Night Sessions, The (2 page)

The woman opened her eyes and let go of Campbell's hand.

“Thanks,” she said, and that was all she said. Campbell was still feeling smug as he retrieved his rolling case from the overhead locker and debarked. He nodded and smiled to the robot that thanked him in the doorway and wished him a pleasant stay or safe onward journey. The heat struck him as soon as he stepped through the exit door. He'd known to expect it but, coming straight from a New Zealand winter via twenty hours in the aircraft's air-conditioned coolness, the thirty-degrees-Celsius heat opened his pores instantly. He strolled through Customs, dragged his case along walkways and underpasses to his pre-booked Travelodge check-in, and took the lift to his room. He thanked God it was air-conditioned.

The view was of the corner of one tower and the back of another. Shadows of aircraft passed over like predatory birds every few seconds. Campbell unpacked a change of clothes, laid his Bible on the bedside cabinet, and took his washbag to the bathroom. After showering, shaving, and putting on fresher and lighter clothes, he felt ready to face the Scottish August heat. He was, as he'd expected, jet lagged, but he intended to surf that zoned-out sense of unreality to get him through the awkward confrontation to come. That, plus some instant coffee and a prayer. He suspected that the men he had come to meet were counting on the same thing to compel him to honesty. That seemed the most plausible reason why they'd insisted on meeting him the morning he arrived.

His instructions were quite specific. He was not to use any public transport or taxi. He was not to phone. He just had to walk, following the map. The map was hand drawn. Campbell had it folded inside his Bible. He took it out and looked at it while he sipped his coffee. He had been warned not to store it on frames or any other electronic device. Which was fine with Campbell. He had a good memory, drilled by childhood years of catechism and Bible study, and he didn't use frames anyway.

He folded the map, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and headed out. At the exit it took a moment's puzzled gaze at the sky for him to figure out which direction was north.

Turnhouse had a raw feel, like all airport developments. The strips followed the old runway paths. Of all the ways to get around—skybridge, tunnel, monorail, shuttle bus, bicycle—surface walking was the worst provided for. Campbell made his way along narrow weed-grown sidewalks between and around the feet of the towers. Office blocks of HSBC, Nissan, Honeywell, Gazprom; factories of ever-changing Carbon Glen start-ups; high-rise farms, car parks, the control tower like the hilt of a giant sword; slowly turning slanted slopes of solar-power collectors whose supercooled cables dripped liquid nitrogen through carbon-dioxide frost. Campbell sweated again, cooled only by the downblast of descending aircraft.

Beyond the commercial strips the paths opened to streets of fast-built housing blocks, their buckysheet sides arbitrarily coloured, their windows overlooking well-tended vegetable gardens and scuffed play areas. Every roof bristled with aerials. Every ground floor had its shop or cafe. Vehicles in the throes of repair or adaptation almost outnumbered those in running order. Kids ran around and youths hung about. Campbell dodged soccer balls and pavement cycles, irritated and baffled until he remembered that it was the school summer holidays here. Old people and young parents were the only adults he could see; the others, he guessed, were working in the farm and factory towers or cleaning the offices. Despite these indications of full employment, the place had an air of newness and impermanence, of being the result of a displacement and decantation, the outcome of a scheme contrived elsewhere. Something in the weathering of the older folks’ faces was rural rather than urban. Campbell guessed that most of the people were here as a result of losing their homes to coastal flooding, or their livelihoods to the high-rise farms.

The streets stopped where the bulldozers still worked, just beyond a bridge over a deep, fast river. Pennants marked a jagged footpath across the site. Campbell negotiated it to the raw edge of an expanse of long grass. He stopped, as if hesitating to dive into cold water, checked his map and the tiny compass on his key ring and walked on. After a few hundred metres of slogging through what was obviously an abandoned field he reached a cluster of deserted farm buildings. There he turned right along a road under a railway bridge, then turned left sharply off the road to head north again up a slope through trees.

The trees thinned, and at the top of the slope he saw the men he'd come halfway round the world to meet.

They could have been a rock band: six men on the skyline, their long hair caught by the breeze. They wore black homburg hats, long black coats, white collarless shirts, black trousers, and black boots or shoes. As Campbell approached, grinning but apprehensive, the oldest of them strode down the slope to meet him. He was a man in his forties, with lean, lined features and bright grey eyes.

“Mr. Campbell!” the man said, grasping Campbell's hand and almost hauling him up. “John Livingston—pleased to meet you.”

“John Richard Campbell, likewise.”

Campbell held the grip for a moment, delighted and relieved that Livingston looked in life just as he did in his pictures, hale and spare, keen and sharp, like some tough old Covenanter who lived on water and gruel, on the run from moss-troopers and dragoons on the moors. There wasn't much about the man online, and what there was dealt solely with his business activities; he was the owner of a small company based right here at Turnhouse, manufacturing carbon-tech components for the space industries. His spiritual endeavours were conducted, it seemed, entirely by word of mouth and—as in his contact with Campbell—by physical mail.

“I trust you had travelling mercies,” Livingston said.

Campbell took a moment to parse this. “I did indeed,” he said. “It all went very smoothly.”

“Good, good.”

Livingston led him to the top of the slope, and through a round of handshakes with the other men, all older than Campbell but still in their twenties. George Scott, Archie Riddell, William Paterson, Patrick Walker, Bob Gordon.

“‘John Richard,’ please,” Campbell said, after they'd all called him ‘Mr. Campbell.’ He smiled awkwardly at the group. “Most people call me J. R.”

“Fine, fine,” said Livingston.

At that moment a shadow fell over them, sped across the land, and passed on.

“A superstitious person would have seen that as an omen,” Campbell remarked.

Livingston chuckled. “As well we're not superstitious, then!” He looked up into the sky, as though he could see the soleta.

“Mind you,” he went on, “I'm no so sure it's a good work being done up there, for all that I make money from space. There's something well presumptuous about blocking the sun, in my opinion. ‘The heavens are the Lord's,’ as the Psalmist says, ‘but the Earth hath He given to the children of men.’ I fear we'd do well not to meddle with the heavens.”

“Well,” said Campbell, “it's an attempt to correct previous meddling here on Earth.”

“Aye, there's that,” said Livingston. “Still, that's out of our hands, and right now it is to the Lord's business we must attend. Follow me.”

Campbell saw that they stood at the lip of a quarry about thirty metres deep. A second later Livingston had quite alarmingly vaulted off the edge and disappeared. Campbell stepped forward, the others behind him, and found a drop of about a metre to a narrow shelf, then another such downward step, which Livingston had just taken. Campbell followed the bobbing homburg down a succession of shelves, scree slopes, gorse handholds and chimney gulleys to the quarry's floor. The flat expanse of gravel was cupped on three sides by the quarry cliffs and broken by huge puddles, rock outcrops, clumps of bushes, rusted remnants of machinery, and the inevitable shopping trolley or two.

Livingston didn't look back. He strode to an open space in the middle of the floor and stopped, looking in all directions as the group re-formed around him.

“Walls have windows, Mr. Campbell,” he said, noticing the visitor's puzzlement. His gaze flicked around his companions. “Let us now ask the Lord's blessing on our meeting.”

He bowed his head, the others following suit, and said a short prayer. At the “Amen” Campbell opened his eyes and straightened up. He tried to stop his knees from trembling.

“This is an informal meeting,” said Livingston, in a formal tone, “of the Kirk Session of the Free Congregation of West Lothian. No minutes are to be taken. I ask those present to affirm that they will give a faithful account of it, if called upon by the brethren.”

Campbell, after a moment's hesitation, added his “Aye” to the chorus.

“Very well,” said Livingston. “We are here to welcome our friend, John Richard Campbell, and to satisfy ourselves as to his saving faith before accepting him to the brotherhood of the Congregation. Now, John Richard, do you understand what is required of you?”

“I do,” said Campbell.

“Do you promise to answer truthfully and without reservation?”

“Yes.”

“What, John Richard, do you understand by the sum of saving knowledge?”

Campbell answered that to everyone's satisfaction.

“And do you aver that that knowledge has by grace been brought home to you, to your soul's salvation?”

“Yes.” That was a question he had no hesitation in answering.

More questions followed: detailed, doctrinal, subtle. Campbell felt on less sure ground here, but his memory for the small print of the Westminster Confession and the Larger Catechism didn't let him down. At the end Livingston nodded soberly.

“Aye, John Richard, you have the root of the matter all right. We thought so, from hearing your discourses. Very powerful, spiritual, and experimental they were.”

Campbell's mouth felt dry. He'd never intended his discourses to go beyond their small circle of hearers in the woods of Waimangu. Yet somehow they had: they'd come to the attention of this tiny church in Scotland, and its elders had been impressed enough to pay his return fare. The airmail letter that enclosed the e-ticket code and the invitation, the instructions and the map had been insistent that no further communication would be possible, and that if any problems arose when he met the elders personally there would be no recrimination. He still felt like a fraud.

“Now,” Livingston went on, “is there anything more you would like to tell us about your discourses?”

Campbell took a deep breath. “There is something I have to tell you, which may shock you. I had no opportunity before, and I'm afraid you may feel this has all been for nothing.”

Livingston glanced around the Kirk Session. “Go on,” he said. “Spit it out, Mr. Campbell.”

“My discourses,” said Campbell, “were addressed to robots.”

Livingston's eyes held steady. “What kind of robots?”

“Humanoid robots,” Campbell said. “The kind that are no longer made, because people find them disturbing. And they're self-aware robots, with the same kind of minds that…emerged, we're told, in some combat mechs in the Fai—the Oil Wars. Some of these humanoid robots have taken refuge in Waimangu. A few of these have shown an interest in the faith, perhaps having become curious about the basis for creation science. And…I've been talking to them about it.”

“And how, Mr. Campbell, would you justify putting the gospel before machines?”

“Because they asked me to,” he said. He had no better answer, and could think of many worse.

“Are we not told,” said Livingston, “not to cast pearls before swine, nor to give that which is holy unto the dogs?”

Campbell looked down, then up. “In my…teens I published some rash and forward theological speculations, I admit. I disavow them. All I can say is that the machines asked me, most earnestly, and I told them. They showed interest, and asked more, and made a practice of gathering around to listen, and…so it went on. I make no claims as to whether the machines have souls, but they do have rational minds. I think—I hope—there is something to be learned from that.”

“And what might that be?”

“The making of artificial intelligence is one of the proudest boasts of the secularists,” said Campbell. “Next to artificial life, it's the greatest triumph for their materialism. Perhaps greater. They claim to have done what Christians once claimed could be done only by God—creating a rational soul. Would this triumph not turn to ashes in their mouths if their own creations were to acknowledge the true Creator?”

“If the Lord could speak out of the mouth of Balaam's ass,” said Livingston, “it's possible He could use a robot's mouth for a similar purpose. Quite aside from the question of the robot's having a soul. Is that what you're saying?”

“Yes!” said Campbell, relieved. “Exactly.”

“Well, John Richard,” said Livingston, “we are very glad indeed you have said that. Would you like to know how we came to know of your discourses?”

Campbell nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

Livingston stuck four fingers between his lips and let out a whistle that echoed around the quarry. The silence that followed was broken by the sound of footsteps crunching over the gravel. From behind a rock fifty metres away a man appeared, and walked towards the group. He wore an open-necked short-sleeved shirt over a broad chest and powerful arms. He had a sweatshirt knotted by its sleeves around his waist. Only when he was a few paces away did Campbell notice the subtle abnormality in the texture of his skin, and the unusually sharp definition of his sinews.

The stranger reached out a hand and clasped Campbell's in a firm, dry grip.

“Good morning, Mr. Campbell,” he said. “My name is Graham Orr. I've followed your discourses with great interest. Pleased to meet you at last, sir.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Orr,” said Campbell. He glanced, a little at a loss, sideways at Livingston, who was eyeing the encounter with a glint of dry humour.

“Are you—are you—?” Campbell floundered. Orr took a step back, with a grimmer smile than Livingston's.

“Not to embarrass you further, Mr. Campbell,” he said, “I'm not a robot.” He grimaced. “I lost my limbs and a lot else in the Faith Wars.”