‘I think we need to be a little to the east,’ said Kavan. He turned and began to walk down the rocky slope, following the path of the land as it twisted around the hungry sea.
He saw it almost immediately. The land there ran down a slope to a shingle beach, and then back up again to a rocky island, almost cut off from the mainland by the waters that noisily sifted through the shingle.
A stone building stood at the summit of the island, red stains of long-rusted iron running down its sides.
‘What is it?’ asked Karel softly, the first time the robot had spoken that day.
Kavan didn’t know. The white stone of the building was like nothing he had seen before: more lustrous than marble, it almost seemed to glow in the grey morning light.
They walked down to the shingle beach. Opposite them, a worn set of steps, cut directly from the rock, rose out of the shingle and made their way up to the building.
‘The path must have been covered by the beach,’ observed Eleanor. ‘Just how old is that building, do you think?’
They climbed the path, and Kavan noticed how the orange-and-white stains of lichen covered its surface. The shells of the organic life forms that inhabited this land were stuffed into every crack, lining the walls below the tideline in obscene profusion.
The three robots drew abreast as they approached the structure, metal feet rattling on stone. It was such an odd shape, its walls rounded, not straight like that of normal robot construction. They curved up and over to form the roof, giving the building an organic shape. There were strange symbols carved in a line around it, just higher than a robot could reach. Kavan stared up at them, trying to make sense of them.
‘They look so familiar,’ said Eleanor, but Kavan didn’t think so. They just looked like a tangled mess to him.
They walked around the building, searching for an entrance. They found it on the far side, facing the north. A metal door, three symbols above it, engraved in the stone of the building. These symbols were larger than the others. Kavan stared at them for some time, trying to understand them. He couldn’t hold them in his mind.
‘What are they?’ he heard Karel wonder out loud.
Eleanor laughed. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ she said, disbelievingly. ‘You really don’t know?’
‘No,’ said Kavan. ‘I have never seen them before. Have you?’
‘No, I’ve never seen them before either, but I know what they are.’
‘How could you?’ demanded Karel.
‘Any woman would know,’ said Eleanor. ‘That one is the pattern that you twist to make a girl, and this is the pattern you twist to make a boy.’
Kavan gazed at the patterns.
‘What about the one in the middle?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. That one doesn’t make sense. A mind twisted that way wouldn’t think properly. It would have no sense of itself.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘The other carvings, the ones around the side of the building, they all make sense now. Or rather they don’t. They are all minds, after a fashion, but they wouldn’t work.’
They gazed at the symbols for a while longer, to the sound of the waves crashing below.
Eleanor had lost interest. ‘What sort of metal is this?’ she asked, touching the door. Kavan placed his hand on it. He could feel a little iron there, a little gold, a little tungsten. But there was something additional in the alloy, something that he had never felt before.
‘I don’t know,’ he confessed, looking at Karel, the Turing City robot who had grown up surrounded by a richness of metal.
‘You. Come and feel this. Do you recognize it?’
The other robot touched the door.
‘It feels like . . .’ he said. ‘No, I don’t know. But it’s like something I half remember . . .’
The waves crashed around the island. A shaft of watery sunlight fell down upon them. The wind had turned east; it curdled the clouds, breaking them up.
Kavan pushed at the door with all of his strength. It didn’t move.
‘It feels different here,’ said Karel.
Kavan waved his own hand over where the other had indicated, near the door jamb. He felt iron underneath.
‘Could be the latch?’ he wondered aloud. He concentrated hard, sent his lifeforce down into the metal of his hand, felt at the iron there, felt it click into place.
‘Got it,’ he said. He pushed at the door, and it swung open easily.
‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Eleanor, you keep watch out here.’
‘I want to go in.’
‘Later.’
‘What about the symbols? Can you be sure you will understand what you see?’
‘Later,’ repeated Kavan.
There was a crowd of people standing in the depths of the building, frozen in a dim half-light that filtered down from the roof to part-fill the single room. Kavan closed the door and turned up his eyes, waited for them to adjust.
The roof was sea-green and translucent: a thick old plastic faded by the elements. Not the original roof, reckoned Kavan, but something added much later by . . . who? It now looked so worn and weathered. A muted light filtered through it, illuminating the crowd that waited in patient silence below.
So many robots, arranged in rows, all facing the door, sightless eyes gazing into eternity. All of them dead, the lifeforce long drained from their minds, the current long gone from their electromuscle.
Slowly, carefully, Kavan moved up to the nearest, his own eyes adjusting to the gloom.
The robot body that stood immediately before him was old. It wore iron panelling, red rust bubbling up among the faded remnants of what little paint had not flaked away from its body. It was a little shorter than Kavan, the curve of the arms and the legs not as graceful as his own. Everything about the body was a little straighter, a little squarer, a little less elegant.
He moved past this robot to the next one in the line. It looked older still. Shorter again, the panelling that covered its body was punctured by holes where the rust had eaten it away.
Kavan continued down the line. What was the purpose of this display? Had someone come to this land and collected specimens of local life to be exhibited here? Had the robots at the top of the world come to Shull, explored the land, made this exhibit, and then left? Why?
Down the line, past the robots, walking backwards through time. The bodies on display became smaller and more primitive the further he went. Realization dawned: This was a depiction of evolution on Shull laid out before him.
He moved even further back along the line, pleased by his deduction. Now the robots looked less like robots and more like animals. He passed four-legged crabs in thick iron shells. Something a little like a six-legged spider. Now the bodies had no legs: he saw a fish and something like a tiny whale, its metal body snub and rounded. And then there was nothing but the shells of organic life. He came to the end of the line and looked back along the exhibit.
Now he understood what he was looking at.
This building was testament, proof and warning all in one. There was no Book of Robots, there never had been. There was nothing but the evolution of robots.
But Kavan understood this: that if he wanted to rule the world, then the Book of Robots would be a useful tool. Particularly if he had a say in what went in the book. Just look at how the North Kingdom robots had fought, all because they had believed . . .
So who had erected this display, and why? So close to the northern coast of Shull . . .
He looked up to the faded green plastic of the roof. It was old, of course, but plastic did not last that long. That roof had been constructed in the last hundred years or so. The building would be older than that. Much older . . .
He looked closer at the walls further up by the roof. He saw slots there, spaces for beams and supports to be plugged in. This building wasn’t originally a museum, he decided. Had the robot display come later?
He turned around, scanning the walls for more clues, and then he noticed the p
atterns carved into the wall, opposite the door by which he had entered. They had been there all along, but he had been too taken by the display of robots to notice it. Now he moved back to take in the huge diagram that filled one whole interior wall of the building.
He gazed up at it, trying to make sense of what he saw. Circles, lines, dots, all in a half swirl, engraved into the smooth metal. For a moment, he considered going outside and summoning Eleanor for help, wondered if she might understand, just as she had with the patterns engraved on the building’s exterior, but then, just like that, it all made sense. The pattern revealed itself.
It was an astronomical map. Here, at the side, was the Sun, then the first planet, Siecle, and then Penrose with its two moons, Zuse and Néel. And further out, Bohm with its single ring. All drawn to a larger scale, their position in the galactic map clearly marked. And over here, almost at the centre of the map, another system was marked. This system sat at the centre of a large circle. The Penrose system lay on the circumference of that circle.
Other systems were also marked. Some well within the circle, some beyond. Kavan gazed at them, not recognizing any of them.
Maybe he would return here later with an astronomer.
An astronomer? He gazed back up at the slots incorporated in the facing walls of the building. Now he knew what this building had been originally: an observatory. Those slots had held the mechanism that supported the telescope.
So, the robots at the top of the world had come here to Shull to look at the stars. And this is what they had seen, engraved on one wall of the building. What then? Had they taken down their telescope and installed this exhibit instead? Why? What could they have seen in the stars that would have caused them to do that?
Kavan looked at that plastic roof again. The exhibit had come much later, he was sure of that. This building reminded him of a battleground. A battle between two competing philosophies. Perhaps the robots at the top of the world had built it to perpetuate the myth of the Book of Robots. Perhaps other robots had built it to destroy that myth.
Kavan thought about Eleanor again. He should summon her to the building. Maybe she would spot something that he had missed? But he was unwilling to do so. Eleanor was already too unpredictable. What if she were to see something important and not tell him? Then he noticed something else written on the map wall. Something not so carefully engraved as the galactic map, but something written in a different style, carelessly scratched into the wall at robot height.
The Story of Nicolas the Coward, he read. And then:
The Story of the Four Blind Horses.
The Story of Eric and the Mountain.
And then, finally, in much larger letters:
Zuse! The Night Moon! The robots at the top of the world said it was the proof! Treason! But perhaps the Book exists, after all!
He gazed at the words. He had heard the first story, of course. Everyone had. The second sounded vaguely familiar, too. But the third one, Eric and the Mountain. He was sure that he had never heard of that before.
And as for the last words. The night moon? The robots at the top of the world had come here and had looked at the stars, and had found that Zuse was the proof.
Proof of what? Kavan had looked at the night moon nearly every night of his life. It was just a moon, a perfectly normal part of his existence. What could the robots at the top of the world have seen in the stars that led them to believe that their moon was proof of anything?
Slowly, Kavan looked around the room, taking in the map, the display of the bodies, trying to understand what he was looking at.
For the first time in a life built on certainty, he wondered if there were other answers written before him, answers that he had walked past without noticing their presence.
Eleanor
‘What do you think is over there?’ Eleanor asked Karel, gesturing to the northernmost part of the island. ‘Shall we go and have a look?’
‘What about Kavan?’ asked Karel.
Eleanor laughed. ‘Kavan has led an army that has conquered an entire continent. I’m sure he’ll be okay on his own in some old building for a few minutes.’
She began to walk down the northern slope of the island towards the sea. Pale yellow sun broke through the clouds and bathed her in its light.
She could hear the tread of metal on rock as Karel followed her.
‘I thought as much,’ said Eleanor. ‘Look at that, the way the rock slopes into the sea. Banjo Macrodocious was right. There is a road from here to the north, or there was once, anyway. You can see its pattern under the shingle and the shells. It’s been cracked and washed away, but there it goes, heading to the top of the world.’
Karel gazed at it. ‘Do you think we are standing at the beginning or the end?’ he asked.
‘I was wondering exactly the same thing . . .’ she said, and she turned to face him. ‘. . . Brother.’
He gazed back at her, taking in what she had just said.
‘You didn’t really think it was Kavan, did you?’ she said.
‘What are you talking about? I don’t have a sister!’
She looked closer at him, gazed into his yellow eyes. ‘I had wondered. You didn’t even notice that we have the same colour eyes?’
He looked back at her. He knew she was speaking the truth, she realized. Eleanor almost laughed. She knew exactly what he was thinking. Of course she did. They both were the same person. Liza had woven them both to be the same, save for that one small variation in the weave . . .
‘I never thought that I was like Kavan,’ said Karel defensively.
‘Yes, you did,’ said Eleanor. ‘You thought that he was your dark side revealed. You thought that you could do all that he has done. You can’t lie to me. I am you. Look at me, look at how far I’ve risen within Artemis. All because of the way that our mother wove us. All because some soldier with a gun wanted to know what she really believed. You know what the joke was, though, don’t you? Neither Artemis nor Turing City were what they claimed to be; when it comes to the crunch, hardly any one really believes what they think they believe.’
Karel said nothing.
‘But you and I are different, aren’t we, Brother? Because when that soldier held that gun to Liza’s head he made her do something that neither of them expected . . . You don’t want to believe me, do you? You even hate me a little for what I’m saying. I know why, because I feel it a little myself. Better to be Kavan than to be me. Better the leader than the second-in-command. You’re reduced a little by seeing what you could have become, had you thrown in your lot with Artemis. You’d like to believe you could have gone all the way.’
‘Artemisians are killers. I’d never have supported them.’
‘Yes you would. Look at me: I’m the proof that you would. Come on, Karel, there’s no shame in being second-best. Aren’t you proud of me? Second-in-command isn’t bad. And it helps you to realize just what a genius Kavan is. We couldn’t have done what he did. Look at us – we couldn’t even bring ourselves to kill him.’
Karel was whining softly. Eleanor could hear the faintest edge of feedback in the air.
‘You know it’s true, Karel. Think about it, Kavan never knew anything about you. How could he? It was I who told him about the robot with the unknown mind in Turing City. It was I who saved you from your apartment and had you put on that train.’
‘It was you that had Axel killed!’ he shouted.
‘Listen Karel,’ she said, ‘I have no loyalty to your wife or to your child, I only have loyalty to Artemis. And to you. Liza twisted it into me when she made me. Fighting back at her attacker in the only way that she could. That and her little trick with the second child’s sex. How would he tell the difference, until it was too late?’
‘Eleanor?’
They both stopped at the sound of the voice. Kavan had returned.
Karel
Karel and Eleanor turned to gaze at Kavan. How much had he heard?
He didn’t appear to regi
ster anything. ‘We return south,’ said Kavan. ‘There is nothing for us here.’
Eleanor and Karel exchanged glances.
‘But what about the Book of Robots?’ asked Karel.
‘The Book of Robots does not exist,’ replied Kavan. ‘There is nothing in that building but what we have always known. Proof of robot evolution.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Karel. ‘Let me see.’
‘There is no need to see,’ replied Kavan. ‘I speak the truth. This world is a natural place. There is nothing in that building or anywhere else to suggest otherwise.’
‘Why bring me up here if you’re not going to let me see the building? I have experience of other cultures!’
‘Yes?’ Kavan seemed nonplussed. ‘That experience is valueless. There is only one culture of note, and that is Artemis.’
‘But what about Turing City?’
‘Turing City is no more.’
‘No!’
‘You doubt my word? But you saw what we did there.’ Kavan seemed more confused than annoyed.
‘I want to see what’s in the building!’ repeated Karel.
‘I told you, there is nothing to see. The Book of Robots never existed. It was nothing more than an excuse for subversion, a fairy tale that robots could go beyond the way their wire was twisted by their mothers.’
‘Let me see!’ shouted Karel. Behind him, he was aware of Eleanor, drawing back, bringing them both within the sights of her rifle. Her rifle? He realized at that point he was no longer carrying his own. He had left it lying on the ground, near to the building. He wasn’t a soldier; he wasn’t used to carrying it . . .
Kavan was growing impatient. ‘You will not see the building. We are leaving now.’
‘Nicolas the Coward!’ called Karel, anger rising within him. ‘What is in there that you are hiding?’
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