Blood and Iron (44 page)

It was peaceful for the moment, though. An island of calm under the stars. Somewhere out there humans were grouping to attack. Land ploughed up and covered in alien crops that poisoned the native life of Yukawa was being trodden by robots speaking openly of rebellion. And here he stood, in this square with humans on one hand and robots on the other, and somewhere in the Copper Master’s house Li-Kallalla would be piecing together the parts of the radio, and for the moment keeping quiet about what he, Wa-Ka-Mo-Do, had done. How long would this suspended moment last? He was happy to have nothing for company but these darkly fascinating machines, singing with that strange alien electricity.

The guns suddenly raised themselves into the air and turned as one to face the same direction. A rapid pumping sound started up. There was remarkably little noise, it was almost a rippling of the air, but Wa-Ka-Mo-Do saw the electromagnetic field formed by so much metal being sprayed through the planet’s own magnetic field. Orange light flared, out there in the distance of the night. The firing ceased, the guns turned their heads a little and then immediately resumed. Another orange explosion. The guns moved once more. Something was coming out of the night, so fast that one of the guns set up by the Copper Master’s house was cut neatly in half. Now it was the turn of the house itself. Tiles shattered in a line of destruction that snapped off as suddenly as it had begun. The guns were firing once more, pointing at the third orange explosion lit up in the distance.

After that the guns seemed to lose interest, they lowered themselves, resting. Alien women, exotic and fascinating – they were moving! Up and turning to face the opposite direction, too late . . .

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do was tumbling over and over, clattering metal, scraping red paint on stone. The ground was shaking and cracking; Wa-Ka-Mo-Do’s vision was filled with static, he felt his thoughts fold themselves around each other for just a moment, felt time jump forward a few seconds, as he moved from a scene of motion, dust and stones and tiles sliding and shaking through the air, to one of stillness, of the world recast after the explosion; the rubble and debris settled.

‘What happened?’ He was speaking out loud, to whom he didn’t know.

The human guns were dancing around him, bobbing up and down in their bizarre dance, spinning this way and that, lighting up the sky in orange balls, lighting up the distant hills, the far horizons, casting deep, fiery reflections in the lake below.

Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah was running towards him, flanked by two humans, coolant water shining on their faces.

‘What have they done, Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah?’ cried Wa-Ka-Mo-Do. ‘What have they done to the Emperor’s city?’

‘Half the west side of the city is gone,’ said Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah. ‘The Street of Becoming is buried beneath the houses that once lined it, the human weapon pierced through to the rock below!’

Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah had lost most of the panelling from his body. His grey electromuscle was smeared in carbon: he sparked as he moved.

‘I’ve failed, Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah,’ said Wa-Ka-Mo-Do. ‘I’ve failed in my duty.’

‘No, Honoured Commander. The city still stands!’

From somewhere deep below them, half felt, half heard, came the sound of rock cracking, the shifting, sliding rumble as more of the city collapsed upon itself.

‘Wa-Ka-Mo-Do!’

He turned to see Gillian, the human commander. The green cloth panelling that she wore was torn, her headset crackled as she spoke.

‘They hit us with a mini-nuke, high radiation yield,’ she explained.

‘Do you understand those terms, Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah?’ asked Wa-Ka-Mo-Do.

‘No, Honoured Commander.’

‘I do. It means that robots minds are being affected.’

Gillian wiped a hand across her brow.

‘We’re evacuating this city. There’s a shuttle dropping towards us right now, we need to get all the humans up to this square so they can board it!’

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do was watching the human cannon, leaping and spinning all around him.

‘Your guns seem to be holding off the enemy,’ he observed.

‘They will,’ said Gillian. ‘It’s the radiation that’s the problem,’ her voice was still crackling. So was his own, he realized. ‘And they may try another mini-nuke: go for an airburst, though if they do that they will irradiate the land. There’ll be no crops here for—’

‘Damaging the land? This is the Emperor’s land.’

‘Not any more, Wa-Ka-Mo-Do, not any more.’ There was a sadness and finality in her words that the headset managed to translate.

‘Honoured Commander?’

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do realized he was still staring, lost in the motion of the guns.

‘Yes, Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah?’

‘Shall I help escort the humans up here to the terrace?’

‘Yes,’ said Wa-Ka-Mo-Do. ‘Yes, quickly.’

He heard, above the odd purring of the human guns, a new sound. One that was gaining in volume.

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do looked at Ka-Lo-Re-Harballah.

‘What is it, Honoured Commander?’

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do knew what the sound was.

‘Gunfire. Those are robot weapons. It’s finally happened. The rebellion has begun.’

Karel

‘We’re going out of our way,’ said Simrock. ‘The Northern Road will lead us into Raman.’

‘So?’ said Karel. ‘It’s easy to walk. Better to take our time leaving the mountains than to rush and fall to our deaths.’

‘No,’ said Simrock. ‘There is a better path. An older one. One from before the time that robots walked these mountains.’

‘How do you know?’ demanded Melt. ‘How do you know?’

‘He just does,’ said Karel. ‘The Spontaneous just do. He was right before, wasn’t he?’

‘Come on. Over this way.’

The Spontaneous robot stepped over the wall at the side of the road. He began to walk up a narrow ledge.

‘Hold on!’ called Karel. ‘What do you mean, before the time that robots walked these mountains. Who could have made the path?’

‘Robots, of course.’

He carried on, creeping along the ledge.

‘Do we follow him?’ Karel asked Melt.

‘For the moment.’

‘Are you sure? I thought you didn’t trust him.’

‘I don’t. But we said we would follow him.’

And at that Melt heaved himself onto the ledge and began to follow Simrock along it. Despite the weight of his body, he moved with surprising grace through the mountains. He seemed at home here, up amongst the sheer slopes that tilted their faces to the sky.

Karel was not so comfortable as he brought up the rear, edging along the narrow path. It turned a corner, and he took a last look back at the Northern Road before it was lost from view.

The trail they followed was ancient and strangely constructed. Karel wondered at the mindset of the robots who would build a path that sometimes climbed near vertical cliff faces, cutting grooves with which to pull themselves forwards. More than once Karel and Melt found themselves lying on their fronts, fumbling in the darkness for the grooves that had been carved into the rock so they could pull themselves forwards. Karel’s body was badly scratched and so full of grit: it constantly irritated his electro-muscle. As for Melt, he didn’t even have the comfort of looking forward to a chance to strip down and clean his body. Or was that such a comfort? It was all that Karel thought about now, and it made the irritation worse.

Still, they walked and climbed and crawled on, heading south all the while.

‘What was that?’ called Melt.

‘What was what?’

Karel was too busy keeping both hands on the rocks. Despite his heavy body, Melt leaned back, one hand and one foot wedged into a wall.

‘It’s Simrock. He’s speaking to himself. Is that what the Spontaneous do?’

‘Ruth?’ said Simrock. ‘That’s an unusual name. Where do you want to meet? The village? It’s not that far.’

‘What village?’ asked Melt.

‘It’s just around here!’

‘Who were you speaking to?’

‘I don’t know.’ Simrock didn’t seem concerned. ‘I can’t see anybody.’

Karel hurried to catch up.

‘What’s going on, Simrock?’

Simrock pointed. ‘There is a village just around this corner. I know it’s there!’

‘Who is Ruth?’ asked Melt.

But Simrock had already gone on ahead.

‘I knew it! Just here! Can you see it yet?’

‘No!’ called Melt.

‘He’s not speaking to us,’ said Karel.

They rounded a corner and halted, gazing down at the scene below in amazement.

Karel had never seen the village before, and yet he felt as if he knew it. He had the image woven into his mind, along with other tales and stories of childhood. This was how robots used to live, back before the villages had grown into towns and then states. Back when there was enough iron in the ground for all the robots on Penrose.

The village was a huddled collection of little circular buildings, all of the same basic design. Triangular sections of iron were riveted together to make bulging domes, which were fixed into place on stone foundations that rose to about the level of the knee. Flakes of orange rust peeled from the metal.

‘It’s not been abandoned for that long. No more than forty years, I would say.’ Karel looked around in wonder. ‘The village is set back on this ledge, it wouldn’t be visible from below, the rock is too shear above. But surely someone would have come up here?’

Melt said nothing, he pushed on, following Simrock towards the village. It was surrounded by a low stone wall; beyond the wall the ground was paved in wide, broken flags.

Karel followed him slowly, looking around in wonder. He felt as if he had stepped out of his own world and into another. At any moment he expected ancient robots to emerge from the antique buildings, waving to him with simply constructed limbs, peering at him through poorly focussed eyes. He imagined them coming forward and touching his body, admiring the metal, the smooth curves of its construction, scratched and damaged though it may be.

He heard Simrock’s voice, calling out.

‘Ruth? I’m here! Where are you?’

There was movement up ahead in the village. Two, three robots emerging from amongst the low, round buildings.

No, not robots! Karel halted in astonishment. Melt had recoiled, had clumsily assumed a fighting position.

They walked like robots, they had arms and faces like robots, but they weren’t made of metal. They were animals!

Wa-Ka-Mo-Do

Once, when he was a young robot, Wa-Ka-Mo-Do’s father had taken him to visit a tanning factory. He had seen the dead bodies of the cattle, flayed of their skins, lying in a pile, waiting for processing. There was something so exotic and other about the shapes of their internal frameworks, their
skeletons
, yellow bones smooth and curving in that weird way that suggested intelligent design. But what robot mind would bend and deform a structure in this fashion he didn’t know.

‘
You say that
,’ his father had said, ‘
but I think we could learn a lot from such constructions
.
The material is light, but it’s strong! Look at the way the curves give strength.
’

Organic life was like that, reflected Wa-Ka-Mo-Do. It looked so flimsy and soft, like you could squash it with one hand. But look at the damage it caused . . .

The west side of Sangrel reminded him a little of the tanning yard. The buildings had lost their roofs, their tiles blown away or shattered. Only the metal skeletons remained, twisted and blackened and illuminated by the fires that still burned orange and white below. One row of houses had been cut lengthways by the explosion, the further half collapsed; flames could be seen flickering through the broken windows. And beyond there, the centre of the blast, a crater punched into the very rock of the city itself, molten rock glowing red at its heart. Wa-Ka-Mo-Do knew about atomic weapons. Those robots close to the blast would find their minds subtly altered, their life spans drastically reduced. Not that anyone would care.

Columns of smoke held up the starry sky, cold and aloof above the damaged city.

‘How many are dead?’ wondered Wa-Ka-Mo-Do aloud. As he spoke, the crackle of gunfire sounded once more. Instantly he moved, searching out the sound. ‘Over there,’ he pointed.

A bell tower, the cap lost in the explosion, the bell still tolling slowly as it swayed in the night, and there, silhouetted by orange flames, two robots, firing down at the lower end of the Street of Becoming. Wa-Ka-Mo-Do looked closer. There on the ground was La-Ver-Di-Arussah, directing her troops to fire back. Successfully. First one, then the other of the two robots fell, the bell still tolling all the while, metal bodies smashing to the ground, shattering into fragments. They wore pig-iron bodies: cheap metal was all the poor of Sangrel could afford.

More shots, from further away, and La-Ver-Di-Arussah turned her troops towards the new attackers. Wa-Ka-Mo-Do saw how the robots were massing, saw how they were approaching the Street of Becoming in ones and twos, silhouetted bodies clambering over the rubble, carrying knives and guns, rocks and stones and metal bars.