Futuretrack 5

by Robert Westall

  “Kitson, Henry, will make the tea.”

  Again, that indrawn breath of envy.

  “Depress the red button,” intoned Headtech. “Pour boiling water into the teapot, first removing the lid. Rotate the pot clockwise until it is thoroughly warm. Always warm the pot.”

  A censorious echo from the waiting ranks: “Always warm the pot.” Like a church service.

  “Take the spoon,” intoned Headtech softly, his pebble glass roaming the ranks. “Transfer two spoonfuls of Indian tea leaves into the pot. One for each person, and one for the pot.”

  “One for the pot,” echoed the ranks.

  It was hard not to giggle. It was hard to stop my hand trembling, spilling a few black tea leaves onto that shining white trolley. Every eye watched for my slightest error. One black speck would have ruined my career. But I managed it safely.

  “When the velocity of steam issuing from the kettle no longer increases, fill the pot.”

  I watched the jet of steam grow longer and longer.

  “Enough,” said Headtech. “Pour.” His voice was sharp with exasperation. But the fatal error would have been not waiting long enough…

  I poured. Immediately, a rich aroma ascended, billowed steamily down the hall. Real Indian tea, costly as diamonds now the Indians found they got richer growing opium. Among the ranks, every nostril twitched. I replaced the lid with the tiniest clink that only Headtech and I heard.

  “Kitson, Henry, has made the tea. He is now tea boy to the chief systems analyst.”

  The assembly sighed; till the end they’d hoped for a mistake.

  “Take the tea to the analyst, at seven precisely.”

  The venerable electronic clock at the far end of the hall swung its minute hand vertical. As the red second hand and the blue millisecond hand swept up to join it, the doors below swung open automatically.

  The trolley’s wheels kissed gently on the polished floor. A dying song of steam came from the kettle. The willow-pattern cup and saucer rattled like a little chiding monkey. The teapot fumed like a fragrant chimney, and off down the enviously sniffing ranks I went.

  Another door marked “Programming Terminal” swung open. Another, and another. I was in an unknown part of the building; an unused part. Bare concrete walls with crudely chalked directions. I entered too many lifts that took me up and down at random. Turned too many corners, losing all sense of direction. Crossed slender glass bridges, so that I seemed to wheel the trolley out among the lamplit stars. Saw beneath me other bridges I’d just crossed in the opposite direction.

  When I looked back, there were no doors marked “Exit.” I passed far too many doors altogether, all painted dull red, none carrying any sign. Some weren’t even real doors (I kicked them as I passed) but nailed-up plastic board. Others opened onto pits of darkness. I felt like a rat entering a 3-D maze; the kind they starve to death in. I felt like a stray thought entering a mind immensely cunning, devious, and possibly mad. Idris, the chief analyst. Idris protecting himself and Laura. Idris and Laura, the fairy tale that tragically came true; Idris and Laura, a legend rotting.

  I glanced at my watch; I’d been walking fifteen minutes and the whole building wasn’t that big. I wondered if the pattern of lift and corridor would start repeating itself, so I’d go on walking forever, like a poor fly on a Moebius strip. The teapot was nearly cold. My legs ached and shook. Was the old sod pumping some drugging gas into the air conditioning? Certainly he’d be watching me on closed-circuit TV. Idris watched everybody; nobody saw Idris. Except his current tea boy. He’d be watching me sweat; shaking and drooling with senile laughter. They reckoned he was well over fifty. If he was still alive. Maybe he’d been dead and rotting since he threw his last tea boy out, a year ago. Dead and rotting, and electronic Laura calmly carrying on… People heard his voice over the phone every day. But Laura had long since recorded his voice and thought patterns, could mimic him to perfection…

  The end came suddenly. A last door swung open. The trolley sailed through and I crashed into a pile of rubbish. A very high pile; a lot descended on my head. Sharp-cornered picture frames; painful broom handles. I was practically buried. I removed a vacuum hose that coiled round my neck like a boa constrictor, and stared about. A lumber room… but expensive. A Georgian grandfather clock, leaning heavily, held up by two books under one worm-eaten leg. Its front ripped off, displaying rusty weights. That painting that hung dirtily askew … a Rembrandt? A cheap print, surely? But there was a hole in it; the torn edge showed frayed canvas and hand-applied paint flaking off. A clever fake? I picked off a sliver of paint and smelled it. Linseed oil? I put the sliver gently into my top pocket. Later, I’d have it analysed by flame-spectrometer.

  A Chippendale chair, with a black 1920s bike leaning against it; oil from the chainwheel was soaking into the damask. A 1910 typewriter, a brass bioscope, a bundle of salmon-fishing rods. The loot of centuries, scattered and spoiled like the toys of some millionaire baby.

  “Idiot!” A tall man was standing motionless in one corner, buried to the waist in a horn gramophone and dusty piles of 78 rpm records. A faded man; his hair, once ginger, was now grey-pink. His face long, white, and bony; his nose even bonier. An animal nose, the kind an anteater might poke into things. It sniffed twice, to punctuate each remark, and when it sniffed it twitched left-right, left-right. On each side, set in a cage of white bone, a small green eye, cold as a marble. The huge hands holding a record had flat white knuckles and ginger hairs between.

  His white coat had suffered thirty years of rape; pockets gaped like manure sacks, the front hung open in rigid greasy folds, buttons dangled useless on three-inch threads. In places the fabric had worn into rags.

  “Stupid little idiot. You’ve ruined an experiment that took three months to set up.”

  “Like what? Structural inertia in nineteenth-century junkshops?”

  He nearly laughed, then stopped himself and shouted, “What do you want?”

  “I’ve brought your tea.”

  “I said what do you want? You can’t want to bring a nasty old sod his tea.”

  “They told me to.”

  “I didn’t ask what they told you. I asked you what you wanted.”

  “To get on with my job.” I was getting narked.

  “Tea boy? Call that a job for a twenty-one-year-old?”

  “It’s the only job I’ve got.”

  “But if you lick their shiny white boots they might give you a better one? Like mine, perhaps? What do you want, boy? Want, want, want? Or do you enjoy licking boots?”

  “I want to know why you’re so bloody rude.”

  “I’ve thrown people downstairs for less than that.” He advanced, carrying the 78 like a weapon. He was no prettier close to; his breath was foul. His bleached ginger eyelashes made his eyes look like creatures that had crawled out of a swamp. “You know I can sack you just like that!” He snapped his bony fingers. “I sacked the last one in one minute forty-five seconds.”

  “I still want to know why you’re being so bloody rude.”

  He gave me a sideways, marble glint. “Because no one can stop me. No one can stop me doing anything. I built Laura.” He waved a huge hand.

  I saw a gilt Louis XIV table, with fag burns round the edge. Five different coloured phones, each sitting on a heap of scraps of paper, like a bird on its nest. Draped from them, hundreds of Coke-can rings hung on pieces of yellow wool. There was a large paper airplane, made from computer printouts. Its wings were delicately scalloped, full of carefully cut holes. Beyond, an unmade bed. Fastened to the wall above, Laura, the national computer.

  I was surprised how small she was. Built of stainless-steel boxes; smaller than a man. She bore some resemblance to a winged figure, with outstretched arms touching a word processor one side, a display screen on the other. Where the head should have been was a woman’s face, sculpted in stainless steel, the mouth slightly open on darkness, but the hollows of the eyes full of little points of steel that ca
ught the light, so the expression of the eyes seemed to change.

  “Why does she look like an angel?”

  “Because that’s the way I made her. Why shouldn’t she look beautiful?”

  “I like the face.”

  “Should bloody well hope so—cost me a thousand credits. Say hello.”

  “On voice transmission,” I said, twisting my voice into the whine of computerspeak.

  The 78 record broke in pieces over my head. “That’s no way to talk to a lady. Say hello nicely.”

  “Whom am I addressing?” asked Laura. The voice was low, rich, and infinitely sad. Unlike any computer I’d heard.

  The analyst pulled me to him confidentially; I nearly fainted from the smell of his armpit. “I made her voice myself. From just this. Listen.”

  He pressed a button; there was the click of a tape recorder coming on; then the crackling noise that telephones made before I was born.

  “Hampstead 76112. Oh, it’s you, Idris. You shouldn’t be phoning me. You’ll get in terrible trouble if they find out. I can’t talk—here’s Mummy coming. Good-bye, Idris. I love you.” It ended with a sigh, and another click.

  “That’s the last words she ever said to me,” said Idris. “She married an Est and had four kids. Died seven years ago… Laura.”

  “You built the whole voice, just from that?”

  “Took me twenty years. That steel face I had made— that’s like her, too.”

  “How did you… lose her?”

  “I scored a hundred percent in my E-levels, just like you. Est-ladies don’t marry Techs. Tell her your name and rank.”

  Repressing a shudder, I did so.

  “Good evening, Kitson, Henry.” The voice carried only its eternal note of sadness.

  “She likes you,” said Idris. “I think we’ll keep you, for a bit. Shall we, Laura?”

  “I have recorded acceptance of his voice.”

  “Smart computer, that. I made her smart. Taught her to ask for context.”

  “Context?”

  “If any of them wants to ask her something, they have to put their question into context. Tell her everything about the project they’re working on. So she keeps on knowing more and more. She knows everything—that’s why she’s still the national computer.”

  “Everything?”

  Idris laughed bitterly. “Not everything. She doesn’t know about human decency—ethics. Never heard of Buddha, or Bertrand Russell. Can you imagine a Buddhist computer running a lobo-farm? That’s my trump card, boy. I’ve made a last tape for her—full of ethics. Kind of truth bomb. Feed her that, she’d blow up, poor old thing. Course, they know I’ve got something up my sleeve, in case they try getting rid of me. They’ve tried searching for it, while I’m asleep. But they’ve no idea where it is. Could be inside her already, couldn’t it? Just waiting for one tap on a button. Still, I never leave her alone for a second, even to go to the loo.” He pointed to a long row of toilet bowls, spaced along one wall of the great room. “This used to be an unused gent’s cloakroom, till I made them rip all the partitions out.”

  “Why’d you keep her here?”

  “I built her here, in secret. And I like the view.” He restlessly snatched up a photocopy of The Times dated 1933 and turned to the crossroad. “Word of nine letters— why Charles James does not leave fingerprints?”

  “Fox gloves?” I suggested.

  “Digitalis, idiot. Which gives us ‘pachyderm’ which gives us ‘upstart’, a disgusting clue.” He flung down the crossword, finished, and pulled out an ancient gilt pocket watch. “Took me ten minutes this morning. Mind’s going to pieces. Must be the weather.”

  “Can’t be. Temperature and humidity are kept constant throughout the Centre.”

  “Soulless Tech brat.” He grabbed me by the coat and blasted me with his breath. “What about the phases of the moon? Mean distance from the sun? The proton shower from the stars? The weather inside my body, inside my soul? Do you really think we can shut ourselves off from weather? Look at those rotting peaches there. While we’ve been talking one molecule of peach has entered your body and one molecule of me has entered the peach. Can you disprove that, Tech brat? Heh, heh? You’re assuming stillness, boy. Can you guarantee stillness? D’you think you’re God?”

  “No, I’m the tea boy.” “Pour it, then, pour it. Two sugars.” It seemed I was not going to be thrown downstairs immediately.

  The months I spent with Idris were never easy. But they had high spots. He cared for nobody; made indecent suggestions to Headtech daily. But the night he made an anatomical suggestion to the Prime Minister made me realise how much power he and Laura had. In the thirty years since Idris built her, from stolen parts, in a locked loo of this very toilet, Laura had gathered all knowledge to herself. Before Laura, there’d been many computers: police, military, public health. By electronic stealth, Idris had burgled them all. Even the sewage computer, on principle. The Ests found out after a year, when Idris started correcting other people’s programs. By then, it was too late. The Ests demanded Laura be revealed and dismantled. Idris retaliated by sending the Treasury computer berserk. It stampeded the money markets and in one day Britain lost a thousand million Eurocredits. The Ests surrendered…

  Most of the time, Idris behaved himself. His work load was fantastic. One moment Laura would be concluding a copper deal with the primitive home-grown Nigerian computer, swindling it blind on behalf of the nation. The next, she’d print out the air-pollution pattern for Europe, which she’d worked out simultaneously. Russian missile servicings; the French president’s pattern of phobias…

  Late at night, when she’d circuits to spare, Idris let me play with her. I’d request the day’s births in, say, Glastonbury. Pick out one child; get the state biographies of both parents, a genetic forecast of the child’s future health including life expectancy. Plans of the house where he’d live; details of the house’s construction and history…

  You could only do it for Est-children, of course. No records of Unnems. I tried tracing Rog… nothing.

  “She’s not just a calculator,” Idris would plead, gripping my shoulders. “Relate to her; ask her what she’d like to do.”

  Always a creepy moment.

  There were worse. The drunken nights when Idris sang duets with her. The old Bing Crosby number, “True Love.” That old cracked man’s voice and Laura’s smooth female voice uplifting it, backing it with infinite sadness:

  “For you and I have a guardian angel On high, with nothing to do, But to give to you, and to give to me Love forever true. …”

  Or the nights he quarrelled, damning her machine logic, trying to twist it in knots. And Laura always so reasonable, till he pounded the gilt table in fury, and drunken tears dribbled down his three-day growth of whiskers.

  But the worst nights of all were the nights when he began muttering about somebody called Scott-Astbury. Scott-Astbury had tricked him, when he was a new and lonely chief analyst. Scott-Astbury called by with bottles of the best Scotch, talked about salmon fishing. Scott-Astbury had news of the human Laura, just snippets.

  One night, in a half-drunken argument, Scott-Astbury had cast doubts on the power of the new electronic Laura…

  “I told him,” said Idris, hiccuping, “I told him me and Laura could do anything. He bet me a whole crate of whisky we couldn’t do… something.” He would always seal his lips tight at that point and stare at me like a frightened child. “But we did it, Laura and me. Proved it could be done. Won the bet. He took away the printout of what we’d done. For a joke… just for a joke, to show his grand friends. He sent round the crate of whisky, but he never brought the printout back. And then the printout began coming true. And now it can never be… undone.” At that point he would always begin to cry silently, with his mouth gaping, showing rotten teeth, and the tears running down his face in a solid sheet.

  “What did you do for him, Idris?”

  But he would only shake his head violently and hi
de his face in his hands. I never got another word out of him. Except that Scott-Astbury was evil, evil, and when Idris was dead, and I had Laura, I must never let her work for Scott-Astbury. Who had done for us all… After that, he would take the last enormous drink that sent him into merciful, snoring oblivion.

  Then I would put him to bed and go and tap out questions to Laura about possible Scott-Astburys. That was worst of all, because in the whole of Britain, there was only one Scott-Astbury, orphan and bachelor. And I already knew him, as a total buffoon. All Cambridge knew him. Second-class honours degree in anthropology. Honorary unpaid secretary of the Fenlands Cultural Survey. Scott-Astbury with his solitary published book on the Christmas mummers of England, nothing but snippets of country folklore and badly exposed photos of ancient toothless rustics. Scott-Astbury with his plump potbelly and sweating bald head, dancing amid his morris men in King’s Parade on May morning. If we wanted to get a laugh in the Centre (and God knows they were hard enough to come by) an impersonation of Scott-Astbury always did the trick. Scott-Astbury was the final proof that Idris was going stark staring bonkers.

  He’d been the greatest; most days he still was. But he was like a powerful engine, running itself to death. A great, rusted sword that still hewed savage blows at his many enemies, but one day would splinter. An autumn tomato plant, still putting out new shoots toward the light, but with grey, crumbling mold creeping over its leaves. A time would come…

  And every time I left him, to fetch our meals, some high Tech would stop me, smiling, in the corridors. How was Idris’s health? Had he taught me to run Laura yet?

  I wasn’t just the tea boy; I was Judas.

  I warned Idris, every time I tried to stop him drinking. But he already knew.

  “I won’t let you down, Idris.”

  “I know, boyo, I know. You can have her, when I’m dead.” And the drunken tears would flow again.