Jean-Christophe Valtat - Aurorarama

AURORARAMA

Aurorarama

Copyright 2010 by Jean-Christophe Valtat

All rights reserved

First Melville House Printing: July 2010

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
mhpbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Valtat, Jean-Christophe, 1968
Aurorarama : a novel / Jean-Christophe Valtat.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-935554-88-2
1. Steampunk fiction. I. Title.
PQ2682.A438A97 2010
843.914dc22

2010025659

v3.1

To Serge, who built this city with me.

It was shewed us by Vision in Dreams, and out of Dreams, That that should be the Place we should begin upon; And though that Earth in view of Flesh, be very barren, yet we should trust the Spirit for a blessing.

A Blast on the Barren Land, or the Standard of True Community Advancd, Presented to the Sons of Adam by Henry Hotspur, Being a Platform to Plant the Waste Land Of the Northern Isles & Septentrional Parts, & to Restore the Regiment of Commonwealth, Printed in the Yeer 1649

Is not human fantasy,
Wild Aurora, likest thee,
Blossoming in nightly dreams,
Like thy shifting meteor-gleams?

Christopher Pearse Cranch,
To the Aurora Borealis, 1840

A Panorama of New Venice
by Samuel Elphinstone

Here is the true City of the Sun.
William F. Warren, Paradise Found, The Cradle of
the Human Race at the North Pole, 1885

I n New Venice, every year around February 15, when the sun goes up for the first time after four months of polar night, it is customary for the inhabitants to gather on the bridges and embankments and take off their mittens and hats to salute the benevolent star. By this, as the Inuit do, they manifest their respect and also their hope that they will be alive at the same time next year. It is a well-known piece of local lore that, having mocked this ritual, the German explorer Mr. Wulff died from cold, hunger, and exhaustion a few months afterward.

As far as Gods go, the Sun may not have, it is true, the most impressive record. He has certainly none of the gift of the gab that runs in the Jehovah family and when it comes to throwing lightning bolts Jove-style, He is as inept as the average mortal. But, down to earth as He is, when one needs a God who is punctual, reliable, and handy around the house, and that is exactly the kind of deity one needs above 80 North, good old Ray is likely to be the connoisseurs first pick. This is why, whatever confessions they claim to belong to, the New Venetians are at least once a year sun-worshipping heathens of the purest ilk. The sun, on this day, just stays aroundmore than upfor an hour or so, but when the night comes down again, the crowds throw a party in the streets that is noisy, spectacular, and messy, full of dominoes, fireworks, confetti, screams, laughter, brawls, trysts, and vomitus.

There is, however, a corporation for which this could be said to be the worst time of the year: the shore-workers of the Septentrional Scavenging and Sewerage Service, whose ungrateful duty it is to clean the mess. It was during the long night of that short day that one of their gangs made a strange discovery.

The three men, clad in the traditional black overcoats, white bird masks and wide-brimmed hats of their plague doctors outfits, operated in foggy Niflheim, the northernmost part of the city, right at the corner of the Pining and Pothorst canals. Their chasse-gallerieas the shore men call their bargeswas waiting just below the embankment, still in sled mode, for the ice on the canals had not been broken yet, as it would ritually be for the Spring Equinox.

Their sturdy silhouettes fading in and out of the thickening mist, the Scavengers were busy hooking an overbrimming large dust-bin to the crane in the barge when all of a sudden a faint jingling sound made them turn their long hooked beaks toward Byfrst Bridge. There, coming from where the canal dissolved into the night, passing the rare gas lamps that smeared the milky fog with blurs of livid light, emerged by and by, and much to their surprise, a sled whose pack of dogs had no driver at all.

The ghost sled approached, as steadily as allowed by the dreamlike strangeness of its apparition, and as it arrived next to the chasse-gallerie, stopped right there on its own. Wrapped in a cloud of breath and steamy fur that blended with the surrounding haze, the dogs stood still and, heads tilted, stared with intelligent eyes at the three Scavengers.

Such men, whether by trade or character, are not easily troubled, but this went, or came from, beyond the pale. They gazed at each other for a quizzical while. Chipp, who led the gang, eventually walked towards the edge of the embankment, snapped open the skates inserted in the soles of his hip boots, and lowered himself carefully onto the ice, while his gang mates reached for their lever-guns and watched over his progress. The dogs, however, showed no nervosity or fear as Chipp slid closer to them, his skates grating in the silent night.

The sled struck him as a curious hybrid of Inuk techniqueits runners were obviously one of those complex mosaics of driftwood and animal bonesbut its body was of a quite different nature: the platform was a copper cylinder, painted black, but with a pale green glass or crystal lid, over which Chipp leaned as far as his beak allowed, trying to see if there was something inside.

It was not something, but someone: a lady. Old enough. Dead, or so it seemed, as no blur of breath troubled the glass above her thin dark lips and her pale bony face. She wore a sober black dress of antique cut, and on her lap, her long fine hands were placed around an oval, silver-framed mirror that reflected a distant, dreamy image of Chipps bird mask.

He thumped on the glass with his thick black glove, knowing that it was useless, that the heavily made up eyelids would not open at his signal. He wondered what he should do with this spectacular piece of toshas they referred to their findings. Report it to the authorities? Certainly. But for Scavengers, the authorities were first and foremost their own tight community. They would decide together what to do.

What puzzled him most was that the sled seemed to have come straight from the North. And he knew that north of here there was nothing, and maybe not even that.

He drew a curtain aside, and in the dim, glimmering light of perfumed oil-lamps, found himself facing the incubator, a huge brass cylinder with a small padded door