A Fine Black Sky
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
There once was a man, who was of inventive mind. He toiled even as he thought, in measurable eccentricity, throughout the long days without end, over many months, many years, perfecting, improving, redoubling his efforts until he was close, so tantalisingly close. They would say, whenever they attended, that he was so caught up in his work, and for what reason, pray, that he would work himself to a standstill, or more likely to death? Yet he continued unabated, with effort and blood, to simply make it work. “You’ll become a part of that machine one day!” they would say, and one day he did just that.
Remark upon something often enough, be it a descriptive demeanour, or an odour particularly false; continue to call them upon it, and surely, eventually - inevitably and irrevocably - they become it.
And so the apprentice waited without for a long spell, his usual early introduction affected when the inventor awoke. But there came no stirring form within the garret - not a murmur nor the tinkering of metal, neither the call of frustration from the tirade the inventor would throw himself upon when things simply refused to follow simple logic and animate as was appropriate for the work put into it. The apprentice pushed the door gently, and it gave.
Inside was silent, save for the whistle of a breeze entering the small room from the large and singular open window, that spread a continuous view of the City, high up as the garret was, where a rag that had once been a fine curtain wavered in the breeze as a standard to the energy once full within the room.
Now there was nothing.
The apprentice rushed to the window, fearing the old man had deemed it time enough, and that failure was too much to take, that he had taken flight out of the window, ending the perpetual suffering in crashing below. But there was no sign. There had been no sign when the apprentice had approached the building, he now admonished himself. Of course the old man wouldn't have taken his own life. Life was all that he had strived for - immortality through invention. And there it was, his last great work, bristled by the unerring gust that ran through the dust filled room.
The apprentice ran out to the streets, forgetting temporarily what the inventor had built, striving for the man himself, through dens, houses and drinking establishments, but no further details were ascertained over the whereabouts of the old man. Those from his Club, the drab and dreary men in their drab and dreary lives, sat upon drab and dreary chairs to a drab and dreary ideal. He called on persons acquainted with the old man. He even conversed with suppliers, past and present, to see if there was a glint of the old man in the deep seam of the City. Nought but debt arose in the dealings with kith, kin and commerce.
Reluctantly, the apprentice returned to the garret, bereft and with no direction left to turn. He looked upon the object that had so vexed the old man, the troublesome trophy of a life in pursuit of perfection, levelled into a thing, a machine of gallant despair. It just sat there, emblem to majestic ideals. The apprentice was about to strike it out of some sense of duty and remorse, though he was not prepared for what he saw there, within that machine.
It seemed the old man had discovered, perhaps by chance, the missing component from the complete perfection of his invention. All the toil, all the blood, sweat and multitude of tears had been for that one shining moment when the old man had reached his zenith, and wept. For there amongst the cogs, the parts, the springs and the gears, was the old man himself. He had become, literally, a part of his machine. Homo in machina.
But for the apprentice, this could not be all the old man had been worth, simply becoming a part in his machine? There was so much left to teach the apprentice. So much more for the old man to do - for himself perhaps, but for others, for the people - if for nothing more than the advancement of technology. The old man, the apprentice assumed, demanded in absentia to be withdrawn from the machine, as he was a soul worth saving.
The apprentice set about the task of releasing the old man from his prison, seeing it simply as an act of kindness to a seemingly lost spirit - forgetting the selfish nature by which he enforced it.
He attempted the tried and true methods laid down by his master, but nothing useful was produced by the action. He searched through the old man’s books and papers, but to no avail. He talked to the old man’s peers, searched libraries full of books - the collated and collected knowledge of the age - but nothing worked. He began to formulate his own ideas, through trial and error, but not a stirring within the machine indicated a positive outcome. Bereft of all options, the apprentice, now of an age himself, lay down upon the mattress, hunched up in one corner of the garret, and looked at the cracked and patchy plaster work of the ceiling, hoping, perhaps by divine intervention or simply by searching the lines and stippling of the cheap coat of paint that had once made the garret seem a sensible habitat for a man of little action and much thought, to be a solution to his confinement.
In the end, much like the old man himself, the apprentice had spent so much of his life in the pursuit of freeing a spirit, a soul already bound and tied to its creation, that he too became as the inventor - he became an old man, became part of the machine also.
He had lived no life save that of a pauper, and when he was too old to think of anything further, or elicit the aid of others, the apprentice, now master himself through the many acts of inventive thought, picking absently at the flaking green patterned wallpaper upon the tight walls, performed the last act of his life. He untied the tether about the machine, opened the window wide, much as it had been on the day the apprentice had come in and noticed his master as part of that contraption.
The machine then came to life, if such a collection of cogs, springs and gears could be thought of as alive in any real sense, save for the soul of the old man it contained - clinking and clanking, whirring and screeching, the machine spread to its full height and width, now taking up nearly a quarter of the garret. It hopped from one clawed standing to the other, forming something of a caw in the mechanical head, blinking once or twice to the world.
And then it took to the air, hovering there, moving slowly at first. But with each confident movement, the machine appeared to become more sure of itself, until it turned, inexorably, toward the open window. It perceived, if that was possible, a sense of freedom in the darkness outside the garret, through the window upon the world.
Thus flew the Hale Bird, free at last, out into the world, even as the once apprentice took his last breath in the world. And he was smiling. How could he have not seen it? How could he have left it so long to realise the inalienable truth? And thus he had completed the task he had set himself. He had freed the soul once trapped, of the old man, who had been master, and was now myth.
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