Robots vs. Fairies(75)

“Do you want me to stop?” said old Grandma Toffle.

“No, no, I just . . .”

“There were many terrible things done in the old days,” said old Grandma Toffle. “Were there really giant, human-shaped robots roaming the Earth in those days? That I can’t honestly tell you. And was there really a little dead girl with turquoise hair? That, too, I’m sure I can’t say, Mowgai.”

“But she wasn’t really a little girl, was she?” I said. “She wasn’t that at all.”

“Very good, little Mai,” said old Grandma Toffle.

“She was a fairy!” said Mowgai triumphantly.

“A simulated personality, yes,” said old Grandma Toffle. “Bottled up and kept autonomously running. Such things were known, back then. Toys, for the children, really. Only this one somehow survived, grew old as the children it was meant to play with had perished.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

“Things were awful back then,” said old Grandma Toffle complacently. “Now, do you want to hear the rest of it? There’s not that long to go.”

“Please,” said Mowgai, though he didn’t really look like he wanted to hear any more.

“Very well. Oli looked down, and . . .”

*

Oli looked down, and the entire world was spread out far below. He could see the shimmering blue sea in the distance, and the ruined city, and the blasted plains. And far in the distance he thought he could see the place the Cat and the Fox spoke of, the place of miracles: it was green and brown and yellow and blue, a land the like of which had not been seen in the world for centuries or more. It had rivers and fields and forests, insects and butterflies and people, and the sun shone down on wheat and fig trees, cabbages and daisies. And on little children—children just like you.

It was the Land, of course.

And Oli longed to go there.

“A human child,” said the giant robot. Its eyes were the size of houses. “It has been so long. . . .”

“What will . . . what will you do with me?” said Oli, and there was only a slight tremor in his voice.

“Kill . . .,” said the robot, though it sounded uncertain.

“Please,” said Oli. “I don’t even know how to be a real boy. I just want to . . . I just want to be.”

“Kill . . .,” said the robot. But it sounded dubious, as though it had forgotten what the word meant.

Then the little girl with turquoise hair shot up from Oli’s shoulder in a shower of sparks, startling him, and hovered between him and the giant robot.

*

“What she said to the manshonyagger,” said old Grandma Toffle, “nobody knows for certain. Perhaps she saw in the robot the sort of child she never got the chance to play with. And perhaps the robot, too, was tired, for it could no longer remember why it was that it was meant to hunt humans. The conference between the little fairy and the giant robot lasted well into the night; and Oli, having seen the sun set over the distant Land, eventually fell asleep, exhausted, in the giant’s palm.”

And here she stopped, and sat back in her rocking chair, and closed her eyes.

“Grandma Toffle?” I said.

“Grandma Toffle!” said Mowgai.

But old Grandma Toffle had begun, not so gently, to snore. And we looked at each other, and Mowgai tried to pull on her arm, but she merely snorted in her sleep and turned her head away. And so we never got to hear the end of the story from her.

*

That summer long ago, I roamed across the Land with Mowgai, through hot days that seemed never to end. We’d pick berries by the stream, and watch the adults in the fields, and try to catch the tiny froglets in the pond with our fingers, though they always slipped from our grasp. Mowgai, I think, identified with Oli much more than I did. He would retell the story to me, under the pine trees, in the cool of the forest, with the soft breeze stirring the needles. He would wonder and worry, and though I kept telling him it was only a story, it had become more than that for him. One day we went to visit Elder Simeon at his house in the foot of the hills. When he saw us coming, he emerged from his workshop, his clockwork creations waddling and crawling and hopping after him. He welcomed us in. His open yard smelled of machine oil and mint, and from there we could see the curious hills and their angular sides. It was then—reluctantly, I think—that he told us the rest of the story.

“The robot and the fairy spoke long into the night,” he said, “and what arrangement they at last reached, nobody knows for sure. That morning, very early, before the sun rose, the manshonyagger began to stride across the blasted plains. With each stride it covered an enormous distance. It crushed stunted trees and poisonous wells and old human dwellings, long fallen into ruin, and the tiny machines down below fled from its path. The girl with turquoise hair was with him, residing inside his chest, where people keep their hearts. The manshonyagger strode across the broken land, as the sun rose slowly in the sky and the horizon grew lighter, and all the while the little boy slept soundly in the giant’s palm.

“And, at last, they came to the Land.”

“They came . . . they came here?” Mowgai said.

“And the manshonyagger looked down on the rivers and fields, and the fruit trees and the tiny frogs, and of course the people, our ancestors who fled here with the fall of the old world, and it never knew such a Land, and it thought that perhaps the old days were truly gone forever. And it was very tired. And so, with the little girl—who was not at all a little girl, of course, but something not a little like the manshonyagger—whispering in its heart, it laid the boy down, right about here.” And he pointed down to the ground, at his yard, and smiled at our expressions. “And the boy grew up to be a man, among his kind, though there was always, I think, a little bit of him that was also part machine. And he became a salvager, like your mother, Mai, and he spent much of his time out on the blasted plains, and some said he sought his old home, still, but always in vain.