Fiendish Schemes by K. W. Jeter

to my dying day. “What manner of beast,” I enquired of the coachman, “are these?”
    “ ‘Beast’? No bluidy beast’re they.” His laugh rattled congenital phlegm in his neckerchiefed throat. “ ’Tis but pipes ye see.”
    I stared at him in noncomprehension. “What do you mean, pipes ? Are they not snakes? Giant serpents?”
    “Get a bluidy clew, man.” He pointed toward the fields. “D’ye see them movin’ about?”
    “No—” In this, the carriage driver was correct. Other than the hissing emissions from their flanks, no animate sign was visible. “I do not.”
    “Hardly be bluidy snakes, then, would they?” Gleeful scorn brightened his visage, of the variety relished by the unlettered, when they catch their educated betters in some apparent foolishness. “Snakes be writhin’ about, all wriggly like. ’Less they be daid, of course.” His self-congratulatory logic continued to its conclusion. “So these be pipes, ye maun admit.”
    “Pipes.” I mused over the baffling possibilities. The landscape being so marshy, as though our route had brought us to the edge of the infamously dismal Chat Moss, it hardly seemed likely that there was any need to convey water from one point to another across it. “Pipes bearing what?”
    “Aye, steam, of course.” His black-nailed index finger pointed again. “D’ye not see it?”
    Understanding broke behind my brow, as dams are riven by burrowing sappers’ sudden gunpowder charges. My habitation of the last few years had been so rural that I had read and heard gossip of these engineering marvels—so termed by their enthusiastic adherents—that had gripped the English countryside, but I had not witnessed them. Until now.
    This was my understanding, previously unconfirmed by observation: The country’s journals and broadsheets had been lavish in their printed adoration of that coterie of British entrepreneurs, men of wealth and influence who wished to become even wealthier and more influential by bringing the alleged benefits of steam power to society at large. The heat of the vast fires churning at the Earth’s core, conjectured by the more advanced thinkers in the scientific community, evidenced by the molten rock spewed forth by the Italian peninsula’s Mount Aetna and other, more distant volcanic apertures, would warm our hearths and furnish propulsive force to our factories. The slight disadvantage of there being few if any volcanoes and vaulting geysers in the British Isles would be addressed by the simple if arduous expedient of digging straight down to where these seething thermal channels were believed to run. Once tapped, the same red-hot, sluggish magma from which the overly excitable Romans had fled, would just as readily fire the boilers of our own newly created steam mines, as their inventors called them.
    More than mere heat being required to generate steam, though, the precise location of the steam mines was a pressing issue. While much of the English countryside was as perennially damp as the fields on the edge of which stood myself and my carriage driver, even greater and more easily channeled quantities of water were required to service this grand scheme. Thus the locating of the mines in what had previously been known as the Lake District. The idyllic, romantic shores of Windermere and Buttermere and Ullswater, and all the rest extolled by the enraptured poets, were transformed to muddy bogs as their liquid contents were funneled to the grim, grey power houses erected in the surrounding fells and valleys. That sable night, once lit by only the slowly wheeling constellations and the moon’s mensural caravanserai, was now reddened to a furious near-day by the lava-fed furnaces, their glow reflected by the now perpetual clouds pressing heavily from above. Gouts of fire, the inevitable accidents of industry, scorched the hillsides bare of trees and foliage, leaving only blackened rock where poetical daffodils had once nodded.
    “Aye,