Robots vs. Fairies(73)

“But . . . but we can think,” said Mowgai.

Old Grandma Toffle snorted again. “Think!” she said. “And where did that ever get you?”

“But we can tell stories,” I said quietly.

“Yes . . .,” she said. “Yes. That we can. Very well. What was your question again?”

“Do you know what happened to the boy, Oli, when he left the town?”

“Know? No, I can’t say as that I know, little Mai.”

“Then . . .”

Her eyes twinkled in the light of the fire, much as Elder Simeon’s did in the sun. When she smiled, there were dimples on her cheeks, making her appear momentarily younger. She said, “Sit down, children. Sit down, and let me tell you. The boy wandered for a long time. . . .”

*

The boy wandered for a long time away from the town. He missed his parents, and his dog, and everyone. The world beyond the town was very different from everything he’d ever known. It was a rough place at that time, which was not that long after the great floods and the collapse of the old world, and many of the springs were poisoned, and the animals hostile and deadly, and flocks of wild drones flew against darkening skies, and unexploded ordnance lay all about and some of it was . . .

Not exactly smart, but . . .

Cunning.

He went for a long time without food or water, and he’d grown weak when he met the Fox and the Cat. They were not exactly a fox and a cat. One was a sort of mobile infiltration unit, designed for stealth, and the other was a stubby little tank. They were exactly the sort of unsuitable companions the Town had worried about when it let the boy go.

“Hello, young sir!” said the Cat.

“Who . . . who is it?” said the Fox. “Who dares . . . walk the paths of the dead?”

“My name’s Oli,” said Oli. He looked at them with curiosity, for he had never seen such machines before.

“I have never met an Oli,” said the Cat.

“I have never tasted an Oli,” said the Fox, somewhat wistfully.

“Please,” said Oli, “I am very hungry and very tired. Do you know where I could find shelter?”

The Fox and the Cat communicated silently with each other, for they, too, were very hungry, though their sustenance was of another kind.

“We know . . . a place,” said the Fox.

“Not very far,” said the Cat.

“Not . . . not far at all,” said the Fox.

“We could show it to you,” said the Cat.

“Show it to . . . you,” said the Fox.

“Shut up!” said the Cat.

“Shut . . . oh,” said the Fox.

“A place of many miracles,” said the Fox, with finality.

And Oli, though he couldn’t be said to have trusted these two strange machines, agreed.

They traveled for a long time through that lost landscape, and the wasteland around them was slowly transformed as the sun rose and set and rose again. Soon they came to the outskirts of a vast city, of a kind Oli had never seen and that only salvagers now see. It was one of the old cities, and as it was still not that long after the fall of the cities, much of it still remained. They passed roads choked with transportation pods like weeds growing through the cracks, and vast grand temples where once every manner of thing had been for sale. Broken houses littered the sides of the streets and towers lay on their sides, and the little tank that was the Cat rolled over the debris while the Fox snuck around it, and all the while Oli struggled to keep up.

The city was very quiet, though things lived in it, as the Fox and the Cat well knew. Predatory things, dangerous things, and they looked upon Oli with hatred in their seeing apparatus, for they hated all living things. Yet these were small, rodentlike constructions, the remnants of a vanished age, who loved and hated their fallen masters in equal measure, and mourned them when they thought no one was looking their way. And they were scared of the Fox and of the Cat, who were battle hardened, and so the unlikely trio passed through that city unharmed.

At last they came to a large forest, and went amid the trees.

“Not far now,” said the Cat.

“To the place of . . . of miracles,” said the Fox.

“What is this place?” asked Oli.

The Fox and the Cat communicated silently.

“It is a place where no machines can go,” the Cat said at last; and it sounded wistful and full of resentment at once. “Where trees grow from the ground and water flows in the rivers and springs. Where the ground is fertile and the sun shines on the organic life-forms and gives them sustenance. Plants! Flowers! People . . . useless, ugly things!”

But the Fox said, “I . . . like flowers,” and it sounded wistful only, with no hate. And the Cat glared at it but said nothing. And so they traveled on, deep into the forest, where the manshonyagger lived.

*

“What’s a manshonyagger?” said Mowgai, and as he spoke the word, I held myself close and felt cold despite the fire in the hearth. And old Grandma Toffle said, “The man hunters, which roamed the earth in those days after the storms and the wars, and hunted the remnants of humanity. They were sad machines, I think now, driven crazy with grief for the world, and blinded by their programming. They were not evil, so much as they were made that way. In that forest lived such a manshonyagger, and the Fox and the Cat were taking the unwitting Oli to see it, for it had ruled in that land for a very long time, and was powerful among all the machines, and they knew they could get their heart’s desire from it, if only they could give it what it wanted, which was a human.”