by Neil Clarke
Oli knelt by his dog and stroked his fur. There was water in the boy’s eyes, a combination of oils and mucins and hormones such as prolactin. But he wiped away his tears.
“Good-bye, Rex,” he said. The dog whined. Oli nodded, seriously, and turned away.
This was how Oli left us, alone, on his quest to become a real boy: with the town silent behind him, with the broken moon shining softly overhead, with us watching him leave. There is an old poem left from before, from long before, about the child walking away . . . about the parent letting them go.
We think we were sad, but we really don’t know.
We waved, but he never turned back and saw us.
“This is a very strange story, Elder Simeon,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “It is very old, from when the world was different.”
“Were there really thinking machines in those days?” Mowgai asked, and Elder Simeon shrugged.
“We are thinking machines,” he said.
“But what happened to the boy?” I said. “What happened to Oli?”
“They tell no stories of his journey in Tyr,” Elder Simeon said. “Nor in Suf or in the floating islands. But old Grandma Toffle tells the tale . . .” But here he fell silent, and his mechanical duck waddled up to him and tucked its head under Elder Simeon’s arm, and its golden feathers shone in the late afternoon sun. “It’s just a story,” Elder Simeon said reluctantly.
We left him then, and wended our way back across the fields and over the brook to the houses. That night, after the sun had set and the lanterns were lit over our homes, I felt very grateful that I was not like that strange boy, Oli, and that I lived in a real place, that I lived on the Land itself and not in something that only mimicked it. But I felt sad for him, too: and Mowgai and I sought out old Grandma Toffle, who sat by the fire, warming her hands, for all that it was summer, and we asked her to tell us the story of the boy.
“Who told you that nonsense?” she said. “It wasn’t old Simeon, was it?”
We admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that it was, and she snorted. “The old fool. There is nothing wrong with machines in their rightful place, but to fill your heads with such fancy! Listen. There was never such a city, and if there was, it has long since rotted to the ground. Old Simeon may speak of self-repairing mechanisms and whatnot, but the truth is that decay always sets in. Nothing lasts forever, children. The ancients built cities bigger than the sky, and weapons that could kill the Earth and almost did, at that. But do you see their airplanes flying through the sky? Their cities lie in ruins. The old roads are abandoned. Life continues as it always did. The mistake we’d always made was to think ourselves the most important species. But the planet doesn’t care if humans live or die upon it. It is just as important to be human as it is to be an ant, or a stinging nettle.”
“But . . . but we can think,” said Mowgai.
Old Grandma Toffle snorted again. “Think!” she said. “And where did that ever get you?”
“But we can tell stories,” I said quietly.
“Yes . . .” she said. “Yes. That we can. Very well. What was your question again?”
“Do you know what happened to the boy, Oli, when he left the town?”
“Know? No, I can’t say as that I know, little Mai.”
“Then . . .”
Her eyes twinkled in the light of the fire, much as Elder Simeon’s did in the sun. When she smiled, there were dimples on her cheeks, making her appear momentarily younger. She said, “Sit down, children. Sit down, and let me tell you. The boy wandered for a long time . . .”
The boy wandered for a long time away from the town. He missed his parents, and his dog, and everyone. The world beyond the town was very different from everything he’d ever known. It was a rough place at that time, which was not that long after the great floods and the collapse of the old world, and many of the springs were poisoned, and the animals hostile and deadly, and flocks of wild drones flew against darkening skies, and unexploded ordnance lay all about and some of it was . . .
Not exactly smart, but . . .
Cunning.
He went for a long time without food or water, and he’d grown weak when he met the Fox and the Cat. They were not exactly a fox and a cat. One was a sort of mobile infiltration unit, designed for stealth, and the other was a stubby little tank. They were exactly the sort of unsuitable companions the Town had worried about when it let the boy go.
“Hello, young sir!” said the Cat.
“Who . . . who is it?” said the Fox. “Who dares . . . walk the paths of the dead?”
“My name’s Oli,” said Oli. He looked at them with curiosity, for he had never seen such machines before.
“I have never met an Oli,” said the Cat.
“I have never tasted an Oli,” said the Fox, somewhat wistfully.
“Please,” said Oli, “I am very hungry and very tired. Do you know where I could find shelter?”
The Fox and the Cat communicated silently with each other, for they, too, were very hungry, though their sustenance was of another kind.
“We know . . . a place,” said the Fox.
“Not very far,” said the Cat.
“Not . . . not far at all,” said the Fox.
“We could show it to you,” said the Cat.
“Show it to . . . you,” said the Fox.
“Shut up!” said the Cat.
“Shut . . . oh,” said the Fox.
“A place of many miracles,” said the Fox, with finality.
And Oli, though he couldn’t be said to have trusted these two strange machines, agreed.
They traveled for a long time through that lost landscape, and the wasteland around them was slowly transformed as the sun rose and set and rose again. Soon they came to the outskirts of a vast city, of a kind Oli had never seen and that only salvagers now see. It was one of the old cities, and as it was still not that long after the fall of the cities, much of it still remained. They passed roads choked with transportation pods like weeds growing through the cracks, and vast grand temples where once every manner of thing had been for sale. Broken houses littered the sides of the streets and towers lay on their sides, and the little tank that was the Cat rolled over the debris while the Fox snuck around it, and all the while Oli struggled to keep up.
The city was very quiet, though things lived in it, as the Fox and the Cat well knew. Predatory things, dangerous things, and they looked upon Oli with hatred in their seeing apparatus, for they hated all living things. Yet these were small, rodentlike constructions, the remnants of a vanished age, who loved and hated their fallen masters in equal measure, and mourned them when they thought no one was looking their way. And they were scared of the Fox and of the Cat, who were battle hardened, and so the unlikely trio passed through that city unharmed.
At last they came to a large forest, and went amid the trees.
“Not far now,” said the Cat.
“To the place of . . . of miracles,” said the Fox.
“What is this place?” asked Oli.
The Fox and the Cat communicated silently.
“It is a place where no machines can go,” the Cat said at last; and it sounded wistful and full of resentment at once. “Where trees grow from the ground and water flows in the rivers and springs. Where the ground is fertile and the sun shines on the organic life-forms and gives them sustenance. Plants! Flowers! People . . . useless, ugly things!”
But the Fox said, “I . . . like flowers,” and it sounded wistful only, with no hate. And the Cat glared at it but said nothing. And so they traveled on, deep into the forest, where the manshonyagger lived.
“What’s a manshonyagger?” said Mowgai, and as he spoke the word, I held myself close and felt cold despite the fire in the hearth. And old Grandma Toffle said, “The man hunters, which roamed the earth in those days after the storms and the wars, and hunted the remnants of humanity. They were sad machines, I think now, driven crazy with grief for the world, and blin
ded by their programming. They were not evil, so much as they were made that way. In that forest lived such a manshonyagger, and the Fox and the Cat were taking the unwitting Oli to see it, for it had ruled in that land for a very long time, and was powerful among all the machines, and they knew they could get their heart’s desire from it, if only they could give it what it wanted, which was a human.”
“But what did the Fox and the Cat want?” asked Mowgai.
Old Grandma Toffle shrugged. “That,” she said, “nobody knows for sure.”
Stories, I find, are like that. Things don’t turn out the way they’re supposed to, people’s motivations aren’t clear, machines exceed their programming. Odd bits are missing. I often find myself thinking about the Fox and the Cat, these days, with the nights lengthening. Were they bad, or did we just misunderstand them? They had no regard for Oli’s life; but then, did we expect them to? They learned only from their masters, and their masters were mostly gone.
In any case, they came to the forest, and deep within the forest, in the darkest part, they heard a sound . . .
“What was that?” said Oli.
“It was nothing,” said the Cat.
“N-nothing,” said the Fox.
The sound came again, and Oli, who was near passing out from exhaustion and hunger, nevertheless pressed on, toward its source. He passed through a thick clump of trees and saw a house.
The house stood alone in the middle of the forest, and it reminded him of his own home, which he had started to miss very much, for the ruined houses of the city they had passed earlier were nothing at all like it. This was a small and pleasant farmhouse, built of white stones, mottled with moss and ivy, and in the window of the house there was a little girl with turquoise hair.
“Please,” said Oli. “May I come in?”
“No . . .” whispered the Fox, and the Cat hissed, baring empty bomb canisters.
“Go away,” said the little girl with turquoise hair. “I am dead.”
“How can you be dead?” said Oli, confused.
“I am waiting for my coffin to arrive,” said the little girl. “I have been waiting for so long.”
“Enough!” cried the Cat, and the Fox rolled forward threateningly, and the two machines made to grab Oli before he could enter the sphere of influence of the house.
“Let me go!” cried Oli, who was afraid. He looked beseechingly up at the little girl in the window. “Help me!” he said.
But the Cat and the Fox were determined to bring Oli to the manshonyagger, and they began to force the boy away from the house. He looked back at the girl in the window. He saw something in her eyes then, something old, and sad. Then, with a sigh, and a flash of turquoise, she became a mote of light and glided from the house and came to land, unseen, on Oli’s shoulder.
“Perhaps I am not all dead,” she said. “Perhaps there is a part of me that’s stayed alive, through all the long years—”
But at that moment, the earth trembled, and the trees bent and broke, and a sound like giant footsteps echoed through the forest. Oli stopped fighting his captors, and the Fox and the Cat both looked up—and up—and up—and the Cat said, “It’s here, it’s heard our cries!” and the Fox said, with reverence, “Manshonyagger . . .”
“But just what is a manshonyagger?” demanded Mowgai.
Old Grandma Toffle smiled, rocking in her chair, and we could see that she was growing sleepy. “They could take all sorts of shapes,” she said, “though this one was said to look like a giant metal human being . . .”
The giant footsteps came closer and closer, until a metal foot descended without warning from the heavens and crushed the house of the little girl with the turquoise hair, burying it entirely. From high above there was a creaking sound, and then a giant face filled the sky as it descended and peered at them curiously. Though how it could be described as “curious” it is hard to say, since the face was metal and had no moving features from which to form expressions.
Oli shrank into himself. He wished he’d never left the town, and that he’d listened to Mrs. Baker and turned back and gone home. He missed Rex.
He missed, he realized, his childhood.
“A human . . . !” said the manshonyagger.
“We want . . .” said the Fox.
“We want what’s ours!” said the Cat.
“What was . . . promised,” said the Fox.
“We want the message sent back by the Exilarch,” said the Cat.
The giant eyes regarded them with indifference. “Go back to the city,” the manshonyagger said. “And you will find the ending to your story. Go to the tallest building, now fallen on its side, from whence the ancient ships once went to orbit, and climb into the old control booth at its heart, and there you will find it. It is a rock the size of a human fist, a misshapen lump of rock from the depths of space.”
Then, ignoring them, the giant machine reached down and picked Oli up, very carefully, and raised him to the sky.
Below, the Cat and the Fox exchanged signals; and they departed at once, toward the city. But what this message was that they sought, and who the Exilarch was, I do not know, and it belongs perhaps in another story. They never made it either. It was a time when people had crept back into the blighted zones, a rough people more remnants of the old days than of ours, and they had begun to hunt the old machines and to destroy them. The Cat and the Fox fell prey to such an ambush, and they perished; and this rock from the depths of space was never found, if indeed it had ever existed.
Oli, meanwhile, found himself high above the world . . .
“But this is just a story, right?” said Mowgai. “I mean, there aren’t really things like manshonyaggers. There can’t be!”
“Do you want me to stop?” said old Grandma Toffle.
“No, no, I just . . .”
“There were many terrible things done in the old days,” said old Grandma Toffle. “Were there really giant, human-shaped robots roaming the Earth in those days? That I can’t honestly tell you. And was there really a little dead girl with turquoise hair? That, too, I’m sure I can’t say, Mowgai.”
“But she wasn’t really a little girl, was she?” I said. “She wasn’t that at all.”
“Very good, little Mai,” said old Grandma Toffle.
“She was a fairy!” said Mowgai triumphantly.
“A simulated personality, yes,” said old Grandma Toffle. “Bottled up and kept autonomously running. Such things were known, back then. Toys, for the children, really. Only this one somehow survived, grew old as the children it was meant to play with had perished.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
“Things were awful back then,” said old Grandma Toffle complacently. “Now, do you want to hear the rest of it? There’s not that long to go.”
“Please,” said Mowgai, though he didn’t really look like he wanted to hear any more.
“Very well. Oli looked down, and . . .”
Oli looked down, and the entire world was spread out far below. He could see the shimmering blue sea in the distance, and the ruined city, and the blasted plains. And far in the distance he thought he could see the place the Cat and the Fox spoke of, the place of miracles: it was green and brown and yellow and blue, a land the like of which had not been seen in the world for centuries or more. It had rivers and fields and forests, insects and butterflies and people, and the sun shone down on wheat and fig trees, cabbages and daisies. And on little children—children just like you.
It was the Land, of course.
And Oli longed to go there.
“A human child,” said the giant robot. Its eyes were the size of houses. “It has been so long . . .”
“What will . . . what will you do with me?” said Oli, and there was only a slight tremor in his voice.
“Kill . . .” said the robot, though it sounded uncertain.
“Please,” said Oli. “I don’t even know how to be a real boy. I just want to . . . I just want to be.”
> “Kill . . .” said the robot. But it sounded dubious, as though it had forgotten what the word meant.
Then the little girl with turquoise hair shot up from Oli’s shoulder in a shower of sparks, startling him, and hovered between him and the giant robot.
“What she said to the manshonyagger,” said old Grandma Toffle, “nobody knows for certain. Perhaps she saw in the robot the sort of child she never got the chance to play with. And perhaps the robot, too, was tired, for it could no longer remember why it was that it was meant to hunt humans. The conference between the little fairy and the giant robot lasted well into the night; and Oli, having seen the sun set over the distant Land, eventually fell asleep, exhausted, in the giant’s palm.”
And here she stopped, and sat back in her rocking chair, and closed her eyes.
“Grandma Toffle?” I said.
“Grandma Toffle!” said Mowgai.
But old Grandma Toffle had begun, not so gently, to snore. And we looked at each other, and Mowgai tried to pull on her arm, but she merely snorted in her sleep and turned her head away. And so we never got to hear the end of the story from her.
That summer long ago, I roamed across the Land with Mowgai, through hot days that seemed never to end. We’d pick berries by the stream, and watch the adults in the fields, and try to catch the tiny froglets in the pond with our fingers, though they always slipped from our grasp. Mowgai, I think, identified with Oli much more than I did. He would retell the story to me, under the pine trees, in the cool of the forest, with the soft breeze stirring the needles. He would wonder and worry, and though I kept telling him it was only a story, it had become more than that for him. One day we went to visit Elder Simeon at his house in the foot of the hills. When he saw us coming, he emerged from his workshop, his clockwork creations waddling and crawling and hopping after him. He welcomed us in. His open yard smelled of machine oil and mint, and from there we could see the curious hills and their angular sides. It was then—reluctantly, I think—that he told us the rest of the story.
“The robot and the fairy spoke long into the night,” he said, “and what arrangement they at last reached, nobody knows for sure. That morning, very early, before the sun rose, the manshonyagger began to stride across the blasted plains. With each stride it covered an enormous distance. It crushed stunted trees and poisonous wells and old human dwellings, long fallen into ruin, and the tiny machines down below fled from its path. The girl with turquoise hair was with him, residing inside his chest, where people keep their hearts. The manshonyagger strode across the broken land, as the sun rose slowly in the sky and the horizon grew lighter, and all the while the little boy slept soundly in the giant’s palm.