The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare

by Zillah Bethell

  It was irritating. No, that’s far too mild. Sometimes it was just so bloody annoying not being able to see color. All the time—every single day—I would miss out on some experience or other—or at least have a very watered-down version of it—just because I couldn’t tell one thing from another. It made me sad and it made me mad.

  “Forgiven,” I sighed eventually. I put my eye back to the telescope and watched the dot sparkle a little more, all the while slowly moving across the lens.

  “You know, the best way to look at stars with the naked eye,” Vivi rattled on beside me, “is to look just past them. Try and stare straight at them and you miss a lot of the detail. You’ll find it difficult to focus. But look a tiny bit away—take your eyes off them—and you can see them much more clearly.”

  “Hmm.”

  Vivi and I swapped places again and she gave the two metal sticks attached to the telescope a couple of little turns.

  “So? What are you going to do now? About your dad, I mean.”

  I shrugged. “Not much I can do. Mum says we can write letters. He can make a QWERTY call every few months. That’s about it.”

  I went too quiet too quickly and Vivi picked up on it.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Well…” I wasn’t entirely sure I could bring myself to even form the words. Even after everything, it still felt vaguely treacherous. “The problem is that … well … I don’t know if I can.”

  “Why not?”

  “He left soldiers to die … that’s what the army says.” Whenever I thought about it, it made me feel sick. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to think. On one hand, he’s my dad. And on the other…”

  The room suddenly became embarrassingly silent.

  Eventually, it was Vivi who broke that silence.

  “Well, at least you actually have a father. That’s one up on me. Even if he is in prison.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Still, you should have listened to me about getting your revenge on Boyle. It didn’t do you any good in the end, did it?”

  “Yes, yes, Your Royal Highness.” I put on a fake posh voice. “I shall certainly be listening to you next time with your wise and thoughtful words. How foolish I have been not to heed your advice. I bow to your greater knowledge.” I gave a little curtsy.

  Vivi stopped what she was doing and looked at me.

  “Why are you always so sarcastic, Auden? I don’t understand. Why are you always so sarcastic about everything?”

  The question caught me off guard.

  “I, er…”

  “I’ll tell you what I think, shall I? I think you use sarcasm to protect yourself. I think that you think that you can hide behind a sarcastic comment and not reveal what you really feel. Am I right?”

  I was shocked. She was absolutely correct. I definitely did use sarcasm like a shield. Without a doubt. Even I hadn’t really realized it before she said so, but now that she had it was obvious.

  Of course, I wasn’t going to tell her that.

  “Er, no! I don’t think so!” I said in a kind of über-sarcastic way, and Vivi laughed.

  “You know, you really are hopeless, Auden.”

  I smiled, and stared out the window at the clear starry sky that hung like a poster above Trinity.

  *   *   *

  Vivi wasn’t entirely correct. Getting my revenge on Boyle wasn’t a complete waste of time. Apart from finding out the truth about my dad, I suddenly saw Paragon in a whole new light. Perhaps he was just a robot filled with circuit boards and pneumatic pistons but, to me, he had become a whole lot more. Caring, comforting, consoling. A friend.

  After all, he was there for me when my dad wasn’t.

  *   *   *

  We all watched the Sifters below, motoring from one large pile of trash to another. They picked out individual items with their pincers, inspected them with their visual sensors, and pulled the salvageable parts off, stacking them onto a trailer before tossing the useless ends into a large rectangular bin.

  Me and Vivi and Paragon were sat on top of one of the enormous mountains of discarded trash that dominated the recycling yard. The sun was burning down and I felt so incredibly thirsty.

  “We still haven’t worked out what your job is, Paragon,” I said, my mouth dry and clicking. “Perhaps you could do that.” I nodded my head toward the Sifters, one of whom was now having difficulty wheeling itself over a long sheet of corrugated metal.

  Paragon gave a short laugh. “Nope. I don’t believe so. Somehow I don’t think that any of those machines down there know anything about the poetry of Christina Rossetti or the paintings of John Constable or the names of all fifty-five of Jason’s Argonauts or the Latin name for a three-toed sloth, do you? I mean, why would they?”

  “So why do you know all this stuff?” I asked. “Have you been designed to replace a teacher? If so, please replace the one we’re having next year. He’s vile.”

  Paragon laughed again. “I don’t believe I’m a teacher. I don’t know why I believe I’m not a teacher.… It’s just a sensation I have. A gut feeling.”

  Only days before, comments like that would have made me go purple with rage. A robot, after all, deals in black-and-white and is not allowed to have “gut feelings” about things. Are they? They deal in yes/nos and on/offs. Not in-betweens. Right?

  But now … I had come to realize that the world is not always the logical place it likes to think it is, and that people are hard to read. Life is not the straightforward, one-after-the-other A, B, C that you imagine when you’re young. It’s all more complicated than that. More twisted around. Like a ball of string. Or to be more precise, like lots of balls of string all tied around each other, impossible to pull apart.

  So why not accept that a robot might think? Might feel? Might understand what it was I was going through?

  “You’re incredibly fast,” I said. “Is that the main reason for you? To be fast? To race? To do something quickly?”

  Paragon shrugged.

  “I don’t know, but…” He picked up a spherical rubber-ball-like thing from the pile of junk that we sat on. “Watch this.…”

  He held it between finger and thumb, rolling it slightly as he showed it to us. Suddenly, he clamped his entire hand over the ball, hiding it from view.

  “Now,” he said, a hint of mischief in his voice, “what have I got in my hand?”

  “A ball,” Vivi replied.

  “Ah-ha. But have I?”

  Vivi nodded. “It’s a bit like a ball, anyway. Looks like one.”

  “Yes. Okay. Let’s not get too tied up in what the thing is—let’s assume it’s a ball, shall we? It’s close enough. What I’m interested in is … do I have it in my hand? Do I really have it in my hand?”

  The way he said really reminded me of me.

  “Yes. You do,” said Vivi.

  “Ah-ha.”

  Slowly he peeled his fingers open to show that there was nothing in his hand. Vivi gasped and I just smiled.

  “Did you just crush it to dust?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Where is it, then?” Vivi puzzled.

  “Ah-ha!” Paragon brought up his other hand, which was wide open and empty. Steadily he curled his fingers over into a fist before opening them again.

  Sitting in the palm of his hand was the ball.

  “Whoa!” It was my turn to sound amazed. “How did you do that? Have you got a secret tunnel running along your arms or something?”

  “Prestidigitation,” Paragon said.

  “Prestid … what?”

  He gave his fingers another flourish. “Magic!”

  “You mean it’s a trick?” Vivi said. “Sleight of hand?”

  Paragon nodded. “It’s a simple thing to learn. Just a series of moves. That’s what prestidigitation is. A combination of skills designed to look impressive. Humans have to practice a long time to make them work. Luckily”—he kind of swaggered where he s
at—“I come preloaded with all those skills.” He reached out and pulled a five thousand pound note out of my left ear. “See.”

  “I wish you could conjure up some water from somewhere,” I said, the back of my throat burning. “I’m so thirsty.”

  *   *   *

  As the afternoon dragged on, we made our way slowly back toward Unicorn Cottage. Most of the countryside around Cambridge was deserted and we very rarely saw anybody at all. Whenever we did, Paragon would either hide behind a hedge or simply pull up the collar on the trench coat and tug down the wide-brimmed hat that he had recently started wearing at a jaunty sort of angle before quickly passing them by. Thankfully, today we didn’t see anybody. It made things much easier when we didn’t.

  I’d also stopped checking to see if I was ever being followed. Since the day I’d bumped into Boyle in the streets just outside Trinity, I hadn’t noticed anyone trying to track me. Maybe I had been imagining that the soldier guy was following me? My silly black-and-white brain just playing tricks on me.

  We took a slight detour from the lanes along which we usually walked and crossed over onto Wandlebury. Thousands of years ago, the Wandlebury Ring was a hill fort. The shape of a circle, it meant that the inhabitants could defend themselves easily from attackers down below. Then at some point it had been turned into a park with a massive stable block dominating one end.

  “We were always taught at school that there were two gods called Gog and Magog buried somewhere around here,” Vivi said as we climbed toward the ditch that ran around the edge of the park. “I don’t know why. I can’t really remember the rest of the story.” She looked a bit disappointed with herself that she couldn’t recall the detail. “Remind me to look it up later.…” She glanced at Paragon. “When my QWERTY’s working again.”

  As we got nearer the top of the small hill, my foot suddenly lost its grip on some rubble and my left leg slid away from beneath me. My body slumped to the ground and I hit the side of my face on a jagged rock that was sticking out of the earth. Stunned, I just lay there.

  “Auden!”

  Paragon bounded over and crouched on his knees beside me. His hand reached out and seized me by the shoulder.

  “Auden. Are you okay? Here. Let me help you up.” He grabbed me under the arms and lifted me with ease back onto my feet again, dusting the mess from my shirt. “There! Oh no, you’re hurt.” His fingers dabbed at the side of my face and I could see blood dripping off the tips of them. “You’ve cut your head.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, my own fingers feeling the small gash that had sent blood trickling down the side of my cheek. “It’s nothing.”

  “Wait.” Paragon bent over and, getting hold of the bottom of the trench coat, ripped a strip of material from it. It was about two inches wide and fifteen inches long. “Come here.” He positioned the strip around my head, covering up the fresh hole, and tied it swiftly and securely, the material squashing across the top corner of one eye. “There. That’ll keep it clean for now. But when you get home you must wash it out. With water. Okay? You have to clean it up with some of your daily allowance. Yes?”

  “I will.” I felt a bit odd with the bottom couple of inches of a trench coat wrapped around my head. “It’ll be all right, though. It’s nothing.”

  “I know, I know,” Paragon said. “You’ll live.” He patted me on the back. “You okay? Or do you want to go home?”

  I pointed upward.

  At the top, everything leveled out. The ground was flat and dotted with trees. The grass looked mostly dead. The large stable building was grubby and run-down. Nobody had been up here in a long while.

  No humans, anyway.

  Because above us, in the trees, birds sang like it was the first light of morning. Sheltered from the noise of the wind, the birdsong echoed from tree to tree, bouncing like a pinball from one tall pine to another.

  The three of us stood there and listened as bullfinches, crossbills, sparrows, and siskins (Paragon had spent an entire afternoon teaching us which was which) made their music and sang to one another like a high, spread-out choir.

  Suddenly, Paragon threw his hat and his coat onto the ground and took several strides away from us toward the center of the circle. He stopped and held his arms heavenward, his head turning left, then right as he watched the tops of the trees.

  And then he started whistling.

  High-pitched.

  Like a bird.

  I looked at Vivi, who did a sort of don’t-ask-me face.

  A second or two later, something fluttered down from one of the trees and landed on Paragon’s right arm. A sparrow. It twitched its head as it tried to make out what sort of strange thing it had just landed on. Paragon watched it as it skipped its way along his arm toward his face.

  A moment passed, then another sparrow came to land on the top of Paragon’s head, quickly followed by another alongside the first on his right arm. Three birds, all of them singing along with Paragon’s whistling.

  He slowly turned around to face us.

  It was usually impossible to tell whenever Paragon was smiling—his face was immobile after all. The grille for a mouth never moved. The lights in the eyes simply glowed. But I knew that at that moment he was smiling like he’d never smiled before.

  “This,” he said as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the birds. “This is a special place.” A fourth bird took up its place on Paragon’s left arm. “A very special place. If I were to get all rusted up and left to power down here, I don’t think I’d mind. I can think of worse places to be.”

  One of the birds on the right arm hopped over Paragon’s head to meet the newcomer on the left arm. Paragon laughed and I found myself joining in.

  “What do you think, Vivi? Wouldn’t make a very good scarecrow, would I?”

  “No. You wouldn’t.” She grinned. “One of the worst.”

  A smaller sparrow seemed to join the others. It pecked a little at one of the lights blinking on and off near Paragon’s elbow before flying off again.

  “‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’” Paragon began.

  “‘That perches in the soul…’”

  “Christina Rossetti?” Vivi asked.

  “No. Emily Dickinson,” Paragon replied.

  “You’re quite keen on her, aren’t you?” I said, trying to disguise the fact that for some peculiar reason—right at that very moment, and from out of nowhere—I felt like I wanted to cry. Deep down in my chest, the poem or the vision of Paragon and the birds—something, anyway—was making me want to curl up on the ground and cry. I tried to brave it out. “You like her poems, don’t you? Always quoting her poems, you are.”

  Paragon looked hard at me and I knew that he knew. I realized then that he always knew.

  “Oh, you know, Auden,” he said, the lights on one of his eyes flickering like a wink. “She’s okay. She’s all right. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  *   *   *

  “So when do you think you’ll tell your mother all about me?”

  Paragon was staring out my bedroom window watching the irrigation pyramids spitting over the crops.

  “I mean, you can’t keep me secret forever. All secrets tend to come out in the end no matter how hard you try to cover them.”

  Sandwich was sitting at the bottom of my bed. She was so used to seeing Paragon around in the day that she didn’t pay him any attention anymore. She was cuddled up and purring, and every now and then Paragon would stroke her ears gently and make her purr and dribble even more.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my pencil scratching over the large sketch pad. “I haven’t really given it much thought. I just assumed I’d keep you a secret forever and hide you away down under the shed every night.” I was trying to capture the exact shape of Paragon’s head, but I was finding it difficult. Each time he moved I could see I was doing it wrong. I’d already worked my way through about a third of an eraser in the time I’d been attempting to draw him. “I’
m not sure how she’ll react to a seven-foot-tall robot who’s been living under her lawn. I don’t think she’ll be all that happy.”

  “Might be a bit of a shock, I suppose,” Paragon noted. “Although I could be useful. Keep the house tidy. Take care of the garden. Cook dinner. That kind of thing. I might be useful, what with your dad being away.”

  I kept on sketching. Badly.

  Paragon turned from the window and looked at me.

  “You haven’t talked much about it,” he said. “Not since you found out.”

  “Not much to say, is there?” I rubbed one of Paragon’s eyes out and blew the crumbs of eraser off the page.

  “There’s always stuff to say, Auden.”

  I sighed and put the pad down on the bed, alongside Sandwich.

  “I dunno,” I said. “It’s a bit like everything I’ve ever known has turned out to be wrong. Like finding out the moon’s not real or something. Or that there are more than a hundred and eighty degrees in a triangle. I can’t trust all the stuff I have always assumed to be true. I’m not sure I can trust what people tell me.”

  “Auden.” Paragon leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. “I may not be a human being, but I know an awful lot about them and the way they behave. It is true that humans are imperfect creatures. They have cracks in their behavior. But these cracks are—trust me—only tiny. Humans are, in fact, nowhere near as imperfect as they like to believe themselves to be. Oh yes, there are some who are badly damaged. People who lie and hurt and take pleasure in doing so. A bit like your ‘friend’ Boyle, I suppose. But for the most part, humans are kind and truthful and wise and decent. If you ask someone for help, then chances are, they will help you. And that’s always been the case. Ever since the first human crawled out of the swamp and stood on two legs. If it wasn’t the case, then the entire human race would have died out thousands of years ago. It is only through support and trust and love that humans have survived.”

  “What about wars, then?” I asked. “Why do we have wars? Why are thousands and millions of people off fighting right now?”

  Paragon shook his head. “I honestly don’t know. That’s the one aspect of human behavior that I really do not get. Some people say it keeps the world in balance—straightens everything out before the world can evolve even further. Some say it is mankind acting out behavior that was necessary at the beginning of time—when they had to fight for food—and that people have never managed to forget it, despite evolution. But I don’t know. War is the one thing that makes no sense to me.”