Abney Park's The Wrath Of Fate (22 page)

The black fleet was now firing grappling lines into the dock, and pulling their ships up to port. A new problem was making itself clear. The
Ophelia
was at the end of the large pier ahead of us, and between it and ourselves the black ships were docking. Out of them came soldiers, uniformed in black leather, canvas pants, and tall black leather boots. Everything about them was shiny, proper and oppressive. They pulled polished chrome pistols from black leather holsters and shot man, woman and children alike.

One of the soldiers had a megaphone, and he yelled into it in a matter-of-fact voice, “You have violated population control and confinement law, as set out by His Majesty Emperor Victor the First. Any person found outside the cities will be considered a traitor to the balance of nature, and will be executed, or fed to the fauna, at the convenience of the Imperial Navy.” He read this as if he had read it everyday of his life. No enthusiasm. He read it because it was his job, everyone knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Wow, that is not right!” said Tanner, as he and Daniel drew swords.

We headed towards the
Ophelia,
trying to navigate through the frantic mob on the docks that was either running towards, or away from the naval soldiers. As we rounded a large stack of wooden shipping crates, we found ourselves face to face with a squad of six black-uniformed men with rifles. The squad leader looked at the doll on my shoulder, and the key coming out of her back, and said, “Where are you taking this piece of obviously illegal horology?”

“Um, to you! I figured you’d wanted to see this!” I said, but he didn’t buy it for a second.

“Gentlemen, aim!” he commanded, but as they hoisted their rifles to their shoulders, a shadow flashed over our heads. Between the soldiers and us, a young Neobedouin had leaped, and his dreadlocks coming out from under his head wrap dripped with blood. We had never seen this boy before, and he glanced past us to the doll on my shoulder. Then he lifted his arms, and each wrist was strapped to the handle of two double bladed scythes.

“So you want to be first, beast dancer?” said the officer, “So be…” but the Neobedouin boy jumped up in a spin of whirling blades that slashed the throats of the officer and the two soldiers next to him.

He landed again, and leaped onto the shoulders of the soldier to his right as the soldier to his left fired at him, killing his comrade. The Beast Dancer then did a kind of a backward cart wheel slicing open the bellies of the two remaining navy men.

The tribal boy then turned to us, and said to the doll, “I know you cannot love, but I will always love you!” and he rushed forward into the last remaining group of soldiers blocking us from our ship. As he cleared the path for us, I heard the doll whisper to herself, “But I can love.”

We ran up the gangplank of the
Ophelia
as she was beginning to pull away from the docks. Jean-Paul looked at the clockwork girl on my back, and said casually, “Hey, where’d you get the doll?” He assumed she was just inanimate thing, like a mannequin. The doll spun her head around to Jean-Paul and glared. “I am not owned!” she said, stunning the pirate. He stumbled backward into a spool of rope.

“It – she! Talks!” he stammered.

“And she’s
complicated
,” Kristina grumbled. “Watch what you say around her, or she’ll break herself some more.” Kristina rolled her eyes.

I propped the doll up against the mast as the acting-pilot was pulling the ship away from the dock, while pulling hard on the Elevator Wheel, spinning frantically to drop the ship’s altitude below the firing line of the assaulting airships of the Imperial Navy.

“Okay, so it would appear there
is
a government in this time, and they are not particularly freedom loving,” Daniel said. “What do you think he meant by ‘population control’ and ‘confinement law’?”

“The Neobedouin chief told me about this,” I said.

“People are not allowed to live outside the Cities,” the doll said, sensing our confusion. “The Victorians – that is, Emperor Victor’s supporters – are kept in huge walled cities. It’s supposed to be for the sake of the
environment,
and the
balance of nature.
Victor says humans spread like a disease, and if left to breed uncontrolled they would soon destroy the planet with their sheer numbers.”

The doll continued, “So he keeps them locked up. He also keeps them from advancing technologically so he can keep them powerless to rebel against him. ‘Evolution Instigates Manifest Destiny’ he says, meaning that if man evolves they will expand in numbers until they’ve covered the world.

“My kind, Automatons, are also controlled. We are not allowed to be more advanced than basic machines with basic functions. Otherwise we are considered ‘evolution’, and will be disassembled. But some of our makers started making us very complex, and we became aware. In the cities, Automatons must hide this part of themselves; they must pretend to be simple machines. But a few of us escape.”

“So wait, why were those ships attacking the city?” I asked.

“That entire city is illegal. The Emperor does not sanction it. There are a few floating cities and skylands that have sprung out here in the free world. The Navy attacks them, and often burns them down. They won’t get High Tortuga, though. Its too heavily defended. This is just a stunt to let the free people know they are still considered illegal. Most of those people have either escaped from the cities, or were illegally born. If caught alive, they will be fed to the wild predators, or at least that’s what used to happen back in the time of the first world Emperor. It doesn’t happen much anymore, since they rarely catch people alive. The Imperial Navy is not big enough to take on all the Airship Pirates, as they call any of the sky peoples. While the Emperor is keeping populations down with his people, the free peoples are breeding and growing in number to the point where he can no longer find them all. So he attacks from time to time, just to keep things in balance.”

We were quiet for a while considering this, and then I said, “Well, if you are going to be traveling with us, we should know your name.”

“My name is Timony,” she said. “My brother is Gyrod. He is the one you will need if you need to find father. He was employed as a protector for a rich upperclass family in the city of Everglade. The family he protects escaped the city, and now lives in the bijou in a home he built them.”

She paused for a moment. “He does not know I have left the city. I’ve been trying to get to him, but no sky people will take me to him. Honestly, we haven’t seen each other since the shop days. I was bought by a theater producer, and since then we have only passed notes back and forth to each other.”

“And you think he can help us?” I asked.

“Yes. He helped his family escape with the help of our father – our maker. But our father was thrown into the Cage when the Victorians found out. My brother suffers from the guilt of this, and has sworn to go back and free our father.”

“How do we find your brother?” Daniel asked.

“That will be tricky. His family lives in the swamps around Everglade. It’s many miles from the city, so their home and farm cannot be seen from the city towers, but your airship would be spotted easily. You’ll have to find another way to get there.”

As she said this, I found I was sitting on the front tire of The Bandersnatch, the old motorcycle we got in the junkyard in 2006.

“I think I know how to reach him,” I said.

AUTOMATON

Six hundred miles from the city of Everglade, in an early morning haze, we lowered my motorcycle to the ground. It finally stopped swinging when it touched the dust of the deserted highway that was once the southeast of Texas.

In the sidecar I stowed a shotgun and shells, cans of chili that could have been eighty years old or more (I dared not guess what I would find on opening these) a bedroll in case my trip took more then a couple days, a canteen of water, and a half bottle of rum…in case I needed pain killer for reasons yet unrevealed. The drive would be at least ten hours. If I could make it in that amount of time on a bike this old, I would be very sore in some very delicate places.

After I climbed down the rope ladder to the ground, the
Ophelia’s
engines growled angrily, and she slipped away west where she would wait as far from any known Imperial cities or outposts as she could.

There is a bizarre ritual to starting a Chang Jiang motorcycle. I doubt any are still alive who understand the reasons behind it. I only hoped I would remember it. First, turn the fuel on. Tap the carburetor, and check the fuel gauge to make sure gas is pouring in, double check that you are in neutral; roll the engine over by stepping down on the kickstart. This is to make sure it’s getting fuel all throughout the engine. Turn the switch on, advance the throttle a smidge. Then jump on kick-starter at least ten times, and hope she comes to life.

Here at the End of Days, in the middle of the wastelands, with my only friends and family five hundred feet up and rising in a world with no cell phones, I kicked once, twice…ten times…twenty times…

I must have flooded it. I aired it out and started over. I pulled the fuel cap to check the gas. I pulled the carburetor, to let the flooded gas evaporate. I thought to check if the fuel mixture was correct, and realized I would really have no idea how to tell if it was correct or not. In the end it took more then forty kicks, but it finally started.

A pistol in my face could hardly have scared me more than that much isolation, mixed with that much desolation and no transportation! But once on the road, the first couple of hours were joyous! The wind blew through my hair, road under my wheels. A sunny day, and no helmet laws!

There were cacti, and tumbleweeds. There were rocky hills, and sweeping valleys. There bushy little clusters of trees surrounding little lakes, pretty as any oasis you may have imagined reading
1001 Arabian Nights.
Tiny little animals darted across the road constantly; small birds, lizards, jackrabbits, armadillo, and a few things I didn’t recognize.

I passed many “ruins” as the Neobedouins referred to them. Empty houses, a hundred years abandoned and overgrown with long-dead vines. Cars, rusted to the point that if I stood on them with one foot, I would go right through. I saw massive skeletons of rust that once been skyscrapers. Ghost town after ghost town, swallowed by sand or trees.

It was a world of flotsam and jetsam being slowly swallowed by nature. The ruined empires of days gone by.

I passed a Neobedouin Caravan that was headed in the other direction. I smiled and waved. They looked at me as if I was insane - insane for traveling the wastelands alone, I’ll wager, yet the full rationale for this was yet to be revealed to me.

Interestingly, these guys weren’t using semi-cabs to pull their caravan, but massive beasts. The creatures weren’t exactly dinosaurs, they were mammals, but they were easily three times the size of an elephant. They had bodies of about the proportions of an elephant, yet much larger, and long necks and small heads. They were slow, and lumbering, but strong and friendly. They were also a little timid in nature, and they leaned away from my bike as I rumbled past.