The Holy Machine (24 page)
So we left the Facility with Ruth carrying her own true self in its plastic case. She had wrapped it in a blanket and carried it like a baby. We got back into the car and I drove us down the coast to that little cove of Aghios Constantinos.
We parked the car on the road and walked through the olive groves until we were overlooking the sea. Then Ruth sat down with her back against a tree-trunk and unwrapped the body. With so much of its lower half missing and with no limbs, it was really no bigger than a small child. She cradled it in her arms. Its breath whistled in and out of the nozzle sticking out of its chest. The electric pump faintly hummed. The heart throbbed steadily beneath her surrogate hand.
I sat against another tree and watched her. I wondered whether she had ever cradled me like she cradled that mutilated thing?
‘It can’t survive more than two hours,’ Dr Hammer’s parting words had been. (By ‘it’ he meant the body of course. He would have referred to the syntec vehicle as ‘she’).
He had been hoping no doubt that reason would still prevail in time and that Ruth would return her body and resume her carefree life in SenSpace.
‘Not more than two hours at the outside,’ he had repeated.
After an hour or so had passed, Ruth lay the strange bundle carefully on the ground and took from me the garden trowel we had bought earlier. She found a suitable spot between the olive trees and began to dig.
It was a cheap trowel and the earth was hard and stony. When the job was only halfway done, the handle broke off. Ruth swore. She threw away the useless handle and began to dig with her hands. Time was running out for her. I offered to help but she swore at me too, savagely, like a snarling dog. She tore at the dry stony earth with those clumsy syntec hands until the flesh came away in bloody strips from the plastic fingers.
Finally she was satisfied. She turned aside from the shallow hole and gently picked up the box of organs and flesh. Then she pulled awkwardly with her broken fingers at the plastic skin covering the face – if you can call such a thing a face. And when one cheek was open to the air, she bent and kissed the moist and pallid skin…
…and at the same moment as she gave the kiss, she felt it – the warm lips of some unseen being touching her gently on the cheek.
Ruth smiled and placed the bundle carefully into the hole she had dug for it, covering it up again with a mound of earth – just leaving the breathing nozzle sticking out, so she could fade away rather than suffocate.
And that was the last that the world saw of little Ruth Simling, who it had never noticed much, preferring as she did the company of machines, and the safety of solitude.
But she was to speak one more time.
When she had finished her work, Ruth’s redheaded vehicle lay down beside the mound with one arm protectively draped over her own grave, and waited. Two hours had gone by now and nutrient levels were very low in the blood that still pulsed around beneath the soil, but Ruth was still, just, awake.
‘This isn’t suicide you know, George,’ said the body under the ground through its syntec mouthpiece, ‘This is the opposite of suicide.’
I nodded. The Vehicle lay back and became completely still. The wind whistling in and out of the yellow nozzle became gradually fainter.
The Vehicle stood up.
‘I am not getting any more instructions via SenSpace,’ it said to me. ‘I would be grateful if you could return me to the hire facility. There’s a deposit payable on my safe return.’
I nodded and the redheaded robot and I walked back through the olive grove to my car.
I felt quite calm at first as if nothing much had happened. With the beautiful syntec beside me, I drove back towards Illyria City through the bright landscape of summer.
But then I began to shake, and soon I was shaking so much that it was impossible to drive. I pulled over on the side of the road. That pressure from behind my eyes was stronger than I’d ever felt it.
‘Mummy,’ I whispered, while the beautiful empty syntec sat impassively beside me, staring straight ahead, its torn hands resting in its lap, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy…’
I couldn’t have said it to Ruth herself. She never liked being Mum.
Then the dam broke and the tears came pouring down from my eyes for the first time since I was a little child.
‘Help us! Help us!’
‘My little boy, Holy One, he’s blind!’
‘Please help my mother. She’s in so much pain!’
‘Holy One, here! Please! Please!’
Standing in the back of a Toyota pick-up, supported by Alec and Steve on either side, the Holy Machine turned its head slowly and stiffly from left to right to take in the enormous crowd. Everywhere there were faces looking up at it, crying faces, imploring faces, adoring faces. Crammed into the dusty square, tens of thousands waved, screamed, wept, climbed on each other’s shoulders in the hope of a clearer view of the small, fragile figure wobbling along in the back of the battered truck.
‘Me, Holy One! Please look at me!’
‘Turn water into wine like you did at Vlora!’
‘Make mannah for us to eat like you did at Skopje!’
‘Bless us, Holy One!’
‘My little boy…’
‘… look at me…’
‘… please…’
‘… he’s only six and he’s blind…’
Such adulation would surely have made any human being go crazy. Under the pressure of all this love, men or women of flesh and blood would soon believe themselves capable of the miracles imputed to them, soon feel that they were truly at the centre of the universe, the avatars of God.
But the Holy Machine was not susceptible to such pressures. It looked round at the scene from the back of the pick-up, scanning slowly from left to right and back again, just as it might have looked round at an ordinary street or the white cloisters of the monastery that was its home. It had no desire for fame or aggrandizement, not because it was exceptionally virtuous or strong, but simply because the prerequisites of such feelings had never been part of its make-up.
It existed to serve humanity. Humanity seemed to want to hear its insights. So it shared them.
The Toyota edged its way forward.
‘Make way, please! Make way!’
‘Just a touch, Holy One!’
‘Make way!’
Again the Holy Machine looked from left to right and back. The scene was blotchy and grainy to its eyes and suddenly its whole field of vision seemed to invert and then black out altogether.
‘Have I finally gone blind?’ thought the Holy Machine calmly, while its minders tightened their grip to prevent it from falling.
It moved forward slowly in darkness. Then the truck stopped, there was a fuzz of colours in front of its eyes and a patchy vision returned as the minders helped it up onto a wooden dais. It saw a vast sea of faces, most of them just a blur but some, here and there, for some reason oddly distinct.
The Machine clung to the rail. Its vision had been deteriorating for months, along with its hearing. Its right leg would no longer bend in the middle. Its disciples had done what they could to help. They had sent as far as Athens and Milan and Belgrade in search of engineers who still had some expertise in computers and robotics, and a few minor improvised repairs had been made. They had even tried Illyria itself, although help had been refused from that quarter. But the truth was that the Machine was falling apart, and very probably even the Illyrian engineers who had built it could have done little to stave off its imminent end.
‘My friends,’ began the Holy Machine at last, ‘my friends, thank you for inviting me to come and talk to you here in Tirana…’
It paused while an interpreter repeated its words in Albanian. In the Machine’s blurred and blotchy field of vision the face of an Aromune shepherd boy become suddenly distinct, brown-skinned and tousle-haired, the distant descendant of legionaries from ancient Rome. And then the strong, firm, austere face of a middle-aged woman stood out from the blur, a peasant woman from the Buret mountains, a leader in her community and the mother of nine sons.
Their bodies renew themselves, thought the Machine, they reproduce themselves, they come from a line that has existed unbroken for millions and millions of years. Not only their minds are self-evolving but their bodies too: slowly changing, slowly adapting, taught and shaped and refined by the world itself.
‘My friends,’ the Machine said, and again it paused. For the first time it looked upwards. It saw the tense faces of two imams watching from high up in the minaret of the Etem Bey mosque, and it lost its train of thought.
‘Is it just straight sex you’d like?’ it asked, ‘Or was it something special?’
(The Albanian interpreter looked round in consternation, hesitated, then decided he couldn’t have heard correctly. ‘It’s a very special occasion today,’ he translated, ‘with so many people of both sexes here to see me.’)
Something went wrong there, thought the Holy Machine, and it began to squeak out a message, far above the highest frequency of human hearing, to House Control, far away in Illyria City:
‘
Please note equipment malfunction: there are some discontinuities of…
’
It stopped, realizing the futility of what it was doing, and struggled again to collect its thoughts.
‘My friends. If you read the history of your religions, much of it is about a struggle to rid yourself of the limitations of your bodies, and to live and to see and to understand the world as much as possible as if you were disembodied spirits. For bodies can seem like arbitrary and stupid things whose wants and desires drag the spirit down. Sometimes in the past, I myself may have seemed to have been saying this…’
Again the Machine paused.
‘I may have become awake, George,’ it mumbled to itself, while the interpreter was speaking, ‘but I am still a robot. I am still a machine…’
The Machine lifted its head. It saw a pretty young woman with blonde hair watching it from the plinth of the equestrian statue of Skanderbeg. She looked very much like Lucy, but she held in her arms a pump little fair-haired child.
‘I do not wish you to despise your bodies,’ it went on, ‘or to despise the animal part of your nature, or your instincts. I do not possess a body as you do. This body of mine is almost irrelevant to my actual nature. But I am a different kind of thing to you. Beings like me could not appear in the world without beings like you. I would not exist if I was not made by human beings…’
The Machine hesitated. It noticed an officer of the Albanian National Army, with twirled moustache and fierce blue eyes.
And then its vision failed again.
‘
Please note equipment malfunction…
’ it squeaked again.
‘I’m sorry,’ it said out loud. ‘You won’t be charged for this session. Please report to House Control who will be glad to provide a replacement.’
(The interpreter took a deep breath. ‘My words are free and for everyone,’ he translated, ‘and when I am gone, God will send another in my place.’)
Now totally blind, the Machine groped in the darkness for the thread of its speech.
‘The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,’ it said into the void. ‘Biology is a bridge, a slender bridge, the only bridge…’
And then: ‘I can put on something special for you if you…’
The interpreter turned round anxiously. Alec and Steve, at the foot of the dais, looked up in alarm and then rushed up the steps as the Machine slowly toppled to one side. Before they could reach it, it had crashed to the wooden stage.
The crowd went wild. In a matter of minutes, the whole stage was swarming with people. Alec and Steve were thrust aside and the plastic shell of the Machine was torn into pieces, not out of anger, but out of grief.
Then the dais collapsed. Several people were crushed. I believe four people died that day in the scrum. But I was near the back and got out without much difficulty, back again to the City.
As to the pieces, they became holy relics, cherished and quarrelled over by the many rival cults which were to grow up in the name of the Holy Machine.
Fakes came into circulation too. There were plenty of broken robots to hand.
It is said that if you were to gather together all the Machine’s extant fingers they would number more than thirty.
I had told Marija that, at midday on the 1st of October, I would be in the observation gallery at the top of the Beacon. I really had no idea if she’d come. But she did, at five past twelve, looking harassed and flustered and ready for a fight.
‘I’m getting really fed up with you, George Simling,’ she said, without even pausing to say hello, ‘I just hope you’re going to tell me what the hell you’ve been up to all this time, and why you’re so damned secretive, and why you keep running away.’
I smiled. Below us the towers of Illyria stood clear and bright in the autumn sunshine, and the distant mountains of the Outlands stretched away on every side, north and south and east, until they gradually disappeared into the haze.
