Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

'Cheese!' laughed Lord Rooksby. 'Obviously it is nothing but green gas rising from the finest cheese.'

There was more laughter from the audience.

The commodore shook his head in annoyance. Coppertracks was leading the audience in too fast – ploughing ahead at ramming speed. He should have been revealing his findings at a rate of knots the scientists' conservative bent could more readily absorb and adjust to. The crowd were not, for the main, steammen who could share new information between themselves with a joining of cables and the implicit trust that came from such networking. They were minds of slow meat that needed wheedling and convincing.

'Let us gaze next, my colleagues in science, towards our world's nearest neighbour in the dark, cold void: Kaliban.'

The red world came onto the screen, the light from the magic lantern catching the swirl of smoke from mumbleweed pipes as several of the assembly lit up. Coppertracks waved an iron hand at the screen. 'Long linked in song and saga to various gods of war, instead, in reality we find a dead, dry world of crimson dunes and – perhaps – something else.'

The commodore advanced to the next slide, a high-magnification view of the celestial body.

'The shooting stars lighting up our skies of late have not all been debris from the tail of Ashby's Comet. I have traced some of the rocky projectiles back to what I think must be volcanic eruptions on the surface of Kaliban. And see what else I discovered during my explorations. Observe the fine splintering of lines you can see across the celestial sphere's surface. I have analysed the geometry of these lines and come to the conclusion that they are artificial in nature.'

A hush fell over the crowd.

'Yes, artificial. I believe these lines are a series of canals, vaster and far more sophisticated than the waterways of our own Jackals. A universal transport system that may once have rivalled the timetables of the merchant marine of the Royal Aerostatical Navy in its ability to transport cargoes and people around their world.'

'Poppycock,' said Lord Rooksby. 'You see a splintering of rock fissures and detect the hand of intelligence behind it! I have never heard such arrant nonsense. It is well known that you share the roof of your home with an author of celestial fiction, one Molly Templar, whom I see has accompanied you here tonight. I believe you have spent too much time pondering her last tome of facile writings rather than upon serious scientific investigations.'

Molly made to leap up from their projecting lantern, but the commodore pulled her back.

'I'm going to go up there and shove my last tome of facile writings down his smug, grinning-'

'Leave him be, lass,' whispered the commodore. 'Or at least, let's be leaving the long-haired popinjay until later. A fight in here is what he wants, anything to embarrass our old steamer in front of his fellow scientists.'

She saw enough reason in the commodore's words to shrug off his hands and sit down.

'Nonsense is it?' retorted Coppertracks, pointing an iron hand at Lord Rooksby. 'Then by my cogs, how do you explain this?' Commodore Black advanced to the next slide, an amorphous grey mass whose peripheries were tinged with red.

'Sir, I do not even know what that unsightly mess you have so kindly brought before us is.'

'That is because you do not have access to the transaction engines of the Steammen Free State,' said Coppertracks. 'Some of the most advanced thinking engines of their kind in the world. When the geometries and shadow lines are resolved and cleaned using the power of our transaction engines, we see instead…'

The commodore shook his head. That was a terrible mistake, reminding the Jackelian audience that their civil service's great engine rooms beneath Greenhall had a rival high in the mountains of Mechancia – a rival with steam-driven thinking machines that made their own transaction engines look like wind-up toys sold over the counter at Gattie and Pierce.

'…this!'

The commodore advanced to the next slide, the image of a stone-carved face filling the screen, a scale written across it indicating that the face was three hundred miles across in width, four hundred from neck to skullcap.

Coppertracks continued over the hush of the crowd. 'This incredible carving is clearly humanoid – the features of the race of man, or something close to it. An artefact on a scale more massive than any we have attempted here on Earth.'

'Clearly, sir,' shouted Lord Rooksby, 'you have taken leave of your senses. Give me but a lump of coal from your boiler's furnace and I will whittle you a shape as pleasing to the eye with my penknife.' Another member of the audience lifted a piece of coke from the boiler bin of the steamman sitting next to him and tossed it towards Lord Rooksby. The aristocratic scientist seized it and raised it towards the ceiling. 'Behold, damsons and gentlemen of the Royal Society – I give you the miraculous face of the great Pharaoh of Kaliban. Give me but a hundred years of erosion, a real-box camera and the poorly written plot of a penny dreadful, and I shall carve for you an entirely new branch of science – and for my next trick I will find you the face of the Man on the moon and send an airship to converse with the ice angels of the coldtime.'

The crowd followed Lord Rooksby's lead and began to bray Coppertracks down in annoyance.

'You fools,' cried Coppertracks, pointing to the image on the screen. 'Can you not see the evidence before your eyes? There was once life on Kaliban, life capable of constructing canal works and carving vast effigies from their mountains.'

'Celestial fiction, sir,' hooted Lord Rooksby, sensing that now was the time to steer events towards the projects favoured by his own lickspittles. 'This is pure celestial fiction.'

'Life!' called Coppertracks, beseeching the massed ranks of the Royal Society. 'Life that might be able to converse with us, if we would but make the effort.'

A low wailing echoed about the assembly chamber now, Coppertracks struggling to be heard over the eerie heckling. 'My proposal is to build a colossal transmitter capable of receiving and generating vibrations across the void. We have already seen that the vicinity of our sun is blessed with an uncommonly large quantity of celestial bodies, many that would appear to be candidates for bearing life.'

The commodore dropped the next slide down in front of the assembly, but it was too late, the scientists had become a mob. A piece of coal was thrown towards the screen, an explosion of black soot impacting the image of Coppertracks' proposed large-scale transmitter schematics.

'Give him the shoulder,' someone hissed.

'Ah, no,' wheezed the commodore behind his magic lantern. 'Not the high shoulder. Not poor Coppertracks.' He glanced around the room, trying to see who would do it first.

Would they?

It was too late. The mob of scientists had eagerly taken up the cry and at the other end of the hall the first boffin was already being boosted onto the shoulders of a colleague. Across the seats, the smaller, lighter members of the Royal Society were mounting the shoulders of their fellows, pointing and shaking their fists angrily at the steamman presenter. The energy under Coppertracks' skull fizzed in disappointment and shame. In all the years of his long scientific career in Jackals he had never been given the high shoulder before. All scientists stood on the shoulders of giants when they undertook their solemn investigations, but now they were doing it to him, standing on the shoulders of those more worthy than the steamman, looking beyond his work. Coppertracks' proposal had not even been judged valuable enough to come under the gaze of his colleagues' scrutiny.

Commodore Black glanced furiously up towards the smirking Lord Rooksby, who was now pretending to pay attention to his two blonde dollymops rather than enjoying the moment of his adversary's discomfort.