The Holy Machine (20 page)

60

But even amid this mayhem, there were small islands of peace. I came to a remote valley in Macedonia, where people went about their lives as if the outside world did not exist.

And there a peasant named Zhavkov befriended me. He was a widower, living with his daughter Leta. He was getting old and finding it hard to maintain his small farm. He gave me a bed in his loft and a seat at the family table if I would work for him.

He was a slow man and turned out to be an easy master to please. When I was incompetent, he enjoyed the feeling of superiority that it gave him. Yet when my competence exceeded his, that pleased him too. Far from feeling put down, he congratulated himself on his own cunning in acquiring a farmhand from the legendary City where they could make machines talk and destroy their enemies with beams of light.

‘Perhaps we could plant the tomatoes over here?’ I’d say, ‘They’ll get more shelter and catch more rain when it falls.’

He would slowly consider. He knew only one way of doing anything and that was the way his father had done it and his father before that, even if that meant walking round three sides of a field instead of taking the direct line. So new ideas, derived from a fresh analysis of the problem, seemed almost magical to him.

Slowly he would smile.

‘Well, and why not? That’s not a bad idea, not a bad idea at all.’

And he’d beam at me, nodding slowly many, many times.

‘They say old Zhavkov is a fool,’ he’d chuckle, ‘but who else has a real Scientist from the City to help him? You tell me that!’

Leta too was pleased by me. Everything about me intrigued her, and what began with good-natured teasing, soon became knowing looks, accidental touchings, small treats set aside in the kitchen for when I came in.

This wasn’t discouraged by Zhavkov. He would nudge me knowingly when we were out in the fields together.

‘You seem to have made a good impression on my Leta,’ he would say, ‘not such a bad-looking girl is she? She’s turned away more than one young lover in her time I can tell you.’

It was true. She was pretty in a plump, cheerful way. And she was sweet-natured, though slow and unsophisticated like her father. I enjoyed her interest in me at first and didn’t discourage her flirtations.

One day, when we were alone in the house, she engineered a playfight with me over a sweet cake, which ended up with her in my arms. We kissed. We became aroused. Laughter became breathless.

Then Leta took my hand and led me up to her tiny room. She unbuttoned her dress. Out tumbled her big soft breasts. And then she smiled kindly, seeing me hesitate, and gently took my hands and placed them over her thick, dark nipples.

Quite suddenly, and with horrible vividness, the image came into my mind of Lucy tearing away her breasts and revealing the dead plastic shell beneath, with plastic tubes oozing yellowish liquids…

I pulled back abruptly from Leta. Her smile turned to dismay. Mumbling apologies I collected my few things from the loft…

61

Some weeks later, I climbed off a dilapidated bus in a mountainside village in Montenegro, reputed to be another island of peace. The bus came this way only once a week and was soon surrounded by villagers, unloading purchases, greeting returning travellers, climbing on board for the return journey. I was hot and weary and seeing a concrete water tank in the middle of an apple orchard, I made my way down to it, kicked off my broken old shoes, and climbed into the cool green water.

After the initial cold shock, the coolness was enchanting, and I lay back and let it spread through me. I could still hear the villagers talking and shouting on the road by the bus, but the peaceful dreamy sound of a single skylark twittering straight above me seemed more significant than all the talking and shouting in the world.

‘Well, look at me!’ I said to myself, as I finally pulled myself out of the tank and settled myself down in the shady grass under a tree. ‘I’ve found my vocation. I’ve become a hobo.’

I chuckled softly, a grubby, unshaven, smelly figure dressed in ragged clothes. I closed my eyes. Images drifted into my mind from Epiros and Corfu, Albania and Macedonia, Illyria and the Peloponnese, melting and merging together as I began to dream.

But then,
splash
, an apple fell into the water tank.

I started slightly, then rolled onto my side and prepared to settle down again.

Splash
! A second apple hit the water. I sat up, realizing that there wasn’t a tree overhanging the water tank, so someone was throwing the apples in.

A young dark-haired village woman was standing watching me a few metres off, holding another apple ready in her hand. I gaped stupidly at her. She smiled.

‘George Simling!’ she said in perfect Illyrian English, with just a trace of an Antipodean twang. ‘What on
earth
are you doing here?’

It was Marija.

She laughed. ‘Don’t worry George, you haven’t seen a ghost. I live here now, with my Uncle Tomo. Well, he’s my mother’s cousin, but I call him my uncle. I got into some things back in IC which were hard to get out of…’

‘The AHS by any chance? Me too.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. It was me that got you into that, wasn’t it?’

I shrugged: ‘It’s not your fault that I wanted to impress you.’

‘
Did
you?’ she seemed quite genuinely surprised. ‘I always thought you rather looked down on me. You never seemed to want to stay in my company.’

I covered my face with my hands. I felt that dull ache pressing behind my eyes.
This
had been the shameful beginning of Lucy’s betrayal. Marija had offered me her friendship. I chose instead – I deliberately
chose
– a confused, barely awake robot to play the part of my girlfriend. What would Marija think of me if she knew that?

* * *

‘Are you
alright
?’ Marija asked.

I took my hands away from my face.

‘Yes, just… tired.’

‘Come up to my uncle’s place. You can have a wash and something to eat, a sleep if you want. You look as if you could do with some sleep.’

‘I could.’

‘Come on then, it’s this way. Where were you heading George? Where have you come from?’

I made a gesture of pushing the question away. I had laid down that burden when I climbed into the water tank. I didn’t want to pick it up again so soon.

She laughed. ‘Okay. Tell me later. Now listen, I’d better warn you Uncle Tomo is a priest. Don’t worry, he’s no fanatic. He’s a pragmatist. That’s the way things tend to be in Montenegro. Okay it’s an Orthodox theocracy like Russia or Serbia or the Greek states, but our bishop is no zealot. We keep ourselves out of trouble and get on with life as best we can. I quite like that. I used to be much too keen to change everything, I think, as if I thought no one else had ever tried before.’

62

I had always felt daunted by the Orthodox priests with their long beards and robes, but I liked Marija’s uncle at once. He was a small, sharp, wiry, humorous man with a narrow face and piercing blue eyes that gave him a slightly Irish appearance. His wife Nada (they had no children) was also immediately likeable, almost a female version of her husband, thin and wiry with a sly, ironic smile. Both of them had lived all their adult lives in this small Montenegrin village, but they were open to the wider world and seemed genuinely pleased by my arrival. A bath was run for me, spare clothing was found for me, a bed was prepared for me to take a siesta. While I sat in the cool bath, good wine was being fetched from the cellar by Aunt Nada and a lamb was taken from its mother’s side in my honour and slaughtered by Uncle Tomo himself. I had the pleasant illusion that I had come home.

But it was harder when we were all sitting at table and Marija and her aunt and uncle were all pressing me for the story of my travels.

‘It must be two years now,’ said Marija, who couldn’t conceive of being anything other than purposeful. ‘Where have you been all this time? What have you been doing?’

‘Well,’ I began. ‘First of all I went down into Greece and then…’

It was very hard to make a convincing narrative without Lucy in it, but I didn’t think I would retain this warm welcome if I was honest with them and admitted to them that I had run away from Illyria with an animated sex toy and then engineered its destruction.

‘… I got a job with a farmer named Zhavkhov,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed working there, but unfortunately his daughter started getting a bit too fond of me. She was nice enough but… well, her attentions were getting rather insistent, and…’

‘And so you ran and ran until your clothes were in rags and you stank like a tramp,’ said Marija tartly.

I had hoped to make the story about Zhavkhov and Leta into something amusing and light-hearted, something that would demonstrate my credentials as a real warm-blooded human being. It seemed Marija had not been fooled.

I turned to Uncle Tomo, anxious to change the subject.

‘Can you tell me, because I’ve always wondered, what’s the difference between the Orthodox and the Catholic church?’

Uncle Tomo smiled, ‘Well, there are many differences. For one thing, if I was a Catholic priest, I would not be married to Nada here.’

‘But what is the difference, you know, in actual belief?’

The priest chuckled, ‘Actually a single word, the Latin word
filioque
, which the Western church inserted into the creed. It means
and the son
. The West maintained that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son. We in the East hold firmly to the view that the Holy Ghost proceeds only from the Father, albeit
through
the son. Of course there were other factors too, but that was the doctrinal difference that led to the schism back in 1054.’

He looked at me, smiling, a hint of a twinkle in his eye. Was he anticipating my incredulity, or did he himself find these things hard to take seriously?

Marija intervened, ‘You see, Uncle, for people like me and George brought up in the City, it’s hard enough to even imagine that such entities as the Holy Ghost or the Son are real, let alone feel so confident of their existence that we could think of discussing their precise relationship. Do you think any of your parishioners understand the doctrinal difference between Catholic and Orthodox?’

Uncle Tomo beamed: ‘No. Not one, I shouldn’t think.’

‘But they all hate Catholics like the plague,’ said Nada, with her sly smile.

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Tomo, laughing, ‘they hate them much worse than Muslims or Bogomili or even atheists!’

Perhaps he wouldn’t have laughed quite so easily if he had seen with his own eyes the full horror of the Holy Wars, but still, the laughter of Uncle Tomo and his wife was infectious – and both Marija and I joined in.

‘But as to the question of
belief
,’ said Uncle Tomo, ‘you know you City people have a completely different conception of it than we do. You will not believe in anything unless it is proved to you, will you?’

‘Well,’ said Marija, ‘science climbed a long way by only using building blocks that were properly tried and tested.’

‘Of course, unquestionably,’ said her uncle, ‘but our idea of belief is completely different. For us it is a matter of
will
. Of course it is difficult to believe in the Resurrection, of course it is difficult to believe in the Trinity. What evidence is there? But we see that as a challenge. We struggle to
make
ourselves believe.’

‘It must be even harder,’ I said, ‘when only a few kilometres away there are villages where they all believe in Mohammed and dismiss the Trinity as polytheism.’

‘Of course. And harder still when not so very far down the coast is that wondrous City of yours which claims to have made religion itself obsolete and can produce amazing miracles to demonstrate the power of its own way of thinking, like machines that can talk and planes that vanish into thin air.’

‘But Uncle,’ asked Marija, ‘do you actually believe that your way of thinking is right and everyone else’s is wrong?’

Uncle Tomo and Aunt Nada exchanged amused glances. He shrugged.

‘Who can say? But I will say this. Everyone must have beliefs that can’t be proved. Even you City people must do secretly, because your science can’t tell you how to live or how to die. Do you agree?’

Marija and I nodded. Such thoughts, after all, had led us into the Holist League and the AHS.

‘Well, there is a good deal to be said for a community having some sort of consensus about what those beliefs should be. We have that here and it’s peaceful. Down in Albania it’s different and there is terrible bloodshed. Not far to the west of here it is even worse: not only Catholics and Orthodox and Muslims, but Bogomili, Protestant sects, followers of new prophets and holy men, even some people who’ve gone back to Slavonic paganism – all at each other’s throats, all accusing one another of being in league with the Devil. Do you know, there are even stories that along the coast there is someone or something calling himself the Holy
Machine
!’

‘Yes Uncle,’ exclaimed Marija, ‘but don’t forget that until the Reaction, there were plenty of countries on Earth where people had different beliefs and all coexisted quite happily.’

‘
Seemed
to coexist quite happily. But in reality the scientific viewpoint with its apparent miracles was driving the others back. I don’t make excuses for some of the things that were done. I know your parents suffered, and probably George’s also. But the Reaction arose partly from a real fear that something valuable was being lost to the world.’

Seeing glasses empty, Uncle Tomo passed round the wine.

‘As I understand it,’ he said, ‘when you City people want to decide whether a statement is true, you consider whether it is
useful
. That is the scientific method isn’t it? Is it
useful
to say the Earth revolves round the sun? Yes it is, because it makes a whole lot of other things fall into place. And yes, that test of truth makes a lot of sense. But shouldn’t we apply the test of usefulness to whole systems of thought and not just to single statements? Which is the more useful, the scientific worldview, with all its wonderful technical miracles, or the religious world-view, with its sense of purpose and belonging? It would be nice to have both, but suppose that isn’t possible? Which one should we keep? It’s not a straightforward question is it? Terrible things are done in the name of religion, without a doubt, but it was not religion but science that brought the world itself to the brink of destruction.’

He handed the question over to us with a flourish.

Marija laughed and turned to me: ‘A good arguer my uncle, isn’t he? What do you think?’

I shrugged. The truth was that I’d been only half-listening. My thoughts had gone off on a completely different tack.

‘This
Holy Machine
,’ I said. ‘What do you know about it?’

‘Not much more than I’ve told you,’ said Tomo, a little crestfallen that his carefully developed argument had been wasted. ‘I heard he preached in Neum. They say he is a robot, but I assume he is really a man dressed up. There was a fellow in Kosovo recently who claimed to have grown the wings of an angel, until finally someone managed to get close enough to pull one of them off.’

‘Sometimes robots run away from the City, I’ve heard,’ said Aunt Nada.

‘Yes,’ I snapped, ‘and then your fellow believers catch them, and they are crucified, impaled and burnt…’

They all looked at me, startled by my sudden passion.