The Holy Machine (16 page)

47

Little Rose was sitting at her kitchen table having coffee with Sol Gladheim.

‘You know,’ she was saying, looking out of the window at her garden, ‘I’ve half a mind to take out all those red rose bushes down there and have a little apple orchard instead. What do you think?’

‘I think that would be very nice,’ said Mr Gladheim. ‘It would be a nice place to go out and sit sometimes. Perhaps you could– ’

Little Rose turned round in surprise. Mr Gladheim had frozen, his mouth open in mid-sentence.

‘Sol?’

A horizontal section slid sideways out of the middle of his body – and disappeared.

‘
Sol!
’

Another section slid away – and his legs disappeared below the knee.

‘
Sol!
’

She jumped up and rushed to him but his face vanished. Then the rest of his body slid away in three successive horizontal slices. There was nothing left of him at all.

Little Rose ran to the window.

The garden had changed. All the alterations and improvements she had made had vanished. It had reverted to the form it had when she first moved in. And, leaning on a spade and talking over the fence to her neighbour, Mr Topalski, was the ‘extra’ who had inhabited her house before she arrived, in the shape of an elderly man called Mr Philips.

‘Mr Topalski!’ Little Rose called, running out of her back door. ‘What’s happening?’

She knew the old Pole was also an extra and not a real person, but he had always been a good neighbour to her all the same. (Nothing was too much trouble. He was always willing to help out.) Now he didn’t show any sign that he had even heard her. Nor did Mr Philips. Their voices rose and fell conversationally, but as she drew near to them, she realized their words meant nothing at all.

‘Yabbly yibbly yabbly yibbly,’ went Mr Philips.

‘Yibbly yabbly yibbly yabbly,’ went Mr T, with an authentic Slavonic accent.

Two gardens away a little boy was riding round his garden on a bicycle.

‘Jimmy!’ screamed Little Rose, ‘JIMMY!’

Jimmy took no notice at all.

And, far overhead, huge symbols went streaming across the sky:

Poor Little Rose. When she turned round, she found her kitchen too had changed. All the alternations she had made, the tiles, the paint, the furniture, had vanished. The fabrics and fittings had all reverted to their default settings. The house was identical again to the copies of it that recurred every five kilometres, north, south, east and west.

‘There’s some technical glitch,’ she told herself, ‘that’s all it is. The SenSpace system is temporarily down. That’s all. They’ll fix it in no time.’

And she reached up to lift the SenSpace helmet off her head.

But of course there
was
no helmet. She wasn’t wearing a SenSpace suit, she wasn’t in a SenSpace room and she had no corporeal arms to remove a helmet even if it had been there. The nerves that once operated the flesh and blood limbs of Ruth Simling, were now wired directly into a SenSpace radio transmitter and from there were connected to the SenSpace net. The muscles they had once controlled had long since been removed and incinerated.

Little Rose ran through her house and out into the street. A policeman was out there going about his rounds.

‘Help me!’ she called out to him. ‘What’s going on? Help me please!’

But he took no notice at all.

She began to run. The City went on forever.

It went on forever, but it repeated itself every five kilometres. After the Residential Area where Little Rose lived, there was Park, with fountains and trees and a lake. A group of children were dancing ring-a-roses on top of a small green hill. They danced round and round, singing in bright voices, and taking no notice at all of Little Rose as she went running by.

All across the sky, the giant symbols marched:

After Park was Downtown where illuminated signs flooded the streets with reckless colour. Last time Little Rose was in her nearest Downtown those coloured lights had advertised shops and services but now they too had gone back to their default settings and had nothing to say but their own names:

‘
RED!
’ one sign shouted, flooding a street in crimson, ‘
RED! RED! RED!
’

‘
B – L – U – E ! ! !’
another proclaimed, letter by letter.

Another flickered between two colours:

‘
Green
.
ORANGE
Green
.
ORANGE
….’

Little Rose glimpsed a reflection in an orange-drenched window. It vanished, then reappeared again in green, a strange stick figure, a diagramatic woman, a mere lattice of lines without flesh or substance.

It was her. It was Little Rose. It was all that was left of her.

‘
RED! RED! RED!
’

‘
Green
.
ORANGE
Green
.
ORANGE
….’

‘B – L – U – E ! ! !’

After Downtown was Rough Area. This was the place where City without End
^TM
residents could go to smash windows and visit strip clubs and get into fights with gangsters without ever getting hurt. None of the windows were broken now. Pimps and gangsters’ molls talked gibberish to each other on the street corners without even looking at the strange stick-woman running by.

‘Yibble yabble yibble yabble…’

It was the same in the Millionaire Zone and the Artists’ Quarter. It was the same when she came to the next Residential Area. A blackbird trilled in the branches of a Chinese plum tree. A ginger cat crossed her path. The peaceful sound of unseen extras mowing unseen lawns wafted through the imaginary air as she came to the exact counterpart of her own street, the exact replica of her own house, the exact replica of Mr Topalski, washing his Buick in his front yard, under a sky full of meaningless signs.

48

+000000113-000000254, read the notice over the gate of Park.

These were its coordinates. Five kilometres east, Park would be called +000000113-000000255, fifty kilometres south, Park would be called +000000103-000000254. They used to have names over the gates chosen by local residents, and little details of design that marked out one from another. Now only the numbers distinguished them.

On their green hillock, the circle of children were dancing ring-a-roses.

Atishoo-atishoo…

Five kilometres to the north in Park +000000114-000000254, an identical circle of children were dancing. So they were five kilometres eastward in +000000113-000000255, and
every
five kilometres, north, south, east and west for ever and ever and ever. Every five billion kilometres, the numbers themselves began to repeat.

Little Rose ran to the top of the highest hill in the Park and stopped to look around. Houses, towers, hills stretched away into the distance. But, many repetitions away, a whole section of the City disappeared as she looked, as if a great mouth had bitten it off and swallowed it. After which there was a flurry of ghostly traffic all around her, a muttering and murmuring, like a wind of soul-fragments, hurrying towards the gigantic hole where that section of city had been.

yibbly dibbly deeble dargle, yibbly dibbly deeble dargle…
went the whispering traffic of ghosts.

Then, for the first time since Mr Gladheim was struck dumb, she heard a voice speaking real words.

‘Don’t just stand and look at it! Can’t you see the danger?’

It was a thin man, as thin as a stick, sketched out in black and white, his face a diagram of fear.

But under his arm he carried a second head, a second diagrammatic head, which looked at Little Rose and smiled reassuringly.

‘What larks eh?’ said the disembodied Head.

But the thin man clucked his tongue.

‘You’d better come with us!’ he said, ‘We have to get away from that thing over there or it will eat us too.’

To her own surprise, Little Rose just smiled.

The Head chuckled.

‘How can you laugh?’ exclaimed the Thin Man urgently. ‘
It’s
coming! Look! Run!’

Across the City, Park +000000113-000000249 disappeared into an invisible maw.

yibbly dibbly deeble dargel…
went the ghosts as they hurried towards oblivion.

Even the letters in the sky were flowing towards the gap.

Poor Little Rose. Her whole life had consisted of running to new safe places as old ones were violated. But if monsters invaded SenSpace when she no longer had arms or legs or eyes, then where else was there left to run?

She felt terror, and rage… but oddly too, she also felt
relief
.

‘Come on!’ called the Thin Man.

‘No,’ said Little Rose, ‘No. I think I’ll just stay here.’

‘Bravo,’ said the Head, ‘Me too! I’ll stay as well!’

‘You certainly won’t,’ said the Thin Man, grasping his bodiless companion firmly and taking to his heels.

‘Follow us!’ he shouted back. ‘Do you
want
to be devoured?’

The Head gave a kind of bodiless shrug as it was whisked away.

‘Good luck!’ it called out to Little Rose as it disappeared from her view.

Little Rose waited, watching the nothingness draw closer like a tide. Another Park, another Downtown, another Residential Area. The ghosts yammered more and more loudly with each new and nearer bite.

Soon the thing was eating through the nearest Downtown, the nearest Artists’ Quarter.

Then it went
gulp
and there was nothing beyond the lake.

yimmer yammer…
went the ghosts voices.

Gulp went the mouth again, and the lake was gone.

Gulp.

Gulp.

Gulp.

49

Little Rose found herself back on that high platform under the stars. She was looking out over the patchwork of the SenSpace worlds. There was the seaside, there was the forest, there were the mountains, there was a little part of the City without End
^TM
, all laid out for her to choose from, just as if nothing amiss had ever happened.

‘I’m very, very sorry, my dear,’ said a familiar voice. ‘You must have had a dreadful time of it. There was a technical problem with the interface, I’m afraid.’

Little Rose turned smiling to Mr Gladheim. He put a protective arm across her shoulder. ‘You know I’ll never feel quite the same about you again,’ she said, ‘now that I’ve seen you vanish in slices.’

Mr Gladheim didn’t know what to say.

‘Are you under the control of a human operator at the moment?’ asked Little Rose.

After a moment’s hesitation, Mr Gladheim nodded.

Little Rose nodded.

‘What’s your name, operator?’

Again Mr Gladheim hesitated.

‘I don’t know if I’m…’

‘Go on,’ said Little Rose.

‘Er… Janet,’ he said, ‘Janet Müller.’

Little Rose smiled at the notion of a woman speaking with Mr Gladheim’s manly baritone.

‘Ruth Simling,’ she said, ‘That’s who
my
operator is. Not that there’s much left of Ruth Simling.’

Mr Gladheim nodded, sagely, Janet Müller not knowing what else to say.

‘Everything’s back to normal down there in the City,’ she made Mr Gladheim say after a pause. ‘Your House is back how you made it. I expect you want to go back there don’t you? Maybe we could sort out that orchard you wanted?’

Little Rose turned away from him and looked out over the many worlds below them.

‘Be honest Janet, how would you like it if this was the only place you could be?’

Janet did not know what to say to this either, so she let Sol Gladheim look shrewd and sympathetic and not say anything at all.

Little Rose, however, was looking out over the worlds.

She noticed some bare mountains in the distance she hadn’t seen before. She thought perhaps she’d go there.