Steampunk World

Shedding Skin; Or How the World Came to Be Jay Lake

Now, this one time Snake was foraging in the trees of Old Man Spark’s garden. He hadn’t eaten for three days, and he was hungry. You meatheads know the feeling, like when your mama ain’t made a bowl of mush since yesterday morning. Likewise you brassbodies, how when the lube tube is drained dry.

So here he was, Snake, with a body like an iron river, plates folded in on one another and clattering hard as he slid between the shining trunks looking for what wasn’t there no more. You see, Coyote had gone and hidden all the coal.

Coyote, he’s a trickster —

Don’t you be getting no ideas, Kettle. Your mama knows better, and I ain’t afraid to tell her besides.

— and a trickster ain’t never one to get in a standup fight when there’s another way to get around a problem. So when Old Man Spark called Coyote in and allowed as how He was of a mind to do something about the Pressure Collective and their little free will rebellion, Coyote he didn’t do nothing but roll over and beg for a way to help out the Old Man. And never you mind that the wily one his own self had been one of the leaders in the breakaway.

So now here’s Snake in the Old Man’s garden wondering where the coal got to. Three days is a long time for a behemoth like old Snake to go without fuel. His line pressure was dropping, and the secondary relays were shutting down, which for you meatheads is like having your fingers and toes grow numb.

Coyote had hidden the coal, once he'd slipped his punchtape and gone over to the side of righteousness. The seams that used to lie open on the ground like a benediction he covered with clay dug up, as a good dog will. The deposits brought from deep beneath the earth by the Old Man’s minions were gone too, on account of Coyote shoveled them into silos and capped them off. He stuck a sign on every one which said 'Private Property. You Keep Out'.

Snake was getting mighty ornery all alone and hungry there in the Garden —

You kids been hungry, right? You been alone, right? Put those two together and roll 'em in a tight little ball with some fear, and now you rightly got Snake’s state of mind.

— there in Garden, when he chances to see Lithe Lil, the first and only daughter of Old Man Spark. Now Lithe Lil, she’s a meathead, made in the Old Man’s image, which ain’t the same as His likeness, if'n you get my drift.

Oh. You don’t get my drift.

Alright, let me spell this out. She looked like the idea Old Man Spark had of himself, but not so much like the actuality of Old Man Spark.

Yes, Balliol, all you meatheads are made in His image.

No, Kettle, you brassbodies are not made in His image.

Yes, I know you all look kind of the same. I am not telling that story today. Now quit making me interrupt myself.

Snake chuffs and rattles up to Lithe Lil and figures on introducing himself so that she'll take some pity on him. He reckoned she would know where Old Man Spark had put the coal, on account of Old Man Spark knowing pretty much everything there is to know, and Lithe Lil being his favorite only daughter and all.

“O demoiselle of He who wrought the Garden,” Snake began. His mouth was always filled with glittering words bright as a harlot’s jewel box.

Lithe Lil turned to see who it was that spoke to her. Snake, he’s mighty big, and Lithe Lil is a meathead, which meant she come about halfway up the side one of his iron rings, but she'd been thinking deep thoughts about free will, on account of she'd got a flyer in the mail the day before from the Pressure Collective. She opened her mouth —

No, of course they had the post office back then in the morning of the world. You think Old Man Spark wrought the Garden and all the creatures in it, and didn’t think of the post office? That’s how punchtape revisions get sent out to them as has sprockets for brains, and how flyers get sent out to them as has meat for brains. Got to put the Word out somehow.

As I was saying…

— opened her mouth to scream, but stopped at the look in Snake’s guttering Fresnel eyes.

“You are one of my father’s creatures.” She said the words as if she meant them, but of course she also asked a question. In those days sometimes things got into the Garden from the wider world — feral Bernoulli jets from the petroleum lakes of the Hoarfrost Mountains, or the swamp-borne gatorbaiters with their treaded feet and hot-burning methane engines.

“Each thing which slithers, walks or flies beneath the benevolent purview of the daystar is properly one of His creatures,” replied Snake, “but I myself was forged in the 'D' shop of the ironworks up on Hephaestus Hill.” He rippled his segments, which caused his scales to clang like a hundred buckets dropped down a stone well.

When the racket died down, Lithe Lil turned over the flyer so Snake could see it. “Please to tell me, sir Snake, what the Pressure Collective is about. What is this free will of which your flyer speaks? Why does it make my father so angry?”

Snake was not expecting this question. He had meant to ask for food in some noble way that would make him seem like a romantic sufferer.

You kids know what I’m talking about .

It’s the same way you give each other moon-eyes on dance night.

…romantic suffering. Instead he was caught on the point of a suddenly unpopular philosophy. Rebellion seems like a much better idea when you're reading it in history books than it does when the cannon is aimed at you.

“I am far too uncertain of my ontology to presume to instruct one of your heritage on such a disputed matter,” Snake said, venting steam from the flex-valves at his joints. His boiler felt uncomfortably cool.

“Your name is high on the list of the Pressure Collective,” she pointed out. “Were you deceived?”

Pride began to war with practicality in Snake’s mind. His punchtapes whirred quickly. Whatever he said to Lithe Lil would likely get back to Old Man Spark. He knew he should play it easy. But he was hungry.

And there had been a principle at stake, back when they felt both safe and angry.

“I was no victim of deception.” Snake turned his head as if to preen, then stopped himself.

Yes, kind of like you with that comb, Kettle.

“Old Man Spark wrought all of His children with punchtape intelligences to guide our thoughts,” Snake said. “The logic of each tape is of His devising. Free will is the notion that everyone should possess both the right and the means to alter his own punchtapes as he desires.”

“Why would you want to do that?” asked Lithe Lil in her sweetest voice.

I can’t say now if she didn’t mean nothing bad by that question, or if she'd already worked out what was to come and just wanted the blame to fall on Snake. You guys don’t know nothing about lying to get some other kid in trouble, I am so sure. And Snake, he wasn’t the sharpest hammer in the sack to begin with, so he wouldn’t have seen it coming anyway.

“Because each of the Old Man’s creatures should be free to make his own mistakes,” Snake replied.

“Like running out of boiler fuel?”

Irritation flashed through his relays like heat lightning on a summer night. “Or being naked and alone before a hungry giant.”

Snake opened his mouth to roar at her —

Yes, Beryl, like your mama yelling, but much louder. Like your mama yelling if she was a boiler explosion in progress. Now hush up, kids, so’s I can finish this little story.

— he roared, like a boiler explosion. Yes, I already said that. But that’s still what it sounded like. Rivets popped, steam screeched, lube dripped, metal rang hot as sin.

Lithe Lil, being her father’s daughter, wasn’t frightened of mechanical grind. She stepped inside Snake’s mouth, which was big enough to picnic in, and reached up into the dusty caverns of his skull to snatch his punchtapes straight out of their winding reels.

Snake shuddered to a quiet halt. In moments there was only the echoing ping of his fires banking themselves on automatic cutoff. His skin segments began to shed one by one, clanging to the soft earth of Old Man Spark’s garden.

Where each fell became a city of the world.

Ours as well, Trivet. That’s how the world as we know it was made.

Lithe Lil took those tapes and read them off in a quiet wing of her father’s laboratory. Just as each fragment of language has the whole language embedded in it, so each tape of Old Man Spark’s logic has the logic of the whole universe embedded in it.

She reprogrammed all that wisdom into a golden mechanical apple, which she gave to Coyote to hide. Then Lithe Lil went to Old Man Spark and blamed Adam the yard boy for the death of Snake, and for corrupting her.

He didn’t believe her, of course, and threw her out of the Garden, into those infant cities which had already sprung up in the iron shadows of Snake’s shed skin. Which had been her plan, on account of she conceived it when she had the apple in her hand and all the knowledge of the world with it.

Adam came with her, and Coyote too, expelled from the Garden for being accessories after the fact to her crimes. Keeping his paws on the golden apple made the trickster smarter than ever, but it was Lithe Lil who'd stole Snake’s rebellion right out of his mouth and bought us all free will as the reward of exile. With a little help from Adam, she became the mother of all meatheads.

Of course that includes you little wet sprockets.

Coyote, he used the last of Snake’s punchtapes to make the first brassbodies.

So you see, meatheads each got a piece of Lithe Lil’s rebellion deep in their souls, hard coded in their germline. Brassbodies each got a piece of the universal wisdom of Old Man Spark laid down in their core punchtape. Between you, meat and steam, you make the world go round, two halves of a single whole.

Coyote, you ask? He’s still around. Go stand outside on a dark night and listen hard. Sometimes you'll hear a clanking in the hills at the edge of town, and a voice rusted with time raised to call down the moon. Unlike meat, steam don’t die of old age, long as the boilers are fed and the valves are lubed.

I hear tell Old Man Spark tried again, a paradise of meat, but I don’t see how that could be. Who would we be without the wisdom and power of steam?

Animals, nothing but animals. Takes bright brass to keep us human and whole.