Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology (41 page)

“Why, see how big and strong he's got in just a couple of months!” he'd exclaim. “If this elixir can do that for a starvin’ orphan boy on just a tablespoon per day, just think what it can do for you!”

Then he'd make wiggly wobbly finger signs at me while I stood there mute, pretending to agree with everything he wiggle wobbled at me, and he would wipe away a crocodile tear. He sold many a bottle of elixir that way, and many a tender-hearted woman in those Nebraska towns took us home to her table and fed us up like royalty.

The end of that summer of 1889 we was workin’ the fairs and carnivals around Omaha, which is a sleepy little frontier railroad cow town. Late one afternoon we was tied up at the train station, next to a big dirigible from the Standard Oil Company by the name of
River Raft
, and I got stuck again shoveling coal into the blimp. Without no warnin’ at all, the sky clouded over and within ten minutes the clouds went from white to gray to greenish black.

Now, the locals all knew what that was: a tornado sky. When the air got muggy and still and full of electricity, they disappeared into the woodwork, leavin’ me out there shovelin’, fat, dumb, and happy. Ozzie Osmond was snorin’ away in the blimp, sleepin’ off another bottle. Tired out from all those strenuous hundred-feet-up-hundred-feet-down blimp hops with pretty local girls, I guess.

I felt somebody grab my shoulder. When I turned around I was face to face with a man I would have recognized anywhere, whose photographs and sketch portraits were in a dozen books and penny dreadfuls I had at home: Mark Twain himself, Mr. Samuel Langhorn Clemens, all decked out like a riverboat gambler.

Could have knocked me over with a feather. I stood there starin’ at him with my mouth hangin’ open, and he shook my shoulder. “Boy,” he said, “you and that carnie better get out of here. There’s going to be a blow.” He pointed to the sky, but I guess I just looked confused, because he shook me. “My conveyance, the
River Raft
, is casting off the second I get back on board from warning you. I suggest you do the same.”

“Just then there was a big gust of wind that nearly knocked us both off our feet. That gust was too much for the flimsy moorings of Ozzie’s blimp, and it tore free, shootin’ across the countryside, whirlin’ around the cyclone center that was just becomin’ visible, a mile or so off. The
River Raft
was tied down hard to a steam engine with steel cable. She tugged and pulled at her moorings, but thank goodness she didn’t let go.

I scrambled to my feet and started to run after Ozzie's blimp, but Clemens grabbed me by the elbow and spun me toward the dirigible. The man was fast! He pelted across to the
River Raft w
ay quicker than I'd have believed possible for a man in his fifties, and pretty much threw me up the ramp and through the boardin’ hatch. The captain yelled, the ground crew let go the moorings, the new-fangled diesel engines rose up in a roar, and all the dozen or so propellers on the
River Raft
clawed the air.

Thank goodness it wasn’t a big tornado, as such things go, or it would have torn that dirigible, and Ozzie’s blimp, to shreds. The dirigible fought its way clear, clawin’ and screamin’ all the way. The blimp did not. Later, Ozzie spun all sorts of yarns about that twister, about how he got sucked up and blown away to a wonderful land, where he set himself up as a wizard and had all sorts of adventures with witches and tiny people, talking lions, living scarecrows, and mechanical men. Me, I take it all with a grain of salt. I know Ozzie too well.

Mr. Clemens was on his way home that summer. He had gone with his friends to northern California just to see the total eclipse of the sun. The whole way across the country! They had hauled the brand-new
River Raft
on a Union Pacific train all the way from New York to Sacramento, where they loaded her up with hydrogen. And now they were takin’ their sweet time pokin’ along back across the country by air.

It was my pure luck—or maybe blessed providence—that they were in Omaha when that twister hit, and that Mr. Clemens noticed me out there shovelin’ like a slave, and come after me. Saved my life. And changed it forever.

He hauled me up to the billiard room inside the dirigible, sat me down, and put a glass of water in my hand, with real honest-to-goodness cubes of ice in it. Then he sits down in front of me and leans forward.

“I caught your snake oil act with that Ozzie feller back there in Omaha,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.“I’ve seen a lot of them in my day. But that one took the cake—you pretending to be ten years old and deaf and dumb. Big strapping farm boy like you. What are you? Sixteen? One or the other of you read my book from a few years ago to come up with the deaf and dumb angle.”He grinned real wide and sucked on his big old cigar, blew a cloud of blue smoke at the ceiling.

“Now I’m going to bet,” he said, pointin’ that cigar at me, “that you’re no more deaf and dumb than I am. Am I right?”

“Yessir,” I said. “Of course I read your book, sir, but that whole deaf and dumb thing was just Ozzie’s way of keepin’ me from runnin’ my mouth and spoilin’ the con. Says I’m nearly as green as the marks.” Clemens got a big kick out of that. Sat back, and boy did he laugh!

Long story short, he talked his friend Mr. Rogers, who owned the Standard Oil Company, into givin’ me a berth on that dirigible, and that was the true beginning of my airship career. I signed on as a deck hand, but pretty soon they saw clear that I had more on the ball than that, and I moved up fast. The captain of the
River Raft
took me under his wing. Started in to teach me navigation, and found out real quick that I already had a good start.

Next voyage out, when we went from New York to Gander, Belfast, and London, he made me a midshipman. Three voyages back and forth across the Atlantic, and I was a second mate. Two years later and three voyages all the way around the world, I was first mate.

It was in London that the Assam State Oil and Railway Company, from the far northeast of India, offered me my own brand new airship, which was just about finished being built in Germany. She was just over half the size of the
River Raft
, but she was mine! The company was launchin’ a pair of them to use to help build railways, and hunt and drill for oil out in the heavy forest of the State of Assam. Mine was to be called
Ganesh
. You saw the elephant-head god painted on my bow, right? Ganesh is the lover of wisdom, the protector, the remover of obstacles, the god of beginnings. The sister ship was to be named
Kali
, after the goddess of time, change, and destruction.

So that’s how I first went to India. We did fine, my new crew and me, that first voyage from Germany to Assam. And everything was fine for the first few months we worked over the forests of Assam.

But then the monsoon season hit, and all the work on the ground came to a soggy halt. Worst of all, the Rhodesians started getting bored. Rhodesians was the company’s security police—hired thugs, really, every one of them cut loose for one reason or another from the British South Africa Company. And when they got bored they got meaner than snakes.

One in particular, a great hulk of a man named Corrock, an ax handle wide at the shoulders and a full head taller than me, was a real animal. I had heard stories about how brutal he was toward the railway and forestry workers, even his own men. He didn’t just keep order for the Company; he loved keepin’ people in fear, beatin’ men, women, and children at random. He would hunt men for sport when they tried to leave the work gangs and go back to their families.

When the monsoons started, Corrock got it in his head to use the slack time to make some extra money. He and his men took to the forests to poach elephants for their ivory, just as they done in Africa. When they figured out that Indian elephants just don’t produce ivory the way African elephants do, it didn’t stop them. Instead they got angry, ruthless, and all the more brutal. They hunted the bulls until there wasn’t a single tusker alive within a two-days’ elephant ride.

Corrock was right disgusted to learn that an Indian elephant cow don’t even have tusks—she has “tushes”—glorified molars that can’t even be seen unless her mouth is open. But these maggots didn’t think nothin’ of slaughterin’ an eight-thousand-pound cow for a couple of pounds of near worthless tooth ivory.

I fought hard against orders to take them up scoutin’ the herds from the air, but in the end, I had to follow orders or lose my ship.

The mornin’ of my last day as an airman was beautiful: the rains had let up for a bit. Corrock and his men loaded onto the dirigible. Since we was only supposed to go out for the mornin’, scout one particular herd, then come back, I only needed one other man: my loadmaster, a friend we called Assami, to handle the ropes. That day I was both captain and pilot. Corrock brought his whole five-man squad, which should have been my first warning that this was more than just a scouting expedition.

Corrock sat next to me, up in the co-pilot’s seat, tellin’ me where to fly. He was no airman, so it was easy to make more engine noise than I had to. I could easily have circled upwind of each of the places on his list, then drifted silently downwind. Instead I came directly upwind each time, with all my engines roaring.

Wild elephants are real smart, and learn quick how to stay away from people, so we flew around for several hours without seein’ a single one. I was managin’ to warn them all to hide. Corrock was none the wiser, but got pretty angry at not having any luck. Finally we come to the last place on his list: a small clearing in the forest barely twice the length of
Ganesh
.

I came up on them from downwind just like at the other spots, with all the engines roarin’. But the knot of elephants in the center of the clearing didn’t move. They stood in a tight circle, their heads toward the middle.

“Circle in on them,” Corrock says. So I did exactly that, hopin’ every moment that they would break and scatter. But they never moved.

“No tuskers,” I said to him, as soon as we got a close look. “Nine cows, four calves. One more cow in the center giving birth.”

“Shut your mouth, Yank, and keep circling,” he said.

Almost as the words came out of his mouth, I heard a sound that made my blood run cold, a sound that will haunt me ‘til the day I die: the rattle and roar of a Vickers machine gun. God help me! I watched the circle of elephants wilt to the ground like a bouquet of flowers under a blowtorch.

“Don't shoot! Leave them alone! They're mothers with babies!”I screamed, and turned back to Corrock, with a crazy idea that I could talk some sense into him. I found a Colt .45 Peacemaker pointed straight at my forehead.

“Land,”was all Corrock said. So I did.

As we neared the ground, my loadmaster jumped out the door with a hawser to make us fast to a fallen tree. Then he doubled over that tree trunk and puked.

Corrock’s men piled out with bone saws and rifles. They walked through the herd, laughin’ and talkin’, shootin’ into the head of each of the wounded cows and calves in turn, and started sawin’ the tushes out of the jaws.

I don’t remember leavin’ my seat or climbin’ out of the dirigible. I do remember standin’ over the carcass of the mother who had been giving birth. She was still quivering from the rifle shot to her brain. She was a magnificent beast, easy ten thousand pounds, clearly the matriarch of the herd. In a circle around her, dead on the ground, were fourteen of her daughters and granddaughters. And there, mostly hidden by her body, lay a newborn female calf, so new born that the birth caul still covered her head.

I remember kneelin’ beside her, clearin’ away the caul, gatherin’ her up in my arms. She was nearly as big as me, but I seemed to have strength to spare. The killers hadn't come to her yet. She was unwounded and still breathing.

I remember walking with her to
Ganesh
, and yellin’ to the load master, “Cast off. We’re leavin’.” I laid her down as gently as I could, climbed in, and pulled Assami in after me.

The propellers had never stopped turnin’. The engines were still runnin’. I had just rotated the propellers for upward lift—we hadn’t yet left the ground—when I heard a scream. I jumped up in time to see Corrock throw Assami out the cargo hatch. As he turned back toward me, he was drawin’ that Colt Peacemaker.

It was pure reflex: I yanked the handle for emergency ballast dump, just as Ozzie Osmond had done those years before when we first met. The dirigible jumped off the ground just the same, climbin’ even faster than Ozzie’s little blimp, because her propellers was pullin’ hard.

Corrock was caught off guard, and he fell against the frame of the hatch. Even as much bigger than me as he was, that was all the advantage I needed. I flew through the air and hit him at the knees in a full-on, American-style football tackle.

He pitched backwards out the door without a sound, his Peacemaker in his hand. It’s a miracle that I didn’t go flyin’ out the door with him, but somehow I didn’t. By the time I managed to get back to my feet and into my seat,
Ganesh
was several hundred feet off the ground.

At first I flew back toward headquarters, but in the end I flew right over, because I knew that even if the fall hadn’t killed him and made me a murderer, there was no way Corrock would let me live after I tackled him like that and left him and his men in the forest. And I had that baby elephant to think about, behind me in the passenger cabin, crying for her mother.

After two days, I had flown forty-six hours straight, stopping only once for fuel, heading straight to Bombay, to the only zoo I knew about, hoping they could save her. I was coming in low over the hills near the ocean, west of the city. That's when the
Kali
caught up to me. The first hint I hadn’t made a clean getaway was when I heard their Vickers machine gun open up, above and behind me.