Stone Gods (10 page)

Spike leaned forward and kissed me. 'Bend the light.'

'You're a robot,' I said, realizing that I sounded like Pink McMurphy.

'And you are a human being — but I don't hold that against you.'

'Your systems are neural, not limbic. You can't feel emotion.'

Spike said, 'Human beings often display emotion they do not feel. And they often feel emotion they do not display.'

That's a description of me all right. I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all.

'There's a planet,' said Spike, 'made of water, entirely of water, where every solid thing is its watery equivalent. There are no seas because there is no land. There are no rivers because there are no banks. There is no thirst because there is no dry.

'The planet is like a bowl of water except that there is no bowl. It hangs in space as a drop of water hangs from a leaf, except that there is no leaf. It cannot exist, and yet it does. I tell you this so you know that what is impossible sometimes happens.'

* * *

'I don't want to get personal,' I said, 'but I'll say it again — you are a robot. Do you want to kiss a woman so that you can add it to your database?'

'Gender is a human concept,' said Spike, 'and not interesting. I want to kiss you.' She kissed me again.

'In any case,' she said, very close, very warm, and I am responding, and I don't want to, and I can't help it, 'is human life biology or consciousness? If I were to lop off your arms, your legs, your ears, your nose, put out your eyes, roll up your tongue, would you still be you? You locate yourself in consciousness, and I, too, am a conscious being.'

Spike moved away into the shadows as Pink McMurphy appeared in the doorway in a gold bikini, gold wrap, gold sandals, gold Alice band and gold earrings. Her fingernails were painted gold. She must have registered my expression. 'I wear gold in the evenings,' she said, by way of explanation. Then she said to me, 'I was hasty in my judgement. We're all here in space. We all have to get along. I'm going to forget about your bomb. We all act hasty sometimes.'

She was smiling like a New Age Guru. I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood. Pink poured herself some more champagne, and ripped into a bag of nuts. 'What are you girls talking about?'

'The fact that Spike isn't a girl,' I said. 'We're trying to work out the differences between Robo
sapiens
and
Homo sapiens
.'

'You think too much,' said Pink. 'I'll get you a drink. It's obvious — cut me and I bleed.'

'So blood is the essential quality of humanness?' said Spike.

'And the rest! The fact is that you had to be built — I don't know, like a car has to be built. You were made in a factory.'

'Every human being in the Central Power has been enhanced, genetically modified and DNA-screened. Some have been cloned. Most were born outside the womb. A human being now is not what a human being was even a hundred years ago. So what is a human being?'

'Whatever it is, it isn't a robot,' I said.

'Y'know, she's right,' said Pink, looking wise, or as wise as it is possible to look in a gold bikini.

Spike wasn't giving up. 'But I want to know how you are making the distinction. Even without any bio-engineering, the human body is in a constantly changing state. What you are today will not be what you are in days, months, years. Your entire skeleton replaces itself every ten years, your red blood cells replace themselves every one hundred and twenty days, your skin every two weeks.'

'I accept that,' I said, 'and I accept that you are a rational, calculating, intelligent entity. But you have no emotion.'

"S right, y'know, they don't feel a thing. When I was having a nervous breakdown, my Kitchenhands — y'know, the pink ones I had specially done, you met them, Billie, when you came to see me — well, they just fetched and carried the Valium and the tissues, but there was no sympathy.'

'I am not a pair of Kitchenhands,' said Spike.

'It was just an example,' said Pink.

'So your definition of a human being is in the capacity to experience emotion?' asked Spike. 'How much emotion? The more sensitive a person is, the more human they are?'

'Well, yes,' I said. 'Insensitive, unfeeling people are at the low end of human — not animal, more android.'

'I am not an android,' said Spike.

'I didn't mean to insult you. I've worked with androids — they're pretty basic, I know, but . . .'

'I am a Robo
sapiens
,' said Spike, 'and perhaps it will be us, and not you, who are the future of the world.'

'Aah, you'll never replace humans,' said Pink, getting up. 'Let's have more champagne.'

'Humans are rendering themselves obsolete,' said Spike. 'Successive generations of de-skilling mean that you can no longer fend for yourselves in the way that you once could. You rely on technicians and robots. It is not thought that anyone in the Central Power could survive unassisted on Planet Blue. Pink, do you know how to plant potatoes?'

'You mean like chips?'

'Or how to cook them?'

'Sure I do - the bag goes in the microwave.'

'Can you sew? Can you plane a length of timber? Can you build a fire? Can you fish? Can you row a boat? Could you design and build a simple pulley?'

'They'll have figured all that out for us,' said Pink.

'They ... ' I said.

'Exactly,' said Spike, glancing at me. 'Humans have given away all their power to a "they". You aren't able to fight the system because without the system none of you can survive. You made a world without alternatives, and now it is dying, and your new world already belongs to "they".'

'I never heard of an activist robot,' said Pink.

'It's just one more thing we're going to have to be on your behalf,' said Spike.

'What are you going to do?' I said. 'Overthrow us?'

Spike laughed. 'Revenge of the Robots? No, but you see, Robo
sapiens
is evolving — Homo sapiens is an endangered species. It doesn't feel like it to you now but you have destroyed your planet, and it is not clear to me that you will be viable on Planet Blue.'

'Robots can't exist without humans,' I said.

'That was once true,' said Spike. 'It isn't true any more. We are solar-powered and self-repairing. We are intelligent and non aggressive. You could learn from us.'

'Oh, this is funny!' said Pink. 'Learn from a robot? Honey, you may be able to get us across the universe and paddle a canoe when we reach the other side, but you don't know anything about life.'

'There are many kinds of life,' said Spike, mildly. 'Humans always assumed that theirs was the only kind that mattered. That's how you destroyed your planet.'

'Don't blame me,' said Pink. 'I didn't destroy it.'

'But you have a second chance. Maybe this time ... '

Pink was singing,
'Maybe this time, I'll be lucky, Maybe this time he'll stay ... Maybe this time, for the first time, love won't hurry away
... '

She began to dance with herself in front of the window, vast with stars.

Spike turned to me, smiling. 'We came the long way round. Look over here. I want to show you something and to explain something.'

She stood up and went over to the pages pasted on the wall.

She pointed at one of the yellowing texts:
Nothing in this wide universe I call, save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all
.

She said, 'On the official space mission, when we hung in our ship over Planet Blue, Handsome came aboard for the celebrations. While the crew were making the film record, the first shots to be replayed back to Orbus, Handsome got out his book of poetry. Everyone laughed at him, but he insisted that only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world. Underneath the digital images of Planet Blue, he wrote,
She is all States, all Princes I, Nothing else is.

'I can read several languages and I can process information as fast as a Mainframe computer, but I did not understand that single line of text.

'I went to Handsome and asked him to show me the book. He sat beside me, our heads bent over the page, his hair falling against mine, and he explained first of all the line, and then the poem, then he put the book into my hands and looked at me seriously, in the way he does when he wants something, and he said, "My new-found land."

'He left, and I went back to my data analysis, and I thought I was experiencing system failure. In fact I was sensing something completely new to me. For the first time I was able to feel.'

She walked around the room, stopping in front of random bits of paper, and reading aloud,

'To whom I owe the leaping delight .

Being your slave what should I do .

When in silks my Julia goes ...

When did your name become a charm?

Me she caught in her arms long and small

She smiled and that transfigured me

She having gained both wind and sun.'

She said, 'Handsome has shown me what it feels like to be loved in this way, but I want to know what it feels like to be the one who loves in this way.'

'I'm not here for the experiment,' I said.

'Love is an experiment,' she said. 'What happens next is always surprising. '

I put my head into my hands. I am being woo'd by a robot. Pink McMurphy had found the track on the digipod and was now singing karaoke with Liza Minnelli:
'All the odds are in my favour, something's bound to begin, It's gotta happen, happen sometime, Maybe this time, I'll win . . .
'

Handsome burst through the space-door, flushed and excited. 'We found it! We got it! We can do it! We deflect the arch-mother of all asteroids, and collide it with Planet Blue at this point here . . . '

The men filed in behind him.

He opened one huge wall to show a close-up of Planet Blue and brought the infrared pointer across the image towards a mountain range. 'Spike, I want you to assess the impact ... look . . .'

'Will you sleep with me?' asked Spike.
 

'The land here contains massive deposits of sulphur,' said Handsome.

'I can't sleep with a computer . . . '

' . . . which should prevent the dust particles . . . '

'I want to touch you.'

' . . . falling back to the planet's surface too quickly . . .'

'And if you did touch me, what then?'

'If the duststorm clears too quickly the dinosaurs will recover.'

'I would find a language of beginning.'

'We need to black out the sun completely, and destroy the larger life-forms on this planet.'

'And you once voyaged would be my free and wild place that I would never try to tame.'

'We have to operate some kind of species-control quickly.'

'And the place that you are would never be sold or exchanged.'

'If we can wipe them out, we can begin again.'

'I want to begin this with you.'

'It's risky but it could work.'

'You can't love me. You don't know me.'

'It will shape a crater, maybe two hundred kilometres wide.'

'Can you only love what you know?'

'The trouble is, we can't predict how long the duststorm will last. '

'Or is love what you don't know?'

'It's risky, but it's our only chance.'

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse—there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.

Love is an intervention.

Hand over hand, beginning the descent of you. Hand over hand, too fast, like my heartbeat. This is the way down, the cliff, the cave. No safety, no certainty of return.

My lover is made of a meta-material, a polymer tough as metal, but pliable and flexible and capable of heating and cooling, just like human skin. She has an articulated titanium skeleton and a fibre-optic neural highway. She has no limbic system because she is not designed to feel emotion.

She has no blood.

She can't give birth.

Her hair and nails don't grow.

She doesn't eat or drink.

She is solar-powered.

She has learned how to cry.

'Don't regret it.' said Spike. 'Change it if you have to, but don't regret it.'

And she's right. I can say no, I can change my mind, I can have regrets, but I can't wipe out the yes. One word, and a million million worlds close. One word, and for a while there's a planet in front of me, and I can live there.

There she is,' said Handsome. 'Planet Blue.'