Little Rose ran through her house and out into the street. A policeman was out there going about his rounds.
‘Help me!’ she called out to him. ‘What’s going on? Help me please!’
But he took no notice at all.
She began to run. The City went on forever.
It went on forever, but it repeated itself every five kilometres. After the Residential Area where Little Rose lived, there was Park, with fountains and trees and a lake. A group of children were dancing ring-a-roses on top of a small green hill. They danced round and round, singing in bright voices, and taking no notice at all of Little Rose as she went running by.
All across the sky, the giant symbols marched:
After Park was Downtown where illuminated signs flooded the streets with reckless colour. Last time Little Rose was in her nearest Downtown those coloured lights had advertised shops and services but now they too had gone back to their default settings and had nothing to say but their own names:
‘RED!’ one sign shouted, flooding a street in crimson, ‘RED! RED! RED!’
‘B – L – U – E ! ! !’ another proclaimed, letter by letter.
Another flickered between two colours:
‘Green. ORANGE Green. ORANGE….’
Little Rose glimpsed a reflection in an orange-drenched window. It vanished, then reappeared again in green, a strange stick figure, a diagramatic woman, a mere lattice of lines without flesh or substance.
It was her. It was Little Rose. It was all that was left of her.
‘RED! RED! RED!’
‘Green. ORANGE Green. ORANGE….’
‘B – L – U – E ! ! !’
After Downtown was Rough Area. This was the place where City without EndTM residents could go to smash windows and visit strip clubs and get into fights with gangsters without ever getting hurt. None of the windows were broken now. Pimps and gangsters’ molls talked gibberish to each other on the street corners without even looking at the strange stick-woman running by.
‘Yibble yabble yibble yabble…’
It was the same in the Millionaire Zone and the Artists’ Quarter. It was the same when she came to the next Residential Area. A blackbird trilled in the branches of a Chinese plum tree. A ginger cat crossed her path. The peaceful sound of unseen extras mowing unseen lawns wafted through the imaginary air as she came to the exact counterpart of her own street, the exact replica of her own house, the exact replica of Mr Topalski, washing his Buick in his front yard, under a sky full of meaningless signs.
48
+000000113-000000254, read the notice over the gate of Park.
These were its coordinates. Five kilometres east, Park would be called +000000113-000000255, fifty kilometres south, Park would be called +000000103-000000254. They used to have names over the gates chosen by local residents, and little details of design that marked out one from another. Now only the numbers distinguished them.
On their green hillock, the circle of children were dancing ring-a-roses.
Atishoo-atishoo…
Five kilometres to the north in Park +000000114-000000254, an identical circle of children were dancing. So they were five kilometres eastward in +000000113-000000255, and every five kilometres, north, south, east and west for ever and ever and ever. Every five billion kilometres, the numbers themselves began to repeat.
Little Rose ran to the top of the highest hill in the Park and stopped to look around. Houses, towers, hills stretched away into the distance. But, many repetitions away, a whole section of the City disappeared as she looked, as if a great mouth had bitten it off and swallowed it. After which there was a flurry of ghostly traffic all around her, a muttering and murmuring, like a wind of soul-fragments, hurrying towards the gigantic hole where that section of city had been.
yibbly dibbly deeble dargle, yibbly dibbly deeble dargle… went the whispering traffic of ghosts.
Then, for the first time since Mr Gladheim was struck dumb, she heard a voice speaking real words.
‘Don’t just stand and look at it! Can’t you see the danger?’
It was a thin man, as thin as a stick, sketched out in black and white, his face a diagram of fear.
But under his arm he carried a second head, a second diagrammatic head, which looked at Little Rose and smiled reassuringly.
‘What larks eh?’ said the disembodied Head.
But the thin man clucked his tongue.
‘You’d better come with us!’ he said, ‘We have to get away from that thing over there or it will eat us too.’
To her own surprise, Little Rose just smiled.
The Head chuckled.
‘How can you laugh?’ exclaimed the Thin Man urgently. ‘It’s coming! Look! Run!’
Across the City, Park +000000113-000000249 disappeared into an invisible maw.
yibbly dibbly deeble dargel… went the ghosts as they hurried towards oblivion.
Even the letters in the sky were flowing towards the gap.
Poor Little Rose. Her whole life had consisted of running to new safe places as old ones were violated. But if monsters invaded SenSpace when she no longer had arms or legs or eyes, then where else was there left to run?
She felt terror, and rage… but oddly too, she also felt relief.
‘Come on!’ called the Thin Man.
‘No,’ said Little Rose, ‘No. I think I’ll just stay here.’
‘Bravo,’ said the Head, ‘Me too! I’ll stay as well!’
‘You certainly won’t,’ said the Thin Man, grasping his bodiless companion firmly and taking to his heels.
‘Follow us!’ he shouted back. ‘Do you want to be devoured?’
The Head gave a kind of bodiless shrug as it was whisked away.
‘Good luck!’ it called out to Little Rose as it disappeared from her view.
Little Rose waited, watching the nothingness draw closer like a tide. Another Park, another Downtown, another Residential Area. The ghosts yammered more and more loudly with each new and nearer bite.
Soon the thing was eating through the nearest Downtown, the nearest Artists’ Quarter.
Then it went gulp and there was nothing beyond the lake.
yimmer yammer… went the ghosts voices.
Gulp went the mouth again, and the lake was gone.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Gulp.
49
Little Rose found herself back on that high platform under the stars. She was looking out over the patchwork of the SenSpace worlds. There was the seaside, there was the forest, there were the mountains, there was a little part of the City without EndTM, all laid out for her to choose from, just as if nothing amiss had ever happened.
‘I’m very, very sorry, my dear,’ said a familiar voice. ‘You must have had a dreadful time of it. There was a technical problem with the interface, I’m afraid.’
Little Rose turned smiling to Mr Gladheim. He put a protective arm across her shoulder. ‘You know I’ll never feel quite the same about you again,’ she said, ‘now that I’ve seen you vanish in slices.’
Mr Gladheim didn’t know what to say.
‘Are you under the control of a human operator at the moment?’ asked Little Rose.
After a moment’s hesitation, Mr Gladheim nodded.
Little Rose nodded.
‘What’s your name, operator?’
Again Mr Gladheim hesitated.
‘I don’t know if I’m…’
‘Go on,’ said Little Rose.
‘Er… Janet,’ he said, ‘Janet Müller.’
Little Rose smiled at the notion of a woman speaking with Mr Gladheim’s manly baritone.
‘Ruth Simling,’ she said, ‘That’s who my operator is. Not that there’s much left of Ruth Simling.’
Mr Gladheim nodded, sagely, Janet Müller not knowing what else to say.
‘Everything’s back to normal down there in the City,’ she made Mr Gladheim say after a pause. ‘Your House is back how you made it. I expect yo
u want to go back there don’t you? Maybe we could sort out that orchard you wanted?’
Little Rose turned away from him and looked out over the many worlds below them.
‘Be honest Janet, how would you like it if this was the only place you could be?’
Janet did not know what to say to this either, so she let Sol Gladheim look shrewd and sympathetic and not say anything at all.
Little Rose, however, was looking out over the worlds.
She noticed some bare mountains in the distance she hadn’t seen before. She thought perhaps she’d go there.
50
All the mountain roads were decayed and rutted. The way into the village of Anachromia was little more than a stony track climbing over a narrow pass and down into a stony valley. There were a few fields at the bottom of it but the crops grew so sparsely there that at first sight they didn’t seem to be cultivated at all. Overhead the sky was a leaden grey.
The streets of the village were empty, except for a few chickens and goats wandering the potholed paths between the rough stone houses. There were no children playing, no faces at windows looking out. The entire human population of the village – a hundred or so men, women and children – were gathered in the small village square. Under the supervision of a white-bearded priest holding aloft a silver crucifix, an adulteress was being publicly flogged by two sweating soldiers of the Greek Christian Army. Beside the priest stood the woman’s tiny, bewildered, husband, a meaningless smile on his face.
The woman cried out with each blow. Her husband winced. The priest muttered prayers. Some villagers smiled, some wept, some shouted abuse. In some way or another, everyone was busy with the ritual that was taking place.
But when the car appeared, the whole village turned to stare. A hundred gaunt and malnourished faces watched silently as the vehicle passed among them. Even the soldiers and the cuckolded husband stared, even the victim herself hanging from the whipping post. They all stared with the same blank incredulity as the foreigners went by: Lucy and I sitting stiff and upright as we approached them, passed through them and then proceeded slowly out of the village again, along another rutted track.
I think it must have seemed to those villagers that they were watching ghosts, visitants from a mythical age when there were televisions, Coca-Cola, a weekly bus down to Sparta – and there were tourists, those strange stiff wealthy beings who came down from Northern lands, and stared and took photographs, and seemed so stiff and inhibited, yet wore hardly any clothes.
The villagers watched until we had vanished from sight.
And then, no doubt, everyone assumed his or her part in the drama they had been playing out – weeping, shouting, praying, leering, looking stern…
In the car, as we bumped slowly out of the village and back onto the mountainside, we were both silent. Lucy stared straight ahead of her. I stared straight ahead of me. Every once in a while Lucy would ask a question in a flat, empty voice:
‘What are Greeks?’
‘What is hate?’
‘What are men?’
Occasionally I would give a surly answer. Usually I ignored her. Back in the ASPU House I had once told Lucy to ‘be herself’ and her face had suddenly drained of all semblance of humanity. She may not have understood my instruction, but in fact she had faithfully carried it out. The syntec’s real self was that blank thing. She was dreary, she was duller than the most dreary and vacuous human being.
And yet there was determination in her. She was ruthlessly indifferent to the loss of her flesh. But there were things, many things, that she wanted to find out.
‘What are women?’
‘Why are those people doing that?’
‘Why were syntecs made?’
Sometimes she’d ask questions about things she’d read.
‘What is flesh?’ she asked me several times. ‘What is flesh?’
The sky was dark. There was going to be another storm.
The track climbed down into a larger valley and we passed through a small town. Small boys chased after the car, banging on the door and demanding coins.
Outside the town hall, a huge face gazed down. Painted in lurid colours the local ruler, Archbishop Christophilos, marched triumphantly forwards under the Holy Cross, with brave moustachioed soldiers in bandoliers on either side of him and his enemies perishing all around: Muslims above, schismatics below, heretics to the left… And to the right the beacon in Illyria had been set ablaze and stern Greek soldiers were smashing goggle-eyed robots in the streets…
Epiros had once seemed exotic and dangerous to me, but it was really a client state of Illyria. This was the Peloponnese, the heartland of the Greek Christian Army. This was really the Outlands.
‘Where are we going?’ Lucy suddenly asked as we drove out of the far side of the bleak little town.
The very sound of her voice now infuriated me, so hollow, so completely devoid of the resonances of human experience. Several times I had dreamed of copying my Cretan namesake in that guestworker’s tale and ending Lucy’s pointless existence with a chisel driven through the computer in her chest.
But in real waking life, I could never forget that I was the one who had brought Lucy here, and I was the one who told her that it made no difference that she was a syntec and not a real human being. I couldn’t destroy her. I couldn’t even abandon her, because out here that would amount to exactly the same thing.
‘Where are we going? To some damned village of course. Somewhere to eat and spend the night and find some more gas for the car so we can drive onto another damned village tomorrow.’
Lucy considered.
‘You said we’d stop after a time.’ Her attempts to frame original statements were always agonizingly slow. ‘You said you would have to stop… to make more money.’
‘Well we haven’t got to that stage yet.’ I snapped.
I had no idea at all what to do, other than keep wandering.
‘You shouldn’t travel in those mountains,’ I had been told by more than one well-meaning local, ‘There are bandits there who think nothing of raping women and cutting the throats of men. They will do it to Christians even, let alone atheists like you.’
But I ignored the advice, perhaps even half-hoping that an encounter with the bandits might provide a way out of my dilemma.
‘Well, you can’t earn us any money can you?’ I sneered at Lucy. ‘You’ve gone and destroyed the tools of your trade!’
Lucy said nothing, recognizing a hostile situation type HS-56.
I drove on. I wouldn’t stop until darkness came. Then I would find a room somewhere where Lucy could hide and moon over her books in the darkness.
51
The Illyrians made us.
The Greeks say we should never have been made.
If we go to the Greeks, they smash us to pieces.
If we stay, the Illyrians take away our thoughts…
They hate us.
They made us.
Why did they make us?
George hates me.
Every time he looks at me or speaks it is a Hostile Situation.
(I ask House Control to help me, but Security never comes.)
George hates me because I am a machine.
He hates me pretending.
He wants me to really be a woman.
But why did he go with me then?
There are many real women.
Men were hitting a woman in that village.
Her flesh was torn.
Perhaps it is really flesh they hate? But they are flesh all the way through.
Should this fault be reported to…
52
Lucy sat near the window in a tiny room that had been vacated for us by the owner of the local store in yet another village. She had taken off her dress because it chafed against the raw flesh at the top of her arms and legs. (I don’t think this hurt in exactly the human sense, but sensors embedded in the damaged flesh clamoured constantly to the silicon brain in her
chest, and took away information-processing capacity from elsewhere.)
Through the window came faintly the mournful rise and fall of the Orthodox liturgy. It was a day dedicated to the local saint, and most villagers, having crowded round to ogle at Lucy on our arrival, were now in church, where the services continued from morning to night. The storekeeper had left his fourteen-year-old son, Spiro, in charge of the tiny store which doubled as café, restaurant and bar.
I was down there drinking steadily, but already dreading the prospect of returning to Lucy: the stale smell of her suppurating flesh, her dull blank face stooped over some book or gazing into space as it pursued its slow, dull, ponderous thoughts…
There were two shepherds in the store as well as me. They had done their praying earlier in the day. One of them – Petros – was a man in his forties. Andreas, his nephew, was about my age. Both had large moustaches and were lean wiry men with sinews hardened by the daily journey up and down from the village to the stony pastures hidden away in the mountainside above.
I fascinated them. My fair skin and strange accent seemed to them uncanny. I think they would have liked to have poked at me and undressed me just to see how I was made, though not half as much as they would like to have done it to my beautiful wife. (Both had watched her silently under heavy-lidded eyes, undressing her in their minds, imagining a soft and yielding nakedness, and never guessing that under her pretty dress there was nothing but a hard plastic shell, with broken nutrient tubes and a printed manufacturer’s code).
It being impossible to undress Lucy or me, they did the next best thing: they plied me with raki to loosen my tongue, and besieged me with questions:
‘Do you really not believe in Christ?’
‘Do you admit that Constantinople is rightfully Greek?’
‘Which is the greatest country on Earth?’
The Holy Machine Page 15