Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (4 page)

Tavil is asleep when he hears the noise. It intrudes in his dreams because of its novelty—a sound that doesn’t exist in the Machine. He sits up in bed. There is no need to press the button for light because over the past weeks something has changed in the Machine.
His room is in a perpetual shade of twilight no matter how often he presses the button or complains to the Central Committee.

Still the noise persists. Laboriously, he heaves himself into his chair and causes it to motor across the room to the source of the noise: the door.

Someone is knocking on the other side as if trying to secure his attention. A light sweat breaks across his forehead and
in the folds of his arms at the thought of another person endeavoring to initiate face-to-face communication.

He contemplates ignoring the knock and calling for a bath instead to wash away the offending perspiration. But the bathing liquid has been a bit tepid and a touch malodorous for his liking lately.

Throughout all these thoughts, the sound persists, gratingly so, and he fumbles for the
buttons, forgetting for a moment which is the one to activate the door, as it has been so long since he used it last.

The door parts, and Tavil is faced with a woman. He sees no carriage waiting in the corridor, and he is exhausted just thinking of the energy she must have expended bringing herself to his room. She stands just across the threshold and, though much time has passed, he recognizes
her: long hair that sways with her subtle movements, legs strong enough to carry her for as long as she could want, dark spots spread across a face browned from the sun.

She is the one from the surface. An expression of disgust shifts across her features as she takes in his appearance. When she speaks, Tavil is jolted back to that moment on his initial day Underneath when she issued her first,
and only, warning:
Tell them nothing about the surface
.

He struggles to remember what to do in a situation such as this. Whether there is some sort of greeting he is supposed to give, a gesture he should offer. Unable to come up with anything, he merely sits in his chair and stares.

“The Machine is stopping,” she tells him.

The statement jolts Tavil, sending a tremor of alarm through him. He
reaches for the Book of the Machine, needing the comfort of its weight, but he has left it behind on the table by his bed. His fingers fumble in agitation, searching for something to occupy them.

“To say such a thing is blasphemous,” he informs her.

“No matter,” she says. “I have friends in other cities—they’ve seen the signs. It’s only a matter of time now.”

Tavil doesn’t want to believe her.
“Impossible. No lecturer has touched on such an idea. Besides, the Machine is omnipotent—it cannot stop.”

Her upper lip curls. “Even so, the Machine was made by men and has escaped the bounds of men’s understanding. There is no one left who knows enough of the whole to repair it.”

Tavil scoffs. “The Machine will fix itself.”

She shakes her head. “It will not. The power station is failing and
soon enough everything else will follow. Those left Underneath will suffocate. Now is the time to escape to the surface—it’s the only chance to survive.”

Drops of sweat drip along Tavil’s cheeks, his desire to reach
for his Book so powerful he is almost shaking. The woman’s words begin to penetrate deeper into his consciousness, attaching themselves to recent events to give them significance
and meaning. All the little ticks and hiccups in the operation of day-to-day life that never occurred before and have been so subtle and pervasive as to be ignorable: buttons not responding as usual, lags in repairs, shudders sometimes felt within the walls.

All of it supporting the same conclusion the woman has drawn. “Why are you telling me this?” Tavil asks her.

The woman drops into a squat
so that she is facing him head-on. “You’re from the surface, like me. There are more of us down here—we’re the only ones who know how to live aboveground. We’re the ones with the best hope outside the Machine.”

She reaches forward. “Come with us,” she says as she grasps his hand in hers.

At her physical touch Tavil recoils, jamming the button to move his chair away from her. “You forget yourself!”
He rubs his hand against his tunic as if he can somehow erase the feeling of her flesh resting on his own.

Shaking her head, the woman straightens. “You’ll die if you stay down here.”

In response, Tavil presses the button to close the door, sealing himself back into his sanctuary. He wheels to the center of his room but doesn’t disengage the isolation knob. Instead he stares at his hand, remembering
the feel of the woman.

There’s a part of him, a small part, that used to know how to climb trees and walk for miles through the grassed plains, that knows the woman speaks the truth and accepts it. It explains the lights, the bathing liquid, why his favorite music sometimes pauses and gasps as it never has before. There have been delays
when he presses the button for food, and his bed has twice
now risen from the floor with its sheets still tossed about and wrinkled as if he’d just awoken.

When he was a child, his parents and theirs before them predicted that the cities of the Machine could not continue forever. They spoke of ancestors who’d been rendered Homeless, cast out of the Underneath after a rebellion, and who had thereafter chosen to live a natural, honest life on the surface.
According to them, technology was a bane rather than a blessing; it rendered men decadent and complacent.

And Tavil had believed them. He’d abhorred those who lived underground and awaited the day their constant quest for comfort would cause them to collapse in on themselves. It’s why he’d snuck down the tunnel that night so long ago. To see the Underneath for himself, before its inevitable end,
so he would have firsthand knowledge of the Machine to pass on to future generations as a warning to never allow life to sink to such depths again.

But his parents had been wrong. He’d been wrong. Underneath is progress, evolution. It is life at its most advanced—existence for the pure pursuit of ideas and the cleansing of the human soul!

He reaches for the Book of the Machine and lifts it to
his lips. “Oh, Machine,” he murmurs, kissing the cover. Holding the Book is tangible proof of the truth he’d been denied as a child on the surface: that there is power greater than himself.

The thought comforts him, causes his trembling to cease and the sweat gathered along the remaining wisps of his hair to dry. He closes his eyes to feel the hum of the Machine around him, caring for him and
protecting him. He is a part of it now, irrevocably so.

So be it if it fails—this marvelous Machine of progress. He has known of this inevitability from the moment he released the final rung of the ladder and fell into its depths. He will not abandon it now, will not return to that old life of strain and sacrifice.

It is too much to ask of him. He would rather live his last moments below the
surface, ensconced in the Machine, than spend eternity aboveground away from its comforting hum.

Even until the end, Tavil’s faith in the Machine is absolute. He has his rituals, and he adheres to them faithfully: repeating the mantra of the Machine as the first and last words he speaks each day, kissing the cover of the Book three times before opening it and after setting it down, ensuring it
never touches the floor or that its spine faces the door.

Some of these are habits he developed on his own over time, others are shared by the larger community of believers. Even as the medic system fails, the lifts cease their function, the bathing liquid turns foul, and the beds no longer rise from the floor, those Underneath continue their devotion.

If anything, this causes Tavil’s idolization
of the Book to intensify as it remains proof of the Machine’s supremacy.

And then the communication system collapses, the last throes of their dying world. Tavil knows that many around him have left their rooms to gather in the tunnels and along the airship platforms. Unlike him, they did not know of the inevitability of this day; they had not been expecting and waiting.

They had not known their
fate as he has.

The idea of joining one of these groups repulses him. He rubs his hand against his tunic, remembering the last time he came into physical contact with another human being. The
woman from the surface, who’d warned him of this day and asked him to eschew what he believed for the chance at a life he did not want, who’d offered him a false salvation from a world he so embraces.

In these final moments, Tavil thinks of his sister, Pria, left behind on the surface. He pictures her face framed by the stars as he’d last seen her before climbing down the ladder into the Underneath. What a life she must have led, constantly wrenched by the needs of the human body: for food, for shelter, for the constant touch of others. No time for her soul, any moments of quiet contemplation necessarily
rare.

His life would have unfolded similarly had they never seen the geyser of air pouring from the ground and found the shallow hollow where a man from the Underneath flailed about around an old ventilation shaft. Had Tavil never decided to take the unexpected opportunity to see the world of the Machine for himself.

What a waste his life would have been had he stayed aboveground.

Tavil sits
in the chair in the middle of his room. The motor in its base ceased working yesterday and so he hasn’t moved since. Though the lights have cut out, Tavil still turns the pages of the Book, feeling the thinness of the paper with his fingers. He does not need to see to know what is written on them; he memorized his favorite passages ages ago.

When the Machine stops, there is nothing. The walls
cease their vibration, the constant hum finally stills. Tavil mumbles lines from the Book to himself, clinging to the comfort of his eternal adoration of this marvelous Machine.

Otherwise the world would be too silent.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
………………………………………

When I first read “The Machine Stops” I thought of it as a fairly straightforward postapocalyptic story: the Earth’s surface becomes uninhabitable, which forces mankind underground to live in cities where every aspect of existence is controlled by the Machine. However, the more I reread the story and considered it, the more I came to see it as a work of genius.

Not only is it a thought-provoking meditation on the role of technology in our lives, it is also a graceful portrayal of faith and how easy it is to become so focused on worship of a
thing
—on a representation of the belief—that one can lose sight of belief itself. In the story, E. M. Forster leads his characters toward a very deliberate conclusion in which they ultimately understand, and accept,
their fallacy. This is what I wanted to explore in my own story.

There is a moment in “The Machine Stops” when one of the characters makes his way to the surface through an old ventilation shaft and later recalls: “I thought I saw something dark move across the bottom of the dell, and vanish into the shaft.” This is where my story begins: What if that dark shape were a man from the surface, and
what would happen to him if he became trapped in the Machine?

The King of Elfland’s Daughter
(1924). The Irish writer Lord Dunsany wrote over sixty books, including short story collections, mysteries, plays, essays, an autobiography, and several novels, of which, unquestionably,
The King of Elfland’s Daughter
is his best. Evocative and wildly inventive, his prose has influenced many writers, including H. P. Lovecraft and Jack Vance. I know when I began reading
this novel, I was forever and completely enthralled by Dunsany’s language. For years afterward, every bit of writing I put my hand to was not-so-very-subtly influenced by his lyricism.

Here the reader finds Alveric, the prince of the Vale of Earl, who is sent by his father, the king, into Elfland so that when he returns it will be with some bit of magic that will enrich the lives of the mundane
people who live within the fields we know. The witch, Zironderel, gifts the prince with a magic sword made from lightning bolts gathered from under cabbages in her garden, on the high land where the thunder rolls. In due course, after winning through adventure after adventure, he does return with the Elf King’s daughter, Lirazel, and soon everyone in his kingdom will know the coming of too much
magic into their lives.

—Charles Vess.

G
ARTH
N
IX

It was a year ago, or slightly more, as I recall. I was coming back from Orthaon, I had been there to discuss the printing works at the original monastery, they had a very old press and, though it worked well enough, it had been designed to be driven by slaves, and since the most recent emancipation a number of the mechanical encouraging elements needed to be removed,
quite a difficult task as the original drawings for the machine were long lost and some parts of it were very obscure.