Only Human

by Tom Holt

  ‘Wow,’ said a voice in the darkness. ‘Did you feel that?’

  There was an awkward silence, marred only by the statutory drip of water, the scuttling of the small, clawed feet of Dukes of Hell on dry flagstones, the sound of somebody shivering.

  ‘Would someone tell that young man,’ observed the female demon, ‘that it’s terribly bad manners to do someone else’s job without asking them first. Not that we could ever pull a stunt like that,’ she added bitterly. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s talented amateurs.’

  ‘Not to mention beginner’s luck,’ growled a further voice, the demon called Bumble. ‘Some of us had to work hard to get to this level. Then again, some of us weren’t born with a silver spoon gripped between our fangs.’

  There was an awkward lull in the dialogue, spoons being a contentious issue among these folk, with particular reference to the length of the handle.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the female, brisk with sledgehammer cheerfulness, ‘it’s a bit of luck for us, so I suggest we pack in the gift-horse dentistry and talk about what we’re going to do next.’

  Various free-floating voices mumbled agreement, with only Bumble pointing out that if certain people Upstairs who should remain nameless were going to make a habit of doing evil by stealth in this way, there didn’t seem to be an awful lot of point.

  ‘Before we go charging in with both hooves,’ the female demon continued, ‘we’d better just stop for a moment and make sure we all know exactly what it is we’re setting out to do. Agreed?’

  A muted chorus indicated their support for the proposal, and the female demon, having cleared where her throat would have been if she’d had one when wearing her true shape, continued.

  ‘The game plan,’ she said, ‘is this. At the moment, Himself upstairs has the monopoly on Creation. Result: stagnation, decadence, decline, all research and invention in atrophy, and we’re not making a penny out of a potentially lucrative market. Can this state of affairs be allowed to continue? we ask ourselves. No, it can not.

  ‘Which is why,’ she went on, ‘we’ve formed a syndicate to design and build an alternative life form with which the landlords of habitable planets can stock their worlds. Now there’s no point in mucking about with sentient rocks and super-intelligent electrical currents and things that look like failed soufflés; in physical terms, there’s nothing to whack the upright two-armed biped with its brain in its head and the good old opposable thumb. What we’ve got to do is find some way of improving on Old Reliable; and it’s not the hardware that needs updating so much as the software. The programming. The hard disk. Agreed?’

  Another round of muted approval, tempered only by a suggestion that there had to be a better way of producing more of them than that. Something neat and quick and quiet, the voice recommended, where you just add water or take a cutting or something.

  ‘The software on the present model, however,’ she continued, ‘is an absolute bloody disaster; I don’t think anybody would disagree with that, least of all the little perishers themselves. In fact, we’d be doing our prospective creations a favour. All right so far? Good.

  ‘What we’ve now got to do,’ she went on, ‘is find a better set of systems, one that’ll be compatible with the hardware but which won’t end up self-destructing the whole production run and taking the planet with it. And that’s why recent events have given us an opportunity we just can’t afford to miss. Because, thanks to our unwitting friend in a high place, there are now five human bodies walking around up there with non-human systems running them; and the very fact that they’re still walking around several weeks later proves to me that these systems work. What we’ve got to do now is analyse them, pull out the bits that we want to incorporate in our product and combine them, along with a few herbs and spices of our own, to make something we can flog to planetholders everywhere. Everyone happy with that?’

  ‘Sure,’ growled a voice in the middle darkness. ‘Except, with all due respect, we haven’t exactly got very far, have we? Two direct approaches, two washouts. Three, if you include the painting.’

  There was nothing in the tone of the female demon’s reply to suggest a shrug of a pair of notional shoulders, but it was there all right. ‘So we went about it the wrong way. We asked first. This time, we don’t bother asking. And before you say We can’t just go grabbing ’em off the surface and taking them to bits with a damn great spanner, someone’s sure to notice, I’d like to point out that that’s exactly what we can do, now that Our Kid’s gone and switched off the security cameras.’

  ‘Hello and good morning, you’re listening to the Early Bird show, my name’s Danny Bennett and today’s big story is the total and completely unexpected eclipse of the sun, which none of the world’s great scientific institutions managed to predict. And the question we all should be asking is, if they didn’t know, who did? Is this just a perfectly innocent natural disaster, as a Home Office spokesman was at such pains to assure us earlier this morning? Or, with the US Presidential elections less than four years away and tension further escalating in the strife-torn Gulf, is there more to today’s outbreak of total darkness than meets the eye? With me in the studio this morning we have . . .’

  If Homo sapiens had been deliberately trying to prove the First Voice’s point, they couldn’t have made a better job of it. Their ability to scuff up the patently obvious, to the point where any other explanation than the true one would be more acceptable, had never been more brilliantly displayed. Thanks to Danny Bennett and hundreds of thousands of steely-eyed newshounds like him right across the now unexpectedly pitch-dark planet, humanity was divided into two roughly equal groupings: those who were hysterically convinced that it was some ghastly manoeuvre by the Americans (especially numerous, needless to say, in America), and those who had long ago learnt that anything they say on the news is bound to be the exact opposite of the truth, who therefore dismissed the eclipse as One of Those Things and contented themselves with digging out the candles left over from last winter’s electricity strike.

  In their defence, it has to be said that none of them could be expected to realise what was going on since none of them actually knew what the Sun and Moon are for.

  In the security room Topside, meanwhile, the seemingly endless array of monitors suddenly went blank.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘It’s gone dark,’ said the robot, peering out of the window.

  ‘So it has,’ Len replied. ‘Is it supposed to do that? Remember, I used to live in a factory.’

  The robot accessed some relevant data. ‘Not really,’ it replied. ‘Or at least, not right now. You see, there’s this thing called the sun, it’s a big burning thing in the sky—’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Len replied hastily. It hadn’t taken him long to discover that asking the robot to explain things was really only something you dared to do if you had a spare week. ‘Fuse blown, I expect. That or a couple of wires come loose. I expect they’ll get it fixed in a minute.’

  The robot hummed for a second or so as information sloshed into it from data stores in five continents. ‘I doubt it,’ it said, considered whether or not it should explain, assessed its master’s mood to nine decimal places and added, ‘apparently it’s not quite as simple as that.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ Len replied impatiently, ‘it’s just a big light, that’s all. If it’s not a fuse or a loose connection, what can it be? Might be a flat battery, I suppose.’

  ‘It hasn’t got batteries,’ the robot said. ‘It’s, um, solar powered. Look, to cut it short, there’s something between it and us. All we do is wait for the obstruction to go away. These things happen, apparently.’

  Len shrugged. ‘No skin off my nose, anyway,’ he replied. ‘We’ve got work to do, remember? Now let’s see, we’ve got the paint and the scaffolding poles, that just leaves the—’

  Outside in the street there was a screech of rubber on asphalt, a loud bump which made the ground shake, and the tinkli
ng of glass, soft and musical as the laughter of malicious elves. ‘Hello,’ Len said, turning his head. ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘Car accident, probably,’ the robot said. ‘That’s when two internal-combustion-propelled road-going vehicles - sorry, I don’t suppose you’re in the mood.’

  ‘Sounded a bit drastic,’ Len mused. ‘Is that perfectly normal too?’

  The robot nodded. ‘Very much so,’ it said. ‘More people are killed and injured on the roads of Britain every year than died in the Battle of—’

  ‘Killed?’ Len turned and scowled at the robot. ‘Thought you said it was perfectly normal.’

  ‘It is. One minute you’re driving along quite happily, then next you’re staring up at a white ceiling and they’re giving you your lunch through a tube up your nose. It’s amazing what your lot - I mean their lot, sorry - are prepared to get used to.’

  Another screech, bump, tinkle. And another. Len put down the hacksaw he’d been adjusting and stood up. Something, his machine’s sense of harmony told him, was out of alignment here; there was a jib strip loose or a lock nut in need of adjustment, and machines abhor that sort of thing in the way that Nature abhors a vacuum. ‘Altruism,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That stuff you were telling me about. Could we do some of it and stop these internal-combustion-propelled road-going vehicles bopping each other?’

  The robot ran a feasibility scan. ‘I don’t see why not,’ it replied. ‘Speaking of which, there’s a substantial probability that what’s causing all these accidents is the eclipse. Because it’s dark, you see.’

  ‘So they can’t see where they’re going. Haven’t they got lights?’

  The robot tilted its head, noticing as it did so that the left-side integral oil reservoir in its neck would need topping up in approximately sixteen months’ time. ‘Sure they have,’ it replied. ‘But it’s not night-time.Which means it’s not supposed to be dark. So some people aren’t switching their lights on. And before you ask—’

  ‘Don’t tell me, that’s perfectly normal too.’ Len’s brow furrowed. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘most of these human buggers couldn’t get a job as a screwdriver, let alone a milling machine or a turret lathe. Thick as bricks, the lot of ’em. All right then, let’s go and altruise. These internal-combustion-propelled—’

  ‘Call ’em cars,’ suggested the robot. ‘It’s easier.’

  ‘Cars, then. They’re machines, I take it?’

  ‘You bet. Pretty neat bits of engineering, some of them.’

  Len relaxed. ‘That’s all right, then. At least there’s somebody intelligent we can talk to about this.’

  The robot, needless to say, was fitted with a 250,000-candlepower halogen searchlight right between the sensor heads that served it as eyes. Once they reached the street, the beam from this magnificent accessory illuminated a thoroughly depressing scene. Just in case someone might ask for an exactly appropriate word to describe it, the robot ran a quick dictionary check and came up with ‘shambles’.

  ‘Idiots,’ Len muttered, as a car whipped past him at high speed, narrowly missing the corpse of a small van. ‘They’ve all got perfectly good headlamps. Why don’t they . . .?’

  At the robot’s request, all the component data stores of the Net thought about that one for approximately a sixth of a second. ‘It’s quite obvious,’ the robot said, ‘once you take into account modern human operational protocols. You see, it isn’t against the law to drive around without your lights on during a total eclipse of the sun. It’s only not illegal because nobody’s thought to make it illegal, but since it isn’t, they aren’t. Turning their lights on, I mean. The idea is, they’ve got the Government to tell them what to do and what not to do. Until the Government tells them they’ve got to switch on the lights during an eclipse, they can’t. Even if they want to. All they can do is wait till the next election and vote in a different government who will tell them to switch their lights on when the Earth’s orbit around the sun coincides with the orbit of the moon around the Earth. And according to my data, there isn’t another election due for up to four point two years.’ The robot paused to reflect on this. ‘Let’s hope for their sakes,’ it added, ‘that it’s not going to be a very long eclipse.’

  Len tried to get his head around that one, but it wasn’t that bendy. ‘Stuff that,’ he said. ‘Oh look, here comes another—’

  It was a new-model Escort, and it hadn’t seen the van. Just at that crucial moment when impact could still just about be avoided, Len took a deep breath and shouted.

  The driver of the Escort, suddenly seeing a van directly in front of him, swerved, yanked the wheel back, swore and carried on. He hadn’t heard anything, of course, because when Len yelled:Switch your bloody lights on, you clown!

  he’d yelled it in Machine; admittedly with a thick Engineering accent, whereas the car only spoke Automotive, but it managed to get the gist.

  ‘It worked,’ muttered the robot.

  Len shrugged. ‘Well, there was obviously no point talking to the human. Oh for pity’s sake, here’s another.’

  An hour and a half later, Len was still yelling at passing cars and averting fatal collisions, when something remarkable happened. The cars started turning their lights on, even though it wasn’t lighting-up time yet.

  ‘Huh?’ he asked the robot.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the robot replied. ‘They’ve passed a law.’

  The small van which had caused most of the trouble was skewed across about a third of the width of the road. Its nose was folded round a lamppost (now rather banana-shaped) and its door had been left open by its driver, who had presumably limped off to find somewhere comfortable to wait for the next General Election. All in all, it looked . . .

  ‘Unloved,’ Len remarked, looking at it. ‘You’d have thought its human’s place was at its side at a time like this.’

  ‘Don’t think they see it that way,’ replied the robot. ‘Not that I’m defending them, I hasten to add. It’s just the way things are. The chances of the driver having gone off to get it some iodine and a nice strong cup of sweet tea are fairly slim.’

  A look of disgust settled on Len’s face like mist coming in from the sea over high ground. ‘It’s times like this,’ he said, ‘I don’t have any trouble deciding whose side I’m on. Come on, let’s see if there’s anything we can do for it.’

  The van’s engine had long since stalled, but its brave little tape deck was still gallantly warbling, even though nobody was bothering to listen to it; like a brass band in the park on a rainy day, or the orchestra on the Titanic. Len walked up and switched it off.

  ‘How’re you feeling?’ he asked it in Machine.

  ‘Awful,’ the van replied. ‘My subframe hurts.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Len replied. ‘That’s a nasty knock you’ve taken there. Now I’m not a mechanic, but I’d say you’ve got a twisted chassis, bent upper link, severe rupture of the hoses, probably some internal haemorrhaging—’

  ‘Oh my God,’ whispered the van pitifully. ‘That’s terrible.They - they aren’t going to write me off, are they?’

  Len looked grave. ‘It’s early days yet,’ he said. ‘Until we actually get you up on a ramp and see precisely what the damage is—’

  ‘Don’t let them scrap me, please,’ the van pleaded. ‘Damn it all, I’m only M-reg, I’ve hardly begun living yet. Is there a chance, do you think? Honestly?You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’

  Len shrugged. ‘There’s always a chance,’ he replied. ‘It may be a cliché, but it’s true; where there’s ignition there’s hope. Look, I’m going to get you over to my workshop, where we can get a spanner on you and - well, what is it?’ he snapped, as the robot’s tapping on his shoulder threatened to dislocate it. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  ‘Um,’ replied the robot. ‘Just a quick word.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Um - over here.’

  Annoyed, Len took a few st
eps back. ‘Come on, spit it out. We’ve got to move fast before its whole system drains down.’

  The robot shuffled its precision-ground feet. ‘I hate to have to point this out,’ it said, ‘but you can’t just go around mending things that don’t belong to you. It’s against the law.’

  Len stared at the robot in amazement. ‘Why the hell not? Look, there’s machine over there in agony, and you want me to walk away? Of all the—’

  The robot cringed. ‘I know,’ it said. ‘But the owner might not want it repaired. He might be only too happy to let them junk it and take the insurance money instead.’

  ‘But that’s disgusting,’ Len snarled. ‘It’d be murder. No, the hell with that. You get behind and push, but for pity’s sake be careful. If its sills have gone, we could kill it if we start mauling it about.’

  Together they managed to trundle the van across the road. Len opened the sliding door and they machine-handled it up into the workshop, trying their best to ignore its heartrending groans at the slightest bump.

  ‘Right,’ Len ordered, grabbing an inspection light and sliding underneath. ‘I’ll need the arc welder and five hundred ccs of SAE20/40. Don’t just stand there, get on with it.’

  The robot nodded; then a suggestion filtered down through its circuits from some distant cybernetic origin. ‘Shall I get lots of hot water and clean towels?’ it asked.

  Len looked blank. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the robot admitted. ‘I just got the idea from somewhere that it’s something humans do at times like this.’

  ‘Welder. Oil. Now. And a set of AF spanners and the big Stilson,’ Len added, wiping oil out of his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘And a printout of the workshop manual’d be a help, while you’re at it. I’ve never set eyes on one of these things before, remember, and there’s only so far I can go on general mechanical principles. I’ve got to drain off all the fuel before I do anything at all, or I’ll blow us all up.’