Then she turned round with a small laugh.
‘But that’s just a personal observation of mine, and strictly between you and me!’
I got up to let her out. She extended her hand to shake as I opened the door.
‘Very nice to meet you, Mr Simling.’
As her eyes met mine, I felt as if she could read in my face where I had been earlier that day: the red room, the sickly muzak, the syntecs with their scented flesh, the sweat streaming down the face of fat Paddy Malone…
I blushed.
‘Very nice to meet you too Mr Simling,’ I blurted.
Of course this visit had done nothing to allay Ruth’s fears.
‘What did she mean flip? What could they do? I thought they were supposed to be safe George! Not like those horrible Macedonians brooding about God and the Devil and whatever else those Outlanders think about. And now she says they’re dangerous too!’
‘She didn’t say they were dangerous. She just meant they wander off sometimes, or stop doing their job…’
‘Well, she shouldn’t have said all that. I’ve got a good mind to report her to the company.’
‘For being honest with us? Would you prefer people to lie?’
‘Perhaps one of them might kill somebody. How do you know what she meant by flip?’
‘I just guessed’ I snapped.
I didn’t care at all about what the robots might or might not do, but I was flustered and shaken, as I always was after any social encounter.
‘Why can’t anything be safe?’ Ruth complained. ‘Why is there always a snake in the grass?’
‘Oh give it a rest, Ruth, can’t you? Why don’t you just go into SenSpace for a bit and forget it, eh? There are no snakes in there. Not unless you want them to be, anyway.’
Ruth looked at me, almost cunningly.
‘Only if you come too,’ she said.
I hesitated. I hated SenSpace and the total surrender that it involved. It gave me the queasy feeling of being swallowed alive. But just now this didn’t seem so unappealing.
I shrugged.
‘Okay. It’s a deal.’
6
There were stars. They weren’t like the stars of ordinary reality: they were multicoloured, they stretched back in three dimensions, and they were moving, around, above and between one another.
There was a warm smell of a summer night, a hint of lilac. Celestial music came faintly from far away and then broke out into a bold fanfare as huge coloured 3D letters burst like fireworks across the firmament.
The SenSpace Consortium of Illyria
Welcomes You To
S E N S P A C E
‘Yes, welcome to SenSpace, George!’ said an intimate, female voice in my ear, ‘It’s been a long time. Are you travelling alone, or do you have companions I need to link you up with?’
‘One companion, Ruth Simling,’ I said, reluctantly adding her SenSpace alias: ‘Little Rose.’
‘Ah yes,’ said SenSpace fondly, ‘dear Little Rose! I’ll link you up immediately.’
Ruth appeared beside me, as our hitherto parallel SenSpace universes were merged into one. Or rather, Little Rose appeared, a small, mousily pretty young girl in a party dress, still recognizable as my mother, but some ten years younger than myself.
I looked away. We were standing on a high platform, the swirling stars above and around us. Beneath a vast patchwork landscape was laid out, teeming with detail and activity, which seemed to stretch away for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.
You could have studied it for hours just as it was, but what made it even more absorbing was the fact that whatever patch you looked at would immediately grow, as if a powerful pair of binoculars had been put in front of your eyes.
Here were children playing on a sandy beach for example, splashing among white surf and breakers of perfect translucent green. The longer I looked at it the closer they became. I could hear their voices and the sound of the surf. I could hear the flapping sound from a small boat with red sails. I could feel the sand. I could hear one little girl whisper to her brother they were going to build the biggest sandcastle ever seen. ‘That will teach John,’ she said, ‘That will teach him!…’
I looked away. The seaside at once shrunk again to a tiny blue and yellow patch far off on the surface of the seething quilt of the SenSpace world.
My eye fell on a forest. The green was very bright, like coloured glass. There was a dragon with fiery nostrils waiting in a cave. Knights were riding towards it through the emerald trees. Their silvery armour glinted, their shields were bright. You could see every single leaf on every twig.
Here was a city. The towers were ten times higher than Illyria’s. Open trains full of laughing people whizzed between them on precarious monorail bridges. Little coloured biplanes swooped and dived among them. I could see the smiling faces of the pilots as they raced one another round the towers. I saw a red plane crash through a bridge and into the side of a building with a big explosion. But then the plane was gone, the bridge was whole again and trains of happy people were whizzing across it once more.
‘There’s something I’d like to show you George,’ said Ruth beside me in her Little Rose voice.
She reached out and took my hand (I mean my SenSpace hand: back in the real world, in our apartment in Faraday District, she and I were at opposite sides of the room), and I followed where she led.
We came to a little cove, where olive groves came down almost to the edge of the sea. The sea was blue and so clear that shoals of fishes seemed to be flying rather than swimming over the smooth white stones on the bottom, and a rowing boat at anchor appeared suspended in space over its own shadow.
Cicadas and crickets kept up their incessant throbbing among the olive trees and pines. The air was heavy with the aromatic resins of wild herbs baking in the sun. There were goat bells in the distance. A small bird with a scrap of wool in its beak, crossed the sea to a little rocky islet fifty metres off the coast, on which grew a single small pine.
At the top of a little rocky cliff, were the ruins of a Byzantine shrine…
‘But this is Aghios Constantinos!’ I exclaimed.
Little Rose looked up at me smiling and nodding.
‘It’s even better under the moon!’ she said, and the daylight began at once to fade…
‘But it’s a real place, Ruth!’ I said. (The daylight hesitated, unsure whether to proceed, and the sun stopped its descent towards the sea.) ‘We used to go there. We had picnics. I found a tortoise once.’
‘There are tortoises here too,’ she said, ‘Look!’
‘But you can still go to Constantinos and see real tortoises, Ruth!’
Little Rose frowned. ‘I’ll never go back there. Not after what happened.’
Ten years previously a Swiss Illyrian had been kidnapped and murdered by Greek terrorists on that same stretch of coast, close to the border. Our visits had stopped from that date on.
‘Look!’ said Little Rose, ‘A tortoise, see, right down by your feet!’
7
I had not expected to meet Marija Mejic again after her visit to us about Shirley. But as it happened our paths crossed not long afterwards. It was at a training event for export companies put on by the governement at the Nora Ullman Institute. Myself and two others – Tony Vespuccio and Ricky Timms – were there to represent Word for Word. Marija was one of the representatives for the Illyria Cybernetic Corporation.
Ricky was a sort of friend of mine. He was a year younger than me and a victim to raging adolescent acne at the age of twenty-one. We used to get drunk sometimes and talk about programming and sport and various cult TV programmes aimed at immature young men like ourselves. Sometimes we used to go down to the sea front and fool around in the arcades. We didn’t actually like each other much.
Tony was a little older than us and a lot more experienced.
At the seminar we were divided into small groups of four, each of which was supposed to look at various
practical problems involved with exporting technology-based equipment to the medieval and theocratic states beyond our borders. (Illyria relied on these states, after all, to provide it with food, raw materials and, in spite of robots and syntecs, labour.)
In my group were Ricky, Tony and Marija.
Marija remembered me.
‘We never found that robot of yours you know,’ she said.
I muttered something about how the replacement seemed to work fine.
‘Is your wife alright?’ she asked, ‘She seemed really shaken up.’
‘Wife?’ exclaimed Tony incredulously. ‘Wife?’
I blushed.
Ricky giggled.
I buried myself in the interesting learning exercises provided.
Tony, on the other hand, did not even pretend to be impressed by what the government had laid on for us and he chatted to Marija instead. I listened, fascinated by how easily he seemed to do it.
I learnt that Marija had come to Illyria at the age of eleven from New Zealand when it too, after almost all of the other industrialised nations, was finally engulfed by the Reaction. For her family, it was a return to the Mediterranean, from where they had migrated only a generation previously.
She was tired of her job with ICC and unhappy with the limited options of the little bubble in which we Illyrians lived. She had recently joined the Holist League.
‘Why?’ asked Tony, who lived essentially for pleasure.
‘Illyria was a more generous place when it was founded,’ she said. ‘But I feel that now it’s slowly becoming a mirror image of the countries it was supposed to be a refuge from. The Beacon, for example, was supposed to symbolize the power of free thought. And yet now all kinds of thoughts are banned – even the League has been threatened.’
Tony shrugged. Resignedly, he turned his attention to the task in hand, having come to the conclusion that Marija was dull, even if she was pretty.
But I was interested. I’d always loved the Beacon since I went there with my father as a child. On one occasion, I remember, I had to stay the night with him (I think Ruth had had to go into hospital for some reason or other) and we went up to the top of the Beacon after dark. I’d never seen so much of the world: the dark sea to the west with flecks of phosphorescence and the tiny lights of ships and fishing boats moving across it, the brilliant City immediately below with all its flashing signs, and beyond the city, deep in the Zagorian mountains and up and down the coast, the little yellow lights of the Outland settlements beyond our frontiers: Greek and Shqip and Vlach and Slav…
‘And look at the way we’re supposed to watch old Ullman crumbling that figurine every night,’ said Marija. ‘I mean what does that tell you about this city?’
‘Have you ever tried winding it back?’ I found myself saying, very much to my own surprise.
‘No, I haven’t,’ said Marija, turning her bright, interested eyes on me.
Feeling increasingly awkward, I told her about my experience: the human form assembling itself from dust in Ullman’s godlike hands.
‘It’s as if…’ (I faltered a bit at the end of this unusually long speech). ‘It’s as if the way you see the world depends on the direction you choose to come at it from…’
‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Marija. ‘Exactly!’
Tony laughed. When it was time to go, Marija wrote down for me the date of a forthcoming meeting of the League.
‘You’re well in there, George,’ Tony said to me, when Marija said goodbye. ‘Play your cards right and you and she could get together and discuss the meaning of life on a regular basis.’
* * *
Outside night was falling, and the Beacon, which is silvery by day, was lighting up from within to give glimpses of its intricate interior, like one of those transparent water creatures you can watch under a microscope and see its heart beating and the food moving along its gut. Gigantic and yet seemingly weightless, it hovered over its own reflection. People were going in and out of it, up and down it, round and through it like ants in a nest: on staircases, galleries, walkways, escalators. High up in the Beacon‘s great spherical head, people were riding the Ferris wheels that revolved outside.
I walked over to the railings. The sea softly splashed against the stones. From a flagpole above me, the eye of Illyria flapped in a light breeze.
Was Tony joking, or did he really think that someone like Marija might be interested in the likes of me?
I became aware of another sound just below me. A pair of lovers were kissing in the protective darkness of the concrete sea wall, kissing and kissing and kissing, slowly and gently feeding on one another’s mouths.
8
I went to the meeting of the Holist League. It took place in the function room of a bar in Upper Edison. There were about thirty people there, among them Marija, looking very beautiful in a loose white jumper. She smiled and gestured to the seat beside her. I was still trying to think of something to say when the meeting began and the main speaker was introduced.
It was a philosopher called Paul Da Vera, a strikingly good-looking Brazilian perhaps five or six years older than Marija and myself who spoke with great fluency and wit for about an hour, mainly about the meaning and origin of words.
‘Spirit’ was one of these words, I remember. Da Vera said that pre-technological societies would attribute all kinds of events to the presence of spirits. More technological societies, with more organized religions, would limit spirits to certain locations: there were ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ objects, a material and a spiritual world. And then science-based societies, such as Illyria and its precursors, had tried to dispense with spirits altogether.
But Da Vera argued that every Illyrian from Ullman downwards did still believe in spirit and would not be able to function without that concept – even if it wasn’t given that name. He demonstrated this point with common English expressions such as ‘the spirit of the law’ (as opposed to the ‘letter of the law’) which Ullman and others had regularly used in speeches. ‘Spirit’ referred to the attributes which things possessed as wholes and which transcended the sum of their parts.
‘And once we accept the idea of wholeness,’ Da Vera said, ‘we are a mere step aware from the idea of holiness, which derives from the same etymological root.’
Tame and commonplace as this might sound, it was strong stuff for an Illyrian audience at that time.
I have to admit that at this point I lost the thread of his argument because I had more immediately pressing things on my mind. I had made my mind up that I ought to ask Marija to have a drink with me afterwards. But the idea of actually speaking any such words made me almost physically sick. I spent the entire second half of the meeting rehearsing and discarding one sentence after another in my mind.
‘I wondered, Marija, if you would like a…’
‘Have you got anything on, Marija, or do you fancy a…’
‘Marija, I thought I’d have a glass of wine before I went home and I wondered…’
‘Do you know any good bars in this part of town, Marija? I was just…’
Meanwhile Da Vera finished speaking and invited comments. A discussion of some sort followed in which Marija played a part. And then the meeting ended.
‘That was very interesting didn’t you and I was wondering if you’d like to have a bar with me…’ I said to Marija.
‘Sorry?’
(I had omitted to get her attention before I started to speak.)
‘I did wondering you would drink?’
‘A drink?’ She smiled. ‘Well… I’d like to, but I’ve got something else on…’
‘Yes of course, sorry…’
I rushed away.
‘See you at the next meeting perhaps?’ she called after me.
At the door someone pushed a leaflet into my hand and I glanced back at Marija. She had gone across to the speaker, Da Vera, put her arms round him and given him a kiss.
9
Well who cared? What did it matter?
Why did I need anyone? I was hurrying through the streets, dodging between cars, looking at no one. There was no stopping me. I was in the Night Quarter, I was inside the red room with the sleepwalkers and the dreamy half-human voices that crooned baby, baby, baby love…
Lucy was wearing a short, sleeveless denim dress and dangly earrings, sitting on a sofa with her bare legs curled up underneath her. I headed straight for her. She smiled at me and started to get up. I felt wonderfully empty, as if I was made of air…
‘Would you like to come upstairs with me?’
I nodded. Her smile broadened, seemingly with pure delight.
‘I’m afraid my room’s a bit of a tip,’ she said. I noticed that her speech was British, with a faint regional burr.
‘What’s that accent?’ I croaked.
‘Wiltshire,’ she said, ‘It’s in the south of England. My dad was a postmaster there.’
She glanced at me, smiling almost mischievously, as if acknowledging the absurdity of this life story with which she’d been provided along with her vat-grown human flesh.
We crossed the landing and she opened a door. It was a student’s room: a single bed, a desk, a computer, a reading lamp, a couple of mugs, a jar of freeze-dried coffee, some underwear draped over the back of a chair, a half-finished bottle of red wine… There was even a shelf of discs and books, though the books seemed to have been bought at random from some second-hand place and had no coherent theme: History of Western Thought, Pygmalion, The Cell Biology of Plants, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, Principles of Self-Evolving Cybernetics, The Song of Wandering Aengus, Byron in the Balkans….
Lucy handed me a kind of menu that lay on the bedside table, next to an edition of Dickens.
‘Is there anything special you want?’
I swallowed. ‘No. Just for you to undress and… kiss and…’ She nodded and smiled. Briefly she took my left hand and ran her thumb over my credit bracelet. (Her thumb contained a barcode reader, invisible to the naked eye). Then she put her arms round me and kissed me quickly and warmly on my lips before standing back and slipping off her dress, leaving nothing on but the dangly earrings.
The Holy Machine Page 3