Robots vs. Fairies(52)

“He’ll be happy you’re alive. Trust me. Besides, you fought it off with a rock. That’s got to be good enough, right?”

“It’s nothing compared to a giant robot.”

Jela snorted. A rock. A giant robot. Maybe it didn’t matter how you fought a giant squid, just so long as you fought.





TEAM ROBOT




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BY MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL

Robots are awesome. Why? Because we’re tool-using creatures, and a robot is the ultimate tool. It can be crafted to do a specific job, and do it with precision. My dad used to work for a textile company, which could take your measurements via light, shoot them into a computer, and then have robots cut out a custom-tailored garment for you in minutes. For me, that epitomizes why robots are cool, because we can design them to do anything.





THE BOOKCASE EXPEDITION


by Jeffrey Ford

I started seeing them during the winter when I was at death’s door and whacked out on meds. At first I thought they were baby praying mantises that had somehow invaded the house to escape the ice and snow, but they were far smaller than that. Minuscule, really. I was surprised I could see them at all. I could, though, and at times with great clarity, as if through invisible binoculars. Occasionally, I heard their distant cries.

I’m talking about fairies, tiny beings in the forms of men, women, and children. I spotted them, thin as a pin and half as tall, creeping about; running from the cats or carrying back to their homes in the walls sacks full of crumbs gathered from our breakfast plates. Mostly I saw them at night, as I had to sit upright in the corner of the living room couch to sleep in order not to suffocate. While the wind howled outside, the light coming in from the kitchen illuminated a small party of them ascending and descending the dunes and craters of the moonscape that was my blanket. One night they planted a flag—a tattered postage stamp fastened to a cat’s whisker—into my knee as if I was undiscovered country.

The first time I saw one, it was battling—have you ever seen one of those spiders that looks like it’s made of wood? Well, the fairy had a thistle spike and was parrying the picket legs of that arachnid, bravely lunging for its soft underbelly. I took it all in stride, though. I didn’t get excited. I certainly didn’t go and tell Lynn, who would think it nonsense. Let the fairies do their thing, I thought. I had way bigger problems to deal with, like trying to breathe.

I know what you’re thinking. They weren’t a figment of my imagination. For instance, I’d spotted a band of them running along the kitchen counter. They stopped near the edge, where a water glass stood. Together, they pushed against it and toppled it onto the floor. “Ya little bastards,” I yelled. They scattered faint atoms of laughter as they fled. The broken glass went everywhere, and I swept for twenty minutes only to find more. The next day, Lynn got a shard in her foot, and I had to burn the end of a needle and operate.

I didn’t see them constantly. Sometimes a week would go by before I encountered one. They watched us and I was certain they knew what we were about in our thoughts and acts. I’d spotted them—one with a telescope aimed at my nose and the other sitting, making notes in a bound journal—on the darkened porch floor at night when we sat out wrapped in blankets and candlelight, drinking wine and dozing in the moon glow. I wondered, Why now, as I trundle toward old age, am I granted the “sight,” as my grandma Maisie might have called it?

A few days ago I was in my office at the computer, trying to iron out my thinking on a story I’d been writing in which there’s a scene where a guy, for no reason I can recall, just disappears. There’d been nothing strange about this character previously to give any indication that he was simply going to vanish into thin air. I can’t remember what I’d had in mind or why at some point it had made sense to me.

The winter illness had stunned my brain. Made me dim and forgetful. Metaphor, simile, were mere words, and I couldn’t any longer feel the excitement of their effects. A darkness pervaded my chest and head. I leaned back in my chair away from the computer and turned toward the bookcases. I was concentrating hard not to let the fear of failure in when a damn housefly the size of a grocery-store grape buzzed my left temple, and I slapped myself in the face. It came by again and I ducked, reaching for a magazine with which to do my killing.

That was when a contingent of fairies emerged from the dark half-inch of space beneath the middle of the five bookcases that lined the right wall of my office. There was a swarm of them, like ants round a drip of ice cream on a summer sidewalk. At first I thought I wanted to get back to my story, but soon enough I told myself, You know what? Fuck that story. I folded my arms and watched. At first they appeared distant, but I didn’t fret. I was in no hurry. The clear, strong breath of spring had made of the winter a fleeting shadow. I saw out the window—sunlight, blue sky, and a lazy white cloud. The fairies gave three cheers, and I realized something momentous was afoot.

Although I kept my eyes trained on their number, my concentration sharpened and blurred and sharpened again. When my thoughts were away, I have no idea what I was thinking, but when they weren’t, I was thinking that someday soon I was going to go over to the preserve and walk the two-mile circular path through the golden prairie grass. I decided, in that brief span, that it would only be right to take Nellie the dog with me. All this, as I watched the little people, maybe fifty of them, twenty-five on either side, carry out from under the bookcase the ruler I’d been missing for the past year.