It is a tale they tell of the clockwork worlds, where the sun and planets and the starry firmament swing around the earth on titanic gears of brass and steel, like an immense orrey. The music of their turning, tooth ringing on tooth, ratchets ticking and chains clanking, fills the universe with harmonious and mathematical sound, and delights the clockwork citizens of the earth.

Riktiktoktanon the artificer was prosperous and successful, and admired by all for his skill in creating useful or amusing flesh creatures to pull wagons and carriages, or serve as toys for the clockwork children. Flesh creatures of his creation could be seen drawing ploughs in the fields of green copper flakes and red iron dust, from which sprang the delicate tin and golden fronds of metallic corn and wheat. Still others, great monstrous flesh golems, labored unceasingly on the mills, whose mainstaves passed their power through uncounted belts, chains, gears, axles, linkages, and pistons to provide motive power for the clockwork world. But for all his success in his profession, love never came to Riktiktoktanon, he became increasingly lonely, and finally, in his loneliness, vowed to make himself a companion out of the flesh he knew so well.

He extracted organic material from the earth, grew it in his bubbling vats and retorts, and formed it into organs and bone. He dissected other flesh creatures he had made, and molded their limbs anew. He flayed their skin, stripped it of its hair, and bleached it until it was golden and silver. And when he was done, he had made a girl out of flesh, shaped exactly like a real clockwork girl in all her limbs and parts, so that all visitors to his workshop marveled at how real she looked, how beautiful she was, and said what a genius Riktiktoktanon was for creating such an enchanting doll.

But although she resembled a real girl, she could never be clockwork. When Riktiktoktanon put his ear to her chest, all he heard was the fleshy 'lub-dub, lub-dub' of her heart, not the pleasing 'tic-tock, tick-tock' he longed for. All her limbs moved with an unnatural smoothness, like water flowing in a stream or beeches bending in the wind, not with the cogwheel jerks and stops of the clockwork people. She had no key in her back to wind her up, and instead consumed vegetables and meat to sustain her life, and this disgusted Riktiktoktanon. He knew he had failed, he had created only the illusion of a clockwork girl that could not ease his loneliness, but only taunt him with it.

When he could bear it no longer, he vowed to end his torment by destroying his creation. He took a great hammer, and was about to break her into parts, but when the flesh girl recognized his intention, tears burst from her eyes, and she implored him to cease. Riktiktoktanon stopped, astonished that a flesh creature had such feelings in it, or fear of dissolution. The flesh girl laid her head on Riktiktoktanon's golden shoulder, and crying all the while, told him that she had grown to love the life he had given her, and even if she could never be a clockwork girl, she wanted to live in the world and be his companion. But Riktiktoktanon did not respond. The flesh girl begged harder, and banged on Riktiktoktanon's steel chest with her fists, but still Riktiktoktanon did not respond. She leaped up and cried, "You are a cruel clockwork man, for you gave me life, and let me taste the joys of living in the world with all its beauties, and now you wish to take that away, simply because I am not like you! How can you be so cruel!" But Riktiktoktanon did not respond, or move in the slightest. Then the flesh girl realized that her salty tears falling upon him had rusted and corroded his mechanisms, and he would never move again.

Upon realizing this, she gave a great cry of despair that filled the sky, and all who heard it wondered at the depth of its sadness. The flesh girl cried to the clockwork gods to hear her in her hour of misery, and swore that she had loved Riktiktoktanon, and that though she loved her own life, she loved him more, and prayed the gods might take her life instead, if they would but return his life to him.

Roctoctibatou, the clockwork goddess of mercy, heard her prayer, and came to her in the form of a cloud of a hundred mechanical songbirds, twittering sweetly with voices like tinkling music boxes. "Your tears slew him," she said to the flesh girl, "and your tears have saved him, too. Therefore, go, cry upon him again."

The flesh girl did not understand this, but she said, "I will do as you command. I have slain him once, I cannot hurt him more." She took the still form of Riktiktoktanon in her arms, and let her hopeless tears wash over him.

And behold! one by one his fingers and joints and limbs began to move again, and at last Riktiktoktanon lifted his head, and looked upon her, and said, "I love you true." He wiped her tears from her face with a tin finger, and showed them to her, and she saw that her tears were no longer salt water, but machine oil. And when she lifted up her hand, she saw that her fingers were articulated steel and brass and silver, and so was her body, for the goddess had made her into a clockwork girl.

The End

Bio
When asked about himself, John had this to say:
"My mother was a bar hostess and good-time girl in the bad side of Venusburg; I never knew my father. I grew up tough and grew up fast, and I had killed a boy in a knife fight and nearly died myself in another before I was ten years old. I used to love to hang around the spaceport, and watch the great spaceliners doppler in from Earth and Mars and the outer planets. (This was in the late '30s and '40s, before the atmosphere of Venus became too hot and dense for humans to survive.) I plied an old broken down spacer named Uncle Bill with liquor and he taught me enough of the ropes to fake it as a nav runner's mate. I bought forged ID, lied about my age, and shipped out on the 'Queen of Tranquillitatis' when I was 16.

I been knocking around this 'ole solar system for most of my life, I seen a lot, and now I figger it's time to set down and write some of its stories."