Arachnodactyl Read Free

transmit the intended action to the machinery inside the arm. By flexing various muscles and rolling his shoulder, he can control the mechanical arm nearly as well as his other. When it works, that is.”
    “Can nothing be done for his voice?” Ikey’s dad asked.
    Smith arched an eyebrow at Ikey’s dad. He slipped the stem of the pipe from between his lips, held it for a moment as if to speak, then snapped it back into place with a click against his teeth. A puff billowed from between his lips before a stream of smoke charged down from his nostrils and obliterated it.
    Admiral Daughton chuckled. “I suppose there is. I’ve been endlessly impressed with the inventions coming out of Kerryford these days. The wonders they can do are extraordinary. But a proper coachman needs only two arms to steer by and an ear to hear the destination. The tongue is hardly necessary, if one knows where he is going, and doesn’t need to bother for directions.”
    The plating over Smith’s arm popped as Ikey pried it off the arm.
    “You break it?” Ikey’s dad asked. He stepped away from the small keg and stared over his son’s shoulder.
    “What’s it matter?” Uncle Michael asked. With his good leg, he scooted his chair over to the end of the table. “He breaks it, he’ll fix it.”
    “I’m not getting paid for him to fix his own mistakes.”
    “I’ll take a beer,” Uncle Michael said. He gripped the edge of the table with his hand and pulled the chair up to the end of the work bench.
    “Help yourself,” Ikey’s dad grunted.
    Smith slid his mug over to Uncle Michael. Each exchanged a nod.
    Ikey stifled a grin. He then took a moment to peer over the inner workings of Smith’s arm and marvel at the mechanisms inside. It held the grace of a watch, but the power of a small engine. The workmanship was fantastic and new to him, and so he took a few minutes to poke around and examine each piece, study its shape and the movements it made and the function it introduced as it interacted with the other pieces to form mechanical systems. As Uncle Michael had taught him, Ikey built models of the systems in his imagination and pictured how they worked together, how each one delivered a function dictated by the form. One only needed to know the shape of a thing to know how it behaved. Once he understood how the arm was to function, finding the broken component became a matter of finding where the function broke down.
    Admiral Daughton took a drink of his beer, then leaned forward. “You might want to consider a trip to Kerryford yourself,” he said to Uncle Michael. “Might get your leg fixed up.”
    Ikey’s dad snorted. “Then he’d have no excuse to avoid work.”
    “He looked busy to me when I got here,” Admiral Daughton said. “I doubt any man with sense takes his leisure beside a busted tractor in the rain.”
    “Any man with sense.”
    Ikey’s grip tightened around the handle of a pick. His dad was antsy, more agitated than usual. It wouldn’t bode well for him and Uncle Michael this evening, after Admiral Daughton and Smith left.
    Ikey set the pick aside and plucked a pair of needle-nose pliers out of the tool roll. He fed the point into the works, testing the parts and making sure they moved as their shapes suggested they should.
    “Do you and this young man repair a lot of mechanical items?” Admiral Daughton asked Uncle Michael.
    “Aye, that we do. But this one here, he’s the one fit for the task. Never seen anything like it. It’s like the machines talk to him.”
    Ikey stifled another smile, though they’d both be damned if Uncle Michael didn’t stop goading his brother-in-law.
    “That’s good to hear,” Admiral Daughton said. “I was rather surprised to find that anyone out here had any mechanical skills at all.”
    Ikey’s dad sucked at his teeth. “It’s these new machines. Cost of labor goes up as all the men either go off to war, or on to work in the cities. No one’s left to work the