I was working fifteen-hour days, traversing the city on house calls, looking in on my patients who’d contracted a particularly virulent new disease. Fevers, sweats, vomiting, liquid excrement. Along with these symptoms, the telltale signature—a slow trickle of what looked like green ink issuing from the left inner ear. It blotted pillows with strange, haphazard designs in which I momentarily saw a spider, a submarine, a pistol, a face staring back. I was helpless against this scourge. The best I could do was to see to the comfort of my charges and give instructions to their loved ones to keep them well hydrated. To a few who suffered most egregiously, I administered a shot of Margold, which wrapped them in an inchoate stupor. Perhaps it wasn’t sound medicine, but it was something to do. Done more for my well-being than theirs.
In the middle of one of these harrowing days, a young man arrived at my office carrying an envelope for me. I’d been just about to set off to the Air Ferry for another round of patient visits in all quarters of the city, but after giving the lad a tip and sending him on his way, I sat down to a cup of cold tea and opened the card. It was from Millicent Garana, a longtime friend and colleague I’d not seen in months. The circumstances of our last meeting had not been professional. Instead, I’d taken her to the Hot Air Opera and we marveled at the steam-inspired metallic characters gliding through the drama, their voices like so many teakettles at the boil.
It was with that glittering, frenetic memory still twirling through my head that I read these words: Dr. Lash, please come to my office this afternoon. When you have finished reading this, destroy it. Tell no one. Dr. Garana. My image of Millicent, after the opera—her green eyes and beautiful dark complexion, sipping Oyster Rime and Kandush at the outdoor café of the old city—disintegrated.
Apparently it was to be all business. I needed to show I was up to the task. I pulled myself together, tidied up my mustache, and chose my best walking stick. There was a certain lightness to my step that had been absent in the preceding days of the new disease. Now as I walked, I wondered why I hadn’t asked Millicent out on another nocturnal jaunt when last we parted. In my imagination, I remedied that oversight on this outing.
Only in the middle of the elevator ride to the Air Ferry platform, jammed in with fifty people, did I register a sinister thread in what she’d written. Destroy the message? Tell no one? These two phrases scurried around my mind as we boarded and later, drifting above the skyscrapers.
We were in her office, me sitting like a patient in front of her desk. I tried not to notice how happy I was to see her. She didn’t return my smile. Instead, she said, “Have you had a lot of cases of this new fever?”
“Every day,” I said. “It’s brutal.”
“I’m going to tell you some things that I’m not supposed to,” she said. “You must tell no one.”
I nodded.
“We know what this new disease is,” she said. “You remember, I’m on the consulting board to the Republic’s Health Policy Quotidian. The disease is airborne. It’s caused by a spore, like an infinitesimal seedpod. Somehow, from somewhere, these spores have recently blown into the Republic. Left on their own, the things are harmless. We wouldn’t have known they were there at all if the disease hadn’t prompted us to look.”
“Spores,” I said, picturing tiny green burr balls raining down upon the city.
She nodded. “Put them under pressure and extreme heat, though, like the conditions found in steam engines, and they crack open and release their seed. It’s these seeds, no bigger than atoms, that cause the disease. The mist that falls from the Air Ferry or is expelled by a steam carriage, the perspiration of ten thousand turbines, the music of the calliope in the park—all teeming with seed. It’s in the steam. Once the disease takes hold in a few individuals, it becomes completely communicable.”
I sat quietly for a moment, remembering from when I was a boy the earliest flights of Captain Madrigal’s Air Ferry. As it flew above our street, I’d run in its shadow, through the mist of its precipitation, waving to those waving on board. Then I came to and said, “The Republic will obviously have to desist from using steam energy for the period of time necessary to quarantine, contain, and destroy the disease.”
“Lash, you know that’s not going to happen.”
“What then?” I asked.
“There is no other answer. The Republic is willing to let the disease run its course, willing to sacrifice a few thousand citizens in order to not miss a day of commerce. That’s bad enough, but there’s more. We’ve determined that there’s a sixty percent survival rate among those who contract it.”
“Good odds,” I said.
“Yes, but if you survive the fever stage something far more insidious happens.”
“Does it have to do with that green discharge?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Come, I’ll show you.” She stood up and led me through a door into one of the examination rooms. An attractive young woman sat on a chair by the window. She stood to greet us and shake hands. I introduced myself and learned her name was Harrin. There was small talk exchanged about the weather and the coming holiday. Millicent asked her how she was feeling and she responded that she felt quite well. She looked healthy enough to me.
“And where did you get that ring?” my colleague asked of the young woman.
Harrin held up her hand to show off the red jewel on her middle finger.
“This ring . . .” she said and stared at it a moment. “Not but two days ago, a very odd fellow appeared at my door, bearing a small package. Upon greeting him, my heart jumped because he had a horn, like a small twisted deer antler, protruding from his left temple. The gnarled tip of it arced back toward the center of his head. He spoke my name in some foreign accent, his voice like the grumblings of a dog. I nodded. He handed me the package, turned, and paced silently into the shadows. Inside the outer wrapping there was a box, and in that box was this ring with a note. It simply read—For you, and was signed The Prisoner Queen.”
Millicent interrupted Harrin’s tale and excused us. She took me by the arm and led me back into her office. She told her patient she would return in a moment and then shut the door. In a whisper, she said, “The green liquid initiating from the ear is the boundary between imagination and memory. The disease melts it, and even though you survive the fevers you can no longer distinguish between what has happened and what you have dreamed has happened or could have happened or should have. The Republic is going insane.”
I was speechless. She led me to the opposite door and out into the corridor. Before I left, she kissed me. In light of what I’d been told, the touch of her lips barely startled me. It took me the rest of the day to recover from that meeting. I canceled all of my appointments, locked myself in my office with a bottle of Fresnac, and tried to digest that feast of secrets.
I never really got beyond my first question: Why had Millicent told me? An act of love? A professional duty? Perhaps the Republic actually wanted me to know this information, since I am a physician, but they couldn’t officially announce it.
My first reaction was to flee the city, escape to where the cloud carriages rarely ventured, where the simply mechanical was still in full gear. But there were the patients, and I was a doctor. So I stayed in the city, ostensibly achieving nothing of medical value. Like my administration of the Margold, my decision to remain was more for me than any patient.
The plague spread and imagination bled into memory, which bled into imagination—hallucinations on the street, citizens locked in furious argument with themselves all over town, and the tales people told in response to the simplest questions were complex knots of wish fulfillment and nightmare. Then the Air Ferry driver remembered that to fly the giant vessel he was to ignore the list of posted protocols and flip buttons and depress levers at a whim. When the graceful, looming behemoth crashed in a fiery explosion into the city’s well-to-do section, wiping out a full third of the Republic’s politicos, not to mention a few hundred other citizens, I knew the end had come.
Many of those who had not yet lost their reason fled into the country and from what I’d heard formed small enclaves that kept all strangers at bay. For my part, I stayed with the sinking ship of state. Still tracking down and doing nothing for those few patients suffering from the onset symptoms of the disease.
Scores of workers remembered that their daily job was something other than what it had been in reality and set forth each day to meddle, renowned experts in delusion. Steam carriages crashed, a dozen a day, into storefronts, pedestrians, each other. A fellow, believing himself one of the gleaming characters at the Hot Air Opera, rushed up onstage and was cut to ribbons by the twirling metal edges of his new brethren. There was an accident in one of the factories on the eastern edge of town—an explosion—and then thick black smoke billowed out of its three stacks, blanketing the city in twilight at midday. The police, not quite knowing what to do, and some in their number as deranged as the deranged citizenry, resorted to violence. Shootings had drastically risen.
The gas of the streetlamps ran low and the city at night was profoundly black with a rare oasis of flickering light. I was scurrying along through the shadows back to my office from a critical case of fever—an old man on the verge of death who elicited a shot of Margold from me. As I’d administered it, his wife went on about a vacation they’d recently taken on a floating island powered by steam. I’d inquired if she’d had the fever and she stopped in her tale for a moment to nod.
I shivered again, thinking of her, and at that moment rounded a corner and nearly walked into Millicent. She seemed to have just been standing there, staring. The instant I realized it was her, a warmth spread quickly through me. It was I this time who initiated the kiss. She said my name and put her arms around me. This was why I’d stayed in the city.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked her.
“They’re after me, Lash,” she said. “Everybody even remotely involved with the government is being hunted down. There’s something in the collective imagination of those struck by the disease that makes them remember that the Republic is responsible for their low wages and grinding lives.”
“How many are after you?” I asked and looked quickly over my shoulder.
“All of them,” she said, covering her face with her hand. “I can tell you’ve not yet succumbed to the plague because you are not now wrapping your fingers around my throat. They caught the Quotidian of Health Care today and hanged him on the spot. I witnessed it as I fled.”
“Come with me. You can hide at my place,” I said. I walked with my arm around her and could feel her trembling.
At my quarters, I bled the radiators and made us tea. We sat at the table in my parlor. “We’re going to have to get out of the city,” I said. “In a little while, we’ll go out on the street and steal a steam carriage. Escape to the country. I’m sure they need doctors out among the sane.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said and covered my hand, resting on the table with her own.
“There’s no reason left here,” I said.
“I meant to remember to tell you this,” she said, taking a sip of tea. “About a week ago, I was summoned out one night on official business of the Republic. My superior sent me word that I was to go to a certain address and treat, using all my skill and by any means necessary, the woman of the house. The note led me to believe that this individual’s well-being was of the utmost importance to the Republic.”
“The president’s wife?” I asked.
“No, the address was down on the waterfront. A bad area and yet they offered me no escort. I was wary of everything that moved and made a noise. Situated in the middle of a street of grimy drinking establishments and houses of prostitution, I found the place. The structure had at one time been a bank. You could tell by the marble columns out front. There were cracks in its dome and weeds poked through everywhere, but there was a light on inside.
“I knocked on the door and it was answered by a young man in a security uniform, cap, badge, pistol at his side. I gave my name and my business. He showed me inside, and pointed down a hallway whose floor, ceiling, and walls were carpeted—a tunnel through a mandala design of flowers on a red background. Dizzy from it, I stepped into a large room where I saw a woman sitting on a divan. She wore a low-cut blue gown and had a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. Her hair was dark and abundant but disheveled. I introduced myself, and she told me to take a seat in a chair near her. I did. She chewed the tip of tortoiseshell for a brief period, and then said, ‘Let me introduce myself. I’m the Prisoner Queen.’ ”
My heart dropped at her words. I wanted to look in Millicent’s eyes to see if I could discern whether she’d contracted the plague in recent days and survived to now be mad, but I didn’t have the courage.
Although I tried to disguise my reaction, she must have felt me tremble slightly, because she immediately said, “Lash, believe me, I know how odd this sounds. I fully expected you not to believe me, but this really happened.” Only then did I look into her face, and she smiled.
“I believe you,” I said, “go on. I want to hear the rest.”
“What it came to,” said Millicent, “was she’d summoned me, not for any illness but to tell me what was about to happen.”
“Why you?” I asked.
“She said she admired earnest people. The Prisoner Queen told me that what we have been considering the most terrible part of the disease, the blending of memory and the imagination, is a good thing. ‘A force of nature,’ was how she put it. There’s disorganization and mayhem now, but apparently the new reality will take hold and the process will be repeated over centuries.”
“Interesting,” I said and slowly slid my hand out from under hers. “You know,” I said, rising, “I have to get a newspaper and read up on what’s been happening. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right back.” She nodded and took another sip of tea, appearing relaxed for the first time since I’d run into her.
I put on my hat and coat and left the apartment. Out on the street, I ran to the east, down two blocks and a turn south, where earlier that day I’d seen an abandoned steam carriage that had been piloted into a lamppost. I remembered noticing that there really hadn’t been too much damage done to the vehicle.
The carriage was still there where I’d seen it, and I immediately set to starting it, lighting the pilot, pumping the lever next to the driver’s seat, igniting the gas to heat the tank of water. All of the gauges read near full, and when the thing actually started up after a fit of coughing that sounded like the bronchitis of the aged, I laughed even though my heart was broken.
I stopped for nothing but kept my foot on the pedal until I’d passed out beyond the city limits. The top was down and I could see the stars and the silhouettes of trees on either side of the road. In struggling to banish the image of Millicent from my mind, I hadn’t at first noticed a cloud of steam issuing from under the hood. I realized the carriage’s collision with the lamp must have cracked the tank or loosened a valve. I drove on, the steam wafting back over the windshield, enveloping my view.
The constant misty shower made me hot. I began to sweat, but I didn’t want to stop, knowing I might not get the carriage moving again. Some miles later, I began to get dizzy, and images flashed through my thoughts like lightning—a stone castle, an island, a garden of poisonous flowers spewing seed. “I’ve got to get out of the steam,” I said aloud to try to revive myself.
“The steam’s not going anywhere,” said the Prisoner Queen from the passenger seat. Her voluminous hair was neatly put up in an ornate headdress and her gown was decorated with gold thread. “Steam’s the new dream,” she said. “Right now I’m inventing a steam-powered space submarine to travel to the stars, a radiator brain whose exhaust is laughing gas, a steam pig that feeds a family of four for two weeks.” She slipped a hand behind my head, and after taking a toke from the tip of the tortoise shell, she leaned over, put her mouth to mine, and showed me the new reality.
A Note About “Dr. Lash Remembers”
I wrote this story for Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded anthology for Tachyon. Whenever I write a steampunk story, some reviewer, even if they like the story, inevitably mentions that it’s not really steampunk. Normal steampunk to me seems like a pretty musty genre. When I think of it, the image of a room crammed with old furniture comes to mind. Most stories in this subgenre focus on the anachronistic/futuristic technology. My steampunk stories are steampunk, whether the reviewers know it or not, it’s just that I’m focusing on the steam, not the junk that it animates. Steam is the new dream, baby. Actually, the Prisoner Queen appeared in a sequence of three dreams I had over a period of as many nights, and she definitely endorses the steam angle.