Elizabeth Bear - Karen Memory

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Karen Memory: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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"You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like memory only spelt with an e, and I'm one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie on Amity Street. Hôtel has a little hat over the o like that. It's French, so Beatrice tells me."
Set in the late 19th century — when the city we now call Seattle Underground was the whole town (and still on the surface), when airships plied the trade routes, would-be gold miners were heading to the gold fields of Alaska, and steam-powered mechanicals stalked the waterfront, Karen is a young woman on her own, is making the best of her orphaned state by working in Madame Damnable's high-quality bordello. Through Karen's eyes we get to know the other girls in the house — a resourceful group — and the poor and the powerful of the town. Trouble erupts one night when a badly injured girl arrives at their door, begging sanctuary, followed by the man who holds her indenture, and who has a machine that can take over anyone's mind and control their actions. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the next night brings a body dumped in their rubbish heap — a streetwalker who has been brutally murdered.
Bear brings alive this Jack-the-Ripper yarn of the old west with a light touch in Karen's own memorable voice, and a mesmerizing evocation of classic steam-powered science.

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Priya could. “I think you’re a monster.”

The captain smiled. “I so rarely get to share these triumphs with anyone who will appreciate them. But it doesn’t matter what you see, does it, ladies? You’ll never get the chance to tell anyone.”

I drew myself up and found my voice. “You think President Hayes won’t go to war to keep Alaska?”

“Your government has no resources with which to fight another war, currently. We can’t drive the Americans out of Alaska. But we can make it too costly for you to stay. Who’s to argue with a cholera epidemic? And once the country is vacant…” He shrugged expressively. “It’s open to settlement, isn’t it?”

“That’s horrible.”

“Ah,” he said. “But my country is only using the tactics pioneered by yours. Have you not heard of the use of blankets tainted with smallpox against the native tribes of North America by the English settlers here?”

I didn’t do much more, quite frankly, than gape at him. Which seemed to make him think the argument was won. He cocked one of those saturnine eyebrows at me and winked while my stomach writched around inside me like I’d swallowed a pint of live worms.

“I thought you’d see it my way. Good evening, ladies.” He added something in Russian to the seamen, who took us by the elbows and drew us away. I tried to think of something to shout after him, but words deserted me, and by now you’ll know that that don’t happen too much.

I was staggering when they pushed us down the corridor. I’d like to blame it on exhaustion and injury, but I think it was the pure horror of what I’d just seen dragging at my feet. So many dead. With no chance to do nothing about it. Even if they could swim, anyone who jumped into the sea and avoided the wreck and the killer arms and the thrashing would freeze to death in minutes.

At least I’ll say this for Ivan and Boris. They wasn’t any meaner than they had to be. And after Bantle and Standish and Nemo, that seemed near enough to a kindness, just then.

Chapter Twenty-three

Well, what happened next is that Priya stabbed Ivan in the jugular with half of my hairpin. It weren’t real gold — it was plate over brass — and with the swing she put behind it, it went right in. Well, maybe it weren’t his jugular. Maybe it was that big artery there under the ear, the one you slit hog slaughtering. Whatever you call it. Either way, he grabbed at his neck and went over sideways.

I felt kind of bad about Ivan taking it that way, him just being a workingman and in no ways in charge of the plan. But that didn’t stop me from punching old Boris in the jewels when he turned around to see what was happening. Men look for the knee, you understand. So it’s better to swing with a fist when you really need to nut one.

Boris doubled over with a wheeze, and Priya kicked him on the temple straight legged. He went down on top of Ivan.

We left ’em there and ran.

Where we was running to was anybody’s guess, quite honestly, but I was thinking there had to be a hatch and it had to be up, and freezing and drowning in the ice-cold Sound was miserably preferential to being flogged to death, if you take my meaning, and hell if we popped that hatch underwater we might founder the whole evil octopus and sink it to the sea’s bottom. It could join its victims there for all I cared, and that Russian Nemo with his perfect manners could go down with it.

And then I had my greatest stroke of genius since that ham sandwich with pickles that time.

There was a fire ax behind glass in the corridor — or gangway, or whatever the hell you call it on a submersible. With a sign next to it that I’m pretty sure read: BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY in Cossack.

I took one look at that thing and put my elbow through the glass. It shattered really satisfactorily, and I don’t know if it was sugar glass or I was just that tired of everything’s fucking shit. I turned around to see Priya holding up a pipefitter’s wrench as long as your arm. There was a panel open on the bulkhead behind her and some other tools were racked inside it, but none looked as fit for mayhem as that wrench.

“Next time, spare your elbow,” she suggested.

Then I had an ax in my hand, Hallelujah, and somewhere not too far away a fire alarm started to shrill.

Submersibles must have some kind of strict regulations about fires on board, because the next thing I knew my ears were popping something fierce, and I felt like the floor — the deck, I guess — was shoving at my boot soles.

I looked at Priya and Priya looked at me. I said, “We’re surfacing!” and she punched the air. Then she looked dubious. “We need to find a hatch. An outside hatch.”

“Do you think this thing has a lifeboat?”

“I think we’re going to find out.” Grimly, Priya brandished the pipefitter’s wrench. “I’ll freeze and drown before I stay in here. Follow me!”

Men was boiling out into the corridors, but they wasn’t expecting a couple of crazy Maenads swinging Christ knows what at ’em, and we left a trail of shouts and broken wrists behind us. Amazing how nearly any man will back down if you brandish an ax in his face.

I didn’t feel none too bad about it, neither.

I was just fending one off behind us, and when I turned around Priya was gone. Panic stabbed me, but then her hand closed on my arm and pulled me into a side corridor. I was pretty proud of myself that I didn’t even swing the ax at her when she startled me.

She dogged the hatch behind us and then took her wrench and shoved it through the wheel that locked the door. “That should hold ’em for a bit. Come this way.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

She pointed at some writing on the wall. It looked like letters, sort of. But only some of them was the same as English letters. “Exit this way,” she said.

I kissed her. And then stepped back suddenly. “I mean—”

“Oh, good,” she said. “I wondered if you were just putting up with me.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Because that seems likely.”

She grinned, all full to bubbling over with the mania of adventure. “Come on!”

She led me up a ladder through a tube so narrow it made my breath come quick and shallow — and I wondered how the Ivans and Borises had even managed to squeeze their shoulders down it. Maybe they’d been lowered into the submersible young and fed up inside it, like when you grow a pear inside a bottle to make pear brandy on.

Then we was at the top. Priya spun the hatch and threw it open—

— and I realized just how fucking cold it was out there. Savage air poured down on my head as Priya climbed out, and I gritted my teeth and followed her.

We stood on a tiny deck, drenched in seaweed. Priya grabbed a pipe railing with one hand and crouched down to scoop a tiny, flopping fish back into the sea. When she stood again, she snatched her fingers back and blew on ’em. The wind whipped our hair and plastered what passed for our clothes to our shoulders. The submersible rolled in the valleys between waves. No lifeboats in sight. It was so cold I wanted to scream.

“What if they submerge?”

“With the hatch open?” She smiled bitterly. “At least we won’t go alone.”

I put an arm around her. She was the only warm thing in the world. “If they come up, we jump,” I said.

She nodded. We didn’t need to say it — that a clean, quick death by freezing was better than whatever Standish had in mind. And that as soon as we hit that water — well, there wasn’t any ice in it. But any child in Rapid could tell you how fast cold water could kill.

There was drifts of rain and curls of mist all over, and would you believe it that my damned hair was freezing up again? Maybe Merry Lee had the right idea in cropping it all off. Christ, I hoped she and Marshal Reeves had made it clean away.

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