Stone Gods (21 page)

'Is it a story?'

'Yes, but there will be no time for reading today. It says on my timesheet that today is for Mobile Data Recognition.'

'What's that?'

'We're going for a walk.'

Among humans she will find an archive of the heart — the one thing she can never have. In the centre of ourselves, which isn't in the middle, is the heart.

I lifted her head from its titanium plate and fitted her into the perfectly made Authorised Personnel Sling. Two colleagues will have to sign us out, and I will have to take a WristChip to monitor us. Spike is encouraged to walk in the gardens of MORE-
Futures
, an artificial rainforest two acres square that cools the MORE HQ.

* * *

Off we went, a normal day like every other, and then I saw that the gate from the garden into the street was open. We went and stood in the liminal opening — parrots and vines behind us, electric trams ahead. I had a strange sensation, as if this were the edge of the world and one more step, just one more step ...

'Where are we going, Billie?'

Wreck City — where you want to live when you don't want to live anywhere else. Where you live when you can't live anywhere else.

The eco-tricity tramlines stop about a mile away from Wreck City. The bomb damage hasn't been cleared in this part of town, and maybe never will be. People live in the shells of houses and offices, and they build their own places out of the ruins.

On the edge of Wreck City, its unofficial boundary and no man's land, is a long, long, low, low drinkers' dive, constructed out of railway carriages laid end to end. These carriages work like an ancient city wall, ringing the inside from the outside, except that here it's the outside that's ringed from the inside, so that bandit architecture has found a way of making the official part of town, Tech City, into its own banlieu.

Wreck City is a No Zone — no insurance, no assistance, no welfare, no police. It's not forbidden to go there, but if you do, and if you get damaged or murdered or robbed or raped, it's at your own risk. There will be no investigation, no compensation. You're on your own.

They call the perimeter bar the Front.

We took the tram to the last stop and got off, walking the last mile over the pocked and pitted scar tissue of bomb wreckage. The fires never go out, smouldering with a molten half-life, the wind blowing ash and flakes of metal into your clothes and hair. Ahead of you is the ring of railway carriages, untwisted from their reared-up tracks, and welded into a linked circle like a charm bracelet — Great Western, Great North Eastern, Virgin, EuroStar and, right in pride of place for the tourists, half of the Orient Express.

Tourists come here, this far, to drink and meet girls, but you can't pay in jetons, it has to be real money. Dollars they take, and silver and gold: you can pay with jewellery. You can barter. Guns are accepted, as are sexual services.

In Tech City there's a crackdown on alternative currency. The 'Jetons Are Us' campaign is on hoardings all over town. The Black Market is Bad Capitalism: MORE is against the Black Market and Bad Capitalism.

MORE employees are discouraged from visiting the Front. In any case, the theory is that as we're paid in jetons, and as we don't own anytbing we can sell or barter, the Black Market and Wreck City will eventually die their own death, deprived of energy like a burned-out star.

That's the theory. In fact, most of us have pre-War stuff we can trade on the Black. I have dollars, from an account I emptied just in time, lots of dollars, and I bring them here to Wreck City.

We went forward and stepped up into the Lalique carriage of the Orient Express. A couple of girls were kissing on a plush four seater. They were drinking champagne — pre-War vintage. That's a lot of Black money.

A boy with tattoos was arguing over the price of a bull terrier he'd got sitting up on the bar. He wanted to sell the dog to get drugs. The dealer didn't want the dog. Did the barman want the dog? No. The boy ran out, smashing a glass. The dog whined. I went to stroke him and he tried to bite me.

'The dog is suffering from rejection,' said Spike, who has taken extra modules in Counselling.

'So are we all,' I said, 'but we're not allowed to bite. You stroke him. '

'As yet I have no hands,' said Spike, reasonably, 'but please put me next to the dog. I would like to observe him.'

Carefully I put down the five-million-dollar — not counting research costs — head on top of the rough wooden bar made out of railway sleepers, and next to the bull terrier. Spike smiled. The dog lay down with his nose in the fibre-optics of her neck.

An unshaven man built like a mobile burger trailer came towards us. 'You want whisky, beers, champagne? That's it.'

I asked for whisky and put down the dollars. He took them. 'You want doubles or triples?'

'Singles,' I said.

'This isn't a singles bar. I'll give you triples for the price of doubles. Who's your friend?'

'I'm educating her. She's a robot.'

'She's got no body.'

'She's designed to think.'

He nodded, and poured freehand into the thick, short tumblers.

'What's she designed to think about?'

'War, money, the future.'

He nodded. 'She'll need a drink, then.'

He went back into his den, watching television, his heavy back and shoulders hunched away from us and towards the screen.

I took the drinks — triples — which, as robots don't drink, meant double triples for me.

Spike was looking around, thinking. Not much else for her to do. 'What is this for?'

'The bar?'

'No. Why is it here? MORE provides everything that anyone needs or wants. There's no need for a ghetto.'

The man in the back heard and turned. 'This is no ghetto — nobody forced nobody here. This is Wreck City — you should get out more.'

'As yet I have no legs,' said Spike.

'Get your friend to carry you —we don't do disabled-access here, We got no laws, no rules, no quotas, but if you got no legs, somebody will carry you, and if you got no arms, somebody will stroke the dog for you.'

He loomed out of the back, massive and grinning. 'This is real life, not some puppet show.'

'Are you calling Tech City a puppet show?' I said.

'Somebody's pulling the strings in that place, and it ain't me and it ain't you.'

'I am being designed to make decisions for the betterment of the human race,' said Spike.

'Thanks, but I'll mess up for myself,' said the barman.

'Sure,' I said, 'but did you want elected politicians behaving like dictators to mess up for you? You didn't make the War and neither did I, but we lived through it, and now we're here.'

'Wrong,' said the barman. 'You're there.' He pointed a finger the size of a fifieen-centimetre drill-bit out of the door and towards Tech City. 'I'm here.'

'And when they blow us up again? Then where will you be?' He shrugged. His shoulders were like brick hods. 'Another bar, another burned-out place. You know what I'm talking about — politicians, robots, it makes no difference.'

'Robots are apolitical,' said Spike. 'We can make reasoned decisions in a way that humans cannot.'

'It'll never work,' said the barman.

'It's going to work,' I said. 'She's the future.'

'Not here,' he said. 'We'll do as we want right where we are. This is where the spirit is, and no robot is changing that.'

He went to switch bottles for the girls in the corner. They were drunk. One of them was eating sardines out of a tin. I love tinned sardines.

'Don't get fish-oil on the velvet,' said the barman, grinning.

'Sardines are rich in omega-3 ,' said Spike, inconsequentially. She can't help it. We have to program it out of her — but for now she has to make available any information, however trivial. It's the way she learns communication with the human interface — i.e., how to talk to us.

* * *

An electric whirring noise outside the door made us all look round. I got up to see what was happening.

Three electric golf-buggies were pulling up outside the bar.

Inside the golf-buggies were twelve smiling Japanese people, wearing identical pre-War Burberry hats and macs. Their tour guide was explaining something to them in Japanese, and gesturing at the perimeter carriages.

The barman came to the door, stooping his hulk under the buckled frame. 'Saki bar is in the Bullet car, eight carriages down,' he said, but the tour guide, smiling and waving, came forward and addressed him.

'This is International Peace Delegation wishing to bring Aid and Sanitation to War Refugees.'

'We don't need Aid and Sanitation,' said the barman. 'And we're not refugees.'

The tour guide or interpreter, or whatever he was, went on smiling. Then he bowed. 'You are all people displaced by War and unable to live a normal life.'

'We were unable to live a normal life before the War,' said the barman. 'That's why we all came here after the War.'

'Terrible conditions,' said the interpreter.

'I take that badly,' said the barman.

'We will come in and inspect,' said the interpreter, bowing. 'Then we can make Full Report and recommend Aid.'

'And Sanitation,' said the barman, pulling his Walkie-Talkie from his belt.

The rest of the Delegation were climbing carefully out of the golf-buggies and leaving their travel umbrellas neatly folded on the seats. The Walkie-Talkie started crackling.
'Murder on the Orient Sxpress
,' he said.

Seconds later, fifteen bikers wearing jeans and leathers, shades and bandannas, the fringes on their jackets flying, the weak sun glinting off their Ray-Bans, legs astride Harleys, scuffed boots on the foot-rests, tooled saddlebags showing the necks of Bud bottles, came tearing in front of the perimeter carriages and surrounded the golf-buggies. The delegation put its twenty-three hands in the air. There had obviously been an incident once before.

'We have Permit!' protested the interpreter.

'A permit assumes authority,' said the barman. 'A permit assumes control. There is no control and no authority here — not from the outside. Go back to Tech City — they built it for you.'

The bikers cheered, honked their horns, revved their 1400CC engines, dug their heels in the dirt and spun wheelies.

The Japanese climbed silently back into their electric golf buggies. The interpreter bowed and assured the barman that he would be hearing from them, and their sponsors, very soon.

And then it happened.

A Harley rider rode up behind the golf-buggies, seeing them off like a two-wheeled sheepdog, when the interpreter noted that Illegal Substances were being used.

'What illegal substances?' asked the barman.

'Petrol derivatives,' said the interpreter.

'Those bikes don't run on petrol derivatives, you moron,' said the barman. 'They run on petrol — gas — tonnes of it.'

'Petrol!' said the interpreter. 'Banned! I make Full Report.'

The Harley rider was unimpressed. He unhitched a dinky can of fuel from the back of his bike —like a Billy-bottle — and chucked the contents over the rear of the nearest golf-buggy. Petrol fumes coloured the grey air blue. Then the rider backed his bike in a semi-circle, took out a lighter and threw it at the golf-buggy. It exploded.

'Jesus!' said the barman, dragging the four half-on-fire Japanese to safety. The rest of the bikers commandeered the remaining two golf-buggies and occupants, chained them to the bikes and set off like a stock-car finale, dust in vertical towers, straight through the Guard's Van entrance of the adjoining carriage and off into — who knows where?

The interpreter was running for his life, zigzagging through the fire, fumes, smoke and dust. A Burberry hat lay on the ground. The barman kicked it. 'That'll teach him to come with Aid and Sanitation.'

'What about the others?' I said, bewildered by the speed of it all.

'What others?' said the Barman. 'I don't see no others, do you?' I followed him back into the bar. The champagne girls had gone. The sardines had gone. The bull terrier had gone. Spike had gone.

'Excuse me ... ' I said.

The barman passed me a tumbler of whisky. 'On the house,' he said.

'Tanks today surrounded the perimeter of the No Zone, known as Wreck City, in a bid to free eleven abducted members of the Japanese Peace Delegation. The Delegation had been intending to carry out a Humanitarian survey of conditions in the zone. A spokesman from MORE-
Justice
told reporters that it was time to take a tougher approach to No-Zone activities. "It's just a den of thieves," he said. "We left them alone while we were rebuilding our own infrastructure, but there is now no reason why anyone should be living outside Tech City. We have offered jobs and accommodation to anyone in the No Zone — an offer we still extend. This will be day one of a seven-day amnesty for any No-Zone inhabitants to come forward and live within the wider community of their fellow citizens. After that, we're going in." ,