The Steampowered Globe Read online

  The

  Steampowered

  Globe

  Editors

  Rosemary Lim and Maisarah Bte Abu Samah

  AS¡FF

  Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy

  AS¡FF

  Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy

  An imprint of Two Trees Pte Ltd

  Registered Address:

  1 Raffles Place

  #20-02 OUB Centre

  Singapore 048616

  www.twotrees.com.sg

  Copyright © the respective authors 2012

  Copyright © typesetting & design Two Trees Pte Ltd 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, transmitted or used in any form or by any means without the permission of the publisher and the authors.

  Opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors.

  While some characters are based on long-dead historical persons, all other characters are totally fictional. Any resemblance to a real person or people, living or dead, is absolutely coincidental.

  The Steampowered Globe

  ISBN 978-981-07-0549-7

  Edited by Rosemary Lim & Maisarah Bte Abu Samah

  Cover design by Ben Lim

  Cover images www.canstockphoto.com

  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  The steampowered globe / editors, Rosemary Lim, Maisarah Bte Abu Samah. – Singapore : ASiFF,­ c2012.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-981-07-0549-7 (pbk.)

  1. Steampunk fiction, Singaporean. 2. Short stories, Singaporean (English) I. Lim, Rosemary. II. Maisarah Abu Samah,­ 1985-

  PR9570.S52

  S823 -- dc22 OCN760854676

  Contents

  "Ascension" by Leow Hui Min Annabeth

  "No, They Dream of Mechanical Hearts" by Claire Cheong

  "Morrow’s Knight" by Viki Chua

  "Colours" by Yuen Xiang Hao

  "How the Morning Glory Grows" by Mint Kang

  "Help! Same Angler Fish’s Been Gawking for Eight Minutes!" by Ng Kum Hoon

  "Captain Bells and the Sovereign State of Discordia" by J Y Yang

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Ascension

  by Leow Hui Min Annabeth

  It is December tenth. Thirty-three years, then, exactly to the day; and she is eighty-three. The thought does not disturb her. She has had a very long while to come to terms with her mortality. And she has known, for a very long while with unwavering certainty that this day would arrive in time. Thirty-three years. The machine is complete, the Empress’s oldest wish will come true and Ada will be able to leave this surreal celestial half-world at last. Thirty-three years were lost to her. Thirty-three years were hers.

  The thought is intoxicating, giddying, liberating. She is withered; she is decrepit, shrunken with age. In the chrome surface of a 鼎in her workshop, she inspects her reflection, unimpressed. This morning she pinned an orchid to the lapel of her padded jacket – not in celebration, mind; she plucked the orchid from the vase at her bedside just because. Now the pink of the bloom stands out, sharp and shrill against her dark complexion. It reminds her of the scarlet sins of a mad, bad George Byron.

  Ada winces, but does not remove the flower. There was a time when she would have found herself preoccupied with a feeling of unease, shrinking away from the thought of her parents and her old life; but she has changed, she is no longer the nervous, pitiable wreck that she was as a younger woman. She has, in truth, so much more to treasure than the aimless philandering of a long-dead poet.

  So she pulls her jacket a little closer about herself, setting her jaw in aged obstinacy. She looks around the room – it will be her last time here, she thinks, and she wants to preserve it in her memory as it is. (If only memories could be moved as easily as she trusts she can move life.)

  The desk by the wall, her cyano-typed linens neatly arranged in a corner. The scribe-zhēng beside it, for when she was too tired to hand write her notes. The 鼎 she had endeavoured to use as a crucible, before she jury-rigged it into part of a wind-up mechanical fan. (And hadn’t that been a laugh? The Empress had been ever so tickled when the court ladies were left bewildered by what to do with their delicate folded 扇子 of silk.) The cooling engine, with its airflow reversed now that it is winter, clanking away to radiate warmth from the ventilation slats.

  And the small touches that make the room hers – not just a workroom but her study-room, her sometime living quarters, hers. Ada is not a sentimental woman; her mother beat any inclination toward romanticism out of her, and she is, in any case, not much given to turning maudlin, even in her cups. But there is a string of pearls, on the table – one of William’s wedding gifts, which she has not worn since their separation. A letter, much read, delivered from Greece – “My lovely, precious child, forgive me ...” She cannot hate her father, but she can hate what he did with his life. And, beside the door, a small structure of brass, gleaming from the coat of polish she frequently applies – a perfect miniature model of the difference engine, the work between her and Charles (and Mary Somerville, of course), which was never finished in London or the Paris of her exile.

  Well, she thinks, her amusement grim. Well, the engines. Please God, I at least have done something with my days.

  Outside in the courtyard the clock gong strikes three past the dawn hour. Ada twitches her braid further over her shoulder, gritting her teeth at the ache of arthritis, and calls into the speaking tube by the door:

  “Pearl, you may enter now. Godsdamn, where is the child! Pearl!”

  The patter of feet running along the corridor outside. A cautious knock on the door, which Ada flings open.

  “Lady Jin,” the maidservant murmurs.

  Pearl is a good girl, well behaved and sharp of wit for all that she is just fourteen. Her mistress relents.

  “I am going to Her Majesty now,” says Ada, quietly, imperiously. “I do not require that you accompany me, but I want you to take charge of the possessions in this room. Except for what the Crown claims, they are yours, and I have lodged affidavits to that effect.”

  Pearl’s expression is composed, settled. Privately Ada wonders how much the girl knows.

  “Do not worry, Lady Jin. I will apply myself to my studies.”

  Ada has tutored her in mathematics and in engineering; and who knows, perhaps Pearl will even win a scholarship to the imperial colleges. Perhaps she has done right in encouraging the child to dream. Perhaps Pearl will pass the official examinations and take pride of place in the imperial workshops, building aetherships and writing punch-cards for the Jacquard engine.

  And perhaps a maid from a poor family will end up married before her sixteenth year, and will spend the remainder of her life in indentured drudgery, no longer able to work magic with numbers. So many paths that twist into the future ... Ada shakes off the desire to hug this granddaughter of hers, to whisper, “I will take care of you after I am gone, when you make offerings to me and call me Ada 姨.”

  Instead she gestures Pearl into the room, shuts the door and walks down the freezing passageway toward the gate into the courtyard. And then across the cobbles of the palace compound, towards the 太和殿, and into what remains of her life.

  *

  There are many accounts of the arrival of Lady Jin Ada into the Imperial Court, but in truth it was many years ago that Ada found her way into the land under heaven, calling herself Elizabeth King on the passage from England, and using her title of countess when she claimed an imperial audience. Neither of those names had any currency in court – Her Majesty preferred to style her Lady Jin – but she was, sometimes, secretly pleased that she was still recognized
as an enchantress of numbers.

  “But that is to be expected!” the Empress exclaimed, when Ada confessed her surprise at this appellation.

  “If not for natural philosophers like yourself, we would long have been overrun by the field mice of your continent. Overrun, and carved up into extra-territorialities, as南洋 was before we liberated it.”

  The Empress said that in a tone so unyieldingly matter-of-fact, so arrogant, that it was burnt into Ada’s memory. For if she had to situate her empress in an occidental context (for慈禧太后 was her empress, far more than the so-distant Victoria Regina) then she would say, in all confidence, “She is our Ailénor d’Aquitane.”

  She learnt her histories, as a child, before her mother set her to algebra and Euclid. She read of Eleanor and she never forgot her. Naughty, wicked Eleanor, who went on crusade to kill, and who adored l’amour courtois. Wife of kings! Mother of kings! Strumpet, warrior, monarch. A paradox, Eleanor, and a paragon at the same time. Even so, Ada told herself, even the inimitable Poitevin queen was but a pale precursor to Cixi.

  Ada was grateful for the Empress’s patronage, grateful with a depth of feeling that she had owed to no one else, not to her mother and certainly not to Charles. The empress was, for one, honestly proud of Ada’s achievements; and it was for this pride that Ada sold her loyalty to a chit, an upstart whore who somehow jostled her way onto the Heavenly Throne.

  And it was for the challenge also: when the Empress looked at her, with an incomprehensible emotion in her implacable face, and said, “We have brought you in, as our own daughter, to extend the reach of my realm and to defend us from your nation of barbarians, through your skill in the natural sciences. But there is another matter.”

  A pause, during which moment the blood had been thudding so hard in Ada’s ears that she could barely hear a thing.

  “You see,” said the Empress softly – and it seemed to Ada that Her Majesty was weary, slipping into an informality of speech – “there is also that matter, that small trifle, of my heart’s desire. That one thing that has eluded so many generations of kings and emperors – I believe you will be the one to find it for me.”

  Ada had fallen to her knees at this and pressed her head to the floor, doing obeisance in a manner which would have scandalized her own ancestors. “My queen, my queen, thank you for your trust in me, for harboring me, thank you.” And she took her oath, there and then, under the outraged glances of the courtiers.

  *

  The Great Hall is empty, silent; and the winter cold bites through clothing into bone. The lesser halls, where the Empress holds court sometimes, have mannequins installed along the walls – some as heralds with phonographs, and some to play the zither. (Ada had no part in the design of the phonograph, though she wrote the algorithms for the doll-musicians. She regretted that almost instantly; the mechanical music grates.) Not so太和殿,which is unadorned by the modernist impulse to technology.

  The only appearance of anything out of place is the new throne that stands upon the highest dais.

  “Your Majesty,” Ada whispers as she approaches, and the sound carries through the mausoleum. (Because this is a mausoleum. It will no longer be used for weddings and coronations, for the great feasts of the monarchy. Not after today. She knows it.)

  “Madam,” the Empress rejoins, voice cracking. This is the closest to intimacy that they will ever achieve.

  “Help me, if you please.”

  Now that Ada is closer to the throne she can see it more clearly, and she almost rears away in her shuddering horror.

  A monstrosity, she thinks. Grotesque. And then, her repulsion giving way to curiosity: Is this really the fruit of my imagination? Did the architects construct this from my plans?

  The chair – it is a chair, not a throne, an electric chair as lethal as the one that tinkerer boy in Menlo Park has dreamed up so far across the western seas in the Occident – the chair is fitted to the Empress’s frame like a brace. There are iron valves, brass pipes, tubing that she cannot remember having specified in her diagrams.

  “I am not an anatomist!” she cries, before realizing the words have left her shrivelled lips. “I cannot guarantee that this will accomplish anything, Your Majesty.

  “And you will die,” she continues in her passion, “if not now, then eventually! That is the natural order of things. And His Majesty Guangxu will be emperor after you, and his children thereafter. And all shall be well, the kingdom shall be well, you can rest easy in heaven ...”

  “Heresy,” snaps the Empress. “Control yourself, madam. This one will not be well if you shriek and squawk and continue to utter all these inauspicious delusions. You made a vow to us, and that is the end of it.”

  Under that piercing stare, Ada falters and feels the colour come into her cheeks.

  “Lady Jin” – and the Empress’s tone softens, and she beckons Ada closer – “have I not told you that I respect you, for your intellect and your age, because you are my elder despite my rank?”

  That is truth. She has learnt so much from this woman two decades her junior, in the years she has spent at court.

  “You call me inscrutable,” the Empress said once, her fury ice-like. “Have you never wondered what it meant? Have you never thought how it placed demands upon me, upon my people, to be open to the scrutiny of yours? I will be as inscrutable as I please, Lady Jin, because it shows I do not give in so easily to the diplomacy of gunboats asking me to open my soul.”

  “Lady Jin,” the Empress calls again. “I am begging you” – and that is not possible, the royal family does not beg – “I have kept you here so long and you are so close to winning your freedom. Can you obey one last order?”

  It is not a matter of can you, Ada realizes, but will you. Or must you. The most powerful woman in the world needs her help. And she needs to obey. She needs to be free.

  She has spent thirty-three years in this beautiful cage in the紫禁城.

  “Your Majesty.” Ada watches the Empress carefully because she will not stand to be gulled this one last time. “You said to me, when you were younger, ‘I am only a queen because my son is a powerful heir; you are only the queen of numbers because your father was a rich man.’ But that is a lie, Your Majesty. You are queen because you have made it so.”

  She lifts herself, slowly, painfully, with an effort, climbing the steps to the throne. If there were anyone else in the Great Hall it would be treason, lèse majesté.

  Here and now, the Empress does not protest. “Are you sure you will do this?” Ada whispers, feeling faint.

  The Empress’s lip curls – iron matriarch to the end. “You are strangely squeamish today, Lady Jin.”

  “I do not feel well. I did not take my medication.” Ada is not lying.

  It is the final part of their arrangement. Every morning for thirty-three years, the Empress has sent a eunuch to her quarters with the lithium salts for her melancholia and the wheat grain for the crab in her belly. Until last week, when the messenger did not arrive, and Ada did not bother asking for him.

  “You will feel better soon,” the Empress promises. “As will I.”

  Ada wrenches the first plug into place.

  *

  She sits on the floor of the Great Hall, peering through the dimness with tired, old-woman eyes. She can hear the spitting and wheezing and clank of the artificial respiration, and the rasp of a voice speaking to nobody in particular:

  “What the great men of the past could not accomplish ... the First Emperor, dead of the mercury pills; the archer-god Hou Yi, whose wife was sacrificed to prevent his eternal tyranny; the Yongle Emperor, who would rather cull the treasure-fleet of Zheng He in search of the elixir of life ... what these men set out to do, who in the process failed and perished in the flesh as men are wont to do, I have achieved.”

  It makes Ada smile, pulls her mouth taut against her dry, wizened skin. Her gaze is fixed on the single phlegethon gas lamp hissing and burning in the bracket by the throne.
She bites her lip as she watches it sputter, feeling the dull throbbing in her womb and her head, feeling her body crave the laudanum.

  Then the lamp goes out, and there is only a machine muttering, muttering through the dark.

  Glossary

  鼎: ding; a type of cauldron or vessel, used in antiquity.

  scribe-zhēng: the zheng is a keyboard-like string instrument; this is a reference to a typewriter analogue.

  扇子: fanpiece

  姨: aunt; a term of respect for an older woman.

  太和殿: the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest hall and the centre of the Forbidden City.

  南洋: Southeast Asia.

  慈禧太后: Empress Dowager Cixi.

  紫禁城: the Chinese name for the Forbidden City.

  Annabeth Leow can be found on a certain sunny island in the sea. A hard-drinking tea-imbiber, she enjoys postcolonialism and Southeast Asian fantasy stories, usually at the same time.

  No, They Dream of Mechanical Hearts

  by Claire Cheong

  “Hey, hands off.”

  It was a sharp voice that rang through the dark room, echoing all the more for the enclosed space and the previous silence. Only the centre of the room was lit, and in that circle of incandescent lamplight, a soldier, dressed in traditional uniform of red and gold, paused. Surprise, perhaps, stayed his hand but recovery was quick; he scooped his target brusquely into his arms and made for the door.