2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Page 26

  “We could be there by sunset if we hurry,” Della said. “Come on!”

  We weren’t there by sunset, needless to say. I couldn’t walk fast on my throbbing ankle, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t have walked as fast as Della at the best of times. Apparently, on surveying trips with her father, she thought nothing of hikes that seemed punishing to me. I trudged along steering the locker on its leash, and occasionally resting my hurt foot on it while I caught my breath.

  “Shouldn’t we be able to see the railroad from here?” I asked when we camped that evening.

  “There’s nothing to see but the rail line,” Della said. “And the grass hides that until you get close.”

  “But if there’s no station, and we haven’t seen a train coming yet …”

  “There’s one at least every week,” Della said. “So it can’t be many more days.” There were only a few sips of warm water left in the bottle. We waited as long as we could stand it before we drank them.

  The next day was worse, with no water and the knowledge that we had no water pushing us to move faster. By the time I could see the long line of the tracks in the distance, my ankle hurt like it was touching a hot iron with every step. I made myself quicken my steps, promising myself that when we reached the rail line I could collapse.

  We did, and I did, sitting down heavily in the dirt next to the tracks. “I can’t go any further,” I said, and I meant it.

  “There’s probably a station inside of a hundred miles,” Della said.

  “A hundred miles might as well be the moon.”

  “For me, too,” she said in a small voice. She sat down next to me, her hair straggling down her back and plastered to her forehead with sweat.

  I buried my face in my knees, wishing as hard as I could that when I lifted my head the Octavia would be hanging in the air above me, unburned and perfect, with my ma letting down a hanging basket to take us both aboard. I raised my chin and saw only the hot chalky sky.

  “Peggy,” Della said after a while. Her voice was hoarse, but there was a sudden interest in her tone. “The locker can walk for half a day when it’s wound up.”

  “It might make ten miles before it wound down,” I said. “If it even kept going in the right direction.”

  “But that’s using all its energy to walk,” she said. “How far do you think it could go if it ran along the rails?”

  I looked at the locker, and looked at its legs. They had smooth wheels in them as part of the gearing of the knees, and I could just about see how they might come apart and go back together to hold the wheels on the track and the locker upright. But making the legs pump in the right direction to make it move …

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” I said.

  “You said you didn’t mind working,” Della said, and that was really the thing that made up my mind, because I decided I’d rather be trying to build a rail car out of a walking bot than thinking about how thirsty I was and what would happen if we didn’t find water.

  “I don’t,” I said, taking out the little tool kit in the locker. I started taking the legs of the locker apart.

  By the time I had it built, I had a sick stomach from working in the heat with nothing to drink. Della did most of the work of winding up the locker. I took a turn when she couldn’t crank the handle anymore.

  She’d written a note, like we were shipwrecked mariners. We are south down the rail line without any water and not much food. We are survivors from the Octavia. Adele Oglethorpe and Margaret (Peggy) Duchesne.

  I held my breath as I switched the locker on. It shuddered for a moment, and its legs started pumping. The wheels that rested on the track started turning. It started moving, slowly at first then picking up speed, whirring along even faster than I’d hoped it would go. It swiftly rattled its way down the track to the north, and we watched it until it was out of sight.

  I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep. Della sang for a while, her voice raspy, and then stopped when she got too hoarse for me to hear the words. We sat and waited, until it seemed like all the world was grass and the rail line, stretching forever empty in both directions out of sight.

  I opened my eyes when I heard Della humming a song. I realized she wasn’t humming; the rails were singing to themselves. “Della,” I said. I shook her shoulder when she didn’t answer. It took a long time for her to stir, but when she did, she sat up, her eyes going wide.

  “There’s a train coming,” she croaked.

  She scrambled up and hauled me up. I had to lean on her arm to stay on my feet. At first we couldn’t see anything. Then a speck in the distance grew to an ant, a toy train, and then a real blessed train thundering towards us trailing smoke. Just as I was afraid it couldn’t see us, it began slowing, its whistle sounding loud and low.

  A woman jumped down before the train came to a stop and came running towards us. It was my ma, still in her captain’s uniform. When she reached me and swept me up in her arms, her wool jacket smelled of smoke. I started gulping and couldn’t stop. Her strong hands smoothed my hair.

  “Here’s water,” a railway porter said. He handed me a cup and I gulped some down then managed to loosen my grip on the cup so the porter could hand it to Della. Della leaned on her father’s arm. It seemed to me that there were tears in his eyes behind his spectacles, although maybe it was the smoke.

  “Did the Octavia burn?” I asked, the words scraping my throat.

  “We got her down and put the fire out. I expect we can salvage her,” Ma said briskly, although I knew those kinds of repairs didn’t come cheap. Her arm was tight around my shoulders, like she was afraid I’d blow away in the wind.

  “Please let me cover your repairs,” Mr. Oglethorpe said. “I expect my engineers can get you back in the air without too much delay.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” my ma said in a tone that suggested she thought he had sunstroke. I expect I was staring just the same myself. Most passengers wouldn’t take kindly to nearly having an airship burn around their ears.

  “It’s the least I can do in return for what your daughter did,” he said, resting his hand gratefully on Della’s shoulder.

  I opened my mouth to explain that we wouldn’t have found the rail line without Della, but my throat was too sore. Instead I just shrugged to let Della know that I would tell the whole story once talking didn’t make me cough. And that’s what I did.

  By the time we pulled into the nearest station the stars were coming out and the moon was lifting over the horizon.

  “We’ll go someday,” Della said, turning her face up to the moon. Although the moon still seemed awfully far away, I figured she was more than likely right.

  Robot Sister Number Phi

  Marilag Angway

  Marilag Angway started her foray into science fiction and fantasy sometime in the early ‘90s by reading books written by females for females. She had no idea that these books were far and few at the time, and feels lucky to have had the opportunity to be inspired by female authors to think big and never stop imagining. When she isn’t scribbling her mind away, she’s lending what brainpower she has left to a good cause: the molding of preschool minds. Gotta start them young, right? You can find Marilag’s bookish and writing and randomy ramblings at storyandsomnomancy.wordpress.com.

  There was nothing angelic in Angel’s screams. In fact, there was nothing angelic about an irate Angel at all, with her big, buggy red eyes and her dog-like snarl and her wild, curly hair. Shai could not understand why her parents even named her older sister after something that was so peaceful and serene and every bit as un-Angel as can be.

  She doubted very much that angels threw shoes or retractable forks at their younger siblings. Angel sure did.

  Shai ran out of her older sister’s room. The door pffed shut, followed by the thud of a small red shoe. At least Shai thought it was a red shoe that Angel threw at her. Angel loved the color red.

  Once the door closed, the screaming stoppe
d. It probably went on for a little longer on the other side, but that was the beauty of doors and walls. They muffled the sounds coming from inside the room. With a big sigh, Shai walked back towards her room and came face to face with the meta-sitter, its skin glossy brass and glass head sparking with blue electricity. “Disturbance. Is there a problem—” it took a moment to scan the girl, then, “—Shai?”

  “Nothing,” Shai said.

  “Detected screaming in Bedroom Four,” the meta-sitter continued, “Have you been rummaging again?”

  Shai heaved her shoulders, remembered that the meta-sitter was not good with body language, then said, “No.” Shai placed her hands at her back, holding onto the silver and gold bracelets she’d taken from Angel’s jewelry box. When the meta-sitter said nothing else, Shai pointed her chin out, pouted, and said, “She was just mad I went into her room again.”

  “You should learn not to disturb your older sister,” the meta-sitter said. It whirred, clicked, and rolled toward Angel’s door. “Go back to your room,” it said to Shai, who was only too happy to leave the hallway.

  Once her own door closed, Shai giggled. She jingled the bracelets and knew her project would be complete soon. All she had needed was the jewelry.

  …………………………

  Shai’s Bedroom Five was at the other end of the hall and looked nothing like Bedroom Four. Angel had taken some pains to organize her things into shelves and closets and cupboards. All of her shoes had been on one side of the room, and her bags and jewelries were covered in thin, plastic bags and stacked on metal shelves that protruded from the walls beside her four-poster bed. Angel’s clothes hung inside a closet with a numeric pad, and all she had to do to access them was to touch the screen next to the closet with the right clothes selected. Angel wasn’t very attentive, but she paid much attention to her clothes. Anything that looked remotely strange in her closet sometimes caused tantrums, ones Shai could not understand.

  Shai kept her room in disarray, which bothered Angel so much that she’d refused to go in ever. There were clothes on the cushioned mattress, which was inside a butterfly tent since Shai did not desire a typical bed, on the carpet floor, on the couch, on the small chairs that circled a tea table. Shai owned one pair of outside shoes, which she wore inside as well, and one pair of really nice shoes that was not wrapped up in plastic and stacked on a shelf. All of Shai’s metal shelves contained books and papers and notebooks, some old and frayed and battered, some smelling of newness that could only come from the newly bought and newly published.

  She did not own any jewelry.

  “You will get your first bracelet on your twelfth birthday,” Mama had said one day after Shai questioned her. Shai was only ten. That made things worse, because Angel had turned twelve that week.

  “Why twelve?” Shai had asked. “Why not ten?”

  “Because you’re irresponsible,” Angel had said, puffing her chest and smiling with a knowing smile. Angel did a lot of things that sounded impressive, but Shai was not fooled. “Responsibleness happens when you’re my age.”

  “Responsibility,” Mama corrected and nodded. “Patience is the first step to responsibility.”

  Shai hated it when they treated her like a kid. She was smart, she read a lot, and she knew that the girls in her books did not wait for responsibility to arrive in gift-wrapped packages like Angel did. Some eleven-year-old girls were learning to become roboticists and mechanics and scientists who ended up building rockets and floating buildings and robots that looked kind of like humans but were not. Genius Girls, her mother had called them. Girls who tested so high on The Assessment that the government had taken interest in their education. Not every girl was a Genius Girl. Angel wasn’t, but that didn’t seem to stop her from believing that she knew more than Shai.

  The Assessment declared that Shai was not a Genius Girl either, so she had not been sent to the special academies at the center of the nation, even though she had started reading at three and knew her mathematics at six. She was not very good with tests, and The Assessment was a collection of different tests to make one long test that took hours and sometimes days to complete. Shai never finished The Assessment; she fell asleep on top of the mathematics problems after she’d doodled all over the back.

  Papa had been more amused than disappointed. When he received the results, he put up Shai’s mathematics page on one of his large corkboards like a certificate. “Cheer up, starshine,” Papa said when Shai felt all kinds of miserable. “Your assessor is a fool. If he’d been paying attention to your doodles instead, he’d have seen your brilliant ode to – are those penguins? Yes, I thought so – Sierpinski’s triangle. It’s a work of art, truly, my star.”

  Papa hadn’t cared that his daughters were not Genius Girls.

  “Everyone has different interests,” Papa said, “All that book learning in the academies have nothing on practical application and passion. And you, my girl, have the Passion with a capital P.” And so he taught his youngest daughter about electricals and mechanicals and roboticals. And he often called Shai his “Star Who Shines.”

  Shai’s father built robots that were used all over town, and sometimes he would allow Shai an opportunity to place a part and set the wires. Once he had even let her help design a robot’s personality code. But she had never built a robot on her own or without her father’s supervision. In normal circumstances, Shai would never have attempted it.

  Until Angel found out one day what Shai was doing while Angel went to school. Shai was being unladylike, Angel said. Ladies did not smell of oil and metal and heat. They did not have tattered skirts and matted hair and greasy skin and calloused hands. They did not follow their fathers around with wrenches and screwdrivers and a pocketful of gears and bolts.

  “I don’t want to be a lady,” Shai said. She stuck her tongue out. “Ladies are estupidas.”

  “I am not stupid!” Angel shrieked. The argument escalated from there.

  “Stop it, you two,” Mama said, splitting the girls up on separate sides. “You’re hermanas. Act with a bit more decorum, will you?”

  Sisters were overrated, Shai thought. And that was when she decided she’d build herself a better model.

  …………………………

  Only Father knew about Shai’s little laboratory, because he had been the one who helped her build it. It was inside her room just behind the large bookshelf that was twice as wide as Shai and three times as tall.

  She pulled at her bookshelf and moved it a few feet away from the wall. She stuck her hand out and patted the wall until she came across a button. She pushed the button and a door slid open, making the same pffed sound as Angel’s bedroom door. Past the door, lights brightened, and the large screen at the front powered on. In a woman’s voice, it said, “Greetings, Mistress Shai. How can I be of service?”

  The girl held up her prize, the silver and gold bracelets, and she placed it on the center table. “Bring up Robot Sister, please. I would like to finish her.”

  “Certainly, Mistress Shai. One moment.” The screen, which had shown an image of a bald, blue talking face, went black, whirred for a moment, and came back to life. The bald face returned, smiling. “Detecting several versions of Robot Sister. Which option would you like?”

  “The latest one.” Shai had been working so long on the robot that she could not remember what version she had stopped at.

  “Bringing up latest model, version nine point two,” the voice said. “Initial assessment: personality and power drives installed, mechanical limbs functioning at ninety point one, zero, two percent efficiency, and eye-hand coordination calibrated to provided parameters. Debug recommended. Debug now?”

  “No,” Shai said. She examined her work of art – for it was a work of art, indeed.

  Robot Sister was a head taller than Shai and made out of many different scraps and parts from Papa’s private office. The robot’s entire plating was made of bronze, which was much darker and shinier than Shai
’s mestizo skin. The arms were mismatched and stiff, one side a long broom handle (shortened so it passed the hip a bit), the other a piece of curved wood from an old rocking horse, which curved just above the hip. The legs were both metal and came from a discarded three-legged stool, which was no longer three-legged.

  The eyes had been tricky, for Shai could not find a pair that mimicked the ever-changing hazel that she and Angel had, so she settled for the glass eyes on a life-sized doll that she had received from her Tia Kassandra. Shai never liked the doll anyway, it was dressed all in pink frills. The frills and the pink made the doll look too creepy, so she extracted the eyes and put the doll away at the back of her closet.

  The robot’s body was dressed comfortably in one of Angel’s hand-me-down Sunday dresses, which were normally too long for Shai to fit. The hem of the skirt reached down to the ankles, and complimented the nice shoes that Shai almost never wore.

  Shai fastened the bracelets around Robot Sister’s head. Once done, she arranged the circles so it looked like hair ringlets that hung a little above the robot’s cheekbones. The robot was complete.

  “Debug now,” Shai said.

  “Debugging,” the computer said. “Full debugging E-T-A: twenty minutes.”

  She would show Angel that she didn’t need her as an older sister. Having a robot one would be much more fun and much more helpful. The computer ticked down the time in low whispers. The only sign of life coming from the robot was the beeping of its computerized torso.

  Shai smiled, sat on a cushy bean bag and waited.

  …………………………

  Angel’s first word had been “quinceañera.” At least, that’s what Shai’s mother told her friends over and over again. Most kids tended to start their speaking journey with “mama” or “papa” or some other word that described parents. Or food. Shai’s first word had been a normal request to be fed, “pudding” or “pie” or some such, no one really remembered. To the immediate family, it hadn’t been as humorous or as complicated as “quinceañera.”