There. That glint and gleam of white slicing the desert edge. A glacier calved, bound by heavy rope to the mother of all oxcarts. It is pulled by a quadrupedal robot colored a mid-century plastic beige. Fuchsia and green and yellow lines give its hound-form racing stripes, something that looks as though it can go fast when it, in fact, cannot. Mist curls off the frozen boulder, its rough facets, its prismatic and clear knife peak. So many kinds of ice are contained on its surface: melting, snow-bitten, shale-flaked, pebbled, smooth blue, and carved as the grooves of a whale throat. The wind whistles along its geometry in a song that does not belong on such a playa of hot white. It is a song to raise dinosaur bones from silt. It is a violin in the way of an unstoppable parade, and it is cold.
A lone cloud warps from the sound and comes apart, leaving not a shadow on the plateau.
***June!#77.221 910//:: I don’t want to have this conversation anymore. I won’t leave this place. Why won’t you come? I sent the boat, I put all we have on it for you. Everything except the books.
The oxcart robot lets the radio signal play out. It hums along to the amplitudes of the sonic interference. Even though the transmission is a millennia-old echo, the sound makes the robot forget that being alone is something it can feel.
In the far distance, a valley strewn with metal fins that shudder and howl. The oxcart creaks quietly through the shade of its stainless-steel towers. They are wings from airships and aerocraft that once flew and fought and sliced the sun like jet-fueled daggers. They once burst apart and caught fire and crashed into the sea, where they drifted to the reefs below. But that sea has long since evaporated. The souls of the pilots have not, and the oxcart robot can sense their thermographic imprint cowering behind airfoils and propeller blades.
As always, the robot tries to say hello, but the ghosts recoil from the sharp bandwaved communication. They only know how to scream and shimmer now, anyway.
***July!#76.222 910//:: You sent me everything except the one thing I need, and to hell with the books. What am I to tell Miranda? That you’ve chosen to be a librarian instead of a mother? Lending out novels to what? Certainly not people. Maybe you can start a reader’s group with the goddamned robots then.
The oxcart robot is programmed to detect distress in vocal patterns so it may offer aid and pathfinding. This radio transmission triggers a feeling in the robot, over and over again, each time it tunes in to the echo. It knows both voices needed a kind of help it could not give. Still, the oxcart robot checks the glacier shard’s rope ties, the mag-lev engines on the cart wheels, and carries on forward with its journey.
Beyond the last stabilizer fin lies a landscape of craters and salt ponds. The robot relaxes, reverses its intake valves to inflate buoys on the oxcart, turning it into a bright orange raft. Paddling is smooth in the green-blue water, and the robot floats easily, pulling the glacier. This is the robot’s favorite part of the journey: wading by the fountains, bronze and shaped as great disks held above slabs of marble by ancient trees. It is here the amphibians congregate, slick-backed and mooing on docks and felled signal towers and the rims of pumice wells. The creatures like the desert salt. They encircle the robot to lick the crust and crystals from its many casings and armored plates, splashing water with their fluked heads. The robot takes this to be a kind of worship and accepts their tongued prayers with the humility of a prophet lost at sea.
***June!#77.221 910//:: Would you have us grovel over tar pits for irradiated turtles? Drink from wells stained with starship fuel? I can’t let these stories go. There are a hundred thousand homes for us to live in here; the imaginary ones are all we have left. I don’t want to see our daughter rot in a tent in the middle of the jungle, in a world that’s forsaken us.
Desert gives way to sky at the end of the pond network. A merciless slope stops at a cliff’s edge with a wending valley of eroded sandstone pillars and failed quarries and boulders that fall in reverse, trapped in an endless experiment of time and entropy gone wrong. This is the most dangerous part of the expedition, and the robot clings close to the raft, prepares to be funneled down the aqueduct network that pierces the valley with a thousand concrete slides.
***July!#79.645 119//:: Goodbye now. I choose to rot with our family in the tent. We’re scrapping the radio for walkie-talkies. I hope when the sun eats you alive…I hope your books burn last. I hope you can hold onto them for as long as you can.
The robot tucks its legs and guides the plunge.
Algae makes controlling the glacier difficult, it being slippery and steaming green and aging in reverse. So, it is in a sideways and sprawled-flat condition that the robot slides into the central confluence, surging as a log flume along the bleached battlements of the hydroelectric fortress. Here, the wild cascades froth and bulge in pockets of negated gravity. Atop a sequence of rapids, the cart is siphoned up by such a gravity well, and it takes every servo in the robot’s body to cling to the aqueduct, turning the glacier into a silver and dripping hot air balloon. But the cart splashes down, as it always does, and the robot is steady in its paddling.
The aquaways end at a gentle delta that tendrils and fingers its blue into the hills of a meadowland. Sunflowers grow tall with each flower stalk caked and plastered with nests. Odd birds peer from the dwellings with witch beaks, and they chitter away in the voices of old radio signals: recordings of airborne love notes and desperate broadcasts that never reached beyond the front lines of a war the world has long forgotten.
***August!#51.499 166//:: Sub-C causal violations have increased tenfold since climate reversal crystals entropized—at the site of impact, a nude elf played a piano—tribute to the death of reason and prelude to the age of absurdity.
***October!#96.333 814//:: There are manta rays on stilts—soul siphons—she twirled all the way into the mouth like a ballerina—blood-crushed happy.
***January!#29.845 577//:: We are circling the Ever Thought, our forms are heading for ruin. I wonder…when all thinking things here are buried and burned, when the old guard sets to its long sleep where memory fades, what beasts will come then to roam?
Where the meadow gives way to stumbling cliffs and a raging mint sea: the pantheon. The round concrete is pocked and flush with ivy, lilac, buzzing with a kind of bee that was meant to save the world. The oxcart’s wheels fall into long-worn grooves in the gravel as the glacier reaches its final resting place on a square landing.
And the robot sits. Waits.
Cool water trickles and drips. The sun is relentless in licking the ice away. Moisture flows along invisible lines on the landing and forms a circuit latticework, a microchip of forgotten technology—a motherboard sandblasted through the ages, but under the cold flow of freshwater, comes once again to life. Glacial coolant pumps and whirs into the crumbling rotunda. A megalithic entranceway slides open, and the robot approaches, bows down with grace.
The robot pulls a slip from its casing, a mottled paper punchcard that reads Land’s End Public Library Book Return. It enters the slip into a slot on the wall, and the doors open.
Inside, the air is mummified, and the robot’s footsteps ring as those of a monk walking in a tomb. Light illuminates the lobby of a grand library, the curved shelves of novels and histories and instruction manuals facing spine out or landslid over fleets of carts. At the far end is a plate glass wall overlooking the green sea, piles of books formed as a throne with a skeleton sat atop them.
The robot accesses the library’s intercom system and speaks in a low echo to the skeleton and its audience of books.
“This will be the last time I can visit. I brought what remains of the ice, and the sun will do what it has always done, and then this place will be sealed forever.”
Beyond the glass, the sea heaves. The robot must silence its sensors so as not to hear the roar and chittering of invertebral dolphinoids.
“I wish I could have taken you to your daughter, that I could have found her bones and brought them here. I wish I could have read her remains a story and imagined her falling asleep. I think her dreams are wishes of a kind I could never see.”
The robot rests on its haunches. It taps the radio transceiver at the skeleton’s side, snugs a book in its brittle boned arms.
“I figured it’s time I stop reading you these old books. I’ll read you something new now. Tales not meant for your kind. About knights at the bottom of tidepools and their birthday candle deeds. Scroll books from wizards who dwell in primordial landscapes made without care for human modes of locomotion. The prayers of creatures that worship with their tongues—think in holovision fountain sprays. I’ll sing to you a lullaby for the color blue and the many toymaker hearts it hides inside.”
With a gentle lean, the robot pretends to kiss the skeleton on its forehead.
“Hush now. Rest. Let me tell you: these stories from a world where all the sun touches turns to steam.”