Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Part 5

"Might not," he agrees. "Then again, you never know," and the first joint of an index finger slips inside her.

"Then again," she whispers, and so she tells him a dream she's never dreamt. How there was a terrible fire and before it was over and done with, the flames had claimed half the city, there where the gra.s.s ends and the mountains start. And at first, she tells him, it was an awful, awful dream, because she was trapped in the boardinghouse when it burned, and she could see him down on the street, calling for her, but, try as they may, they could not reach each other.

"Why you want to go and have a dream like that for?" he asks.

"You wanted to hear it. Now shut up and listen."

So he does as he's bidden, and she describes to him seeing an enormous airship hovering above the flames, spewing its load of water and sand into the ravenous inferno.

"There might have been a dragon," she says. "Or it might have only been started by lightning."

"A dragon," he replies, working his finger in a little deeper. "Yes, I think it must definitely have been a dragon. They're so ill-tempered this time of year."

"Shut up. This is my dream," she tells him, even though it isn't. "I almost died, so much of me got burned away, and they had me scattered about in pieces in the Charity Hospital. But you went right to work, putting me back together again. You worked night and day at the shop, making me a pretty metal face and a tin heart, and you built my b.r.e.a.s.t.s-"

"-from sterling silver," he says. "And your nipples I fashioned from out of pure gold."

"And just how the sam h.e.l.l did you know that?" she grins. Then Missouri reaches down and moves his hand, slowly pulling his finger out of her. Before he can protest, she's laid his palm over the four bare bolts where her leg fits on. He smiles and licks at her nipples, then grips one of the bolts and gives it a very slight tug.

"Well, while you were sleeping," he says, "I made a small window in your skull, only just large enough that I can see inside. So, no more secrets. But don't you fret. I expect your hair will hide it quite completely. Madam Ling will never even notice, and nary a Chinaman will steal a glimpse of your sweet, darling brain."

"Why, I never even felt a thing."

"I was very careful not to wake you."

"Until you did."

And then the talk is done, without either of them acknowledging that the time has come, and there's no more of her fiery, undreamt dreams or his glib comebacks. There's only the mechanic's busy, eager hands upon her, only her belly pressed against his, the grind of their hips after he has entered her, his fingertips lingering at the sensitive bolts where her prosthetics attach. She likes that best of all, that faint electric tingle, and she knows he knows, though she has never had to tell him so. Outside and far away, she thinks she hears an owl, but there are no owls in the city.

5.

And when she wakes again, the boardinghouse room is filled with the dusty light of a summer morning. The mechanic is gone, and he's taken her leg with him. Her crutches are leaned against the wall near her side of the bed. She stares at them for a while, wondering how long it has been since the last time she had to use them, then deciding it doesn't really matter, because however long it's been, it hasn't been long enough. There's a note, too, on her night-stand, and the mechanic says not to worry about Madam Ling, that he'll send one of the boys from the foundry down to the Asian Quarter with the news. Take it easy, he says. Let that burn heal. Burns can be bad. Burns can scar, if you don't look after them.

When the clanging steeple bells of St. Margaret of Castello's have rung nine o'clock, she shuts her eyes and thinks about going back to sleep. St. Margaret, she recalls, is a patron saint of the crippled, an Italian woman who was born blind and hunchbacked, lame and malformed. Missouri envies the men and women who take comfort in those bells, who find in their tolling more than the time of day. She has never believed in the Catholic G.o.d or any other sort, unless perhaps it was some capricious heathen deity a.s.signed to watch over starving, maggot-ridden guttersnipes. She imagines what form that G.o.d might a.s.sume, and it is a far more fearsome thing than any hunchbacked crone. A wolf, she thinks. Yes, an enormous black wolf-or coyote, perhaps-all ribs and mange and a distended, empty belly, crooked ivory fangs, and burning eyes like smoldering embers glimpsed through a cast-iron grate. That would be her G.o.d, if ever she'd had been blessed with such a thing. Her mother had come from Presbyterian stock somewhere back in Virginia, but her father believed in nothing more powerful than the hand of man, and he was not about to have his child's head filled up with Protestant superst.i.tion and nonsense, not in a Modern age of science and enlightenment.

Missouri opens her eyes again, her green eye-all cornea and iris, aqueous and vitreous humours-and the ersatz one designed for her in San Francisco. The crutches are still right there, near enough that she could reach out and touch them. They have good sheepskin padding and the vulcanized rubber tips have pivots and are filled with some shock-absorbing gelatinous substance, the name of which she has been told and cannot recall. The mechanic ordered them for her special from a company in some faraway Prussian city, and she knows they cost more than he could rightly afford, but she hates them anyway. And lying on the sweat-damp sheets, smelling the hazy morning air rustling the gingham curtains, she wonders if she built a little shrine to the wolf G.o.d of all collier guttersnipes, if maybe he would come in the night and take the crutches away so she would never have to see them again.

"It's not that simple, Missouri," she says aloud, and she thinks that those could have been her father's words, if the theosophists are right and the dead might ever speak through the mouths of the living.

"Leave me alone, old man" she says and sits up. "Go back to the grave you yearned for, and leave me be."

Her arm is waiting for her at the foot of the bed, right where she left it the night before, reclining in its cradle, next to the empty s.p.a.ce her leg ought to occupy. And the hot breeze through the window, the street- and coal-smoke-scented breeze, causes the sc.r.a.p of paper tacked up by her vanity mirror to flutter against the wall. Her proverb, her precious stolen sc.r.a.p of Shakespeare. What's past is prologue.

Missouri Banks considers how she can keep herself busy until the mechanic comes back to her-a torn shirt sleeve that needs mending, and she's no slouch with a needle and thread. Her good stockings could use a rinsing. The dressing on her leg should be changed, and Madam Ling saw to it she had a small tin of the pungent salve to reapply when Missouri changed the bandages. Easily half a dozen such mundane tasks, any woman's work, any woman who is not a dancer, and nothing that won't wait until the bells of St. Margaret's ring ten or eleven. And so she watches the window, the sunlight and flapping gingham, and it isn't difficult to call up with almost perfect clarity the piano and the guzheng and the Irishman thumping his bodhran, the exotic, festive trill of the xiao. And with the music swelling loudly inside her skull, she can then recall the dance. And she is not a cripple in need of patron saints or a guttersnipe praying to black wolf G.o.ds, but Madam Ling's specialty, the steam- and blood-powered gem of the Nine Dragons. She moves across the boards, and men watch her with dark and drowsy eyes as she pirouettes and prances through grey opium clouds.

The Cast-Iron Kid.

Andrew Knighton.

Andrew Knighton lives and occasionally writes in Stockport, England. He's had a couple dozen stories published in magazines such as Murky Depths, Dark Horizons, and Jupiter. He occasionally scrawls down thoughts and details of his latest stories at andrewknighton.wordpress.com. He writes, "This story comes from a childhood watching westerns with my dad. I loved the sights and sounds of the imagined west. The hats. The spurs. The steely gazes. The tense silence breaking into sudden violence. But most of all, I was drawn to the code of the West. The sense that there were rules at play here, rules totally different to those around me. As a kid, I wanted to understand those rules. As an adult, I want to understand what happens when you break them."

JOHNNY HAD LIVED his whole twelve years in Dirtville, but even he knew it for a useless dustbowl of a place, like a dried-out patch of prairie gra.s.s clinging to the thin, lifeless soil. The fields were all but barren, livestock too scrawny to be worth the effort of eating. Only one shop was still open and its shelves were mostly filled with air. Since the railroad had changed route, taking the trains and travellers with it, half the buildings had been torn down for trade or firewood, or just to get at the prairie dogs nested underneath.

Johnny watched as Dog-Valley Dan slowly paced the main street of Dirtville, his strides weighty with resolve. Thirty-seven cartridge cases glinted on a thong round Dan's neck, one for every man who'd dared face him in a shoot-out. Thirty-seven corpses, rotting in dusty frontier graveyards.

Dan was an infamous outlaw, wanted in seven states for his exploits on the gunfighting circuit. The last man who'd stopped in Dirtville, a salesman named Hicky, had brought a stack of newspapers and penny dreadfuls describing the exploits of these men, and Johnny had mastered just enough of his letters to read those stories. Like the rest of the townspeople he trembled in antic.i.p.ation at Dan's arrival.

As Dan stalked the wide, sandy street folks peered nervously out through flimsy wooden shop-fronts. A small child, running into the open, was whisked away by his mother, a shrew-faced woman in a faded bonnet. The only sounds were the clink of Dan's spurs and the creaking of the general store sign. Johnny held his breath and gripped his catapult tight to his chest.

A figure in a wide black Stetson emerged from the rickety saloon. Behind him the barkeep, Mr. Kent, peered hawk-nosed over the top of the still-swinging doors with their peeling paint. The man in the hat turned to face Dan, fat gloved hand dangling below his holster.

"You the Cast-Iron Kid?" Dan asked, his words echoing down the empty street.

The figure in the Stetson nodded, steam rising from his wide shoulders in the midday heat.

"I hear tell you're a coward, boy," Dan drawled his usual lazy provocation. "Gonna prove me wrong?"

The Cast-Iron Kid's face was wrapped in impa.s.sive shadow. With a hiss he strode into the middle of the street and turned to face Dan. The silence stretched out, long and tense, as dust blew against the boarded-up storefronts and a tumbleweed rolled down the road.

"Draw." The Kid's voice emerged, low and scratchy.

Before the words could hit the floor Dan's pistol was in his hand, bucking and roaring, chambers spinning as he let fly. Six sharp clangs rang out as bullets. .h.i.t the Kid and ricocheted off into the distance. Dan stared, slack-jawed, as for the first time in his brutal life an opponent failed to fall beneath a hail of lead.

Slowly, the Kid's coat slid to the ground, revealing a wide chest of gleaming grey, six shallow dents where the bloodstains should have been. He doffed his hat and a cylindrical head reflected the sun's rays, ridged and flat-topped like an old tin can with dark, gaping holes for a mouth and eyes. Steam emerged from a short smokestack on his back, and every movement was accompanied by a hiss of oiled pistons or whir of hidden gears.

"My turn," came the crackling gramophone voice as the Kid's hinged fingers reached for his gun.

Sooner or later, every gunslinger and fist-fighter came to Dirtville, drawn by the reputation of the Cast-Iron Kid. Word was the Kid had never been beat, and for the fast-draw fanatics of the Western Territory, that sounded an awful lot like a challenge. Johnny figured no other boy saw so many famous faces, not even the sons of politicians in Washington or rich business folks up in New York. From the stoop of Elmer Klief's porch he watched the Kid take on Desolation Sal and Wilson Payne, Gettysburg Phil and Running Hammer, leaving each one cold in the dirt. One time, the sheriff of neighbouring Harper's Fall raised a posse of a dozen men and rode them into Dirtville to bring justice for those the Kid had killed. They lynched the metal man out by the old well, hanging him from an oak so dry and shrivelled it barely even bent beneath Cast-Iron's weight. But he soon got bored of swinging, tore the improvised gallows clean out of the earth and beat the posse into a rich dark smear. That fall, crops grew round the old well for the first time in years.

Some fights took it out of the Kid, but he always got patched back up. If Johnny kept quiet he got to sit in the smithy while the town's elders, like old Mr. Moore the watchmaker and Heinrich Altman the railroad engineer, tinkered with the Kid's innards to keep him in shape. They cleaned pipes and calibrated gears while Jim Roe's wife, Ellen, who everyone knew was the real strength at the smithy, beat the dents out of that shining carapace. As the years pa.s.sed Johnny got older and the adults a little greyer, but old Cast-Iron stayed just the same.

The Stranger rode into town on a white horse named Ghost, past the derelict station and the tiny, cramped graveyard. There was little soil to be dug this side of the mountains, and most of it had to be kept for the malnourished crops. But that didn't stop folks dying, so the gravedigger had taken to planting the deceased vertically, feet first in deep, narrow tunnels. The bleached crosses cl.u.s.tered tight on Boot Hill.

Johnny sat by the side of the road, stretching out the cord on his homemade catapult. As The Stranger approached Johnny let fly, shattering one of the old bottles perched on a nearby fence. Then he reached down into the dry dirt, fingers seeking another good-sized pebble.

"That's mighty fine shooting," The Stranger said. "Reckon you must be the best shot this side of Tombstone."

Johnny loosed a sharp flint which clattered ineffectively off the fence. He shook his head.

"Try these," The Stranger said, pulling a handful of ball-bearings from his bag and placing them beside the boy. Johnny picked one up, feeling the cold lead weight in his palm.

"What're they for?" he asked.

The Stranger shrugged.

"Engine stuff," he said. "I had a buddy used to work the railroads, gave me them for luck."

"Don't you need 'em?" Johnny asked.

The Stranger looked round at the barren valley full of pale, weather-beaten buildings with cracked windows and loose tiles.

"Not as much as you, I reckon," he said.

"You here for Cast-Iron?" Johnny asked.

The Stranger nodded and pulled two dimes from the pocket of his vest. "What can you tell me about him?"

The boy pursed his lips, sucking thoughtfully.

"He's real iron," he said, accepting the coins. "Ma says the menfolk built him to draw folks in, on account of the railroad don't run through here no more, and there ain't no other way to make a living round these parts."

He poked a finger through a hole in his oversized shirt.

"This here came off of Oklahoma Slim. Mr. Klief got his pants, on account of his old breeches didn't have no backside left to 'em, and Sally Altman got his jacket to keep her warm in winter. He had a whole bag of gold too. The mayor took it to the traders at Harper's Fall, got us all manner of grain and tinned food. When we heard you was coming Ma said we'd eat well this winter."

The Stranger rose slowly to his feet and stood gazing at the distant hills. The wind blew long, dark curls of hair across his stern face. There was a long silence, broken only by the rusty creaking of the general store sign.

"What's your name, boy?" The Stranger said at last.

"Johnny," the boy replied.

"Thanks, Johnny," The Stranger said and raised his hat before turning back towards his horse.

Johnny plucked one of the lead b.a.l.l.s from the dirt, rolled it around in his grubby fingers. He glanced nervously up the street into town, but nothing moved except the tumbleweeds. Still clutching the ball-bearing he ran after The Stranger and whispered conspiratorially in his ear.

"Bullets bounce off of him."

The Stranger nodded, tethered his horse, and strode up the long street into town. Stopping outside the general store he rolled up his sleeves, unhooked his spurs from his boots, and plucked a two-by-four from the barrel by the door. With a calm, quiet tread he stepped into the shadow of the saloon and placed himself next to the creaking door, back pressed up against the wall, plank raised firmly in two calloused hands. There he waited.

After twenty minutes Johnny heard the rattle of the bar door followed by a whirring of gears. The Stranger hefted the plank up to his shoulder and, as the Kid's looming shadow pa.s.sed, swung out with all his might. There was a clang like a cathedral bell and the gleaming barrel head flew away, leaving steam pouring from between shiny shoulders. The Stranger struck again and again, splinters flying as he battered the Kid with his improvised club, sending the dented body reeling back into the street, dust spurting beneath each heavy footfall. With a thud that echoed down the whole valley Cast-Iron's gleaming sh.e.l.l crashed to the ground, a lone gearwheel tumbling out of the gaping neckhole and rolling to a halt at Johnny's feet.

The Stranger cast aside the splintered remnants of his club and leaned down over the heap of dusty metal, sweat dribbling down his face in the noonday heat.

"That's for my buddy Dan," The Stranger said, mouth finally lifting in the hollow image of a smile. But his grin turned to a grimace as the headless body stirred, rising from the packed ochre earth and reaching out towards him. Cold steel hands clamped round The Stranger's throat, tightening and twisting with ruthless mechanical might. The man's eyes bulged, foam fringing his mouth, and even though Johnny looked away he could not escape those desperate rasping breaths or the final sickening snap.

Johnny took one last look at the graveyard, thinking of all the wanderers and lawmen he'd seen dropped into its pits as he grew up. Sure, some of them had been mean, and more had been villains of the West's worst sort, but that didn't make it right. In one hand he clutched his catapult, a st.u.r.dy frame of wood-sc.r.a.ps and rat-glue, an object of his own making, not scavenged from some poor sap sleeping on Boot Hill. In the other he hefted the thing he'd gone to Tombstone for, trading in his fifteenth birthday hat. Sheriff Peterson's hat, still smelling of hair-cream and blood.

He stood outside the saloon and called for the Cast-Iron Kid, called him every dark curse-name ever muttered and more he'd dreamed up on the long lonely journey back to Dirtville. At last the doors parted and the Kid strode into the street, piston innards hissing.

"What is it, little Johnny?" the gramophone voice asked.

"It's my turn," Johnny declared. "I'm calling you out, like those other folks did."

The Kid let out a long, mirthless laugh.

"This how you get to become a man, is it?" he asked. "Well, little Johnny, let's see what make of man you are."

Johnny pulled back on the sling, rubber straining, sc.r.a.p-wood creaking, the smells of sweat and rat-glue cutting through his fear. The Kid started to laugh again, the sound circling and repeating. Then he fell silent as something struck his chest with a clang, a wide iron bar marked "N" and "S" at either end. Gears froze as the magnet's power flowed through them, sticking each one to the next. The street was filled with tinkling and whirring as delicate springs and ratchets caught fast and snapped. The Cast-Iron Kid stood motionless, joints stuck in place, steam seeping through the gaps. His firebox backed up and choked on its own fumes, sending clouds of soot-black smoke pouring from his mouth and eyes. Fingers spasmed, stretched back on themselves and burst apart in a hail of tiny articulated plates. Then with a thud that echoed back from the mountains the Kid fell forwards, showering Johnny with dry, lifeless desert dust.

There was no s.p.a.ce left in the graveyard for the Cast-Iron Kid, so they melted him down and sold him as engine parts. Years later, folks pa.s.sing through Harper's Fall would tell of the sheriff there who sat on his stoop running two ball-bearings round his hand, one of worn lead, the other of cold cast iron.

Machine Maid.

Margo Lanagan.

MARGO LANAGAN'S most recent novel, Tender Morsels, was a Printz Honor Book and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her collection of speculative fiction short stories, Black Juice, was also widely acclaimed; won two World Fantasy Awards, two Ditmar, and two Aurealis awards; was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and also won a Printz Honor. Her collection Red Spikes was a CBCA Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Margo lives in Sydney, Australia, and maintains a blog at amongamidwhile.blogspot.com. Of "Machine Maid," she writes, "For this story I did a bit of research about automatons, which along with dolls and clowns have to be some of the creepiest things people have invented. The woman isolated on a bush property is an oft-used character in Australian fiction; I just decided to give her the intellectual curiosity and the means to fight back against her situation."

WE CAME TO Cuttajunga through the goldfields; Mr. Goverman was most eager to show me the sites of his successes.

They were impressive only in being so very unprepossessing. How could such dusty earth, such quant.i.ties of it piled up discarded by the road and all up and down the disembowelled hills, have yielded anything of value? How did this devastated place have any connection with the metal of crowns and rings and chains of office, and with the palaces and halls where such things were worn and wielded, on the far side of the globe?

Well, it must, I said to myself, as I stood obediently at the roadside, feeling the dust stain my hems and spoil the shine of my Pattison's shoes. See how much attention is being paid it, by this over-layer of dusty men shoveling, crawling, winching up buckets or baskets of broken rock, or simply standing, at rest from their labours as they watch one of their number return, proof in his carriage and the cut of his coat that they are not toiling here for nothing. There must be something of value here.

"This hill is fairly well dug out," said Mr. Goverman, "and there was only ever wash-gold from ancient watercourses here in any case. 'Tis good for n.o.body but Chinamen now." And indeed I saw several of the creatures, in their smockish clothing and their umbrella-ish hats, each with his long pigtail, earnestly working at a pile of tailings in the gully that ran by the road.

The town was hardly worthy of the name, it was such a collection of sordid drinking-palaces, fragile houses and luckless miners lounging about the lanes. Bowling alleys there were, and a theatre, and stew-houses offering meals for so little, one wondered how the keepers turned a profit. And all blazed and fluttered and showed its patches and cracks in the unrelenting sunlight.

The only woman I saw leaned above the street on a balcony railing that looked set to give way beneath her generous arms. She was dressed with profound tastelessness and she smoked a pipe, as a gypsy or a man would, surveying the street below and having no care that it saw her so clearly. I guessed her to be Mrs. Bawden, there being a painted canvas sign strung between the veranda posts beneath her feet: "MRS. HUBERT BAWDEN/Companions Live and Electric." Her gaze went over us as my husband drew my attention to how far one could see across the wretched diggings from this elevation. I felt as if the creature had raked me into disarray with her nails. She would know exactly the humiliations Mr. Goverman had visited on me in the night; she would be smiling to herself at my prim and upright demeanour now, at the thought of what had been pushed at these firm-closed lips while the animal that was my husband pleaded and panted above.

On we went, thank goodness, and soon we were viewing a panorama similar to that of the dug-out hill, only the work here involved larger machinery than the human body. Parties of men trooped in and out of several caverns dug into the hillside, pushing roughly made trucks along rails between the mines and the precarious, thundering houses where the stamping-machines punished the gold from the obdurate quartz. My husband had launched into a disquisition on the geological feature that resulted in this hill's having borne him so much fruit, and if truth be told it gave me some pleasure to imagine the forces he described at their work in their unpeopled age, heaving and pressing, breaking and slicing and finally resting, their uppermost layers washed and smoothed by rains, while the quartz-seam underneath, split away and forced upward from its initial deposition, held secret in its cracks and crevices its gleamless measure of gold.

But we must move on, to reach our new home before dark. The country grew ever more desolate, dry as a whisper and grey, grey under cover of this grey, disorderly forest. Unearthly birds the size of men stalked among the ragged tree-trunks, and others, lurid, shrieking, flocked to the boughs. In places the trees were cut down and their bodies piled into great windrows; set alight, and with an estate's new house rising half-built from the hill or field beyond, they presented a scene more suggestive of devastation by war than of the hopefulness and ambition of a youthful colony.

Cuttajunga when we reached it was not of such uncomfortable newness; Mr. Goverman had bought it from a gentleman pastoralist who had tamed and tended his allotment of this harsh land, but in the end had not loved it enough to be buried in it, and had returned to Suss.e.x to live out his last years. The house had a settled look, and ivy, even, covered the shady side; the garden was a miracle of home plants watered by an ingenious system of runnels brought up by electric pump from the stream, and the fields on which our fortune grazed in the form of fat black cattle were free of the stumps and wreckage that marked other properties as having so recently been torn from the primeval bush.

"I hope you will be very happy here," said my husband, handing me down from the sulky.

The smile I returned him felt very wan from within, for now there would be nothing in the way of society or culture to diminish, or to compensate me for, the ghastly rituals of married life, now there would only be Mr. Goverman and me, marooned on this island of wealth and comfort, amid the fields and cattle, bordered on all sides by the tattered wilderness.

Cuttajunga was all as he had described it to me during the long grey miles: the kitchen anch.o.r.ed by its weighty stove and ornamented with shining pans, the orchard and the vegetable garden, which Mr. Goverman immediately set the electric yard-man watering, for they were parched after his short absence. There was a farm manager, Mr. Fredericks, who appeared not to know how to greet and converse with such a foreign creature as a woman, but instead droned to my husband about stock movements and water and feed until I thought he must be some kind of lunatic. The housekeeper, Mrs. Sanford, was a blowsy, bobbing, distractible woman who behaved as if she were accustomed to being slapped or shouted into line rather than reasoned with. The maid, Sarah Poplin, was of the poorest material. "She has some native blood in her," Mr. Goverman told me sotto voce when she had flounced away from his introductions. "You will be a marvellously civilising influence on her, I am sure."

"I can but try to be," I murmured. I had been forewarned, by Melbourne matrons as well as by Mr. Goverman himself, of the difficulty of finding and retaining staff, what with the goldfields promising any man or woman an independent fortune, should they happen to kick over the right pebble "up north," or "out west."