All Those Vanished Engines

All Those
Vanished
Engines

A
LSO BY
P
AUL
P
ARK

A Princess of Roumania
*

The Tourmaline
*

The White Tyger
*

The Hidden World
*

Soldiers of Paradise

Sugar Rain

The Cult of Loving Kindness

Celestis
*

The Gospel of Corax

Three Marys

If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories

No Traveller Returns

 

 

 

*Denotes a Tor Book

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

ALL THOSE VANISHED ENGINES

Copyright © 2014 by Paul Park

A portion of
All Those Vanished Engines
was originally commissioned in 2011 by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, part of a permanent sound installation by Stephen Vitiello. For more information on this project, visit: www.massmoca.org.

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

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Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-7540-7 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-4716-3 (e-book)

CIP DATA—TK

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First Edition: July 2014

Printed in the United States of America

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All Those
Vanished
Engines

PART ONE

Bracelets

1. T
HEN

Maybe the first part of the story would be called
The Bracelet,
or else
Bracelets
would turn out to be the better name. Paulina suspected there were at least two, one an imagined version of the other, but she couldn't tell which was which. How could she know? She herself imagined something made of intertwining strands, modeled on the actual bracelet her cousin had brought back from the island of Ceylon, or so he'd claimed. She'd been very young. She hadn't seen it since. Now, sitting by herself in the stifling dark, she examined it in her imperfect memory: braided gold wire and elephant hair. “A mixture of the contrived and the biologic,” he had remarked in his high, precise voice, which nevertheless carried with it an ironical inflection, as if he didn't expect to be taken seriously.

Her father's cousin, actually, was what she had been told. Like all the men in her family he was handsome, with a lean, sensitive, clean-shaven face. His yellow hair was longer than necessary, as Gram often said. But the old lady had not yet closed her doors to him despite his eccentricity. She even treated him with grudging respect, because of his heroism in the old days. Not that Paulina cared about that. She distrusted every vestige of “the woah,” fought before her birth. Instead she appreciated his kindness, how he sat her on his knee and called her his little lump-cat, and told her stories about strange jungle beasts—once he had brought her the scooped-out shell of a pangolin. His visits were infrequent, parceled out between trips abroad and to a private sanatorium in Richmond. At forty-five, he'd never married. By the time she began to write
The Bracelet
in her diary, she hadn't seen him in many years. She pictured his name—Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, CSA—engraved in a circle on the golden clasp. “Imagine giving something like that to a child,” her grandmother had said, not bothering to lower her voice. “Even to play with.” Then promptly she had stolen it, locked it away, forgotten where it was. When Paulina asked her about it later, she had started to cry. “I'm a lost, 'lorn critter,” she said. “Everything goes contrariwise for me.”

In times of stress, that's what she often misquoted. The old lady seemed at moments to be losing her mind, part of a process of internal rot that Paulina associated with the summer heat. Once she had watched the workmen break apart a termite-infested beam in the basement of the Marshall Street house. Where was the queen in all that whirling debris?

That year Petersburg had not seen a single flurry of snow. Paulina had once read in a book how after a mild winter, summer would bring a succession of strange plagues, because nothing evil or despairing had grabbed its chance to die. Now in March the household had already suffered through a number of ninety-degree days. Bored and sweltering in St. Paul's Church on the last Sunday before Lent, dressed in black as was required of her, she had listened to a lesson from the Book of Numbers:

And the people spake against God, and against Moses, Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.

And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died …

Then the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.

Paulina imagined the old man twisting the brass serpent and fastening its tail between its jaws, just as her cousin the colonel had wrapped the golden bracelet in a helix pattern on her skinny, bone-white arm. But that wasn't the only reason the text spoke to her. She also loathed that light bread, the disgusting buttered milk-toast that Andrew concocted in the mornings according to her grandmother's instructions. So she sympathized with the people of Israel, whose God had punished them for their unhappiness, and then made them worship the punishment and even find comfort in it, as if the punishment itself could be the source of their salvation.

She guessed this brazenness was what made God so special. An ordinary person would have been ashamed to reveal himself like that, to Moses of all people, let alone permit the story to be written down and read aloud in churches, the words themselves like drops of boring venom.

Yet she was desperate for words, any words. Her grandmother had forbidden her to read anything for weeks, ever since Paulina had come back from visiting her childhood nurse in Walnut Hill, a woman who had lost all five of her own babies, and who—old now, past caring—blamed herself: “It was the milk. I poisoned them. I hated that man so much, it turned my milk to gall.”

This also sounded biblical—punishment to comfort, comfort to punishment. At home, when Paulina asked if it were possible to kill a child that way, she'd had to tell her grandmother she'd read about it in a book, which she'd found in the William R. McKenney Library—her grandfather's library—around the corner.

“And is it true that Mars has water on it?” Paulina asked. “Water in the middle of that red desert? Some people think the Martians must be gigantic squid-like creatures, but I don't believe it. I believe they're more like us.”

Sooner hung for a sheep as a lamb. That same day, the old lady had told Andrew to lock up the glass-fronted cases in the hall. She was afraid of how the books were affecting her granddaughter. Only she said, “infect”—often, now, she made mistakes of that kind.

So deprived, Paulina set out to concoct a story of her own, set in the North, where freezing temperatures would kill the microbes, cool the blood. Before the atlas was taken away, she'd found another Petersburg in New York State, in the Taughkanic Mountains. Across the ridge, in euphonious Massachusetts, she pictured a village of white clapboard houses among the birches and the pines, the smell of pine sap like a disinfectant. She pictured something far in the future, eighty, ninety years, beyond malice and superstition and the clutch of memory. It would be a glorious age of new machines, of steam engines and airships. You'd be able to see for yourself what Martians looked like.

Gram had already told Andrew to shut the house in the mid-morning, pull down the blinds. Because like many people she prescribed to others the remedies for her own sickness, late in the afternoon she sent Paulina to her room to lie down in the dark. Relaxation had been known to moderate some types of nervousness, others not. Andrew, in his kindness, brought her pen and ink. “Yes, miss,” he said, “you sure need something. You'll grow wild in there, cooped up.”

Her diary was a small book with marbleized covers. This was the third episode of
The Bracelet
so far. She wrote the false date of the future solstice (December 21, 1967), when Mars might possibly hang even closer in the sky. She blotted the ink, paused, and then continued in a rush, her pen squeaking on the page:

It snowd again during the nite, more sno than even the old men had ever seen. With what had fain the past month, the sno was ovr the windows in my room and the morning sun pusht thru it making prisms in the glass. That winter the streets were almost tunls, cleard dayly by steam-powrd pangolins becaus the sides tended to colaps. When there was scool I walkt on duk-bords ovr the ice. I had not gone to scool that week.

Sitting up in bed in the darkened room, using her dinner tray as a desk, she could scarcely see the mispelled words:

My mother was making bacon. I coud smel it. For a few hours evrything was going to be all rite, evn tho the enemy was al around the town. They had brot their machines down thru the woods. We spoke via the electrik tube and mother cald me down, first telling me to wake my sister in the next room. But Elly was alredy awake and I coud hear her laffing to herself. I was afraid of disturbing her and braking her mood but she shoud eat somthing, I thot. She had probably bin up since befor dawn working on her books if you coud call them that: leavs of papr cut into smalr squares and then sown together.

I went into the upstairs hal and nokt on her dor but there was no respons of cors. I did not want to disturb her. She was huncht ovr on her bed when I went in. The lite made patrns on the rug. She was working carefully and efishently but had alredy discarded sevrl finisht books.

I pikt one up from the flor. “Brekfast is redy,” I said, watching the bracelet slide up and down her rist. The lite pikt out the golden hair along her arm.

She leaned over her tray. She enjoyed writing in first person, inside the mind of a boy whom she called “Matthew.” As she wrote, she invented or borrowed the phonetic spelling and simple constructions of the future, when (she imagined) writing might finally serve to communicate thought rather than reinforce social distinctions and bedevil children. But would the world every really change so much? There also she fumbled in the dark.

In addition, she thought this way of writing might function as a simple code in case her grandmother decided to snoop. The old lady was easy to confuse. “You think it is the same bracelet,” Paulina wrote in a new paragraph, “but your rong. They dont evn look the same.”

Dissatisfied, she chewed the end of her pen for a moment before crossing out those last two sentences. Then she continued:

Elly was 7. Her memory was perfect. She new evry prime number to 100,000.

On each page she had drawn 2 piktures with a carefl line between them. But the drawings themselves were sloppy and quik, the adventurs of a stik-figure vershun of herself in a landscape of enormous numbrs. In this one, Elly stood at the botm of a clif, preparing to clime up or else to hang a rope-swing from the top. She had grapld hold of the horizontl spike in the midl of a 3, a smalr number between 2 elongated digits. The clif face was 4467313569430909. Above it dark clouds of smalr numbrs hid the sun.