Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology (42 page)

And it’s just about the last thing I remember for the next several weeks. The next thing I remember is comin’ to real slow, not really knowin’ if I was alive or dead, how much time had passed, or where I was.

If I was dead, I knew this wasn’t any heaven I ever heard about, because all I could see was pinkish-grey haze. My eyes had been burned bad. I couldn’t feel anything from my shoulders down. I could hear folks talkin’, like from very far away, too dim to make out.

“You were at the Good Doctor’s leper hospital! In Bombay!” Nick guessed. “That’s how you come to be flying for her!”

Yep. The Good Doctor. Doctor Lakshmi. I crashed and burned less than a mile from her compound. She came with Kocheril and Gunjita, and they carried me back, more dead than alive. She brought back the baby elephant, who was almost unhurt. It was a miracle. Two miracles.

She hid me among the leprosy patients when the Rhodesians came lookin’ for me. Convinced them that no one could have survived that hydrogen fire and crash. Which was nearly the truth. She got the baby elephant to the zoo, to a nursing mother with another baby. She lived, and in a year or two she’ll go back to the wild.

For weeks Kocheril, the orderly, and Gunjita, the nurse, cared for me around the clock. Doctor Lakshmi came every day, and eventually, when I was strong enough, she gave me the first of the ruby light treatments for my eyes.

She never promised anything—didn’t want to get my hopes up—but finally the day came when she could remove the bandages for good. I really didn’t expect anything at all, except that my eyes were probably burned far too bad for me to ever have hope of seein’ again.

I remember her slowly, gently unwindin’ the bandage. “Open your eyes slowly. Give them time to adjust to the light. You have been a long time in the dark.”

I waited a long time before I spoke. “Hmm!” I said. “You look exactly as I pictured you.”

The Good Doctor laughed. “Is that good or bad?”

“Very good! Either my eyes work perfectly and you are the most beautiful woman I ever saw, or I’m still asleep and dreamin’. Or hallucinatin’.”

“You flatter me, young man!” She patted me on the shoulder, which I couldn’t feel, but liked all the same.

I went on and on to her about how I could never repay her for my life, or for my sight. That’s when she said something that would change my life. Again.

She said, “I don't need or want repayment. No one here pays for their treatment. But there may be a way for you to help. First there are some people I want you to meet. Gunjita? Kocheril?”

My eyes must have been big as saucers when I seen those two. They had been strangers months before, but now they were dear friends. And I had never laid eyes on either of them until that very moment.

I wouldn’t have taken either of them for human at first glance. Not nearly as human-lookin’ as you, Nick. They both roll around on hard India rubber wheels. Totally silent. They’re both encased completely in stainless steel cabinets. Easy to sterilize, I guess.

Multiple sets of clockwork and hydraulic arms plainly designed for one thing: caring for hospital patients. Only from the eyes up did they look human. Black hair, both of them. Gunjita’s had flecks of gray. The kindest eyes I have ever seen on a human being. Except maybe the Good Doctor’s.

Kocheril got a good laugh out of it. “Sahib,” he said, “the look on your face is priceless.”

“Well you no good so-and-so!” I said when I could finally talk. “Makin’ me think all this time you had the strength of three men, liftin’ me around all by yourself like I was a baby!” He got another good laugh out of that.

“But I do!'” he says. “It takes several non-mech attendants to do what I do. And my body never gets tired. I need far less rest.”

“He is worth six human attendants,” says Gunjita.

“And she is worth six human nurses,” says Kocheril.

When I asked them how they got this way, they told me it was Doctor Malieux’s gift to them, that they were once like I was now, completely without the use of their bodies. Both of them torn up by leprosy, with nothing to do but lie in bed all day, waiting for pneumonia or some other infection to finally kill them.

She gave them back the ability to move, to be useful. More than anything, she gave them the ability to give back something of the loving care that others had showered on them.

All three of them was really concerned that I understand that this was entirely their choice. That they chose the life they had. Not like you and the other industrial mechs here in London, Nick. Gunjita and Kocheril are free to come and go as they choose. They are Doctor Lakshmi’s Friends. She calls them “fellow servants.”

“You mean I get the same chance?” I said. I was pretty excited. “I get to serve right alongside you in the hospital?”

Doctor Lakshmi smiled. “No, my friend,” she says. “My father and I have been discussing you at length ever since you first came here. You are a karmic gift. A great opportunity.”

“Your father?”

“My father is the Maharajah of Golkondah. He is the financial benefactor of the clinic and the colony. We have agreed that having you here—you, a trained airship pilot—gives us a new opportunity. We want to expand our work, to bring the most severe cases from all over India. To fly them here. We want you to lead that effort.”

“How would I do that?” I asked.

She said, “I am having a new, very special airship built, one that can be made to serve as your body. You will become a mechanical man. A very large, very special, flying mechanical man. A mega-mech.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I choked up a minute, but when I could finally talk, I said, “Doc! Good glory! If you had offered me this even when I had full use of my arms and legs I mighta took you up on it! To be a creature of the air?To fly?With my very own body? Doc! That’s every airman’s dream!”

“I thought you might feel that way,” she said. “But I want you to sleep on it, consider it carefully. It would be sad if later you felt you had been rushed into a decision.”

“I can tell you my answer won’t be no different tomorrow.”

“Very well. Tomorrow we will speak again.”

“Like I said, Doc, count me in.”

“Very well,” she says, with a big grin on her face.

“One favor, Doc?”

“What is it?”

“Could we name the ship after the one I crashed?”

“Perfect,” she says. “
Ganesh
. The god of new beginnings.”

I - Cavatina

Mr. Jonesburry stepped off the ramp with a heavy sigh of relief as his feet finally touched solid ground. Adjusting his hat with a trembling hand, he fumbled nervously as he recovered his pipe from one of his many coat pockets.

He placed the stem between his teeth, beginning the quest to locate his tobacco pouch, but stopped short as he laid eyes on a nearby collection of hydrogen tanks. The oversized gas canisters had him quickly rethinking his plan and he returned the pipe to its hiding place, deciding instead to make a beeline for the airfield’s terminal building.

Jonesburry could remember when he never used to have a problem with the airships. Quite the contrary: not that long ago, he would have considered himself quite fond of the machines. They often used a much faster form of transport, a blessing given his occupation and the time constraints which were often placed on delivering a bounty to its intended destination. But there was also a time when he rather enjoyed the sensation of flying over the vast expanses of open ocean. There was a certain sense of freedom to air travel that no other method of transportation quite managed to replicate.

But since this latest job, he had somehow lost his fondness for the contraptions and he knew it wasn’t due to his own misgivings. No, it was MacGregor, the man he had been contracted to retrieve, who had the issue with flying, and it was his insecurities that were beginning to bleed through their shared bond.

Nothing but giant, flammable death traps.

That had been the way he had described the airship when they had first boarded back in the colonies. Back then, it had taken nearly all of Jonesburry’s considerable mental effort to compel the overweight man to mount the airship’s boarding ramp. The binding’s link had only been newly formed, and in the first few hours it often took substantial energy to compel a charge to do anything they considered even remotely life-threatening.

But as time passed and their shared neural bindings deepened, it often became far less problematic for Mr. Jonesburry to direct the actions of his charges against their will. After all the time they had spent together on the airship’s continental crossing, he now had no doubt that he would be able to compel MacGregor to walk straight into the path of an oncoming train—if he were so minded to, that was.

Not that he would actually consider inflicting any direct harm to this man, nor to any of the men he had been commissioned to transport, for that matter, though certainly not out of any begrudging respect for his charges or concern for their continued wellbeing. He was smart enough to know that the men he had been paid to escort often found themselves summarily executed by the same people who sought to have them ferried halfway around the globe. And undoubtedly, nearly all of them had done things—despicable things—and they all deserved their fates as far as Jonesburry was concerned.

No, what kept Jonesburry from bringing harm to his charges, even to one as reprehensible as this particular one, was the inevitable damage that would be inflicted on his own treasured reputation. He had spent years cultivating his client list, and he certainly could not afford the inconvenience caused by failing to deliver a charge, alive and unspoilt, to his intended destination.

Crossing the airfield at a rapid pace, MacGregor had to break into a jog to match Jonesburry’s long-legged gait. Through the bond, Jonesburry could tell the heavyset man was having problems keeping up, but a wordless command forbade him from falling behind. Jonesburry may not have been able to hurt his loathsome charge, but that didn’t mean he could not make him suffer in his own small ways.

By the time that they reached the limestone building serving as the airfield’s terminal, MacGregor was nearly bent double and breathing like an overheated bulldog. Sweat poured from his ruddy face as he tried to mop the beads of moisture away with the corner of his pocket kerchief.

“Stand up properly and breathe normally,” Jonesburry commanded, allowing the waves of compulsion to wash over the knot that lay in the back of his mind. The man responded immediately, and Jonesburry smiled to himself. There was no real reason to prevent the man from catching his breath, but after more than a week of having to share the wretch’s nauseating thoughts, he drew his own pleasure where he could.

Jonesburry wondered where his own welcoming party would be as he cast his gaze through the assembled crowd of travelers and their loved ones. After several minutes of forcing his way between the terminal’s frantic bustle, he felt a brief stab of panic emanating from the charge’s knot that announced that the overweight man had spotted the client first.

Jonesburry followed MacGregor’s line of sight to the kiosk tables in the building’s corner and recognised the familiar figure of his business partner, Horace. A gruff and disheveled-looking man, he perched on a stool as he nursed a glass of whiskey. However, despite Horace’s less-than-inviting demeanor, the men accompanying Jonesburry’s associate were they who had the charge so unsettled.

Two muscle-bound toughs, each looking as though they required a crowbar to cram themselves into their tightly fitting suits, stood flanking an elderly gentleman perched on his own stool. The older man, obviously of some means and most likely his latest client, turned and pointed directly at the two travellers. The toughs stiffened and the knot in the back of Jonesburry mind edged closer to pure hysteria.

Whatever MacGregor may have done to the well-dressed man (and from the nature of his thoughts over the course of the journey, Jonesburry could certainly venture a decent guess), he obviously wasn’t looking forward to their imminent reunion.

“We’re going to visit some old friends of yours by the looks of things,” Jonesburry said. “Stay quiet and do precisely as instructed. And for God’s sake, calm down, would you?”