The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (27 page)

On the obverse, Naranh was enthroned with every indication of deification, although there is no record in the histories of the City of the Shining Sea that Naranh ever petitioned the temples for this honour. Nonetheless, he sat on a throne with a back that only reached his shoulders, and the deity letter was especially emphasized, being twice as large as the others.

From Viu’s journeys there began to pour a confusion of coins: her likeness in elephant tusk, narwhal horn, turquoise, gold, electrum, cowries, honeycomb-crusted soap, mahogany, green glass, glazed and unglazed ceramics, oxidized copper that crumbled in King Naranh’s palm, palimpsests upon ancient hoard-finds, horse leather, compressed feathers, peach pits, paper, salt impossibly hard.

Whether round or square or knife-shaped, whether large or minute, unbordered or part of an ornate whole, the coins showed Viu looking directly out, crowned and lash-less, faintly smiling.

No other coin showed a monarch’s face from such an angle.

They arrived from every part of the world-map’s rim, sometimes simultaneously from far-apart regions, so that Naranh could not follow or predict his sister’s route. He screamed and raged, and his allies began to dry up like a nightmare of the Shining Sea’s demise.

Their group of people and wagons and animals grew exponentially.

Stories travelled: of a city on wheels and hooves where anyone who sought peace was welcomed like family, of a leader who spread steamworks and magic to those who wanted freedom from the City of the Shining Sea’s monopoly, of unending supplies of steam that cooled into clean water. No one in the mobile city thirsted. And Naranh’s army never drew near.
A god’s protection
, people whispered.
Blessed city
.

Viu continued to spread her gift and her schematics. Months passed. A year. Two. Gradually cities met Naranh on battlefields with their own weapons of steam and clanking, slicing, shooting metal.

Tilodah Tu modified her machine with parts from inventors she met along the way – some of whom joined the group, and for the first time she welcomed assistants into her caravan, and let them sink their hands up to the wrists in piles of the strangest issues.

Cardamom pods, vanilla pods, fox bone, snakeskin, the tin maps of the Morro tribe.

At night, Tilodah Tu would whisper a litany of the substances not yet tried in her mint.

“Hush, love,” Viu would whisper back. “Sleeping.”

She slept rarely.

Even with the help of the unseen god, she struggled to keep her city clear of the war raging and fragmenting across the plains and hills. So many people relied on her for safety. Though Tilodah Tu thought only of the substances she might turn into coins, Viu knew that they needed a different future.

She made new plans.

The final issue of Naranh amended the previous one to title him
Emperor
instead of
King
. Every other detail remained the same.

No mints besides the one in the City of the Shining Sea produced the coin.

The most famous of the coins Viu sent to her brother were the fifty struck in ice, delivered in a large stone chest insulated with furs and cloth. Even so, they were stuck together when Naranh opened the chest, their features half gone. They melted within hours, although not before Naranh could put them to use cooling his drinks and laugh loudly with his few remaining courtiers.

The lid of the chest read:
I have built my own city of steam, brother, too high in the mountains for you to reach
.

No further coins arrived.

In the Temple of the Steam God, supplicants offered minor denominations of a more conventional issue, un-melting.

The coins of the City in the Ice were small and simple in motif, with Viu’s face on the obverse and a mountain on the reverse.

No longer minting fun, functionally valueless coins, Tilodah Tu controlled her work far more carefully. She struggled. Treasurer was not an easy title to bear, and she could not afford to discard it as she had Professor of Numismatics. She dreamed of inflation guised as a succession of wild monsters. She spent hours of each day making entirely different records to those she had kept in the plains.

Some issues she never got around to burying – too much else took her time, day after day.

They would survive.

In her free time, she occasionally made limited runs of curio-coins: seven from a yak’s hoof, ten from glistening black rock, three from a rare fungus that mummified subterranean caterpillars and grew from their foreheads. Most of the time, she wandered the city with Viu and other friends.

“We made this,” she murmured to Viu, on a night when the first snow drifted down from the mountains. The animal shelters were ready for winter. The food stores were full and secure from the elements. Soon the rivers would freeze. The city’s temples – one for each god – would hold festivals.

“We did.” Pride and happiness flowed from Viu like steam.

“My life has developed in so many different ways.”

“Do you think I planned all this from the beginning?”

The City in the Ice was famed for many things, but above all else were its schools. Knowing her role in the war that had torn parts of her old map to shreds, Viu established her city’s schools explicitly as forums of learning and discussion. Above all else, they posed the question:
how do we fairly and usefully use this technology we have all shared?
There were many answers.

Radio Jones came dancing down the slidewalks. She jumped from the express to a local, then spun about and raced backwards, dumping speed so she could cut across the slower lanes two and three at a time. She hopped off at the mouth of an alley, glanced up in time to see a Zeppelin disappear behind a glass-domed skyscraper, and stepped through a metal door left open to vent the heat from the furnaces within.

The glass-blowers looked up from their work as she entered the hot shop. They greeted her cheerily:

“Hey, Radio!”

“Jonesy!”

“You invented a robot girlfriend for me yet?”

The shop foreman lumbered forward, smiling. “Got a box of off-spec tubes for you, under the bench there.”

“Thanks, Mackie.” Radio dug through the pockets of her patched leather greatcoat and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Hey, listen, I want you to do me up an estimate for these here vacuum tubes.”

Mack studied the list. “Looks to be pretty straightforward. None of your usual experimental trash. How many do you need – one of each?”

“I was thinking more like a hundred.”

“
What?
” Mack’s shaggy black eyebrows met in a scowl. “You planning to win big betting on the Reds?”

“Not me, I’m a Whites fan all the way. Naw, I was kinda hoping you’d gimme credit. I came up with something real hot.”

“You finally built that girlfriend for Rico?”

The workmen all laughed.

“No, c’mon, I’m
serious
here.” She lowered her voice. “I invented a universal radio receiver. Not fixed-frequency – tunable! It’ll receive any broadcast on the radio spectrum. Twist the dial, there you are. With this baby, you can listen in on every conversation in the big game, if you want.”

Mack whistled. “There might be a lot of interest in a device like that.”

“Funny thing, I was thinking exactly that myself.” Radio grinned. “So whaddaya say?”

“I say …” Mack spun around to face the glass-blowers, who were all listening intently, and bellowed, “
Get back to work!
” Then, in a normal voice, “Tell you what. Set me up a demo, and if your gizmo works the way you say it does, maybe I’ll invest in it. I’ve got the materials to build it, and access to the retailers. Something like this could move twenty, maybe thirty units a day, during the games.”

“Hey! Great! The game starts when? Noon, right? I’ll bring my prototype over, and we can listen to the players talking to each other.” She darted toward the door.

“Wait.” Mack made his way ponderously into his office. He extracted a five-dollar bill from the lockbox and returned, holding it extended before him. “For the option. You agree not to sell any shares in this without me seeing this doohickey first.”

“Oh, Mackie, you’re the greatest!” She bounced up on her toes to kiss his cheek. Then, stuffing the bill into the hip pocket of her jeans, she bounded away.

Fat Edna’s was only three blocks distant. She was inside and on a stool before the door jangled shut behind her. “Morning, Edna!” The neon light she’d rigged up over the bar was, she noted with satisfaction, still working. Nice and quiet, hardly any buzz to it at all. “Gimme a big plate of scrambled eggs and pastrami, with a beer on the side.”

The bartender eyed her skeptically. “Let’s see your money first.”

With elaborate nonchalance, Radio laid the bill flat on the counter before her. Edna picked it up, held it to the light, then slowly counted out four ones and eighty-five cents change. She put a glass under the tap and called over her shoulder, “Wreck a crowd, with sliced dick!” She pulled the beer, slid the glass across the counter, and said, “Out in a minute.”

“Edna, there is
nobody
in the world less satisfying to show off in front of than you. You still got that package I left here?”

Wordlessly, Edna took a canvas-wrapped object from under the bar and set it before her.

“Thanks.” Radio unwrapped her prototype. It was bench-work stuff – just tubes, resistors and capacitors in a metal frame. No housing, no circuit tracer lights, and a tuner she had to turn with a pair of needle-nose pliers. But it was going to make her rich. She set about double-checking all the connectors. “Hey, plug this in for me, willya?”

Edna folded her arms and looked at her.

Radio sighed, dug in her pockets again, and slapped a nickel on the bar. Edna took the cord and plugged it into the outlet under the neon light.

With a faint hum, the tubes came to life.

“That thing’s not gonna blow up, is it?” Edna asked dubiously.

“Naw.” Radio took a pair of needle-nose pliers out of her greatcoat pocket and began casting about for a strong signal. “Most it’s gonna do is electrocute you, maybe set fire to the building. But it’s not gonna explode. You been watching too many kinescopes.”

Amelia Spindizzy came swooping down out of the sun like a suicidal angel, all rage and mirth. The rotor of her autogyro whined and snarled with the speed of her dive. Then she throttled up and the blades bit deep into the air and pulled her out, barely forty feet from the ground. Laughing, she lifted the nose of her bird to skim the top of one skywalk, banked left to dip under a second, and then right to hop-frog a third. Her machine shuddered and rattled as she bounced it off the compression effects of the air around the skyscrapers to steal that tiny morsel of extra lift, breaking every rule in the book and not giving a damn.

The red light on Radio 2 flashed angrily. One-handed, she yanked the jacks to her headset from Radio 3, the set connecting her to the referee, and plugged into her comptroller’s set. “Yah?”

The flat, emotionless and eerily artificial voice of Naked Brain XB-29 cut through the static. “
Amelia, what are you doing?
”

“Just wanted to get your attention. I’m going to cut through the elbow between Ninetieth and Ninety-First Avenues. Plot me an Eszterhazy, will you?”

“
Computing
.” Almost as an afterthought, the Naked Brain said, “
You realize this is extremely dangerous
.”

“Nothing’s dangerous enough for me,” Amelia muttered, too quietly for the microphone to pick up. “Not by half.”

The sporting rag
Obey the Brain!
had termed her “half in love with easeful death”, but it was not
easeful
death that Amelia Spindizzy sought. It was the inevitable, difficult death of an impossible skill tenaciously mastered but necessarily insufficient to the challenge – a hard-fought battle for life, lost just as the hand reached for victory and closed around empty air. A mischance that conferred deniability, like a medal of honor, on her struggle for oblivion, as she twisted and fell in gloriously tragic heroism.

So far, she hadn’t achieved it.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love being alive (at least some of the time). She loved dominating the air currents in her great titanium whirligig. She loved especially the slow turning in an ever-widening gyre, scanning for the opposition with an exquisite patience only a sigh short of boredom, and then the thrill as she spotted him, a minuscule speck in an ocean of sky. Loved the way her body flushed with adrenaline as she drove her machine up into the sun, searching for that sweet blind spot where the prey, her machine and that great atomic furnace were all in a line. Loved most of all the instant of stillness before she struck.

It felt like being born all over again.

For Amelia, the Game was more than a game, because necessarily there would come a time when the coordination, strength and precision demanded by her fierce and fragile machine would prove to be more than she could provide, a day when all the sky would gather its powers to break her will and force her into the ultimate submission. It would happen. She had faith. Until then, though, she strove only to live at the outer edge of her skills, to fly and to play the Game as gloriously as any human could, to the astonishment of the unfortunate earthbound classes. And of the Naked Brains who could only float, ponderously, in their glass tanks, in their Zeppelins.

“Calculations complete.”

“You have my position?”

Cameras swiveled from the tops of nearby buildings, tracking her. ‘
Yes
.”

Now she’d achieved maximum height again.

“I’m going in.”

Straight for the alley-mouth she flew. Sitting upright in the thorax of her flying machine, rudder pedals at her feet, stick controls to the left and right, she let inertia push her back into the seat like a great hand. Eight-foot-long titanium blades extended in a circle, with her at the center like the heart of a flower. This was no easy machine to fly. It combined the delicacy of flight with the physical demands of operating a mechanical thresher.