Surfing Samurai Robots

by Mel Gilden

  I don’t know how long I stood there watching. Long enough for the rainbows to fade and for me to feel like myself again. The kitchen was solid for the first time. I barely remembered the room where I had awakened.

  In another part of the house, something banged. I jumped. Not long after that, Whipper Will came into the room with a stack of thin boxes.

  ‘Make some room on that table, will ya, dude?’ he said.

  I moved more dishes and pushed aside a metal box that had two wide slits in the top. It was plugged into the wall, but I don’t think it was a radio. Whipper Will dropped the boxes with a heavy thunk. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Fine, now that the yoyogurt wore off.’ I watched him carefully. ‘Though I miss the rainbows.’

  Whipper Will nodded. ‘Everybody does. That’s why they come back for more.’

  ‘There must be a lot of money in yoyogurt.’ Guys on the radio were always in business for the money. People sometimes died because they wanted too much of it.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Whipper Will. ‘But look at this.’ He held one of the boxes out to me. I took it. On one side was a picture of a guy in a long brown cloth-tube. Something brown perched on his head. Smoke rose from the end of a thin white cylinder that dangled from his mouth. The box opened like a flower, a half circle of sheets bound along one edge. Each sheet was covered with black marks.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘A library book. Don’t you have books where you come from?’

  ‘Not exactly. We have small blocks of wood packed in little cases.’

  Whipper Will explained the facts of life to me. I heard about fiction, nonfiction, reference books, picture books. All very handy. All very compact.

  I said, ‘All right. I’m impressed. What about these particular books?’

  ‘Raymond Chandler.’

  ‘I heard his name on the Philip Marlowe broadcasts.’

  ‘Chandler was the hot dog who wrote the original Philip Marlowe stories. I brought these for you to read.’

  I picked up the book again and flipped through the pages. I stared at the black marks but couldn’t force them to make sense. Marlowe was in here somewhere, and I had to find him. Where you been, Marlowe? I said. He looked more tired than usual. There was a blotch under his eye the size and colour of an eggplant. He said, A back room in Bay City. I was knocked as silly as a couple of waltzing mice.

  I said, ‘I learned to speak English off the radio, remember? I don’t know one written word from another.’

  ‘Hang loose, will you, bro’? That’s why I brought these too.’ He held up a much thinner book. It had colourful pictures and a word or two on each page.

  ‘That looks about right,’ I said.

  Whipper Will and I spent the rest of the day together at what turned out to be the kitchen table. We had baloney sandwiches there at lunchtime. We drank a lot of soda pop, People walked through, sometimes stopped to watch or kibitz, but soon got bored and went about their business.

  We had just finished T (T is a Teddy bear Tying his Tennis shoes) and were tired. (T was also for Tired.) After taking a good stretch, Whipper Will asked me if I wanted to see something.

  He took me through a tunnel — a hallway — to a small room piled with clothes. It smelled like Earthpeople, only more so.

  ‘My bedroom,’ he said with pride I did not understand. I stood in the doorway while he clambered over drifts of clothes to a table on which sat the smaller brother of the big eye in the other room.

  ‘This is my computer. You have computers in, uh, Bay City?’

  ‘We get along,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, a little embarrassed. ‘Of course you do. How would you get here, otherwise?’

  ‘Good question,’ I said. It could mean anything.

  ‘OK. You’re from Bay City. Right.’

  He climbed back into the hall and led me down more tunnels to a small warm room at the back of the house. When he swung open the door, he said, ‘Sorry about the chlorine smell, but I have to keep this place pretty clean.’

  I nodded, not understanding. But I could see he’d done a good job. Compared to the rest of the house, where you could break your neck crossing the floor, this room seemed empty. A platoon of shiny glass jars stood on a long counter that divided the room in two. To one side was a refrigerator and a wooden cabinet.

  ‘This is where I make the yoyogurt.’ He laughed. ‘Actually I don’t make it. The bacteria do. I just give them a chance.’ He took a jar from the wooden cabinet and turned it slowly in front of me. The glop inside was pretty disgusting.

  ‘Pure culture,’ he said. He saw he was losing his audience and said,’Wanta hear a joke?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What’s the difference between yogurt and California?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yogurt has an active culture!’

  The joke pleased him. He laughed until I said, ‘Now I have one. What’s the difference between yogurt and yoyogurt?’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re the expert.’

  He meditated on my face for a while, then chuckled deep in his throat. He said, ‘I’m the only one who knows how to make yoyogurt.’ He pointed to himself with some pride. ‘Nothing else has the kick.’

  He opened a back door and led me outside. Whipper Will had a small fruit-and-vegetable garden back there. ‘Grow it all myself,’ he said. ‘All organic.’

  ‘Organic?’

  ‘You know. No pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Wanta see my compost heap?’

  I didn’t know what a compost heap was, and after he showed it to me, I didn’t care. He acted as if he were showing me his private stash of rubies. I nodded and said, ‘I guess my education is complete now. I’ve seen a compost heap.’

  ‘You haven’t even finished the alphabet.’

  We went back to the kitchen and clawed our way, hand over hand, through the rest of the alphabet. It was a long wait to find out that Z is for Zoot. Punctuation was another matter entirely. The concept was new to me. In Gomkrix you’re on your own.

  By the time Bingo brought in a pizza for dinner, I could get through one of those kids’ ABC books without any trouble.

  When the pizza and brewski — otherwise known as beer, I discovered — was gone, Captain Hook and a few of the others took bowls of yoyogurt from the refrigerator. Whipper Will offered me some, but I turned him down. I had work to do that evening, and I’d need my entire brain for it.

  Whipper Will left me and joined the rowdy party in the next room. Talk, loud music, and strange smoke filled the air. Occasionally, silence struck suddenly, as if I’d gone deaf, and it seemed even louder than the noise.

  While all this was going on, I was reading the top book in the stack. The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler. There were a lot of words in it I didn’t know. I made lists and would ask Whipper Will about them later.

  But on page twenty I found out why I had come to Earth. There was more to it than just helping Earthpeople, and Chandler called the reason by name. He said, ‘But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid ... He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ A good enough man for any world. Rightly or wrongly, I felt that Chandler was talking about me. He had known I was coming. And here I was. Confident of my destiny and of Chandler’s blessing, I rested my head on the book and fell asleep.

  The next morning was another beautiful day. Most of them are beautiful in Malibu, but I never heard anybody complain. Outside, the board-riders were already at it.

  I looked through the kitchen refrigerator and the cabinets for something that might be breakfast. The refrigerator was full of brewski and yoyogurt. I avoided them and pulled out some lonely cold cuts, curled and old. I found some bread in a metal box and built a dry, tasteless sandwich.

  I walked outside, and standing in that air was like being wrapped in silk. Still chewi
ng, I walked across the black path, avoiding a very thin woman riding what I guessed was a bicycle. She glanced at me and smiled, but continued on her way.

  As I stomped across the warm sand with the wind blowing in my face, the board-riders looked less human, and I became more confused. Oh, they had two arms and two legs apiece, but they reflected the sunlight as if they’d been polished. And though they were graceful, it was the mechanical grace of a machine that was doing its job without thinking or pleasure, not the grace of an animal.

  ‘Oh, wow!’ someone cried, despite the fact that I seemed to be alone on the beach.

  ‘Ahh-roooh!’ said a voice that was soon joined by others. ‘Ahh-roooh!’

  I came to a place where the beach suddenly fell away as if the ocean had taken a big bite out of it. Below me, all eight of my friends were sitting with their backs against the wall of sand, fiddling with controls on black boxes about the size of a Raymond Chandler novel and howling at the hard blue sky. They were twitching with excitement.

  I found my way down to their level, and after watching them stare intensely at the board-riders, I said, ‘Good morning.’

  Not one of them looked up at me. They kept working their boxes and watching the water. Whipper Will said, ‘Hang loose, will you, bro’?’

  A moment later, one of the board-riders flipped into the air. He and his board tumbled in opposite directions and fell into the water with splashes I couldn’t hear because of the boom of the waves breaking against the shore. ‘Wipeout!’ Whipper Will cried and buried his face in his hands. This had no effect on most of his friends, but Bingo patted his shoulder and said, ‘Stay cool, bro. Everybody wipes out.’

  That wasn’t what Whipper Will wanted to hear. He shrugged off the girl’s hand and stood up. He stalked over to me, and we watched the ocean wash the board and the rider to shore.

  While Bingo watched us from one side, I helped Whipper Will drag the rider up onto a sheet of plastic. The board, attached to the rider by a long cord, dragged after. I had a pretty good look at the rider now. It wasn’t a person. Not a human or a Toomler or anything else. It was made entirely of brown metal, even to the skimpy bathing suit it wore. Its eyes were empty blue disks.

  Whipper Will dropped to his knees and opened a small door in the thing’s chest. Inside were enough wires to make a spaghetti dinner and a row of tiny white switches.

  I said, ‘It’s cute. What is it?’

  Morosely, Whipper Will said, ‘It’s a surf-bot. You know. Like a robot that surfs.’ He did something with his control box while watching the inside of the surf-bot’s chest. The surf-bot jerked its arms and legs.

  ‘It shouldn’t have done that. And if I can’t figure out why it does that, I’m not even going to qualify for the Surf-O-Rama, let alone win.’

  ‘Surf-O-Rama?’

  ‘A big surfing contest right here in Malibu. We’re sort of the home team.’

  ‘I haven’t seen you or any of your friends get wet yet.’

  Whipper Will’s eyebrows went up and down as if they’d gone over a bump. He said, ‘And you won’t, either. We don’t actually surf ourselves. That’s what the robots are for.’

  ‘You just control them from the beach.’

  ‘Right on. Surf-botting is tougher than it seems. Not just any hodad can do it.’

  I watched a surf-bot slide as if it were on greased rails along the inside of a wave that was taller than it was. ‘Anybody ever do any real surfing around here?’

  ‘Sure,’ Whipper Will said, suddenly excited. ‘Frankie and Annette. They used to make movies back in the sixties. We’ll be showing some of them tonight, if you want to see.’

  ‘Can’t wait,’ I said.

  We stared at the water for a while. The constant rhythmic motion was hypnotic. I was suddenly aware of thunder behind me and realized that it had been going on for a while and was getting louder.

  As one, Whipper Will and I turned around. The other surfers came up behind us. We were facing a lot of rolling stock coming our way.

  Six of what I guessed to be Earthpeople were riding what were definitely not bicycles, but big black two-wheeled machines with engines that split the early morning silence the way a hammer splits a ripe fruit.

  The riders were unlike any Earthpeople I had seen so far. Still, they were enough like Earthpeople that I didn’t think they were aliens. Not very alien, anyway.

  Their skin was cut and blasted, as if they’d spent the night together inside a spinning cement mixer. Their long dirty hair flew out behind them like vines of a plant you would not care to have in the house. Each of them sat far back in his saddle, almost lying down, with his arms stretched to the handlebars, which they handled casually, as if to demonstrate how easy it all was.

  They were dressed in black shiny stuff — leather — and rolled red bandannas wrapped around their heads. I could not see their eyes for the mirrored glasses over them. The riders looked as playful as a slaberingeo’s spiked tail.

  ‘Why are we just standing here?’ Thumper said.

  ‘Because running wouldn’t do any good,’ Whipper Will said.

  ‘Who are they?’ I said.

  Without looking at me, Whipper Will said, ‘Gotterdammerung. They’re a motorcycle-punk club that likes to inspire terror in people on the beach.’

  ‘Not much of a challenge for them,’ I said. ‘Is it a job or a hobby?’ Gotterdammerung didn’t look any friendlier as it got closer.

  They lined up in front of us but did not kill their engines. I did not think it was because they were worried about the need to make a fast getaway.

  One of them yelled to us over the sound of the motorcycles, ‘Yo, surf scum! We got a proposition for ya.’

  Chapter 3

  Shut Up And Deal

  GOTTERDAMMERUNG had all the charm of a tragwort, a slaberingeo predator that eats anything if it is hungry enough, which is usually. Gotterdammerung’s members could not be ignored, or you would likely lose an arm. Only an arm, if you were lucky. Being downwind of them was not a treat.

  ‘What’s the haps, Tankhauser?’ Whipper Will said. I was impressed at how steady his voice was.

  ‘What is this flippin’ bravado, Will? You wimps are flippin’ scared of us, and you know it.’

  ‘You wimps make me sick,’ another of the choir sang out. This one looked as if, beneath the folds of fat, she might be a female.

  ‘Shut up,’ Tankhauser explained. Suddenly cozy, he shook his head and said, ‘Women. I can’t get that Goonhilda to close her yap.’

  Though his statement didn’t seem to require an answer, Tankhauser just glared at us for a long time. Maybe he was giving Whipper Will the chance to ask what Gotterdammerung was doing there so he could tell him to shut up. Tankhauser looked like the kind of guy who would never get tired of that kind of fun. Whipper Will didn’t say anything.

  Gotterdammerung creaked as they shifted in their saddles. Enough chains to haunt a castle crisscrossed their chest and festooned their thick boots. Pictures and writing decorated various parts of their bodies. Eyes on fire and bloody knives seemed popular, as well as ladies in winged helmets. Tankhauser shut off his engine. The others did too. These guys were as good as a chorus line.

  It was only a matter of time before Tankhauser noticed me, and now it happened. He said, ‘Who’s the geek with the nose?’

  ‘This is Zoot Marlowe,’ Whipper Will said. ‘Zoot, this is Tankhauser and his friends, Goonhilda, Sickfred, Dollkyrie, Wortan and Thor-head.’ Not one of them moved. I did not rate so much as a nod.

  Tankhauser said, ‘You’ll let anybody onto this beach, won’t you?’

  I wanted to say, ‘Obviously,’ but for my health I let it pass.

  Whipper Will said, ‘You’re right, Tank. Not much of a beach. What brings you here? You can’t be out of yoyogurt already.’

  ‘I can if I want, but I’m not,’ Tankhauser said with the petulance of a small child. ‘What I’m out of is patience.’ He kind of flexed his hands. ‘I don
’t like comin’ down here and giving you surf scum money for yoyogurt. I wanna make it myself.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as you think.’

  ‘Don’t give me that crap. A little sour milk.’

  The waves pummelled the shore. The sun beat down. Gulls bobbed and weaved overhead. All very pleasant if you weren’t waiting for some yabo to pull out his knife and do a little informal surgery.

  Whipper Will said, ‘We don’t charge you half what we could.’

  ‘Wimps,’ Wortan grumbled. He had a thick curly beard and collected his hair up under a flat leather hat. If anything, he did not seem as bright as Tankhauser.

  Tankhauser looked cagey — an eye-squinting grimace that hung on his face as naturally as an extra lip — and spoke with all the sincerity of a salesman with his fingers crossed. He said, ‘Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. We ain’t barbarians.’

  ‘We know that, Tank — ’

  ‘Shut up. We ain’t barbarians, so we ain’t gonna just chain-whip you till you tell us what we want to know.’

  As grateful as he was for this, Tankhauser’s kindness surprised Whipper Will. ‘What will you do, Tank?’

  ‘We challenge you to a duel.’

  ‘I’m not much with a chain, Tank.’

  ‘Right. But you guys are hell on surfboards.’

  Tankhauser let that sink in. I didn’t understand what was going on. Why didn’t Gotterdammerung just take what they wanted? Unless I read human psychology all wrong, it didn’t make sense.

  ‘Right on,’ said Whipper Will as he nodded. I felt better now that he seemed to be as confused as I was. ‘Surfboards at twenty paces.’

  Tankhauser began to heat up; I could see the pressure building. But the redness went back to hide behind his ears, and he only said, ‘Twerp, you take a lotta chances. Listen:

  ‘The big Surf-O-Rama is coming up. If we win, you give us the yoyogurt recipe. If you win—’ Gotterdammerung laughed. Deranged monkey laughter. It was not a pretty thing to hear. ‘If you win, we leave the beach forever.’