Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Part 8

"Yes, sir. It's merely a security precaution."

"Oh, indeed?" He began to make his way back down the carriage. "Are we in danger?"

"Oh, no sir. This is simply routine. Pirate activity has increased somewhat, of late, and there is a small fear of dromedon terrorism."

"Goodness." The little man reached into his jacket. "How distressing."

"I a.s.sure you, sir, there is no cause for concern."

"As a matter of fact, there is." The dwarf seemed a little sad. He drew out a small pistol and pointed it at Virgil.

"Terribly sorry about this," he said, and fired.

6: THE MADWOMAN IN THE INFIRMARY.

Everywhere was forever, and each atom of that endless landscape contained in turn its own eternity, complete and entire. It was a fractal explosion of time and place, simultaneously infinite and nonexistent, all of it occurring at once, and forever, and never.

Chloe's mind struggled to encompa.s.s this landscape. For all of its liquid adaptability, the human mind is founded upon a few basic prerequisites: sequentiality, finitude, smallness. It could not contain everything that she had seen on the platform. But neither could it stop trying-it bent its every effort toward taming the jumbled chaos of the disordered multiverse it had seen.

But it was all madness, madness and madness and madness. And so the lady screamed.

In some small corner of her consciousness, still tethered faintly to the objective world, she knew that she was strapped to a narrow bed in a small room; that the room contained a woman in a white nurse's uniform and a gentleman in a long frock-coat; that she was screaming, continuously. But all of that was a diaphanous filament in an ocean of churning chaos, and she could no more grasp it than she could gather sunbeams.

Suddenly, a blinding light arced across the landscape of her dementia, and her world went black, and when it swam back into view it encompa.s.sed only the small room, and the nurse, and the gentleman in the frock-coat, who was applying a pair of what appeared to be plastic earm.u.f.fs to her bare chest. Thick coiled wire emanated from each earm.u.f.f, and disappeared into a large, blinking machine beside her bed.

"Will that be enough, Doctor?" said the nurse.

"I'm afraid not. She is already regressing. Increase the voltage, if you will."

"Yes, Doctor."

They faded again, washed away on a tsunami of madness, and she screamed forever.

And then she was in the small room again. There was in the air the tangy scent of burnt flesh.

"Uncanny," said the gentleman, shaking his head. "There is no stopping this. Nurse, please..."

No more, she thought. No more. A manic strength seized her, burning down the avenues of her body like a demon conflagration. She bulged and tightened, strained and swelled, surging against her constraints until they snapped and whipped away from her like flailing adders. She surged off the table, roaring.

The nurse barely had time to scream before Chloe was on her, thrusting her back, grabbing her head with both hands, slamming it against the wall. Once, twice, three times, and with each blow Chloe felt the chaos inside of her recede a little more-her mind clearing, the terrible visions dimming, and then disappearing.

The nurse grew limp, but Chloe did not stop until she felt a hand on her shoulder. She spun, grasping a metal bedpan as she did, and dashed it against the side of the gentleman's head. He fell, and she fell with him, tearing at his eyes, sinking her teeth into the soft flesh of his throat.

When she rose, some moments later-her face wet and crimson, her shift stained with the doctor's remains, her breast rising and falling with the exertions of murder-she was calm, composed. She studied the bodies. They did nothing to dim the gentle peace that had settled over her.

But the madness was already billowing back. She could feel it, like a wolf breathing at the nape of her neck. She turned in a circle, desperate again, and then ran toward the door on bare feet, vaulting the nurse's body, her thin checkered shift billowing behind her like a bloodied sail.

She burst out of the infirmary just as a train policeman was hurrying up, and fell on him before he could draw his weapon.

His screams kept her own at bay. For this, she loved him.

7: THE PIRATE IN THE DINING CAR.

William sat down, and placed his valise on the floor beside him. The dining car was crowded, and alive with that uniquely aristocratic species of quiet noise-a background hum of conversation punctuated with the tinkle of silverware. He ordered lamb chops and a bottle of port, then studied the people around him, looking for the inevitable train agent. Presently he found him: a young man in sidewhiskers who seemed markedly uncomfortable in his finery, sitting by himself near the door, doing a poor job of pretending to read the newspaper. Their eyes met, briefly. William smiled and nodded, and the agent did the same.

The lamb arrived. He ate it slowly, savoring the meat's soft piquant pliancy, drank the last of his port, checked his watch, removed the napkin from his lap and placed it on the plate, then rose and drew his weapon and shot the train agent, twice. The agent's head exploded in a spray of blood and bone that spattered the wall behind him and soiled the dress of a large matronly women sitting nearby. She screamed, and then fainted. There was a general hubbub, panicked aristocrats climbing over one another in a mad aimless dash to nowhere.

William fired another round into the agent's body, and shouted: "Silence!"

The diners froze, and turned to look at him. And then settled slowly back into their seats, like a troupe of cowed schoolchildren.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" cried William. "I believe it is customary at this juncture for the a.s.sailant-that is, myself-to inform you that there is no need to be alarmed, that no harm shall come to those who cooperate. I'm afraid I can give you no such a.s.surances." He reached into his valise and drew out the fop's head. Its face was frozen in an expression of superciliousness caught in the act of becoming terror. The stub of his neck trailed a tattered skirt of flesh, an abbreviated esophagus, a short bony tail of spine.

"It was not, strictly speaking, necessary for me to kill this man," said William. "I could have simply subdued him. It would have been the simplest thing in the world. But he displeased me exceedingly, and so I found it pleasant to separate his head from his body, using the crudest implements at my disposal." He paused. No one spoke, or made a sound. "The only reason I have not killed every one of you is because it would be inconvenient for me to do so. But I must stress that this state of affairs is balanced on a knife's edge, and could change at any moment. Is that understood?"

Silence.

"Please empty your pockets, ladies and gentlemen. Remove all of your baubles, your rings, your necklaces, your jeweled undergarments. Your money, your papers, your spectacles. In short, anything of value. Place them on the table before you. If you are unsure of an item's value, please err on the side of caution and place it on the table. If I find that anyone has withheld anything, my wrath will be biblical. Is that clear?" He put the fop's head down on the table. "Please begin."

There was a general bustle as the Vickies went about the business of disgorging their valuables. William watched, amused, as women stripped rings from their fingers and tore pendants from their necks, men fumbled watches out of their waistcoats, cufflinks from their sleeves, tiepins from their cravats. The better-dressed pa.s.sengers went so far as to remove their outer garments entirely. Soon the small dining tables were piled with a dragon's-horde of treasure.

William checked his watch. If all was proceeding according to plan, his confederates would soon begin ransacking the first-cla.s.s cars. He pulled two large plastic bags from his valise and held them out to two men sitting at a nearby table. "Gentlemen," he said. "If you would be so kind as to collect my possessions." The men did not move. He sighed. "Please rest a.s.sured that you will not be harmed for doing my bidding. In fact, quite the opposite."

The first man rose, took a halting step, then stopped. His eyes went to a point just above William's shoulder, and widened.

William reacted instantly. He thrust himself backward, pressing himself against the wall of the dining car, and-keeping his firearm pointed at his trembling prisoners-drew a second weapon and trained it on the carriage door.

A fantastically unattractive dwarf stood in the open doorway, an expression of deepest surprise on his face.

"Good evening, sir," said William. "Please join us."

But the dwarf simply stood, regarding William now with an air of bemus.e.m.e.nt.

"I do not like to repeat myself, sir," said William.

The dwarf laughed. It was a strange sound, a sort of lilting, giggling cough, as infectious as it was odd. William found himself smiling. "You find this amusing?"

"Oh, infinitely," said the dwarf. "Have you read Sartristosophocles, sir?"

There was a restless shifting in the car. William cast a quick glance down the length of his right arm, then returned his attention to the funny little man. "The halfbreed dromedon? I'm afraid I have not had the pleasure. But I'm afraid that I do not have time to discuss philosophy."

"In his Atemporal Atales," said the dwarf, "Sartristosophocles wrote: 'I find myself on far more slippery footing in the sequential world. For the atemporal universe is reliably astonishing, while the sequential is only sporadically so.' I have never fully apprehended his meaning, until this moment." The dwarf reached into a pocket and removed a small golden sphere.

William recognized it instantly. Unless he missed his guess, it could fell cities.

"I believe that we are confederates, sir," said William.

The small man shook his head. "No. Confederates in sin, perhaps, but that is all. The paths we travelled to this moment were quite different."

"Nevertheless," said William. "There is no need for you to trouble yourself. My men will soon do your work for you."

"It is my policy not to trust pirates. Even when their goals appear to align with mine."

"But I cannot allow you to detonate that, sir."

The man smiled. "Allow?"

"Indeed."

"There is no allowing, sir. There is only the act, and its consequences." The little man cradled the golden ball in his palm, and turned his attention to the dining car's occupants. "I had hoped to explain my cause to you," he said, raising his voice. "But circ.u.mstances have intervened. All I can do is a.s.sure you that what I do now, I do for the best of all reasons. Forgive me." He tilted his hand, and let the orb drop.

William watched it fall. It touched the floor, and then sank through. The tiny hole it left in its wake quickly grew from a circle the size of a shilling to one the size of a fist, a pomegranate, a cannonball. Cracks issued from its circ.u.mference, ramifying down the surface of the dining car like black lines of lightning.

One of the lines touched a gentleman in a dark frock-coat. He became every moment of himself, from the instant he was born, to the instant he died. The s.p.a.ce that he occupied, in his mult.i.tudes, imploded.

William turned away. The carriage door was open, the dromedon gone. He holstered his weapons, and ran.

8: THE CONDUCTOR IN THE LINENS CLOSET.

Virgil awoke to darkness and pain.

He touched his side, and felt dampness, warmth. He touched his head, and flinched away from an electric stab of pain. And then he turned his hand outward, grasping blindly at the dark. His fingers brushed a soft mound of silk, a pile of terrycloth, a stack of pillows. He was in the linens closet.

This seemed to him a very strange place to be. He felt certain that, all things being equal, and given his many duties, it was not a place he should have been at the moment.

He waited for his mind to supply him with answers, which it did, presently: the ugly little man, the gun, the shot. Pain blossoming in his side, his legs growing weak. Crumpling to the ground, hugging his belly. Looking up to see the dwarf standing over him, revolver pointed at his head.

He remembered opening his mouth to plead for his life, but instead saying this: "I am not a conductor, sir. I am not Terry Hawthorne. I trafficked in the forbidden mysteries of the between, and have suffered the consequences. I am Virgil Smythe, and it is my ambition to become a concert pianist." Because now, at the end of his life, all he wanted was to be known.

The dwarf studied him. Turned his head and studied him again, out of the corner of his eye. "Oh dear," he said. "You poor man."

And then the most extraordinary thing: the dwarf lowered his arm, letting his jumbleshop tumble of features settle into something like sadness. "I cannot," he said. "You will die with the rest of them, but I cannot." He sighed, and turned his weapon about, grasping it by the barrel-and then paused again, and seemed to consider. "I will come back for you," he said, and brought the b.u.t.t down sharply on Virgil's head.

You will die with the rest of them. Virgil struggled to his feet, and stood leaning against the wall, waiting for the waves of nausea and pain to subside. He must alert train security. He fumbled about until he found the door handle, and opened it, and stepped out.

For a moment, before he was able to collect himself, he simply stared. The walls of the carriage had become a ma.s.s of insects, and their rapid, restless scurrying filled the hall with a chitinous, sibilant hissing. Portions of the skittering horde occasionally arranged themselves into recognizable configurations. There was a flickering rendition of his mother-Virgil's mother-her face a mask of tragedy, streams of c.o.c.kroach tears falling from her c.o.c.kroach eyes. There was a bas-relief of his wife-Terrence's wife-ants and beetles, cradling a squirming spider-sculpture of his daughter-she looked up and opened her mouth, and a pa.s.sing phalanx of centipedes paused in their travels to arrange themselves into a cartoon speech bubble above her head. Don't forget to pick up the baklava in Kingsbridge, she said. Be careful. I love you. And then she disappeared, and the insects erupted into a mad frenzy, like a snowstorm in a hurricane.

Virgil had read about this, of course. When a causality field is in the first stages of collapse, and the mind is presented with a glimpse of the between, it attempts to interpret it in terms of the familiar, grasping desperately for metaphors. The chaos usually manifests as insects, or rain, or sandstorms: anything mult.i.tudinous, small, and chaotic.

Quite suddenly, the carriage returned to its former aspect: thick carpeting, dark wood-paneled walls, bronze gaslight fixtures. The field seemed to have rea.s.serted itself-but only weakly, as artifacts were already appearing: doors shifted from one end of the hall to the other, side tables wrenching themselves free of their moorings and stumbling away, untethered lamps and papers and pens falling upwards in small pockets of inverse gravity. The door to Number 8 flew open and Mr. and Mrs. Treppany and their two children squeezed out, combined now into a single ma.s.s, a tumbleweed of arms and legs, faces scattered randomly across the surface of their shared body. Virgil stepped aside as they rolled past, reaching out to him with all of their arms, mouthes open on a silent plea.

And so the train was already compromised. The only thing left was to gather up as many pa.s.sengers as possible, and get them to a lifeboat.

Virgil ran down the hall, hunched over his injury, opening doors, finding fresh scenes of horror behind each. Mr. Braithwait had become his room: the walls, a stretched drumhead of tearing skin, pulsed with the warmth of a waning life, and the floor surged hungrily toward him, in a rippling tidewall of Braithwait; Ms. Cragstone was bifurcating steadily, splitting off into new Cragstones with every pa.s.sing second, slowly becoming a crowd of herself; Mr. and Mrs. Clarendon were devolving into their predecessor species, heads expanding, brows sloping, backs bowing, arms becoming legs, hands becoming feet, feet becoming paws. The crackle of reconfiguring bones filled the room, along with the increasingly animalian cries of its occupants.

Virgil shut the last door and stepped back. The floor surged under his feet, undulating like waves on a choppy sea. He began to despair of finding anyone to save.

Just then the carriage door opened and a woman stepped through. She wore a white checkered shift as bloodstained as a birthing sheet. Her eyes were large and open so wide as to appear lidless, her hair wild and disordered, thrusting out at tentacular and improbable angles. Her face was filthy, covered in a viscous film. She stopped, and studied him.

Virgil moved quickly to her side. "We must hurry, Madame," he said. "If you would come with me..."

The woman did not move. There was about her a sense of unearthly calm, a preternatural stillness. Presently, she opened her mouth, exposing a hedge of ochre-stained teeth. And then continued to open it, until the hedge became a hole, the hole a cavern, the cavern an abyss-until her mouth was open wider than any mouth had any right to be.

Virgil had all but convinced himself that the woman was simply another chaos hallucination when she dipped her head and sunk her teeth into his shoulder. The pain was quite real, and he cried out. She lifted her head and stared at him with wide and curious eyes. Her blonde and matted hair shimmered above her like an aureole of serpents. And then she began in earnest the process of destroying him.

9: THE PIRATE IN FLIGHT.

William ran, the train's dissolution close on his heels, transforming, consuming, unbecoming the carefully ordered realities around him. He went from carriage to carriage, shouldering aside the panicked throngs spilling out of their rooms, moving as quickly as he could. But the waddling little man was nowhere to be seen. William had begun to despair of catching up to him when he burst through the door of the first-cla.s.s sleeping carriage, and came to a skidding halt.

A train conductor lay writhing on the floor, torn open and spilling himself onto the thick carpet, breathing in sporadic, dying heaves.

A woman in a bloodied shift knelt with her back to him, quietly mauling the little man.

And the little man lay squirming on his back, like an overturned beetle, fending away the woman's attacks, and doing a generally poor job of it.

William drew his weapon and shot the woman. She shuddered, drooped, then rose and staggered toward him. He shot her again, and then again, and then a third time. She fell, at last, but continued to move toward him, hand over hand, dragging herself across the buckling landscape of the dissolving carriage.

The little man stood, and brushed himself off. "Thank you, sir."

"My motives are entirely selfish, I'm afraid," said William. "You've rather ruined my plans for escape, so I would very much like to share in yours."

"Of course. If you'll grant me a moment." The little man began to disrobe, methodically: first his bowtie, then his waistcoat, his trousers, chemise, boots, stockings, smallclothes. When he was done, a dromedon stood in his place, grey skin glistening in the flickering light of the gaslamps.

William blinked, blinked again, and then smiled. "Oh, well done, sir."

The dromedon bowed, then drew a taper from his discarded waistcoat, stood on his toes, and thrust it into the nearest gaslamp. When it ignited, he lowered it into the pile of clothing. After a moment, tendrils of smoke began to rise from the pile. But the smoke did not behave as smoke should. For one thing, it was lavender. For another, it seemed quite solid. For a third, it appeared to be arranging itself into some sort of opaque archway. A portal.

"Where does it lead?" asked William.

"The question isn't where, really," said the dromedon. "It reconfigures the reality of those who pa.s.s through it. It's more of a what, I suppose."

"That will do," said William, and raised his weapon. "Please step aside."

"I would advise against killing me just yet, sir. It is not as simple as pa.s.sing through. You will need me to mediate the means and circ.u.mstances of the journey."

"Ah." William thought about this. "You are lying to me, perhaps?"

"Perhaps. Please help me with the conductor." The dromedon crossed to where the twitching and bloodied man lay dying. After a moment, William joined him. Together, they dragged him to the portal. The dromedon placed his hand on its shimmering surface, and closed his eyes. "Good," he said, and, with William's help fed the man into the aperture. He disappeared, inch by inch, until he was gone.

"One of your accomplices?" said William.

"No. I only just met him today."

"I see." William paused. "Although I don't, actually."

"I made him a promise." The dromedon looked at the woman. "Now her."

"Did you make her a promise as well? While she was attempting to extract your viscera, perhaps?"