“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.”
Then, ignoring them, the giant machine reached down and picked Oli up, very carefully, and raised him to the sky.
Below, the Cat and the Fox exchanged signals; and they departed at once, toward the city. But what this message was that they sought, and who the Exilarch was, I do not know, and it belongs perhaps in another story. They never made it either. It was a time when people had crept back into the blighted zones, a rough people more remnants of the old days than of ours, and they had begun to hunt the old machines and to destroy them. The Cat and the Fox fell prey to such an ambush, and they perished; and this rock from the depths of space was never found, if indeed it had ever existed.
Oli, meanwhile, found himself high above the world. . . .
*
“But this is just a story, right?” said Mowgai. “I mean, there aren’t really things like manshonyaggers. There can’t be!”
“Do you want me to stop?” said old Grandma Toffle.
“No, no, I just . . .”
“There were many terrible things done in the old days,” said old Grandma Toffle. “Were there really giant, human-shaped robots roaming the Earth in those days? That I can’t honestly tell you. And was there really a little dead girl with turquoise hair? That, too, I’m sure I can’t say, Mowgai.”
“But she wasn’t really a little girl, was she?” I said. “She wasn’t that at all.”
“Very good, little Mai,” said old Grandma Toffle.
“She was a fairy!” said Mowgai triumphantly.
“A simulated personality, yes,” said old Grandma Toffle. “Bottled up and kept autonomously running. Such things were known, back then. Toys, for the children, really. Only this one somehow survived, grew old as the children it was meant to play with had perished.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
“Things were awful back then,” said old Grandma Toffle complacently. “Now, do you want to hear the rest of it? There’s not that long to go.”
“Please,” said Mowgai, though he didn’t really look like he wanted to hear any more.
“Very well. Oli looked down, and . . .”
*
Oli looked down, and the entire world was spread out far below. He could see the shimmering blue sea in the distance, and the ruined city, and the blasted plains. And far in the distance he thought he could see the place the Cat and the Fox spoke of, the place of miracles: it was green and brown and yellow and blue, a land the like of which had not been seen in the world for centuries or more. It had rivers and fields and forests, insects and butterflies and people, and the sun shone down on wheat and fig trees, cabbages and daisies. And on little children—children just like you.
It was the Land, of course.
And Oli longed to go there.
“A human child,” said the giant robot. Its eyes were the size of houses. “It has been so long. . . .”
“What will . . . what will you do with me?” said Oli, and there was only a slight tremor in his voice.
“Kill . . .,” said the robot, though it sounded uncertain.
“Please,” said Oli. “I don’t even know how to be a real boy. I just want to . . . I just want to be.”
“Kill . . .,” said the robot. But it sounded dubious, as though it had forgotten what the word meant.
Then the little girl with turquoise hair shot up from Oli’s shoulder in a shower of sparks, startling him, and hovered between him and the giant robot.
*
“What she said to the manshonyagger,” said old Grandma Toffle, “nobody knows for certain. Perhaps she saw in the robot the sort of child she never got the chance to play with. And perhaps the robot, too, was tired, for it could no longer remember why it was that it was meant to hunt humans. The conference between the little fairy and the giant robot lasted well into the night; and Oli, having seen the sun set over the distant Land, eventually fell asleep, exhausted, in the giant’s palm.”
And here she stopped, and sat back in her rocking chair, and closed her eyes.
“Grandma Toffle?” I said.
“Grandma Toffle!” said Mowgai.
But old Grandma Toffle had begun, not so gently, to snore. And we looked at each other, and Mowgai tried to pull on her arm, but she merely snorted in her sleep and turned her head away. And so we never got to hear the end of the story from her.