by Johan Kalsi
—Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: Literature
My father did not carve me out of a lump of pure Chrysolite. I was born the irregular way: from a woman.
The Society of Maker's Son, though filthy with the poor and the mad, is a happy place. The Unmarried Proctors and Proctoresses keep mainly to their quarters and duties: the orphans, students, abandoned mothers and sick are separated by sex, and keep their respective overseers quite busy. Only during weekly or holiday love feasts do those people gather down in the Broken Heart with the married members of their order, and the children, to worship.
Still, it is a lively and active community. Something is going on, always. It was during the dance preceding the Jubilee play that I was able to make my way to the women's side of the convent.
In my haste to plead with the guards, I nearly overlooked the beautiful lady, wrists and neck locked in the stocks. Her beatific smile stopped me dead in my steps.
“Clarissa?”
She inched her neck against the velvet collar. Even in those days, the stocks had become little more than an inconvenience rather than a physical punishment, intended only to shame and isolate.
Some are still foolish enough to call this progress.
“Little Bottie!” she cried, her light teeth gleaming. “Praise God! What word from Jack? Have you seen him today?”
“No, but I imagine he's in similar circumstances in the opposite square,” I said, gently acknowledging the apparatus.
She shrugged as well as one could in such a state. “Ah well. It was worth it. He asked me to marry him!”
My heart ached with both joy and a strange nostalgia. Quite obviously, I never fancied her, a human, as my unrequited sweetheart, and yet, her happiness, and even mine for her and my friend Jack made me realize quite well that no one living would ever be able to feel the same sort of happiness for me.
I smiled broadly. “Praise Maker and congratulations!”
“Praise Maker,” she said softly, blushing.
It was the first conversation I ever had with her without staring up at her chin. It helped that she was bent over at the waist. I looked her in the eye.
“Well, that will certainly be a relief for your minders once the two of you are made honest. Ought to free up the stocks for the less hardened criminals among our clan. In any case, you and Jack and I must get together to celebrate as soon as you get out.”
“Yes, most definitely. Very soon,” she said, “We may be leaving this month. He's been named Exorcist, you know.”
Another sign of our devotional decline, I thought. An Exorcist, as I understood it, had once been a high calling with a rigorous standard on old Accam. Now it became a way for the Order to keep rambunctious young men out of polite society and among the more harmless spirits of the Accamian Empire in Exile: slaughterbots, kracks and phantasms.
Or perhaps my thoughts were self-pity. I would miss my friends.
“He's heard a rumor that he'll make First Test against that widget vampire in What Cheer.”
“Well, God bless. If he needs a Second – “I cut myself off too late. She grimaced.
“I'm sorry, Bottie--” she said.
Normally I bristle silently against the fact that I had been named by my fosters--not for my courage or loyalty--but after my race, due to the sheer peculiarity of it. My mother-- until recently comatose--had never any say in what they called me. But Clarissa's pet term for me carried none of that judgment. In fact, I easily fooled myself that she believed my given name 'StoutBottle' referred not to my height, but my heart.
She continued, “--But he's chosen to go without a Second, and is taking me as Third only because we'll be married by then.”
She did not think to mention the fact that I could never qualify as an Exorcist's Second, or even a Third, for that matter. Technically, I was the sort of thing an Exorcist would more likely cleanse than cling to.
“Well, of course. I'm sorry, I really must leave you to your duties,” I said, gathering my strapped books. “I'm going to see my mom.”
“They are letting you see your mother? Oh I think that's wonderful.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, a bit too eagerly. They were letting me see my mother.
One way or another.
I had to step over the woman who only ate birdseed and thought she was an inch-worm, which was difficult for me, as her hips were wide and my legs were short. I caught my back foot on her rump and stumbled to the guard house. She apparently had a horse's supply of bird seed at her disposal.
“Bottie,” said the guard at the convent hospital, exasperated. Her gray brows seemed permanently collapsed whenever I appeared. “You can't come in. You know that dear. You aren't even supposed to be here without an approved escort.”
“Clarissa's occupied.”
“She's not an approved escort, and I know exactly with whom she's been occupied.”
“Please let me in, Sister.” I pulled myself up on the ledge of the half door, struggling to lift my crystal-bearded chin upon its mantle.
The guard shook her head and reached casually for her electric hog-whip. “You know I can't dear. Your mom isn't ready to deal with you.”
“It's been a month since I was born!” I said, my voice cracking, my feet dangling.
“Your concept of time is still very unsettled. Even with a healer at her bedside every hour of the day, she's not well enough yet. You were delivered laparotomically, for pity's sake. She's the first woman known to have survived that. It isn't a pretty surgery.”
I breathed out and dropped to the ground. I unbuckled my books and pulled out the thin green one. The guard rolled her pale hazel eyes as I waved it in her direction.
She snorted and said, “That isn't even Holy Scripture.”
“It is the Didache for the Maker.” I put an artificial emphasis on the last part of the book's title. I regained my composure and patiently thumbed to the marked passage.
“In the absence of husband or male forebear, a woman's son shall lead the family. He will not be kept separate from her except for the sake of prayer.”
She lifted my working cap and patted my head as if I were a tot. “Little dearie. You aren't a man, you never will be, and - outside a' sneakin' in to see your ma--you never are gonna want to be.”
I pulled my shirt open just as I'd seen a hot-blooded Jack do the week before in the square, when another young theologian challenged him to a fist debate over the physical properties of the Duality.
“Do I look like a woman?” I said, slapping my palm across a xylophone of flat plates.
Red blotches crawled up the guard's neck, and she shut her eyes. Instantly, I realized I'd broken decorum, again, and folded my shirt closed.
“Forgive me, please?” I said in a practiced and not terribly manipulative way.
She kept her eyes squeezed shut, facing away as she considered my request.
So I slipped past.
They kept mom at the top of the hospital, as close to the sun as possible. The windows and shutters were all flung wide and the sheer curtains danced like long fairy wings into the room. The room was a far cry from when I'd last been in it, squalling with terror at the splashes of running blood as they pried me up and out of her cadaverous grey torso.
Now, she looked like an illuminated page out of a children's tale. Her eyes at rest, her cheeks like garnets, her natural curls spilling down her bare shoulders in lush, sloe cataracts. I heard my artificial respirator breath go out, and felt light.
Short as my legs are, they can scramble, and my fingers scale walls faster than centipedes. I was winded, but a good ten seconds ahead of my pursuers. That's all I wanted.
“Momma?” I said, my baritone cracking.
I stepped into the room as I heard a hallway door pop open. I went to the foot of her bed, wondered if I had fallen into Dreamland. The linens smelled of turmeric root, ginger, and a hint of claw.
A pair of angry nurses came in and clasped me, one by the short cable be
tween my jaw and neck. Obviously, I could have tossed both out the window with little effort. The fact that they knew that, too, and even more obviously didn't care, tells you where the power resided in my relationship with the women of the convent.
Mom woke up, delirious.
As the big nurse crushed my head against her breast and marched me to the door, the other one made tittering noises and went to calm my mother down.
“I am,” Mom said, “No, I’m fine! Is that him? Thunnaklot, turn around.”
Her voice was a scratchy mix of liquor and pipesmoke.
I wiggled in the Valkyrie's grasp. Mom could see my face. I felt Thunnaklot's big old sigh against the back of my head. She was slowing down just before turning out of sight. Instead, she marched me back to face the bed.
“Bring him in,” Mom said. “That's my baby.”
I sat at her bedside for a long time while she beamed at me, running her hand against the stubble of my young beard and stroking my face.
“You look like your father,” she said, “but already bigger. No wonder they are amazed I survived. No wonder the nurses have been so tender to me!”
“Mom, I'm sorry –“ I said. Sorry what? Sorry I almost killed you on my birthday? Sorry I'm a freak? Sorry about dad? She didn't give me a chance. She held a porcelain hand against my lips, tapping with her fingers.
“Never say 'sorry' when there is no sin. I never learned to read the Scripture, but that little much I've known since I was a girl. No doubt you know what I am and my reputation, no doubt you've heard I lived in squalor and worked in drunkhouses.”
“I need to find him.”
She turned her head to the open window, the daylight turning her caramel eyes golden. “No. Stay here. You are my first child. My only.” She swept her hands over the sheets covering her lower body. “My last, but my best. I must raise you.”
“I am raised, momma. I'm different than the normal way.”
“Special,” she said. It sounded like a magic word coming out of her mouth. “You know that blue stone is now a bane? A poison used by wicked spirits to separate man? It is good you came from me, and not that unholy factory, that rock of steel and smoke. That makes you special. The only special thing I've ever had. Wait for me to grow strong again. I'll take care of you then. You need your mother.”
“Dad. He wasn't special?”
“Special to me, but could I keep him? He's taken the shape of my broken heart, and you, no matter where you go, will always be mine. When I needed him, he was taken captive, doomed among the eidolon: slaughterbots, I’m sure. After all, unlike you, he came from chrysolite.”
I stiffened, recognizing how miserable dad must have been as a creature in this world: either too poor to afford the stone of my people or, worse, too drunk and unsteady to carve me into life. Instead, he wed himself to human flesh.
“I need my father, too. Let me find him now, and I promise I'll return.”
Even in her weakened state, she knew, far better than I did at the time that I was lying to her. She sighed and closed her eyes.
She told me where he'd gone.
As I was still treated like the infant orphans and unworthy of productive labor, it took me weeks of humiliating myself among the noble almstakers to collect enough spending money to light out. Against the weak admonishments of Jack's missionary council, I was able to hitch on as a ward of the newlyweds.
By writ, I wasn't even allowed to split logs, build gadgets or carve wild turkey, or anything that would constitute the slavery or hard labor of a child. For a dependent non-laborer, I was well-armed and well-tooled. I carried a heavy woodmaul in one hand and a sharp utility wand that doubled as a carving knife in a sheath.
I told you the admonishments were weak. The permission they granted made me living proof that the rigor of the old ways had atrophied. I was not human, but even I could tell that if the race was not in dire straits, its culture most definitely was.
The road to the Necropolis of Despair was sunny and well cobbled, and the mission masgid on its outskirts, though spare and neglected for months, was cozy. Jack and Clarissa found themselves occupied in the lone private room, presumably to review the obligations and duties of an Exorcist in a Lost City.
Swiping Jack's long-unread scriptural scrolls and Orders of Exorcism, I left the couple to their long and somewhat noisesome philosophies and stole in to the Necropolis at sundown.
I recognized the old temple from the picture book that I used to learn the alphabet the Tuesday after my birthday. In the book, its spires struck out at garish angles, and its surface crawled with buzzing metal imps and kracks, with heavily armed slaughterbots at the toothlike gate.
Here though, in real life, it was dilapidated, bare and straight-lined, its gate wrenched permanently open. A faint blue glow came from its sloppy, sloping belly. I snuck down the corridor to find a translucent glowing wall. I touched its surface with both hands.
It was warm chrysolite.
Voices barked and chuckled on the other side. The eidolon missing from the surface infested the guts of the Necropolis. Their sacrilegious chatter and blasphemous plans were impossible to comprehend using anything other than spiritual insight, and I had precious little of that.
Iron bones rattled. I took to a knee and prayed they were not my father's.
In the blue light, the lettering of the Scripture scroll seemed large. I prayed for the strength to break the barrier, for courage, for, if it was God's will, holy bloodshed. I prayed also that I would not drop my maul or die in an embarrassing way.
I scanned the Orders of Exorcism like it was a book of spells, disappointed to find that it was mostly a critique of the concept of demons as a rational construct.
Securing the scriptures, I left them safely against the wall. I kept the Orders on me, in the hopes that they would be more impressive to evil things than they were to me.
I took a measuring blow with the maul against the wall, and then a full swing, anticipating hard recoil. There wasn't one, as the wall quite unexpectedly fell over, shattering against the ground. The maul sailed like a goose through the firelit room, pounding against a fresh tapestry and clunking into the dirt floor.
A quartet of naked slaughterbots looked up from their dice and stories game. The rolling board had been upset in the shock of the falling wall.
I drew my knife.
The creatures jabbered incomprehensibly. It wasn't that I couldn't understand their vocabulary; it was the order of words that was a mess.
Even at a gallop, I was no more than half the distance to my foes before several other monsters amassed from the wings, or behind cloth-covered doorways. The worst part about being surrounded is the gaps between the enemies. Those gave brutally false hope of escape.
I began to make incantations from the Orders to drive the demon thrall away, hoping to release the eidolon to their more natural pursuits. The approaching beasts didn't even halt at the name of God.
It was another name altogether that brought the panting, heaving villainy to a halt.
My own.
“Servo!”
I had never heard the voice before, but I knew it was my father's. From the top of a stone flight of stairs leading to a dark alcove, the red and white robes of a Robot Lord appeared. His crystalline network flowed like white water from his face, and in his hand he held a short shepherd's crook. A high crown balanced on my dad's head, and didn't topple as he descended the steps.
Even where I stood, fifty feet from the entrance, fragments of Chrysolite spread across the uneven floor. The eidolon moved out of Dad's way as he walked toward me, scooping up a shard as he approached. I wondered if he was planning to plunge it through my heart.
“Great Maker, this stuff is terrible. Can you imagine trying to carve a bot out of this junk? We'll have to glue it together again, because I'm sure not going to go mining for any more of it. Impossible to find, fragile. Not like you!”
He punched me in the chest with such swiftness that
I didn't have time to flinch.
I smelled sweet, warm rye on his breath as he hugged me, the point of his crown poking me in the nose.
“Good to see you. For the first time! More handsome than I would have guessed, considering my mirror. But your mother –“
“Mom-” I said.
“-deserves better. I belong here in the dark with my friends.”
I looked into the open, slow breathing mouths of the fish-eyed monsters, caught snatches of their impossible speech.
“No. I came to rescue you, to shine a light in this dark place –“
“You are not like me, Servo. Sunlight gives me headaches. Your people are tolerable to me but irritating.”
“Even mom?”
“She's a saint, but that's part of the problem. Even she believes in your weird old god, and I – no offense – I just don't. I don't want any part of that business.”
I sighed deeply and firmed my spine. “Then if I can't draw you home, I will stay with you!”
“Son,” he said with a gentleness that broke my heart, “You can't. I don't know how to put this but...human. You’ve got some of it in you.”
He shrugged and opened his hands to me. “So,” he said, “let's agree to keep things separate. Do you need anything? Money? Food? Weapons? We have plenty around here. Hardly ever use them.”
Keep things separate. My father was divorcing me. I shook my head. “Why? Why did you ever make me?”
“I didn't,” he said, “your mother and I did. You've got to understand, Servo. I loved you before you were born – so much so that I deeply considered changing my very nature! I love you now. But you are fortunate to be separate from me. It is better. You belong out there.”
“I belong in-between, or nowhere,” I sulked.
His small hands took my chin and tilted my face towards his wrinkled wizard's visage.
“You belong. By tradition, it is too early for me to pass on my maker's secret to you, but by tradition, you should have been carved from chrysolite, like every other robot in the world. Besides, I may never see you again, so I will tell you the mystery, exactly as it was told to me.”
