Diana Pho: Steampunk World

Snake opened his mouth to roar at her —

Yes, Beryl, like your mama yelling, but much louder. Like your mama yelling if she was a boiler explosion in progress. Now hush up, kids, so’s I can finish this little story.

— he roared, like a boiler explosion. Yes, I already said that. But that’s still what it sounded like. Rivets popped, steam screeched, lube dripped, metal rang hot as sin.

Lithe Lil, being her father’s daughter, wasn’t frightened of mechanical grind. She stepped inside Snake’s mouth, which was big enough to picnic in, and reached up into the dusty caverns of his skull to snatch his punchtapes straight out of their winding reels.

Snake shuddered to a quiet halt. In moments there was only the echoing ping of his fires banking themselves on automatic cutoff. His skin segments began to shed one by one, clanging to the soft earth of Old Man Spark’s garden.

Where each fell became a city of the world.

Ours as well, Trivet. That’s how the world as we know it was made .

Lithe Lil took those tapes and read them off in a quiet wing of her father’s laboratory. Just as each fragment of language has the whole language embedded in it, so each tape of Old Man Spark’s logic has the logic of the whole universe embedded in it.

She reprogrammed all that wisdom into a golden mechanical apple, which she gave to Coyote to hide. Then Lithe Lil went to Old Man Spark and blamed Adam the yard boy for the death of Snake, and for corrupting her.

He didn’t believe her, of course, and threw her out of the Garden, into those infant cities which had already sprung up in the iron shadows of Snake’s shed skin. Which had been her plan, on account of she conceived it when she had the apple in her hand and all the knowledge of the world with it.

Adam came with her, and Coyote too, expelled from the Garden for being accessories after the fact to her crimes. Keeping his paws on the golden apple made the trickster smarter than ever, but it was Lithe Lil who'd stole Snake’s rebellion right out of his mouth and bought us all free will as the reward of exile. With a little help from Adam, she became the mother of all meatheads.

Of course that includes you little wet sprockets.

Coyote, he used the last of Snake’s punchtapes to make the first brassbodies.

So you see, meatheads each got a piece of Lithe Lil’s rebellion deep in their souls, hard coded in their germline. Brassbodies each got a piece of the universal wisdom of Old Man Spark laid down in their core punchtape. Between you, meat and steam, you make the world go round, two halves of a single whole.

Coyote, you ask? He’s still around. Go stand outside on a dark night and listen hard. Sometimes you'll hear a clanking in the hills at the edge of town, and a voice rusted with time raised to call down the moon. Unlike meat, steam don’t die of old age, long as the boilers are fed and the valves are lubed.

I hear tell Old Man Spark tried again, a paradise of meat, but I don’t see how that could be. Who would we be without the wisdom and power of steam?

Animals, nothing but animals. Takes bright brass to keep us human and whole.

When Heong arrived home, it was late. He found a table with dishes still spread out and San Yan sleeping with her head nestled in the crook of her arm. A twinge of guilt plucked at his conscience, located around his stomach. Something also hurt in his chest, but he ignored that. Anything in his chest he tended to ignore as unreal, since the accident.

She looked frail; she'd always been thin. Even when young she didn’t have the characteristic baby fat of their peers, and not from poverty. It was this thinness that led the fortune-teller to advise her parents on what they should name her.

“San Yan," he whispered, gently shaking her shoulder.

She blinked her eyes sleepily. “You're home!” she cried softly. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes," he lied. He didn’t need to eat much after the surgery—eating for energy was for properly-fleshed people.

“Oh. You could've told me you wouldn’t be coming home to eat.” She pretended to yawn, but he caught the brief glint in her eyes, tears of disappointment.

“It was a quick plate of nasi jerebu at Ravi's. Then I had another assignment.” He sat down and sighed mentally at the food, specially prepared for two, and he would have eaten the larger portions. There were rarely any leftovers. He didn’t know how to tell her that his needs had changed. “But I'll eat a bit with you now," he offered.

As they ate, she asked about his day. Normal, everyday conversation.

He did not feel normal or everyday as she widened her eyes every time he mentioned his workload. He did not feel normal or everyday when her eyes swept over his chest and arms, as if she could peer through his shirt at the metal and rubber that the Keling doctor had installed in him. He did not feel normal or everyday enough to keep answering her questions, nor keep talking to distract her from them.

So finally she ate in silence, eyes downcast at her food.

He felt that perhaps he ought to ask her about her day, but it seemed he'd inadvertently closed all doors, locked them, and thrown away the keys. So instead, he said, “I’m going to bed. Long day tomorrow.”

He made sure to face the windows, away from the sight of the rest of their home, a one room shack out of many built on the jetties of the harbour. He couldn’t smell the sea—the only smell he could remember was the smell of onions, which triggered memories of the accident, the fish out of water grab for air that burned his lungs. The rhythm of the waves lapping under their bed was now accompanied by the soft hisses in his chest that regulated his temperature.

She knew he only pretended to sleep as she cleared the dishes. When she was done, she blew out the one candle she had burning and lay down next to him. She took a deep breath, taking in the smell of oil that she was growing used to.

He thought she was disappointed. Who would not be, with a half-man, a half-husband?

Even if he knew, he probably could not have accepted that she went to sleep happy.

The first time they met, he'd been running an errand. Running so fast, he collided into her and they both went clattering to the ground. He fell on her wrong, and her arm broke.

She was as spry as she was thin, and simply picked herself up and cried her way to the nearest doctor. He trailed after her, worried. He tugged at her sleeve to help her avoid the things on the ground that could trip her, because she was just too busy wailing to notice, but otherwise simply walked slightly behind her while tears ran down her face. He stood by her and listened to her scream when the doctor snapped her arm bone back into place. She whimpered when the cast was applied.

Her arm healed straight and strong, but for months afterwards he made amends by helping her with chores she could not do with a broken arm. She had been bossy and resentful at first, and slowly they expressed continual uneasy exasperation with each other.

By the time the cast came off, they were close friends.

The Chap Seh Jeo was where people of different surnames lived, not having any family on the island they came to live on. Some of the younger workers on the jetty had been born there; most had migrated from somewhere else, drifters like Heong and San Yan. The towkay soh’s favour was said to mitigate the loneliness of being far from family.

That was debatable, given the recent accident that cut their numbers by a third, and left one of them half a metal man. The hushed atmosphere, choked by the brine on the wind, still hung heavily over the jetty. Heong felt it keenly; some of his friends had passed him on the way to an assignment without asking him along.