The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (35 page)

Gordon shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

Hollerith spread his arms wide to indicate the sheer presence of the machine. “You, Aztec, should know what we are going through right now.”

“Indeed?” Ixtli perked up. The man was still talking, waiting for something, eager to prove … something. If they could keep him talking, then maybe there would be time for the boy outside to go for the police.

If he did ever go. That was a gamble.

“The tyrants and occupiers of our lands …” Hollerith got up and Ixtli tensed. “The colonies tried to rise once, to be crushed in their boots.”

“You’re a dissident,” Gordon hissed.

“Revolutionaries! Visionaries!” Hollerith stood up. “Gentlemen, what you see before you is the engine of a new future. The British boot will be forced back. This machine is the constitution of the new United States of America.”

“The what?” Ixtli remembered that the boy had called these people constitutionalists.

Now Hollerith paced in front of them. “A set of rules for governing us, fair, impartial and written by the people. The tyrants refused to let man rule himself, and so we’ve had to go underground. Slowly, building our ranks. We have citizens all throughout the thirteen colonies, waiting for their moment to rise up.”

One of the dockworkers took out a punch card from the end of a station. “Mister Hollerith.” He handed it over.

Hollerith glanced at the card. He blinked. “I hold here your future, gentlemen.”

Ixtli looked at the complex pattern of holes. “Really? The machine dictates your actions?”

“What is government but a set of programmed instructions we all agree upon? And in a democracy, it is blind, and her instructions carried out by men. This is no different.

“The things that happen to us, we feed them into the computer, and it sorts its responses and hands them back to us on our cards, telling us how to serve it best. Judgements, foreign policies and now … war. It is our destiny, it always has been, to spill out throughout this country and claim it for ourselves. To spread from sea to sea. Already telegraph operators string throughout the thirteen, even through the Indian lands between us and the west coast, passing on and coordinating instructions with other constitutional machines running in parallel all throughout the land. The US will rise again.”

“Manifest destiny, embodied within the unflinching intelligence of a computing machine,” Ixtli said.

“You’ve heard of the theory? The machine decided that a diplomatic incident would be what we needed. It said to look out for anything resembling one, so that we could use that to gain recruits, and worry people about the threat of foreign murderers here in our city.”

“That theory is that your race is somehow owed it all: the lands of the Mexica, the Indians, and what the British rule already,” said Ixtli. “Yes, I’ve heard this before. In Texcaco, yes, in the Mexica-Americas war. Many of your border men, out of the reach of the British, were prodded on by the Louisiana French by having that belief dangled before them. An ugly scene.”

“This will be different.” Hollerith looked at the punch card. “I’m sorry, but as enemies of the state, you will not have a trial. You will be executed as spies. So says the Constitution.”

“So says the Constitution,” murmured the hundreds in the warehouse.

“You’ll be taken to a room, where ten blindfolded men with rifles will fire. The Constitution will randomly load a pair of guns. Take them away.”

Gordon struggled again, but Ixtli remained calm. “Now you are killing harmless public servants in the name of your cause, just like any other group of dissidents.”

Hollerith refused the bait. “I have sworn to protect the Constitution, gentlemen, from all its enemies. Your rhetoric will have little impact on me.”

The three dockworkers moved in, and Ixtli walked with them through the rows of furiously spinning clockwork and blank government officials’ faces.

They were forced into a tiny closet, and the door was barred shut.

“Thanks for delaying them,” Gordon said, leaning against the wall.

“I did what I could.” Ixtli moved around in the dark, trying to find out if there was anything useful, but the space had been cleared of everything.

“When they find us dead, I imagine my heart will be cut out,” Gordon said. “And you will be dead nearby of a gunshot, maybe?”

“It will stir up enmity, feed unity and a sense that they need to cohere against an outside force.”

It wasn’t just his death, but the betrayal of his country. Ixtli kicked at the door in frustration.

“Hey,” a familiar voice hissed. The door cracked open and in slipped the boy. He left the door ajar, the welcome light bringing their temporary cell out of the deep dark and into murkiness. “I knew you’d get yourselves in it deep and end up losing me my money.”

“Did you call the police?” Gordon asked.

“Police? No damn police. Just Slim Tim.”

“Who’s Slim Tim?” Ixtli moved closer to the boy.

“Who’s Slim Tim? he asks. Slim Tim is me!” Slim Tim sliced the ropes off.

“And no one noticed you?” Gordon asked.

Slim Tim shrugged. “They was busy with the lights.” He smiled, and then counted off his fingers. On the last one something boomed loudly and Slim Tim chuckled. Light flashed and danced brightly.

Gordon pulled the last of his rope free. “Let’s make a break for it.”

They glanced out of the closet. Nothing but people tending the machine.

“Run,” Ixtli said.

They skirted the dark walls, ducking and weaving around the dangerous moving parts of the living machine. The escape almost worked, but near the doors a man throwing switches paused, frowned, and shouted at them.

The cry went up all throughout the warehouse, and the ten men with rifles ran through an aisle of machinery, blindfolds loose around their necks. “Stop!”

“Only two of the guns will kill us,” Ixtli said. “Run for it, and whoever survives, get out to call the officials.”

“Scatter,” Gordon said, and they did. All ten rifles fired, and Ixtli felt relief. Nothing had hit him, no bullets pinged, they were all blanks. He turned the corner with the other two before the second round, this one not loaded with blanks, could be fired.

They burst out of the main doors, ran down the corners to where the hansom waited, and all three piled in, shouting, “Go, go, go!”

“You pay me now,” Slim Tim said. “Very next thing.”

Ixtli grabbed Slim Tim’s shoulders. “You’re damn right we pay you next.” He shook the boy. “You will make a small fortune tonight, Mr Tim, a small fortune.”

Gordon met Ixtli the next morning at the airfield before he left and stuck his hand out. “Mr Ixtli, my thanks.”

Ixtli regarded the offered hand. A strange custom. He took it carefully and finished the American ritual, a sign of respect for what they had both been through. “Did you get Hollerith?”

Gordon shook his head. “They smashed the machine, and took their punch cards with them. We reduced their abilities significantly, though, thanks to you.”

“Thanks to you.” Ixtli’s superiors would find this a fascinating tale. He wondered what they would do with the information. Computer-run governments and humans no better than automatons, run by small dots on a piece of paper.

“What a barbarous idea, letting machines rule you.”

Ixtli looked around. “What is a government but ideas that are set down on paper for rules, and then interpreted and run by individual human machines? Is it really that far-fetched?”

“But cogs and wheels? We will find these people and their cards and burn them out.”

Ixtli nodded, relieved. The Constitutionalists had taken all their punch cards with them. Good. “Of course, that is the typical response of a nation. But Gordon, remember this: all ten of those weapons fired were blank, we were never hit.”

“What do you mean?”

“A government is the will of its people, and the will of Hollerith is twisted. He and his people want land, and revolution, and blood. Revenge against the British. Manifest destiny above all else.

“But if the pure ideals of an idea were really input into a machine, maybe it fought back, Mr Doyle. Maybe it told all those soldiers to load blanks. And Hollerith indicated that maybe the machine hadn’t ordered that man’s death at the museum, but merely suggested they look for such an incident.”

“Maybe,” Gordon said. “Maybe.”

“Consider it, that the ideas are what is important. If you ever come to Tenochtitlan, make sure to visit.” Ixtli smiled. “Where the pursuit of truth reigns free, and all manner of theories live side by side, jostling each other.”

They shook hands again, and then Gordon grabbed Ixtli’s shoulder.

“I have a favor to ask: now that we have solved this crime and my men are looking for Hollerith, might I get your permission to send my notes and files to my brother? He fancies himself something of a writer and follows such things. Intrigue, and the sort.”

“Of course,” Ixtli said. “What is your brother’s name?”

“Arthur.”

“Just make sure my name is changed,” Ixtli laughed. And with that last bit of business, the two men separated. Ixtli boarded the airship.

Somewhere past French Louisiana and over tribal lands, Ixtli reached under his coat and pulled out a stack of punch cards. An insurrection, guided by machine, could be imminently useful.

The basis of the computing machine’s rules could be corrupted, maybe even by telegraph commands, or a hidden series of codes activated by punch cards slipped in by an agent. An agent who had been called north by a special signal, thanks to a series of pre-programmed instructions.

Ixtli’s world faced threats. Spanish to the south, English colonies and French to the north, and the intermediate and forever fickle tribal societies in the midlands. Tenochtitlan was always aware of the need to keep Europeans on their toes. Keeping the Europeans divided and fighting among themselves kept them from focusing their eyes on new land.

So now Ixtli held up the punch cards he had taken the ones he’d replaced were now with the dissidents, who were none the wiser.

He leaned over the window, and dropped the cards out to flutter in the wind.

Where they would land, he had no idea. It was not his place to know, or ask. He was just another agent in the vast machine that was his government.

“If only it were as easy to fix my eyes as it is yours,” I said to Miriam as I peered through the glasses hanging off my nose. My attic workshop was dark, the cuckoo clock on my wall had just announced midnight, but moonbeams lit my cigarette smoke like heavenly girders. Miriam was, after all, my little angel. Her bronze frame glinted in the moonlight as I twisted a wrench inside her enclosure. As her lens came into focus she clicked happily. She wouldn’t bang into furniture or wake up the sleeping any longer. (Or such was my hope; her bent frame was evidence of a recent encounter with a club.) I placed her on the floor and she crawled onto the table by the window. Beside her stood Beth, Eve, Leah, Talia and Shoshanna, her sisters in trade. Together, they looked like a litter of shiny, eight-legged, hairless cats. Their eyes peered up at me, awaiting my command.

“Are you ready,
meine kinder
?” I said.

Miriam tapped her head against the window pane. Her sisters chittered.

“Make
mame
proud,” I said as I opened the window. And my little girls, eager to please, crawled out my fourth-story window. They spidered down the steep wall and vanished into the night. The rooftops of Manhattan’s Lower East Side stretched into the distance like a tumultuous gray sea frozen in time. I leaned out into the cool air and exhaled smoke toward the stars. A kitten – a flesh and blood one, sleek and brown and beautiful – sat on the roof across the way and watched me with two glowing eyes. Down below, I heard a thump; I hoped it wasn’t Miriam’s lens acting up again. When I glanced at the roof once more, the kitten had gone.

At 6 a.m. the next morning, after three cups of strong coffee, I descended to the ground floor of my home to my pawn shop, ‘Tchotchkes’, to the sound of clocks chiming wildly. Outside my windows, which were painted with fading Yiddish letters, the morning sun was bright and clean and cut hard slices through the cobbled streets. A flock of airships meshed the sky, their engines droning like worker bees as they moved to and from South Street Airport. Like gray pike swimming upstream, pious Jews raced past the windows to the nearest
shul, talis
bags in tow, so they could pray before heading to work. But Divya stood motionless among them, a stone in the river. She was punctual, sleepy-eyed and lovely, as usual. I opened the door, kissed the
mezzuzah
, and held the door open for her. She wore a modest brown dress, a fresh crimson
bindi
on her forehead, and a gem-encrusted silver necklace. The last lit up her face like flashes from a fire. As she passed me I reached for her neck and she flinched, then tried to disguise her reaction with a nervous laugh.

“Relax, dear!” I said. “I’m just curious.”

Sheepishly she held the necklace up to my eyes: a silver band encrusted with glistering gems. I didn’t need a loupe to know they were real diamonds.

“Beautiful,” I said. “A gift from Robert?”

She nodded, and when I offered no more she slipped quietly inside my store.

An auto-giraffe whirred past. The officer on its saddle, shaded under a tassled canopy, like a
chupa
, leaned over the side and shouted to me, “Mornin’, Jessica.” He tipped his cap.

“And to you, Elijah.”

Officer Elijah had lost his left eye in a tussle four years back, and the replacement, a metallic contraption of lenses and gears, made him look half machine. Sometimes I thought the injury had affected his brain, too. “Jessica,” he said as he stopped his auto-giraffe. He revealed an envelope and handed it to a small crawler, which ran down the tall mechanoid’s leg and offered it to me. The brutish police crawler lacked the grace of my bronze children, now slinking through the city’s streets, though they shared the same military provenance.

“What’s this?” I said, taking the envelope.