The Steam-Driven Boy (14 page)

‘Mom? Why?’

‘I don’t know. A joke? Because that’s what they need out here, maybe, a mom. Because they depend on me? I don’t know.’

Sewell decided to call her nothing at all.

‘Well, what are my duties going to be? What’s the routine?’

She smiled. ‘We can talk about that tomorrow. Right now I’ll clean up your room, Roger, and then maybe you’d like to take a nap. You must be tired from your trip.’

He didn’t like this. ‘No, I’m not tired at all, as a matter of fact. And I’ll clean the room myself, thank you.’

He did, and dumped Benny’s miserable effects – dirty socks, a bent deck of cards, a comb fluffy with dead hair – into a plastic bag. He installed Jane’s picture, his philosophy books, his journal. After making the bed, he sat on it, and prepared to meditate. The door slammed open.

‘I thought you might like a nice cup of tea, Roger. I could have made coffee, if you’d preferred, but I was making tea anyhow and so I just thought I’d try it out on you. You sort of look like a tea man to me, I could be wrong, but usually I can tell a tea or coffee person just by looking at them. The only ones who ever throw me are the cocoa people, and thank God there aren’t many of them. I don’t know what it is, but I never have trusted a man who likes cocoa all the time, so you know what I mean?
Oh, I know it’s silly, but …’

He sat there, amazed, and watched her. She talked on about tea, about the different kinds, and the fact that they all come from the same plant, but from different parts of it, harvested at different times of the year. She spoke briefly of tea ceremonies, of which she personally knew nothing, she would be the first to admit, and of unjust tea taxes and the Revolutionary War. She went on, until the tea grew cold in the cup she was holding. Then she went back to the kitchen.

Sewell wedged a chair against the door. When he had meditated for half an hour, he felt mildly euphoric, full of energy and ready to start work. The chair began to crack.

‘Why have you got your door fastened? Roger, it’s only me, bringing you a cup of tea. Roger?’

The chair splintered and in she came, beaming through the steam. As he drank the tea, she told him Benny and the others had always liked a cup of tea at about this time of day. Of course Benny was English, and liked his tea with milk. She preferred lemon, some nothing. Then there were catnip tea, camomile tea and mint tea …

Sewell finally stopped the flow by asking her about the work.

‘Oh don’t worry about that, not today. You just got here, for goodness sake. Take it easy.’

‘I didn’t come here to take it easy,’ he found himself shouting. ‘I came here to explore. Now are you going to tell me the set-up, or am I going to switch you off?’

‘I’m sorry.’ She was silent a moment, twisting her fingers in the ends of her apron strings. ‘Roger, I didn’t want to tell you this right away, but the fact is, there just isn’t any set-up. There just aren’t any duties for you.’

‘What do you mean?’ He leaped up and grabbed her by the throat. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘It’s true,’ she said evenly. ‘You can check the general rules bulletin, and the roster of back orders, clear back thirty years ago, when we first came here to Cedar Rapids.’

‘I believe I’ll do just that!’ He slammed her against the wall and strode into the office. An hour later, when she brought him a sandwich and milk, he was sitting with his hands tangled in his gritty hair.

It was true. The first explorers had measured the planet, discovered its single mountain chain, examined the consistency of the sand that buried nearly everything else, plumbed the two lakes, tested their water, and recorded the weather.

Now, as far as GX was concerned, the work was finished. Daily weather observations and periodic examination of the sand could best be done by machines. A man would be stationed on New Cedar Rapids to keep GX’s claim clear, ‘just in case’. There was nothing for him to do, for two years.

‘I think I’ll go out and scout around anyway,’ he said, later that evening. ‘Where’s the oxygen equipment?’

‘Well – actually there isn’t any, Roger. We haven’t kept one here for
years. There’s just the one each new man wears, which the old man wears when he leaves again.’

‘Damn!’ He thought for a moment. ‘I could probably get by with just an air filter, for a little while. I’ll try that.’

The machine had begun baking cookies, and the tent was filled with the fresh smell. ‘You’ll have to get an early start, then,’ she said. ‘The wind gets too high later on.’

But he slept late the next morning, and when he awoke, it was with the luxurious feeling of playing hookey. This wasn’t going to be so bad at all, he reasoned. There were a million worthwhile things he could fill his time with: there was his study of logical empiricism, which he could really get into, maybe even write a paper or two. There was his journal. All right, it wouldn’t be a chronicle of adventure, but a record of his thoughts and impressions from the centre of a sandstorm. He could write a novel. Finally, he could meditate. In fact, he could begin right now.

But first, breakfast in bed. She lingered in the doorway, asking him what he’d dreamed, commenting on the way he’d arranged the room. ‘Is that your girl? “All my love, Jane.” Isn’t that sweet? Nice-looking girl, too. What they call photogenic. Some people never come out right in pictures, and others look much better than they really look, you know? I’ll bet Jane is that type.’

‘What about you, Rita-Mom? I’ll bet you photograph just exactly the way you look in life, eh?’ He chuckled, seeing the remark had hit home.

He tried to do some philosophy with what was left of the morning, but she interrupted him first to clean the room (‘It’s in the general regulations’), and again to ask him what he preferred for lunch.

Lunch was excellent, but the home-brewed beer that went with it made him sleepy. He dreamed of Jane, but the machine kept wandering into the dream at awkward moments. Then, Jane, too, became a machine, and he discovered that, from the waist down, she consisted of nothing but a coaxial cable.

He awoke late in the afternoon, with a headache and an unpleasant taste in his mouth. Mom was there with the aspirin and lemon tea.

‘I’ve wasted the whole day,’ he said. ‘It’s getting dark.’

‘You just aren’t adjusted,’ she said soothingly. ‘The day only has twenty hours here, you know. I’ve never figured out why they stuck to the same old clock, instead of shortening the hours, and having twenty-four again. As it is, they have a fraction left over every day, so we gain a day every so many months. Or is it lose a day? I never can remember whether you set the clock ahead or behind, can you? It’s the same with Daylight Savings Time …’ And she was off, discoursing ignorantly on time for nearly one (normal) hour. It was only a machine, he told himself. He could turn it off any time.

He sat over his journal for four hours after dinner, but all he could write was:

‘Sand. Sand. Sand.’

The following days were more of the same. His study of philosophy
bogged down the day she showed him she could reel off pages and pages of Wittgenstein in German or English – and considered Wittgenstein a waste of time. He noticed he was putting on weight, then stopped noticing. Finally he hung a dirty undershirt over the mirror in his room, and forbade her to touch it.

She interrupted his meditations so often that he found them impossible even when she didn’t interrupt. He stopped shaving, at first to annoy her, then for no reason at all. In her cleaning, one day, she knocked Jane’s picture down and cracked the glass. He forbade her to clean his room any more, regulations or no.

He found her supply of home brew and got drunk, sitting at the kitchen table and listening to her endless chattering.

‘Shut up!’ he screamed. Seizing her by the shoulders, he shook her. ‘Shut up, for God’s sake!’ And stopped her moving, plastic mouth with his own mouth. ‘I want a woman,’ he murmured.

Slowly but firmly, the steel rods in her arms pushed him away. As always, her expression was calm. ‘Unfortunately, my manufacturers didn’t foresee your need,’ she said drily.

‘What?’ he grunted it, his flushed, uncomprehending face hanging over her. He had begun to list, slightly.

‘I’m not a woman,’ she said, pronouncing the words slowly and distinctly. ‘I’m a Kewpie doll, Roger.’

He was on his knees, vomiting, and then he lay flat in it and went to sleep.

In the morning he wrote a second entry in his journal:

‘We are all machines, or’

He lay the fibre pen down without capping it. The ink in it dried, and the page with the unfinished entry became dusty.

With a fine irony, he began to call her ‘Mom’. It became a meaningless, habitual form of address.

He wanted to go out, into the sandstorm, just once before his replacement arrived. But he was afraid.

Mom was talking about Jane’s photograph. ‘I mean, since the glass is cracked anyway, and it really is silly to try to remember people from photographs, either you remember them anyway, or –’

He touched the switch at the lobe of her ear, and she became a statue. In the silence, he could hear her watch.

Tying a cloth over his face, he hurried out.

It was inhumanly cold. The faceless landscape around him lay dormant. It was the floor of some lifeless sea, cold, empty, frightening. With effort, Roger pushed himself away from the door and waded out a few steps.

Then the bleak wastes came to life, at the touch of the morning wind. Dunes began to blur and shift, and the light of the sun was dimmed. Roger’s breath came harder.

What was he doing here? The wind was furious, now, trying to bury his legs, flinging sand at his eyes. A man could die here like a scream,
unnoticed amid the senseless movement of the sand. Roger felt himself smothering. The door, only a dozen steps away, seemed now unreachable. He saw himself choking, dying, his lungs filling up with sand, flesh torn from his bones, the bones themselves rubbed to sand …

Roger stumbled inside and fell across his bed, coughing and cursing, the tears pouring from his sore eyes. It was some time before he realized with a shock, that he was having hysterics.

‘They told me an explorer needs guts and imagination,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘It was a lie. An explorer must be a coward, afraid to do anything beyond strictly following orders. He must not be able to care about a woman, a set of ideas, or a way of thinking or feeling. He must deal only with the mundane, the day-to-day, the “given reality”, as the interviewer said.

‘I think GX was ingenious to think of using a Mom for each explorer, to help break him down to an efficient tool. He who lives with machines becomes machine-like, and now I see the title Mom is more than honorific. She is truly the mother of the mechanism Roger Sewell.’

It was clever of GX to provide her with a switch, he thought. As if he were able to switch her off for good.

‘– else you don’t. Well, I see you’ve turned me off long enough to go outside and come back in tracking up the whole place, as if I didn’t have enough to do. You men! If there weren’t any dirt, you’d invent it, I swear. Now what are you doing, burning your journal? What in the world for? We could have used the paper. I was just thinking the other day, if I had some paper, I could write down alternate menus for each meal, and you could just check off what you liked, instead of my having to bother you with a lot of questions. And have you accuse me of talking too much, I know that’s what you think. At least I don’t brood, my mind’s an open book …’

Picture, if you will, an inventor, working in his bicycle shop in 1878. His long hair occasionally falls in his eyes; he shakes it aside impatiently, flexes sinewy arms against the pull of a wrench, biting his lip with preoccupation. Now and then he may pause to sip some of the cool lemonade his widowed Mom has brought to him, sip and glance up at the picture of Sam Franklin on the whitewashed plank wall.
Early to bed and early to rise
… he thinks.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
His serious brows knit, as he ferrets the last bit of truth from these proverbs.

Such an inventor was Emil Hart. He and his mother shared a small cottage exactly in the centre of the state of Kiowa. Their modest home was otherwise undistinguished except for a heavy mortgage, which the good widow hoped to reduce. Toward that end she knitted clever antimacmillans (lacy affairs designed to protect the tops of sofas and chairs from a then-popular hair grease called MacMillan’s) and sold peafowl eggs. Emil augmented this meagre income by repairing bicycles and selling the F
RIDAY
E
VENING
P
OST
(founded by Sam Franklin). Yet he knew fate intended for him a greater calling – inventor of the Time Engine!

One day Fenton Morbes, the town bully, stopped by. Seeing the great engine spread over the entire shop, he whistled with amazement.

‘What’cher doing?’ he asked.

‘I’m only filing a bit of isinglass,’ said Emil, shaking the hair from his eyes. He had no time to waste speaking to Morbes.

‘I mean, what’cher building?’ Morbes removed his bicycle clips and tossed them carelessly into a corner. They were made of costly aluminium, for he was rich.

Emil sighed. ‘I’m building a temporal extrapolator,’ he said. ‘It will enable me to go into the future.’