The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (29 page)

Rudy had sold insurance once, collecting weekly nickels and dimes from the hopeful and the despairing alike. Until the day he was handed a pamphlet. He took it home, he read it, and he realized what a sham his life was, what a shill he had been for the corporate powers, what a fraud he had been perpetrating upon his own people, the very people that he should be helping to escape from the treadmill of their lives.

He finished his coffee and hit the street. Crowds were already building near the CityPlace – that vast open square at the heart of the city, carved out of the old shops, tenements, and speakeasies that had once thrived there – where the aerobattle would take place. He picked out a corner near some ramshackle warehouses on the plaza’s grimy southern rim. That’s where his people would be, his tillage, as he thought of them.

“Tillage” was a word his grandfather used back when Rudy was young. The old man used to speak lovingly of the tillage, the land he had farmed in his youth. The tillage, he said, responded to him as a woman would, bringing forth fruit as a direct result of his care and attention. Not that he, Rudy, had great amounts of time to spend on a woman – but that hadn’t seemed to matter on the streets, where women were freely available, and briefly enjoyable. Sexual intercourse was overrated, in his opinion. Politics was another matter, and he made his friends among men and women who felt the same. They kept their distance from one another, so the Naked Brains couldn’t pick them all off in a single raid. When they coupled, they did so quickly, and they didn’t exchange names.

Moving deftly through the gathering crowd, he held out only one pamphlet at a time, and then only after catching a receptive eye. A willing offering to a willing receptor, that wasn’t illegal. It wasn’t pamphleteering, which was a harvestable offense. Last thing he wanted, to be harvested and, if the rumors were, as he suspected, true, have his grey matter pureed and fed to the Naked Brains.

But to build his cadre, to make his mark, he needed to hand out a thousand pamphlets a day, and crowds like this – in the CityPlace or on the slidewalks at rush hour – were the only way to do it.

“Take this, brother. Thank you.” He said it over and over. “Salaam, brother, may I offer you this?”

He had to keep moving, couldn’t linger anywhere, kept his eye out for the telltale stare of an Eye of the Brains. When he had first started this business, he had sought out only men who looked like himself. But that approach proved too slow. He’d since learned to size up a crowd with a single glance and mentally mark the receptive. That tall, black-skinned man with the blue kerchief, the skinny little freckled guy in the ragged work clothes, the grubby fellow with the wisp of a beard and red suspenders. All men, and mostly young. He let his female compatriots deal with the women. Didn’t want any misunderstandings.

The guy with the kerchief first. Eye contact, querying glance, non-sexual affect, tentative offer of pamphlet. He takes it! Eye contact, brief nod, on to the little guy. Guy looks away. Abort. Don’t offer pamphlet. On to the third guy—

“What’s this, then?” Flatfoot! An Eye? Surely not a Fist? Best to hoof it.

Rudy feinted to one side of the copper and ran past him on the other, swivel-hipping through the crowd like Jim Thorpe in search of a touchdown. He didn’t look back, but if the cop was an Eye, he’d have backup pronto. Around the big guy with the orange wig, past the scared-looking lady with the clutch of kids – yikes! – almost overturned the baby carriage. What’s that on the ground? No time to think about it! Up and over, down the alleyway, and into the door that’s cracked open a slot. Close it, latch it, jam the lock. SOP.

Rudy turned away from the fire door. It was almost lightless in here. He was in an old, run-down kinescope parlor, surrounded by benches full of kinescope devotees, their eyes glued to the tiny screens wired to the backs of the pews in front of them. On each screen the same blurry movie twitched:
Modern Times
, with the Marx Brothers.

He took a seat and put a nickel in the slot.

He was just a regular Joe at the movies now. An anonymous unit of the masses, no different from anybody else. Except that he didn’t have his girlfriend with him. Or a girlfriend at all. Or any real interest in having a girlfriend. Or in anything so historically blinkered as going to the kinescope parlor.

Rudy had heard about this particular kinescope in a Know the Foe session. It was supposed to be funny, but its humor originated in a profound class bias. The scene that was playing was one in which Harpo, Chico and Zeppo were working on an assembly line while their supervisor (Groucho) flirted with the visiting efficiency inspector (Margaret Dumont). Zeppo and Chico worked methodically with wrenches, tightening bolts on the bombs that glided remorselessly into view on the conveyor belt. Harpo, equipped with a little handheld pneumatic drill, worked regularly and efficiently at first, drilling a hole in a bomb fin which Zeppo promptly unbolted and Chico replaced with a new fin. That his work was meaningless appeared to bother him not at all. But then, without noticing it, Groucho leaned against a long lever, increasing the belt’s speed. As the pace increased, Harpo realized that the drill could be made to go faster and faster, just like the assembly line. He became fascinated by the drill and then obsessed with it, filling the bombs’ fins with so many holes that they looked like slices of Swiss cheese.

Chico and Zeppo, meanwhile, kept working faster and faster as the line sped up. For them, this was grim business. To keep from falling behind, they had to employ two wrenches, one per hand. Sweat poured off them. They shed their hats, then their jackets, then their shirts and pants, leaving them clad only in voluminous underwear. Harpo, on the other hand, was feeling no pressure at all. He began drilling holes in his hat, then his jacket, then his shirt and pants.

Groucho urged Dumont into his office, then doffed his hat, clasped it to his chest and tossed it aside. He chased her around the desk. Dumont projected both affronted dignity and matronly sexual curiosity. A parody of authority, Groucho backed Dumont up against the wall and, unexpectedly, plucked a rose from a nearby vase and, bowing deeply, offered it to her.

Charmed, Dumont smiled and bent down to accept it.

But then, in a single complex and weirdly graceful action, Groucho spun Dumont around, bending her over backwards in his arms, parallel to the floor. Margaret Dumont’s eyes darted wildly about as she realized how perilously close she was to falling. Meanwhile, Harpo had started to drill holes from the other side of the wall, the drill bit coming through the plaster, each time missing Groucho by a whisker. His desperate gyrations as he tried to avoid the incoming drill were misunderstood by the efficiency expert, who made to slap him. Each time she tried, however, she almost fell and was forced to clutch him tighter to herself. Groucho waggled his eyebrows, obviously pleased with his romantic prowess.

Just then, however, Harpo drilled Dumont in the butt. She lurched forward, mouth an outraged O, losing balance and dignity simultaneously, and overtoppling Groucho as well. The two of them fell to the floor, struggling. It was at that instant that Chico and Zeppo, still in their underwear and with Harpo in tow, appeared in the doorway to report the problem and saw the couple on the floor thrashing about and yelling soundlessly at one another. Without hesitation, all three leaped joyously into the air on top of the pile. Behind them, the runaway assembly line was flooding the factory with bombs, which now crested into the office in a great wave. The screen went white and a single card read: BANG!

The audience was laughing uproariously. But Rudy was not amused. None of these characters had a shred of common sense. Furthermore, it was clear that appropriate measures to protect the workers’ health and safety had not been implemented. Harpo should never have been given that drill in the first place. And Margaret Dumont! What was she thinking? How could she have accepted such a demeaning role?

Rudy stood up on his chair. “Comrades!” he yelled. “Why you are laughing?”

A few viewers looked up briefly, then shrugged and returned to their kinescopes. “We’re laughin’ because it’s funny, you halfwit,” muttered a surly-looking young man.

“You there, brother,” Rudy addressed him directly. After all, he, of everyone there, was Rudy’s constituency. “Do you think it’s funny that the Brains work people beyond endurance? That they speed up assembly lines without regard for the workers’ natural pace, and without increasing their compensation? Do you think it’s funny that a human man and woman would take the side of the Brains against their own kind? Think about this: what if Charles Chaplin – a man who respects the workers’ dignity – had made this kinescope? There would be nothing funny about it: you’d weep for the poor fellows on the Brains’ assembly line. As you should weep for Chico and Zeppo, whose dream of a life of honest labor and just reward has been cruelly exploited.”

“Aw, shut yer yap!” It wasn’t the young man that Rudy had addressed. This was the voice of an older man, embittered by many years of disappointment and penury.

“I apologize, sir,” said Rudy. “You have every right to be angry. You have earned your leisure and have paid dearly for the right to sit here in the darkness and be assaulted by the self-serving garbage of the entertainment industry. Please return to your kinescope. But, I beg of you, do not swallow the tissue of lies that it offers you. Argue with it. Fight back! Resist!”

A huge hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed Rudy’s right shoulder.

“Awright there, buddy,” said a firm but quiet voice. “And why don’t yez come along wit’ me, and we can continue this discussion down at the station house?”

Rudy twisted about in the flatfoot’s grasp. A sudden head-butt to the solar plexus, a kick to take the man’s feet out from under him, and Rudy was running fast, not once looking back to see if he was being pursued. Halfway to the exit, he spotted a narrow circular staircase that burrowed down into the bowels of the earth below the kinescope parlor. He plunged into the darkness, down into the steam tunnels that ran beneath all the buildings of the Old Town.

That was Phase Three of his plan: run like hell.

Amelia had less than five minutes to the start of the Game. She sprinted to the flight deck and her autogyro. Grimy Huey was waiting, and he didn’t look happy. “Why didn’t you tell me you were having work done on the machine? You don’t trust me no more?”

“Huey, I’m up. We can talk about it later.” She swung into the cockpit. The engine was already running. Even when he was ticked off, Huey knew his stuff. “Just throw me out there. The whistle’s about to blow.”

Grimy Huey waved and Amelia grabbed the controls. Everything in place. She nodded, and the launch platform thrust the autogyro out of the Zep, into takeoff position.

The steam-whistle blew. The Game was in motion.

Amelia kicked, pushed, pedaled and screamed her improbable craft into the air.

For a time, all was well. As was traditional, the flying aces appeared in goose-vee formation from opposite sides of the plaza, ignoring each other on the first pass, save for a slight wing-waggle of salute, and then curving up into the sky above. Then began the series of thrilling moves that would lead to the heart-stopping aerial ballet of sporting dogfight.

On the first fighting pass, the advantage was to the Reds. But then Blockhead O’Brien threw his autogyro into a mad sideways skid that had half their ‘planes pulling up in disarray to avoid being shredded by his blades. Amelia and Hops Wynzowski hurled themselves into the opening and ran five stars, neat as a pin, before the opposition could recover.

Amelia pulled up laughing, only to discover that the Big E was directly behind her and coming up her tail fast. She crouched down over her stick, raising her hips up from the seat, taut as a wire being tested to destruction, neurons snapping and crackling like a Tesla generator. “You catch me,” she murmured happily, “and I swear to God I’ll never fly again for as long as I live.”

Because if there was one thing she knew, it was that Eszterhazy
wasn’t
going to catch her. She was in her element now. In that timeless instant that lasted forever, that was all instinct and reflex, lust and glory. She was vengeance and righteous fury. She was death in all its cold and naked beauty.

Then a rocket flew up out of nowhere and exploded in her face.

Rudy pounded through the steam tunnels as if every finger in the Fist of the Brains was on his tail. Which they weren’t – yet. He’d given Fearless Fosdick the slip, he was sure.

It was only a matter of time, though. Back at Fat Edna’s, he knew, they had a pool going as to the date. But when the Fist came for him, he wasn’t going to go meekly, with his hands in the air. Not Rudy. That was why he was running now, even though he’d given the flatfoot the slip. He was practicing for the day when it all came down and his speed negotiating the twists and turns of the tunnels would spell the difference between escape and capture, survival and death.

The light from Rudy’s electric torch flashed from a rectangle of reflective tape he’d stuck to one wall at chest level. Straight ahead, that meant. Turn coming up soon. And, sure enough, up ahead were two bits of tape together, like an equal sign, on the right-hand wall. Which, counterintuitively, signaled a left turn.

He ran, twisting and turning as the flashing blips of tapes dictated. A left … two rights … a long downward decline that he didn’t remember but which had to be correct because up ahead glinted another tab of reflective tape and beyond it another two, indicating a left turn. Into the new tunnel he plunged, and then, almost falling, down a rattling set of metal steps that definitely wasn’t right. At the bottom the tunnel opened up into an enormous cavernous blackness. He stumbled to a halt.

A cold wind blew down on him from above.

Rudy shivered. This was wrong. He’d never been here before. And yet, straight ahead of him glowed yet another tab of the tape. He lifted his electric torch from the ground in front of his feet to examine it.