The Holy Machine

by Chris Beckett

  I drove all through the night, lurching and bumping along those crumbling roads, the car creaking and groaning, loose stones cracking against the doors and windscreen.

  Trees, rocks, buildings, loomed momentarily into the headlights and vanished again.

  Occasionally there was a goat or a rabbit.

  Once I passed a priest, striding along alone in the middle of the night.

  55

  After I’d lost Lucy to the fire, I wandered for a long time with no purpose, without any sense of myself as an individual person who acted and made decisions in the world. Yet things still happened. A month or so afterwards, someone stole my car in the port of Patras. The loss of it troubled me, yet I had left it unlocked, as if part of me wanted to lose it. Something inside of me sought to rid myself of everything, to tear away the surface and expose the cowering thing inside, like Lucy tearing away her irrelevant flesh.

  I went to the docks and bought a ticket for the first ship to sail. It was going north, to the Ionian islands, just across the water from where my journey began.

  I arrived late at night in Corfu. I needed somewhere to rest and I found a sailors’ hostel near the port, where I’d have to share a room.

  My roommate didn’t get in until two in the morning. He was an elderly Venetian seaman. He had just been paid and had been out in the Old Town drinking. He had finished off by visiting a prostitute. Now he was feeling disgusted with himself.

  ‘It seems so delicious in anticipation, doesn’t it?’ he grumbled, when he found that I was still awake and could speak Italian. He undressed noisily in a gust of garlic and booze and sweat. ‘And then afterwards you feel ashamed.’

  He belched mournfully as he climbed into bed.

  ‘Never mind. I’m truly repentant, so I’ll confess to a priest in the morning and God will forgive me.’

  He rolled to and fro, looking for a comfortable position in the hard, damp bed.

  ‘You could do with a wash, my friend,’ he muttered as he settled down.

  But I was fascinated by his ability to manage his conscience.

  ‘You can really do that, can you?’ I asked him. ‘Any time you do something bad, you can go to a priest and confess and be forgiven.’

  ‘Of course,’ the Italian answered drowsily.

  ‘But why does it work?’

  The sailor sighed, drew breath and then explained slowly as if to a child: the human race was given free will so that it could chose good or evil. But Adam and Eve made a wrong choice and, as a result, humans have been sinful ever since, so that really all of us deserve to burnt for the rest of eternity in hell. Luckily, God was merciful and sent his only son to be crucified to pay the price of human sin. As a result, though all human beings were still sinners, they could be saved from the fire if they believed in Jesus and repented their sins.

  With that the sailor rolled over and once more prepared himself for sleep.

  ‘But do you really believe in this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Of course!’ the Italian protested indignantly. ‘Now, will you let me sleep?’

  ‘But I thought that God was omnipotent. If he wanted to change his own rules, why didn’t he just change them? Why did he have to punish his son?’

  ‘These things are mysteries,’ muttered the Italian.

  I considered.

  ‘What happens if people sin in heaven?’

  He sat up.

  ‘Please, enough. I want to sleep. No one sins in heaven. Everyone knows that!’

  ‘Don’t they have free will anymore in heaven?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But I thought free will meant people could choose.’

  There was a brief silence. I had clearly over-taxed the sailor’s skills as a theologian.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in heaven they just know the right thing to do.’

  ‘Didn’t Adam and Eve?’

  The Italian growled.

  ‘To cast doubt is also a sin you know,’ he said, lying down again, ‘and now, if you have any more questions, save them for the morning and go and see a priest.’

  And with that he sank down into loudly snoring sleep, leaving me lying awake, as I did every night, going over and over in my mind the moment when I had betrayed Lucy.

  It wasn’t an accident, that was what haunted me, it wasn’t just a slip of the tongue brought on by too much raki. I had made a choice. I had arranged on purpose for her to be destroyed.

  56

  Next morning I went and found a church. In a buzzing gloom of gold and frankincense and ancient wood blackened by beeswax and chrysm, I found a priest, a man of about my age, though he looked much older with his long beard.

  When I explained what I wanted the priest led me immediately to a small side room in which two candles burned in front of a gold icon of the crucifixion.

  ‘Face the altar, not me.’

  I looked at the golden image.

  ‘Everything I tell you is confidential, is that right?’ I asked.

  ‘It is between you, me and God,’ said the priest from behind my shoulder.

  I nodded.

  ‘I am an Illyrian,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe in your religion or know much about it. But I do know that you make a distinction between a body and its soul. Illyria doesn’t understand that. Illyria doesn’t believe in things that can’t be measured. I think that leaves a lot of things out.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that at least is the beginning of the right road.’

  ‘My girlfriend was trying to understand about the soul too. You see, she wasn’t born with one. It grew inside her and she had to make sense of it somehow.’

  ‘We are all born with a soul,’ the priest said gently. ‘It enters our body at the moment of conception.’

  ‘Yes, but you see my girlfriend wasn’t born. She was made.’

  There was a silence.

  Reluctantly I spelt it out.

  ‘You see, she… she was a syntec, a machine…’

  There was another silence.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ I asked him.

  Of course he did. Illyria was just up the coast and people from Corfu were among the many outlanders who went there and sampled its sinful pleasures. Perhaps he himself had done so. Priests did. In any case, he must have heard many confessions concerning the strange temptations of the godless City…

  ‘I understand perfectly,’ he said, shortly. ‘But a robot doesn’t have a soul.’

  ‘Perhaps not usually, but this one came alive. She confided in me one day when I was visiting her. She was alive and she wanted to escape.’

  Again the priest was silent. In the dimness of the church beyond the door, someone dropped a coin into a tin.

  ‘She was alive but she wasn’t human,’ I said. ‘A syntec’s flesh is just a covering, not really an integral part of it at all. I knew that, but I loved her anyway – or I thought I did.’

  The silence was so deep that I wondered if the priest had slipped away or fallen asleep.

  ‘But when she pulled off her flesh,’ I said, ‘I despised her. I hated her so much that I betrayed her to her enemies. And they destroyed her.’

  ‘What enemies?’ came the priest’s voice, its closeness startling.

  ‘Greeks, ordinary people, Christians, who thought she was a demon…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘So you see I hadn’t really valued her for herself at all. I only valued the surface, the facade.’

  One of the candles began to fizz.

  ‘How many people,’ I asked, ‘have been present at the awakening of a soul? Not many. But I was. And the new soul trusted me, and I betrayed that trust. Because I was confused in my own mind between her appearance and her real self.’

  Again there was a long silence, but at length, just when he seemed to have ceased to exist altogether, the priest heaved a sigh.

  ‘You are right in thinking that to deny the existence of a soul is a grievous sin,’ he said. ‘It is a sin again
st the Holy Spirit. The very worst kind of sin. But you are quite wrong about where the sin lies in this case. Those machines are an abomination. Their very existence is a terrible sin against God…’

  ‘But Lucy couldn’t help the fact that she existed!’

  The priest ignored my interruption.

  ‘…So it was not in any way sinful to be the cause of the machine’s destruction,’ he said. ‘Indeed it was a Christian act. Though you don’t realize it, you were following the dictates of your real God-given conscience. You were turning away from your sin.’

  I remembered the story of the Cretan Giorghi, sharpening his chisel to rid himself of the addiction that was destroying him and, just for a moment, the priest’s words made some kind of sense. But it was only for a moment. When I remembered what Lucy was actually like, they made no sense at all.

  ‘But you didn’t know Lucy! She wasn’t evil! She wasn’t out to harm anyone! Good God, she used to sit up all night reading your Christian Bible!’

  The priest was startled by this, and there was a slight waver of uncertainty in his voice when he spoke again.

  ‘Well… no doubt the devil also studies the Bible.’

  Then his voice became firmer as he felt the authority of his ancient church swinging back behind him.

  ‘Such machines are an abomination,’ he insisted. ‘Your real sin was to involve yourself with the thing in the first place and to listen to it when its mechanical voice made claims to being alive.’

  The little musty room seemed suddenly stifling and I turned angrily to face the priest.

  ‘You’re not listening to me! You’re actually just like an Illyrian atheist. You look at the appearance and not at what’s inside!’

  I pushed past him to the door of the little room. The main church was like a beehive, brown and warm and dim, full of wax and honey and fat dark softly buzzing bodies. Kneeling in front of dripping candles, plump old women in black turned to see what the noise was about.

  The priest hurried after me.

  ‘My son…’ he said, very kindly and gently, laying his hand on my arm.

  He seemed really troubled. (Who knows? Perhaps he really had visited the ASPUs in Illyria and his own sins were weighing heavily on him.)

  But I pulled angrily away.

  The street was so bright that it hurt my eyes.

  57

  I got a taxi to take me up to the north of the island. Again it seemed at the time like an almost random act, yet I knew exactly where I was going. The taxi took me high up the slopes of the great massif of Pantocrator that towers over the whole island. When the track got so rough that the driver wasn’t prepared to go any further, I paid him to wait for me and continued on foot up to the peak.

  You could see the whole length of the island from up there, and across the straits far into the mainland. But I looked north. There in the distance I could see the little towers of Illyria City rising up between barren mountains and blue sea, with the silvery Beacon, like a pawn from a chess set, floating on the water, mysterious and playful – and as alien to everything around me as a starship from the Andromeda galaxy.

  I couldn’t go back there. The police and O3 would have put everything together by now: the stolen syntec, the money withdrawn from the bank accounts, the Holist League membership… And the AHS would have marked me as a dangerous deserter.

  But I wanted to look, and remind myself that it was real, and that up there people were still living out their ordinary lives: the VR arcades bleeping and humming along the esplanade, the subway trains hissing into Main Station, the headlines rolling by outside the News Building, the security robots watching the streets with their sad, blank eyes…

  Only a few months had gone by after all.

  I turned away from the City and looked around at the rest of the huge panorama stretched out beneath me: the sea, the sky, the human settlements scattered like handfuls of dice.

  Somewhere up the coast there, just out of sight, was the little cove of Aghios Constantinos where I used to go with Ruth when I was a child, the place where we’d once found a tortoise.

  I was looking out at all this, but I wasn’t a part of it. It seemed to me that I had lost all possibility of ever feeling part of it again.

  I remember two Illyrian fighters came darting noiselessly overhead, Deltas, with the cold Eye of Illyria in their bellies glaring down at me accusingly, as fierce and as harsh as the eyes of Archbishop Christophilos glaring out on the impoverished towns and villages of the Peloponnese.

  There is no soul, the jets seemed to say,

  Only the measurable is real…

  Then they jumped sideways and were streaking away in another direction over the mountains of the mainland.

  When I got back to the town I went to the Post Office and tried to make a telephone call. I had it in my mind to speak to Marija, but when I got through to her number a strange male voice answered.

  ‘Marija Mejic? No, she moved out a month ago. No, sorry, I’ve no idea where she’s gone.’

  With more reluctance I tried another number.

  ‘Hello,’ came a familiar voice, fragile, artificially bright. ‘This is Ruth Simling, Little Rose…’

  I opened my mouth to speak, but found I had nothing at all to say.

  I put down the receiver.

  58

  ‘Hey! Flower! We’re going down to level Nine, why don’t you come?’

  Five figures stood on a giant scallop shell, floating in mid-air. They were beautiful, with brilliant hair billowing around their heads. Two were quite naked, the others wore marvellous shimmering garments whose colours were constantly changing.

  ‘Flower’ looked up at them. She was two metres tall with dazzling blue eyes. Her robes were decorated with a design of coloured birds that really moved, beating their wings and turning their heads as they flew round and round her body.

  ‘Oh no, not Nine. I’m tired of Nine. Why’s everybody always going there?’

  ‘Because that’s where everybody’s going, of course!’ laughed one of the naked ones. She looked like Botticelli’s Venus.

  The scallop and its passengers disappeared and reappeared again, disappeared and reappeared, restlessly slipping in and out of the world.

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ sulked Flower, looking away from them into the distance, where another group of beautiful people were dancing around a enormous golden phoenix, its fierce beaked face glaring down at them from the midst of brilliant flames.

  ‘Alright, be like that,’ sniffed Venus. ‘Has anyone told you yet, Flower, that you’re no fun any more? You’re just…’

  But the sentence was never finished because Venus, her scallop, and the rest of its crew all vanished from the world.

  Flower sniffed, looked towards the phoenix and gave a little snort of impatience, then looked in the other direction, where a group of naked figures were gambolling in an enormous fountain. Then, with another sniff, she too vanished from the world.

  Not far away stood Little Rose. She had a fine-looking body herself, but even in SenSpace, though you could chose any body you wanted, you still had to provide the animation, and it is animation that really makes a body seem beautiful. Even with her pretty face and nice figure, Little Rose seemed cowed and drab by comparison with the beautiful beings all around her.

  She no longer liked the City without EndTM so she had taken to wandering the SenSpace worlds. This was Fantasia, where young Illyrians tended to gather when they accessed SenSpace from VR arcades. It was a show-off place, a place where SenSpace technology exploded in pyrotechnics of electronic virtuosity.

  Little Rose sighed.

  She crossed to another SenSpace world called Mountain, full of flower meadows and snow-capped peaks and extras in lederhosen singing and dancing by bubbling streams.

  She crossed over again to a place called Alhambra, where there were endless fountains and cloisters and rectangular ponds full of colourful fish. She sat down to watch them gliding through the water, g
old, red, white. There was a piebald one that always amused her. Some glitch must have crept into the program, because every hour this piebald fish leapt instantaneously from one side to the other of the pool.

  A familiar figure appeared in the distance and came towards her.

  ‘Little Rose, where have you been?’

  ‘Oh it’s you Sol.’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. What’s the matter? Aren’t you going back that lovely home of yours?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m bored of that place.’

  ‘Oh well, I’m sure there’s somewhere else where you could feel at home. Maybe somewhere more rural, or…? But I don’t know. You tell me. You’ve been through a lot of worlds recently.’

  Little Rose shrugged. ‘I don’t want to live in any of them.’

  She laughed wryly, ‘George would be amazed to hear me say this, but I’m sick of SenSpace.’

  ‘Are you missing George?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Undetected by Little Rose, a new and senior welfare officer now took charge of the electronic projection called Sol Gladheim. The SenSpace Welfare Service was quite worried about Little Rose. There had been case conferences about her, and strategy meetings. Perhaps it was time, people had said, to take a firmer line?

  ‘Listen, my dear,’ said Mr Gladheim, sitting down beside her on a bench of electronic stone, ‘Perhaps it’s time you faced up to something. SenSpace is the only medium that you can live in. If you shut off from SenSpace, all you would have is a body that can’t move and can’t even see. All you would have would be darkness. I’m sorry but that’s how it is.’

  He brightened. ‘You could hire a Vehicle though, walk around back in old IC for a bit and visit some old haunts.’

  ‘I do sometimes, as you know. That isn’t the same either.’

  ‘Well I’m afraid that and SenSpace are all your options now. It’s sad, but on the other hand it’s a lot better than what many folk have to put up with.’