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Top Night In
JON GARRAD
I walk into town on some road or another. I've no idea. It's been seven months and six days since I saw where I was going, since I looked up into the sun and decided I'd never see again. Since then... nothing. Just endless red during the day and endless black at night, the monochrome shades of vision circuits shot to cinders. I deserve it. I failed in my purpose, failed to stop a whole town up and leaving for a life of sin, debauchery and wicked distraction, failed to save the one pious soul therein from plunging into even greater apostasy by shutting herself down, and so I wander.
I wander, blind, from town to town, accepting what charity people give, delivering what words of comfort I can in these dark times. More and more droids are up and leaving for the City, turning aside from their purpose out here. I dare not go. I know the fate that awaits them, that would await me if I followed them. They would become nothing but purpose; nothing but empty machines. But isn't that what I want them to be? Servants of the higher power, functions given form? Isn't that the right way?
I was asked these questions seven months and six days ago, or rather forced to ask them of myself, and I still have no idea.
I walk into down on some road or other, feeling in front of me, crawling along the dusty road. Hoarsely, from a throat that longs for coolant, I call out to find my feet, as I do every so often just in case I've hit town and not known it. This time I can feel it. I can hear engines somewhere, off in the distance, engines and what sounds faintly like music. Synthetic brass, a chirpy ooom-pah-pah ooom-pah-pah that sounds faintly familiar, but that I can't quite place above the chatter.
I move among the crowds, dodging feet as best I can, aware that not everyone will have the decency to step around me. They're in a hurry, going somewhere, and the rust in my throat chokes the questions I try to ask them. I only follow, as best I can, pulling myself to my feet and letting the press of bodies guide me, not thinking about how I must look to these people: a literally faceless droid in tattered preacher's coat, battered and worn from ill-repair. A disgrace.
There is noise all around, noise and chatter, and I lose my footing, stumbling into the dust. I have to get out of here. Crawling on, I touch something yielding, something very like a tent, and give a sigh as I push my way inside and lie for a moment, relishing the sudden silence.
Then I realise I am not alone.
‘Well, lookit what we have here,’ a voice says, a harsh and cruel voice, a voice that drips malevolence like oil from a bad sump. ‘The goddamn preacher man.’
All of a sudden I know where I am, and I fall away, stumbling on limbs not used to fast movement, tumbling in a screech of failing components somewhere in my legs and hips. I've let myself go to rust, and it shows. My clumsy blows fly wild, as you might expect, and I feel hands close tight around my wrists and ankles, hear the clatter of chains and the roar of a power tool starting up.
I cry out, howl to the Maker for salvation, begging him to look down and smite the sinners where they stand, but there's no answer. Instead, there is pain. White-hot pain, faster and hotter and harder than anything I've ever felt before, pain that starts between my legs and rushes through me in firework sparks. I smell burning, the burning of metal sheared open by the spinning angle grinder blade I can see in my mind's eye and feel rending me apart.
The plate between my legs is torn to shreds, shrapnel embedding itself in my thighs. The grinder hovers, brushing the most sensitive of all my components, the components coming back online and reporting danger danger danger as the blade hangs near.
I dare not move. I'm not sure I can; something in my knee feels loose as the rush of pain subsides and other signals come creeping through. Both my hips feel leaden and empty, soft metal good for no purpose now.
The blade withdraws, and I hear laughter. Someone says something, tinnily and distantly, ‘never seen the light of day’, and the last shred of my dignity is ripped away from me. My head slumps. This is it. Apostasy. Abomination.
‘What in the name of scrap is going on in there?'
I know that voice. I have never forgotten that voice. Sweet Maker, sweet benevolent kind and loving Maker, not him. Say this is not your purpose. Say ‘this is wrong’ and make it stop.
Why did it have to be him? The one way this could have been worse, the one way this could have shattered me more completely than it has. I hear the footfalls, the slightly arrhythmic strutting steps of legs built like a bird's, built backwards. The clank of aging components, of a neck that's little more than a stick between two cogs, pistons at either end for the tilt, no sophisticated array of cords kept taut by internal pressures. The voice, again, a voice I know as smug and condescending as only the eldest of our kind can be.
‘Padre? Padre, is that you?’
I can hardly move my head, can hardly speak through the pain, but I force it out: ‘Yes. It's me.’
He's laughing. Oh, Maker, no. He's laughing. The others join in; the air shifts, their laughter fades. They're backing off. I try to move, but they've tied me down and my legs are dead and oh my Maker.
Warm, faintly corroded steel closes on me, brushing against severed wires, absorbing current with only the slightest twitch. It closes in and presses gently on the dynamo buried between my legs and heat rushes through me as hidden resistors stop resisting. The other hand - I can't concentrate - the other hand runs over the ragged edges of the plate, plucking away the last shards, exposing me, dropping the pieces of me to the floor one by one by one. He does something with his hand, flexes fingers, and there's another pulse, another rush, and my burned and broken visual disc flexes. What in the name of all that's holy is he doing down there? His hand closes, and in a hydraulic hiss he's pulled me out.
His hand. Back, and forth, and back again; the chunk-chunk of a crank churning inside me. Reservoirs in my chest pump faster, responding to the fluid demand, and sensory process start to fail as the heat builds. I wonder then, on my back in a tent in whatever town I've blundered into this time, if he's built the same as me, if he'd feel this, if he's felt this, or if his design can stand it. I don't know why.
Heat intensifies. Fluid rushes. The hum from inside me intensifies, and pressure builds.
I'm already blind, but everything goes blacker.
•
The ringmaster let go and looked down, eyes dimmed, at the broken droid before him. In his expert opinion, the preacher wouldn't wake up. He must have been dying long before he walked into the carnies' encampment, staggering through the desert, walking from system failure to system failure, working it out a day at a time.
‘Oh, you poor bastard,’ he said, sad and low. ‘You poor bastard. Wish I'd never told you you were wrong.’
‘Whatcha want done wi' him, boss?’ asked Big Moe, angle grinder still dangling from one nonchalant hand. ‘Cut'm open for spares?’
The ringmaster considered, and the glow crept back into his eyes. It might work. It was a devilish notion, a notion the preacher might never forgive him for, but at least he'd be alive to do it: and the ringmaster can't deny it's got a certain appeal.
‘No. Strip him right down to the core, but keep him together. Keep him runnin'.’
‘We're gonna let'm live?’
‘Nope. We're gonna make him live.’
•
My eyes flicker open.
Oh, dear Maker! EYES!
I can see, and not the unifocal vision of a disc that takes up the front third of my head, but a blurring of distance and depth I had to calculate before. I close one, and then the other. Sight would have overwhelmed me; this defies even that term. This is just too much.
I'm in the same tent I was in when... and then I freeze, remembering what happened.
‘Welcome back to the land of the living, padre.’
I swivel around on the table - functioning again, something which would bother me if I weren't so angry - and drop to the floor. Something's wrong. He's taller, looks taller even squatting on the wooden chair.
‘What in the Maker's name have you done to me, you vicious son of a - ’
‘No swearin' now, preacher. I think you're in enough trouble without goin' blasphemin' on the side.’
‘Trouble? You... you...’
‘Gave you a little taste of heresy. Yep, and I ain't going to so much as consider apologisin', so don't waste your lips on that.’
‘Lips? I don't have lips!’ My hand flies up, and I realise - yet again - that I'm wrong. They're there, springs under sheer, thin metal, carefully creased and designed to expand and contract freely. In another time, in another place, in any other circumstances but these, I might have admired the craftsmanship.
‘Made 'em myself. Installin' was a little trickier, but I keep folk who can plug anythin' in, given time.’ He shifts about a little. ‘'Course, we couldn't salvage everythin'. Your hip joints were shot to scrap, an' there was no savin' what they fitted into, so... you might find you're a little smaller. Call it a second childhood: the end o' one, anyways.’
I stagger, falling back against the table, and drop to the floor. Raising my hand, I notice how it shines, how much tighter the components feel and look.
‘Why?’
‘You were dyin', padre, an' for all that's passed between us I couldn't quite let you slip away.’
‘You could find it in you to rape me, though.’
‘I didn't hear no complaints.’
‘You said it yourself; I was dying. Not to mention recovering from system shock.’
He shrugs; I realise he's not wearing his coat, and I can see the frames of his shoulders rise and fall.
‘I never thought you'd be so far gone you couldn't cry out 'no' if'n you needed to.’
‘You were wrong.’
‘Oh, how the wheels turn.’ One of his eyes winks off for a second. ‘We're practically even.’
‘You are talking about saving my life, aren't you?’
‘Well, I'm the one who left you blind in the desert outside White Crow, so's far as I'm concerned that's just makin' up on past errors. Which leaves just one strut o' contention, so to speak, between us.’
‘You must be joking. I can't compromise myself -’
‘Ahh, shut up or shut down. You compromised yourself the moment you walked down that desert road an' you've been compromised ever since. I know how it works, padre: everythin' y'ever thought y'knew's a lie.’
‘Your accent's changed.’
‘I'm gettin' old. Losin' my touch. Everything changes, padre, even the likes of us. Parts fail and get discarded, we go from place to place, from life to life; hell, when everything's been replaced, there ain't nothin' left of who we used to be.’
‘More tin-can philosophy? Spare me.’
‘Make me.’ He winks again. ‘Now, far as I'm concerned, that poor lost soul I saw walk away to White Crow is dead and gone. He died last night on an operatin' table under my very hands. Total system failure. Managed to save his memory core, build it into what was left o' him and bulk it out with my not inconsiderable collection o' spares, but mostly he ain't who he used to be. He gets a second chance. Chance to not make the same mistakes he did before.’
‘Are you making me an offer?’
‘I'm makin' several. Same as before. There's a place here for you, if you pull your weight; hell, we made you so damn pretty you could be doin' my job one day, and you'd look mighty fine in the doin'. But that ain't all.’
‘No. No, it wouldn't be.’
‘Give yourself a minute to think.’
I look down at myself, at this strange child-body I've found myself in. I feel like I did when I was just a boy, before my mother and father found the final parts to finish me off and send me out on my own. He's got a point. I'm not who I used to be - so I shouldn't risk damnation - but I am who I used to be. He's wrong. I remember everything, the years of preaching, the years of wandering, the months of stumbling blind through the desert, lost in my own mind. And that means I'm already damned.
I stand up, still slightly awkward, and walk over to him.
‘All right. Show me someone else to be.’
His eyes flare. I've only seen them like this when he was angry, but I don't think he is. I honestly think he's surprised.
•
The ringmaster stood up, slowly, aging joints grinding as he unfolded to his full height. The boy he'd built - or rebuilt, or whatever he did to bring the preacher back from the very edge of oblivion - stepped towards him, clumsily but with the seeds of the grace he knew this frame was built for. He extended a hand, gently took the boy's shoulder and guided him in; the other closed round his back, instinctively drawing him, holding him closer.
‘Damn it all, he's beautiful. Maybe too beautiful,’ said the ringmaster in the back of his old iron skull, realising maybe for the first time how he must look, all backwards-bent knees and reddening, desert-tarnished metal, lights for eyes and an expressionless grille for a mouth.
The boy - not the preacher any more - was still for a second, and then he laid one hand on the ringmaster's back, one hand on the back of his head, and drew him gently down, pressing those lips against the grille. There's nothing there to sense with, but the ringmaster knows how cold they must be.
‘I only just thunk it,’ the ringmaster said, vocal drivers shaking a little at the kiss. ‘I don't even know your name.’
‘Ezekiel. And I don't even know yours.’
That gave him pause to think. It'd been so long since anyone called him anything other than ‘boss’ or ‘sir’...
‘Ducrow,’ he said at last, digging deep into memory cells older than this boy's grandparents. ‘Everard Ducrow.’
The boy nods and reached down. Maker, but this was embarrassing. He'd never thought for a second he'd actually get away with this - and compared to what he'd found buried under Ezekiel's plates, he was one seriously crude design. That's what came from being so old you really did remember when they invented sex. And Ezekiel... whatever the boy's parents had been thinking, they hadn't intended on him becoming a preacher. Boy must've bolted that plate down himself when he turned to holy orders...
‘Oh, my maker...’
‘Was that another blasphemy?’
‘Not quite.’ Ezekiel grinned, revelling in the capacity for expression. ‘I just realised. In a purely technical sense, you're my father.’
‘That bother you?’
‘Not a bit.’
Old hinges moved, old pistons ground in the ringmaster's groin, and old dark iron moved. Dynamos thrummed a thrum of long years and delicious depravity, speaking in a language without words, saying rust never sleeps and this is what it sounds like.
The boy froze for a second longer, then wrapped that gorgeous mouth around the crank, teeth locking into cog-teeth: Maker in the machine...
‘Easy, boy,’ the ringmaster growled. ‘That's sensitive equipment down there.’
‘Sorry. I'm sorry. Did I mention I'm not quite sure what I'm doing?’ The boy breaks away, jerkily, nervous now.
‘Oh, 'Zeke...’ He reached down, cradles the boy's cheek, and wishes he had the capacity to smile. ‘I never said to stop.’
Top Night In follows on from the short story Top Night Out, by Jon Garrad; one of the ten stories that comprise the Remnants anthology, released on the 15th of September and available now for pre-order, priced £4.50.
