The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle

by Christina Uss

  Bicycle thought of Brother Otto and Chef Marie and Jeremiah. She knew what they’d think of this life-sustaining pellet: any kind of life that got sustained by eating pellets wouldn’t be much of a life at all. “Uh, great.” She hid the napkin-wrapped pellet in her pocket. “So, did your inventor, Dr. Alvarado, program you to carry tents and make food?”

  My inventor built me to be perfectly suited to long-distance travel, providing shelter and sustenance to my rider. I can even ensure that your shelter has a pleasant, relaxing scent.

  The Fortune released a puff of lemony-scented mist into the air, and Bicycle sniffed appreciatively. “Wasn’t your inventor famous for trying to understand luck, too? Is there really a way to compute whether good or bad luck might happen to us? Dr. Alvarado’s children didn’t seem to think so.”

  Dr. Alvarado added an experimental program to my central processing unit to monitor my rider’s luck while traveling. The cursor blinked for longer than normal before Fortune continued. He ceased work on this model two years, ten months, and twelve days ago. I have not been able to travel until now, so I do not know if I will be successful in monitoring good or bad luck, or computing whether either will happen to us.

  Bicycle wasn’t sure, but she thought the bike might have been embarrassed by its lack of experience. “That’s okay,” she reassured it. “We’ve got quite a ways to go, so you’ll collect a whole lot of data on the way to California.”

  She unzipped her backpack to find a snack. The rain ponchos seemed to have protected everything inside well enough, but even so Bicycle figured she’d unpack everything after she ate to make sure nothing had been damaged by the cloudburst. She found a Feed Bag with some brownies, bit off a hunk, and asked the Fortune, “How about music? Can you play any music?”

  I am equipped with recordings of music from every world culture, including eighth-century religious chants. Here is a list of options. Listing all music items will take four hours, thirteen minutes, and fifteen seconds.

  Bicycle waved away the options that started to scroll down the screen. “Just pick something upbeat,” she said.

  The Fortune started to make a blatting noise that sounded to Bicycle like a tuba swallowing a goat.

  “Whoa, whoa, that is not what I meant by upbeat!” she yelled.

  Bronze Age Lusations would describe that music as very invigorating and upbeat. Perhaps you would prefer I play it more loudly?

  The blatting got louder, sounding now like an army of goats fighting their way out of a sea of hungry tubas.

  “No, no, stop! How about some non-Bronze Age music instead?” She tried to think of a suggestion, and Griffin popped into her mind. “Do you know anything like ‘Oh! Susanna’?”

  Stephen Foster. Of course. I contain his whole catalog.

  The bike started playing a quiet version of “Swanee River” sung by a beautiful soprano voice with a piano accompaniment.

  Do you prefer this?

  Bicycle lay back, arms folded under her head. The music made the tent very homey. “Much.”

  The rain let up sometime in the night, and the next day dawned fresh and cool. Bicycle crawled out of the zippered opening and stretched. “How do I put the tent back in the seat post?” she asked.

  You say “Please put the tent back in the seat post.”

  “Okay, please put the tent back in the seat post.”

  The Fortune sort of inhaled the whole tent back inside itself. Bicycle gathered up her belongings from the floor of the hotel lobby where she’d spread them out. The only thing that had been damaged was the waterproof pocket Polish-English dictionary, which turned out to be more water absorbent than waterproof. Its pages were glopped together. Bicycle had stuck it inside her packet of Spim’s Splendid Sponges to see if the sponges might suck out the moisture overnight, but it was still pretty soggy. Oh well, it’ll dry out eventually, Bicycle thought, and packed it back up with the rest of her stuff.

  She hoisted the Fortune on one shoulder and the backpack on the other, then carried them outside and over the muddy track and back to the paved road. She was ready to leave the ghost town in her dust.

  “On the road again,” she started to hum as she attached the backpack to the rear rack, and was pleasantly surprised when the Fortune chimed in with guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section. They continued pedaling west.

  After a few hours of dodging tumbleweeds, Bicycle saw something big in the distance. It looked like a thick layer of low-lying clouds, grayish-purple topped with white, resting against the horizon. She studied them until she grasped that these weren’t clouds at all. The Rocky Mountains lay dead ahead.

  Bicycle stopped that night outside a town surrounded by rough hills. The Fortune inflated the tent in no time flat. Before the sun set completely, she climbed up one of the smaller hills to watch the last rays of light sink in the west behind the Rocky Mountains. The line of peaks was sharply clear now. They looked like the fangs of a massive sleepy wolf yawning at the sky. Tomorrow, she was going straight into the mouth of those fangs. Bicycle felt a little thrill of anticipation shiver up her spine. She wondered if the road builders in Colorado worked like the road builders in Virginia and constructed roads that went straight up and down whatever slope was in their way. That night, she flipped through Wheel Wisdom for advice on climbing mountains and found this passage by Zbig:

  I think that mountains are like surprise parties: they are more fun if you don’t know they are coming. For example, when I am in a race and I know a mountain is coming up, I worry, I sweat, I can’t sleep the night before. But when I am busy riding, enjoying the sun and fresh air, and then, unexpectedly, there is a mountain to climb, this is no problem. Climbing up is just one more fun way to make the wheels go forward.

  As soon as the sun lightened the sky Bicycle was up and on the road. As she pedaled, the incline gradually got steeper and steeper, but she focused her energy on turning her pedals steadily, as a real professional bicyclist would do. Breathing hard, she started to imagine what it would be like to ride in a crowd of other cyclists, everyone jostling for position, trying to win an important cycling race to the top of the mountain. She could almost hear competitors in her head, calling out to their teammates in Italian and French and Spanish and Belgian and Polish and Dutch, trying to intimidate her so she would lose her nerve and slow down. “Never!” she said to herself, standing up in the pedals as if she were sprinting to get away from the other riders. She was pulling ahead. The other riders were astonished at her burst of speed. Could anyone challenge this American girl’s incredible speed and stamina in this race?

  “She’s all alone! She’s broken away from the pack and no one has the strength to follow! Who is this…amazing…American girl…on her way…to becoming Queen of the Mountains?” Bicycle panted out loud to herself, still standing up in the pedals. She pretended the red and yellow wildflowers lining the road were adoring fans, come there to watch her win.

  “Yes, who is this amazing American girl?” said a voice at her shoulder.

  Bicycle thought, Boy, my imagination is extra intense—must be the thin air.

  But the wiry cyclist on her left was as real as the road itself. He gave her a salute, accelerating to pass her. Behind him came six more riders, three young men and three young women, dressed in identical neon yellow jerseys labeled KING TUTTER’S BUTTER POPCORN CYCLING TEAM. Each one smiled or saluted as he or she passed.

  The last woman, with a long braid, turned as she passed Bicycle and waved her onto her back wheel. “Stick with us! If you stay right on my wheel, it’ll be easier to make it to the top,” she said.

  Bicycle focused her eyes on the woman’s rear wheel. She positioned the rubber of the Fortune’s front tire within an inch of the other rider’s tire and pumped her legs like crazy to keep a steady speed. The cyclists ahead of her rode in a smooth line, each rider keeping close to the person ahead. So this is what it’s like to ride with a team! she thought. Cool!

  The rider at the front
of the pack maneuvered to the left and eased up, letting the rest of the riders pass him by on the right. He pulled in behind Bicycle and started riding close on her back wheel. “So, Amazing American Girl, how do you like riding in a paceline?”

  “I love it!” shouted Bicycle. She’d seen professional cycling teams ride like this in the films back at the monastery, in a perfect compact line, trying to achieve the most efficient speed possible. It took a lot of concentration and focus to stay right behind someone’s back wheel without bumping into it. The Fortune showed her speed and distance as the road got steeper and steeper. Bicycle wasn’t sure, but she thought the screen might have blinked the word impressive for one split second.

  One by one, the other riders took their turn pulling at the front of the pack. After a few minutes, each of them peeled to the side and let the pack pass by, latching on to the very end of the paceline. The woman with the long braid was now at the front, riding hard. She called over her shoulder, “Ready to take the lead?”

  “Ready,” Bicycle replied.

  The woman gave Bicycle a thumbs-up sign, peeled to the left, and dropped back. Bicycle was alone at the front of the team, leading the way. Bicycle felt her legs burning and her lungs calling out for her to slow down, but she kept pushing up the steep incline. The road curved around in a snakey switchback, and when she came around the next bend, she had a clear view of the road ahead and saw the top of the pass.

  Bicycle let out a whoop of excitement with one searing breath. “Yahoo!”

  The rest of the team joined in, hooting their own happy words: “Yippee!” “Whoo-hoo!” “Yeah doggies!”

  Bicycle stood up on her pedals and used the last of her energy to roll under the big sign marking the top of the climb. WOLF CREEK PASS, ELEVATION 10,857 FT. YOU ARE STANDING ON THE GREAT DIVIDE, it said. She was panting so hard she thought she might throw up. The team encircled her and started patting her on the back and shoulders, talking over each other.

  “You did great!”

  “Just keep breathing—thinner air up here, you know?”

  “Did you know what makes the Great Divide great? If you spit off one side of the Divide, your spit will flow down to the Atlantic Ocean, and if you spit off the other, it’ll go to the Pacific.”

  “Dude, I think your spit would just sit there and eventually evaporate.”

  “What I mean is, if you could spit in a river running down one side, it goes west. But if you spit in a river running down the other, it goes east.”

  “Everyone stop talking about spitting! Hey, Amazing American Girl, want a snack?”

  The wanting-to-throw-up feeling wavered and passed. Bicycle couldn’t do much more than pant and nod in thanks.

  The team rested long enough to share some buttered popcorn and chug some energy drinks. “Gotta get down the hill, our coach will be waiting. Want to come along?” asked the woman with the braid.

  “I think I need some more time to recover,” Bicycle said.

  The woman gave Bicycle half a dozen popcorn packets and energy drinks, saying it would save them carrying the weight since their sponsor, King Tutter’s, supplied them with all the popcorn and corn-based drinks they could stand and then some. Then, like a well-oiled machine, they formed a new paceline and pedaled out of sight down the other side of the pass.

  Bicycle was alone on top of the evergreen-covered mountain with a view of the whole state of Colorado below. It smelled great up there. Sipping an energy drink, she pulled out a couple of postcards. She wrote a celebratory note to the monastery, letting them know she had made it as far as the Continental Divide, as well as one to Mr. Pittsburg in Midway Station, Kansas. She sketched a mountain with a big smiley-faced bicycle wheel on its crest.

  On Top of the World

  Dear Mr. Pittsburg,

  I’m writing to you from two miles up in the sky. Sunflowers and flat roads are certainly wonderful, but mountains are full of wonder, too. Someday you should come west if you can. And whatever you do, bring a bike.

  Sincerely,

  Bicycle

  After a few more breaths of thin, pine-scented air, Bicycle coasted down the other side of the mountain, admiring the crisp scenery of green valleys and burbling streams that she’d missed while working her way up to the top. At the bottom of the mountain, she rolled into a town called Pagosa Springs and found a SlowDown Café near a natural hot springs pool. She parked the Fortune in a bike rack and began to poke through her pack to find her well-worn Free Eats card from Chef Marie so she could dig into a colossal post-mountain-climbing meal. However, she couldn’t seem to find the card. She was getting hungrier by the minute and her stomach let out a loud liquid growl as she kept looking.

  The Fortune blinked, Why do you produce such a noise?

  “Oh, I’m so hungry I can’t think straight!” Bicycle answered, still searching. Her stomach rumbled again, a long gurgle with a bubbling squeak at the end. The nearby hot springs pool blorped out a similar bubbling gurgle. Her stomach responded more loudly, as if it were dueling with the pool for most unpleasant noise.

  If money is required to obtain food, I can be of assistance. The Fortune popped open a small slit on the side of its computer screen and hummed. Out of the slit scrolled three pieces of paper that floated to the ground.

  Bicycle picked one up. It was a one-hundred-dollar bill. Her eyes opened as wide as bike wheels. “Okay, Fortune, that’s enough,” she said, grabbing the money and ripping it up. She threw it away and glanced around. Luckily, no one was outside the restaurant to notice a bike spitting out hundreds of dollars. “I don’t need any counterfeit money, thanks anyway.”

  It is identical in every detail to genuine United States currency. I can also print yen, pounds, euros, złoty, rubles—

  Bicycle cut it off. “Never mind! Let’s talk about this later.” She decided to bring her backpack into the restaurant and search for her Free Eats card inside.

  After pawing through her pack a bit more, she was relieved to peel the card from the back of the still-damp Polish-English dictionary. She sat down at a table near the window, asking the chef to cook her something befitting a cycling champion.

  She was sticking her fork into a plate piled high with rainbow-trout spaghetti when the chef, a woman wearing a red bandana covering her hair, came over to sit at her table. “You’re Bicycle, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Correct, yes, that is me!” Bicycle said, slurping her spaghetti and getting trout on her chin.

  The chef grinned. “Nice to finally meet you, girlfriend. Your inspiration got Chef Marie to make some smart changes to our cafés. Business is great! I swear, hungry bicyclists are the best thing to happen to any restaurateur. We had a bunch come in to eat earlier with their coach, and they requested three kinds of dessert.” The chef leaned closer, lowering her voice. “But I’m not talking to you just to thank you. I’m wondering if anyone’s told you about the lady in black.”

  Bicycle stopped slurping pasta.

  The chef continued. “We SlowDown Café chefs talk every week, discussing recipes, that sort of thing. The other chefs have been reporting on your progress to California. But lately, there’s been someone asking questions at the cafés, questions about you.” The woman peeked around and lowered her voice again, almost whispering now. “She’s always dressed in black clothes. She comes in and asks, ‘Has anyone seen a young girl, wild hair, riding a bike?’ The other chefs say that the lady is pretty scary, that her eyes freeze your heart to ice. So far, no one’s told her anything. We think maybe this lady in black is bad news.” She sat back. “Do you know her?”

  Bicycle froze. The lady from the auction. What did the auctioneer call her again? Miss Monet-Grubbink. I was right to be creeped out when I saw her at that café in Kansas. She was following me. Her eyes fell on the Fortune outside the window.

  She remembered how Miss Monet-Grubbink had looked her up and down with those cold, calculating eyes when Bicycle had bid on the Fortune 713-J. The more Bicycle
had learned about the Fortune, the more valuable she’d realized the bike was. Especially now that she knew the Fortune could print up enough fake money to buy Dr. Alvarado’s entire estate. It’d be worth a literal fortune to anyone dishonest enough to take advantage of it. Bicycle put her cheek down on the table and groaned out loud.

  “I knew it.” The chef nodded. “She is bad news, isn’t she? Don’t worry—none of us will give her any information about you. You can count on us.” She stood up. “Now I’ll let you eat.”

  Bicycle lifted her head and sighed. Her appetite was a lot less than it had been. She took a halfhearted bite of her trout. The incredible flavor perked her up a little. The chef brought a basket of warm, fresh bread with soft pats of melting butter, followed by a slice of caramel cake as big as her head. Bicycle cheered up a little more. Well, she thought, surveying the calories laid before her, if she wants the Fortune, she’s got to catch us first. She popped a big hunk of buttered bread in her mouth. I sure won’t make it easy for her.

  Bicycle spent the first week of June camped in the most out-of-the-way spots she could find, trying to keep a low profile. She rode through Colorado’s western frontier towns with her bike helmet pulled down to her eyebrows, not talking to anyone, determined not to give her would-be bike thief a single hint about where to find her and the Fortune. Whenever she heard a car approaching behind her, she gripped her handlebars and steered into roadside drainage ditches, crouching protectively beside the Fortune until the car passed. She was extra grateful for the Fortune at night, after the bike informed her it could camouflage the tent to match the scenery and ensure they were well hidden once the cover of darkness had fallen.

  The riding was tough. Craggy mountains rose up like ancient soldiers standing at attention along her route, eventually giving way to open plains once more. After that week of tense travel, a painted billboard welcomed her to UTAH—STILL THE RIGHT PLACE. The billboard showed a broad swath of blue sky, pale orange desert sand, and a big rock formation with a big hole in it. A smaller sign below let Bicycle know this was THE BEEHIVE STATE.