Steampunk
Fairy Tales
Copyright 2016 Angela Castillo Chris Champe,
Leslie & David T. Allen, Allison Latzko,
Heather White, Ashley Capes, Daniel Lind
Preface
Imagine how your favorite fairy tales would be told by an advanced Victorian society that's powered by steam.
That was the idea Angela Castillo proposed in our online writing community. She handpicked six other writers to contribute and provided few restrictions.?It wasn't until weeks later we realized that, even with such a small group, the authors represented three continents and were retelling myths from Germany, England, France, Italy, and Japan.
Some stories stay close to their roots, while others have familiar elements but come with a twist. When?reading, make a little game of it: see if you can guess the fairy tale. Some are classics, others are obscure, and a few might not be circulated in your culture. You can check your guesses at the end of the book.
One thread unites them all: each tale is a reimagining of how it would be told from a steam-driven society. Please, enjoy.
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If you would like to learn more about steampunk, please see https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk
The Clockwork People
Angela Castillo
Old Man Streusel knew about the magic in his toy shop. It whispered in his ear and sent dancing breezes to tickle his nose even when the doors and windows were closed.
When customers entered the building, the magic settled on their cheeks in a warm glow. Most adults wrote it off as happy childhood memories brought on by the colorful toys, but the children knew better.? They stared at Streusel with wide eyes and he would wink.
Whirs and clicks filled the shop, for Streusel had bestowed the gift of movement to every toy. Tin cows kicked over the tin pails of anguished tin milkmaids. Miniature trains belched steam as they rushed across tiny tracks. Engines in horseless carriages, sized for mouse drivers, chugged and clunked when curious children cranked the front handles.
Streusel's joy was only complete when the shop was full of happy children. He would wrap up one toy after another, whispering a blessing with each as he sent them off to new homes.
The toy shop was located in a large village built around a great factory, with giant rows of smokestacks that belched black clouds into the heavens. This company was owned by a kind man who cared for people and made sure each employee was paid fairly and not overworked.
On paydays, tired factory workers stepped into the cozy shop on the way home to choose toys for their children.
Most days, Streusel created many toys at once, like a one-man factory. He'd set out gears, frames and various metal shapes to form rows of boats, trains or dolls.
But Pieter was different.
Pieter was a clockwork doll. His body was formed from hammered tin and his inner workings created from the gears and cogs of a discarded cuckoo clock. Streusel had made dolls that could wave, twist and bow, but Pieter could do all three and then some. Streusel spent months on the toy, bending pieces this way and that, often staying up far into the night to frown over a tiny scrap of metal. Since Streusel had no family of his own, he poured all the love his lonely heart possessed into the little doll.
Finished at last, he sat the tiny man in a place of honor beside the cash register.
Pieter charmed all the customers with his bright red cap and green coat. Whenever a child came into the shop, Streusel would turn the tiny key in his back and Pieter would go through a special routine. He would remove his hat, bow and dance a jig-fast at first, then slower and slower as the clockwork ran down.
Children clapped and squealed in delight, and parents would ask, "How much?"
Streusel always folded his arms, shook his head, and beamed until his round cheeks turned pink. "Not for sale," he would say. "He's my special one."
He had almost completed Gerta, his clockwork woman, when he noticed a change in Pieter.
Sometimes when he'd turn the key, Pieter's antics went on after the clockwork wound down. On occasion the toy would give an extra bow or wave. When Streusel was alone in the shop, working on Gerta's parts, he'd hear a quiet 'creak.'?He'd look up to see Pieter's tiny face turned toward him, his shiny, painted eyes gazing at him with an extra twinkle Streusel hadn't added with a brush.
Adjusting the setting on his workman's goggles, the old man always checked the toy over to see if he'd overlooked a flaw causing these strange movements. The magic tickled the back of his mind, reminding him of its presence.
Gerta progressed much faster then Pieter, being Streusel's second doll of the kind. By the time he'd put the finishing touches on her blue milkmaid dress and formed the pink flower for her golden metal curls, Streusel could no longer deny the truth.
The magic of the toyshop had settled into Pieter's tin heart. Streusel wasn't frightened when Pieter clanked over the tabletop to him and made a bow so deep his cap almost brushed the wooden surface. After all, the toyshop was a place of joy and happiness, and therefore could only create good magic.
From then on, when Streusel polished and painted and tweaked, he would hear little snaps and creaks and look up to see Pieter standing beside him, watching in apparent fascination.
Then came the night he placed the completed Gerta beside Pieter. Pieter placed a hand on Gerta's tin shoulder and made a creaking sound.
Streusel's eyes widened. Though quiet, the doll had clearly said, "Hello."
A shudder ran through Gerta's tin form. Her head turned. "Hello!" she creaked back.
Pieter took Gerta's hand, and together they bowed before Streusel. "Father," they said in unison.
The following days were filled with fun. While Streusel tinkered at his work bench, the little dolls played hide-and-seek among the tools and parts, calling to each other in tiny voices. At night, they snuggled in doll beds while Streusel read them bedtime stories. When customers came into the shop, they would 'play dollies' as they called it, entertaining the children with their funny routines. Parents begged Streusel for a price, and he would always refuse. How could he sell his children?
One day, a dark cloud settled over the town. The factory owner who had cared so much for his workers died. A wealthy man from a land far away purchased the factory from the family of the deceased.
Whispered stories began to drift through the streets about injuries from faulty machinery. Wages began to spiral down, and those who complained were fired and sent out into the street.
Workers trudged by Streusel's toy shop on weary feet with no extra coins in their pockets for such trivial things as toys. The children would press cold noses to the shop windows to gaze at the forbidden treasures.
Only a few weeks after this turn of events, Streusel sat at his counter, sliding the few pennies he'd managed to collect into a tin box. Pieter and Gerta stood before him, dancing their prettiest jig. He forced himself to smile.?What do they know of this cruel world??The magic in the shop had weakened from the sadness, but the dolls remained happy and full of joy.
Not long after, Streusel was forced to give up his peaceful life. He sold his remaining toys for pennies. An old woman bought the shop to turn into a day-old bread store. With this money, Streusel knew he could survive for a short time.
One of Streusel's good friends owned the theater in the middle of town. He offered Streusel the small loft above for help with building repairs. When the toymaker arrived, he unpacked his few possessions and placed them around the tiny apartment. Last, he pulled out his greatest treasure: the cardboard box containing the two clockwork dolls and their beds.
The toys stretched and looked around them in bewilderment.
"Father, where is the workshop? Where are the children?" Pieter asked.
Streusel began to cry in great, heaving sobs, and the toys patted him and laid their cold, tin heads against his tear-stained cheeks.
Every day, Streusel went out to look for work. He was too old for the factories to consider and all the shop owners would shake their heads in regret. Sometimes he sold small parcels of firewood he had gathered from the woods near town. More often he brought Pieter and Greta out to the streets. They could attract a reasonable crowd and bring smiles to the most dismal of faces with their antics.
After dancing merry jigs or doing acrobatics, the dolls pretended to wind down with hats outstretched. Children pleaded with parents, and someone in the crowd always produced a spare penny so Streusel could wind them up again.
When he walked home each day, Streusel struggled with the guilt of bringing his children back to the gloomy apartment, but when he saw the pinched faces of neighborhood children he would comfort himself by thinking,?at least my children will never go hungry.
One gloomy day, rain drenched the dreary streets and left a maze of puddles in its wake. Streusel almost chose to stay home, but his stomach rumbled and it was too wet to gather wood dry enough to sell. So he picked up the cardboard box and stepped down the narrow, dark staircase to the ground floor of the theater. Tinny voices strained through the walls of the box while the dolls talked in excitement about the children they would see that day. Streusel held the box closer to his ear.
"I love you, Pieter."
"And I love you, Gerta."
Streusel chuckled to himself. It never ceased to fill him with wonder, these tiny people who had come into his life.?Ah. They are dolls. What could they possibly understand about love?
He found an awning by a busy street to set up for the day. Despite the mist, quite a few people scurried through the lanes, and soon the clockwork dolls performed for a larger crowd than ever. They emptied their tiny caps into Streusel's big one, and before long it was jingling with coins.
The happy event was interrupted by a child's cry. "Run for your lives!"
A black carriage crashed through the crowd, drawn by four ebony steeds. The coachman had neglected their bits and foam mixed with blood streamed from the cobalt mouths while they reared and plunged through the mud in a wild-eyed frenzy.
People screamed and scattered. Streusel's dolls stood in the middle of the street where they had been kicked by the frightened children's feet.
Streusel pleaded from the side, "Come to me! Come, my children!" but they could not hear him through the madness. Hand in hand, they ran in the wrong direction, under the wicked wheels of the carriage.
The coach clattered away, and the street cleared. No one saw Old Man Streusel when he bent to collect the broken parts of his dolls.
He trudged home and cleaned the mud from the twisted pieces of tin as best he could. Placing them back in the cardboard box, he decided to bury them in a quiet place after the rain stopped. The air in the room rested on his shoulders like a leaden shawl. Every spark of magic had been sucked away.
"Now, I have lost everything," he wept.
The next morning, dawn poked a cold finger through the apartment's single, small window. A scratching sound came from the box.
"Not a rat!" he howled. "This is the absolute worst!" He picked up the box with the intent to fling the filthy animal against the wall.
A breezy bit of magic swirled past his face and blew open the top of the lid.
Pieter's shiny brown eyes stared up from the box.
The old man stared in wonder at a perfectly formed clockwork child with golden curls, Gerta's dimpled cheeks, and a jumper of green and blue.
?The child waved a tin hand. "Hello!"?
Perfection
Chris Champe
The gala was in full swing, with the players on stage the center of the entire production. Not only for their music, but the act of playing itself was something to behold. They moved in perfect harmony, each and every motion, no matter how small, matched flawlessly across the entire stage. Fingers brushed across strings with a smooth surety that could never be found in nature. The pianist's hands flew over the keys with absolute efficiency.
Of course, there were murmurings among the crowd.
Those who felt the motions were unnatural. Those who felt it lacked the human element.
Of course it did.
It was simple fact that humans were flawed. Why else would they build machines to act in their place if not because machines were better suited to the task? Why reject the unnatural, as though nature were the final authority on how things ought to be done? Wasn't the rejection of and improvement upon nature the entire course of human progress?
If one were so eager to embrace nature over ingenuity, perhaps one should abandon medicine, clothing, and shelter; avoid all those conveniences of the modern world, and take up life in a cave somewhere deep in a forest. Arguments about the superiority of nature would not stand so strong against a winter in the elements, or sleep disturbed by the all-too-near howling of wolves.
Mary blinked and steered her thoughts away from the morbid turn they had taken, and turned her focus back to the performance. It was hardly unusual for her to become lost in thought since her accident, but her mind rarely took such dark paths. Instead, her daydreams were typically focused upon more immediate concerns, such as how she might occupy herself for the day, or what great work her dear husband was currently perfecting.
Perfection in all things was her husband's eternal drive, and these were merely his most recent attempt at achieving it. The entire band was composed of automata, something that had long been considered impossible, for no machine could properly imitate the smooth, controlled motions of human talent. Their mobility had always been a rough, jerky, haphazard affair. It was a brave man who allowed an automaton to serve the tea, or, at least, one very forgiving of stains. Giving it an instrument was merely an exercise in recreating the confused cacophony that a small child would produce, given the same opportunity.
This new design, though ?. It was not enough that they move as humans could. That would have never satisfied her husband, and he had confessed to her that he had mastered that challenge months before. But no, he strove further. His work was not complete until his creations combined the precision of the machine with the grace of the flesh, into a final product greater than either of its parts.
And not only were their motions stunning, but their appearance as well: the polished metal of the limbs, highlighted by the faint glow of the luminiferous relays beneath, carrying energy from the zevatron core to the brilliantly complex mechanisms which drove their motion. The new cores, designed to last a lifetime in typical applications, were one of the few aspects of the automata that were not her husband's design. Aetheric energy was one of the handful of fields he conducted no work in, and that her husband considered this new model from his friend Mr. Lorentz satisfactory for his work spoke volumes of its capability. Even with her limited understanding of the technology, Mary was aware that Lorentz's design improved upon the older Mosley model by an order of magnitude.
But it was not the glistening of metal or the shine of aetheric energy that drew her eyes most of all. What she had been focused upon for near the entirety of her little daydream had been the hands of the pianist automaton. She had been a keen student of the instrument herself, once, though she had not been able to play since her accident. She watched those brass and steel fingers dance across the keys for a few minutes longer, then closed her eyes and placed her hands upon an imaginary keyboard, picturing, in her mind, the feel of the ivory as she found her place and began to play.
Or as she attempted to play.
However she pictured the keys in her mind, however well she recalled old scores, however certain she was of where her fingers ought to next land, her limbs simply refused to cooperate. The motions she made felt? awkward. Restrained, somehow, as though she did not have quite the control of her body that she was accustomed to. She let a scowl mar her face as she redo
ubled her efforts at focusing upon her imaginary performance, but the more she tried to force her body's cooperation, the more awkward and exaggerated her motions became, furthering her frustrations ever more.
Suddenly, strong hands grasped her own, holding them in place. Her eyes flew open to meet the steely grey of her husband's. In the corners of her vision, she could see several guests watching her, expressions ranging from interest, to concern, to the blend of scorn and embarrassment usually reserved for the mentally ill when they failed to compose themselves in public.
"Darling, you're drawing stares," her husband said quietly to her. "Are you alright?"
Why? She had merely been ?. She shook her head. Her thoughts were growing muddled, a frequent result of overstressing herself. She hadn't been playing, had she? No, she was attending the party. The automaton was the one playing.
"I ? I'm fine, dear," she said, pulling back slightly from his hands, though he didn't relax his grip. "I was merely ? recalling playing on my own piano."
He nodded. "I thought as much. I've told you before, you have yet to fully recover from your accident, and you're in no shape to be playing now."
Mary's eyes drifted back towards the artificial player on the stage, who, along with its bandmates, kept up the music, unconcerned with the scene playing out before them. "I was so good, then ?. How could I lose all of it?"
"You were perfect." He took one of her hands to his lips and kissed it, then released her other hand to put his upon her back. "And we'll have you perfect again soon enough. But you mustn't concern yourself with your piano. Attempting it could strain your body, and the stress would strain the mind. For now, it's best that you have a rest. You've worked yourself up."
"I'm fine, though, dear," she objected, though she couldn't muster the will for more than a token resistance when her husband began guiding her towards the door. "I could stay and watch the musicians a bit longer."
He shook his head. "No, that's what set you into this spell to begin with. Come along, you need to lie down and have a rest."
She gave in and allowed her husband to walk her from the floor, the eyes of several partygoers following them as they left, though only one said anything as they passed.