by Sean Wallace
Marx’s tongue kept flappin’ until he got his way; such smooth words never did the marks any good. Bitter smoke billowed from the street vendors’ burners, following the losers home. Nightwatchmen changed shifts, grunting salutations and beating billies against enhanced meat-hooks, as adrenaline levels bloated the carnival’s nihilistic avenues. (“To see now, how a jest shall come about!” laughed the dancing girls. “I warrant, and I should live a thousand years, I never should forget it—”) The disgruntled baker turned away from Marx’s stall, stuffing his remaining two guineas into a ragged pocket. He nearly tripped over the fox wheeling its way up to the target.
Dressed in a chrome yellow top hat and matching damask suit, the fox was a dapper fellow, every inch a gentleman. The spiked wheels of his wicker invalid’s chair sought purchase on the midway’s greasy cobblestones; they skidded nauseatingly, and moved forward at an inchworm’s pace. No matter if it took until morning for his master to reach his goal, the fox’s kettledrum construct would not interfere. Only when he was contentedly puffing away on a mahogany pipe, his wheeled chair jauntily parked on the scuffed painted footprints, did the housebot approach. He draped a Burberry rug across his master’s immobile copper knees, tucking it gently between the chair’s arms and the fox’s atrophied hindquarters, then stood off to his left-hand side.
The fox’s eyes never wavered from their prize as he asked the bot to analyse the odds of his winning this game.
A slender ticker tape chugged out of a slit beneath the construct’s speaker box. He tore it against his serrated teeth, and passed the results over to his master. “Immeasurably in your favour. As usual, Sir.”
“Hey there, cowboy.” Marx rearranged his features until they imitated a passably charming grin. He released a burst of steam from his top hat as he spoke.
The crow eyeballed the fox from his lofty perch. Those who balanced on wheels instead of legs were such simple targets. Weaker than children, and less confident. “Come have a go,” he said, flicking the gear to the corner of his beak and projecting his voice for all to hear. “In fact, what’s say we give him TWO goes for free, on accounta his poorly condition? Don’t that sound fair, Robin?” he asked, seeking and receiving the showman’s nod.
The fox tapped his pipe on the chair’s padded arm, watched its sticky contents combine with the sludge lazily seeping around his wheels. (“—let them measure us by what they will, We’ll measure them a measure, and be gone . . .”) He flicked a shred of tobacco off his lap, and gently cleared his throat.
“Indeed, I will take two shots, as you’ve so kindly offered, Mr Black,” said the fox.
It took a second for the crow to realize the fox was addressing him. Not “bird”, not “jackdaw”, not “scoundrel”, no. He was Mr Black.
The fox feigned interest in the kaleidoscopic projections whirling around Marx’s tent while the crow fluffed and preened his feathers.
Then he opened fire.
“Shot the first: a question. How did such a magnificent creature – genuine Corvus corone, pure flesh and bone, not a single enhancement – how did such a miraculous being come to be shackled and used as a cyborg’s lackey?”
The crow spluttered, and nearly swallowed the gear in earnest.
“Shot the second,” the fox continued, undaunted. “An offer. Work for me.”
The crow cocked his head, and waited for the punch line.
“Let me set the terms,” said the fox, “for I am sure you will find them suitably appealing.
“First,” he said, “I will prohibit you from participating in any specimen of show – even though it would be an absolute delight to hear your dulcet tones raised in song, Mr Black, old chap. But, no. No singing today. Instead, I would like to employ your golden sense. What does Mr Marx pay you? Some flattering mirrors in front of which you might preen? Perhaps some chymical bird-feed?”
The crow kept silent.
(“True, I talk of dreams; Which are the children of an idle brain; Begot of nothing but vain fantasy . . .”)
“I will offer you a gentleman’s fare, Mr Black,” the fox continued, quietly. “I am not interested in paying carny’s fees for such a one as you are. Sneer all you like at the term, Mr Marx; you cannot deny that you have treated this dark angel as nothing more than a lowly carny.
“I need a partner, Mr Black, for a somewhat more lucrative . . . oh, let’s call it a venture, shall we? Your guile, your cleverness, your wit: these are exactly the assets I need for this undertaking. You are far too intelligent for this braggart’s show! In fact, the show’s very success hinges on your intellect. Don’t think I didn’t see you exchange the false gear with the real, earlier—”
—the crowd stirred, grumbled as they fondled their weightless pockets—
Marx fumed, “That’s enough out of you, cowboy—”
“—indeed without your finesse, there would be no Robin Marx! And how does he repay you? By tying you to a mouldy planet and shoving a gear down your gullet?”
(“Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of the collar . . .”)
“What horror will he perform next? Are you a crow, Mr Black? Or are you a soiled dove, blackened much as this city has been of late, by too many trips up Marx’s sooty arse?”
The paralytic’s got a point, thought the crow.
He spat the gear out, propelling it with fury, loosening his tongue to ingratiate hisself to his new employer. The crowd dispersed like exhaled smoke. (Ladies, dames, raised their voices, “To move is to stir; and to be valiant is to stand; therefore, if thou art mov’d, thou runn’st away . . .”)
The tiny gear negotiated a haphazard path across the cobblestones, before spinning to a halt at the housebot’s burnished feet. Before Marx could shift his frame off the counter, the bot had dropped a silk handkerchief onto the gear, collected it and polished it properly. Then he lifted his master’s damask coattails, exposing the clockworks inset in his narrow russet back.
Half of the works were still, while the other portion whirred out their quotidian functions. The bot gently laid the gear into the fox’s lower back, and used his index finger to screw it into place.
“What do you want me to do, boss?” asked the crow, his eagerness to escape the ramshackle orrery hanging like a painful chandelier from his brief question.
“Why, you’ve already done it, old chap,” said the newly mobile fox as his lower legs sprang to life. “You really have done it!”
(“O, Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”)
Yipping like a newborn pup, the fox switched his tail into overdrive. He sprang out of his redundant chair, blew the crow a grateful kiss as he sped past, fleeing the scene before he could get slicked.
(“What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” chimed the sideshow dames as the Johnnies were ejected from their parlours. The women’s laughter was harsh and raw.)
Terrain
Genevieve Valentine
The trains carved into land that wasn’t theirs, and swallowed the men who laid their iron roads – the tracks like threads to draw white men closer together – monsters belching smoke across a land they meant to conquer.
So Faye made herself scarce the day the men from Union Pacific visited Western Fleet Courier, to ask Elijah about the land.
Elijah wasn’t a man who thought much where he didn’t have to; maybe it was just as well, since many who’d thought harder were cruel, and Elijah’s place was where she and Frank had made their home.
So far.
The railroad men spoke with Elijah a long time. They cast looks around the yard where Fa Liang and Joseph were working on a dog, weighting the front pair of its legs so it wouldn’t flip backward the first time you scaled a rock face. Fa Liang muttered something to the dog, and Joseph laughed, and the tall railroad man watched.
They watched Maria tending vegetables, rake in hand, shirtsleeves rolled to her elbows.
Faye kept in the barn. And Frank was somewhere those men would never find him. (Better not to tru
st anyone with the government. That much they’d learned the hard way.)
But Elijah was white, and kind-hearted, and had made friends when he lived in River Pass – Harper at the general store still set things aside for him. Elijah had no reason to fear two men who smiled and seemed polite; once or twice, he laughed.
Bad sign, Faye thought.
They shook hands with him and left at last, and Faye was able to tear herself away from the hole in the boards and pretend nothing was wrong.
People came with messages for delivery every week: homesteaders, wagon trains, the Pony Express. If she was shaken every time a stranger showed, she’d spend her life in this barn.
When Elijah came into the barn, he smiled, but there was a second’s pause before he said, “Hello, Faye.”
She didn’t mind the pause; worse to be called a wrong name.
It was easy to mistake Frank and Faye. The twins looked like their mother, the high brow and strong jaw, and they had the matching, flinty expressions of a lot of the Shoshone children who were sent to the white school. It made Frank look like a warrior, and Faye look troubled.
She stood beside Dog 2, one hand on its right foreleg. It was foolish to seek comfort in machines – look at the railroad – but still, she felt calmer with it close by.
She should have had a wrench, if she was pretending to work, but she’d been shaking.
Elijah meant well. Elijah was an easygoing man, most days. He tried to keep peace, he tried to be fair.
Faye just didn’t think she and Elijah had the same idea of fair.
She couldn’t even ask – the words stuck when she saw him – and she held her breath and looked at the open door behind him, the sliver of deep blue sky.
She’d been waiting for a sign to run. An open door was as good as anything.
Then Elijah said, “Lord, these trains have made men greedy.”
The land can be beautiful, depending where you’re coming from.
The sun sets in bands of red and gold, and one of turquoise just ahead of the night; sunrise is cool in summer and sharp in winter, like ice cracking; and the horizon’s so unbroken that weather isn’t a surprise – you see clouds well ahead of the rain.
The soil is shallow and it fights, but there are wildflowers and tall grass until snowdrifts cover them. Snowdrifts, with rock to rest against, climb taller than a house, thin dry powder. The snow can turn any moment, with the wind, and swallow a man whole. You don’t go out alone in winter if you want to make it home.
There is, sometimes, water. It’s always flowing away from you.
There are always hills on the horizon, even though you’re already so high up you never catch your breath. You can look out and out and out across the basin, and see specks on the horizon, twenty miles away, where a city’s fighting to take hold.
Sometimes a city lasts. Sometimes you look out one night and not one lamp is lit, and you know the land passed judgement on it.
When you look at the night sky, it makes you dizzy.
Part of this is wonder. Part is knowing how far away from other lives you are, in this wide unbroken dark.
If you’ve made your way west from the forests, and given up town life for the frontier, this land seems like punishment.
It’s beautiful, if you’re coming home.
Elijah Pike owned the fifty acres of Western Fleet Courier.
He’d come to River Pass from Boston, after he’d tired of being someone else’s clerk and decided it was time to make something of himself in the West. He’d been an indifferent farmer – too uncertain of the soil – but River Pass needed even indifferent vegetables, and he’d found enough success on his own that when Fa Liang presented himself, Elijah had the land, and money for an extra barn, and parts for the dogs.
He was proud of the business; he was proud that they sometimes boarded a scrawny boy from the Pony Express while they handed off a message going where no horse could reach.
Elijah had painted the wooden sign himself: “Any Message, All Terrain”. It hung below the wrought iron sign for Western Fleet, nailed to the arch marking his property line.
It was just as well he owned the land; he was the only one of them who could.
A dog has six legs. Each one is thin, and tall as a man, and arched as a bow, and in their center they cradle the large, gleaming cylinder of the dog’s body. The back half conceals a steam engine, with a dipping spoon of a rider’s seat carved out ahead of it, with levers for steering and power, and just enough casing left in front to stop a man from hurtling off his seat every time the dog stops short.
It looks ungainly. The casing jangles, and the legs seem hardly sturdy enough to hold it, and when someone takes a seat it looks like the contraption’s eating him alive.
But legs that seem ungainly in the yard are smooth on open territory, and dogs don’t get skittish about heights or loose ground, and when scaling a rock face, six legs are sometimes better than four.
There’s a throttle for the engine, and three metal rings on each side of the chair, where the rider slides his fingers to operate the legs. Left alone, the dog walks straight ahead; when the rider starts his puppetry, it treads water, dances, climbs mountains.
It takes a strong boy to wield one – not muscled, but wiry, a boy who can keep his balance and his head if the ground slips out from under him.
Faye won’t train them if they look like they force their own way. On the trail, a rider has to understand enough to sidewind Dog 3 in heavy winds, enough to hear what’s breaking in old Dog 1 before it breaks.
Sometimes she and Fa Liang placed bets about what would need fixing up when some boy came back.
“The boy,” Frank said, “if he breaks Dog 2.”
Faye shouldered him, but Fa Liang said, “No bet.”
The dogs never tire, and need a quarter of the water a horse does. The boys carry some, but the inside of the engine shell collects condensation at night, which siphons into a skin.
That was Faye’s idea; their mother taught her, a long time ago.
They’re five strange beasts – they terrify horses – but they do as promised. The Express advises riders to use them if the road gets impassable for animals.
Even folk in River Pass have a little pride that for those who need a message sent where no messenger goes, you can point them right to Western Fleet.
Fa Liang started the business.
He left the Central Pacific line and came to River Pass in search of work. River Pass wouldn’t have him.
He’d never said if it had come to blows; it didn’t always have to.
But Susannah Pell from the clerk’s office followed him out of the general store and told him about Elijah, living on land of his own, well outside the city limits.
Elijah welcomed him. He was working alone, then, and the place was falling to ruin.
The barn had a pile of equipment Elijah had run so poorly that no one would take it off his hands.
The first dog Fa Liang built was small, and slipshod – the engine casing was one sheet of tin, and the seat little more than a metal spoon nailed on in front of it. The engine sputtered on steep inclines, and it limped. But when the livestock count was off one day, Fa Liang rode out in it, and came back with a calf he’d maneuvered out of a split in the rock.
“Damn,” said Elijah, grinning.
Fa Liang peeled himself off the seat – that first build wasn’t kind to the rider, his back was scorched for a week – and asked, “There a courier in town?”
They met Joseph when they came into River Pass looking for a blacksmith.
Fa Liang handed him two uneven legs from the dog.
“I need something to make this one longer,” he said. “And some weight, for the bottom.”
Joseph frowned, turned it over and over, smoothed his hands over the joints.
Then a smile stole over his face, and he said, “What the devil are you building?”
When Elijah came back from the general store with his wagon
of dry goods, Fa Liang and Joseph were waiting.
Joseph had come from Missouri a freedman, after dismissal from the Union Infantry; he’d been working to earn money to go with the Mormon wagons headed west.
“If it weren’t for the dogs,” he told Faye once, “I’d have kept going until I hit the ocean.”
The dogs wouldn’t have kept him long, but Maria came soon after, and she could keep hold of almost anything.
What Maria hadn’t held was her farm – Texas ranchers ran her off as soon as her husband was in the ground.
But she was determined to find another homestead, so she’d joined a traveling preacher, and in River Pass, when he demanded to see the husband she’d claimed to have in a town she’d picked off a map, Maria saw Elijah coming out of the clerk’s office, and took a chance.
Sometimes, in January when it seemed winter would never break, Frank asked for the story. Maria made Elijah act it out, laughing; she claimed he’d been marvelous.
Faye didn’t buy it. Elijah was an honest man. Play-acting didn’t suit him.
“He must have been bad, though,” Faye said once, when they were alone.
Maria grinned. “Horrible. Not even Padre was fooled.”
“But you came back with him.”
She shrugged. “A man who can’t lie is sometimes a good sign.”
Faye went to wash before the supper bell rang at the big house.
They came from their own cabins – Joseph, Fa Liang, and Frank and Faye from farthest out.
Maria had moved into the big house two winters back, when the ground betrayed her and her cabin floor split.
The garden turned into a cornucopia when she laid hands on it.
(“It’s like he tried to kill them,” Maria muttered to Faye once, wrist deep in dirt. She was planting squash far enough apart that they wouldn’t choke.)
When they came inside, Maria glanced up and nodded. “Frank. Faye.”
Frank glanced at Faye with the ghost of a smile. He had his shell necklace on, looped down his chest like a breastplate, and it was the only reason why Maria had been able to tell one from the other. It was the same, the days Faye wore her skirt because her trousers were drying.