Barren Cove

by Ariel S. Winter

  “So I should read for my protection?”

  “Master Vandley read for pleasure as well. He told me he could read much faster than the tablet could talk.”

  “I’ll read for protection,” Beachstone said, and sat up and leaned forward. “ ‘The . . . cat . . . is also . . . crying.’ ” He advanced the page. “ ‘The ellff says, ‘Do n-ah-t cry.’”

  “Good,” Asimov 3000 said.

  Beachstone didn’t reply. He shifted, bringing his legs up under him so he was on his knees, leaning over the table. Asimov 3000 resisted the impulse to reprimand the boy for having his feet on the chair. He did not want to discourage Beachstone now that he had resolved to work hard.

  Beachstone continued to sound things out, the words that he had seen before coming faster and more fluidly, still scratching his leg at intervals.

  The front door opened. The boy started at the sound, watching the front hall through the dining room door. Kent appeared, paused, and went on.

  Beachstone returned to his lesson, his focus uncanny, fending off any help Asimov 3000 tried to offer as he decoded the simple text and went on to the next story. The robot was proud that he had been able to instill such concentration, satisfied in a way that many robots today would not understand.

  Eventually Asimov 3000 went to prepare a meal for the boy. The stripe of sunlight on the table had shifted, so it didn’t quite reach the tablet anymore. The robot placed the plate on the table, but Beachstone didn’t even glance at it. Asimov 3000’s pride from earlier turned to worry. Such intensity could not be safe. Had he scared the boy too much with his talk of deceitful robots?

  “ ‘. . . break the egg,’ ” the boy read in an expressionless monotone.

  “Good work,” Asimov 3000 said.

  The boy moved on to the next sentence.

  5.

  MARY STOOD AT the edge of the cliff behind the house watching the small speck on the beach below. From this distance, with no zoom, the boy looked like his namesake, like a stone that had been washed ashore. When she did zoom in, he came into focus, still as immobile as a rock, sitting with his feet flat in front of him so that his legs formed two triangles with the ground. His wrists resting on his knees, he held a tablet in front of his face. Good. He was safe. She checked on him every day at some point in the afternoon, worried that Kent would try something else to harm the boy.

  Already as penitence, Mary had gone to town and found the small shop that served the human population. It brought in supplies on an as-needed basis, filling each human family’s account of regularly ordered items—rice, flour, sugar, butchered meat. Mr. Brown, the shop owner, had been skeptical when Mary came into the store with her list of items. He asked if the order was to be charged to Mr. Vandley’s account, that he thought Mr. Vandley had passed on, though the account hadn’t been used in many years. But Mary set up a new account in her father’s name and asked for it to be kept supplied regularly. The money she had slid across the counter had spurred Mr. Brown’s attempt to fill the order.

  But errands were the easy part. Mary wanted to interact with the boy directly again, like she had when she stitched him up. Father fawned over the boy, acting almost hostile to his own children, making it difficult for her to play a part in the human’s care.

  She watched the waves hurry up the beach, nearly touching Beachstone’s feet, but stopping just short. Behind him, the cliff’s shadow crept toward the water, poised to ensnare him, as though he sat in the light between two realms.

  There had been moments when it seemed that Beachstone was pleased to see her. The way he relaxed when she came into whatever room he was in. She wished to message him at those times, but there was no way she could, and she didn’t want to speak aloud in front of her father or brother. If only they had time alone.

  She watched him some more. What was she afraid of? Hurting him? Being useless? Having misread his human cues? That he cared for her no more than he did for Kent? His manner when she had saved him from her brother had been anything but grateful. She reviewed every time they had been together. There was so little she understood.

  There was only one way to learn.

  She hurried to the beach stairs and didn’t pause at the bottom, afraid to lose her momentum. She crossed through the cliff’s shadow to the border of sun a few feet from the boy. Her shadow preceded her, and he looked back before she was alongside him.

  “Hello,” she said.

  He squinted at her. “Move over one step. The sun’s in my eyes.”

  She came around in front of him, on the wave-smoothed part of the sand, so the sun wouldn’t be a concern. “Are you watching?” she asked.

  He scratched his thigh. “I’m reading.”

  “Father taught you.”

  He turned back to the screen. She could see all the muscle movements in his face, the strain under his eyes above the cheekbone, a quivering millimeter at the left corner of his mouth, his ears pulled forward. His eyes were not following the words. He was uncomfortable and . . . angry. She had been wrong. He didn’t care for her. “What are you reading?”

  “Stories. About long ago when there were no robots, only people.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re exciting.”

  “Exciting like going to a carnival, or exciting like imminent danger?”

  He looked at her, his eyes narrowed, and there was the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. Mary felt relieved. She hadn’t realized quite how badly she needed him to like her. All those years of hearing her father speak of the Vandleys almost like gods. She wanted something like that for herself.

  “I’ve never been to a carnival,” he said at last.

  “Neither have I,” she said. “But I know of them.”

  “Sit down,” Beachstone said. “I don’t like you standing over me.”

  She complied, sitting cross-legged in front of him.

  “Next to me,” he said. “So we both can see the water.”

  She didn’t understand why, but she did it anyway. He resumed reading without saying anything, scratching his leg occasionally. A sandpiper skittered to and fro, following the waves with precision. A group of gulls swooped at the water and then pulled up to land on the beach. Mary had seen these things before, but she studied them to avoid looking at Beachstone, knowing enough at least to know that staring made humans uncomfortable. After several minutes, Beachstone threw the tablet on the sand in front of them. Mary reached for it without thinking, and as she picked it up, she uploaded the story he had been reading.

  It was about some kind of human with abilities no human ever possessed—flight, excessive strength, nearly instantaneous healing—as he fought a murderous cyborg.

  “There was a cyborg—”

  “He was defeated, but not deactivated,” Mary said.

  “You uploaded it?” Beachstone asked. His head flopped back in annoyance. “I was going to tell you the story.” He grabbed the tablet and tossed it to his other side.

  “You can still tell me,” she said.

  “No, I can’t,” he said, picking a seashell out of the sand.

  She didn’t understand why he was upset, only that he was. “Cyborgs never actually reached that level of technology,” Mary said.

  “And people never flew,” Beachstone said. “It’s a story.”

  “Entertainment.”

  They sat in silence for seventy-six seconds.

  “Do you ever wonder?” Beachstone said.

  “I predict. And worry about my predictions.”

  “It’s not quite the same.”

  She figured it wasn’t. But she didn’t know how to do what he was asking. “Tell me a different story,” she said.

  “Forget it.” He threw the shell toward the sandpiper. It fell short and the bird ignored it. He got onto his knees, and started pushing some of the dry
sand into the wet sand. “Help me build a city,” he said.

  She crawled over to him and started to push more sand into his pile. He mixed the wet and the dry sand and started shaping it into a tower.

  “I’ll be the good guy,” he said as he built. He examined her. “We’ll both be good guys, but I’m more powerful. Start your own building.”

  She began a second pile. Beachstone was trying to smooth out his tower, so that it had flat sides, but it looked more like a skinny volcano. “Who is the bad guy?”

  “We need better tools,” he said, as a portion of his building sloughed off the side. He used that sand to start making another building, and then he looked at hers, which was wide, but had smooth sides in which she had used a shell to cut windows. “That’s good,” he said. “I could do better if I had some real tools.”

  Mary started another building next to her first. The idea of building a city meant just for them was challenging in a way that caused Mary’s processors to come close to capacity. It was something she would never have considered.

  “There’s an evil robot who used to be a cyborg but ripped his last human parts out of him,” Beachstone said. “Now he likes to cut apart humans like he did to his own body.”

  Mary felt a flicker of hurt at that scenario. She couldn’t help but feel it implicated her brother and she felt protective, even if Kent’s attack had made her livid. But at the same time, Beachstone had made her a good guy, and she didn’t want to jeopardize that. She smoothed the conical top of her second building and began cutting a diamond pattern into it. When she noticed Beachstone had stopped digging, she looked up and saw he was watching her.

  Suddenly, he knocked his first building over and then crushed another. He jumped up. “You don’t think this is silly, do you?”

  She wanted to say it was exciting, like the story he’d been reading, but she just shook her head no.

  He looked up at the sky, then down the beach. Without another word he started running, away from the house. The cliff’s shadow had overtaken the entire beach, and Mary worried he would be cold. She saw the discarded tablet, picked it up, and brought it into the cabana. Back on the beach, she zoomed and saw that he hadn’t gone far. He was throwing something into the ocean. She didn’t need to worry. Instead, as she mounted the stairs, she thought about building a city just for them.

  • • •

  Late the next afternoon, she found him on the beach, digging in the ruins of their city. She set down the bucket of tools she had brought him, from which he immediately drew a spade and continued working. “The cyborg’s escaped,” he said. “You say what happens next.”

  Mary knelt. What had been her buildings were now rounded lumps of wet sand, washed free of details by the ocean. A miniature tide pool had formed in the street Beachstone had built to connect them.

  “The city suffers annual typhoons,” Beachstone said, “and is in a constant state of being rebuilt.”

  “The cyborg escaped because the prison was damaged in the storm?” Mary said.

  “Yeah,” Beachstone said, a smile spreading across his face. “We’ve got to stop the cyborg, but all these people need our help too, because their homes have been destroyed.”

  “Do we each devote ourselves to one of the tasks for efficiency?” Mary asked.

  “No, the people’s immediate safety is most important. We need to build them shelters.”

  They set about doing that, building a complex of short, square buildings in a grid pattern. When they had twelve such buildings, indistinguishable from one another, Beachstone sat up. “Okay, that’s enough,” he said. He picked through the bucket of tools, pulled out a small rake, and dragged it through the sand at his side, making parallel tears that resembled freshly tilled farmland. His face was crunched in concern. “We need to drain the street,” he said. He rifled through the tools some more and brought out a rusty trowel. He made a deep cut at the end of the tide pool, and the water started to flow toward the ocean.

  “Now we find the cyborg?” Mary asked.

  “Now we find the cyborg,” Beachstone said.

  Mary waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “Where is he?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Where would you go?”

  She looked at the world they had just completed. “Tunnel under the new shelters. Destabilize the foundations. Let the whole thing collapse.”

  Beachstone grinned. “That would kill hundreds of people. Perfect.”

  Mary felt a wave of happiness. She had contributed to the story and he had liked it! She cast her eyes down and smiled.

  “You start at that end, and I’ll—” He broke off, staring at her. He reached out with his sand-covered hand as though he was going to touch her face. “You look . . .”

  She turned her head away, embarrassed. Had she done something wrong? Then how come she could feel her smile broaden? She checked his expression. Now he looked down, bashful.

  He started digging on his side of the shelters. “You dig on that side, and I’ll dig on this side, and we’ll see if we can meet in the middle without it falling apart.”

  Mary picked out another trowel. Digging with her hands was causing small abrasions in the simul-flesh on her fingertips, making them rough.

  They worked in silence, pausing on occasion to check the other’s progress. The sand, black flecked, became more and more difficult to bore through, packed hard. The cliff’s shadow was upon them, and the holes were as dark as night. Mary saw the sweat running down Beachstone’s face. “Are you all right?” she said.

  He sat back on his heels. “I’m fine,” he said, but he was pale as well as sweaty. “We need to dig a moat, so the tunnel doesn’t fill with water. We’re not going to finish it today.” He stood up and ran his trowel in a straight line between the complex and the ocean, cutting deeper and deeper. Mary moved over to help. When Beachstone judged their work sufficient, he threw the trowel aside and lay down on the sand, looking up at the darkening sky. He rested his hands on his stomach and gave a deep sigh. “Thank you,” he said.

  Mary was confused. He was thanking her? She made the appropriate reply. “You are welcome.”

  A land breeze passed over them toward the sea, and Beachstone sat up. “I’m hungry,” he said. He stood and shook the sand off his clothes. “Make sure to put the tools in the cabana so they don’t get washed away.” He started for the cliff stairs.

  Mary watched him go and then collected the tools.

  • • •

  It was a week and a half after they began building—almost three weeks since the incident in the cabana—when Mary realized she had never removed Beachstone’s stitches. They worked on their city every afternoon now, after Beachstone’s morning lessons with her father. Sometimes Mary waited for him on the beach, and sometimes she joined him after he had already settled down with his reading tablet. They never descended the stone stairs together, and neither ever worked on the city without the other.

  That day, Beachstone was already at the beach when she arrived. When he saw her shadow approach, he turned, his sudden smile suffusing his whole demeanor. “Hey, sidekick,” he said.

  “Hey, hero,” she answered. Every smile she elicited from the boy felt like a surge of energy flooding her core.

  He set down his tablet, scratching his leg, something that had become a subconscious habit with him. “Where were we?” he said.

  Mary held up the first aid kit she had brought with her. “How would you like to get those stitches out?”

  His smile fell and his eyes narrowed.

  “It shouldn’t hurt,” Mary said.

  “How would you know?”

  It was true. She couldn’t.

  Beachstone stood, sand falling away from his pants. “Okay,” he said. “In the cabana.” He started up the beach, expecting her to follow.

  The succes
s of their first tunnel had inspired Beachstone to construct a complete underground system below their city. They had added a seawall to the moat, but water still ended up in the tunnels, so each day began with bailing, which Beachstone merely worked into the story. Imagination still perplexed Mary. She tried to find patterns in the narrative connections he made, and ventured occasional contributions. He seemed to like everything that she had done so far, but she also wanted his criticisms; how else would she learn without input from past experiences to better inform future actions? But there had to be a first term, she figured. At least the stitches were an objective task she could complete.

  In the cabana, Beachstone removed his pants and jumped up on the table in the same place she had stitched him up. His legs were shockingly white in comparison to his sun-browned arms and face. The cut on his thigh was pale pink except at the top, where it was raised and reddish, the black sutures like a line of ants.

  She brought out the rubbing alcohol, which had to be decades old, the plastic bottle milky yellow with age. She opened a sterile swab and used it to wash the wound, and then wiped the surgical scissors and tweezers as well before using the tweezers to grab the knot at the end of the stitches.

  Beachstone watched with a fascination that reminded Mary of Kent at his dissections. Her brother had created an experiment, after all. She cut the knot off and used the tweezers to gently pull the thread through the skin, which stretched before relinquishing the suture. “Did it hurt?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  She moved to the next one, and a small dot of blood appeared where the thread pulled through. She touched the alcohol swab to it, and Beachstone’s leg jerked. “Sorry,” she said.

  “It was just cold,” he said.

  She pulled the rest of the stitches out, and there was some blood, but not much until she reached the red, raised section at the top. When she pulled the thread out there, there was some pus as well as heavier bleeding, almost as though the cut had reopened just there. She blotted away the blood, but when she took away the gauze, more blood welled up, so she covered it and applied pressure.