduce Electric Bob's creature in its every detail, and XX could do nothing to dissuade him. Of course, in XY's version the "cannon" was actually a telescope with a camera attachment, "for long-distance viewing and memory restoration," as XY put it, perhaps already envisioning an advertis.e.m.e.nt for his creation.

I can only imagine the scene when the corroded flanks and disembodied head of the mecha-elephant, stinking of rust and mold and fungus, joined the incomplete silhouette of the embryonic Mecha-Ostrich in their large backyard. That backyard had only a pathetically short white picket fence by all accounts-an attempt at normalcy meant to placate the townsfolk that, in this context, only seemed to emphasize the presence of two mechanical monsters, one dead and one about to be born. Certainly, it provided no protection from the prying eyes of the members of the artist commune, who may not have been sympathetic to S., but who in their often transient comings-and-goings no doubt helped spread a slow contagion of fact and fancy about the couple's exploits that S. couldn't help but notice.

ARMED with new knowledge from examining the elephant's mecha-corpse, XY plunged forward, alternating between welding in the bas.e.m.e.nt (morning) and the backyard (dead of night), along with experiments on the "fluidizing of joints" and the "actualization of movement through interjoined tubes." XX fulfilled what we today would call "project management" and helped talk XY down off of self-created cliffs of nonsense-as when, according to XY's own journal entry, "I was insisting on making it a hundred feet high, with an extra leg for stability, and perhaps replacing the head with a kind of deep sea diver's helmet contraption on top, with but a single red eye."

This mention of a "red eye" disturbed me even on a first reading, let alone the hundredth. Can it be that S.'s influence had already begun to creep into XY's thinking, into his very dreams? That the tentacles of S.'s insurgency of evil had found their mark?

In any event, circ.u.mstances would have curtailed XY's vision even if XX's curt appraisal of ballooning costs hadn't soon cut the Mecha-Ostrich prototype down to size. Their entries doc.u.ment a series of setbacks too desperate and complex to recount here, but which in part concerned townsfolk having caught wind of what XX called disparagingly "the golden goose" (to XY's consternation, who kept saying "that is a bird, but not this bird"). At least one reference to an "infernal drumstick" in the town newspaper's humor column during this time supports this theory. Whatever the reasons, business dropped off precipitously, leaving members of the commune, many of them poor, as the main clients.

Even worse for morale, XY reported to XX one day that he had seen "a mysterious figure in what appeared to be a cloak" on a hill overlooking both the house and the commune: It-for I would not venture a guess as to its s.e.x-just stood there staring down through the glancing light of the late afternoon sun. When I sent up a hallo-meant much like a blow, to make it stumble from its strange certainty-it made no sign of having heard me. This angered me all out of proportion to the offense, and in a haze of misdirected rage, running all the way, I proceeded up the hill toward the stranger. When I got close enough, I looked up and saw that the animating impulse had left the stranger. All that was left was a cloak mockingly hung upon a large strut of my own devising. But I swear I saw it move before I ascended the hill. And who or what could carry such a large strut up a hill-and why?

This obvious intrusion by S. channeled through a kind of "stationary dark rider," conflation of Eye and Old Ones in my opinion, was a warning that XY did not heed-or, as far as is known, even tell XX, for fear, I suppose of it being the last nail, the last bolt, the last nut, that, loosened, would undo their relationship. (Especially as there is evidence in XY's journal that this was not the first sighting; notes in the margin about "shadows" and "uncanny noises.") Should simply fixing what was broken have gained them the attention of S.? No, but as I, the modern Mecha-Ostrich know, the brilliant will always call attention to themselves by the very fact of the light that surrounds them, and which they shed, and while this light will attract some, it will blind others and simply p.i.s.s off those who remain unswayed in a healthier way. Breaking an egg or two, often of enormous size, is unavoidable.

At some point that anonymous donor to the commune known only as "the Prisoner Queen" gave them the money to continue to hobble along. This is where I first heard of the Prisoner Queen, and thought this was XX's way of referring to her rich widow of a mother. Since, I have come to believe that this was another way for S. to influence events, as evidenced by the doc.u.ments I have provided following this account.

The financial stress led inevitably to marital stress. It is clear from the journal entries that XY's many eccentricities, so endearing under other conditions-one can imagine at their most endearing while on vacation in the Bahamas, perhaps, and less so during a knife fight in a Buenos Aires bar-made of him an unbearable monster to XX, and to XY her rebukes sounded like a rejection of his soul. She meant them, of course, out of love and for the preservation of what had begun to be destroyed.