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“He’s here, Joe.”
“’Bout time, Bud. If I have to hear that song again, I’m gonna blow that hunk of metal away before the Cong has the chance.”
“He can hear you, Joe…”
A gleaming silver robot wearing fatigues stood behind Bud, his face inscrutable. Joe’s eyes widened.
“He’s taller than the other one…” he babbled. “Wouldja lookit that, he’s almost human…”
“Where’s my brother?” the robot asked sternly, steam curling from his lips.
“Oh, uh… right back there. Just follow the sound of Procul Harum.”
Bud cleared his throat significantly as the robot stared Joe down.
“Sir!” Joe added hastily.
“He’s back here, Captain,” said Bud, leading the way toward the back of the camp, away from Joe’s stare. “I don’t mind telling you, we’re pretty danged sick of that song. Not sure what it is about it that he loves so much.”
“It’s melancholy,” replied the silver robot. “Rabbit lost his… well, I guess you’d call her his sweetheart… right before we shipped out. She lived with us but… It’s complicated.”
“It sure sounds that way, sir.”
“He’s really naturally cheerful… most people don’t realize how far he can swing in the other direction when something hits him hard enough. He actually thought she was dead for seventeen years, you know… He didn’t want to live at first. It was all we could do to convince him to stay with us.”
“You’re kidding… I mean, I… I’m sorry, sir.”
“I know… a robot with feelings. But I get the feeling you’ve already noticed, unlike your friend back there.”
“Not my friend, sir. You do what you’ve got to do, put up with what you’ve got to put up with.”
“You do…”
Rabbit looked like any other soldier when The Spine walked up. He was in his fatigues, a dirty red bandanna around his copper cranium, slumped forward, elbows on knees, by a portable record player that was wired into the camp radio. As The Spine watched, he put his face into his hands.
“And so it waaas that laaater… as the miller told his tale…” warbled the record player.
“Rabbit?” said The Spine as quietly as he could over the blaring music.
If he’d been afraid of startling his brother, he needn’t have worried. Rabbit didn’t even turn.
“They called you,” he murmured.
“You having some trouble? I hear the whole camp has had all they can stand of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale.’”
“Sorry…” He didn’t move.
“I’m surprised you have a copy. That one just came out…”
“Uh-huh…”
“Rabbit!”
Rabbit slumped forward and draped his arms over his neck. “Go back to your platoon. I’ll be fine,” he mumbled.
The Spine crouched in front of his brother and tried to look him in the photoreceptors. They were closed. He sat up and sighed. He wasn’t sure how this was going to go, but he saw no alternative.
He stood up and turned off the song. A weary cheer spread across the camp.
Rabbit didn’t move, except to slowly rock back and forth, maintaining the rhythm of the song.
“Just as I thought,” said The Spine. He grabbed another folding chair and sat by Rabbit. “You could have been hearing it inside your own head, once you’d heard it the first time. Why torment the whole platoon?”
Rabbit hummed the melody and rocked. Oil dripped onto the dirt below his face.
“You could have just asked them to call me…” The Spine said gently.
“They-they don’t call just because a guy gets a little down, Spine,” Rabbit said thickly. “’Specially if he’s a robut.”
“A little down, hm? Is this about Honeybee?”
Rabbit nodded slightly. The Spine put an arm over Rabbit’s back.
“It’s been two years, Rabbit… I know we don’t forget like they do, but why now? You held yourself together through the funeral, and shipping out, and even the fighting. Why now?”
“I… I don’t know. Maybe it’s that song… Maybe it was the l-l-l-last letter from home… Maybe seeing people crippled and b-b-blown apart every day just got to be too much…” Rabbit’s voice broke. “I can’t even go into stasis because I won’t want to wake up.”
The Spine hugged Rabbit the best he could. There was nothing he could say. So he just stayed with him and said nothing.
--------------
Eighteen years later, Rabbit stood, in full concert garb, outside The Spine’s bedroom.
He was afraid to go in.
The Spine hadn’t left the room in months. They had taken to performing without him, just small park appearances, but it wasn’t the same. The crowds weren’t turning out anymore. This was probably the last time, Rabbit realized, that he’d wear this old vest.
He was miserable. But not as miserable as The Spine.
Rabbit rapped at the doorframe. The only sound was a slightly louder hiss of steam from the inside of the room.
There had been a door until recently. The Spine had locked himself in and Peter V had had the door removed. Rabbit understood why… without oil and water, The Spine would have slowly run himself dry, and stopped. Rabbit was pretty sure he’d been aiming for that.
He knew the feeling. That didn’t mean he was okay with it.
He supposed it was worse for The Spine. He’d had Marie in his life for longer. She made him feel human. As much as Rabbit loved Honeybee, he was pretty sure it went deeper for The Spine. He’d only been a human for three days, they’d told Rabbit. But there was always something different about him after that. As though, having been through a few days of humanity, he’d gotten the knack of it.
And so The Spine had, with the help of Peter Walter III and his friends in high places, married a human woman. They’d even had a kid… well, sort of. Three had pulled a few strings and they’d been able to adopt a baby boy. He’d been as much a Walter as any kid that had grown up there… but when his mother fell ill, it all went wrong. He blamed Walter Manor, Blue Matter, and his pappy for his mother’s cancer. They’d all tried to tell him none of the other humans had gotten sick from living there, but Dave wouldn’t listen. The Spine hadn’t seen his son since… well, it was about two years now since the fight.
Rabbit stuck his head in. The Spine was on the bed, holding a pillow. He’d been that way the last time Rabbit had come in… and the time before that… Rabbit wasn’t really sure how many times it had been now. He hadn’t kept a tally.
“Spine?” he murmured. “We’re b-b-back, buddy.”
Hissss…
“I d-d-don’t think we’ll be going out again.”
Silence… well, as much silence as you can get in a room with two automatons running on steam.
“It’s not the same without ya… but I think m-m-maybe folks just don’t want to see robuts anymore. They got better robuts in the movies. They even got one on TV that talks like I d-d-d-do. I think he’s a robut…”
The Spine sighed. Rabbit, used to getting no response at all, rushed to his brother.
“Spine? Please talk to me, buddy! I know it hurts… Believe me, I know…”
“Do you?” The Spine began. His voice was raspy, dry from long disuse and lack of oil.
“Of course! Honeybee… y’know…”
“It’s not the same…”
“’Course it is.”
“She… wasn’t your wife, Rabbit… You didn’t have a child… who won’t speak to you… She isn’t… rotting…”
The Spine buried his face in the pillow… her pillow… and sobbed like a child. Like a human child. He had cried this way the day she died, for the first time since his brief days as a man. Rabbit, with his keen robotic audioreceptors, had been able to hear it that day, and every time he’d done it since then, alone in his room.
“I love her…” he wept. “I don’t forget… like humans…”
“I know, buddy…”
“How did you survive it, Rabbit? I just… I just want to shut down… but I’m afraid if I do I’ll never want to come back. Maybe I already don’t want to come back…”
Rabbit had suspected as much, but he was still alarmed. Before he could respond, The Spine murmured, “Help me, Rabbit…”
“Of course, Spine!”
“Shut me down…”
“No! That won’t help!”
To his surprise, The Spine chuckled grimly. “Good old Rabbit.”
“You didn’t give up on me. I won’t give up on you! C’mon… we need to get you out of this room for a while…”
He grabbed The Spine’s arm and pulled. Nothing happened. C’mon, Rabbit. He’s titanium alloy, but you’re good old Victorian engineering…
He pulled harder. There was a ping and a thunk. A gear rolled off the bed onto the floor, where he watched it trace a lazy spiral before it clanked onto its side.
His right arm fell off.
“Aw, nuts…” he muttered, prying it off The Spine.
The Spine sat up. His startled face was covered in layers of dried oil mingled with fresh trails of it. He looked as though he was deciding whether to laugh, but just couldn’t remember how.
Rabbit seized the opportunity and hugged him with his remaining arm, then used the leverage to drag him toward the edge of the bed. The Spine, unexpectedly, submitted to his older brother’s efforts and swung his legs creakily off the bed.
“There we go. Let’s go feed some ducks…”
“But your arm…” croaked The Spine softly.
“Oh, yeah…”
The Spine reached down and picked it up. “We’d better get it fixed…”
“Ducks first.”
“No…” The Spine coughed. Flakes of dried oil sprayed from his lips. He turned and spat onto the floor.
“Ew…” said Rabbit. “You’ve really let the suave ladies’ man thing slip, haven’t ya?”
The Spine cleared his throat, forcing oil through it. “It’s my room, isn’t it?” came a voice more like the familiar baritone. “Let’s get your arm fixed!”
“It can wait…”
“Now, Rabbit.”
Rabbit often seemed like a fool, but he’d been around the block more times than most humans… you didn’t go on for that long without learning something.
One thing was always certain… Given the chance, The Spine would always push aside his wants and needs for those of another. It hurt to see it sometimes, but not today, not after seeing what it was like for The Spine to surrender to his misery and leave everything to others, and beg for death. Rabbit never wanted to see that again.
“Alright, brother. Help me find the bolt and we’ll do it your way.”
It was going to be a long journey back. But at least they’d begun.