Diana Pho - Steampunk World

The Bosporus sea reminds him of the shore where he was born, and he thinks of his mother wasting away.

He is distracted from the dream by the tourists’ gasps—not of the usual astonishment—but of distaste and disappointment. The sea’s flawless view is obstructed by a consumptive Magdalene, who leans over a bed of sand and seaweed and spews sputum from behind her long stringy hair.

“Why, that woman is dying!” a matron proclaims, and Nikos holds onto the image to make it clearer. The tourists see the shore disappear behind barren stone walls and several newly-orphaned children tugging at their lost mother’s soiled skirts.

Several of the female tourists wail at the pathos, upsetting their men.

“Von Froeschner!” a male tourist bellows. “This is grotesque. What is the meaning of this?”

Von Froeschner feigns ignorance and asks the audience to bear with what must be a glitch.

To their relief, they are lead out of the woeful house and into an image of a white stone church on the shore, the azul water lapping the pale yellow sand.

“Now that’s more like it,” says the bellowing Brit. Just then, the image becomes crowded with Turkish soldiers slicing kilijs into Cretan women and children; the church is engulfed in flames. The chiaroscuro haze is so realistic that the tourists panic, and some seek the doors. In response, the image leaves the Cretan massacre and enters the door of the church. The entire room darkens for a moment, and the complaining tourists quiet.

Slowly, a stonewall laboratory fades into their vision. Once the image is fully developed, they see von Froeschner standing in-between two operating tables. On his right they can make out the Şehrazat, her head unbolted, brain exposed and blue-sparking. It takes several moments for the exposure to reveal the other slab, but eventually the tourists make out the chiaroscuro depth of an open and empty human skull.

The tourists become frantic. The atramentous curtains are ripped from the rods, making the horrid image fade.

Those who haven’t fainted or sought escape stare at von Froeschner and the orb-shining Şehrazat. The joke made fifteen minutes ago now hangs in the air like a noose.

Ignoring the tourists, who are demanding to be let out of the locked room, von Froeschner grins and saunters over to shut the Şehrazat down. She returns to her default position, her arm gesturing at the triumphant scientist musing over the mob scene unfolding before him.

The Constantinople street is drenched in pure sunlight, saturating almost all color from the scene. The tall, alabaster stone building that zigzags and narrows the passage casts a Payne’s grey shadow onto the ocher cobblestones. Despite its disparity in hue, the street is made interesting by the people who populate it. Several dozen panting and pale Western tourists, sweating in their grey and pastel wools and cottons, faint and gesture wildly at shrouded women who ignore them, dazed by the seen and unseen of their dreams, bewildered by the scenes of Bora Fahir Çalğar and the truths of Nikos Antonakis.

September, 1914

With one day left until the Sapa Inca’s meeting with emissaries from the Unified States of Ameriga, Ilyapa had no idea how to salvage the situation. The Emperor was still broken, and to the minds of anyone whose opinions mattered, it was her fault.

The Sapa Inca Ninan Cuyochi, Son of Sun, Emperor of Viracocha’s Land, rested in a musty bundle in the corner of Ilyapa’s temporary workshop, his four-hundred-year-old mummified body wrapped in a gold-embroidered cloak trimmed with hummingbird feathers and turquoise, and his glorious face hidden from the gazes of ordinary people by a translucent cloth.

“How will you demonstrate your superiority to the Amerigans now that you are broken, Powerful Lord? Was it worth the trouble to acquire one thousand wives?” Ilyapa asked him, staring at the metal mechanisms that usually made the Sapa Inca function. Even she, the First Deviser of his court, was now a wife of the Emperor, despite not being noble by birth. Newly and unwillingly wed as an old woman, aged forty-three. She might now have the right to see his face, but she felt no urge to do so.

For the dozenth time that morning, she lifted her gaze from the stone work surface to look out at the distracting view: the modern city of Cuyochitampu, with its driven professionals scurrying along the river-side streets in this wealthy section near the ocean, more colorfully dressed than the workers one might see on the other side of the city, closer to the overpowering Wall of Inti which separated Viracocha’s Land from the strange little country called Panama. Cuyochitampu’s hard edges were so different from the rustic, weathered stone of Ilyapa’s normal surroundings in the University District of ancient Machu Picchu. She wondered if she would be allowed to return to her own small house, or be forced to move into some sort of wives' dormitory in one of the palaces. The oligarchy would at least permit her to continue running the royal workshops; they had promised.

All promises would be forgotten if she failed to restore the Sapa Inca. She couldn’t see why the upgrade had ruined his answering system, his Voice. The old system had worked for centuries: on the rare occasions when the Sapa Inca was consulted in public, for the good of all, the designated supplicant would ask him a question. His machinery would randomly knot a cord into the numerical code for one of a series of programmed answers: yes, not at this time, I will consider it further, I forbid it, I appreciate your good citizenship, you will become an honored sacrifice to the gods , and so on, expressing the will of the gods through the Emperor. The wide range of these answers was not permittable for the mass wedding. Answers other than “yes" would have contradicted the Powerful Lord’s previously-stated wish to have one thousand wives. It would have wasted a great deal of time, and would likely have aroused the suspicions of anyone who heard the same phrases repeated nonsensically. So, following the oligarchy’s instructions, Ilyapa had finally upgraded the Sapa Inca’s system to the new answering method of punching patterns into thin metal plates instead of tying knots into cords, which she had wanted to do long before. With the new system, certain preset response patterns—such as “always yes"—could be set with a dial on the mechanism. The conservatives in the secret ruling group wouldn’t hear of the upgrade until it was too late to test the system properly, at which point they demanded it.

At least the upgrade held out until after all the brides were accepted, but that was her only consolation. Ilyapa had to fix the malfunctioning device immediately, or become known as the person responsible for destroying an entire continent’s leadership. The Amerigan contingent, waiting on the other side of the Wall of Inti in nearby Panamatampu, would see their advantage and glide over the Wall with their strange, rounded flying devices, not afraid of either the gods or the technology of Viracocha’s Land.

She turned from the window to glare at the disassembled gears and parts another time, and one of them glinted strangely at its edge, highlighted by the afternoon light’s angle. Picking it up, Ilyapa examined a subtle crimp in the metal, just enough to intermittently throw the device’s works out of alignment if it were jarred at all. “How could this happen, Sapa Inca?” she wondered aloud. “Your new gears were molded perfectly—I checked them. I checked all of them before I put them together. And they were only used a few times….”