Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate

By David Erik Nelson

Reviews:

"["Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate"] is at one level nearly wacky, but it has deeper concerns, reflected in the examination of the treatment of such disadvantaged individuals as alcoholics, Confederate veterans, the Chinese, Jews, and of course clockwork ex-soldiers. It all comes together very effectively." -- Rich Horton, Locus, July 2008 (Recommended Story)

"The story is poignant, sad and funny, bitter and hopeful, and altogether amazing in its examination of exactly what it means to be human--and to live among humans." -- Sherwood Smith, The Fix, May 16, 2008.

"By turns filthy and laugh-out-loud funny, the bawdy humour gradually gives way to a deeper sadness. An outstanding story." -- Colin Harvey, Suite101, August 19, 2008.

"The longest story ever in an issue of Paradox, and it is well worth it. . . . The story is frequently humorous but takes on a serious tone, giving us something truly memorable." -- Sam Tomaino, SFRevu, May 29, 2008.

# # # # #

In this celebrated alternate history, a lonely veterinarian recounts a mischievous Confederate veteran's attempts to teach clockwork soldiers to make nice with their neighbors.

The long Civil War is finally over, thanks to the brutal battlefield efficiency of the clockwork soldiers of Sherman's Terrible Mechanical Corps. Many decommissioned "clockies" have fled West to live out their retirement peacefully. A small enclave settles near Lost Creek, Utah, and is accepted as a tolerable nuisance by their Mormon neighbors—until Dickie Tucker, a crippled Confederate veteran, takes it upon himself to teach these machines the art and craft of being, or at least seeming, human.

Lois Tilton wrote in the Internet Review of Science Fiction that this novella is "dark comedy, wonderfully absurd, riotously bawdy, populated by a full set of fantastically flawed characters, such as Two-Ton Sadie the madam, who helps [Dickie] demonstrate the art of copulation, and 'Rabbi' Emet Kohen, who ministers to a congregation of Hebrew Zunis. Yet it is also a poignant tale of wanting to belong, wanting to be counted as a human among humans."

Other stories set in this clockwork universe have appeared in the VanderMeer Steampunk anthologies and Asimov's Science Fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Erik Nelson
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311524959

David Erik Nelson

David Erik Nelson is an award-winning science fiction and horror author. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his lovely wife, tolerable children, and aging dog. In addition to writing fiction about time travel, sex robots, haunted dogs, and carnivorous lights, he also writes non-fiction about hogs, guns, cyborg cockroaches, and Miss America. Find him online at www.davideriknelson.com

Book preview

Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate

by David Erik Nelson

Copyright David Erik Nelson 2014

Published by Ars Architeuthis Press at Smashwords

Published by Ars Architeuthis Press, December 2011

Text and layout: © 2006, 2011 David Erik Nelson

Art: © 2011, Chad Sell, all rights reserved

Cover: © 2014, Jacqueline Sweet, all rights reserved, jacquelinesweet.deviantart.com

This novella first appeared in issue #12 of Paradox magazine, Spring 2008.

DEDICATION

For Fritz Swanson, my friend and fellow editor at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), who first told me of the use of clockwork Chinese robots in the Long American Civil War.

—‌September 10, 2006

Table of Contents

In the summer of 1874 I watched a lynching …

Sundays are lonely days for an irreligious man …

The first such session I witnessed myself …

illustration: TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR PRIVATE PARTY

No queerness in this world is a point unto itself …

Less than a week later …

illustration: They got everything else from observation.

Dickie made himself scarce over the next week …

There was little doubt where Dickie had headed …

illustration: On Windmill Mesa

[About the author and illustrator]

In the summer of 1874 I watched a lynching, watched two buildings burn, watched a man and woman perform gross physical acts on a public street, even watched Dickie Tucker‌—‌a no-account, one-eyed, alcoholic Confederate veteran‌—‌teach androids to engage in conjugal relations. To my enduring shame, I did nothing to help or hinder in any of these efforts, despite witnessing most first hand from the doorway of my Main Street office, beneath the creaking wooden sign reading KAWAZOE: VETERINARIAN

At that time Dickie Tucker was an infamously drunken ne'erdowell. A charitable description of Dickie would be that he had come back from the Long Civil War touched in the head, and neither of sound body nor mind. A child's description would be that Dickie was as crazy as a caged rat and had a face that looked like it had been kicked by the devil after mucking through four miles of overused cattle range. As is oft the case with such coarse declarations, this was the more accurate. Dickie's face was a scarred ruin plucked from a child's fever-soaked nightmare: twisted like taffy, his right eye gone and the socket buried in a roil of pink scar tissue, the right ear a misshapen lump, his nose pushed flat and torqued. The entire visage had the look that it had been grabbed while not yet set and twisted 45 degrees clockwise. As to how Dickie came to his sorry state, the rumors I heard were conflicting. Some said that Dickie had been at the Defense of Atlanta, positioned in a forward trench that had been over-run by a column of clockwork Chinese automaton soldiers‌—‌Sherman's dreaded First Mechanical Battalion‌—‌which were, during the War of Southern Rebellion, conventionally equipped with flame-throwers. The story went that Dickie had caught a blast from one of these before being taken prisoner and nursed into survival by the same savage efficiency with which he'd been defaced. More commonly, it was said that he had deserted his Reb line, tail 'twixt his legs, and scurried into as-of-yet secure Atlanta to hole up in a Chinese bawdy house. There, the tale goes, he passed out into an open brazier while smoking opium, and the attendant soiled doves kept him alive with laudanum and green tea compresses until such time as their clockie brethren controlled the city. In order to win favor with the city's new martial law‌—‌who, unlike most infantrymen, were decidedly not interested in their services‌—‌these parlor-house girls turned over Dickie, and whatever other Confederate soldiers they had detained through womanly guile or martial art, as prisoners of war, to be starved in Elmira Prison, or buried alive in mass graves, or set in a clockie winding-house to pace around a wheel until they finally lost consciousness and were trampled under the boots of their fellow Greybacks, or mashed in a clockie corpse-press into lubricating oil, or what have you.

I do not know if Dickie availed himself nobly or ignobly on any particular battlefield, but I can say that his scars were consistent with those of a man who had suffered a terrible fire, and the fact that he continued to breathe afterward was certainly evidence of the miracles of Asiatic medicine, although if the primary care was provided by whores or automatons is still unknown to me. Judging from the remarkably foul species of abuse he would hurl at any clockie he might happen upon‌—‌and the confused content of these careering tirades‌—‌Dickie Tucker had suffered mightily at the clockies' hands during the War.

Suffice it to say that I would not have associated with such a man, had I not seen what he did in Sy Everett's hog pen in the late early summer of '74.

Sy's was the nearest of the farm holds that ringed Lost Creek's center of private residences and commercial operations, and thus shared the benefit of close proximity to the amenities of town