by Lavie Tidhar
“I’m . . .” He didn’t know what to say. “Isobel.” He whispered her name. She had a real name, a name that belonged to her. “Ich lieba dich,” he said, in that ancient, obsolete Battle Yiddish they had given him. Like the Navajo of Code Talkers in another long-gone war. He could no longer remember the wars he’d been in, he assumed they were given names, that in some historical record they were placed down reverently, dated, placed into context. All he remembered was the pain.
The Sinai desert, the Red Sea shimmering in the heat. Their platoon had encamped in the ruins of Sharm el-Sheikh. No humans in sight, they were robotniks, the best of the best, and they were waiting for an attack that didn’t come.
Motl could no longer recall what the war had been about, or who they were fighting, exactly. The other side had semi-sentient fliers, they were predatory things that came from the sky, silently, that had talons that could tear through armour. Jubjub Birds. Earlier they had watched a Leviathan rise from the depths, organic gun turrets shining wetly in the sunlight, eye stalks scanning the horizon for heat signatures, infrared—
Another platoon had gone underwater, armoured humanoids communicating subvocally in Battle Yiddish as they targeted the Leviathan. They attached themselves to the enemy creature like barnacles. They strapped themselves to the glistening flesh, in the depths, their charges tied to their exoskeletons. Motl and the others watched the explosion, the slow death of Leviathan, the huge body thrashing helplessly in the water. Its death cry made their ears bleed. The Leviathan’s death cloud of spores rose above the water, drifting in the wind. Motl prayed they would not be sent on egg duty. Leviathan spores would hatch in the water and new machines would be born to continue the fighting. Motl was jealous of the others, the ones who had blown themselves up. At least they were allowed true death. . . .
It was quiet there, in the ruins of Sharm. It had once been a minor fishing village then, during Israel’s short-lived occupation, it was a city called Ofira. Now, Motl wasn’t even sure who occupied it. The Bedouins kept well away.
He was a sleek death machine in those days, but that didn’t stop the backwash. That’s what they called it. The backwash was the flow of thoughts and emotions stemming from who you once were, the human you had been, the one they took off the battlefield and cyborged, the dead thing you were before they made you robotnik. Dead man’s memories, you weren’t supposed to have them, but sometimes. . . .
Beyond the shore the Leviathan died, slowly. In the distance a convoy of Jubjubs hunted above the shore line of the Arabian Peninsula.
Motl rested under a palm tree. Made sure his weapons—a part of him—were charged and loaded, that everything worked, that he was primed, ready . . . but the backwash came on him then and it was suddenly hard to think, a memory—
A palm tree very much like this one, a desert oasis, an armed convoy approaching, he and the others lying in wait—
Flares lighting up the sky, he could see rockets, something slammed into the ground nearby sending up a cloud of sand, he heard screams—
Pain erupting, all over, at once. The air was full of things like midges, they crawled over his skin, they got into his mouth, into his nose, his ears, his rectum, they crawled inside him and outside him, dissolving him, hurting him—
Motl blinked. He was trying to fight it, his internal systems (fully operational then) were mainlining sedatives, but it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough to stop the backwash—
He writhed in the sand, screaming, but no sound came. There had been a full moon and it looked down on him. The air was thick with blood and the reek of guts and urine. They wouldn’t let him die. They were everywhere, violating him, they were laying eggs in his bloodstream, they were crawling inside his brain—
Then something changed—minutes or hours or days later. He saw them. He could see. A platoon, desert-coloured uniforms. He didn’t know which side he’d been on, and which side they were.
“We’ve got a live one here,” one of them said.
“Take him.”
The other grinned. He had a—was that a sword? Something so archaic . . . the blade came down, swiftly, and the pain and all sensory perception stopped.
How could he explain all that to Isobel? he thought. Central Station, the stars above, a sliver blade moon. His hands were shaking. He walked down Neve Sha’anan, past Mama Jones’ Shebeen, the Church of Robot node beside it, went towards the core of the old bus station, the abandoned tunnels where once passengers boarded buses, long ago, when buses and robotniks still ran on petrol.
How could he explain the craving?
In the Sinai, in that long-ago campaign, he had gone and sought the priest. The priest was like him, he was a robotnik, but he was also different, he had the offerings of God and the comfort of religion entrusted in his hands.
The priest was standing on a sand dune beyond the ruined city. The sky was darkening, and the priest spoke, preaching into the desert.
And he said: “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man-child conceived.”
And he said: “Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.”
“Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it,” Motl whispered. “Let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.”
He watched the priest, longingly, the need burning in him. The priest said, “Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.”
And Motl replied: “Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?”
The unanswered question of the robotnik, the sermon of Job delivered there, on a sand dune, with Leviathan dying in the warm waters of the Red Sea. “Please,” Motl said. “I need it.”
The priest descended the dune. They were of the same height, but now Motl knelt down, for the priest to bless him. He opened his mouth and felt the priest’s metal fingers, warmed from the sun, on his still-organic tongue. “God,” the priest said, and Motl closed his mouth, and swallowed, the small pill on his tongue melting into his bloodstream.
Crucifixation.
It hit him like a bullet, and the heavens opened.
Walking alone with Central Station at his back . . . west was the sea, the smell of brine and tar, that brought back half-remembered memories. He walked through the night market and the smell of jasmine and deep-fried nambaeit gato and grilled kebabs, but he was not interested in the food.
Isobel could not understand. She had not yet died, had not been reborn.
“For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,” he whispered. His hands were shaking. The need was on him, driving him. His left leg clanged as he walked. He drew stares but then they looked away. Just another broken-down robotnik, just another beggar haunting the night streets looking for a handout or a fix or both.
He came to the tunnels. From above, waste lying on the ground, the black ring of an old fire, the crumbling remnants of bus platforms. There, a grate in an old ventilation shaft. He pulled it out and slid inside, down the rusting ladder and into the tunnels.
Along an abandoned platform stood three figures. They had lit a fire in an open metal drum and stood around it, motionless, the flames reflecting in their metal skin. Motl approached, his heavy footsteps and that clanking noise the only sound in that underground cavern.
“Motl.”
“Ezekiel. Samuel. Jedediah.”
Motionless. A rat scuttled down below. The flames reflected in expressionless metal faces. Sending him back. . . .
He was kneeling by the water’s edge. The Red Sea, at sunrise. The sun reflected off the water and off Motl’s body, suffusing him. Faith came in little pills that dissolved on one’s tongue, God’s own flesh cannibalized by humanity’s child. He had spent the night praying, believing—God, manufactured and produced in the Jerusalem labs, was all-encompassing, it made the backwash
recede into the background, become irrelevant— God said, You are doing God’s work, there is a purpose to your being, you are loved, you may be a tool but a tool that is needed—
The effects of Crucifixation were wearing off now. The world still shone, but not as brightly. Just the memory of being needed, and of being loved, and that would have to be enough—
Sand exploded upwards, he half-turned, weapons at the ready—
The Leviathan had died in the night and its giant corpse floated, half-sunk, drifting towards Aqaba.
Ordered, terse commands in Battle Yiddish, and Motl was rising, firing—
The thing erupted out of the sand, bullet-shaped head glistening with slime—Vermes Arenae Sinaitici Gigantes, the giant sandworms of the Sinai—it snatched up Ebenezer, teeth crunching metal as though it were dough, then it burrowed into the sand again.
Silence. Robotniks spreading out across the ruined town, tense, waiting. No one spoke now. God’s lingering presence still suffused Motl’s being, but overriding it was fear, and the smell of spilled coolant and gunpowder.
He didn’t know who had first introduced the giant sandworms to the Sinai, they had been used in the same way one planted mines, for future conflicts, but unlike mines they had multiplied, they thrived. The Bedouins hunted them, they made medicines from their poison.
“It’s coming!”
A sandworm erupted ahead of Motl, one of his fellow robotniks, Isidore, jumped on it, blades flashing, but when you sliced a Sinaiticus Gigans it didn’t die, it split—
And now, from the air—they must have hidden nearby, waiting—a convoy of Jubjub Birds came swooping down, red-eyed, with talons extended, and their smell was the smell of garbage and excrement, and it mixed with the sickly sweet stench of the sandworms—
Someone threw a firebomb, it caught the lead Jubjub and the bird screamed, became a phoenix in flames—
Hell, Motl thought, running, guns firing, hell was a place right here on Earth, a special place God couldn’t go—
A sandworm blasted out of the sand, knocking him off his feet. Dimly he saw Ishmael open up with the flamethrower, and the giant creature burst into flames, keening a high-pitched sound as it thrashed in the sand, unable to burrow under to save itself. Motl rolled, his left leg was unresponsive. He rose stiffly, fired at a Jubjub which came diving at him. Sharm el-Sheikh was burning all around him now, and he placed a sniper shot straight into the bird’s brain and watched it fall into the flames. Whatever the old writers knew about hell, he thought, they got it right about the fire.
Silence in the abandoned tunnels of the old bus station, abandoned but for the robotniks. Derelicts, Motl thought with sudden vehemence. Beggars, homeless, worthless, infidels . . .their only fidelity was to themselves.
Robotniks looked after their own.
There was no one else to do so.
How had he come to be in this place? How had he come to Central Station?
His hands were shaking. He needed a fix.
After that last battle they had patched him up and upgraded him, and sent him out again, and then again, and then again. There was always one last battle, one final war. Then for a long time there weren’t any more engagements and they stayed on the base, waiting, mainlining faith because it kept you from going all heretic, and one day, there wasn’t even word, as such, it was just that the gate opened and the human staff all left and that was that: they’d become, it appeared, obsolete.
After a while, in ones and twos, they had simply wandered off. The world outside the base was strange and uncomfortable, it was hostile in a way the battlefield never was. Motl did odd jobs. It had been good at first, freedom. He’d even laid off the dope.
Then parts started to fail. . . .
“Motl.”
It was Ezekiel. In Central Station, he ruled. He was their captain here.
There were robotniks in Jerusalem, drawn there like leeches to a vein. And some made it off-world, gone to Tong Yun City or Lunar Port. But he, Motl, ended up here.
Backwash, hitting him: memories that shouldn’t be, of times that never were. A woman with dark hair, smiling up at him, a pencil behind one delicate ear; a small girl laughing, chubby pink fingers reaching for him to lift her; the sound of a bicycle bell; the smell of freshly cut grass.
His hands shook.
“Motl.”
“I need it, Ezekiel. I need it.”
“I heard you were with a girl.”
The silence around the fire became more pronounced. Motl, too, was still.
“A human girl, Motl?”
The silence from the others was like sheathed blades.
Motl thought of Isobel, under the eaves of Central Station. Her body radiating warmth, her small hand touching his face, and something must have broken in his lacrimal apparatus, it must have done, because his eyes were wet, and he saw her through a film, through mist.
He’d met her in Central Station, on Level Three where she worked, captain in the virtuality of the Guilds of Ashkelon. They had got to talking, he had a job, now, he was a sweeper, moving slowly across the floors of that busiest of levels. Plenty all around to clean. Good steady work.
She’d been unsteady on her feet, she’d just spent eight hours in a pod, in the virtual. She’d stumbled and he went to her, he gave her balance. It made him feel strange, her hands, her skin on his own metal arm, and as she straightened she smiled at him, with brown eyes, white teeth a little crooked, smiled without any self-consciousness or unease, as if, already, they were good friends.
“Sorry,” Motl mumbled, releasing her, but she stopped him.
“Wait!” He stopped and looked at her, he was taller than her. She was so alive. She said, “I’ve seen you around.”
He didn’t know what to say to that; stayed poised for flight. “I don’t know your name,” she said.
“It’s Motl.”
“Motl . . .” The name, when she said it, hit him with its strangeness.
“I like it,” she said. Then—“I’m Isobel.”
“I . . . I know.”
She had dark hair, pale skin. She smiled easily. She was still young. “How do you know?”
“I’ve seen you around.”
They laughed, together. And suddenly it wasn’t awkward at all. Suddenly it was the most natural thing in the world to talk together, it was something he had never experienced, or rather, he had, he must have had, in another life; another, lost time.
It scared him. His internal systems were breaking down, they couldn’t stop him feeling. His hands shook. “I need it, Ezekiel,” he said. His own voice grated on him.
“What do you think you’re doing, Motl?”
That voice, cool and calm. There were no lone soldiers. Military form kept order. Ezekiel got his share from Motl’s work, just as he got his share from the Crucifixation trade, and the occasional mugging, and what protection racket was going, and from anything else he could get his metal fingers into. Motl respected him for it. Ezekiel looked after his troops.
There was no one else to do it.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen, Ezekiel,” he said. “It wasn’t something I—”
He fell silent. How did he really feel? Before, he did not have to feel, not this much. Feeling was something they had taken out of you when they remade you, when the old you, the one who had a name and a life, that human died and you were reborn in his place. Emotion was regulated, back when all his internal systems worked, back when there was maintenance— fear and anger were good, within reason, but love and affection made you soft. Worse, they made you vulnerable.
He looked at his fellow soldiers now, and saw them new, the reflection of the fire in their metal exoskeletons casting them in a new light. He saw them new, then old, he saw their tarnished rusting skin, and heard the soft clanking sound of despair from broken joints and ill-repaired appendages. They had always been weak, he thought. They had always been vulnerable.
“Do you love the girl?” Ezekiel said, and
now Motl heard his question with new ears, a new understanding. They were his brothers, his kin.
“I . . .” he said, and then he thought, courage. It was a thing he had almost forgotten.
“I love her,” he said, simply.
Around the fire the mute robotniks stirred. Ezekiel nodded his heavy head, once.
“Then go to her,” he said.
In the Sinai that time under a waning moon, he had knelt in the sand and dipped his hands in the warm waters of the Red Sea and watched the dying Leviathan in the distance. The drug, Crucifixation, had taken hold of him, and a beam of light came down from the heavens and lifted him, and his spirit hovered on the waters. Faith, he’d needed faith, they all did, faith to go on.
He would find Isobel, he thought. Right now, he’d go to her, he didn’t care who would see them together. His hands were still shaking and the craving was still there but he ignored it; he tried to. Sometimes you needed to believe you could believe, sometimes you had to figure heaven could come from another human being and not just in a pill.
Sometimes.
EIGHT: The Bookseller
Early morning light suffused Central Station as Ibrahim, the alte-zachen man, came along Neve Sha’anan with his horse and cart. He stopped when he saw Achimwene, who was standing outside the tiny alcove which passed for his shop, and raised his hand in greeting.
Nothing pleased Achimwene Haile Selassie Jones as much as the sight of the sun rising behind Central Station. It highlighted exhausted sex workers and street-sweeping machines, and the bobbing floating lanterns that, with dawn coming, were slowly drifting away, to their own habitats, there to wait until next nightfall. On the rooftops solar panels unfurled themselves, welcoming the sun. The air was still cool at this time. Soon it will be hot, the sun beating down, the aircon units turning on with a roar of cold air in shops and restaurants and crowded apartments all over the old neighbourhood.
“Ibrahim,” Achimwene said, acknowledging the alte-zachen man as he approached. Ibrahim was perched on top of his cart, the boy Ismail by his side. The cart was already filled, with adaptoplant furniture, scrap plastic and metal, boxes of discarded house wares and, lying carelessly on its side, a discarded stone bust of Albert Einstein.