by Robert Brown
AUTOMATON
Six hundred miles from the city of Everglade, in an early morning haze, we lowered my motorcycle to the ground. It finally stopped swinging when it touched the dust of the deserted highway that was once the southeast of Texas.
In the sidecar I stowed a shotgun and shells, cans of chili that could have been eighty years old or more (I dared not guess what I would find on opening these) a bedroll in case my trip took more then a couple days, a canteen of water, and a half bottle of rum…in case I needed pain killer for reasons yet unrevealed. The drive would be at least ten hours. If I could make it in that amount of time on a bike this old, I would be very sore in some very delicate places.
After I climbed down the rope ladder to the ground, the Ophelia’s engines growled angrily, and she slipped away west where she would wait as far from any known Imperial cities or outposts as she could.
There is a bizarre ritual to starting a Chang Jiang motorcycle. I doubt any are still alive who understand the reasons behind it. I only hoped I would remember it. First, turn the fuel on. Tap the carburetor, and check the fuel gauge to make sure gas is pouring in, double check that you are in neutral; roll the engine over by stepping down on the kickstart. This is to make sure it’s getting fuel all throughout the engine. Turn the switch on, advance the throttle a smidge. Then jump on kick-starter at least ten times, and hope she comes to life.
Here at the End of Days, in the middle of the wastelands, with my only friends and family five hundred feet up and rising in a world with no cell phones, I kicked once, twice…ten times…twenty times…
I must have flooded it. I aired it out and started over. I pulled the fuel cap to check the gas. I pulled the carburetor, to let the flooded gas evaporate. I thought to check if the fuel mixture was correct, and realized I would really have no idea how to tell if it was correct or not. In the end it took more then forty kicks, but it finally started.
A pistol in my face could hardly have scared me more than that much isolation, mixed with that much desolation and no transportation! But once on the road, the first couple of hours were joyous! The wind blew through my hair, road under my wheels. A sunny day, and no helmet laws!
There were cacti, and tumbleweeds. There were rocky hills, and sweeping valleys. There bushy little clusters of trees surrounding little lakes, pretty as any oasis you may have imagined reading 1001 Arabian Nights. Tiny little animals darted across the road constantly; small birds, lizards, jackrabbits, armadillo, and a few things I didn’t recognize.
I passed many “ruins” as the Neobedouins referred to them. Empty houses, a hundred years abandoned and overgrown with long-dead vines. Cars, rusted to the point that if I stood on them with one foot, I would go right through. I saw massive skeletons of rust that once been skyscrapers. Ghost town after ghost town, swallowed by sand or trees.
It was a world of flotsam and jetsam being slowly swallowed by nature. The ruined empires of days gone by.
I passed a Neobedouin Caravan that was headed in the other direction. I smiled and waved. They looked at me as if I was insane - insane for traveling the wastelands alone, I’ll wager, yet the full rationale for this was yet to be revealed to me.
Interestingly, these guys weren’t using semi-cabs to pull their caravan, but massive beasts. The creatures weren’t exactly dinosaurs, they were mammals, but they were easily three times the size of an elephant. They had bodies of about the proportions of an elephant, yet much larger, and long necks and small heads. They were slow, and lumbering, but strong and friendly. They were also a little timid in nature, and they leaned away from my bike as I rumbled past.
I can only assume these were beasts the Emperor’s predecessor had brought back from extinction in an effort to “restore balance”. If so, why bring these creatures back? Was it to have a large enough food source to feed the now overrun populations of man-eating predators?
Each massive beast pulled one or two multiple floored hauls as the tribe rode around them on camels. I could hardly imagine a more exotic scene then the pale yellow sands, the brightly painted hauls, the turbaned riders, and strange assortment of beasts from large to immensely large!
That was not the only unusual wildlife I saw. I almost lost my life that evening to a herd of deer-sized beasts with antlers like a gazelle, and what appeared to be two short trunks! I have no idea what they were, but they were spread thickly on the road in a massive herd of at least a hundred beasts. I had just crested a small hill and when I cleared the top I found myself plunging into the herd. They only just darted to the side in time to allow me to break right in the middle of the herd.
I sat, engines rumbling and sputtering, in the middle of this mass of stupid and timid animals. As the sun started to set, I honked my little horn to try to get them to move. They just plodded slowly onward, hardly noticing me and at times even bumping into me. I must have sat there a good twenty minutes, wondering what to do, and thinking of the shotgun.
In my head I had started to call them elelope. That’s “elephant” plus “antelope”, since they looked like an antelope with a couple small elephant trunks. “Antephant’ really didn’t seem to fit them. Eventually something spooked them. The beasts at the head of the herd started to turn back around, making a panicked noise that sounded desperate and fearful. The dumb beasts around me did nothing to alter their course, and some were knocked down as the others pushed in.
Finally, the entire herd started to run in the other direction, and I could see why. Over their heads, I could see three beasts as large as SUVs, hunched and spread in a stalking formation. They had thick prickly fur, long at the shoulders, but short on their legs and hindquarters, and a spotted pattern like hyenas. Their immense size would have made a Siberian tiger cower and run. I swear I could smell them coming.
I couldn’t really move until the herd had raced past, but when I could I gunned the engine, and darted to one side. This sound, however, drew the beasts attention. The nearest leaped a good twenty feet toward me. I saw him coming and I turned to the side, and throttled hard. When he landed where I had been, he slide six feet in the dirt and gravel. A drawback of being that large is that you have more inertia, so stopping isn’t easy. A house cat would have changed directions instantly upon hitting the ground, and would have pinned me before I could get away. By the time he corrected his course, I was now bulleting full speed through the herd.
It leaped again, but I was not so much his target as he was interested in catching the nearest prey. It pinned some poor beast behind me and stood on it as it thrashed briefly, and then resolved to its fate.
This I saw through my rearview mirror. I didn’t turn my head to look back.
In a few moments I burst out the front of the herd, and headed down the empty road with a new fear and respect for the growing darkness around me.
Over the next few hours, the sides of the road began to fill with trees, and I crossed over many little bridges, until finally I was on a raised spit between long, low marshes. Fireflies swirled in the bushes, and the sounds of croaking frogs could be heard audibly over the engines.
Finally, the road turned to wooden planks. This dock and its skewed pylons led about a quarter mile out to a small shack. The sky had turned to midnight blue, dark and foreboding between the trees, but there was a warm, inviting glow coming from the shack. Silhouetted in this light was a large crouched figure, seven feet tall, with unnaturally square shoulders.
He held in his hand what looked like a demolition bar. This was a six-foot long steel bar that is used to tear apart buildings or cars. It’s nearly as thick as your wrist, and is immensely heavy. The shadow held it lightly in one hand, and a dim glow came from were its eyes must be.
“Turn away, Bedouin. Your tribe is elsewhere. My road ends here,” said the voice, raspy, yet strong and threatening. It spoke with the confidence of a man who had won a hundred confrontations of this nature, but this was not a man.
I got off my bike.
“Turn back, B
edouin. Your motion will bring the crocks. They know I am not their food, so they leave me alone, but I’m sure they can smell you already.” At this, something moved in the water.
My eyes searched the black marsh, and I swear I saw a beast the size of a school bus slowly shift under the blackness to point towards me.
“Gyrod, I’m here to speak to you. Your sister has sent me! She has left the city, and wants to see you!” I yelled back to him.
Two things happened at once. First, a massive exaggeration of a crocodile, thirty feet long, with crooked teeth the size of my feet, eyes wild and hungry, put one massive, clawed foot onto the dock. Its head and body lay under the water nearly out of view, and it lifted the tip of its nose into the light and snorted.
The other thing that happened was that a small child of five, in a little white lacy dress, slipped past her stoic guardian, and was running towards me unaware of the beast in the water!
The Automaton yelled in a voice of pained fear and pity, “This is not your father, Isabella, come back to the house!”
The child was nearly to where the beast lay in wait, her eyes on me, and I could see the lizard’s huge nostrils flair as it took in her scent. It was slowly raising its mouth from the water in perfect anticipation.
I didn’t think. Forgetting my shotgun, I leaped from my bike and ran toward her. At the same time, the clockwork man started toward the beast, but as he took his second step, a rattling, scrapping sound came from his torso, a kind of Screeeee-chika-chika-chika-chika! He grabbed at his chest in pain. This sound drew the attention of the beast, and as it swung its head up over the dock to look, the weight of its massive claw broke through, knocking the child to the ground.
I ran to her, and fell on the uneven dock. Together we slid towards the beast, and as my boots hit it, I grabbed the child. The beast swung its head back around and over us, and it opened its foul, blackened mouth.
At this point, the clockwork man pounded his chest hard, denting the metal, which made the scrapping sound quiet, then he leaped into the air. The wrecking bar came down on the head of the beast, and in doing so changed the shape of its skull. At this the beast thrashed in the water, its tail swung into the dock sending planks spinning into the air.
The automaton pulled the bar back, and thrust it into the beast’s cheek. The bar sank two feet into the dark green flesh, and the beast pulled back from the dock in horror, swinging the man like a rag doll.
I held the child, stood, and ran for the house. As I ran, I watched the clockwork man standing astride the beast. He lifted the bar again to strike, but as he did the rattling scrapping sound came again. Screeeee-chika-chika-chika –chika!. He froze mid-swing and stumbled backward into the water.
The beast pulled back, facing where the clockwork man had sunk, and slowly submerged.
I ran up the porch of the house, stumbling on an overturned dollhouse, and threw open the screen door. I set the child on a wooden bench, and with a “Stay!” I turned and ran back out.
On the porch stood the automaton, with scrapped and stained copper and brass fitting dripping with mud, black blood, and swamp grass. He grasped at his chest in pain.
All he said was, “My sister?”
FATHER
The cabin was a single room, containing a small dinette set, a kitchen, a double bed, and two child-sized beds. We put five-year-old Isabella in a bed next to her eight-year-old sister who had managed to sleep through the night’s events.
The little cabin was a mess. Dishes were on the floor with half-eaten food stuck to them. Spoons and plates stuck to the blankets of the beds. Couch cushions had been taken from the old sofa, and arranged into a fort in the center of the room. There was a pile of unopened canned food in the corner of the kitchen, and a pile of old half-emptied cans on the floor around it.
“I apologize for the mess,” said the brass man. “But I have been traveling further and further away to find food for them. The girls are good, and stay inside when told, but they do make a mess when I’m gone.”
Visibly tired, he began to tidy up. “I was not made for domestic duties,” he said, trying his best to pick up a glass bowl with his huge brass fists. “I was not made to take care of children. I was made to protect, not to nurture. But with their parents dead six months now, ‘protecting’ has more responsibilities than it used to.”
He was quiet for a minute. “Tell me of my sister.”
So I told him of the doll, and the floating city. I told him of our airship, and the broken Chrononautilus.
“I guess our ship needs some work. How about you? What is that grating sound I keep hearing whenever you are about to do something strenuous?” I said.
“My flywheel. I have weighted wheels inside me. When I am about to leap or run, or swing my rod, it spins up inertia that I can then use for extra momentum. But it’s been damaged. Bent. It doesn’t fit just right any longer, and so as it spins it vibrates and drags against my heart. This heats up, and can occasionally lock things up inside until I cool,” he said.
“Can it be replaced?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I found a replacement, in a…well, a few miles from here. But I don’t know what will happen it I take the old one out. I could die,” he said.
“Forgive my ignorance, but couldn’t you just be restarted? Perhaps if I…” I said, but he interrupted me.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he said.
We had talked now so long the sun was beginning to rise. As it did the children woke.
First the eldest woke up, and she sat in bed staring at me with her blinking, sleep-blurred eyes. She was a girl of eight, with red pigtails and a freckly face. Her eyes were green, and looked like they had seen recent tears. As she watched me, she absentmindedly took a small, broken plastic crown from her night stand and put it on her head, as if it was simply what one did first thing in the morning.
When the other child woke, without opening her eyes she got out of her bed and climbed into her sister’s, and hugged her. Then, still without opening her eyes she went back to her bed, grabbed a rag doll from under her pillow, and then got back into bed with her sister.
Gyrod said, “Eventually the wheel is just going to freeze up. At that point I will stop. There is no way of telling when it will happen, but I will die.”
Under his rasping deep tones, I heard a soft voice ask her sister, “Is that daddy?” They were looking at me.
“So I suppose I should just try to change the gear. But if I fail, the girls will be alone. And if I die because I didn’t try to replace it, the girls will also be alone. “
Finally, the littlest one slipped out of her sister’s lap, and crawled into mine. She pressed her small curly blond head (which smelled like a hug) against my chest and asked, “Daddy?”
I hugged her back, and said, “Sure.”
Would you have done any different? It wasn’t just Doctor Calgori’s dying words to me. These tiny children had lost their father and mother when they were too young to remember them. They were barely taken care of by a dying guardian made of metal, who at any point could seize up and never move again. Then they would be alone, in a wasteland of man-eating beasts. No, don’t kid yourself, you would have done the same damn thing. Even if you think yourself cruel enough to correct this babe with glistening eyes, “No, kid, I ain’t your dad.” But you are wrong. You’d have done the same thing.
I took a nap that morning, while the girls gleefully packed tiny suitcases full of things like crayons, dollhouse furniture, and other tiny toys their guardian had carefully plucked from the ruins with his massive metal hands. I never mentioned we were leaving, they just assumed.
When I woke, they excitedly asked me where we were going. “I guess we are going to live in the skies,” I said. “Have you ever seen an airship?” They screeched with joy. This was too much, Daddy had returned after so long that they could no longer remember what he looked like, only to take them to the clouds to spend the rest of their life as angels!
“Or mermaids!” said Isabella.
“No, mermaids are in the water,” Chloe said in the condescending tones of a big sister.
“No, only monsters live in the water,” Isabella said, with a dark and defiant look. Then she brightened. “We can be sky mermaids! Right, Daddy?”
“Uh, sure!” I said.
It was a hot, sticky day, and we took small suitcases outside, and strapped them onto the back of the bike. Then I loaded both girls into the sidecar, strapped the single seatbelt across their laps. They looked like they were about to go on their first roller coaster ride: excited, nervous and joyful. I went through the Bandersnatch’s starting ritual, as little Isabella watched every step with absolute fascination. Chloe was straightening the blanket over their laps, and lining up their little dolls at their feet on the floor of the sidecar.
The brass man stood looking down at me. “I trust you to be their guardian. I have heard your stories, and I trust you can keep them safe. I will get my new flywheel, and meet you at the crossroads in three days time if I am still moving. Then we will go to my father together.”
“I’ll keep them safe, Gyrod. I might not be made of brass, but I’ve lived through a few things myself.” I glanced at the girls, who looked up at me doe-eyed. “I will keep them safe,” I said, and with that I throttled back and rumbled down the dock and back down the bijou road.
Little Girl, in your dress of snowy white.
Get behind me, safe from creatures of the night.
With these arms and with these fists,
I’ll keep you safe and sound.
Through the forests and the mists,
We’ll go down,
This dark and twisty road.