Winton raised his cup toward his nose and let the fragrance waft across his olfactory sensor.
“Mmm.”
“Do you like it?” Star asked.
“Very much.”
What a pleasant human custom this tea drinking was, he thought. Star was so much like a real human being, and ...
Suddenly, he experienced a brilliant flash of understanding. A vivid picture of himself physically connected to Star burst into his mind – the two of them coupled together, as if they were engineered as a single unit. The whole idea was fantastic, overwhelming!
References to sexual love were shot through his internal library, but he had never had the foggiest insight into their deeper meaning until now.
Star appeared to enjoy his distress.
“What’re you thinking, Winston?”
“I, uh ...”
She smiled coyly over her teacup and slid closer to him until their thighs were touching. Winston’s pressure sensors tingled. For a moment, they really were joined together on some level. Then horrible noises destroyed the mood:
Ga-Screech! Ka-Raow!
Coming from outside!
Grrreeeetch! Crash!
Teacups tumbled from their hands, the pot upended, spilling hot liquid over the table. Star flung herself into Winston’s arms. They clung to each other in a terrified embrace.
Silence ...
“Good heavens,” Star gasped. “What was that?”
“I-I don’t know,” Winston said. “I don’t want to find out, either.”
Minutes passed during which the only sound was that of tea dripping onto the carpet. Finally, Winston summoned the courage to glance outside. The dark, barren landscape beyond the window glowered back, seemingly unchanged.
“We’d better go,” he said, “before I lose my nerve all together.”
“Okay.” Star’s voice was small and frightened, but no less determined.
They glided down the stairs and made for the back exit. Every step they took away from the familiar apartment seemed to move them closer toward an abyss. Winston grasped his spear as if his very existence depended on it – which it very well might.
He nudged the door open and poked his head outside, glancing fearfully in all directions. The parking lot appeared deserted, though who could tell what might be lurking in the peripheral shadows? He resisted the urge to turn on his power cell torch.
“Let’s go,” he whispered.
Four: The Quest Begins
34: Quick March
He stepped through the door into a frightening and uncertain reality. Star sidled up next to him. They stood together with weapons at the ready, like ancient warriors from some adventure movie.
“Stay close,” Winston whispered, “keep an eye out behind us, I’ll watch the other direction.”
“Okay.”
They crept across the parking lot, keeping as far away from obstructions as possible. Winston scanned the dim area ahead, moving his spear point from one side to the other so as to impale whatever threat that might materialize. The hulks of abandoned vehicles on the edge of the lot drew his attention, but he tried not to fixate on them.
Was there a mech wolf lurking among the wreckage?
“Oh!”
Star tripped on a broken piece of pavement. She clutched Winston’s arm to keep her balance.
“Quiet!” Winston rasped.
“Sorry.”
They walked several more paces though the gloom. Then:
Ooof!
Winston tripped over a discarded metal container and fell sprawling. His spear clattered away on the pavement, making as much noise as a jack hammer burst.
“Winston, are you all right?”
“I-I think so.” Winston stood and ran his hands over himself. “No damage, as far as I can tell.”
Star flicked her torch to low beam and retrieved the spear, which had rolled some distance away.
“Be more careful, Winston,” she said. “You’ll run yourself through next time.”
“Yeah, thanks.” Winston switched his own torch onto low beam. “Guess we’d better use these, huh?”
They continued their trek through the parking lot and then out onto the street. A drizzle began, coating the pavement with water and soaking up almost all their torch light.
From the dark entrance of an alleyway, wolfish eyes observed their progress. Razor fangs gleamed as the fugitives passed within easy striking distance. Blissfully unaware, Winston and Star kept moving down the avenue and around a corner ...
“Jeez, what amateurs!” Iridium scoffed.
He slunk back down the alley to the wreckage heaps. The mech wolves once known as Fang and Ripper lay demolished with their power cells removed and their dead eyes staring up accusingly.
When Iridium had seen Winston leave the REX with the flower box, he’d suspected something was up. He raced ahead to Star’s neighborhood and took out the two mech wolf guards posted by her building.
That was the easy part. He’d caught each one by surprise and deactivated it, stripping out its power cell for his own use but leaving the creature otherwise unharmed. Iri’s programming discouraged unnecessary destruction.
These other two had wanted to fight, though, and the violence of their battle had been tremendous. Iri’s auditory sensors still buzzed from the racket. But once again, he’d had surprise on his side, plus a whole lot more intelligence. This saw him through to victory – good thing there were only two of them.
He raised a paw in mock salute.
“It’s been nice getting acquainted with you guys,” he said. “Gotta go now, keep in touch.”
***
Winston and Star gained the city outskirts. The last buildings of the urban area dropped away and the maw of dark, silent countryside opened up.
Winston shined his light onto a road atlas page, then flicked it to maximum power and fished a highway sign out of the murk.
“This is the right way,” he said.
They pressed on at maximum speed without pause. A single, urgent thought occupied their minds: get as far away from Mech City as possible.
The drizzle turned to a light rain and then into a storm lasting over an hour. They wrapped the rain sheet around themselves and kept on walking, shouldering their way through the torrent. The thick black plastic thrummed under the downpour and would have blown away in the heavy gusts if they had loosened their grip for even a moment. The banshee wind howled:
Gooooooooo!
Lightning flashes illuminated their path down the ribbon of ghost highway. To their right, huge electrical towers marched alongside the road with their dead power lines thrashing in the gale. Thunder shook the heavens like the wrath of ancient gods.
The towers crossed the highway to continue their gigantic procession along the far side – the fugitives’ entire route skirted the far side of reality, and beyond. A mass of downed power lines covered the pavement. Winston and Star barely slowed their pace as they navigated the thick tangles.
***
Hours later, the sun rose behind its cloud cover to reveal a landscape differing little from what Winston had seen on his earlier trip – just a bit more rolling with larger stands of dead forest here and there. Derelict buildings appeared occasionally, along with the shades of small towns lurking off the highway exits.
Winston paid little attention, but Star was awed by the barren ugliness.
“So, this is what the rest of the world looks like?” she said.
“Yeah, see what you’ve been missing?”
Midmorning, Winston called a halt. He pulled out the road atlas and scanned the surroundings, trying to reconcile them with their paper representation.
As he surveyed the barren terrain rolling ahead of them like an ocean, a dramatic mood took hold of him. Words poured from his speaker unit:
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is
to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
...for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset,
...To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
“Oh, Winston,” Star cried, “how romantic!”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“Did you make that up?”
“No, it’s from an English poet named Tennyson,” Winston said. “He was writing about the Greek hero Ulysses, from thousands of years ago.”
Star took his hand.
“I don’t think we need to go back that long to find heroes, Winston. They’re still around today.”
Embarrassment tingled in Winston’s brain circuits. He turned his attention to the road atlas.
“We should turn off this highway at the next exit,” he said. “We’ll take secondary roads for a while. It’ll be harder for any mech wolves to track us.”
Star nodded. “Good thinking, Winston.”
“I don’t know how powerful their olfactory sensors are,” Winston said, “but that rain should have washed away any scent we might have left behind.”
“More good thinking,” Star said.
Winston looked up from the road atlas and looked into Star’s face.
How beautiful she was in the soft light! The tense glower that had tightened her face when she was the object of Fascista’s affections had completely departed. A relaxed, and very sensuous, expression had replaced it. He wanted to follow up his poetry quote with some profound statement, but he couldn’t think of any.
“How is your power consumption level, Star?” he asked.
“Fairly high,” she said, “but I’ve never walked all night, either.”
She looked past Winston’s shoulder at the map.
“Can you tell me where we’re going now?” she asked.
“Pickle Lake Castle, in the northwest mountains,” Winston said, “approximately 900 kilometers from Mech City.”
“Wow! I hope I brought enough makeup.”
Winston handed over the summary pages from the research paper.
“Pickle Lake Castle was once a sort of religious commune,” he said. “It attracted marginalized type humans – ‘religious addicts,’ as Dr. Horvath would call them. She did an abnormal psychology study on this particular group some years ago.”
“And Ajax’s head is out there now?” Star asked.
“That’s what he claims.”
Star read through the papers, then studied the road atlas maps.
“This is a pretty thin story,” she said. “Ajax might just be voicing some fantasy, although I don’t think he’d lie outright.”
Winston glanced along the road. Futility beckoned from up ahead.
“I know It’s thin,” he said, “but it’s all we have to go on.”
Star returned the printed materials.
“Well, if nothing else, you got me away from that monster bot in Mech City,” she said. “I’d like to thank you for that.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek – lingering. Winston’s pressure indicators registered the soft contact of her breasts, her perfume graced the air.
Finally, she pulled away. “Lead on, my hero, earn yourself another medal.”
Winston looked down at his chest. “My gosh, I’m still wearing these awful things!”
He grabbed the medals he’d received from F.U. and prepared to rip them off his neck.
“No, keep them,” Star said. “They’ll remind us of what we’re fighting against.”
35: Shopping Excursion
The highway exit led to a large plaza with the usual collection of food and lodging places for human travelers, along with service facilities for their vehicles. Winston had seen many such locales, but Star had never ridden in a vehicle nor been anywhere outside of Mech City before.
“You must have learned so much about the world during the years with your human family,” she said.
“A fair amount,” Winston said. “Dr. Horvath was on the road a lot, and I often accompanied her.”
“It’s more than that, Winston, you’re really smart. You’re like a walking library.”
“That’s an appropriate metaphor,” Winston said. “Approximately 1.9 million volumes of knowledge have been digitized into my memory banks, along with many thousands of motion pictures and TV programs. My cranium and torso contain far more storage capacity than is usual, plus enhanced intellect to process the data.”
“Wow!” Star said. “All I got was the standard knowledge pack. Why do you have so much?”
“Dr. Horvath wished to preserve human history, language, and literature,” Winston said. “She feared that the standard repositories of knowledge were imperiled.”
“So, that was the ‘mission’ she gave you?”
“Right ... I think all of this is the same mission now,” Winston said.
“How so?”
“Should Fascista prevail, he’ll destroy everything good the humans left us,” Winston said. “I’ve already seen one pile of burned books.”
Star took a few moments to absorb this information. Then a fascinating idea presented itself.
“You must know how to build new robots and stuff,” she said.
“My scientific data is mostly general and historical in nature,” Winston said. “Dr. Horvath felt that technology could always be rediscovered, but that human culture would be lost forever without caretakers.”
“Then you can speak lots of languages, right?” Star said.
“My library contains grammars and dictionaries for many human languages,” Winston said. “But I am programmed to speak only English and Hungarian.”
Star’s eyebrows went up. “Hungarian?”
“Dr. Horvath’s native language,” Winston said. “She enjoyed speaking it with me on occasion.”
Star smoothed her hands down her voluptuous figure.
“Well, between the two of us, Winston, we’re slinging a lot of legacy.”
“My memory banks also contain many operas, orchestral pieces and representative samples of other music forms,” Winston said. “I can sing the full repertoire of Puccini, but I don’t think it would sound very good, considering my limited vocal capabilities.”
“That’s amazing!” Star said.
“It’s more of a burden, actually,” Winston said. “I often have little control over the content that emerges from my memory banks.”
He pulled the atlas from his bag and studied its pages. Star examined his impassive face with awe. She’d never imagined that he possessed such capabilities.
Maybe he’ll sing a love aria to me some day, she thought..
Winston looked up from the atlas. “A secondary route follows the course of the highway through this area,” he said. “There should be a crossroads a few kilometers from here.”
“Lead on, my hero,” Star said.
***
They walked through the travelers’ ville, through the little town, and toward the countryside beyond. The atmosphere was becoming warmer, and the sun poked insistently at the thinning clouds.
“Looks like we might get a little sunshine today,” Star said. “I can work on my tan.”
“Excuse me?”
“That was a joke, Winston.” She took his arm. “You’re always so serious.”
Near the edge of the built-up area, they came upon a little shopping mall. One of the stores caught Winston’s attention – Cycho World Sporting Goods.
“Let’s check out that store,” he said. “Perhaps we can find scooters.”
They crossed the parking lot. Vandals had been at work here with spray paint, and their obscene rantings defaced many surfaces. A vibrant, orange message festooned the window of the sporting goods emporium:
FUCK THE WORLD!
“How is that possible?” Star asked.
“Humans had many distorted ideas about their sexuality,” Winston said. “They often used vulgar t
erms in reference to it.”
“That is weird,” Star said. “Guess they didn’t appreciate a good thing when they had it.”
The glass doors were not locked. Winston pulled one open and was immediately assailed by a terrible stench.
The death smell!
He stumbled back. Horrid memories of his last morning at home assaulted his mind, an uncontrollable shaking began to take hold. Star grasped his arm.
“Winston!”
He was on the verge of collapse, but Star’s touch calmed him. The tremors began to subside.
“Let’s get away from here,” Star said.
“No ... I-I’m all right now,” Winston said.
“You don’t look very all right.”
Winston passed a hand over his face, as if he were wiping away sweat.
“Come on, Star. We must have scooters. We’ll never get there on time without them.”
“Okay, but let’s make it a quick visit,” Star said.
She propped the doors open. A foul belch of putrefaction exited, leaving the air inside somewhat less polluted. They switched their olfactory sensors to inactive mode and entered the store.
The place had been partially trashed. Various items lay scattered around – tennis rackets, hockey gear, and other equipment for human games. Spray-painted messages of the “Fuck the World” genre embellished the walls.
The origin of the smell soon became apparent. The body of a young man lay sprawled on the floor by the golf clubs, a can of spray paint clutched in his decayed hand.
“Looks like he died doing what he enjoyed,” Winston said.
“Poor slob,” Star said. “The more I learn about humans, the sorrier I feel for them. Let’s cover him up.”
They found a tarp in the Camping section and spread it over the corpse.
“There,” Star said, “now let’s get busy.”
They moved to the back of the store where rows of bicycles lounged on their flattened tires. Winston stroked a hand over one of the machines.
“I wish I could ride this,” he said, “but I don’t have sufficient balance capability. How about you, Star?”
“Probably not,” Star said. “I can keep balanced in bed, but that’s about it.”
Winston moved to another aisle and rifled through some boxes stacked on a shelf.
“Ah, here we are!”
He withdrew a long cardboard box. It contained a Gorzo the Adventure Robot Action Scooter.
The illustration on the box showed a human boy sporting a full-face Gorzo helmet mask, complete with flashing red eyes. He was riding the scooter at break-neck speed and firing a laser pistol at somebody outside the picture.