The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (62 page)

“Only in this room and we are leaving it.”

“Leaving? And taking the key with you?”

“Just so. Do not worry. The boy will come to wind you eventually. And now, Live Mouse, if you would be so kind.”

“My other wing! You may have my other wing, only let the live mouse use the key to wind me.”

Chickadee paused, waiting for her gears to click forward so that she could look at the Sparrow. Her spring was so loose now that each action took an eternity. “What would I do with one of your wings? I have two of my own.”

The other clockwork bird seemed baffled and hung on the end of the line flapping his wings as if he could fling them off.

The live mouse scraped a claw across the edge of the key. “It might come in real handy on our trip. Supposing Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski want a higher payment than you’re thinking they do. Why then you’d have something more to offer them.”

“And if they didn’t then we would have carried the wing with us for no reason.”

“Now as to that,” said the live mouse, “I can promise you that I’ll take it off your hands if’n we don’t need it.”

Chickadee laughed. “Oh, Live Mouse, I see now. Very well, I will accept Sparrow’s wing so that later you may have a full set. Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski will be happy to have two customers, I am certain.”

The live mouse bowed to her and wrapped the key in his tail again. “Sparrow, I’ll be right up.” Scampering across the floor, he disappeared into the wall.

Chickadee did not watch him go, she waited with her gaze still cocked upward toward Sparrow. With the live mouse gone, Chickadee became aware of how still the other clockworks were, watching their drama. Into the silence, Nightingale began to cautiously sing. Her beautiful warbles and chirps repeated through their song thrice before the live mouse appeared out of the ceiling on the chandelier’s chain. The crystals of the chandelier tinkled in a wild accompaniment to the ordered song of the nightingale.

The live mouse shimmied down the layers of crystals until he reached Sparrow’s flying mechanism. Crawling over that, he wrapped his paws around the string beneath it and slid down to sit on Sparrow’s back.

“First one’s for me.” His sharp incisors flashed in the chandelier’s light as he pried the tin loops up from the left wing. Tumbling free, it half fell, half floated to rattle against the floor below. “And now this is for the chickadee.”

Again, his incisors pulled the tin free and let the second wing drop.

Sparrow’s clockwork whirred audibly inside his body, with nothing to power. “I feel so light!”

“Told ya so.” The live mouse reached up and took the string in his paws. Hauling himself back up the line, he reached the flying mechanism in no time at all. “Ready now?”

“Yes! Oh yes, wind me! Wind me!”

Lickety-split, the key sank into the winding mechanism and the live mouse began turning it. The sweet familiar sound of a spring ratcheting tighter floated down from above, filling the room. The other clockwork animals crept closer; even Chickadee felt the longing brought on by the sound of winding.

When the live mouse stopped, Sparrow said, “No, no, I am not wound nearly tight enough yet.”

The live mouse braced himself with his tail around an arm of the chandelier and grunted as he turned the key again. And again. And again. “Enough?”

“Tighter.”

He kept winding.

“Enough?”

“Tighter. The boy never winds me fully.”

“All right.” The mouse turned the key three more times and stopped. “That’s it. Key won’t turn no more.”

A strange vibration ran through the sparrow’s body. It took Chickadee a moment to realize that he was trying to beat his wings with anticipation. “Then watch me fly.”

The live mouse pulled the key out of the flying mechanism and hopped up onto the chandelier. As he did, Sparrow swung into action. The flying mechanism whipped him forward and he shrieked with glee. His body was a blur against the ceiling. The chandelier trembled, then shook, then rattled as he spun faster than Chickadee had ever seen him spin before.

“Live Mouse, you were rig—” With a snap, his flying mechanism broke free of the chandelier. “I’m flying!” Sparrow cried as he hurtled across the room. His body crashed into the window, shattering a pane as he flew through it.

The nightingale stopped her song in shock. Outside, the boy shrieked and his familiar footsteps hurried under the window. “Oh pooh. The clockwork sparrow is broken.”

The mother’s voice said, “Leave it alone. There’s glass everywhere.”

Overhead, the live mouse looked down and winked.

Chickadee pecked the ground, with her mechanism wound properly. The live mouse appeared at her side. “Thanks for the wings.”

“I trust they are satisfactory payment?”

“Sure enough. They look real pretty hanging on my wall.” He squinted at her. “So that’s it? You’re just going to keep on pecking the ground?”

“As long as you keep winding me.”

“Yeah. It’s funny, no one else wants my services.”

“A pity.”

“Got a question for you though. Will you tell me how to get to Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski?”

“Why ever for?”

“Well, I thought … I thought maybe Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski really could, I dunno, fix ’em on me so as I can fly.”

Chickadee rapped the ground with laughter. “No, Mouse, they cannot. We are all bound to our integral mechanisms.” She cocked her head at him. “You are a live mouse. I am a clockwork chickadee, and Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski are nothing more than names on a scrap of paper glued to the bottom of a table.”

Cinderella Suicide had the Whoremaster backed against the greasy-smooth wall of the Tarot, blade beneath his chins. She had that grinning-skull look that meant she didn’t give a damn anymore.

We’d gone Tarot-side celebrating the fair end of a dinkum job: supplies run through the Eureka Stockade. Diggers dug in for years, and likely wouldn’t move, not since they’d found a nice vein of gold ore and settled like ticks. This time we’d been running meds to the troopers. Last time it was swizzlesticks to the diggers.

I scoped 360. Tintype leaned on the wall behind, apart from everyone else like always. He was hefting his swizzlestick, so I edged out of jabbing range. He was a better judge of her moods, anyway.

Swiveling back, I noticed blur at 170 left. Better take it to the tech gnomes stat; outfitting me wasn’t cheap, even with a triune money-pool.

Suicide let the Whoremaster and all his bulk slide down the wall, alive for now, so I quit reckoning the odds on who would succeed him and watched her back. Here a slithy one could punch out a lung, and the state she was in she’d never notice ’til later. Behind me Tintype sheathed the swizzlestick and unleaned. Sometimes Suicide killed, sometimes she didn’t. I never asked why.

A little space between push and pull you could drop coin into. In the wide gap between moment and moment the Whoremaster was spared, but anyone unfocused could lose his life ’twixt breath in and breath out.

So I jangled my purse and smiled big. “A round on me, and one on the Whoremaster after!” I said. I nodded at the fat, sweating man and narrowed one eye. He frowned but nodded back, for no fool he after twenty years at the Tarot, and Suicide let him go and slapped him on the beefy shoulder. He didn’t protest – and wisely, for she hadn’t lost her death’s-head rictus, though the blade sheathed back into her hand and she stepped away.

So I smiled more and tossed the purse on the bar and the whores and troopers cheered and drank and toasted me, six feet of blue-eyed blond, and “Superstar!” they cried with hoarse voices.

That’s us. Cinderella Superstar, Cinderella Suicide, Cinderella Tintype. Fourth-stage triune shipped together, forged together through circumstance. Our real names don’t matter because that’s part of the deal. They link you duet and triune because the survival rate’s higher that way. After manumission, the bonds tend to stick. With duets there’s more to share, but with three, two can sleep at a time.

Superstar, Suicide, Tintype: pensioners with tickets-of-leave, four years past the end of our term. Free to earn our keep and free to starve, long as we never tried to leave New Holland’s shores.

It was my shout for wide-eyes that night, but when dawn cracked gray, Tintype strolled out of the burrow, trim as you please, a pulp under his arm. He nodded to me, squatted down, and unrolled it.

“
All the Year Round
?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Traded it.
Master Humphrey’s Clock
.” I nodded.

I never saw Tintype topsy; not in the freight womb of the Greatship; not on the wharves of Botany. Dressed in black, close-buttoned always. When the Bulls herded us down the planks off the ship to the Dockmaster, we two jostled shoulder to shoulder.

Dockmaster looked up, hot day, rainy days, every day in Botany in his eyes, every day a world unto itself, and smiled a little.

“Pretty boy,” he said to me. “We’ll see you in the Tarot by and by, see if we don’t.”

I didn’t know what he meant, so shut up tight. And he was wrong; I never made a living whoring, not after I came to Botany. Before, I will not say.

He glanced at the gray, trim toff beside me, who’d be tallish were I not taller. “Duet, then,” he said, and scratched at his ledger. The Bull to my left hefted his chip-gun, and duet we would have been forever and a day if not for the shrill ricochet of a girl screaming.

She’d broken from the herd and now she dangled over the edge of the plank at the end of a Bull’s arm, kicking like live bait. I knew what was in the dirty water. She wouldn’t last a handcount.

The Bull looked at the Dockmaster with that girl-scrap clawing at his arm, and I knew he’d drop her if the Dockmaster gave the nod. Instead he beckoned sharp and the Bull twisted her back to earth, shoved her between us with a cruel grip. She bared her teeth at the Dockmaster and he smiled.

“Triune, then,” said he. “Superstar and the Clerk here will keep you in line.” He glanced at the ledger.

“Brand them Cinderella,” he said, and hop skip jump, the three of us were chipped and pointed most politely, sir, to the pens. They chipped us alphabet-wise, by themes. Next was Triune Dulcinea and Duet Evelina. I kept Superstar, the toff shook off Clerk and became Tintype, and from that moment the girl was Suicide. We survived, side by side in the Jelly Orchards, back to back in the mines. Until boom, manumission, forty pounds allowance apiece, and license to upgrade. But never a ticket Home.

Tintype and I watched the dawn spread.

“Did she dream?” I asked, being that I was on wide-eyes since we made burrow-side from the Tarot, and that Suicide had never stopped grinning all the way home.

Tintype nodded, still scoping his pulp. It was never good when Suicide dreamed. “He grabbed at her hair,” he said, suddenly. I looked at him and then let my sights swivel back to the horizon. It wasn’t like Tintype to offer information unsought.

“Why?” Not like she was one of the Whoremaster’s herd.

“He was slapping a whore around. New meat: bought her off the Docks last week. Suicide … objected.”

“Ah.”

She couldn’t stand being touched anywhere on the head. Dockside on her entryday a Bull tried to restrain her by holding the back of her neck. I saw the bite marks she gave him, deep.

Not even headmods: cochlear, scoping, reinforcing – none of that. Just blades, nervewired underskin. Thin, so the variable-magnetization wouldn’t rip them out. Blades all over her body.

Once when she was coming off of shut-eye and it was my turn to sleep I watched her. She was stark and face down because she’d just got her last mods and was healing: thin red welts across her shoulder blades, protruding like wingstubs. Her body was white and bony-thin, with knots of muscle, and I could see the blade-implants moving beneath the surface as she breathed.

I couldn’t sleep that night.

Tintype got a cochlear and both of us have anteflap ear-buttons so we can talk short-distance, but Suicide wouldn’t even get that. None of us elect mod layering; it’s expensive, and a bad idea to have excess metal with the vee-em. Not that some don’t try, and very gala they look, all loops and sparkles and pretty blinkies. Not that some don’t try to fly, either, and some go far before the vee-em surges through and crashes them all atwitter.

Tintype looked up and shifted as Suicide emerged. I blinked. Last night her hair was shaggy-down, but now naught but a fine fuzz. You could see the shape of her skull beneath, no bumps from headmods. Unusual in a pensioner.

She didn’t say anything about it, just scratched her velvet nap and yawned. “Time for your nap, ’Star,” she said. “I’ll wide-eyes a while.”

“It’s my turn,” said Tintype.

She shrugged. “I kept you up.”

“No,” said Tintype. “I’ll reckon while you watch, and when Superstar’s up we’ll go to Botany for a scope adjust.”

Tintype kept all our accounts. I don’t think we even debated that; it was just done-as-done when we got ticketed. He made sure we got every pound of our due, doled us out our fun money and made sure the rest worked for us. I’ve seen teams, duets and triunes both, go from ruination to ruination because they didn’t have a dinkum reckoning-man. He wouldn’t let the tech gnomes in Botany slide with dingbats in my scope.

I napped unsteady, for Tintype was humming whilst he reckoned, and it sometimes hit the button at my ear just so.

List, then. 1788, New Holland becomes New South Wales, and dear England starts to send her slithies there, her dribs and drabs and pick-pocks and whores and cutthroats, to drain the cesspool Britannia’s become. And then we pin the gravitational constant, and solve Pringle’s Mysterious Logarithm, and then just when we’re ready for it there’s an explosion of a different sort (I’m a proud product of my state school, whoreboy though I became). From the skies over Van Diemen’s Land streaks a merry flaming angel arcing down to earth and boom! Kills most of the slithies, and their Bulls, and the Murri and the Nunga in their Dreamtime too, far as any know. Sky goes red from Yangtze to Orkney. A few Nunga are left, fishing the Outer Isles. And more slithies come soon, for England’s still all-of-cess, and we’d just as soon have them die.