K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  Before I could utter a moan, Morgette had hold of the fingers, gave them a tug, seized the emerging wrist with her left hand, and put her back into it. An entire arm jerked forward across the table, jammed at the shoulder, and then did the thing that actually freaked me out. Somehow without the frame of the mirror changing its dimensions, the shoulder came through, an ear, part of a badly unshaven chin, and now there was the whole head, neck, shoulder, arm, cloth cap jammed down over the eyes. The hand pulled free, reached up blindly, pushed the cap back, and a pair of whimsical eyes regarded us.

  "Come now, this ain't very comfortable," said James Cooper Fenimore, the Disposal Man. He caught sight of me with my mouth gaping. "Ah, the Seebeck lad. I was sorry to hear about your great-aunt's demise but cheered by the return of your parents. Always a silver lining, eh? Now come along, if you please, there's work to be done."

  Doubting my own sanity, I grabbed the machine under the arm and helped Morgette haul him into the coffee shop. At the interface with the mirror, his torso distorted like an image in a different sort of mirror, the kind they used to have in funhouse tents, according to Aunt Tansy, who was old enough to remember such antiquities, except that she wasn't, she'd never really existed, she was some sort of imposture, a mask my mother had worn in her period of hiding from the deformers, as my father Dramen absurdly wore the implausible likeness of a gruff old Labrador dog. The Fenimore caught for a moment at the hips, gave a wriggle, popped out and slid across the Formica table, much heavier than a man of his size, and crashed to the floor. Morgette put away her mirror. The machine got to his feet, straightened his cap once more, made us a bow.

  "Another fine mess, eh?" He cast a swift look around the room, took in the pile of cooked offal, drew a familiar gadget from one baggy pocket. "Nothing we can't set right in a jiffy," he told me, reassuringly.

  "You're rather quick to assign blame," I said irritably. The few remaining customers were clambering over tumbled chairs and tables, past the counter with coffee machine and stale treats, headed for the staff exit. I wondered why campus security wasn't here already, sticking their noses in. The hubbub grew louder in the foyer. "It's not as if I invited the damned thing in."

  "As to that," the superiore said with a sniff, "I rather think that's exactly what you did. Rumors abound, young man. You're making rather a name for yourself as a troublemaker."

  I stared at her. "Good God, Madam," I said. "If you cast your mind back thirty or forty seconds, I think you'll find that I was the one who just saved you from being eaten by that thing."

  "Jammervoch," the disposer said, whatever that meant. He sounded like a man with a cold clearing his throat. Yammervogk? "You'll find the beastie had you on its menu, 'less I miss my mark." He did little hop, touched his cap, muttered, "Beggin' your pardon and all." He fired up his gadget, which this time emitted a harsh red beam. With practiced ease, his hand played the beam back and forth, up and down, paring the remains into seething blocks of muscle, melted and concealed fat, bone blackened at the marrow, scaly pelt peeling and worthless.

  "Why don't you just, I don't know, make it disappear? Haven't you got a ray for that? Something green or indigo perhaps?"

  "All in good time, sar," the machine said, patient as ever. "Neatly done is how it's done."

  "Bewahre doch vor Jammervoch!" Lune said in a sepulchral tone, eyes dancing. "Die Zähne knirschen, Krallen kratzen! Good advice at any time, August, but you seem to have done just fine without any tips from us." She took up my left hand, the one still sticky with chocolate, and licked it clean, while the Ensemble woman turned away with an air of unendurable tedium. I felt my heart melt and had to force a certain gruffness into my tone.

  "You're talking nonsense, love. Unless that's Russian. I speak Australian and a word or two of American, but no Russian." I knew as the words came out of my mouth that I was the one talking nonsense. The Vorpal grammar that suffused my nervous system had been my on-board Babelfish in more than one alien and indescribable universe. It was all too new. We put up barriers of inattention and denial when shock grows too grievous. I knew that was what I was doing now; something in me sensed the need to distance myself in facetiousness. Lune responded to my mood.

  "It's not Russian, you fool, it's Estonian. I thought your family were Estonian aristocrats back in the day?"

  "Peasants, I reckon. Piss-ants. Not a president among them." But that was the old August's history, the tissue of lies that had wrapped me safely for two decades in a grimy Melbourne suburb at the top of the hill in an old house where sometimes, in the evening or the dark of the night, people like Lune and my sister Maybelline lugged dead bodies of machines somewhat like James Cooper Fenimore but less polite and far less agreeable, and left them in my great-aunt's bathroom. I sighed.

  "Allow the mirror again, would y' kindly?"

  Morgette fetched it out again with an ill grace. "I don't want it covered with blood," she said.

  Coop shoveled the seeping stuff, bit by bit, through the mirror and into some other universe. I couldn't work out why he didn't open a large Schwelle in the floor and kick it in. I could probably have done it for him if he'd asked. The situation was beyond me. I watched the machine push the last of the guts into the mirror, handed him a paper napkin to clean the glass and the plastic rim. His hands were bloody up to the elbow. Out from the anodized tube burst another handy ray, slurping away the sticky mess from his fake skin, then the disposer was spraying the floor and walls. Where the beam bathed the remains of the Jammervoch, an invisible brush seemed to paint the last of the flesh, blood, and lard into nonexistence, like a wonderful household detergent as advertised on TV. I'd seen it before; I still didn't believe it. Weary enough to tumble straight into bed and sleep for a day, I watched blue light play over the smashed and splintered door, repairing it like a double exposure. I took Lune by the hand, pushed open the repaired door, pulled her after me into the lobby, where, for some reason, everyone stood or sat in a sort of unattending daze. I knew that when the machine was done, none of them would remember anything of their fright, the monstrous thing that had walked among them, the still more monstrous beings who had confronted it. The green ray would see to that. They were pieces in the game, nothing more. I refused to accept that. A month earlier, that had been me. I felt sick, and it wasn't from the meat of the Jammervoch.

  "I have to spend time by myself," I told Lune.

  What were my emotions? I could not have told you. A mixture of anger without a target, vexation, frustration, bafflement to the very edge of a nervous breakdown, maybe. I loved her wildly, I knew that much, she was the center of my life, somehow, and I had to be apart from her, at least for a time.

  "Let's meet at Toby's," I said. My brother Toby—part of me knew, shiveringly—had died, as had my brother Marchmain, as had Lune and my father Dramen and my mother Angelina, yet now they lived, somewhere, enigmatic as ever. I had been the target of deformer malice, yet they had died, as I had died, in dreadful pain, and then been snatched back from death. So now I proposed airily to meet up with a dead man and a dead woman, this dead woman in front of me, alive with a brilliant joy. It was impossible. It was the case. "Give me an hour. Or two."

  The beautiful woman kissed me lightly on the lips, her fragrance in my nostrils dizzying. "Okay, my best beloved," she said, not looking a whit put out. "I'll make sure his back garden is clear of termagants."

  CHAPTER SIX

  SgrA*: 1956, Aged Twelve

  August rain slaps the louvered windows of his back veranda sleep-out, cold Melbourne winter wind bangs at the tiles on the roof, slips chilly tendrils through the edges of the rippled pebble-glass louvers. He has jammed them as tightly closed as possible, pushing the flat aluminum levers, but they are not designed to be airtight. Not like a spaceship air lock, he thinks.

  In his woolen pajamas, snuggled under sheet and blankets, he leafs again and again with unbelieving joy through the pages of his birthday present. He'd asked for it by name, knowing there was alm
ost no chance they'd buy it for him, despite his artful mention of the title at key moments of opportunity. He turns swiftly past the opening pages with their boring chapters and drawings of ancient war rockets fired by absurdly clad Chinese and Indian soldiers from ships and boats crewed by men in mad squashed hats, past the chapter on jet cars and Robert Goddard's liquid-fuel rocket, past rocket launchers slamming into Nazi tanks and U-boats, the V-1 flying bomb streaking across an English town, modified to become the U.S. Navy "Loon" hurtling like a fat bird from the deck of a ship, and finally, finally the marvelous V-2 rocket, blazing fuel, tearing into the sky. And then, flip, flip, the Moon!

  A great winged spaceship braking in flame and debris upon the Moon's scarred surface. A spherical space station hanging above the mighty curve of the cloudy Earth. Rapturous joy, that incredible spaceship canted on its landing props upon the ruptured surface of Phobos, the immense glowing peach globe of Mars filling a third of the sky, vast blurry dull-green webwork of canals, small men in space suits setting up their instruments. What a spaceship! Like an Aussie Rules football, a double-pointed oval but with the ends squared off, a rocket engine at each end for ease of maneuver, four great landing legs tipped with shock absorbers. It was like nothing you had ever seen.

  And at last, explorers laden with equipment treading into the frozen methane of the moon Titan. Saturn and his tilted rings glow like gold in the green sky, three quarters of a million miles away. He closes the book, closes his eyes, draws in a deep, cold, winter breath. That's where he is going.

  How many more years before he can grow up and become a spaceman, before we'll have these great ships? Ten? Twenty? What if he must wait until the year 2000? Impossible! Almost half a century off in the future. He'd be an old man. He'd be... fifty-six years old. For a moment, the pressure of that thought seizes him. He clutches the book, at its stiff cardboard cover. How old is Grandpa? As old as fifty-six years? Mummy is... thirty-six this year, so Nana and Grandpa must be even older than fifty-six. It is impossible to imagine them wrapped tight in glass-fiber spacesuits. Impossible to see them on the icy-cold surface of Titan. It will happen sooner than that. It must happen sooner than that.

  The wind rises outside, pulling at the empty branches of the fruit trees, knocking them against the wooden fence. When he was a little kid, he thought that sound was ghosts or monsters. He'd hidden under the sheet, pulled up the blankets around his head, breathed his own hot breath into the safe, dark space between his chest and the bedclothes. He'd muttered prayers to ward off those menacing creatures. When he made the mistake of mentioning this, they'd taken his comics away. Superman, Batman, Strange Adventures—thrown into the garbage bin, they'd rot his mind, they'd make him nervous, maybe it was true, after all, he did have nightmares, he did fear the things under the bed.

  So now he kept his favorite comics hidden away in the narrow space between the top of his wall-mounted cabinet and the low roof of the sleep-out. He could push his treasures back out of sight, and only his own small hand, reaching in carefully, fingers extended, could hook them out.

  He opened the cabinet door, carefully put away his birthday copy of Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles and Space Ships. He listened keenly; no voices in the kitchen. He drew out his stolen copies of Brick Bradford. It made him guilty to pilfer them from newspaper stores all along the tram track from school to home, although he made sure to replace all the other stolen comics within a day or so, read so carefully, never bent, that nobody would know they were not brand new. The newspaper stores really lost nothing, he'd worked it out in careful detail, except for these ones that he could not bear to replace.

  Suppose some other kid came in wanting the latest Superman comic, and it wasn't there because the day before he'd slid it into his bag. Well, true, the man lost that sale, so it looked like his sin of theft had hurt the newspaper seller, stolen his profit. But wait a moment. There were always other kids coming into the shop, and who was to say that this second kid, the next day, two days later, wouldn't be just as anxious to buy the copy just returned? Newspaper sellers only ever ordered one or two copies of any single issue, so if someone had bought that copy, if he hadn't stolen it the first day, the other kid would've just gone to a different shop to buy his copy. It all worked out, as long as you read it and returned it very quickly, before it was out of date.

  He teased out his six or seven guiltily prized but truly thieved, unreplaced, copies of Brick Bradford Adventures—The Greatest Adventurer in All Space! He'd already read these same stories in the newspaper, where you only got one strip each day, alongside Dagwood and the others, and he'd carefully scissored them out and glued them into a large scrapbook, making his own comic. But some days the newspaper wasn't brought home, or the comics page was used to wrap up vegetable peelings, despite his stricken cries, and sometimes his scissors slipped and made a bad cut, or glue leaked out from one edge and stuck the pages together, so they tore when he opened it next.

  No, there was nothing like the real thing, page after page of beautifully printed pictures and words, the dream of flying the Time Top from star to star, world to world, flinging the great, red, whirling spaceship forward into the future or backward in time, or maybe into worlds that went sideways. Brick had a young friend on his adventures, a stowaway kid called Cricket, a bit of an idiot really, but about his own age. So it was possible. You could go into the Chronosphere—that was the correct scientific name chosen by the inventor of the Time Top, Dr. Horatio Southern and his daughter April—and leave everything familiar behind you.

  He spread the comics out across his bed, pulse beating. The wind clattering at the louvers were the time winds. Here was "The Monsters of Planet Plattner," with a dreadful creature displayed in the great, spherical visiplate, above the levers and dials of the controls. Here was a thrilling underwater realm of aqua people with fins and gills, riding great fish. Here was a cover and story that truly had terrified his nightmare mind: "The Quest for Crystal Q," with its little oriental men rising out of the stark landscape inside hidden glass-and-steel watch-towers that resembled mushrooms, their great sucker weapons flung out to capture Brick, snapping on to his back and clinging like those leeches in the warm summer dam water, ugh. "The Prince of the Black Planet." The world of pirates, where one entire continent on an alien world stared blindly out at space like a skull, with islands below it shaped like crossed bones.

  And most dizzying and delicious of all, "The Sargasso of Space," an astonishing and dismal place where spaceships and jet jalopies of dozens or hundreds of different worlds had become trapped by the flat gravity of two competing stars, unable to break free. And yet you could fly there, light as a butterfly. See, there was Cricket on the cover, arms extended, zooming above the access deck of the Time Top, weightless, delighted, astonishing Brick. I could do that, he thought. I could fly in space. Well, in fact, anyone could, without gravity. That was the trouble with comics, they weren't really accurate. Those controls, those levers—would they really work?

  His movie projector hadn't worked, not the way he planned. He thought of the convalescent hospital where they put him because of the polio scare when he was five years old, after his tonsils were taken out, he turned six while he was there, no school for months, wow, that was exactly half his life ago, he was way behind in reading when he got back, didn't really understand what they were doing in add-ups. He hated it. He hated being there. They made you wear a sort of dress or nightie, not even pajamas, except for the older boys. Nobody came to see him, it was too hard to reach, the train didn't run that far, they had to wait for Grandpa to drive them in the car he used for work. One of the older boys wrote a letter for him, because he didn't know how to do writing yet. BRUNg mE a KAr. They came on his sixth birthday and gave him a beautiful, red, tin, double-decker bus with real wheels that turned, and one of the big kids grabbed it the moment the visitors left and used it as a skate, so it got all crushed down and bent and the wheels were broken, and everyone screamed laughing. Things like tha
t always happened, and they did rude things to each other's bottoms, and the nurses didn't even notice.

  He got them to move him into the next room when a kid in there got better and went home. He was tired of being in a cot with barred sides that pulled up, like a baby, and wanted a real bed. Finally they let him switch rooms, but two strong nurses came in and pushed him in his old cot into the new room, where some other kid had taken the spare bed already. So now he had to make all new friends, and he was still in the cot. But he did get one of the nurses to help him build a movie projector, because he'd designed it and he really, really wanted to try and see if it would work. First he had to get some paper you could shine the light through, and all they had was this thin, gray, waxed-paper stuff, so he cut a long strip of that and drew stick figures one after the other down the length of it, each one slightly different, and he got an empty bathroom tissue roll, and then he had to get the nurse to bring him a lightbulb on a cord, and she said he was a silly thing, but he said the light would go through the paper and down the tube and out onto the wall, but they'd have to do it when it was getting dark, and she brought the lamp in and they set it up while all the other kids peered at him, and he dragged his drawings down in front of the light, and all you saw was a stupid blur. Oh well, said the nurse, I never thought it would work. It should have done, he was sure.

  Now that he thought about it, he felt embarrassed. How stupid. Obviously, he needed a lens to focus the light, and a shutter, and transparent stuff to draw on, and probably other stuff. But he'd only been six, after all. He had much better ideas now. Him and some other kids had worked out how you could build a gun and get your enemies without anyone knowing. You made this thing sort of like a slingshot, but it would have magnets all the way along, electromagnets that only went on when you connected up the battery and pushed a button, and the magnets would drag a metal nail along a groove faster and faster, and then the magnetism would switch off when the nail got to the end, and the pointy nail would shoot away without any noise and get your enemy. First of all, they had to get some wire and some batteries. Next week.