The Steam-Driven Boy

by Sladek, John

  And now the world needed something, and fast. Stan cleared his mind of Hatton and other worries, and turned the energy of his psychic influence upon a million potential customers. His influence spread over the city, giving a million men and women this imperceptible nudge. For some it might come as a moment of reflection: I do need new shoes … For others it might be a slight hesitation as they passed a Nabs window display. Still others would be in the stores, trying shoes on, when suddenly they’d find something …

  IV

  Ferris Moniter, president of Nabs, glimpsed what looked like an autistic child out of the corner of his eye. He bumped his head as he stepped into his private autogyro.

  ‘Ow. Second time I’ve bumped my head on that doorframe.’

  His bodyguard, Truit, stiffened. ‘Yes? Don’t close that door just yet, sir. I want a look at that frame.’ His expert fingers sought and found a tiny hairlike wire. ‘Just as I thought, Mr Monitor. An animal magnet, set there to attract your head. Looks like the work of Nexus Brill.’

  ‘Eurafoot’s Armourer? But assassination’s against the rules!’

  The bodyguard laughed. ‘Armourers have no rules, sir. My guess is, he meant to stun you, just before the Game. Probably had a side bet on it. They say Brill is rich from betting on the Game. Owns Paris, Rome, Antwerp, a dozen such cities. They say he’s had some of them miniaturized and made into charms for his wife’s charm bracelet. By the way, it might interest you to know that our Armourer, Amos Honks, visited the office this morning, while you were out. He may have had access to the autogyro …’

  Ferris Monitor blinked. ‘You can’t mean that, Truit! Why, Amos Honks is our only hope. Think of all the weaponry he’s designed for us! How can you suspect him?’

  Truit thought of the aerial battleship, filled with hydrogen and surrounded with heavy armor. ‘I know, sir – but I can’t help feeling that the two Armourers are in cahoots, somehow.’

  Moniter sighed. ‘Anyway, are there any more assassination attempts in the cards today?’

  ‘Not cards, sir.’ Truit sounded pained. ‘Tiles. Let’s have a look.’ He laid out the traditional tiles of the eleventh-century Chinese game of prophecy, Mah-Jongg. ‘I’m afraid it’s the East Wind, sir. And the Four of Bamboos.’

  ‘Oh? Is that bad? What’s the reading?’

  Truit opened the book and read:

  ‘Many small greatnesses deny.

  No same.

  It does not further to discover several gifts only.

  The wise king avoids fried foods.’

  He closed the book. ‘Sir, I think it’s dangerous to continue this trip to Chicago.’

  ‘Nonsense, Truit. I must go on. I must play and win. To give up now would mean economic collapse, the resurgence of the old, corrupt U.N., and slavery for most of the human race. The tiles must be wrong for once.’

  But he knew the tiles were never wrong.

  V

  At Carmody stadium, the robot doctorator was examining Ed Pagon after his collapse. He lay on the dressing-room floor, doubled up with pain. The robot’s probes moved to check his respiration, pulse, heart, temperature …

  ‘What is it, doc?’ asked an official. ‘Appendicitis?’

  The doctorator peered at him over its square-rimmed glasses. ‘Don’t quote me on this, boys,’ it said, rubbing its iron chin. ‘But it ‘pears as if this here fella is fixing to have a baby!’

  VI

  Amos Honks, Armourer, awoke to a sense of danger. Karen Houseman was still asleep beside him.

  He remembered the whole nightmarish episode at Nabs: Ferris Monitor telling him to arm the corporation for AOW, All-Out War. Ferris Monitor telling him he’d have to do better than hay-fever bombs, better even than Herpes simplex, the cold-sore virus, dropped in drinking water supplies.

  ‘You’ll have to do a lot better,’ Monitor had said. ‘Don’t forget, you’re up against Nexus Brill … by the way, did you know your wife’s been seen with Brill?’

  And later, she couldn’t deny it. The world had come to a sickening halt then, this afternoon at the lawster’s office, when they obtained their punched card decree. There he’d met Karen Houseman, and the two new divorced people had just naturally clung together … so here he was, still sensing danger like a smell of fear.

  Outside he could hear the sound of muffled rotors – a police gyro trying to land quietly in the yard. He sensed, rather than heard, the faceless lawman creeping toward the house, the sound of a weapon being eased from its plastic holster and aimed through the wall at his brainwaves … the trigger being squeezed …

  Amos rolled across the bed and hit the floor just as the humming green beam of a stupidifier flicked through the wall. It caught Karen and she slumped sideways, babbling and drooling.

  Before the cop could fire again, Amos snatched a charm off his wife’s charm bracelet, flung open the door and pitched it into the yard. It was a miniaturized city. He counted to ten and breathed, ‘Goodbye, Paris.’

  With a thunder of cobblestones, the minicity sprang to full size in the yard. He heard the cop’s scream, cut off by a shriek of tires and the blare of a taxi horn.

  Amos smashed a window, gashing his arm, and raced across the Place de la Bastille to the empty police autogyro. He climbed in, took off and headed for Chicago. There had to be some way to stop the Game – before the Game stopped everything else.

  If only he could design some weapon Nexus Brill could not counter. He played the stream of ideas across the porcelain surfaces of his mind:

  How about mad dogs? A nullitron beam? Unconscious mines? Fire-cabbages … even an Earth-mover, which could shift the entire planet during an aerial battle, thus leaving enemy aircraft stranded in outer space.

  Why was it Nexus Brill always had his ideas first? As he wondered, the aura began. The perimeter of his vision was filled with autistic children; his ears jangled with flashing lightmares, and he felt the deep molecular and genetic shift begin.

  He was, as usual, turning into Nexus Brill.

  VII

  The autistic child pointed to a picture of Stan Houseman and said, ‘Nice mans.’

  The Hattonite elders looked at one another. Why ‘mans’? Could Houseman be, after all, the discalced prophet promised by Herkimer Hatton?

  VIII

  The data-scan footline flickered upon the instrument panel of the autogyro:

  LABORS OF HERCULES?

  Athlete to give birth!

  ‘I don’t understand that,’ said Ferris Monitor, looking away to the still blue waters of the Americ Ocean. An hour remained before they reached the finger-shaped Isle of Michigan, with Chicago glittering at its tip like a bright hangnail. Far to the east lay the dark continent of Atlantica, broken only by the British Lakes; beyond that, the Europic Sea.

  ‘In this novel I’m reading,’ he said, taking the foilback from his pockette, ‘the author pretends that Lucifer lost his war against Heaven, so that all the world is reversed, see?’

  Truit, his bodyguard, laughed. ‘Science fiction eh? Don’t believe everything you see in white on black. What’s the name of this book?’

  ‘Autogyro Ace,’ said the president. ‘An Autogyro Novel, by Killhip D. Pick.’

  At that moment a dot appeared above the horizon, far behind them. It grew rapidly to another autogyro.

  ‘Who is it, Truit?’

  ‘Too far to see, sir. Might be friendly …’ The bodyguard trained his electric binoculars on the strange craft, then gasped. ‘No! It can’t be!’

  In a moment the stranger was close enough for Monitor to see, too. The other autogyro contained another Ferris Monitor and another Truit. As he watched, it came closer, passed through his own craft and sped on toward Chicago.

  IX

  The president of Eurafoot sat in shadow behind the Game table, a masked entity without a name.

  ‘Sit you down, Mr Monitor,’ said a disembodied voice. ‘You know the rules of the Game.’ When Truit had checked the seat for bombs and virus, Mo
nitor took his place. An aide brought in a pad of paper and ruled the traditional four lines on its top sheet: Two horizontal, two vertical.

  ‘You may go first, Mr Monitor. You have “X”, and the advantage – for the moment.’

  From the next room came gunshots and electric fizzling, as Eurafoot’s androids joined with Nabs’s cyborgs to fight off Hattonite assassins.

  As Monitor started to make his move, his opponent leaned forward, bringing his face into the light.

  ‘You!’

  X

  Joe Feegle wrote, ‘It was a two-person, zero-sum game. Stan Houseman had established that general strict determinateness held in all cases of special strict determinateness, and in other cases as well, but he had not excluded the possibility that the advance from special to general determinateness was no advance at all! Then he himself was an android, too!’

  Joe was working on his novel, ANDROGYNOID, written under the pseudonym ‘H. K. (Kid) Cliplip’. Joe suffered from the delusion that he himself was written, under a pseudonym.

  XI

  ‘You see,’ said the president of Eurafoot, ‘when Nexus Brill broke that window, he cut himself. He is now infected with a virus that will scourge our planet. It causes the feet to rot off, heh heh.’

  ‘I think Amos Hooks will have something to say about that,’ said a voice from the dark doorway.

  ‘The autistic child!’

  ‘Wrong,’ said Stan Houseman. He fired the demoralizer beam once, and the odd president flopped, spineless, to the floor. It was the end of the universe, all agreed.

  XII

  Nexus Brill saw the great ruled line coming across the sky. He speeded up the autogyro and tried to take evasive action, but it was no use. The ruled line reached him and cut him, along with the earth and sky, clean in two.

  XIV

  ‘So it was Ed Pagon who gave birth to the new universe, eh?’

  ‘Right. There weren’t really any sides, since each company owned all the stock of the other, anyway. And since both were really owned by the Hattonites …’

  ‘Then everyone was an android, really.’

  ‘Brill must have suspected as much. When he cut himself on that window, he failed to bleed.’

  He shook his head. ‘Brill was human, though bloodless.’

  She smiled. ‘Then … it’s all over?’

  ‘In a sense.’

  So saying, Stan and Karen Houseman walked barefoot with the other pilgrims, into the former shoestore.

  ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER

  A CO-ORDAINER’S MYTH

  Floogy Flarl was a wipeout man

  Cashed his cogs, that wipeout man

  Nobody knew how it all began

  But Floogy Flarl

  The Co-ordainer’s name was Hampton Syzygy of the planet Chicago, and he longed to go home. Even though he had to travel far beyond the Asteroid River of Mkaj, far beyond the Gaderene Galaxies and even to the edge of Edgeitself itself, his heart was turning ever homeward, toward the old Folkstad Ohm. But when his heart turned toward Folkstad Ohm it was full of bitterness and revenge, for Ohm was the ancient Lord of the Facility who had inherited Chicago, inherited it by killing former owner, the tyrant Stulk Hermanø. Ohm had ended Hermanø’s reign of blood only to begin his own. There was a song about this, too:

  Stulk was wrong, but he wronged the wrong

  While Folkstad wronged the right.

  Hampton would soon do something about Folkstad Ohm, just as he would later undergo seven trials on the seven planets of Smurr. He would do these things that the adventure books might be filled with stories. But the adventure books came later, and Hampton Syzygy knew nothing of them, for he lived in the present. There was a song about this, too, but now is not for songs, but stories. And of all stories, the most strange and wonderful is the story of how Hampton Syzygy came home to Chicago, and why.

  Hampton came back to Chicago by way of an otherfolk planet, Marvin Jarvis. The people of Marvin Jarvis were all otherfolk, created from animals to serve the human race and the Lords of the Facility. Two guides met Hampton at the spaceport: a sly-looking couple named F’Red and F’Annie, with their little son, F’art.

  ‘We’re not completely human,’ F’Red said. ‘We’re really cleverly mutated foxes. That is, I am a fox, and F’Annie is a vixen. I forget whether F’art is called a pup or a cub.’ After failing to sell Hampton a used car, the couple drifted away in the crowd of otherfolk.

  There were all kinds here: B’Ernie, the beaverman who built dams; E’Laine, the elephantgirl with the phenomenal memory; P’Rick, the porcupineman, a deadly archer. Of course there were ostrichfolk hiding their heads in the sand; swanfolk who could break a human’s arm with one stroke of a powerful wing; snakemen who hypnotized (though their chief victims were birdfolk); electric eelmen working at the power station and many more. Hampton strolled through the streets, nodding and smiling to animalfolk friends. B’Ill the batman was trying to entangle himself in a womanman’s hair. B’Ill the bearman seemed hungry enough to eat a horseman. B’Ill the budgieman and W’Rita the wormgirl dropped their tasks and followed at Hampton’s command.

  It was here that Hampton met M’Arlene, who taught him subtle and peculiar ways. He would not be able to take M’Arlene with him when he left Marvin Jarvis planet. She knew that and accepted it, and yet she ached to go with him, along with W’Rita and B’Ill. But they could help Hampton Syzygy, and M’Arlene could not.

  There was nothing on Chicago that a monkeywoman could do.

  Before he reached Chicago, Hampton Syzygy had to spend a year being scent-cleared on the planet Kipling Glory. The police agents of Chicago were dog-robots, trained to detect the smell of any out-planet on a man, be it eleven months old. This was the only out-planet where a man could acquire a new, acceptable smell.

  Kipling Glory was a skull, the skull of the ancient giant Jo-how, slaughtered, it was said, by the Montag brothers. They had made of his spine a great starship capable of ‘light-doubling’ itself across the universe, and they had set out to find the Centre of the Pattern. Living here on a giant skull reminded Hampton of what Folkstad Ohm had done to the Syzygy family, and his thoughts were cold-tinged with the feel of revenge.

  The day for revenge must come, but now it was time for waiting and for watching, and for washing the dishes. Disguised in the body of an idiot dishwasher, Hampton waited and watched and worked. The dirty dishes came in to the steamy yellow kitchen. Hampton breathed upon them, reaching down inside each dish with his mind and making it wish to be clean, making it vibrate with the hope of cleanliness. Dish-wishing, he called it, and worked at it for eleven months and more, until it was time to throw off his disguise and come to Chicago.

  On Chicago he first visited, almost without realizing where he was going, the Shrine of the Seventh Type of Ambiguity. It stood on a hill overlooking the Desert of Doris Deadlock, an old computer set in the ruins of what once had been the English department of a university, when men had studied English as a medical and legal language. This old computer had long been used by the otherfolk as an oracle.

  ‘Why do we come to this place, O Human?’ said W’Rita. ‘You do not believe in the power of the oracle.’

  ‘I do not disbelieve, either. Anyway, this place is sacred to my family. It was near here my father, Herman Syzygy fought the Last Light-Swallower and killed it, and for that they made him a Protector of the Check.’

  W’Rita smiled, insofar as a worm can be said to smile. ‘That is true. What will you ask the oracle?’

  But Hampton could not answer, for he would not allow himself to think of a question in advance. That way the computer’s telepathic capabilities would become as nothing, and he might gain power over it.

  The question he finally did ask, standing on the windswept bluff overlooking the Venn Diagram Lakes, was:

  ‘What has one leg in the morning, four legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening, and when is a door not a door?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ s
aid the old computer. ‘That’s a toughy. Would it be Long John Silver with a three-legged parrot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about a leg of mutton magically transformed into a dog that pees on your doorstep at dusk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, I give. What is it?’

  ‘A coffee table, made from a door!’ Hampton explained how one began in the morning by putting one leg on, and then had all four in place by the afternoon, but one fell off in the evening. The old computer gave him a secret whereby he might ensnare the tyrant Ohm. W’Rita, the wormgirl who had been bred and created to tie packages up real pretty, now tied herself around Hampton’s finger so he would not forget the secret. They descended and began to cross the Desert of Doris Deadlock.

  They made the crossing at night, when the sand was cool and blue-gray, and the sagebrush silver in the moonlight. Now and then Hampton glimpsed the desert’s owner, Doris herself, flitting behind a rock or bush. He knew it was truly Doris, for the moonlight gleamed on the padlock through her nose.

  At dawn Hampton entered the capital city Vb and went straight to the palace of Folkstad Ohm. On the way, he explained to B’Ill the budgieman why he was needed.

  ‘Like all budgiemen, you were bred and created to guard mirrors, and that is what you must do now. I want you to guard all mirrors at the palace against the false image of Folkstad Ohm; otherwise he may slip in among his false images and escape my revenge. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand and obey, O Human,’ said the budgieman, and seeing that the occasion was serious, he forbore adding the ‘Who’s a pretty boy?’ that was at the tip of his tongue. Hampton entered the palace the way M’Arlene had showed him, and made his way to the private chambers of the tyrant.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ said Ohm, looking up from his clairvoyance machine. Suddenly he made a dash at a mirror on the nearest wall, trying to slip into his false image, but B’Ill was there before him.

  Now Folkstad Ohm turned craven. ‘What do you want of me, Syzygy? I can’t bring your wife and children back to life, can I?’