The Holy Machine (2 page)

2

Ruth had gone to sleep in SenSpace again. Her body dangled from its wires, her helmeted head slumped forward. She would get pressure sores if she wasn’t careful.

I called to her, then went over and shook her. I did it quite roughly. I resented having to look after her.

‘Oh George, it’s you,’ she said, lifting the face piece and blinking at me with her owlish eyes. ‘I must have gone to sleep. Can you get me out of here?’

I sighed, unzipped her and helped her out of the dangling suit. I hated this job because she always got in there naked in order to achieve maximum contact with the taxils.

She was so little and thin. She had no breasts and barely any pubic hair. When I lifted her down it was as if I was the parent and she was the child. And yet if you looked carefully at her belly you could see the traces of my Caesarian birth.

I looked away from her and wrapped her up quickly in the robe that she’d left lying on the floor.

‘You should eat more and spend less time in there, Ruth. You’re not doing yourself any good at all.’

‘Oh I’m so tired George, could you just take me through to my room?’

‘
Carry
you?
Again
?’

‘Please.’

‘Goddamit Ruth, you must
eat
! You’re wasting yourself away!’

But I carried her through anyway, tucked her in bed, sent Charlie through with her knockout pills, and stood and watched her while she curled up in a foetal position and began to sink back down towards sleep.

‘
Please, please sleep
,’ I whispered.

I was exhausted myself, and drained, and wretched. I longed for my own bed, my own oblivion…

‘
Please, just sleep…
’

And it really did begin to look as if for once she would do just that.

But then, no, it was not to be. My whole body clenched as I saw her shoulders beginning to shake.

‘Just
sleep
for fuck’s sake, Ruth!’ I wanted to scream at her, but I bit my tongue.

And as the little whimpering sobs began to come, I made myself cross the room again and sit down on her bed and hold her hand.

‘There, there,’ I repeated mechanically, ‘there, there, there…’

I don’t know much about her childhood. Something frightening must have happened to her I suppose, because I believe the reason she chose a career in science was that it was neutral, factual, safe – far away from the painful and messy business of human life. (That’s how science seemed to people in the days before the Reaction.)

She shut herself in her laboratory in Chicago with her robot assistant Joe and she worked and worked and worked, going home alone in the evenings to a neat little apartment where she tended her houseplants and her collection of Victorian china cups…

In India, the Hindu extremists massacred the industrial elite. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox came to power in a coup, in Central Asia the vast statue of the Holy Martyr was constructed in Tashkent and every day thousands of pilgrims gave blood to keep its wounds eternally flowing… But Ruth came into work at eight every day and extracted DNA from genetically modified chicken embryos, hardly passing the time of day with anyone but Joe.

Then the Elect came to Chicago. They held mass prayer meetings at which thousands turned to Jesus and to their cause, they roamed the streets looking for the abortionists, the homosexuals, the unbelievers… Fired by fierce preachers, the ordinary people of America were rising up against the secular order that had taken meaning away from their lives. The police stood by. The authorities looked away. Everyone could see that a dam had broken. Even the President tried to make his peace with the Elect.

And Ruth had a cup of coffee at 11 a.m. and took ten minutes out to read her porcelain collectors’ magazine. She refused to hear the chanting in the street. She refused to notice the burning houses that could be clearly seen from her fourth-floor laboratory window. Until suddenly they were kicking open the door, flinging open the incubators, sweeping test tubes onto the floors…

Joe was smashed to pieces in front of her, his stalk eyes rolling, his voice box croaking out his repertoire of helpful phrases in random order:

‘Could you repeat that please… Glad to be of help… Have a nice day…’

They told Ruth she had tampered sinfully with the sacred gift of life. Her head was shaven. Dressed only in sackcloth, she was led to that infamous platform beside the lake where Mrs Ullman was later to die.

* * *

‘There, there, Ruth, there, there…’

She never talked about it, but you can reconstruct the scene from countless other stories:

The crowd murmurs and seethes. A big, handsome preacher, with blow-dried hair and a white suit, bellows like a bull about Jesus and hellfire. The first of the sackclothed figures is led forward. He is a cosmologist called Suzuki. In a faltering voice he confesses to teaching that the world began billions of years back in a Big Bang, though he knows now that it was created in six days, just five thousand years ago.

‘And you have
always
really known that, Brother Suzuki,’ says the preacher sternly.

Suzuki swallows. The crowd hisses. Someone throws an egg which hits the scholarly scientist on the forehead and trickles slowly down over his face. Still Suzuki hesitates. The preacher turns towards him frowning.

Suzuki lifts his head to the microphone.

‘I… have always known it. May God forgive my… my sin.’

The preacher puts his arm round Suzuki’s shoulder, ‘Brother Suzuki. Let Jesus into your heart and you will still be saved.’

The crowd surges up, and subsides and surges up again, like a restless ocean. Suzuki is led away, and a young computer scientist named Schmidt is led to the microphone.

‘I never meant to suggest that our programs were a rival to the human mind. They were only intended to model certain aspects of…’

The preacher roars at him: ‘Acknowledge your sin, brother, acknowledge your sin! Don’t compound it!’

‘
Tar him! Feather him! Tar him! Feather him!
’ storms the great dark ocean.

The computer scientist looks round desperately at the group of sack-clothed figures waiting behind him.
Help me!
his eyes say,
What do they want me to say?
But they all look away.

He turns back to the microphone. ‘I confess! Please forgive me! I blasphemed against God. Jesus is Lord! He… died… for… me… God forgive me! God forgive me!’

The preacher embraces him. ‘Easy, Brother Schmidt, easy! Jesus loves you. He has loved you for all eternity…’

Schmidt clings to his tormentor, sobbing like a child.

‘There, there, Ruth, there, there…’

A sociologist called Carp confesses to questioning the institution of marriage, to defending homosexuals, to teaching the satanic doctrine of cultural relativity…

The crowd explodes with rage.

‘I know, I know,’ sobs Carp. ‘I have sinned against the God of my fathers. I have sinned against Jesus. I have sinned in a way against America. I have denied the Lord. But I do repent brothers and sisters. Pray for my soul. Help me to bear the righteous wrath of God…’

There are cheers. The crowd likes this display. But the preacher is frowning.

‘Methinks he doth protest too much, brothers and sisters, methinks he doth protest
too much
. This is
false repentance
, my friends, thrown to us as a sop, while in his heart this unbeliever, this sinner, still nurses the viper of sin and atheism!’

Carp stares at him in terror, ‘No sir, I really do… I mean…’

He is led away to where the tar smokes and bubbles in its black pots.

And it is Ruth’s turn.

A cold wind blows across the lake.

Poor Ruth. Poor little Ruth. All alone up there, facing that dark sea of rage…

She had managed at last to get to sleep. I tiptoed to my own room, and Charlie brought me my own knockout pills.

How excited Ruth and I were all those years ago when we unpacked dear Charlie, all shiny and new from his box lined with polystyrene. How thrilled we were when we found out we could personalize all his store of friendly messages with our own names.

‘Goodnight,’ he said in his raspy electronic voice, ‘Goodnight George’.

3

I took a different route home from work the next day, walking through the Commercial Centre, rather than taking the subway as I normally did to the District of Faraday where we lived. I told myself I needed the exercise.

All along the seafront the crowds streamed, checking out the VR arcades with their garish holographic signs. Under the eye of robot police – two metres tall, with sad, silvery, immobile faces – the children of Illyria made their choices of the countless electronic worlds waiting to entertain them with surrogate adventure, surrogate violence, surrogate sex…

Below the railings, the mild Adriatic sea sucked gently on the stones. I kept walking, steadily, quickly, careful not to ask myself where I was going.

Ahead of me the Beacon of Illyria rose from the sea, Illyria’s cathedral of science, that huge silver tower like a gigantic chess-pawn that seemed to hover weightlessly above the water, though it was the tallest building in the world. People were going across the thin steel bridge that linked it to the land, heading for the delights within. Far up at its huge spherical head, there were four Ferris wheels, one for each point of the compass. They were much bigger than any fairground wheel, but they looked tiny up there. One was pulling in to unload, another was building up to full speed.

I liked the Beacon. When he was alive my father sometimes used to take me there, on the monthly Saturdays when I spent the afternoon with him. It was a relief when we went because it was a genuine treat, a time when I could go home and tell Ruth quite truthfully that I’d had fun, wandering through the intricate maze in there that took you, each time by a different route, through the history of scientific knowledge. He even let me ride on one of those Ferris wheels, though it was understood between us that he would not ride with me. On other monthly visits, he left me to entertain myself and I had to lie to Ruth about what we’d done so as not to have to hear her say what a bad man my father was. He was a great scientist after all, the inventor of Discontinuous Motion no less, and really he had no time for children, least of all a child like me.

(He died when I was ten, incidentally. It was an accident at work and his body was never found. He was working on new applications for Discontinuous Motion at the time, finding ways of punching holes through space to arrive at distant places, so perhaps his body is lying out there somewhere, on some planet orbiting some distant sun.)

But now I turned away from the Beacon, away from the seafront, and along the grand Avenue of Science. I walked past the News Building with its gigantic screen, where President Ullman’s face, forty storeys high, was shown making his annual speech on the occasion of the Territorial Purchase, which he himself negotiated in order to found our unique scientists’ state. After that was the Fellowship of Reason Tower and the gleaming headquarters of IBM, Sony, Esso, Krupp and a score of the other giant corporations that moved here with the refugees. Every ten metres there was a flagpole from which fluttered alternately the many flags of the extinct secular nations from which our people came, and the black-and-white flag of Illyria. Its emblem was a wide-open eye, in contrast to the closed eyes of blind faith which surrounded us on every side.

I kept walking, refusing to tell myself where I was going.

Outside the Senate House there was some kind of disturbance. A little group of Greek guestworkers were holding a demonstration. They were sitting down in the road holding up placards in poorly spelt English:

‘LET US PLEESE CELEBRAT EESTER AND CHRISTMAS.’

‘ALOW US OUR TRADITONS QUIETLY THANKYOU.’

‘LIVE AND LET US LIVE.’

Around them a hostile crowd of Illyrians were shouting abuse while a dozen robot police, silent silver giants, were picking up the protestors two at a time and loading them into vans with as little fuss and as little acrimony as if they were tidying away discarded food cartons.

‘Throw them all out!’ suddenly screamed a thin little middle-aged woman just by me. (She reminded me of Ruth, though she had a British accent). ‘Christians! Jews! Muslims! Throw out
all
the treacherous little bigots!’

Her eyes were bulging with hate and fear.

‘Or gas the lot of them even better,’ wheezed the stooped, trembling man who was with her.

Who knows what ghosts were haunting them? The Oxford Burnings? The Science Park Massacre? While the Elect established their American theocracy, the British tried for a time to keep the Reaction at bay by shutting their dispossessed classes away, surrounded by high fences. But in the end, their dam too had burst.

I turned away from all of this, down Darwin Drive, into the Night Quarter where the restaurants were and the theatres and the cinemas, and…

But still I would not allow myself to know my destination.

4

And then I was there, in the lobby, standing on the red carpet, smelling the sickly smell of scent and disinfectant, hearing the dreamy muzak.

‘Good evening, sir. Do you have an appointment?’

The receptionist was a syntec in the likeness of a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman.

My mouth was so dry I could barely form the words.

‘No… I…’

‘Would you like to choose from the menu – or from one of our special offers? Or would you like to go through to the lounge and make your own selection personally?’

‘I… the… lounge.’

‘That’s fine sir. You’ll see it’s just through the door there. Have a nice evening!’

I glided like a sleepwalker across the corridor.

There were thin women and fat women, black women and white women, barely pubescent girls and handsome motherly women of forty. Some of them were almost naked, others dressed as nurses, as teachers, as housewives, as schoolgirls… There were boys too, and muscly men in posing pouches… And even stranger things: boys with breasts, girls with penises, elfin creatures, impossibly slender and covered in smooth fur, with pointy cat-like ears and narrow cat-like eyes…

They were waiting round the edge of a big dark-red room, some reclining on sofas, some perched on stools, others standing. If you looked in their direction, they would smile and try to catch your eye and start to move towards you. If you looked away they would stop.

The music meandered on and on and on. Sometimes it seemed like saxophones, sometimes like an orchestra of violins from long ago and sometimes like girlish voices that repeated the same few words over and over: ‘Love me, baby, baby love me, baby, baby, my baby love…’

Male sleepwalkers wandered round and round the room, blank-faced, avoiding one another’s eyes, round and round. From time to time one or other of them would come to a stop and a smiling syntec would step forward. The man would be led from the room, as meek and docile as a lost little boy.

‘George!’

A plump, balding middle-aged man stood in front of me.

‘It
is
George isn’t it? Nice to see you! What’s a good-looking young man like you doing in a place like this?’

He had a faint Irish accent and I vaguely recognized him as one of Word for Word’s clients, an export manager for some firm that peddled technological trinkets to the near-medieval states beyond our frontiers.

‘Paddy, remember? Old Paddy Malone. The one with the stupid computer that’s supposed to talk Turkish but can’t! A nice piece of work you did for us there, young George, a very good job indeed!’

He was grinning, he was slapping me jovially on the shoulders but sweat was pouring down his face.

‘What a feast, eh?’ he chuckled, gesturing around the room, ‘Look at that black one over there, isn’t she a
peach
?’

A robot coated in silky black skin saw him pointing, smiled and made to get up from its seat, but the watery eyes of the export manager had moved on.

‘And will you look at that little thing! Don’t you just want to…’

Passing ghost-like men modified their course slightly so as not to run into us.

‘I tell you what, George my old buddy, this place has been the
making
of my marriage! Any time that little itch comes along, you know, I just get down here and sort it out, no problems, no grief for anyone, at no more than the price of a half-decent meal out! Not that I’d actually want to bother the dear wife you know with the actual…’

Again he tailed off. His eyes looked past me. Sweat poured off his bald head. Sweat dripped from his chin. The ghosts went gliding by.

‘Hey! Look over there! That
is
new! Just look at the
tits
on that thing! I think I can see where old Paddy’s going to find his berth tonight.’

Some sort of reaction was building up inside me. I shook away his arm. He wasn’t paying any attention in any case, but was grinning stupidly as the big-breasted syntec came to greet him as if old Paddy was what it had been waiting for all its life.

Horrified, I rushed from the room. I was in such a hurry that I crashed straight into one of those syntec elfin boys which was leading out a bewildered Albanian guestworker with three days stubble on his chin. I sent it flying across the floor.

‘Allah have mercy,’ whispered the dazed Albanian.

* * *

As I crossed the lobby, I saw Lucy coming down the stairs. I recognized her at once. She was even prettier than she had been on the TV, wearing a loose jumper and a pair of jeans, like a student, like a girl of my own age. She saw me looking at her and caught my eye and smiled…

But the experience of the lounge had broken the illusion. This was not really a
she
at all. It was an
it
, a doll, a mannequin, no more real than Ruth’s SenSpace.

‘Ugh!’ I muttered as I turned away and headed for the door.

‘Enjoy the rest of your evening!’ called out the receptionist, ‘Hope we see you again soon!’

‘No chance, plastic one!’ I called back as I stepped out into the street and breathed in the evening air.

I felt pleased with myself as I headed for the subway that would take me home. That was
that
dealt with, I said to myself, that was that nonsense out of my system.

I remember I noticed a fly-posted notice at the subway entrance.

‘The Holist League,’ it read, ‘The whole is more than the parts…’

It brought into my mind again the strange image of Ullman in reverse, creating man out of dust.

Then I bought a bag of fresh doughnuts from a Greek vendor and made my way down to the train in its warm bright tunnel.