The City, Not Long After

by Pat Murphy

  “He talked about the resources here,” she said, remembering Fourstar’s speech.

  “Bullshit. Just a way to get people behind him. Take my word for it. He wants to wipe us out because we’re rebels, we don’t fit. People like Fourstar don’t like people like us.”

  Jax frowned. She didn’t agree that Fourstar was afraid of the people in the city, but she liked being included in “people like us.” She had never been one of a group before. She had always been alone, and the hint of communal identity was appealing.

  “I never thought of it like that before,” Jax admitted tentatively. “I never thought that I was part of a group.”

  Snake glanced at her face. “Sure, you fit in here. You’re just as odd as the rest of us, I’d say. The city takes all kinds. Of course, you’ve got to work on your attitude a bit.”

  She frowned at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  He stopped walking. When she paused beside him, he turned her shoulders so that she faced him. Startled by his sudden scrutiny, she glared at him.

  “Not bad,” he said. “You look pretty tough. But you need some props. Come on.”

  He led her down the block and into a corner drugstore. The glass door had been shattered years before. They stepped through the wreckage. Snake made his way through the dimly lit interior, stepping over piles of fallen packages and broken glass. “Here they are,” he said, reaching a rack of sunglasses in the back of the store. He selected a handful. “These might make it,” he muttered. “Come on.”

  On the sidewalk outside the store, he had her hold still while he put a pair of sunglasses on her face. Through the tinted glass, the world looked dim and cool. “Look here,” he ordered her, gesturing toward the store window.

  She stared at her reflection in the glass. The mirrored lenses reflected her image.

  “Like it?” Snake asked.

  “I don’t know.” She found her new appearance both attractive and faintly disturbing. She looked like a stranger that she wouldn’t have trusted.

  “Try them for a while. They’ll grow on you.”

  That evening, when Danny-boy returned from the bridge, she greeted him wearing mirror shades and a new leather jacket.

  CHAPTER 13

  LATE AT NIGHT THE MACHINE heard metal claws scratching at his window. He moved the kerosene lantern from his desk to the windowsill, so that light spilled out into the alley.

  Through the dirty glass, he could see a face of sorts: sickleshaped mandibles beneath multifaceted eyes. Jointed legs ending in crude metal pinchers gripped the windowsill, supporting the rounded metal torso and lifting the head to the window. The rest of the body was lost in the shadows.

  As The Machine watched, the head swayed to and fro. Lantern light fell on one faceted eye and then on the other, glittering on the photoreceptors that made up the facets. Mandibles rattled against the glass.

  She wanted the sun—The Machine knew that. Her photovoltaic cells converted the sun’s rays to electricity, which powered her movements. His kerosene lamp was a pale substitute, but the best that she could find in the darkened city. “Be patient,” he said to her. “It will be daylight soon enough. Sleep now.”

  She scraped her mandibles against the glass. The wooden windowsill began splintering under the pressure of her pinchers. The Machine took the lantern from the sill, blew out the flame, and crawled into his narrow bed. He smiled as he listened to her retreat, and he imagined her raising her head to the feeble light of the moon. Reassured by the sound of metal on asphalt, he fell asleep.

  The Machine’s bedroom had once been the office for the manager of Cole Street Auto Body Shop. In the adjoining garage, The Machine built metal creatures, which he turned loose to prowl the empty streets of the city. Some, like his late-night visitor, took their energy from the sun, storing the feeble current in banks of batteries that they carried in their bellies. Torpid and slow-moving, they basked in the sun like reptiles. Others were equipped with wind turbines that converted the breezes into power. Still others were wholly battery-powered, scurrying along the city’s gutters throughout their brief and unproductive lives. The Machine had experimented with a breed that ingested organic matter and fermented methane gas, but that proved too volatile, and after a few explosions he had stopped building that species.

  He called his creatures “Children of the Sun.” Though he built their bodies, he felt that he did not truly create the Children. It seemed to him that the Children already existed in some other place or time. He assisted them by building bodies that they could inhabit in this world.

  He searched the city for metal scraps that he could shape into abdomens, torsos, mandibles, legs. He recognized the hubcaps or metal pipes or oil drums or auto fenders that belonged to the Children. He could lay his hand on a set of vise grips and know immediately that this tool would become a claw, manipulated by an intricate set of gears. He could run his hand along the smooth metal surface of an industrial light fixture and know without question that the metal shape would become a head, set with photoreceptors that would guide the creature to light. The Machine gave the Children bodies, and set them free to prowl the city.

  Sometimes he dreamed of the Children’s home: a hot desert world with a blazing sun. There were gray rock walls and canyons through which Children shaped like centipedes scrambled. Wasp-winged Children, able to fly in the world’s low gravity, buzzed overhead and landed on wind-etched turrets of stone. Ant Children clambered up the steep walls, clinging with their pincers to the rock.

  The sun warmed The Machine, and he felt a surge of power as the light charged his batteries. He lifted his wings and took flight, rising to join the circling Children above him.

  Morning: the double garage doors were open and sunshine made a golden parallelogram on the cement floor. Just outside the doors, a metal centipede basked in the sun, recharging its batteries.

  The Machine pushed his gyrocopter from the garage. The dream of flight had made him eager to fly the small craft once again. The cockpit was about the size of a go-cart, riding high on outsized wheels. When the gyrocopter was on the ground, the blades of the overhead rotor drooped a little, giving the craft a mournful look. In the air, the rear propeller pushed the craft forward, and the forward motion kept the overhead rotor turning, providing constant lift.

  The design was based on the autogiro, invented in 1923 by Juan de la Cierva. The Machine’s gyrocopter was a highly maneuverable craft, suitable for flying low over the city. He had built the small craft as a prototype, hoping that its design and construction might lead to the development of Children that could fly. But the control mechanisms required for a flying Child had proven too complex. Though the gyrocopter itself was quite functional, he had had no luck in extending its principles to the construction of Children.

  The Machine pointed the vehicle down Cole Street. He had a straight run of several hundred feet, more than enough to get airborne. He strapped himself into the bucket seat, taken from a high performance sports car. When he turned the ignition key, the Volkswagen engine that powered the craft caught with a throaty roar. Carefully, he set the pitch on the rotor blades to zero and shifted the clutch, connecting the engine to the rotor. The blades began to spin, straightening under the influence of centrifugal force. He watched a dial that registered rotor speed as he adjusted the throttle.

  With a sudden movement he slipped the clutch, disengaging the rotor linkage. At the same moment, he adjusted the pitch of the rotor so that the blades caught the air, jerking the craft aloft. At the top of the ascent, the rear propeller kicked in, pushing the small craft forward.

  He relaxed. Without thinking, he adjusted the rotor pitch, leveling out his climb and flying over Haight Street, past the Golden Gate Park, and out toward the bay. He circled Alcatraz Island once and headed toward the Golden Gate Bridge. He could see Danny-boy in the center of the span, far below him. Danny-boy waved and The Machine waved back. Then he headed back toward his workshop.

  He had no rea
son for making the morning flight. He just wanted to feel the wind on his face; he wanted to rise above the buildings and see the city from above. He felt guilty about indulging himself, but there were times that he could not help giving in to the desire. This weakness and lack of control on his part, he felt, was simply another indication that he was a defective machine. If his father had been a better designer, the urge to fly for no purpose would not overwhelm him.

  Late in the morning, he returned to the ground, landing on the four wide lanes of Fell Street and motoring back to his workshop. When he turned off the engine, the world seemed suddenly silent. He pushed the vehicle into the garage and was taking off his helmet when a woman called to him. “Hey!”

  The Machine looked toward the doorway. Jax stood on the sidewalk just outside the garage door. He stared at her, uncertain of how to react. She was a small woman, but she carried herself with insolent grace, as if she owned the sidewalk beneath her feet, the street behind her, and the sun in the sky above. She wore mirrored sunglasses that hid her eyes.

  “Hey,” she said again. “I’ve been waiting for you to show up. There’s something trapped in the alley.”

  “Something?”

  “Like that.” She gestured at the centipede Child that was still sunbathing on the sidewalk. “Sort of. I’ll show you.”

  Reluctantly, he followed her down the block.

  As they approached an alley he could hear the rhythmic scraping of metal on asphalt. From the entrance to the alley he could see the trapped Child. She was one of his favorites: she had the body of a wasp with a thorax as big around as a strong man’s chest. Attached to her thorax were batlike wings, membranous structures braced with metal struts. On sunny days she spread these wings to expose twin arrays of solar cells.

  Somehow she had caught one wing in the gap between a metal drainpipe and a cement wall. As she walked forward, lured by the sunlight that shone into the end of the alley, the wing had bent, twisting around the pipe until it halted her forward progress. But she had kept trying to walk. The asphalt at her feet was streaked with white where her feet had persistently scraped against it.

  The Machine ran to her, stripping off his T-shirt and tossing it over her head to block the photoreceptors. Blindly, she turned her head from side to side, searching for the light. The pulleys that controlled the movement of her head wheezed and chattered. When she turned her head to the left, he fumbled at the back of her neck. He found and flipped the switch that cut off the power from her storage batteries, and she froze with one foot lifted to step forward. The Machine removed the shirt from her head and stepped back to survey the damage.

  The wing was a total loss: the metal struts were hopelessly twisted; most of the photovoltaic cells were cracked and broken. He tugged gently at the twisted metal, trying to work it free.

  “Here,” said Jax, and it was only then that he realized that she was still nearby. “If I pull here and you pull there, it’ll come free.” He nodded and she grabbed the strut. He could feel the heat of Jax’s hands beside his as they pulled. The metal gave way with a creaking scream, bending under their united pressure, and the wing came free. The Machine stepped back, grateful to put some distance between himself and the woman. The warmth of her hands made him uneasy.

  “Is it dead?” Jax asked.

  “She,” he corrected. “Is she dead?”

  He shook his head. “I can fix her,” he said. “In the shop.”

  He moved to her torso, undid the fastenings that held the metal casing closed, and removed the auto batteries. He could return for the batteries later; without them, the body would be considerably lighter. Jax watched, and when he started dragging the body in the direction of the workshop, she helped. Together they lifted the Child: The Machine supported the head and the woman lifted the abdomen and held it on her shoulder.

  When they reached the garage he thanked her abruptly, but she still didn’t leave. She stood in the doorway and watched as he found a wrench and began to remove the bent wing. She held the wing steady as he worked and caught it so that it did not clatter to the floor.

  He ignored her and continued working, detaching the cable assemblies that controlled the expansion and contraction of the wing, then spreading the broken wing on the floor and salvaging the parts that were worth saving. She left the garage, and he felt relief that she was going. She returned a few minutes later, carrying one of the auto batteries. She made five more trips, bringing back all six batteries. Then she perched on the fender of a car and watched as he dug through the scrap steel to find pipe that would replace the bent wing struts.

  “You don’t talk much,” she said at last. He didn’t say anything.

  “It’s kind of nice,” she said after a minute. “Most of the people around here talk all the time.”

  He kept working. She did not leave.

  “How come you’re called The Machine?” she asked after a bit. “Because I’m a machine.”

  “You look like a regular person.”

  “I’m not.”

  “A machine like a clock or something?”

  “More delicate than a clock. I was built before the Plague. People were much more skilled with intricate machinery then. But that’s why I survived the Plague. Because I’m not human.”

  Jax frowned. “Does that mean that everyone who survived the Plague is a machine?”

  “Of course not,” he said impatiently. “But some of them may be machines and not know it.”

  “Yeah? You think Danny-boy is a machine?”

  “No, he’s too disorderly. But I would guess that Fourstar is a machine.”

  Jax shook her head. “I don’t think so. He sweats just like a regular person.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” The Machine continued calmly. “I appear to sweat, but I’m still a machine. Fourstar is a small part of a larger military machine, set in motion before the Plague. Now that he’s moving, he won’t stop.”

  “You’re right there.”

  She didn’t say anything more. After a time, he grew used to her presence. When he stopped to rest, she was still there. He sat down in the shade just outside the garage door, and she came to sit beside him.

  “You’ll be able to fix her?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “That’s good.” She sat with one leg stretched out comfortably and one bent. Her hands were clasped easily around the bent leg, and she was looking out into the distance.

  A moment’s silence. The shadow of a lamppost had shifted so that it fell across the back of the centipede that lay in the street outside the garage. As they watched, the centipede Child lifted its head and slithered forward until its entire body was in the sun. Then it lowered its head and was motionless again. He understood the Children: they reacted to certain stimuli in predictable ways. People made him nervous.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked her abruptly. “I just came to see you.”

  “No one comes to see me.”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t speak, and he glanced at her. The hands that were clasped around her leg had tightened. She seemed smaller and less sure of herself. She shrugged. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  He waited, saying nothing.

  She drew her other knee in, as if for protection, and locked her hands around both legs. She spoke hesitantly. “When I came into the city, I saw an angel. Instead of skin, half its face was metal. And its hand …” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hold out her hand as she spoke. “Its hand was metal, with joints like those.” She pointed to the centipede’s legs. “And I wanted to know—did you ever make anything like that?”

  He shook his head, remembering the dream that he had had months before. “I make nothing,” he said finally. “I only help the city think its thoughts. These…” He waved a hand to take in the centipede and the other Children in the garage. “These are thoughts of the city. So, I think, is the angel.”

  “I think the angel I
saw was the same one that took my mother,” she said.

  He looked at her. Her confidence was gone. She seemed much smaller than before. “Your mother must have belonged to the city,” he said. “The city came and took her.”

  “But where is she now?” Jax asked. “I can’t find her.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes I think I’ll be able to find her soon,” she said. “Sometimes, when I walk down the street, I know that just around the next corner I’ll find what I’m looking for. I turn the corner, and the street is empty. But the feeling is still there. The next corner. Or the next. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I know.” He had felt the subtle pressure of the city surrounding and containing him.

  The warmth that came from her did not seem as objectionable as it had. He remembered a time that he had found a sick kitten in the street. He had offered it things to eat, but it hadn’t taken them. Finally he had taken it to Danny-boy, who fed it with milk from a bottle. But it died anyway. He preferred the Children. He knew how to fix the Children. He did not like this feeling of confusion. He resented her presence, but he could not tell her to go away.

  “Fourstar is coming,” she said. “He wants to destroy the city.”

  She rested her head on her knees. “Sometimes I want to run away, but I can’t. I told my mother I would help. And Danny-boy …” She let the sentence trail off, saying nothing about Danny-boy. She looked sad and broken.

  He tried to think of things that might help her. “Are you thirsty?” he asked suddenly. “Here—I have cold drinks; I have a refrigerator. Here.” He rushed to the refrigerator and brought back a cold Coca-Cola. “Here, this is for you.”

  She accepted the bottle. “It’ll be all right,” he said, not knowing where the words came from. Somewhere in the past, back before the Plague, back before he knew he was a machine. “I’ll help.”

  She smiled at him and he immediately regretted his words, but it was too late to call them back

  Long after she left, the air of the garage held the scent of her: a touch of sweat, a hint of wood smoke. He tried to work on the solar array for the new wing, but he kept dropping the tiny components. His patience was not up to the task. He began cutting pipes for the wing struts, but the first cut he made was wrong, spoiling a length of pipe. He set that aside as well.