Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  “She’s not flawed—just different.” Matthew paused. “Give her a chance, Marilla.”

  “We’d have to put her through school, simply so she can learn the basics of interacting in society.”

  “So she’ll go to school.”

  “But what is the point of buying an android if we can’t get our money’s worth out of her? There is still the matter of you needing help on the farm.”

  “I’ll hire Barry’s boy out for a couple of hours during the day, and Anne can help me before and after school.” He held up his hand to forestall Marilla’s next protest. “We can’t afford to buy a normal android. And the simple fact is: I like her.” He looked at his wife. “I don’t ask for much, but I’m asking for this.”

  Marilla harrumphed, more to cover her shock than out of any deep need to protest. This was the first time her husband had ever stood up to her and held his ground. This machine must have really gotten under his skin. “The android can stay,” she stated finally, “but strictly on a trial basis. We have a three-month warranty, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then if I’m not impressed by that time, we are returning her for a full refund. And I want no protests, Matthew. That is my condition for letting her stay now.”

  Matthew nodded, satisfied. He knew that despite the condition, he’d just won a great concession from his wife.

  And so every morning Matthew came downstairs to the library at five to find Anne engrossed in one of his books, looking more like the child she appeared to be as she acted out the plays with enthusiasm, the dying light of the fire dancing about in her copper hair. They would talk about her latest literary discoveries of the previous night while Matthew ate his breakfast, and then their day would start, the android helping Matthew milk the cows, muck out the stables, and carry out all the hay for the animals until it was time for her to leave for school.

  Within a week they had developed a comfortable routine, and Matthew was surprised to discover that for the first time in a decade he actually enjoyed getting up before the birds awoke. However, it soon became clear after a few weeks of school that Anne hadn’t been able to make as favorable an impression on her classmates, who were quick to point out how different she was.

  “People don’t often like that which they don’t understand,” Marilla had told the android matter-of-factly.

  But Anne had read about “kindred spirits” and how true bosom friends are accepting of all differences, and as Marilla had said, she just had to prove she was worthy of being a perfect friend.

  So every day she went to school and tried to prove herself by excelling in her classwork. She had much to learn, having only known factory life before Green Gables, but it didn’t take long until she was tied with Gilbert Blythe for first honors.

  And still the classmates' attitude towards her didn’t noticeably thaw. The android couldn’t understand why. Wasn’t she doing everything right?

  “You think you are better than us, don’t you, Miss Anne-droid?” was Josie Pye’s snide comment after Anne won her first spelling bee. She twisted around at her desk to look directly at Anne. “Can you spell machine?"

  Anne looked at her in puzzlement. Is this another test? “M-A-C-H-I—”

  “Do you always have an answer for everything?” Josie interrupted, frustrated that she could never get a rise out of the copper-haired girl.

  “Isn’t the correct response to a question an answer?” she asked, still puzzled.

  Josie glared at her and faced forward again, not speaking to her until their extracurricular painting class that evening. “I’m sure you are perfect at that too,” she muttered.

  “I don’t know,” the android replied. “I’ve never painted before.”

  The class set up outside to capture the majesty of the rolling fields of Avonlea on canvas. Nestled in the tree line along the horizon, Anne could see the roof of Green Gables, and so she painted that first, her strokes precise and her measurements exact.

  Then she moved to the fields, taking care to note the exact hue of the grass and blending the appropriate golden-hued green. Within fifteen minutes the field was done, complete with fences drawn to scale.

  While Anne was busy duplicating the trees on her canvas, the teacher went up to each student in turn to ascertain their progress and study what their diverse depictions of the one view told him about their personalities.

  When he approached Anne, his eyebrows raised at the quality of the painting. Then they furrowed. “Well, it’s technically perfect,” he said, and he sat down to start his painting.

  Diana Berry looked up from her canvas as Anne was starting to outline the clouds. The raven-haired beauty glanced at Anne’s painting, her blue eyes going wide. “Oh Anne! I wish I could paint half as good as you do!”

  “Honey, you don’t need to be talented with looks like yours,” Gilbert Blythe quipped from somewhere behind them. The other students snickered and the light disappeared out of Diana’s eyes. She returned them to her painting.

  Anne looked up from her masterpiece to discover the clouds had moved. Quickly she started painting their new position over the clouds she had already started to form.

  Then she noticed that the sun had changed position. Its lower angle threw a deeper amber cast onto the field. Frantically she started to mix up a different shade of green to replace the grass she’d painted earlier.

  Then she noticed that the new position of the sun meant that Green Gables was completely in shadow, rendering the cottage almost invisible to the naked eye. So Anne painstakingly painted it into a silhouette.

  Then she looked up to see salmon pink was starting to outline the bottom of the clouds, and a peach was spreading across the horizon. The sun was setting.

  Her efforts to keep up with the changing colors of encroaching night meant her painting strokes increased to inhuman speed—and she still couldn’t keep up. Every time she looked up, her painting was no longer accurate. The trees were now completely black along the horizon, and the fences cast long shadows across the field.

  She stopped, at a loss for what to do. As a result of changing the colors in the sky so often and so quickly in a blur of hand and brush, the layers didn’t have enough time to dry, resulting in the salmon pink blending with the earlier lighter blue shades. Her sky was now a mauve color. It was a restful shade, throwing a slightly romantic mood over the painting, but all Anne could see was that it wasn’t an accurate depiction.

  Josie snickered. “It looks like Anne can’t do everything right after all.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Diana said, a little pointedly. “Josie doesn’t think of anyone but herself.” She looked at Anne’s painting. “Why did you keep changing the colors? Not that it looks bad,” she added hastily, “but your painting looked perfectly fine before.”

  “The colors are all wrong.”

  Gilbert appeared over her shoulder, his usual nonchalant stance dissipating in his interest. “In what way?” he asked.

  “We were told to paint this view.” Anne gestured in front of her. “But the colors keep changing. This painting is no longer accurate.”

  “A painting doesn’t have to be technically accurate for it to be considered a masterpiece,” the teacher interjected, only his blond hair visible at the top of his canvas as he continued to paint. “It’s how you interpret the view that brings the painting to life.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Anne.

  “Take a look at mine,” Diana offered, a little shyly.

  Anne stood up and walked over, studying the painting for a long moment. “The clouds are the wrong shape.”

  “Not the wrong shape, Anne. Just a different shape,” she replied. “It’s a matter of perspective. Take a closer look.”

  The android tilted her head to the side, as she always did when she was thinking, and considered the clouds Diana had painted. They were perhaps a little too white. Also the strokes she used to define the texture of the clouds were too coarse to depic
t the lightness of the gossamer structures.

  “Pretend they aren’t clouds,” Gilbert interrupted her thoughts. “What else do you see?”

  Anne considered the shapes of the clouds and nothing else, and automatically started comparing them to images in her memory banks. “They’re animals!” she blurted out suddenly, Diana laughing as the android’s eyes darted up to the sky. Sure enough, she could see the remnants of some of the clouds Diana had painted. If she looked closely enough, she could see what looked like a rabbit bounding over the horizon. “How did you know to do this?” she asked finally.

  “I just used my imagination,” Diana replied, blushing delicately at the attention.

  “But androids don’t have an imagination, do they, Gilbert?” Josie pointed out, twirling her hair around her finger.

  “Knock it off, Josie.” Gilbert replied. “Nobody’s perfect. She just had to know how to look.”

  Anne didn’t hear them. She was still trying to process what she had just learned. “So Diana’s painting is better than mine, even though mine is technically more accurate.”

  The teacher leaned around his easel. “Better is not the right word. It’s a more realized painting.” He paused, trying to work out how to explain it. “Your painting shows us how you—or anyone here—physically sees the fields, but nothing more. It doesn’t show us anything about you.”

  She analyzed his words carefully, and found herself, as well as her painting, lacking. “So I have failed.”

  “No, not necessarily.” The teacher studied the android for a moment, aware that she’d probably never been confronted with failure before.

  “It just means you’ve got more to learn.” He smiled gently. “That is what school is for.”

  “Where do I start?”

  Even Josie was struck by the earnest entreaty in the android’s tone.

  “Here and now,” the teacher responded with a smile. “We’ve still got a half an hour of light.”

  The android sat down at her easel, unwilling to let the teacher know he had misunderstood her. She remembered what happened when the Supervisor at the factory had misunderstood her, and she didn’t want to be sold again. She looked at her painting.

  Where do I start?

  “Do you see Green Gables in the distance?” Diana whispered into Anne’s ear, leaning over in her chair. Anne nodded. “That is not merely where you live, but it’s your home. What do you see when you think of home?”

  Diana watched Anne’s eyes blink rapidly for a few seconds, and then flitter back and forth across the painting. She reached for her paints and brush, and started mixing colors.

  Diana watched, fascinated, while Anne started applying paint to the canvas once more. Her speed belied her android heritage as an airship quickly took shape amongst the clouds in the painting’s mauve sky.

  When the flying vessel was complete, she dipped her brush in a combination of pots and leaned forward. For a minute Diana could only see the back of Anne’s copper braid as the android painstakingly painted a candlelit window onto the silhouette of the cottage, but then she leaned back and dipped her brush into black pot.

  After considering the painting for a moment, the android started to paint a tiny profile of a human in the field closest to the cottage. When she also brushed in a little cattle dog beside the figure, Diana realized that it was Anne’s depiction of Matthew returning to Green Gables after a hard day’s work on the farm.

  The android’s hand hesitated beside the image of the man, and Diana wondered if the android understood what a lovely—and homely—image she had just created: the light from the kitchen guiding the man home at night.

  But then the android’s hand darted upwards, and another silhouette started to take shape at the bow of the airship. It appeared that the figure was looking down at the cottage, and when Diana saw that the silhouette wore her hair in a braid that was lifted by the wind, Diana started in shock.

  Anne had drawn herself into the painting, and she was sailing on an airship, being guided home by the cottage light like a seafaring ship would a lighthouse.

  Who said androids couldn’t have an imagination? Diana thought triumphantly, looking at her new friend’s painting with a smile on her face. Anne might be a kindred spirit after all.

  Matthew pulled out his timepiece and opened the case to see where the clock hands pointed. “It’s time to leave for school, Anne,” he said quietly, sure that she could hear him from across the barn.

  She looked up, blinking in surprise. “Usually my internal clock alerts me before now.”

  Matthew nodded, bemused. One of the things that endeared him the most about the android was that she could often get so swept up in her enthusiasm and curiosity for the current project she was working on that it overrode her most basic mechanical functions, like her inbuilt alarm clock. He knew that Marilla and Anne’s creators considered that a manufacturing flaw, but to Matthew it seemed like a very human characteristic.

  He watched her methodically put his tools back in order, and then cover the machine.

  “I was nearly finished!” she complained.

  “So you will finish it tonight.”

  “I suppose that is an acceptable conclusion,” she replied.

  Matthew laughed. Was the android pouting? "Well, my dear Anne, if this contraption of yours truly works and I never have to milk a cow again with my bare hands, then I will have the time to start teaching you chess before school tomorrow morning.” He smiled at her. “Is that also an acceptable conclusion?”

  It appeared to him that her eyes lit up. “More than acceptable, Matthew.” She tilted her head, considering him.

  Matthew blushed under her scrutiny and busied himself with closing his timepiece and running his thumb lovingly over the initials ornately carved across the lid before moving to put it away. He felt the android’s curiosity before she voiced it. “It was my father’s,” he said quietly. He hesitated a moment, then held it out to her.

  Anne appeared to understand the privilege she was being given. She took the pocket watch from Matthew with evident care, turning it around in her dainty hands to look at the initials, almost imperceptible on the old tarnished metal. She popped the lid open, and her eyes grew wide. She had never seen such a tiny machine. Behind the ornately carved brass hands, she could see the intricate wheels turn, and despite the discoloration of age, she thought it beautiful.

  Matthew let the android hold his timepiece the entire way to school, the light reflecting off Anne’s brass nails as she tinkered with it, drawing his attention to the advancement of her construction in comparison to his beloved pocket watch. The 19th century had seen a huge evolution in machines, and he wondered what the next century would bring if Anne was the pinnacle of this one.

  The buggy started rocking more than usual, with Samuel having to navigate more ruts as a result of the storm the previous night, but when Matthew briefly glanced over at Anne he saw the pocket watch clutched protectively in her tiny hand.

  She seemed almost reluctant to give it up when they reached the school, but then she heard Diana calling and she quickly handed it over, leaping out of the buggy with her usual enthusiasm and grace. She turned to Matthew to say goodbye, and he told her he’d be there at three to pick her up.

  “No need, Matthew,” she said. “Gilbert Blythe said he’d walk me to the bend, and I wanted to see the new flowers that have come out since the last rain.”

  Matthew smiled as he watched her rush off to greet Diana, wondering if she realized how human she sounded.

  He shook his head at his folly. Of course she knows. She doesn’t see herself as a machine!

  He laughed as Samuel pulled the buggy away from school, and he returned home with a smile still on his face.

  “What time do you call this, Matthew Cuthbert?” Marilla asked when he walked into the kitchen to share a pot of tea with his wife before going back to work on the farm.

  He didn’t know why, but by Marilla’s clock he was alway
s late. He pulled out his pocket watch to check—and discovered it was no longer working.

  His heart sank in his chest. His pocket watch had never failed him until today, and it was his last tangible memory of his father.

  He looked at it closely and he could see that part of the clock mechanism appeared dislodged behind the face, and when he shook it gently, he could hear something metallic rattle around. It appeared that an irreplaceable component was broken in his beloved timepiece.

  Marilla saw the look on his face and asked him what was wrong. After he told her, she asked, “What, if anything, did you do differently with the pocket watch today?”

  He thought back on his morning. “Nothing, really. I gave it to Anne to look at, and then let her hold it while we travelled through some storm-created ruts on the way to school.” He paused, considering. “Come to think of it, those ruts really were pretty rough going. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them was what did it.”

  Marilla wasn’t convinced. “Did you watch Anne the entire time she had your timepiece, Matthew?”

  “I can’t say as I did,” he replied, wondering what his wife was getting at. “I had to concentrate on the road on account of those bothersome ruts.”

  Marilla was silent for a long moment, and then she asked, “Do you think the android could have tinkered with it? She seems fascinated with the inner workings of machinery.”

  “Anne was fascinated by the intricacy of my pocket watch,” he admitted. “But….”

  “Think about it, Matthew,” Marilla interrupted. “My theory makes sense. The pocket watch had never broken down in your lifetime, or your Dad’s, until the day you let Anne play with it.”

  He couldn’t find any fault with her logic, but deep down in his heart he knew it wasn’t true.

  When Anne came home that afternoon from her walk with Gilbert Blythe, a posy of wildflowers in her hand, Marilla confronted her. “Did you fiddle with the mechanism in Matthew’s pocket watch?”

  Anne noted the agitated tone in her voice, and became concerned. “What’s wrong with it?”