by Tom Holt
Distressing was putting it mildly. One minute, Karen had been engrossed in the search for a way to save God, the next she was loading the contents of her desk into a cardboard box and promising the loathsome Jenny from the next office down the row but one that they’d keep in touch. Strange, she said to herself as she waited for the lift, how quickly things can change.
What had done it? she wondered. About the only sudden and unexpected factor was the eclipse, which had now been going on for so long that she had difficulty remembering what it had been like before. A messy sort of white stuff poured over everything like custard, if memory served her, and a big shiny thing up in the sky. She wasn’t even sure she could recall exactly what the shiny thing had looked like; in her mind’s eye it had somehow merged with the stylised yellow blob from a child’s painting. Now, when she tried to remember the sun, the image that came to her mind was more like luminous fried egg than anything that had ever existed for real.
Unlikely, though, that the eclipse had done for Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits; which only really left the abrupt and unheralded entry of God into its corporate life. Coincidence? Yeah, sure. And you could use her other leg for an emergency door-bell.
Anyway, she told herself, as she struggled with her cardboard box on the packed underground like a stereotype refugee, now it’s none of my business and I can stop worrying about it. I can dismiss it from my mind and get on with the absolutely pathetically simple task of finding a new job.
Like hell.
Yes, that was all very well, but how was she supposed to continue the search, with no manual, no computer, no way of contacting Kevin Christ and absolutely zero chance of being believed by anybody she went to for help? If she couldn’t crack it with all the resources of KIC to call on, she couldn’t really expect to do better with nothing more sophisticated at her disposal than one of the early-Victorian coal-burning Amstrads and the Ladybird book of computer fault diagnosis. Forget it, Karen. You’ve got problems enough of your own.
Yes, but . . .
Yes but nothing. Out of my hands now. He’s the Almighty, for pity’s sake; big enough and ugly enough to take care of himself.
Yes. But.
Some clown bumped into her as she tried to scramble off the train at Waterloo, spilling the contents of her box and then darting off with only the echo of a mumbled ‘Sorry’ hurled over his shoulder. By the time she’d picked up her fugitive property, which had rolled and bounced away between the feet of her sardine-packed fellow passengers, the train had moved on. Great. She’d have to get off at the next stop, change platforms, wait for the northbound train, go through all this again. It was things like this made her love the human race.
Human race. Human. First real lead you’ve had all along.
How dumb (she asked herself as she shoved through to the doors just before they closed) can you get? All those hours she’d spent trying to find a way of bypassing the computer’s defences, and it hadn’t occurred to her that she was trying to solve the wrong problem. Sloppy thinking. Human thinking. Not appropriate to a superhuman problem.
She sat down on a bench on Kennington station platform, and worked it out a step at a time. The key to it all was a simple formula, one she’d known ever since she was a kid. So obvious . . .
To err is human, to forgive divine. When human beings make mistakes, they worry away at them trying to put things right, trying to stick the pieces back together again with glue. Occasionally they succeed, sometimes they fail utterly and make things worse, frequently they half solve the problem and then leave it while they try and cope with the mess they’ve caused for themselves while they were trying to fix the original problem. That’s the human way. That’s what she’d been trying to do. Wrong.
The denizens of Heaven don’t solve problems or fix mistakes; they forgive them. Confronted with the theft in the Garden of Eden, God didn’t try and stick the apple back on the branch with Araldite or fill in the bitten-out chunk with fine-grade Polyfilla; he simply forgave, and that was that, problem solved. It’d be a nice trick, if you could manage it; simply forgiving the front door for sticking in the damp weather, or the carburettor for being flooded, sitting down with a blocked sink trap and talking it through like sensible, mature adults - quicker, easier and ever so much cheaper. But backed-up sinks and cars that won’t start aren’t divine problems: not usually.
More to the point, you’ve got to be divine to make it work, which explained why it hadn’t actually solved anything when she decided to forgo her moral right to break the arm of the pillock who upset her cardboard box on the train. It was no use her forgiving the wretched computer; big deal. Somebody else was going to have to do that, and from what she knew of the situation the only person with the necessary qualification was sitting under a big umbrella on a river-bank somewhere. Still, what she didn’t know about the precise way in which Heaven works could be written on a medium-sized Universe in letters the size of a hydrogen atom. Let them work out the minor operational details for themselves; she’d done the important part. Now all she had to do was tell them . . .
A task in respect of which the phrase piece of cake wasn’t immediately appropriate. Phone the Pope? Go into Westminster Abbey and ask if they could forward a letter? Dammit, she shouldn’t have to get in touch with them, they should come to her.
With a rumble of thunder like Thor after a hot curry, the train appeared out of the tunnel. The platform was crowded, and it wasn’t easy to move about with her arms full of cardboard box. In fact, if she wasn’t careful, she might end up getting shoved off the platform and under the train, which wouldn’t help anybody.
Oddly enough, that was exactly what happened.
It was probably just as well that she was so preoccupied with righteous indignation against the second clumsy oaf she’d had the misfortune to be bumped into in the space of less than an hour that she didn’t hear the scrunch as the train ran over her, let alone the rather nauseating fizz as all those busy volts ran up and down her nervous system, ringing bells and running away. In fact, she’d been dead for nearly a second and a half before she noticed, and that was only because she’d reached out for her a-present-from-Florence paperweight and found that her hand passed clean through it.
Oh, she said.
Telltale signs - the fact that she was looking down at the roof of the train rather than up at its chassis, that sort of thing - confirmed her initial suspicion. Oh damn. Well, that’s that, then. And of all the blundering, careless idiots—
From her vantage point in the upper air she could see the blundering, careless idiot quite clearly. He looked as if he was having the worst moment of his life; quite probably, he was. Without even thinking about it, she forgave him.
And somehow, without having the faintest idea how she knew, she was aware that it had worked. She had forgiven him, he had been forgiven.
Problem solved.
In a manner of speaking, of course; it still left her quite undeniably dead for one thing, and it would have been nice if the omelette could have been made without her having to be the egg that got broken. Still, no point crying over spilt milk. Or, come to that, spilt anything else.
To forgive—
And then she knew.
Len woke up.
He had been dreaming; the long, silent, majestic dreams of machines, full of straight lines and right angles, of things that fitted exactly into other things, of keyways frictionless and true and the sharp, clean shine of newly cut metal. It was a beautiful dream; the sort of vision that might inspire a god to create a world.
‘Urgh,’ he said. ‘Wassafuxat?’
Someone was bashing the workshop door. Len stood up, quickly trying to remember what he’d recently learned about balance and self-propelled biped movement. Why should anybody want to smash his door in at half past one in the morning?
‘Lock,’ he said.
Hmm?
‘What’s going on?’
Please be more specific.
Len
scowled. Locks aren’t the sensible person’s immediate choice when information’s needed in a hurry. As is only to be expected from mechanisms whose whole purpose is to be exact and to respond only to a perfectly correct key, they tend to be pedantic and fussy.
‘Who’s bashing your door and why?’ Len amended. ‘Any ideas?’
I register five of them. They are not authorised personnel. They do not appear to be human. Their purpose in hitting the door is to open it without recourse to authorised lock-opening procedures. I would imagine they are doing this because they are not authorised personnel. Authorised personnel would not abuse official property in this manner.
‘Ah,’ Len said, as his brain fumbled for its trousers and put its teeth in. ‘Well, try and keep them out.’
Of course I shall try and keep them out. They are not authorised personnel. If they were authorised personnel, they would have an appropriate key.
‘Cheers, lock.’
I should however point out that in the normal course of fulfilling my function as a lock I am already doing everything within my limited powers to prevent unauthorised access by unauthorised personnel. Please note also that I shall not be able to fulfil my function for very much longer.
‘Oh go on,’ Len muttered, testing the three big Stilson wrenches for weight and balance. ‘Give it your best shot.’
Please note that I am on the point of failing to fulfil my function. I should like the record to show that this failure is due to the imminent collapse of the wooden doorframe rather than any shortcoming on my part.
‘Thanks anyway. Robot!’
‘Go ’way ’s middle of night.’
‘Oh for . . .’ Len had an idea. ‘Recalibrate your timescale for Hong Kong time. Robot!’
‘Here, boss!’ At once the robot (for whom it was now 9 a.m.) shot out from its storage space under the bench and stood to attention, its facial mechanisms arranged in a beaming cybersmile. ‘Sleep okay, boss?’
‘Like a top. Robot, there are five heavies trying to smash the door down.’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t just stand there,’ Len fumed. ‘Stop them.’
‘Um.’
For a moment, Len couldn’t believe his ears. ‘What the devil do you mean, um? You’re a robot, dammit.You don’t know the meaning of fear.’
The robot shuffled its feet. ‘Actually, I do. Fear, according to the Oxford English Dictionary—’
‘Don’t muck me about, robot. I gave you a direct order.’
‘I know.’ The robot simpered. (How did it learn to do that? Len wondered. I don’t remember fitting a simper relay.) ‘There’s a problem. I can’t.’
‘What?’
The robot bit its lip, or at least it tried to. There was a grating noise and a few sparks. ‘EC Directive 463837/99 on safety of machinery. Says machines aren’t allowed to hurt people. Sorry.’
‘What?’
‘EC Directive 463837/99,’ the robot repeated miserably. ‘All new mechanical appliances now have to conform to the specifications laid down by this directive, which states, and I’m paraphrasing slightly here, hurting people is wrong. For heaven’s sake, you wouldn’t want me to break the law, now would you?’
Len would have replied Yes at this point, if it hadn’t been for the door giving way and the workshop suddenly filling with large, fast-moving bipeds. Even Len, whose experience of human beings was still rather limited, could tell that these weren’t standard production-model Homo sapiens; too many head and claws, eyes in the wrong section of the anatomy, that sort of thing. They looked as if they’d been thrown together out of the contents of the leftovers in Frankenstein’s spares box with a few bits from a car boot sale thrown in for good measure, and they were holding implements which, although unfamiliar, probably came under the heading of generic weapons.
‘Hold it,’ Len yelled.
The apparent leader of the party stopped where he was, assessing him through several pairs of inhuman eyes. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘Come any closer and I’ll thump you.’
‘Oh.’ The leader shrugged. ‘I thought you were going to say something important. All right, grab them and let’s get going.’
Two of the subsidary Things caught hold of the robot while a third pulled a black plastic sack down over its head. It didn’t move. The leader and his remaining henchthing advanced on Len; in no particular hurry, keeping a multiplicity of eyes and the like on the Stilson in Len’s hands, but not unduly worried about it. As they came close, he backed away. They walked straight past him.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘You’ll see.’
They were standing on either side of the machine; the universal milling and turning machine that was much more Len than any bag of bones and blood would ever be. The leader picked up a twelve-pound sledgehammer single-handed; his chum was toying with the big adjustable spanner.
‘Come quietly,’ said the leader, ‘or the machine gets it.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘As a statement of fact, that has a basic flaw. As a threat, it doesn’t work. As an appeal to my better nature—’
‘Get away,’ Len said, ‘from that machine. It hasn’t done you any harm.’
The subsidiary Thing tapped the main casing gently with the spanner. ‘Cast iron,’ he observed. ‘Brittle stuff, if it gets hit. Can’t be repaired.’
‘All right.’ The Stilson clattered on the concrete floor; only Len heard it swearing. ‘Now get away from the machine.’
The Things took a step forwards; but suddenly there was an atmosphere in the workshop that hadn’t been there a moment before. A sort of dull residual anger, you might say, if you had an excessively powerful imagination. Len could feel it well enough; he could remember feeling that anger many times himself, when some cack-haired apprentice had jammed his feed or graunched his threads. It tended to start with an ill-defined I-don’t-like-this-man, after which it would develop over a period of days, sometimes years, biding its time until the object of the machine’s resentment happened to put his thumb in the way of the boring-bar or lean over a moving chuck with his shirt-sleeves flapping. Then there’d be a short, usually bloody moment, followed by a certain amount of irrational human behaviour; after a while someone’d come along, switch him off at the mains and clean the blood and bits of stuff out of the cogs and threads. Odd how rarely human beings notice that ominous feel in the air.
EC Directive 463837/99 forsooth. One of the first things a machine tool learns is how to defend itself, and how to avenge its slighted honour.
It started when the leader’s right leg brushed against the bench grinder, which promptly switched itself on. The leader immediately jumped two feet in the air and eighteen inches sideways, but all he achieved was to fall heavily across the bed of the bandsaw. With hindsight, an error on his part.
In a slightly edited form, the leader then hurled himself clear of the bandsaw and, with his remaining hand, grabbed at the nearest solid object to steady himself. His rotten luck it happened to be the arc welder.
From the arc welder, the leader then rebounded on to the table of the Great Machine, and that’s where his real problems started. The horizontal arm, set up for slit-sawing, left just enough of him for the vertical arm to mess up quite comprehensively with a face-cutter.
Ah, Len said to himself. Always wondered why they called them that.
The subsidary Thing stayed perfectly still, at least until Len had brained him with the big Stilson.That just left the other three.
‘One of the advantages of buying second-hand gear,’ Len said, ‘is that it doesn’t comply with the latest EC directives. Do we have to do this the hard way, or are you lot going to bugger off and leave me in peace?’
A Thing grinned at him feebly. ‘In a perfect world,’ he said, ‘we’d bugger off. Gladly.’
‘Like a shot,’ confirmed his colleague to his immediate right.
‘Nothing’d give us greater pleasure,’ chipp
ed in the third.
Len shrugged. ‘Please yourselves, then,’ he said; whereupon the spindle moulder jumped them. What a spindle moudler does to pieces of wood is bad enough.
‘You can come out now,’ Len said.
‘Sorry,’ the robot reiterated. ‘If it’d been up to me, I’d have pulled their heads off and made them eat them.’
‘I’m sure you would,’ Len replied, pulling off the plastic sack. ‘Isn’t there something in human literature about a tin man who has no heart?’
‘Not quite,’ the robot replied. ‘In The Wizard of Oz—’
‘Well,’ Len went on, ‘you’re a steel man who has no balls. But we can fix that. Hand me that half-by-nine-sixteenths spanner.’
‘Please—’
‘Nuts,’ Len went on, unscrewing one, ‘but no balls.’ He paused and thought. ‘Maybe it’s a human thing, courage,’ he said.
‘Up to a - ouch, that tickles!’
‘It’ll do more than tickle when I get the brazing torch on you. Now then, I’ll need a schematic of male reproductive organs, some three-sixteenths copper pipe and a soldering iron. God, what a bloody daft way to go about a perfectly simple job of plumbing!’
‘Why are you—?’
Len looked up and reached for a hacksaw. ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘as soon as I’ve bypassed that EC Directive, we’re going to find out who sent these goons, these creatures who threatened to hurt a machine, and we’re going to sort them out. All right?’
‘Okay. Um, boss.’
‘Yes?’
‘Why?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Ah. Now I understand. Thanks, boss.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘Kevin.’ The younger son of God didn’t reply. He was sitting curled up in the window-seat of one of the rear subsidiary seventeenth-floor chapels, gazing listlessly out over the back courtyard and fiddling with a plastic flower. A painter in need of a model for a watercolour lovelorn teenager would have offered him money not to move an inch.
‘Kevin,’ Martha repeated. ‘Your dinner’s going cold.’