Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures by Sean Wallace

Author:Sean Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781472110756
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

The Clockworks of Hanyang

Gord Sellar

Lasher was unsettled, even more than was customary for him, by the lidless gaze of the strange, oriental mechanikaes’ optical apparata. He seemed the only one in the crowd of foreigners upset in this way, however: the Clockworks was a busy place, with machines being banged together, or pulled apart, all about. Commoners in grubby white tunic-and-pyjamas taught by rote a dozen different tasks to the completed mechanikae, whilst all around the thick reek of machine oil hung in the air. One would be forgiven for suspecting that all things mechanikal had been bustled forth into the Clockworks, so as to show off the state of the art as concerned Hanyang, and all of Chosŏn – as the locals insisted on calling their land.

Marvel at the wonders of the Clockworks of Hanyang!, the invitation had read. Witness mechanikae ordered by Eastern discipline and ancient wisdom! See the fusion of modern mechanikal advances with elemental Corean power! A number of other Western dignitaries had received invitations, as well, though probably not accompanied by the desperate letter into which it had been tucked in the envelope that Lasher and MacMillan had received; many of Europe’s most brightly shimmering stars had declined to attend, understandably, but had sent representatives. The brother of the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, accompanied by his wife; a Belgian duchesse seemingly of an adventurous sort; a pair of German twins with a fascination for machines built in the shape of women . . . the whole lot of them had shown up, in hazard of their very lives, along with Charles Lasher and his long-time mentor, James MacMillan.

Turning his oft-absent mind from the staring lenses of the optical apparata and back to the ongoing tour, Lasher realized that he had missed some sort of shocking event. Apparently, a mechanika had lurched forward, seemingly on the verge of crying out, and seized the elderly Master Ko, headman of the Clockworks, by the front of his scholar’s robes. The old fellow’s horrified Western guests cringed as a single mass, crying out in a ragged unison, and Lasher, the sole American of the party, was no exception: he had seen Polish-built mechanikae do things to men – and to women, Christ forgive their foolish builders! – that would have provoked screams from anyone save a madman. He wondered, for a moment, whether these intelligent mechanika of Hanyang were invested with the same ersatz memories, and emotions, and longings, and moral codes as their Western-built equivalents.

Yet in truth, Lasher gaped for another reason entirely: it was the fluidity with which the machine moved that stunned him utterly, despite knowing from the expostulations of his traveling partner to expect wonders such as these. The mere sight of this wondrous, oriental-built mechanika and its gliding movements was far more convincing of the Chosŏn tinkerers’ cleverness than the scribblings of all the starving Jesuits that MacMillan had studied, and decanted orally, during their rail trip across Asia. From the moment

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