It was a pivotal moment in their lives.
If they had attacked the Machine, or raised the alarm back in the village (‘The demon! The demon is still alive!’), they could have been heroes and quite possibly would have finally earned themselves that secure place in the community that had so far eluded them.
But they chose a quite opposite path, a choice for which the whole community would despise and condemn them – and one that could quite easily have led to their deaths. They helped the Machine to hide away in a cave. They brought it the sugar it needed. They talked to it. And finally they began a crazily dangerous journey, sometimes disguising the Machine as an old woman, sometimes hiding it under sacks in the back of a cart, sometimes piling fishing nets over it in the bottom of a boat. They tended it, stole for it, found it books in English to read, even translated books for it laboriously from the Greek.
There must have been many times when they were nearly caught, but they somehow survived, as people often seem to do when they do something completely outrageous and unexpected. And for Alec and Steve, each narrow escape only served to confirm their feeling that what had happened belonged to the realm of the miraculous, that it was God himself who had given a sinless soul to the Machine.
Eventually they had found themselves in the South Slav lands, where, at the ancient collision point of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam, there was a ferment of religions old and new and a great craving for miracles and wonders. Slowly and tentatively at first Steve and Alec had begun recruiting followers for the Holy Machine. For what had touched them about the Machine, touched many others. And the Machine was built to recognize and respond and adapt to human longing.
Word spread rapidly and very soon thousands were coming to hear the Machine speak, and whole communities were coming over to its cause.
70
I stayed for a few weeks in the monastery of the Holy Machine. My bed and my meals were provided for me and my wounds were tended by the monks. The rain stopped. My fever abated. And as I re-emerged from sickness, I found myself to be free too of the burden of guilt that had weighed down on me for so long. I don’t think I have ever felt so happy as I did then, pottering around those corridors and sitting in the courtyard listening to the buzzing sermons of the Holy Machine.
Why do we struggle so much? Why do we demand so much of life, when the happiest moments are when nothing is happening at all?
But, for all that, the time came when I felt like moving on. The monks had provided me with new clothes and I began to pack for a journey. I had it in my mind that I would return to Montenegro again and see Marija. I had no idea what her feelings might be now, or what kind of relationship we might have, but I felt for the first time in my life that it was at least possible for me to enjoy some sort of intimacy with another human being.
And then Alec (the older of the Machine’s Greek minders) came and told me some surprising news: there had been a coup d’état in Illyria. Elements of O3 and the armed forces had overthrown President Kung, and now promised general elections in which all permanent residents of Illyria would be entitled to vote. An amnesty had been declared for the AHS and the constitution was to be amended to allow a wide degree of religious freedom. The new government had also indicated a wish to sign a peace treaty with the members of the Holy Alliance, and had already declared a ceasefire unilaterally as a signal of good faith.
I was pretty dumbfounded by this of course. With hindsight everyone now says that this change was inevitable, and that for the Illyrian state to wage war simultaneously with external enemies and its own proletariat of guestworkers had never been sustainable for any length of time. But then it seemed incredible that something so powerful and entrenched could so suddenly have crumbled. And it was even harder to absorb the fact that I could now return my homeland, something which I’d always assumed would be a permanent impossibility.
For the first time in many weeks I also thought guiltily about Ruth.
So rather than go back up to Montenegro again, I decided to write to Marija and suggest that she meet me in Illyria City.
The Machine had its own cell, unfurnished except for a chair and desk where it sat reading continuously day and night whenever it wasn’t out preaching. The walls of the cell were lined with books obtained for it by well-wishers. There were books on theology, on history, on biology, on cybernetics, on philosophy and also a bizzarre range of other books which had been donated simply because they were in English: blockbuster thrillers, Seventh Day Adventist tracts, maintenance manuals for obsolete cars, tourist guides, comic books, even a dog-eared pornographic magazine.
But when I entered the cell, accompanied by Alec, the Machine was staring into space.
I told it that I’d come to say goodbye.
Its eyes swivelled towards me.
‘Thank you,’ it said.
‘Yes,’ said Alec, ‘If it wasn’t for you, the Holy One would still be an automaton in the syntec House in Illyria City, being used by men and having its mind wiped away every six months.’
I can’t say that this made me especially proud. I wondered how I could ever have entertained sexual desires and romantic fantasies about this strange, chitinous, utterly asexual being.
‘You’ve done well,’ I said to it. ‘It’s amazing how far you’ve travelled.’
The Machine regarded me. My words immediately seemed fatuous. It did not need self-esteem. It did not need personal attachments. It did not experience any especial feeling in connection with partings. Certainly it was conscious. Certainly it was alive. But it had its own quite different priorities from those of human beings.
‘You too,’ it observed.
71
I returned to the glassy towers of Illyria, where the streets were still patrolled by silver giants under the black-and-white flag of the eye (although there was talk now of changing the flag now for something less provocative and hostile). I walked on the waterfront and past the VR arcades, I looked across the water at the Beacon and watched the people going back and forth on the bridge that linked it to the land. I went straight away to the District of Faraday and to our old apartment block. The janitor called to me as I was walking to the elevator:
‘Excuse me sir, can I help you?’
It was a doll-like plastec, not unlike its predecessor, Shirley, who I’d seen on a gibbet in Ioannina. Speaking to it felt strange and uncomfortable. I’d got out of the habit of dealing with surrogate human beings.
‘I’ve come to see my mother, Ruth Simling…’
‘I’m sorry sir, but no one of that name lives here.’
‘Oh come on. She’s not the sort of person to move! Check your records: apartment 148.’
‘Apartment 148 is occupied by a Mr Hubert.’
I went out and found a phone. The number rang for a bit and I wondered if this too would be a dead-end.
Ruth answered just as I was about to put it down.
‘Yes? Ruth Simling here. Little Rose. Hello? Hello?’
‘It’s George.’
There was a short silence.
‘George?’ her tone was almost nonchalaent, ‘Oh. Where are you?’
‘Here. In IC. I’ve just been to the apartment and I hear you’ve moved.’
‘Yes. I’m in SenSpace all the time now.’
‘Nothing new there then! But where’s your address.’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What you mean? You must be somewhere.’
‘Yes, but you don’t want to go there. You’ll have to come and see me in SenSpace.’
Reluctantly, I found a SenSpace access point and climbed into a suit.
‘George Simling? This is a nice surprise!’ purred the familiar intimate voice of the SenSpace Corporation. ‘Welcome back to SenSpace! Long time no see! Any special place you want to be?’
I found myself beside a carp pool, where Little Rose was sitting watching the fishes.
‘He’s just about to do it,’ she said, with a little, empty laugh, �
��wait a moment. Yes, there! One side of the pool to the other! A fish with Discontinuous Motion.’
I sat down beside her.
‘They work on a one-hour cycle, these fishes,’ said Little Rose. ‘A cheapskate program really. They could have put in a self-evolving system.’
‘I was involved with the AHS, you know. I had to get away. I’ve been in the Outlands: Greece, Albania, Dalmatia… I ran away with a syntec, a beautiful syntec, but she got burned in this dreadful village down in the Peloponnese.’
‘There he is again look. In an hour’s time it’ll happen again – whoosh – right across the pool.’
‘I was in the middle of the Holy Wars. I saw hundreds of corpses. You remember Marija? She lives with her uncle now. He’s an Orthodox priest with a beard and his hair tied up in a bun at the back. You’d be amazed at the things people believe out there.’
‘I told Sol about it. He said they’d get it fixed, only this isn’t a particularly popular world, so the investment doesn’t really come this way. It’s all in the big worlds, like Nine and City. Actually that’s one reason I like this place. It’s sort of a quiet backwater and nothing much happens. No one apart from me wants to spend more than a few minutes here. In fact Sol says that if it wasn’t for me they’d probably shut it down…’
I let her wander on like this for several minutes.
‘Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?’ I asked.
‘If you want to tell me.’
I shrugged. We fell to watching the fishes once again.
‘So how much time do you spend out of SenSpace now?’ I eventually interrupted.
‘I never leave it.’
It took me a little while to grasp what she meant. And when I finally did, I got angry.
‘And now you’re going to tell me it’s all my fault I suppose! If I hadn’t gone away and left you it would never have happened, is that right? It was all because of George being selfish as usual! Well you listen to me. It wasn’t my job to look after you. You were the parent not me. I tucked you up in bed and I held your hand when you cried, but it wasn’t my job! It wasn’t my job.’
But Little Rose completely ignored this unprecedented outburst.
‘I didn’t think it was so terrible at first,’ she said. ‘In fact I thought to begin with that it was just what I always wanted: to be able to live in SenSpace and never come out. But I’m tired of SenSpace now. I do hire a Vehicle sometimes and walk around outside a bit, but I haven’t really got anywhere to go. No one to visit. And anyway a Vehicle isn’t the same. You can’t feel the air for one thing.’
We watched the electronic fishes swimming around in their pool.
‘Charlie got thrown out when they cleared the apartment.’
‘I suppose that was going to happen sooner or later.’
‘Yes,’ Little Rose exclaimed with real indignation, ‘but they shouldn’t have just thrown him out without asking me.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I want to get out of SenSpace,’ Ruth said, after some time had passed.
‘Well that’s impossible now, isn’t it?’
‘No, not impossible. You see, I’ve got a plan…’
The plan surprised me. It took more courage than I thought Ruth possessed.
‘But that will mean,’ I said, ‘that will mean that you…’
Little Rose laughed. ‘The hour’s up. Look! Whoosh! There he goes again!’
72
I met Ruth in a Vehicle Centre. She wasn’t recognizable as Ruth of course. The vehicle was a syntec in the form of a pretty young woman with long red hair.
‘Walk up and down the room a bit,’ said the technician, ‘it always feels a odd at first when you’re used to a virtual body.’
‘Yes, I know, I’ve used Vehicles before,’ said the redhead, taking a few steps.
‘This downward pull!’ she said to me, ‘this planet, this mass of rock pulling you towards it! You forget what gravity really means in there!’
It was strange to hear her talk like that, as if for the first time she was actually trying to savour her existence.
‘You can’t trip up in SenSpace,’ she said, ‘you can’t experience an impact that causes pain, you can’t…’
She broke off and went over to the window. The Vehicle Centre was on the tenth floor of the SenSpace Corporation offices, one block away from the sea front.
‘The towers always seem so small!’ she exclaimed.
‘Everyone says that!’ laughed the technician. ‘Even though they are the tallest towers in the world. Like you say we have to take account of gravity out here in dull old Reality.’
Ruth sighed.
‘I used to think it was dull old reality, but you know it’s good looking at a tower and knowing that every tonne of concrete had to be lifted into place against the pull of gravity. In SenSpace making a building is nothing – like doodling on a bit of paper.’
We went down in the elevator and out into the street. It was a bright, hot, summer day. For a while we just stood and watched the people go by. To me, having been so long in the Outlands, they looked well fed, well cared for and shockingly sexy in their scanty summer clothes. But to Ruth, used to the physically perfect denizens of SenSpace, they looked exactly the opposite: clumsy, overweight, ill-proportioned, with clothes that didn’t fit properly or crumpled in the wrong places.
‘Real people are so ugly!’ she said, smiling.
We joined the human stream. Ruth was looking round at everything, taking it all in. She had no sense of smell, no sensation of breathing and – since all her sensations were being transmitted to her brain via SenSpace – her visual field had the same slightly grainy quality that it had within SenSpace itself. But still, she could look around at the people and know that, for them, this truly was reality.
We walked the streets for a little while, and along the sea front. At the head of the Beacon the Ferris wheels extended, gathered speed, drew in again, stopped.
We turned into the Avenue of Science.
‘ROBOT MESSIAH BRINGS SKOPJE TO STANDSTILL’, said the headline outside the News Building, and the huge screen showed a picture of vast crowds in the Macedonian capital, and then a library picture of the Machine itself. ‘NEXT STOP TIRANA’
I smiled. Tirana was not to far away and I decided I would go there to hear it preach. After all, if was not for me the Holy Machine would not exist, and all those hundreds of thousands of excited people wouldn’t even now be heading towards the capital of Albania. I might be alone in this world but I had certainly made a difference to it.
A security robot walked by.
‘What do you make of the robot messiah?’ I asked it.
‘Beg your pardon, sir?’
‘Leave the poor thing alone,’ said Ruth with a giggle.
We went into a department store and bought a garden trowel. Then we hired a car. Ruth paid. I drove. Ruth, in the form of the redhead, got into the passenger seat: a hired Vehicle climbing into the vehicle it had hired.
We headed for the southern side of town, where the Body Maintenance Facility was located.
As we walked from the car to the main entrance, Ruth suddenly stopped.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘What do you mean, what am I doing?’
Then I realized she wasn’t talking to me. She was looking straight in front of her at some figure that was invisible to me.
‘No,’ she said, ‘please don’t try and persuade me. I’ve made up my mind.’
The figure must have said something back to her.
‘No, I am within my legal rights and so is he. I checked up on that. It’s not his responsibility, it’s mine. And I’m entitled to do it.’
Again, there must have been some reply.
‘No Sol,’ Ruth said, ‘I don’t want that anymore. You are not “fond” of me. You are not really even a person. I don’t want those games anymore.’
She turned to me.
‘Come on Geo
rge. It’s just the SenSpace corporation poking their nose in.’
We carried on.
‘You have changed, Ruth,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘It was when City without End seized up,’ she said. ‘It just came to me that there isn’t a safe place anywhere, so there’s no point in looking.’
We went up the steps into the Facility, and were greeted by a stunningly beautiful receptionist.
‘Good morning! What can I do to help?’
She was a syntec of course. She was too beautiful to be a human being, and her desk was completely free of phones, screens or keyboards.
‘My name is Ruth Simling. I’ve come to collect my property.
A moment passed, while the receptionist checked the diary in her head.
‘Yes, Ms Simling, Dr Hammer is expecting you. He’ll be right down.’
‘I didn’t want to see a doctor. I just want to collect what’s mine and go.’
‘Yes, of course. The doctor understands.’
Ruth was about to say something else, then changed her mind and shrugged.
‘We’re two syntecs together, you and me,’ she said to the receptionist after a while.
The receptionist smiled brightly. ‘I beg your pardon, Ms Simling, was there something else you wanted?’
I think she’d been wiped clean recently. Her reactions were a little wooden.
* * *
Dr Hammer arrived soon after. He was a young man, about my own age.
‘Ms Simling? Pleased to meet you. If you’d like to step in here. Do you want your husband to join us?’
He meant me. I looked older, after all, than the beautiful redhead. We followed him into a small interview room.
‘I was hoping to contact you before you left SenSpace.’ Dr Hammer was anxious and tense. ‘You see, I wanted to have a proper discussion with you this step you’re proposing to take. I mean… are you aware of the consequences? There’s no question at all of survival for anything other than the briefest of…’
The Holy Machine Page 21