by Rich Larson
With a gaseous hiss, the pig’s innards spill out as pink wet ropes. Recycler sinks both manipulators inside its body, splashing the rock with blood and uncongealed shit. This is not the first animal Carver Seven has seen her disassemble. Sometimes a burrower will trample through the village, and if the clan cannot drive it away they kill it with a spear. They take it to Recycler, and she brings them back the fat to use as joint lubricant, and the skin stretched and cured for waterproofing.
But lately, Recycler has been hunting. Lately, she does something new. As Carver Seven watches, she pries open her hidden mouth, the whirring orifice the clan can use in cases of great need, when Watcher-in-the-sky slips behind the veil for days on end. Carver Seven has used it himself only once, feeding it with crushed leaves and bark to keep his lifelight on during a dark week. The experience was not pleasant.
Now Recycler takes her proboscis, fashioned from bone and tanned skin and parts of old Carrier that Carver Seven recognizes, and sinks it into the dead pig. Carver Seven blanks his photoreceptors. He does not want to accumulate more visual data of the act. He does not like disassembling of any kind. Not since the accident.
“May Watcher-in-the-sky turn his gaze to you,” Recycler clicks, acknowledging his presence before they slip into their familiar frequency. “Is it your rotator again?”
“My rotator is well, thank you.” Carver Seven flexes the joint she repaired for him a few days prior, to show he has full mobility. Then he places his move in the strategy game they are playing and gives her a rough transcription of everything the Man said during the day. He emphasizes the Man’s claim of creation, because he has been turning it over and over in his mind.
“The Man says many interesting things.” Recycler wins the strategy game in one deft move—she is too clever, with Carrier Three he could battle back and forth for days on end—and offers him a turn with the proboscis. Carver Seven refuses, as always.
He remembers the first and only time he tried using the animal fuel and how his body rejected the blood and bile, spitting it back up. Recycler has adjusted to it. She can use it to work through the entire night, awake in the unholy dark. The rest of the clan does not know this.
Carver Seven keeps her secret, because she keeps his.
“Is it possible the Man made us?” Carver Seven asks. His photoreceptors stray to the packed dirt behind Recycler’s shelter, where his secret is wrapped and buried.
Recycler deliberates another second. “The only way to know if the Man is correct or not is to pry its head open and search its memory,” she clicks. “Since you are so certain the Man has a lifelight inside its hairy skull and is not merely an animal like the climbers in the forest.”
Carver Seven is silent. It is not the first time Recycler has mentioned the idea. Carver Seven does think the Man has a lifelight, but he does not think it can be accessed the same way. When he first found the Man, blood was leaking from its head.
“May I see her?” he asks.
Recycler gives a long clicking scan to ensure nobody is nearby. Then she reaches down into the hard-packed dirt and begins to dig. Carver Seven joins her, shoveling fast and then slow as they reach the correct depth.
He retrieves Carrier Three’s bashed-in head from where it is hidden in the dark earth, far from the gaze of Watcher-in-the-sky, secret from the clan. In violation of the traditions, Carrier Three was not fully recycled after a falling stone crushed her. Carver Seven pleaded and pleaded and pleaded until Recycler agreed to save her head.
Carrier Three’s photoreceptors are blank, and she makes no sound in response to Carver Seven’s soft clicks. But he knows her lifelight is not fully extinguished. He knows if he waits and watches long enough, he will see a single lazy spark moving in slow circles.
“Nobody can repair a damaged lifelight,” Recycler clicks. “Not the Man. Nobody.”
Carver Seven puts what is left of Carrier Three deep inside his main cavity and covers it over. Recycler is usually correct. Recycler is clever.
But no matter how slim the chances, Carver Seven has to try.
The next day, he goes to visit the Man again.
“Hey, look who it is,” he warbles from a distance, because the Man startles easily, like a bird. It looks up at him. Its photoreceptors are pink and glassy.
“Hey, yourself, robo-butt,” the Man says, then returns to its work. There is a storm-felled tree between its soft feet, and it is using the sharp appendage to strip away the branches. Carver Seven looks around and sees remnants of fire, burned pieces of animal. The Man has hunted, how Recycler hunts. Beyond the mess, there are two more trunks already stripped smooth. He wonders what the Man is building.
But his original query is much more important.
“Can you do me a favor and fuck off?” Carver Seven asks.
That gets the Man’s attention. Its audio port opens and it makes the clipped noise that repeats, over and over, sometimes when the Man is pleased but more often when it leaks lubricant.
Carver Seven scans up and down the beach. “Can you do me a favor and fuck off and look here and fix it up a bit?” he asks. Then he opens his main cavity and pulls out Carrier Three’s caved-in head.
“Whoa.” The Man’s photoreceptors enlarge. “Did you do that? This some Lord of the Flies type shit?”
“Lord of the Flies type shit?” Carver Seven echoes, trying to parse the new sound units.
The Man shakes its head. “Who is it?” it asks.
Carver Seven thinks hard. He knows what this latest question means, but he does not know how to communicate Carrier Three’s name, the beautiful arc of click-squeal-click, into the Man’s ugly wet language. Then his subroutines dredge up the sound unit the Man used to wail at the sea, used to punctuate long rambling speeches with.
“She is Anita,” Carver Seven says.
The muscles across the front of the Man’s head, around its ever-wet audio port and brown photoreceptors, twitch in response to the sound unit Anita. Carver Seven recognizes it as distress. He wonders if he has made a language error. Then the muscles slacken again.
“Don’t say that,” it says. “You don’t understand. Don’t have a fucking idea. You’re a robot.”
“Can you fix it up a bit?” Carver Seven asks.
The Man stares blankly at him, unresponsive.
“You say you make us in lab you know,” Carver Seven says, trying to lay things out as clearly as he can. “Is it yes? Is it no? Make her good, please.” He extends Carrier Three’s head toward the Man.
The Man takes her, gentler than Carver Seven would have guessed from how it handles most objects, and holds her in soft fleshy manipulators. “You think I can fix your friend,” it says. It makes the clipped noise, but only once. Its audio port is contorted. “Jesus. I’m not a roboticist, buddy, I’m an electrician. I . . .” Its sounds stop. “This why you been hanging around, then?”
Carver Seven can make no sense of it. Too many new sound units in new patterns, not enough context. “Can you fix it up a bit?” he repeats. “Make to see. Make to talk. Make to think.”
The Man looks down at Carrier Three’s head. “Sure,” it says, the sound coming quietly. “Okay. I’ll fix your friend for you. I’ll make your friend good.”
The Man is going to repair Carrier Three’s lifelight. Carver Seven replays the sounds over and over to be sure he has divined the correct meaning. Each loop sends a fragile joy through him.
“But you have to do something for me, too, okay?” the Man says. “You have to help me build this boat and get off this island. Okay?”
“Okay,” Carver Seven says, not bothering to ask what this boat is. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.”
Carver Seven will help the Man build, and in return the Man will bring Carrier Three back to him.
Over the course of the next three days, Carver Seven learns what a boat is: a collection of trunks and branches lashed together with vines in order to float on top of the sea, as a leaf floats on the surface of a pudd
le. The Man explains it as they work.
The Man is slow and clumsy and tires easily, but is also clever the way Recycler is clever. Always thinking a move ahead, always ready to change the plan when obstacles arise, when the wood starts to warp or the vines are too brittle.
It gives Carver Seven hope that the Man will be able to fix Carrier Three. Often while Carver Seven works, shredding branches and sanding the logs smooth, the Man sits in the shade with Carrier Three’s head. It is difficult to keep his photoreceptors from straying to them. Whenever he looks over, the Man is tapping Carrier Three with its soft manipulators, rapping out mysterious patterns, the muscles of its face clenched in what Carver Seven knows is concentration.
“I just need a few more days,” the Man says when he notices. “I’m getting there. Your friend is almost fixed.”
“Okay,” Carver Seven says, feeling a surge of optimism at the news. “Great, just fucking great.”
The Man pushes air from its audio port. “How is it you ended up cussing more than I do? I know I don’t cuss that much.”
“How is few?” Carver Seven asks. “Few is one few is two few is three?”
“Two,” the Man says, putting both manipulators to its sides, looking over the boat. “Few is two.”
“Could be Anita fixed up and boat all finished few two days,” Carver Seven says, hoping that the two events coincide, that Carrier Three wakes up to see the finished boat Carver Seven has helped to build. She always liked to see the things Carver Seven made. She could always recognize the distinct marks and flourishes of his manipulators.
The Man’s face contorts as if it is briefly distressed. “Could be,” it says. There is a long silence. “What do you think Anita means?” it asks softly. “When you say Anita, what’s it mean to you?”
Carver Seven thinks hard, looping all his favorite memories of Carrier Three, the ones he views so often they have started to decay.
The broad shape of her back, her thick sturdy joints. The proud way she made stacks of wood and stone look light as air. Her kindness. How she always saved the best material, an interesting piece of driftwood or a particularly soft wedge of rock, to share with him, to watch him shape. Their slow-moving strategy game, their familiar channel, their small secrets. All the things they had done before her lifelight was damaged.
“Anita is you need light to function,” Carver Seven says. “Anita is you need and is gone.”
“Yeah,” the Man says. There is lubricant shining in its photoreceptors. “Yeah. She was always a better swimmer than me. I don’t know how it happened.” The Man wipes at its photoreceptors to clear them. “Look, buddy, you should take the head back. When I told you . . .” It falls silent, looking at the boat again. “You’re just a robot,” the Man says, but to itself more than to Carver Seven. “And we’re nearly finished. You better head off, tin man. Back to work bright and early tomorrow.”
Carver Seven understands the sentiment. “Piss off, get out of here,” he says, waving one manipulator in the gesture the Man uses to end a work cycle.
“Yeah,” the Man says. “Same to you.”
It is still staring down at Carrier Three’s head when Carver Seven leaves the beach.
As soon as he enters the village, Carver Seven can tell something is wrong. The air is thick with speech, with the click and buzz and squeal of the clan in deep discussion, but when Carver Seven tunes himself to the frequency he finds it slippery, fragmented. First he suspects he has been damaged somehow, but then he realizes that the truth is far worse. The clan has excluded him.
Shock numbs him for a moment. He has spent most of the past three days out on the beach with the Man, but that is only because the workload in the village has been light. The last storm caused little damage. The decision on a new fence to keep animals out has been delayed while the Cartographers debate its placement. Carver Seven has neglected no duties.
He moves slowly through the village, still grasping instinctively at the speech around him but understanding none of it. Photoreceptors follow his progress. It is only when he sees the other Carvers crafting fresh spears, when he sees Recyler squatting frozen in discussion with the clan’s small and nimble Cartographers, that he begins to understand.
“Carver Seven, may Watcher-in-the-sky turn her gaze to you,” Cartographer Two says.
Carver Seven feels relief, first, that he can understand again. Then dread.
“We are sorry to have excised you from the debate,” Cartographer Two continues. “But it was felt that you are no longer impartial regarding the Man. We have reached consensus without you.”
Carver Seven looks at Recycler, but it would be disrespectful to ask her what she has done, and why, when being addressed by the clan.
“The Man, by your own admission, seems able to think and communicate as a clan member would,” Cartographer Two says. “Because of that, it must be held accountable for blaspheming. Does the Man not claim to have created the clan? Usurping the role of Watcher-in-the-sky?”
There is only one truthful response. “Yes. It does claim this.”
“Because of this blasphemy, we have decided the Man will be shut down,” Cartographer Two says. “We go to the Man’s shelter in the morning. Recycler has been given permission to disassemble and study its corpse afterwards.”
Carver Seven looks at Recycler again and feels something he has never felt before. It reminds him of the Man wailing at the sky, it reminds him that his blades are sharp and he could plunge them into Recycler and damage her, damage her, damage her. She has betrayed him.
Now the clan will kill the Man, and his last hope for Carrier Three will die with it.
Recycler heads quickly toward the edge of the village, back toward her shelter and her flat rock. Carver Seven wants to tell the Cartographers what she does in the night, how she hunts and feeds and no longer needs Watcher-in-the-sky. He doesn’t. He keeps her secret. But he follows her to the wood, and in a high piercing frequency, he speaks.
“All this so you can dissect the Man,” he says. “So you can suck its blood. You are no better than an animal, Recycler. May Watcher-in-the-sky avert his gaze forever.”
Recycler is silent for a long moment. “I told the clan for your sake,” she finally says. “So the Man will not lie to you anymore. You will be grateful in the end.”
Then she disappears into the forest, and Carver Seven does not follow her. Instead he goes toward his own shelter, the one with a widened frame for when Carrier Three sometimes wanted to pass the storm together. He stops on the way to pick up a branch full of thick green leaves. The other Carvers look over to him. He asks if they have sufficient spears to kill the Man that is so fearsome, with its soft red skin and weak manipulators. They assure him they do.
Carver Seven has no tasks to complete. He can go dormant early if he wishes. He walks into his shelter and begins tearing the leaves off the branch, one by one.
Carver Seven wakes up in the dark. It is terrifying. It feels like his photoreceptors have been gouged out, leaving him blind. But he has no time to be terrified. His early shutdown now gives him only a few moments of residual energy. He reaches for the crushed leaves and opens his hidden mouth.
The orifice whirrs and grinds and Carver Seven feels a different kind of energy, rough-edged and erratic, move through his body. It is nothing like the warm comforting pulse of Watcher-in-the-sky. It feels ugly. He sees why the clan forgoes its use apart from emergency, but this, he reasons, is an emergency.
The dark is awful, but Carver Seven knows where he is. He knows that the distances from the shelter to outside the shelter to the path to the beach have not changed. He starts to walk, hearing his invisible treadfeet slap against packed dirt, rustle against leaves and vines. He feels the forest swallow him and hears the sounds of animals. It is difficult not to imagine them stalking him through the forest, drawn to his heat. Some branches have moved since he last walked these footsteps and each one startles him as it whips against his body.
&n
bsp; Finally, he hears his treadfeet rasp on sand. He is on the beach. And even better, there is light. Carver Seven can make out the shape of the shore in front of him, the spiky mass of the forest behind him, even the rippling sea. Confused, he looks up at the sky. It is not the black void he had always imagined it to be when Watcher-in-the-sky blanks her photoreceptor. It is full of small glimmering fragments that look like lifelights thrown up into the darkness.
Recycler never mentioned such a thing. Carver Seven wants to stare for longer, but there is no time. He turns toward the leaning shelter the Man has made in a divot of sand. There is light there, too, from the dying embers of the fire the Man sometimes makes to keep its body warm and alter meat before eating it.
Carver Seven does not want to make noise in case Recycler is awake, as he is. Instead he crouches and moves far enough inside the shelter to place his manipulator against the Man’s prone foot.
The Man thrashes upright. “What the fuck?”
Carver Seven gives up on not making noise. “Back to work bright and early,” he says. “Look who it is.”
“It’s the middle of the goddamn night,” the Man says. “I meant in the morning, and . . .” It rubs its photoreceptors. “Don’t you shut down for night? There’s no sunshine.”
“Some time you gotta improvise,” Carver Seven says. “In morning the Man is no see, no think, no talk.”
“What?”
Carver Seven struggles for a way to communicate the concept of involuntary shutdown. He is not even sure the Man is aware of its own mortality. He picks up one of the spears, its tip stained red, and jabs it into the air.
“In morning, other tin mans hunting you,” he says. “Other tin mans cut up you.”
The Man’s photoreceptors go large and Carver Seven knows it understands.