Blood and Iron (37 page)

‘Why did she want me?’

Go-Ver-Dosai just smiled. He reached up and placed a finger to his head, pried open the broken panelling there and pushed the finger inside. There was a blue flash and three loud cracks. He convulsed and died. Smoke came from his head.

Li-Kallalla looked as if his own mind was melting.

‘You killed him . . .’

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do looked at the young robot.

‘Li-Kallalla,’ he said urgently, ‘whose orders will you follow. Mine, or the Vestal Virgins? Will you speak of what happened in here?’

‘Will you kill me too?’

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do didn’t answer. He didn’t know.

Li-Kallalla spoke, but Wa-Ka-Mo-Do wasn’t listening, swamped by thoughts. Go-Ver-Dosai lay dead and smoking in the middle of the wreckage. He had betrayed the Emperor, betrayed his command, all for what he hoped were the right reasons. Could he be trusted?

Jai-Lyn was asking for help. She had summoned Wa-Ka-Mo-Do. He had promised to go to her aid. But he couldn’t. He had to stay here in this city.

First Ell, then Sangrel. And now Ka.

What was happening on Yukawa?

Karel

‘How long will he stay with us?’ asked Melt, looking at the Spontaneous robot walking the Northern Road ahead of them.

‘There’s no telling,’ said Karel. ‘The Spontaneous are like this, especially when they first emerge.’

‘What happens to them then?’

‘Some of them assimilate into the prevailing society. Some of them wander to the borders. They seem to be driven by imperatives according to the knowledge they are born with.’ He looked around at the high mountain views, thoughtfully. ‘Just like us, I suppose. I wonder how he knew about this road?’

‘There have been others here before us,’ said Melt. ‘An army has marched this road. Kavan’s, I suppose.’

Karel hummed in agreement. The high passes of the Northern Road were littered with the ash of portable forges, the stones worn further by the many feet that had passed.

‘The views are amazing up here,’ said Karel, looking at the streams of snowmelt that wet the grey rock beyond the low wall. ‘The sky is bluer. The rocks seem more alive.’

‘I know,’ said Melt, and Karel thought he heard a touch of sadness there. What was he remembering?

‘Why don’t you like Simrock?’ he asked.

‘No reason.’

‘Yes there is. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

‘I’ll tell you why. His mind is twisted around a story. How can we trust him?’

‘All of our minds are twisted around stories,’ said Karel. ‘Who is to say which ones are the right ones?’

‘I need to rest,’ said Melt, suddenly. He sat down, leaning his heavy body against the low wall by the side of the road.

‘Simrock!’ called Karel. The Spontaneous robot was up ahead, looking over a ridge at the road’s descent beyond. He came back to join them.

‘We need to rest.’

They remained in silence for a while, the blue sky deepening to black above them.

‘Did you have a wife, Melt?’ asked Karel.

‘No,’ said Melt.

‘Karel does,’ said Simrock. ‘She’s in Artemis City.’

Metal scraped on rock as Karel turned to stare at the other robot.

‘How do you know that? I never mentioned that to you.’

‘I know about you, Karel,’ said Simrock.

‘How?’

‘How did he know about these mountains?’ asked Melt. ‘I thought that was the way of the Spontaneous.’

‘What do you know of me?’ said Karel, eyes glowing uncomfortably.

‘I know about your mind.’

‘What about it?’

‘I think it’s probably useful for the present time. It’s not the way for regular robots though. Your moment will pass.’

Karel’s gyros had begun to spin, seeking a balance he did not feel.

‘So many minds,’ said Melt. ‘I once heard a saying. A robot is just a mind’s way of making another mind.’

‘Is that supposed to calm me down?’ wondered Karel.

‘I don’t think that applies to the Spontaneous, though,’ continued Melt, following his train of thought. ‘Where do their minds come from?’ He looked suspiciously at Simrock.

‘We’re all probably descended from the Spontaneous,’ said Karel, also staring at Simrock. How many other robots knew who he was? It was an unsettling thought. Here he was in the mountains, and across the world below him there were maybe robots who even now were looking towards him, and pondering his moves.

‘I know a story about where robots come from,’ said Simrock, brightly. ‘The story of Alpha and Gamma.’

‘I never believed that story,’ interrupted Karel, before the story even began. ‘Anyway, what happened to Beta?’

‘That comes later,’ said Simrock. He began his tale.

The Story of Alpha and Gamma

‘Alpha and Gamma lived in the mountains at the Top of the World. They were the first two robots. No one knows where they came from, and no one knows why they decided to make a child. Some people say that the urge was woven into their minds, as it is in all robots’ minds to differing extents, but that would imply there were robots before Alpha and Gamma to do the weaving. Others say that as Alpha and Gamma grew older they desired a robot to look after them in their old age, but that implies they knew of death, and how could the first two robots know of something they had never seen before? And some people say that Alpha and Gamma wove a child because they simply had the idea to do so.

‘So how was the first mind made? For even though there is disagreement about
why
Alpha and Gamma made a mind, all agree that they did not have the knowledge at first about how to make such a thing. This is something that they learned for themselves.

‘Where to begin? First they opened up each other’s heads and they examined the metal inside. They saw iron and copper, gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and so they went away and they mined ore and they smelted it and they made wire, just like that in their own heads. But the wire they made was straight and smooth and unthinking.

‘“How do we twist it?” asked Gamma, holding the wire in her hands. “Where do we begin? This is just a piece of wire. I see nothing here. No sense of love or fear, no happiness or sadness or yearning or satiety . . .”

‘But Alpha looked at the wire in another way.

‘“I see none of those things,” he said. “But I can do this . . .” and he bent the wire around, twisting it over itself.

‘“Now a current flows,” he said, and he twisted again, “now it doesn’t.” And he repeated the movement over again. “Off and on,” he said.

‘“Life and death,” said Gamma. “But there is no emotion there . . .”

‘“Maybe not,” said Alpha. “But emotion is not all there is to a mind. I can do this . . .”

‘He twisted the wire some more, making two living twists, one larger than the other.

‘“Now it recognizes, more or less,” he said.

‘“More or less?”

‘“Five twists are more than four. Seventy is less than one hundred. More or less.”

‘“More or less? What sort of a mind is that? That’s just numbers. Does it understand that love is more than justice, or that sorrow is more than pain?”

‘“No, but . . .”

‘“Then stop wasting my time!” And she walked from the mountain ledge where Alpha worked, out into the golden sunset. (For I should say that in those days all sunsets were golden, and the world was beautiful and that metal ore littered the ground.)

‘Alpha sat for some time, but the idea had taken hold of him, as such ideas do with men, and he worked through the night, twisting the wire back and forth. He found he could twist the wire to one hundred positions by rotation around the axis of the wire, and a further one hundred positions by pitch. He could make it add, subtract, multiply and divide; it could look at different parts of its own extent; it could loop around itself and remember. He found that he could string these functions together, but he could do no more than that.

‘And in the end he saw that Gamma was right, that the task was pointless, and as morning dawned, he threw the wire to the floor and walked off in search of his wife so that he might apologize.

‘He looked for her to the north and south, to the east and west, but could not find her. In the end he returned to the ledge to see Gamma sitting there, the length of wire in her hands, and she looked up at Alpha, her eyes shining with awe and wonder.

‘“How did you do it?” she asked.

‘“I did nothing,” he bitterly replied.

‘“Did nothing? You brought life to this wire! It doesn’t feel, it doesn’t know, but the rudiments are there!’’

‘“The rudiments? It does nothing but add and take away!”

‘She stared at him.

‘“Alpha, please, don’t be like that to me. I am sorry for the way I spoke.”

‘“Be like what? I did my best, but I failed.”

‘“Failed?” She looked deeper into his eyes, and saw no deceit there. “Alpha, you did the hardest part! It is almost finished! Look, twist it here, twist it back on itself, see, and it will
know
itself. Twist it again, and it will know others . . .”

‘Alpha stared at her.

‘“I don’t see what you mean.”

‘So she showed him again, but he still didn’t understand.

‘And it has ever been thus, that men and women work together to make a child, but neither understands what the other has wrought, nor shall they ever.’ ‘And that is the story of Alpha and Gamma and how they made the first child.’

Simrock beamed at them, delighted.

‘Hold on,’ said Karel, ‘what about Beta?’

‘Oh yes, Beta. In some stories, it is said there was a third robot, Beta, who sat between Alpha and Gamma and placed the extra twists in the metal that moved it from the male understanding to the female understanding. Some say that Beta crept to the ledge in the night and added the extra twists. And some say that Alpha and Gamma never existed, there was only Beta.’

‘How do you know all this?’ asked Melt. ‘You’re Spontaneous, you have only just arrived here. How do you know all this?’

‘I don’t know.’

Karel was wondering aloud. ‘Where do these stories come from?’ he asked. ‘Stories of Four Blind Horses, of Valerie of Klimt, stories of Alpha and Gamma, of Nicolas the Coward. This world is built on stories, some of them we know, some of them we don’t even understand! Where do they come from?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘Why does no one ever ask?’

‘It’s not woven into people’s minds to ask,’ said Melt. ‘Why should it be? They’re only stories.’

‘I’m asking!’

Karel was suddenly shaken, as if by a bolt of electricity. Morphobia Alligator had spoken of this. Robots like Karel, robots who could choose to do things that weren’t woven into their minds.

Robots who saw things that other robots did not.

Karel looked around. Melt, the robot who claimed to have forgotten his past, sat on one side, Simrock the Spontaneous robot on the other. All three of them on a forgotten road through the high mountains. He had once thought that that life in Turing City was liberal and edgy and cosmopolitan. Now it all seemed so safe and predictable, a tiny little island in a far corner of the world.

He had had to come up here to realize just how strange his world really was.

Was he the only one who saw it?

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do made his way from the radio room and out into Smithy Square, his gyros spinning. What was going on? What had happened in Ell?

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do imagined walking through that city. Ell was a beautiful place, set with towers tiled in blue, green and gold. The city was famous for its ceramics, it was said there wasn’t a surface in the city that wasn’t tiled. The robots of Ell made a red iron oxide glaze of a colour unsurpassed throughout Yukawa.

Now he imagined those tiled streets filled with the dead bodies of robots. Bodies slumped on the ground, their arms and legs entangled, their eyes lifeless and faint smoke emerging from their heads. What had the humans done there? What would they be doing in Ka? Jai-Lyn had asked for his help. There was something so pathetic about that request. They had only met for a few hours, and yet she had turned to him. Was that a surprise? Wa-Ka-Mo-Do was probably the most important robot she had ever met.

He walked from the Copper Master’s house into the daylight. The sun was bright, it thinned the black smoke, it threw the scorch marks across the tiled square into harsh relief.

The sight of the humans clustered around one of their cannons at the edge of the square irritated him. La-Ver-Di-Arussah was there, speaking to one of them.

She beckoned him to join her.

‘Honoured Commander, the humans have requested that we remove ourselves from the Copper Master’s house and relocate lower down the city.’ La-Ver-Di-Arussah was buzzing with energy. ‘I’ve already sent Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah down to secure an area around the Copper Market.’

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do looked at the broken roof of the Emperor’s palace, looked at the strange cannons that the humans were erecting all around the perimeter of the square. They seemed to move of their own accord, their strange metal muzzles constantly scanning the sky.