The Steam-Driven Boy (27 page)
Chapter II: The Harpies’ Bazaar
It had become more than a month between Price’s visits to the kayak. Mona lay back in the kayak in her yellow empire gown, trailing one lavender glove in the water. Pterodactyls watched as she combed and brushed out her hair, using for a mirror a smoothed slab of the atmosphere. Price felt suddenly very tired – but then he had always been suddenly tired. He wanted to give it all up, to sublimate awhile with the world around him, to rise beating leathern wings into the hot purple sunset. But this could not be, not for the moment. He still felt a peculiar loyalty to the human species. There was still the scurvy to be cleared up, the report to write, the generator to be fixed. He lit his pipe and frowned through its azure smoke at King’s elephant. It was marching about in a circle, waving a black flag.
Chapter III: Mirror of Xanadu
He would write to the government he thought, coming out of the dream. It was always the same – a hollow, hot, heavy jungle tree, bright green, growing right in the middle of a frozen desert amid yellow orange flames and bearing seven blue grapes. He picked them, one at a time, and crushed them between his toes. The juice ran like blood into the parched flank of earth. But the last grape he reserved, to crush against the roof of his mouth like a spy’s poison capsule, before he died. In the dream he never died.
Chapter IV: Desert of Gas
Man has caused the sublimation. For years, decades, man had poured black, oily fumes into the atmosphere. Some of these fumes descended as solids, to soak into the earth once more, to polarize its proteins. Other matter had risen, faster during the warm days and slower at night, until it reached the sun, altering it slowly and subtly. For over a hundred years, the sun had been getting dirty; now its purplish glow turned the sensitive proteins of earth into iodine.
Price lived in a small, abandoned Abbey, sleeping on the altar and using the decaying harmonium for a cupboard. He kept in the cupboard a few time-fragments, relics of his own past: a bead belt he’d made in scouts; a rusted mouse; a stamped, self-addressed envelope; a bottle of hair-oil that he kept despite his baldness. It was
oil,
after all, sacred chrism, and things in the Jurassic past had died to create it …
A shot echoed across the iodine flats. One of Mona’s kites fluttered like an angry angel’s wing, flickered across his vision and fell. In the distance, Joe Olifant had wrapped himself in a black mantle. He drove madly about in his chariot, his whip flickering out like the tongue of a lizard. Price could hear the frightened screams of the horses and Joe’s dark, Rasputin laugh.
Chapter V: The Parsee of the Cobra Casino
King had in his great circus train more food and water and treasure than he and his assassins could hope to use up. It was foolish of Price to try holding out against them. They were the cruel life-force itself. Why should he drink dew? Why cook his last tins of food over a fire of pterodactyl guana? There was finally nothing left to eat but his beaded belt and the few peanuts that King’s sharp-eyed elephant might overlook.
King had parked his train in a circle, broken only where the chip of blue lake lay soundless, mirroring nightly strange rites. By the light of gas torches, the tattooed woman was charming a cobra. King lay, in his red silk mandarin pajamas, on an enamelled couch, fanning himself with one of Mona’s kites. He was barely visible, a slash of red among the yellow balloons, like a wound. At his feet, the pet pterodactyl was busy, methodically ripping apart a peacock.
Chapter VI: An Ozymandian Tangram
There was no water anywhere. All the water had grown heavy and sunk out of sight beneath the earth, which was slowly turning to dry ice. At last Price hitched up the remains of his belt – so emaciated was he become that, though he had eaten half of it, the belt still fit him – and struck out for the purple flats.
I must look like a Giacometti,
he thought. The silver flats turned azure-gray at noon, while the heated air became dank and brown. He looked back and saw the galloping skeleton of the elephant,
the howda swaying. King, or the ghost of King, was pursuing him, a ghost. They couldn’t let him go off and die alone. They wanted to punish him for turning his back on them, for refusing, like some inverse Toby Tyler, to join their circus.
The elephant was dissolving, and King, sinking slowly to the ground, was falling behind. He took up the electric megaphone and shouted:
‘Come back Price. We need you at camp. Don’t be a bloody fool, man!’
Chapter VII: The Bloody Fool
He came upon the dead city at dusk. For awhile he was apprehensive that King might pursue him here, too, using the circus train. Then he saw that the railroad had long since vaporized, leaving only an ash of tracks. The station, too, was a ghost. He had reached the end of the line, the terminal terminal. The whole city was a gibbous dune, once a mercury refinery, now frozen into a single gaseous crystalline chrysalid, depended from what was once a flaming bloodfruit tree, now gone to iron, ironically.
The tree reminded him of something. He took out the blue grape to eat and found that it, too, was diminished, worn away by the invisible though solid wind that moved from past to future.
RIGINAL
A
PPEARANCES
‘1937 A.D.!’ –
New Worlds
#173, © July 1967
‘The Aggressor’ –
Amazing Stories
, © March 1969
‘The Best-Seller’ –
Strange Faeces
#1, © 1969
‘Broot Force’ –
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, © September 1972
‘Engineer to the Gods’ –
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, © August 1972
‘The Happy Breed’ –
Dangerous Visions
ed. Harlan Ellison, © 1967
‘Is There Death on Other Planets?’ –
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
(as ‘Capital C on Planet Amp’), © December 1966
‘Joy Ride’ –
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, © November 1972
‘The Momster’ –
Fantastic
(as ‘The Monster’), © April 1969
‘The Moon is Sixpence’ –
The Steam-Driven Boy
, © 1973
‘One Damned Thing After Another’ –
The Steam-Driven Boy
, © 1973
‘Pemberly’s Start-Afresh Calliope’ –
New Worlds Quarterly
#1, © 1971
‘The Purloined Butter’ –
New Worlds Quarterly
#3, © 1972
‘Ralph 4F’ –
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, © January 1973
‘A Report on the Migrations of Educational Materials’ –
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, © December 1968
‘Secret Identity’ –
New Worlds
#200, © April 1970
‘The Secret of the Old Custard’ –
If
(as ‘The Babe in the Oven’), © November 1966
‘The Short, Happy Wife of Mansard Eliot’ –
New Worlds Quarterly
#1, © 1971
‘The Singular Visitor from Not-Yet’ –
Playboy
(as ‘The Man From Not-Yet’), © June 1968
‘Solar Shoe-Salesman’ –
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, © March 1973
‘The Steam-Driven Boy’ –
Nova
#2 ed. Harry Harrison, © 1972
‘The Sublimation World’ –
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, © July 1968
‘The Transcendental Sandwich’ –
If
(as ‘The Man Who Devoured Books’), © January/February 1971
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Novels
The Reproductive System
(1968) (aka
Mechasm
)
The Muller-Fokker Effect
(1970)
Roderick
(1980)
Roderick At Random
(1983)
Tik-Tok
(1983)
Bugs
(1989)
Wholly Smokes
Collections
The Steam-Driven Boy
(1970)
Keep The Giraffe Burning
(1977)
Alien Accounts
(1982)
The Lunatics Of Terra
(1984)
Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek
(2001)
John Sladek (1937 – 2000)
John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael Moorcock’s groundbreaking
New Worlds
magazine. Sladek began writing SF with ‘The Happy Breed’, which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology
Dangerous Visions
in 1967, and is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections include
The Muller Fokker Effect
,
Roderick
and
Tik Tok
, for which he won a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there in March 2000.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © The Estate of John Sladek 2002
All rights reserved.
The right of John Sladek to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11061 8
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
*
Aeronauts of the *jet’ age will of course realize Ralph’s mistake here. It is actually the
air
which pushes against the
hot gases.
Ralph was tired at the time, and had a lot on his mind.
1
Superficially, these Three Laws of Robish may resemble Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, namely, in that they use the exact same words and punctuation. These, however, are the Three Laws of Robish.
2
Actually the robot was given a compound order, telling it to, kill a man
and
itself. It did the best it could, under the circumstances.
1
Suppose a man wishes to know the answer to a problem which no man has solved yet. He could ask a robot to try the problem, but first he wants to know whether the problem would damage the robot’s brain. The only way of finding out is to work the equations representing the behaviour of the robot in solving the problem … but this is exactly the same as working the problem itself. There just is no way of finding out if the solution will be damaging, without finding the solution.
1
Robots have a rather mechanical, unpleasant laugh. On the other hand, they are extremely loyal, good at games like Slapjack, and have excellent posture.
