The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  "I'm trying," I say. "But then what? We don't know what it does."

  This is the central question, perhaps of my life. It is why I go slow with Hanover. My hands already know where most of the parts go. They know most of what is broken, and why.

  "Fix it," Blake says, "or at the next council meeting, I will ask that you be sent to live with the hill people for a time."

  There's no disguising the self-hatred in his gaze. There's no disguising that he's serious.

  "For a time? And what will that prove? Except to show I can live in caves with shepherds?" I almost want an answer.

  Blake spits on the wooden floor. "No use to us, why should we feed you? House you..."

  Even ifI leave, she won't go back to you.

  "What if I fix it and all it does is blink? Or all it does is shed light, like a whale lamp? Or talk in nonsense rhymes? Or I fix it and it kills us all."

  "Don't care," Blake says. "Fix it."

  The cliffs around the village are low, like the shoulders of a slouching giant, and caulked with bird shit and white rock, veined through with dark green bramble. Tough, thick lizards scuttle through the branches. Tiny birds take shelter there, their dark eyes staring out from shadow. A smell almost like mint struggles through. Below is the cove where Shyver found Hanover.

  Rebecca and I walk there, far enough beyond the village that we cannot be seen, and we talk. We find the old trails and follow them, sometimes silly, sometimes serious. We don't need to be who we are in Sandhaven.

  "Blake's getting worse," I tell her. "More paranoid. He's jealous. He says he'll exile me from the village if I don't fix Hanover."

  "Then fix Hanover," Rebecca says.

  We are holding hands. Her palm is warm and sweaty in mine, but I don't care. Every moment I'm with her feels like something I didn't earn, wasn't looking for, but don't want to lose. Still, something in me rebels. It's tiring to keep proving myself.

  "I can do it," I say. "I know I can. But..."

  "Blake can't exile you without the support of the council," Lady Salt says. I know it's her, not Rebecca, because of the tone, and the way her blue eye flashes when she looks at me. "But he can make life difficult if you give him cause." A pause, a tightening of her grip. "He's in mourning. You know it makes him not himself. But we need him. We need him back."

  A twinge as I wonder how she means that. But it's true: Blake has led Sandhaven through good times and bad, made tough decisions, and cared about the village.

  Sometimes, though, leadership is not enough. What if what you really need is the instinct to be fearful? And the thought as we make our way back to the village: What if Blake is right about me?

  So I begin to work on Hanover in earnest. There's a complex balance to him that I admire. People think engineering is about practical application of science, and that might be right, if you're building something. But if you're fixing something, something you don't fully understand - say, you're fixing a Hanover - you have no access to a schematic, to a helpful context. Your work instead becomes a kind of detection. You become a kind of detective. You track down clues - cylinders that fit into holes in sheets of steel, that slide into place in grooves, that lead to wires, that lead to understanding.

  To do this, I have to stop my ad hoc explorations. Instead, with Shyver's reluctant help, I take Hanover apart systematically. I document where I find each part, and if I think it truly belongs there, or has become dislodged during the trauma that resulted in his "death." I note gaps. I label each part by what I believe it contributed to his overall function. In all things, I remember that Hanover has been made to look like a man, and therefore his innards roughly resemble those of a man in form or function, his makers consciously or subconsciously unable to ignore the implications of that form, that function.

  Shyver looks at the parts lying glistening on the table, and says, "They're so different out of him." So different cleaned up, greased with fresh fish oil. Through the window, the sun's light sets them ablaze. Hanover's burnished surface, whorled with a patina of greens, blues, and rust red. The world become radiant.

  When we remove the carapace of Hanover's head to reveal a thousand wires, clockwork gears, and strange fluids, even Shyver cannot not think of him as a statue anymore.

  "What does a machine like this do?" Shyver said, who has only rarely seen anything more complex as a hammer or a watch.

  I laugh. "It does whatever it wants to do, I imagine."

  By the time I am done with Hanover, I have made several leaps of logic. I have made decisions that cannot be explained as rational, but in their rightness set my head afire with the absolute certainty of Creation. The feeling energizes me and horrifies me all at once.

  It was long after my country became an Empire that I decided to escape. And still I might have stayed, even knowing what I had done. That is the tragedy of everyday life: when you are in it, you can never see your self clearly.

  Even seven years in, Sandhaven having made the Past the past, I still had nightmares of gleaming rows of airships. I would wake, screaming, from what had once been a blissful dream, and the Lady Salt and Rebecca both would be there to comfort me.

  Did I deserve that comfort?

  Shyver is there when Hanover comes alive. I've spent a week speculating on ways to bypass what looked like missing parts, missing wires. I've experimented with a hundred different connections. I've even identified Hanover's independent power source and recharged it using a hand-cranked generator.

  Lady Salt has gone out with the fishing fleet for the first time and the village is deserted. Even Blake has gone with her, after a quick threat in my direction once again. If the fishing doesn't go well, the evening will not go any better for me.

  Shyver says, "Is that a spark?"

  A spark?

  "Where?"

  I have just put Hanover back together again for possibly the twentieth time and planned to take a break, to just sit back and smoke a hand-rolled cigarette, compliments of the enigmatic hill people.

  "In Hanover's...eyes."

  Shyver goes white, backs away from Hanover, as if something monstrous has occurred, even though this is what we wanted.

  It brings memories flooding back - of the long-ago day steam had come rushing out of the huge iron bubble and the canvas had swelled, and held, and everything I could have wished for in my old life had been attained. That feeling had become addiction - I wanted to experience it again and again - but now it's bittersweet, something to cling to and cast away.

  My assistant then had responded much as Shyver is now: both on some instinctual level knowing that something unnatural has happened.

  "Don't be afraid," I say to Shyver, to my assistant.

  "I'm not afraid," Shyver says, lying.

  "You should be afraid," I say.

  Hanover's eyes gain more and more of a glow. A clicking sound comes from him. Click, click, click. A hum. A slightly rumbling cough from deep inside, a hum again. We prop him up so he is no longer on his side. He's warm to the touch.

  The head rotates from side to side, more graceful than in my imagination.

  A sharp intake of breath from Shyver. "It's alive!"

  I laugh then. I laugh and say, "In a way. It's got no arms or legs. It's harmless."

  It's harmless.

  Neither can it speak - just the click, click, click. But no words.

  Assuming it is trying to speak.

  John Blake and the Lady Salt come back with the fishing fleet. The voyage seems to have done Blake good. The windswept hair, the salt-stung face - he looks relaxed as they enter my workshop.

  As they stare at Hanover, at the light in its eyes, I'm almost jealous. Standing side by side, they almost resemble a King and his Queen, and suddenly I'm acutely aware they were lovers, grew up in the village together. Rebecca's gaze is distant; thinking of Blake or of me or of the sea? They smell of mingled brine and fish and salt, and somehow the scent is like a knife in my heart.

  "What does it do?" Bl
ake asks.

  Always, the same kinds of questions. Why should everything have to have

  a function?

  "I don't know," I say. "But the hill folk should find it pretty and perplexing, at least."

  Shyver, though, gives me away, makes me seem less and less from this place: "He thinks it can talk. We just need to fix it more. It might do all kinds of things for us."

  "It's fixed," I snap, looking at Shyver as if I don't know him at all. We've drunk together, talked many hours. I've given him advice about the blacksmith's daughter. But now that doesn't matter. He's from here and I'm from there. "We should trade it to the hill folk and be done with it."

  Click, click, click. Hanover won't stop. And I just want it over with, so I don't slide into the past.

  Blake's calm has disappeared. I can tell he thinks I lied to him. "Fix it," he barks. "I mean really fix it. Make it talk."

  He turns on his heel and leaves the workshop, Shyver behind him.

  Lady Salt approaches, expression unreadable. "Do as he says. Please. The fishing... there's little enough out there. We need every advantage now."

  Her hand on the side of my face, warm and calloused, before she leaves.

  Maybe there's no harm in it. If I just do what they ask, this one last time - the last of many times - it will be over. Life will return to normal. I can stay here. I can still find a kind of peace.

  Once, there was a foolish man who saw a child's balloon rising into the sky and thought it could become a kind of airship. No one in his world had ever created such a thing, but he already had ample evidence of his own genius in the things he had built before. Nothing had come close to challenging his engineering skills. No one had ever told him he might have limits. His father, a biology teacher, had taught him to focus on problems and solutions. His mother, a caterer, had shown him the value of attention to detail and hard work.

  He took his plans, his ideas, to the government. They listened enough to give him some money, a place to work, and an assistant. All of this despite his youth, because of his brilliance, and in his turn he ignored how they talked about their enemies, the need to thwart external threats.

  When this engineer was successful, when the third prototype actually worked, following three years of flaming disaster, he knew he had created something that had never before existed, and his heart nearly burst with pride. His wife had left him because she never saw him except when he needed sleep, the house was a junk yard, and yet he didn't care. He'd done it.

  He couldn't know that it wouldn't end there. As far as he was concerned, they could take it apart and let him start on something else, and his life would have been good because he knew when he was happiest.

  But the government's military advisors wanted him to perfect the airship. They asked him to solve problems that he hadn't thought about before. How to add weight to the carriage without it serving as undue ballast, so things could be dropped from the airship. How to add "defensive" weapons. How to make them work without igniting the fuel that drove the airship. A series of challenges that appealed to his pride, and maybe, too, he had grown used to the rich life he had now. Caught up in it all, he just kept going, never said no, and focused on the gears, the wires, the air ducts, the myriad tiny details that made him ignore everything else.

  This foolish man used his assistants as friends to go drinking with, to sleep with, to be his whole life, creating a kind of cult there in his workshop that had become a gigantic hangar, surrounded by soldiers and barbed-wire fence. He'd become a national hero.

  But I still remembered how my heart had felt when the prototype had risen into the air, how the tears trickled down my face as around me men and women literally danced with joy. How I was struck by the image of my own success, almost as if I were flying.

  The prototype wallowed and snorted in the air like a great golden whale in a harness, wanting to be free: a blazing jewel against the bright blue sky, the dream made real.

  I don't know what the Lady Salt would have thought of it. Maybe nothing at all.

  One day, Hanover finally speaks. I push a button, clean a gear, move a circular bit into place. It is just me and him. Shyver wanted no part of it.

  He says, "Command water the sea was bright with the leavings of the fish

  that there were now going to be."

  Clicks twice, thrice, and continues clicking as he takes the measure of me with his golden gaze and says, "Engineer Daniker."

  The little hairs on my neck rise. I almost lose my balance, all the blood rushing to my head.

  "How do you know my name?"

  "You are my objective. You are why I was sent."

  "Across the ocean? Not likely."

  "I had a ship once, arms and legs once, before your traps destroyed me."

  I had forgotten the traps I'd set. I'd almost forgotten my true name.

  "You will return with me. You will resume your duties."

  I laugh bitterly. "They've found no one to replace me?"

  Hanover has no answer - just the clicking - but I know the answer. Child prodigy. Unnatural skills. An unswerving ability to focus in on a problem and solve it. Like... building airships. I'm still an asset they cannot afford to lose.

  "You've no way to take me back. You have no authority here," I say.

  Hanover's bright eyes dim, then flare. The clicking intensifies. I wonder now if it is the sound of a weapons system malfunctioning.

  "Did you know I was here, in this village?" I ask.

  A silence. Then: "Dozens were sent for you - scattered across the world."

  "So no one knows."

  "I have already sent a signal. They are coming for you."

  Horror. Shock. And then anger - indescribable rage, like nothing I've ever experienced.

  When they find me with Hanover later, there isn't much left of him. I've smashed his head in and then his body, and tried to grind that down with a pestle. I didn't know where the beacon might be hidden, or if it even mattered, but I had to try.

  They think I'm mad - the soft-spoken blacksmith, a livid Blake, even Rebecca. I keep telling them the Empire is coming, that I am the Empire's chief engineer. That I've been in hiding. That they need to leave now - into the hills, into the sea. Anywhere but here...

  But Blake can't see it - he sees only me - and whatever the Lady Salt

  thinks, she hides it behind a sad smile.

  "I said to fix it," Blake roars before he storms out. "Now it's no good for anything!"

  Roughly I am taken to the little room that functions as the village jail, with the bars on the window looking out on the sea. As they leave me, I am shouting, "I created their airships! They're coming for me!"

  The Lady Salt backs away from the window, heads off to find Blake, without listening.

  After dark, Shyver comes by the window, but not to hear me out - just to ask why I did it.

  "We could at least have sold it to the hill people," he whispers. He sees only the village, the sea, the blacksmith's daughter. "We put so much work into it."

  I have no answer except for a story that he will not believe is true.

  Once, there was a country that became an Empire. Its armies flew out from the center and conquered the margins, the barbarians. Everywhere it inflicted itself on the world, people died or came under its control, always under the watchful, floating gaze of the airships. No one had ever seen anything like them before. No one had any defense for them. People wrote poems about them and cursed them and begged for mercy from their attentions.

  The chief engineer of this atrocity, the man who had solved the problems, sweated the details, was finally called up by the Emperor of the newly minted Empire fifteen years after he'd seen a golden shape float against a startling blue sky. The Emperor was on the far frontier, some remote place fringed by desert where the people built their homes into the sides of hills and used tubes to spit fire up into the sky.

  They took me to His Excellency by airship, of course. For the first time, exce
pt for excursions to the capital, I left my little enclave, the country I'd created for myself. From on high, I saw what I had helped create. In the conquered lands, the people looked up at us in fear and hid when and where they could. Some, beyond caring, threw stones up at us: an old woman screaming words I could not hear from that distance, a young man with a bow, the arrows arching below the carriage until the airship commander opened fire, left a red smudge on a dirt road as we glided by from on high.

  This vision I had not known existed unfurled like a slow, terrible dream, for we were like languid Gods in our progress, the landscape revealing itself to us with a strange finality.

  On the fringes, war still was waged, and before we reached the Emperor I saw my creations clustered above hostile armies, raining down my bombs onto stick figures who bled, screamed, died, were mutilated, blown apart... all as if in a silent film, the explosions deafening us, the rest reduced to distant pantomime narrated by the black humored cheer of our airship's officers.

  A child's head resting upon a rock, the body a red shadow. A city reduced to rubble. A man whose limbs had been torn from him. All the same.

  By the time I reached the Emperor, received his blessing and his sword, I had nothing to say; he found me more mute than any captive, his instrument once more. And when I returned, when I could barely stand myself anymore, I found a way to escape my cage.

  Only to wash up on a beach half a world away.

  Out of the surf, out of the sand, dripping and half-dead, I stumble and the Lady Salt and Blake stand there, above me. I look up at them in the halflight of morning, arm raised against the sun, and wonder whether they will welcome me or kill me or just cast me aside.

  The Lady Salt looks doubtful and grim, but Blake's broad face breaks into a smile. "Welcome stranger," he says, and extends his hand.

  I take it, relieved. In that moment, there's no Hanover, no pain, no sorrow, nothing but the firm grip, the arm pulling me up toward them.