by Neil Clarke
“They took it,” Neill said, holding his empty sleeve forlornly. I imagine he was thinking about sex again; it’s hard to perform the Four in Hand when you don’t have a hand to put in the appropriate orifice.
Yuri thumped him on the back. “We’ll build you another, partner.”
Dana gave Neill a kiss on the cheek, leaving pink lipstick behind. “The important thing is you’re alive.”
Buck was sooty but unharmed. We considered each other across the small clearing. His shoulders were stiff, his chin defiant. I wondered if he had killed any of the government men, and if he’d feel bad about that in the years to come.
Neill said, “You should come back with us, Buck.”
“Nah,” he said, in a slow but deliberate drawl. “I’m better off on my own for now. But y’all keep in touch.”
With that he loped off into the woods, his gait odd.
Only once we were on the chopper, speeding home, did I realize Buck had sawed the skates off his feet.
IV.
For the first thirty years of my life, men in women’s clothing did nothing for me. Dana changed all that. By day he skated around in his blue jeans, leather gloves and black shirts with elbow patches. Come evening, he would disappear into my closets and emerge wearing the best of my gowns, shoes, and precious jewelry. I don’t know who taught him how to apply makeup but he was a master designer with shadow and blush. Whoever knew my nipples would perk up at the sight? The human body is a strange organism.
He said he didn’t want to be a woman full time. That would ruin the skating act. But from the moment he came out of the factory he had a yearning for the lacy softness of a brassiere, the arch of fine high heel shoes, the glitter and graceful folds of a well-made cocktail dress. He liked to shave his legs (yes, my robots had renewable hair) and stretch long, sleek stockings over them. He enjoyed hooking a lace garter belt around his hips. In bed he wore pink lingerie and was an enthusiastic supporter of phalluses shaped like pistols. He also would say or do anything to make me laugh, including the use of feathers, ice cubes, and an endless supply of dirty limericks.
Before the Big Freeze, Dana would go into town dressed as a woman, on the prowl for a man who could love all of him. I worried about those trips, but there’s no stopping a sexy cowboy on a mission. After Neill’s rescue at Mount Sugarloaf, Dana’s feelings for him flared into a one-sided infatuation that affected them both on the ice. Dana started doubling his jumps instead of landing triples,
and Neill nearly dropped him once during a lift, and then someone loosened the seams on Neill’s costume so that all of him popped out during a backflip.
Things might have gotten worse between them, but the next day we received a distress call from Long Island Sound. An ice barge with children aboard had run into trouble. The boys saddled up and rode out on snowmobiles. During the rescue Dana was lost to the water. One moment he was hoisting an infant to safety and in the next, the merciless ice had opened up and sucked him into its black depths.
Neill took the loss especially hard. For weeks he skated around the rink in silence, wearing black clothes and one of Dana’s favorite feather boas. I myself tried to remember all of Dana’s dirty jokes and limericks. None of them seemed funny anymore. The others mourned their lost brother by getting his name tattooed on their forearms and inventing a new jump-spin-land combination called Dana’s Stick.
Buck heard about it, though I’m not sure which of the boys called him. He called me on the vid to express his regrets. I could see a blazing hearth behind him; his secret lair didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but there seemed to be a lot of computers and equipment. I imagined the place was as gloomy and bitter as Buck himself.
“Dana was a good cowboy,” Buck said. “I’m sorry he’s gone.”
“Are you?” I asked. “You didn’t much approve of his attire.”
Which was true, and Buck was robot enough not to deny it.
“I don’t want to fight,” he said, instead. On the vid, his shoulders were slumped and his eyes downcast. “I do miss y’all, even if you don’t miss me.”
Fat snowflakes slapped lightly against the windows of my bedroom. It wasn’t like Buck to be so boldly needy. Maybe all those years alone in New Hampshire were changing his outlook on life. He’d gone there after Herbert’s death; to mourn, maybe, or to bitterly rue the loss of his creator.
“We miss you a lot,” I told him. “You can come home anytime you want.”
“My work is important.” Like Doc, Buck had inherited Herbert’s genius and overinflated ego. He believed he could save the planet. I guess the real Herbert might have been able to, but his mechanical heir hadn’t succeeded yet.
“Kay,” Buck said, breaking the silence between us. “If I came back, would you get rid of everyone but me? Would you let me be your only cowboy?”
From Buck, this was unheard of. We’d never even kissed. From day one he’d been wild, untamed, his own free robot.
He must have seen confusion in my face, because he logged off without saying goodbye.
As it turned out, our grieving over Dana was happily in vain. Three weeks after the disaster on the ice, he sent word from Key West. Robots don’t need to breathe, of course, so after being sucked into the powerful currents of the reversed Gulf Stream, he’d simply hung on for the ride. He liked Key West a lot. Though it was no longer a tropical paradise, the ice fishermen still applauded the sunset each night before snuggling into their igloos. He’d found true love in the arms of a Cuban named Elian, and did we mind if he stayed down there to teach the locals how to figure skate?
V.
Yuri and Cody were my fiercely competitive sexy robots. Not on the ice. During performances they were consummate professionals, and the townsfolk who came up for the shows once a month never saw their intense rivalry. But you’ve never seen two boys compete so much over who could eat more flapjacks (though they couldn’t, technically, eat), get more drunk (simulated, in wildly hilarious ways), or score higher on cowboy video games (eigh-teen-hour marathon sessions in the library were not unheard of, until I got sick of hearing ‘Yee-haw!’ and threw them out). In the back forty they rode robot horses and roped robot steer until Doc had to bang the dents out of them, and then they started all over again. In my bed they wrestled over who got my back passage and who got my front. No matter who won, I always benefited from their rivalry.
One day they got it into their heads to see who could cross-country ski the farthest. By this time Doc was in Italy, Dana was in Key West, and Buck was still in New Hampshire. The skate show had diminished to just Yuri, Cody, and Neill, and didn’t draw crowds from town like it used to. Not that many people still lived anywhere in New England. The smart ones had drifted south to the crowded equatorial nations, and the old ones rarely left their homes anymore.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Cody asked one night, his hand pumping away pleasurably inside me.
“Mind what?” I gasped.
Yuri’s mouth lifted from my right nipple. “If we modify skis to fit our skates and go off for a little while.”
The boys had learned long ago that I can’t deny them anything when I’m about to orgasm, and so off they went on their journey. That was twenty years ago. They circumnavigated frozen oceans, icy Mideast deserts, and the top of every mountain they could find. They brought food, fuel, and engine parts to small villages. In those pockets of civilization where humanity still struggled to survive, they also performed pairs skating routines. The seats were often empty but for wide-eyed children who had never known prosperity or what it was like to be truly warm.
VI.
In the end, only Neill and I remained on the estate. I was too old and withered and stubborn to move. Neill was too devoted to leave. He continued to read the philosophers in the library, though after fifty years he’d surely memorized every one. In bed, he was considerate of my frail bones, vaginal dryness, and decreased libido. Ours was no longer a world in which women could find medical
or surgical solace from the cruelties of old age. Earth was a dying planet, destined to be buried under ice and snow no matter what miracle solutions always seemed at hand.
Long after the house computer had rusted into silence, the skating rink was still operational. Neill had become an excellent solo performer. For hours he would skate to singers long forgotten, like Toby Keith and Taylor Swift. Most days I would pull on my scarf and coat and boots to trudge down the slope and watch him spin. Some days I dozed off in my fireside chair, instead, and he would kiss my forehead on his way out the door.
“I’ll be back in time for dinner,” he would say.
One evening I woke to a cold hearth and dark skies. The house was silent but for my own voice. I made my way down the slippery slope already knowing the sad truth. Neill was exactly where I expect him to be: center ice, arms raised up, legs crossed, face proud. He had skated his final performance. He would stand there until the roof caved in and winter buried him forever.
“I’m sorry,” I said, through tears. “You shouldn’t have been alone.”
“He wasn’t,” a voice said behind me, from the empty stands.
Buck was standing in the shadows, his hands buried in the pockets of his long camel hair coat. We regarded each other across a gulf of empty seats and old regrets.
“He knew his battery was going,” Buck said, shifting his gaze to Neill. “We were never designed to last this long, Kay.”
“The others . . . “ I said faintly.
“Have come to see me,” he said. “I managed to extend them for a few more years, but Neill didn’t want that. He was ready to be released. No one really wants to be immortal.”
I wiped my face. “Not even you, Herbert?”
Buck blinked. For a moment I thought he was going to deny it. Then he said, “How long have you known?”
“I was always suspicious that you wouldn’t sleep with me,” I said. “And I thought something was amiss when you took the biological Herbert’s death so hard. But it was Skylar who confirmed it, on her deathbed. She said she always suspected you’d downloaded your own personality into one of the robots to preserve yourself. You did an excellent job.”
Buck moved closer to the edge of the rink. I wondered if he missed the glide of ice under his skates, the rush of air as he sped around in circles.
“It was an experiment,” he said. “I didn’t really expect success. All of a sudden I was handsome, and young again, and graceful for the first time in my life. But you only had eyes for the others.”
“You could have joined us.”
“I hated you back then. You always made me aware of my own deficiencies. I wasn’t a perfect man, but for decades I believed I was.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Didn’t want to, not with Neill frozen on the ice in front of us. All I could do was pull my hat down over my ears and make my slow, painful way up the slope to the empty house that had been rowdy with sexy cowboys for so many decades. Release sounded like a good word. Sounded like a long promised reward after fifty years of ice.
Buck followed me. Heated up soup that I wouldn’t eat and tucked me into a bed too big for just one person. I remembered him on the night he proposed marriage. Just the two of us in a sidewalk café in summertime, coffee and baklava on the table between us, moonlight on the street and in his eyes.
“Come back to Dodge Falls with me,” he said. “Let us take care of you.”
So I did.
VII.
And it’s here I’ve spent my last years, slowly dying amid well-heated rooms and hydroponic gardens that bloom with long-forgotten flowers. Dana keeps me company most of the time. He’s not very erectile anymore, but we enjoy taking baths together and snuggling under blankets and putting on our best dresses for afternoon tea. Buck never comes to my bed. Maybe he thinks I’ll break a hip. Maybe I’m afraid to show him what a sack of old flesh I’ve become, while he’s still strong and handsome. He spends his days working on the Big Freeze. He thinks he’s finally found a solution; even now, pilots are seeding the oceans and clouds with chemicals that will restore the planet’s damaged equilibrium. We hope.
Dana and I can count the days we have left, or at least a rough approximation. Yuri and Doc and Cody are already gone, my beautiful boys. It’s Buck I’m worried about. Years of skating took their toll on the others, but he could outlive us for another ten years. Who will take care of him? Who will save him from the loneliness and bitterness? He needs a companion.
I should have known he has a plan.
“Here she is,” he says one morning, unveiling a glass cabinet in his lab. “I’ve kept her in storage all these years and just finished the upgrade.”
Inside is a beautiful woman: glossy brown hair, clear skin, firm breasts, legs to die for. Her cowboy hat, suede shirt and fringed shirt are as fresh as the day she rolled off the assembly line. The seventh sexy robot. An homage to the greatest love of Herbert’s life.
“Skylar!” I exclaim indignantly. “You built a perfect replica of her not me?”
He blinks at me. “That’s not Skylar—that’s you!” I glare. He wilts.
“It’s Skylar,” Dana confirms. “Her nose always was a little bit crooked.”
Buck says, “Well, it doesn’t matter. She’s never been activated. There’s no personality profile. I want you to have her, Kay. I can transfer your mind into this body.”
“No. Give her to Dana,” I say.
Dana shakes his head. “Neill’s waiting for me in electronic heaven. But I’ll borrow the skirt.”
Buck steps closer to me. “We need you, Kay. The world needs people to rebuild it.”
I stare at the beautiful Skylar, but spare him a sideways glance.
“The truth is that I need you,” he confesses. “I need my Kay back, no matter whose face you’re wearing. Be young for me again. Be strong and beautiful, and we’ll take on the world together.”
“Huh,” I say.
Buck squeezes my hand. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”
When I said I wanted a companion for Buck, I never thought it would be me. I try to imagine waking up young, strong and beautiful. To spend every day for the rest of my life seeing Skylar in the mirror. I say nothing on the way back to my room. Dana limps along beside me, equally quiet. Maybe thinking of the skirt.
“You could,” he finally says. “You’d still be Kay on the inside.”
“Screw that,” I tell him. “Come on. We’re going to back to Connecticut. Let’s go see Neill, and have ourselves a drink or two, and go out with a bang.”
That afternoon we put on silky blue underwear and our cold-weather clothes. We apply foundation, sunscreen, and mascara at least fifty years past its expiration date. Dana’s blue eyes sparkle under gold eyeshadow. I pull out the small box that contains the last of my jewels.
“Here,” I tell him. “Wear these diamond earrings. They always looked better on you than me.”
We don pearls and gloves and set off. It takes awhile to circumvent Buck’s security system, but Dana has Herbert’s smarts. Outside the secret lair, the winter sky is cobalt blue and the bitter air makes my skin tingle. Trees along the frozen river have long since fallen under the weight of ice and snow, leaving a splintered landscape. I should have brought snowshoes. Dana tosses his skate guards aside and we help each other stay upright. It’ll be nice if Buck’s plan succeeds. If the world’s gardens and forests return after such a long, deep sleep.
“There once was a boy named Cass,” Dana says, after we’ve gone maybe a half mile. The breeze blows his hair back from his handsome face. “Whose balls were made of brass. In stormy weather, they would bang together . . . ”
He sits down on an icy boulder. “Funny. I can’t remember.”
He’s never forgotten a limerick. I sit down beside him and pat his gloved hand. His blue eyes stay fixed on the distance. I think he sees Neill. I think I see Neill, too. Neill with his white hat, and Cody with his green bandana, and Yuri with his big old leather
boots. There’s Doc, too, smiling like he knows a secret. It’s a hallucination, of course, and the only one I’ve ever had without the help of illegal chemicals. Those four sexy robots come over and pull Dana to his feet.
“Time to skate, partner,” Neill says.
I stand up, too, but Doc shakes his head fondly. “Not you, Katherine. You’ve got a world to rebuild and a new body to do it in.”
“Buck doesn’t want me,” I say vehemently. “He wants an ideal. He wants someone to worship him, the bastard. Seventy years and nothing’s changed.”
“Doesn’t matter what Buck wants,” Neill tells me. “You get a chance at life, you live it. Write more books.”
“You never read my other ones,” I sniff.
“Sure I did,” he says. “When you weren’t looking. Didn’t want you to get a swelled head.”
“Write stories about us,” Cody adds. “Tell them we lived, and we loved, and we ate lots of flapjacks.”
Yuri blows me a kiss. “Persevere, sweet Kay.”
They skate off into the sunset, my five sexy robots, doing triple lutzes on the way.
I guess, for the boys, I can live some more. I can write their stories, and the story of life before the Big Ice. I can cut Skylar’s hair, get rid of that cowboy skirt, and bang a notion or two through Buck’s thick metal skull. But first I have to get off this rock and back up the frozen river. The wind is strong but the sun warms my face, and along the way I hear the sound of water dripping off trees. The world is renewing. I’m glad I’ll be here to see it.
Sue Lange is a novelist, playwright, columnist, and filmmaker. She has four published books of speculative fiction satire and tons of short stories published throughout the galaxy, most notably in Futures (Nature). Her bi-weekly newspaper column, Clubs ETC, is about the fabulous nightclub scene in Reading, Pennsylvania. She used to be a member of Book View Cafe. She’s the playwright-in-residence with the Reading Theater Project. Her latest work with them, Dead of Winter, was performed in front of sold-out crowds. Her latest film project, Traffic Opera, is an opera. In traffic.