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Once upon a time there was a man named Ambrose. He was short and stocky and had a snowy-white beard of which he was very proud, for it made him feel like a wise man. Ambrose lived in a huge city that lay on the shore of a great, dark lake. It was always night, and gray stars always shone in the hollow sky.
The city where Ambrose lived had many names: Yhtill, Yashar, Carcosa, and others. He knew them all, though he didn't know how -- for he had never met anyone else in this city and he had always been alone, for as long as he could remember.
Ambrose had once lived in another place. He remembered heat, and he remembered dust. Sometimes when he tried to remember his former life he could taste lead on his tongue, and copper.
Ambrose's city (he thought of it as his, since he was the only one there) was bigger than all outdoors. It was never the same city, either. With the passing of every day, with the slow crawl of every hour, with the turn of his head, it changed. Streets grew wider, buildings grew taller, doors appeared, and windows faded away--or just the opposite. It was a city of magic and wonder, and every time he went out of his home it was like he was seeing it for the first time.
But Ambrose was so alone. He missed other people. He missed talking with friends, he missed telling jokes, he missed playing games, and most of all Ambrose missed being needed by someone else. For in this great city of great solitude no one needed Ambrose. Not even the city--he knew it would get along just fine without him. All of this made Ambrose very sad.
To forget about his sadness, Ambrose became a tinker. He made things. He fixed the things he made. He made new things from old things that didn't work anymore, and restored old things from new things he regretted making. He made toys and clocks and things that made noise. He made bicycles and water fountains and things that were very quiet. He made all of these things and many more, to try to forget his sadness. But nothing he made could do that, because no matter what he made, he was the only one who would ever see it. Sadness poured over him like sunlight, but there was no sunlight in the big and always-new city he lived in. He only remembered it from his old life, and that was only a dream.
Every day was the same for Ambrose. He would awaken, and then stay in bed a little while longer, since no one was there to tell him what to do or when to get up. Soon he would feel guilty for staying in bed and wasting the day--although he didn't really know when a day started and when a day ended, since there was no sun--and he would get up and move about. He never ate breakfast, or lunch or dinner, because there was no food in the city. But Ambrose never got hungry. He remembered eating food, and remembered how good it was and how much he liked different foods, but like sunlight these memories were only a dream.
Once Ambrose got up, he would walk around the building he had taken for his home and look at his recent tinkering. Some things would have broken or run down during the night, and would need fixing. Some things just wouldn't look as good as they used to, and would need cleaning or just plain tinkering with. Some things, a very few things, would be just right. Ambrose would spend the morning with all of them, playing with them or making them work or just watching them.
Then he'd take a walk around the city. Not around the whole city--for it was far too large to ever find the edges, except for where the cobblestones became sand and met the lake--but just through the streets. Every time he went for such a walk, things were different. But Ambrose never got lost. Whenever he was ready to go back home, he just thought hard about his home and kept walking, and after just a couple of streets he'd be home again.
On his walks, Ambrose always hoped he'd find someone else. Sometimes he would hear distant laughter, or smell food, or see a flicker of movement in a window. But he could never find these things for real. The laughter always stopped, the smell always faded, the movement disappeared. He soon learned to stop running after these things, except for every now and then when he just couldn't help it. But he never found anyone else, and it just made him sad.
When he got done with his walk, Ambrose would come back home and fix the things he'd made that needed fixing, and clean the things he'd made that needed cleaning. By evening all of his things would be as good as he could make them once more, until the next day when he'd see new things to fix and tinker with. But his evenings were always free, and Ambrose always did the same thing.
Every evening, he would walk from his home through the streets and to the shore. There he would sit on one of the benches that lined the street along the beach and would stare out across the lake. The waves would roll in, thick and dark, and break on the shore. Ambrose would watch the water, but that wasn't all he watched.
For across the water--far, far away--lay the palace. The palace was huge and grand and so beautiful that sometimes Ambrose would cry just looking at it. It was like a palace from a fairy tale, and Ambrose wanted to go there so badly it hurt him to think about it. But he had no idea how to reach it, and he also didn't know what he would find. What if he had some way to cross the great lake, and got to the great and glorious palace, only to find it just as empty as the city was? He thought that would just kill him, kill him dead. Instead, every night he looked at the palace across the great dark water and he would make up stories about the palace and what went on there, and he tried to pretend that he was there. When he pretended this, he imagined that he was at a great and wonderful party, with lots of people in lots of costumes, with tables of good food to eat and good things to drink, with glorious music played by musicians in bright costumes and funny masks, with a queen to smile and nod at all the party guests, and a king who would sit wise and regal and mysterious.
At the end of each evening, Ambrose would sigh sadly and rise from the bench. He would walk home through the dark city streets. At home, he would go to bed. In the morning, he would sleep later than he should and get up and do it all over again.
This was Ambrose's life. Day after day after day, he tinkered and he walked and he dreamed, and then one day he was no longer alone and everything changed.
* * *
At the moment that his life changed, Ambrose was walking through the streets of the city to his home. It was evening, and he was coming back from staring at the palace and having wonderful waking dreams about what it would be like to go there, when he heard a noise.
Ambrose had heard noises in the city before. He used to chase them down, but they would always disappear. This time, the noise was a squeaking sound, rhythmic and mechanical like from a machine. Ambrose tried not to listen, because he knew it would just go away if he tried to find it. This time, however, the noise found him.
As he neared an intersection, the sound grew louder, and then around the corner came a small child. But it was no ordinary child. This child was made of clockwork, all gears and rods and pistons, like one of Ambrose's tinker creations. But Ambrose hadn't made this clockwork child. She had a small head and stubby forearms attached to a clockwork body. She had no legs, but instead rolled around on one big wheel and one small wheel, which kept her leaning to one side as she woblled along. Some kind of liquid dripped from the clockwork child as she moved, which Ambrose guessed must be oil. The clockwork child had no expression on her chubby porcelain face, but as she rolled, her mouth clacked open and shut and her arms bobbed up and down. The big wheel turned and the little wheel turned and the clockwork child's whole body wobbled left and right, left and right, as she whirled along through the dim and fluid streets of Carcosa.
Ambrose stopped and stared. He had never met any other person in the huge city and he had certainly never expected that the first person he would ever meet would be this little creature. He thought hard about all the things he had ever made and tinkered with: had he ever made this clockwork child? Perhaps he had tinkered her up and then forgotten about her, not noticing when she went wheeling off into the night. But no--he was certain he had never seen her before.
The clockwork child rolled up to him, wobbling, curving, and unsteady. She stopped right at his feet, and Ambrose realized that she had a piece of paper on her back. In fact it was a small envelope, clipped with a clothespin tied to the back of her neck with a golden ribbon. The child looked up at Ambrose, her expression not changing, and waited.
Ambrose leaned down and pulled the envelope from the child's back. On the outside was written, in flowing cursive script, one word:
"AMBROSE."
He stepped back, shocked, and clutched the precious envelope to his chest. Someone had written him! He wasn't alone! Suddenly, everything about his life was different. He fumbled with the envelope, trying to get it open. As he did so, the little clockwork child wobbled away, leaving behind droplets of the thick coppery-smelling liquid. Ambrose took no notice of the odd messenger, and instead rushed home with the envelope clutched tight to his chest.
Arriving at his home, Ambrose raced inside and closed the door. He stood in the light of his cog-and-gear lamp that moved on a slow circuit around the room, riding on a track. As he read the writing on the paper inside the envelope he kept moving forward to keep up with his source of light.
"YOU ARE INVITED," read the paper, "TO A MASQUERADE BALL."
Ambrose trembled. Finally, after so long, someone was out there thinking of him!
"THE PALACE, IN THE EVENING, ONE WEEK HENCE."
The palace! Ambrose's heart sank. How could he reach the palace? It was so far away!
"WE SHALL CELEBRATE THE BIRTH-DAY OF CASSILDA, QUEEN OF THE ROYAL COURT OF YHTILL."
Cassilda! The name immediately sounded familiar, like the name of a forgotten relative or a friend you once had for a too-brief summer.
"COME IN COSTUME. COME TO DINE. COME TO DANCE."
A costume! Food! Music! It was just like Ambrose's dream come to life!
"COME."
But what to do? Ambrose had no costume, no idea how to get to the palace. He had only a week. What could he do?
Ambrose read and re-read the invitation. He pinched himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming. The pain was real. The invitation was real. The party was real. Ambrose was no longer alone!
He thought long and hard about the problem of how to reach the palace, stopping every few minutes to read the invitation again. When he finally, finally went to bed late that night he dreamed of the palace, dreamed of the masquerade ball, dreamed of the costumes, dreamed of the musicians, dreamed of the royal court and of a king resplendent in yellow robes.
* * *
When he woke up in the morning, he remembered all of those so-sweet dreams. He remembered the invitation and grabbed it and re-read it once more to make sure it was real.
Finally, he remembered one more dream from the previous night. In that dream he was flying over the dim, dark lake, but the waters of the lake were of mist rather than water. He was aboard a great flying craft, an open disc that was surrounded by four great bronze heads, which belched steam into the sky to lift him up. In the center of the disc was a great mechanism of clockwork gears and pistons, which supported eleven globes of brass. One globe lay still at the center, while the other ten (of varying sizes, and some with rings about them) moved around the center globe in elliptical orbits of different speeds. This massive craft, this amazing flying orrery, filled Ambrose's mind and right then and there he resolved to create this vehicle, the vehicle that would carry him over the waters of the lake and land him before the beautiful palace of so many sweet, dear dreams.
Ambrose looked around his workshop and then immediately got busy. He would have to scour the city for all the materials he would need, and this would take all day; he invariably could find whatever he needed for his tinkering projects, but it could take quite a while for the city to reveal such materials to him. Undaunted, he set out at once, leaving some of his creations unrepaired, others unpolished, and the rest ignored: he had other things to do on this, the first real day of all the days he had spent in the city.
Street after street fell before him as he walked and examined and poked and peered. In an alleyway he found a sizable quantity of metal sheets, and with some concentration he caused a door to appear in the wall that led directly to his workroom (which saved rather a lot of time and effort!). In the basement of a tall, tall tower he located many great hemispheres of brass. In a secret room within a silent manor he located four huge hollow heads also of bass, their faces identical to that of the clockwork child who had brought him the message. These would serve as housings for the bellows that would make the great craft fly.
But something was missing. There had to be a central mechanism which would drive the whole orrery, which would spin the globes about this way and that, which would pump the steam and work the gears and make the whole craft take flight. He couldn't even begin to conceive of such a thing; it would take him ages to construct such a marvel!
With this on his mind, Ambrose wandered to and fro, desperate and agitated. Such a work, such a marvel--he couldn't just conjure it up! Thinking on this problem, he entered a square that, like the rest of the city, was new to him. In the middle of the square was a great, silent merry-go-round.
Ambrose stood still, stopped in his tracks. He had never seen anything like this in the city. A merry-go-round! It was all metal--brass and copper--but gaily painted over much of its surface. A gaggle of prancing horses surrounded the central spindle, together with great regal wagons and sleds. The merry-go-round gleamed like nothing he had ever seen, and in an instant Ambrose knew he had found the heart of his orrery. He took a step forward, eager to begin taking the merry-go-round apart and rebuilding it to suit his needs, when he realized he wasn't alone.
