A starship malfunctions and strands its 800 passengers on a planet eerily like the Pleistocene
Earth, complete with prehistoric mammals including woolly mammoths, dire wolves, and smilodons. And something else: tens of thousands of
abandoned alien machines consisting of a bowl and two pillars that
respond with drum-like sounds when touched. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any combination, and... something... coalesces in the bowl. It might
be a spoon or an axe or a twisted lump of silvery metal. These artifacts (dubbed “drumlins”) help the unwilling colonists survive, but there’s
something a little weird about what comes out of the “thingmaker”
machines. High-pitched sounds sometimes make drumlins twitch and combine into more complex things. Stranger still, what drumlins do seems to
depend on the thoughts of nearby humans. Wish hard while you whistle
just so... and something amazing may happen.
260 years on, the
castaways have created a civilization resembling late 19th Century
America, based in part on coal, steam, iron, and hard work--and in part
on the mysterious drumlin artifacts. Both short novels in this volume
are set against this background.
Drumlin Circus: Every spring,
Bramble Ceglarek takes Pretty Alice’s Wonderland Circus down the dirt
roads of the west country, dazzling townfolk with clowns, acrobats,
calliope music, and trained animals — especially trained animals. His
wife Julia trains them with a drumlin whistle, and they obey with
peculiar precision. The cultlike Bitspace Institute, hoping to train
animal assassins, sends agent Simon Kassel to steal the whistle. Unknown to him, Kassel has been set up to fail by his Institute rivals who want to be rid of him, and after Julia and her apprentice Rosa are abducted
by Institute thugs who attempt to kill him, Kassel switches loyalties
and joins the circus as a very scary clown.
He returns to
Institute HQ to rescue Julia and Rosa, only to discover that the
training whistle is much more than merely a whistle: a mysterious
“function controller” that compels animals, human beings, and even the
alien drumlin artifacts themselves to obey its bearer.
On
Gossamer Wings: From out in the dry rye fields of the west, rumors have
come to the Bitspace Institute that someone has drummed up something
valuable from the alien thingmakers: a large sphere of pure iron.
Institute agent Hiram König rides out to investigate, and discovers the
strange, mute young woman who has done the drumming. He also learns that the Big Ball of Iron is just the beginning of the previously unknown
drumlins that she has discovered in the vast "bitspace" of the alien
thingmakers. Despite the slow progress of technology in the Valinor
colony, where steam locomotives and the first primitive hydrogen
airships are state of the art, Natalie Bishop is using her talents with
the thingmakers to seek out the drumlin parts she needs to build a
heavier-than-air flying machine. For her, the flier is her masterpiece,
the work that will prove her worth to the people she cares about.
The race is on for König to extract Natalie from the pressure-cooker of a
small town that is her home, before it blows up around her and before
she takes the dazzlingly risky final step and tries to fly.
