“Please,” said Oli, “I am very hungry and very tired. Do you know where I could find shelter?”
The Fox and the Cat communicated silently with each other, for they, too, were very hungry, though their sustenance was of another kind.
“We know… a place,” said the Fox.
“Not very far,” said the Cat.
“Not… not far at all,” said the Fox.
“We could show it to you,” said the Cat.
“Show it to… you,” said the Fox.
“Shut up!” said the Cat.
“Shut… oh,” said the Fox.
“A place of many miracles,” said the Fox, with finality.
And Oli, though he couldn’t be said to have trusted these two strange machines, agreed.
They traveled for a long time through that lost landscape, and the wasteland around them was slowly transformed as the sun rose and set and rose again. Soon they came to the outskirts of a vast city, of a kind Oli had never seen and that only salvagers now see. It was one of the old cities, and as it was still not that long after the fall of the cities, much of it still remained. They passed roads choked with transportation pods like weeds growing through the cracks, and vast grand temples where once every manner of thing had been for sale. Broken houses littered the sides of the streets and towers lay on their sides, and the little tank that was the Cat rolled over the debris while the Fox snuck around it, and all the while Oli struggled to keep up.
The city was very quiet, though things lived in it, as the Fox and the Cat well knew. Predatory things, dangerous things, and they looked upon Oli with hatred in their seeing apparatus, for they hated all living things. Yet these were small, rodentlike constructions, the remnants of a vanished age, who loved and hated their fallen masters in equal measure, and mourned them when they thought no one was looking their way. And they were scared of the Fox and of the Cat, who were battle hardened, and so the unlikely trio passed through that city unharmed.
At last they came to a large forest, and went amid the trees.
“Not far now,” said the Cat.
“To the place of… of miracles,” said the Fox.
“What is this place?” asked Oli.
The Fox and the Cat communicated silently.
“It is a place where no machines can go,” the Cat said at last; and it sounded wistful and full of resentment at once. “Where trees grow from the ground and water flows in the rivers and springs. Where the ground is fertile and the sun shines on the organic life-forms and gives them sustenance. Plants! Flowers! People… useless, ugly things!”
But the Fox said, “I… like flowers,” and it sounded wistful only, with no hate. And the Cat glared at it but said nothing. And so they traveled on, deep into the forest, where the manshonyagger lived.
“What’s a manshonyagger?” said Mowgai, and as he spoke the word, I held myself close and felt cold despite the fire in the hearth. And old Grandma Toffle said, “The man hunters, which roamed the earth in those days after the storms and the wars, and hunted the remnants of humanity. They were sad machines, I think now, driven crazy with grief for the world, and blinded by their programming. They were not evil, so much as they were made that way. In that forest lived such a manshonyagger, and the Fox and the Cat were taking the unwitting Oli to see it, for it had ruled in that land for a very long time, and was powerful among all the machines, and they knew they could get their heart’s desire from it, if only they could give it what it wanted, which was a human.”
“But what did the Fox and the Cat want?” asked Mowgai.
Old Grandma Toffle shrugged. “That,” she said, “nobody knows for sure.”
Stories, I find, are like that. Things don’t turn out the way they’re supposed to, people’s motivations aren’t clear, machines exceed their programming. Odd bits are missing. I often find myself thinking about the Fox and the Cat, these days, with the nights lengthening. Were they bad, or did we just misunderstand them? They had no regard for Oli’s life; but then, did we expect them to? They learned only from their masters, and their masters were mostly gone.
In any case, they came to the forest, and deep within the forest, in the darkest part, they heard a sound….
“What was that?” said Oli.
“It was nothing,” said the Cat.
“N-nothing,” said the Fox.
The sound came again, and Oli, who was near passing out from exhaustion and hunger, nevertheless pressed on, toward its source. He passed through a thick clump of trees and saw a house.
The house stood alone in the middle of the forest, and it reminded him of his own home, which he had started to miss very much, for the ruined houses of the city they had passed earlier were nothing at all like it. This was a small and pleasant farmhouse, built of white stones, mottled with moss and ivy, and in the window of the house there was a little girl with turquoise hair.
“Please,” said Oli. “May I come in?”
“No…” whispered the Fox, and the Cat hissed, baring empty bomb canisters.
“Go away,” said the little girl with turquoise hair. “I am dead.”
“How can you be dead?” said Oli, confused.
“I am waiting for my coffin to arrive,” said the little girl. “I have been waiting for so long.”
“Enough!” cried the Cat, and the Fox rolled forward threateningly, and the two machines made to grab Oli before he could enter the sphere of influence of the house.
“Let me go!” cried Oli, who was afraid. He looked beseechingly up at the little girl in the window. “Help me!” he said.
But the Cat and the Fox were determined to bring Oli to the manshonyagger, and they began to force the boy away from the house. He looked back at the girl in the window. He saw something in her eyes then, something old, and sad. Then, with a sigh, and a flash of turquoise, she became a mote of light and glided from the house and came to land, unseen, on Oli’s shoulder.
“Perhaps I am not all dead,” she said. “Perhaps there is a part of me that’s stayed alive, through all the long years—”
But at that moment, the earth trembled, and the trees bent and broke, and a sound like giant footsteps echoed through the forest. Oli stopped fighting his captors, and the Fox and the Cat both looked up—and up—and up—and the Cat said, “It’s here, it’s heard our cries!” and the Fox said, with reverence, “Manshonyagger…”
“But just what is a manshonyagger?” demanded Mowgai.
Old Grandma Toffle smiled, rocking in her chair, and we could see that she was growing sleepy. “They could take all sorts of shapes,” she said, “though this one was said to look like a giant metal human being….”
The giant footsteps came closer and closer, until a metal foot descended without warning from the heavens and crushed the house of the little girl with the turquoise hair, burying it entirely. From high above there was a creaking sound, and then a giant face filled the sky as it descended and peered at them curiously. Though how it could be described as “curious” it is hard to say, since the face was metal and had no moving features from which to form expressions.
Oli shrank into himself. He wished he’d never left the town, and that he’d listened to Mrs. Baker and turned back and gone home. He missed Rex.
He missed, he realized, his childhood.
“A human…!” said the manshonyagger.
“We want…” said the Fox.
“We want what’s ours!” said the Cat.
“What was… promised,” said the Fox.
“We want the message sent back by the Exilarch,” said the Cat.
The giant eyes regarded them with indifference. “Go back to the city,” the manshonyagger said. “And you will find the ending to your story. Go to the tallest building, now fallen on its side, from whence the ancient ships once went to orbit, and climb into the old control booth at its heart, and there you will find it. It is a rock the size of a human fist, a misshapen lump of rock from the depths of space.”