The Holy Machine (13 page)
Some hours later she was wheeled back into the operating theatre. An eminent neurosurgeon called Professor Patel had been called in. She specialized in the neuro-cybernetic interface. Her bread and butter was artificial limbs and eyes. The Direct Link procedure was rather more of a challenge.
A small team of student doctors, nurses and technicians gathered round her and looked down solemnly at my mother’s little body.
Dreamy with opiates, Ruth smiled up at the grainy, flat faces above her. An injection was administered. The faces floated away like bubbles towards the surface. A blade shone with an almost unbearable sweetness, and she slid gratefully down it. Down the silvery slide, bright as the sun.
When Ruth came to she had arms and legs again, and she could see clearly in colour and three dimensions. She was in the bedroom of her little house. She was surrounded on all sides by vases of flowers.
‘Welcome back, Little Rose,’ said a kind, familiar voice.
‘Oh
Sol
!’ she exclaimed, with tears streaming from her eyes.
‘Take it easy now, Rose,’ said Mr Gladheim, ‘take it easy. I’m not going to go away!’
He reached out to her and she took his hand and squeezed it, then held on to it tightly.
She was still confused by the anaesthetic.
‘There!’ she said, ‘I knew the doctors were wrong when they said I’d got no hands!’
Mr Gladheim smiled, stroking the back of the hand that he was holding.
‘Whether or not people have hands,’ Ruth grumbled mildly, ‘you’d think doctors would know about such things!’
‘You certainly would.’
‘Oh I ache, I ache so much. What have they done to me?’
‘Well at least you’re back with us,’ said Mr Gladheim, ‘and this time we’re not going to let you go!’
‘I’ll go if I want! I can hire a Vehicle you know!’
Ruth started to sit up. Her motor nerves were now wired directly into the SenSpace system via a radio transmitter, and were no longer connected to muscles of flesh and blood. So sitting up was achieved without her real body moving at all, and was therefore no more painful than lying still.
She put her imaginary feet on the imaginary carpet on the imaginary bedroom floor. All the right sensations poured up her sensory nerves.
‘Come on. Let’s go into the garden!’ she said to Mr Gladheim.
She quite liked ordering him around.
‘Yes, let’s! I know everyone will be dying to see you.’
‘What about Charlie and George?’ said Little Rose guiltily.
But then she was out in the sunshine, and there were Gramps and Bessy and Delmont and all her other neighbours.
‘Three cheers!’ they all hollered, ‘Three cheers for Little Rose!’
‘Don’t look at them!’
Lucy and I sat outside a café in the centre of Ioannina, near to the archaeological museum. The usual group of boys and young men had gathered round to stare at the immaculate young woman from the City, as had happened several times already.
‘Don’t look at them, Lucy.’
I knew that if she looked at them and saw them smiling, she would respond. She would smile back, she would give them her sweet come-on look, she would even start getting up from her seat. The last time it happened, in a town near the border, it had very much excited the boys that had gathered round her. It had made them catcall and guffaw and whistle. But it had made them angry too. Their eyes had become cold. They had looked around for the religious police, hating Lucy for what she awoke in them.
‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘just don’t look at them.’
She looked at me instead. But I made the mistake of smiling encouragingly and immediately she was doing it all to
me
, reaching out for my hand, running her thumb over my credit bracelet, looking longingly into my eyes…
‘Shameless!’ I heard someone spit among the onlookers.
‘No. Don’t do it to me either, Lucy. Just be yourself, remember, be yourself!’
Her face at once became blank and dead. There was a sudden silence among our observers.
‘She’s mad,’ they muttered, ‘She’s an idiot of some sort…’
And they started to turn uncomfortably away.
‘Drink up your lemon,’ I said to her, draining my tiny cup of coffee. ‘Let’s get our business sorted out quickly and leave.’
Suddenly a large hand descended on my shoulder.
O3!
I froze, then squirmed round and looked up into a broad, thickly moustachioed face.
‘I remember you my City friend. A merry dance you and your friends led me. I thought I was going to get lynched.’
It was the taxi-driver Manolis. He took a spare chair, turned it round and straddled it between Lucy and I, leaning forward to examine us, a cigarette smouldering between his lips.
‘George, isn’t it?’ he said to me, ‘I remember. A good Greek name! Well, no harm was done, as it turned out, and now we’re friends again aren’t we? Epiros and the City, the Archbishop and the Chinaman with robot legs!’
He lifted his hand from the chair-back to reach out and shake mine: a rather magnificent gesture, managing to combine generosity and nonchalance.
‘And this is… your wife perhaps?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Yes, my wife. Lucy. Lucia in Greek…’
He turned to Lucy, smiling.
‘Just a little smile, Lucy,’ I coached her in English, ‘Just a little smile, that’s it, now be yourself again…’
As her face composed itself back into blankness, the Greek’s eyes momentarily narrowed. Then he extended his hand again with the same grand and lazy gesture, a little medallion of a saint dangling from a gold chain at his wrist.
‘Pleased to make your aquaintance,
kyria
.’
‘Take his hand, Lucy, that’s it, smile, and now let go. Say good morning, remember how I told you? Say good morning in Greek.’
‘
Kalimera
,’ Lucy intoned.
‘Very good! Very good!’ the taxi driver grinned.
I smiled apologetically. ‘It’s all the Greek she has.’
‘Well, no doubt she’ll soon be speaking it like one of us. Please tell her from me that she is very beautiful.’
‘Lucy. Smile. Look shy and pleased. That’s enough.’
The taxi-driver looked at me and back at Lucy. Again his eyes narrowed slightly. Suddenly he leaned back and reached into the pocket of his jacket.
‘Pistachio nuts,’ he said, producing a small paper bag and offering it to Lucy. ‘I can’t resist them. Will you have one?’
A boy jeered. ‘You’ll have to pay her in more than nuts!’
Manolis turned, reddening angrily.
‘Hey!’ he thundered at the group that had gathered again to stare. ‘Some respect please! Do you think these people are animals in a cage?’
Lucy was still staring down at the bag of nuts. She had no idea what they were or why they were being proffered.
‘Won’t you have one?’ asked the taxi driver.
‘Smile at him and say something!’ I told her, adding to Manolis: ‘My wife isn’t very fond of nuts.’
But Lucy took the whole bag. It tore. Nuts fell out over the table. Lucy stared at them.
‘Smile and say something,’ I hissed, ‘and put it down!’
She smiled, not at Manolis but at a man sitting at another table.
‘I do love you,’ she said to the man in English, dropping the bag of nuts.
Then she seemed to realize that she had entered the wrong territory and turned to Manolis: ‘I am a machine,’ she added.
This really scared me, even though Manolis spoke no English.
‘
Never
say that out here, Lucy!’ I hissed, ‘Never, never say that!’
I turned back with an effort and a very strained smile to Manolis, who’d been watching all this closely but without comment. Now he winked at me.
‘I will never understand that City of yours. Never.’
I must have looked flustered. He politely busied himself with lighting a new cigarette, then turned back to me.
‘Now tell me my friend, is there anything I can assist you with? You must have come here for a reason.’
I hesitated, then decided to trust him. I did actually need his help.
‘Documents,’ I said, ‘you showed me a place where I could get documents, and I’ve been looking but I’m not sure exactly where it is.’
He laughed triumphantly, exhaling quantities of acrid smoke.
‘Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say you would need it one day?’
Lucy didn’t eat. She took everything she needed in liquid form: sugar for energy, lemon and egg-white to feed her living skin. So I ate alone that night in a small, dusty hotel in a village some twenty or thirty kilometres outside Ioannina.
It was good to get away from the city and the crowds. There were still plans to be made, but they could wait. I had enough money to live comfortably for several years in the Outlands. I could afford to relax over my casserole of lamb and my bottle of wine, knowing that my beautiful Lucy was waiting for me upstairs, and that she would hold me and give herself to me all night if I wanted, and all the next night and all the next…
Things were not so bad after all. It was just in Ioannina that it had got difficult, but we’d finished our business there now: paying money into various Greek banks and acquiring for Lucy, with the help of Manolis’ counterfeiter friend, a fake British passport to match her accent. (Illyrian passports, it seemed, were too high-tech for the counterfeiter’s skill.)
‘So you are from Illyria?’ enquired our host, a small, rotund ingratiating man, as I wiped the rich juices from my plate with a chunk of bread.
‘That’s right. From Illyria, but I’ve decided that I don’t like the place. Now Epiros, Greece, that is another thing.’
He smiled.
‘My wife is actually British,’ I went on, for no especial reason except to try out how it sounded to say it.
‘British!’ exclaimed the hotelier. ‘My sister-in-law is British. She only lives in the next village. She would love to meet your wife I’m sure, if you are staying here for a while.’
‘That would be nice,’ I said, vaguely. I wasn’t planning to stop long, anyway, and the man had just given me a very good reason for leaving first thing in the morning.
I finished my wine, wished him goodnight and went upstairs.
Lucy was lying on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. She smiled when I came in, reached up to me. I laughed, throwing off my clothes and diving happily into her arms.
‘Oh Lucy, this is good, this is good… Are you glad to be free? I am. I am so glad!’
After sex, we lay companionably side by side, while I enthused at length over the life that lay ahead of us. I felt so optimistic, so proud, so fond of Lucy.
‘Listen Lucy,’ I said to her, ‘I want to say this, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. Yes I know you are a machine, but why should that make a difference? I am a machine too really, so are we all. It’s just that I’m a machine made of flesh and bone…’
Yes, and if someone cut me open they’d find components inside me: a liver, lungs, kidneys, a spleen, a brain that was a mess of grey jelly… strange things, things I’d never seen, which were just as alien to me and to my conception of myself as any components that Lucy might contain.
‘It makes no difference, Lucy. It makes no difference to me at all. I love you just the same.’
‘I love you too, George. I love you so much!’
I knew quite well that these words were just part of her programmed routines, but they still excited me. I pulled her to me again.
‘Have you finished now?’ Lucy suddenly asked me, when I was really sated and was settling down contentedly for my night’s rest.
‘Yes, I’m going to sleep.’
‘Sleep. Sleep is…’
I sat up. ‘Is there a problem Lucy? You seem to worry about this every night!’
‘Sleep. Sleep is… What is it?’
I laughed.
‘I bet I know what your problem is. I bet you were supposed to wake the men up if they went to sleep back in the ASPU House. Isn’t that right? You had to wake them up and tell them their time was up. Is that right? Well, you don’t have to now. We just have to lie down and sleep.’
She lay rigid beside me.
‘But what is sleep?’
‘Sleep? It’s when we lose consciousness for a bit. Rest. Download. Don’t you have to download at night back at the ASPU House?’
Actually every night that we were in Epiros she
did
still download, broadcasting all the day’s input in digital ultrasound to a House Control that could no longer hear her, a little like an Outlander dutifully praying at night to a nonexistent God. But it was an operation that she could complete in a few seconds.
Lucy said nothing, so I settled myself once more and was wandering away in my mind through the streets of a labyrinthine city, partly Illyria, partly Ioannina, when she suddenly spoke again.
‘I will read,’ she said flatly.
‘You what?’
‘I will read,’ she repeated, getting out of bed and going to sit on a chair in the corner of the room.
I had brought her some stuff to read – elementary science books, things like that – and she had been looking at one earlier. She picked it up and began methodically working through the pages. She didn’t need a light. Her eyes were different from ours.
Well why not? I thought. She doesn’t need to sleep. So why not use the night-time for reading?
I settled down again, down into the strange yet familiar city, down into the deepest of sleeps.
Some hours later I woke up with a full bladder. The bed beside me was still empty. From across the room, in the darkness, came the sound of a turning page.
There was something eerie about it.
But I was still half asleep. My uneasiness was transient. I pissed in a chamberpot, climbed back into bed and slid back down again into sleep.
Next morning, when we were sitting at breakfast, the landlord rushed in, beaming, with a large, blonde, fiftyish woman hurrying excitedly in his wake. I was drinking coffee. Lucy was drinking a lemon drink mixed to my instructions. There was no one else in the small dining room, except a middle-aged salesman reading a paper.
(‘HOLY CONSTANTINOPLE IS OURS!’ I remember was the headline. A rather empty sentiment I thought at the time, when Greece was fragmented into little pieces that were to all intents and purposes independent states, while Istanbul stood at the centre of a mighty Islamic empire.)
‘Here they are!’ cried the little hotelier. ‘Here they are!’
‘
Hello
!’ gushed the big blonde woman in English, ‘Takis said you were here and I just
had
to come and see you before you left. It’s such a long time since I met anyone from England – or anyone who spoke English at all!’
I stiffly greeted her, but it wasn’t me that she wanted to talk to.
‘Lucy isn’t it?’ she said, beaming, as she settled down into the spare chair at our table. ‘My name’s Stacey. Came over to Corfu on holiday thirty years ago and fell in love with a handsome waiter. What a cliché, eh? Of course Spiro’s a fat old peasant now. And no one goes to Corfu on holiday any more. Not since, you know, not since people got more religious here… and then back home too, though of course it’s a different religion there… It does get a bit lonely at times.’
She sighed.
‘Spiro and I went back over to Corfu a few years ago. All the resorts are like ghost towns, now. Ruins. All those silly English pub names: the Pig and Whistle, the Dog and Duck. All crumbling away. Like the real pubs back in England probably.’
The Englishwoman pulled herself together.
‘Never mind, eh? I suppose you live in the
Poli
, with your husband here,’ she went on (without thinking, she used the Greek word for City when she spoke of Illyria), ‘and perhaps you see a different side of things. I’ve never been there myself. I tell Spiro sometimes we ought to go up there and have a look. I’d like to hear people speaking English again, though it wouldn’t be the same as going home. But anyway, he won’t have it. He won’t even discuss it. People round here don’t
approve
you know, because of the Poli being against religion and all that. Live and let live I’ve always said, but that’s not exactly fashionable now, is it? No, they don’t hold with going to the Poli at all, not unless you go there to make money…’
She was so full of things she needed to say that for a long time it was simply impossible for her to pause, but I knew that sooner or later the moment would come:
‘Oh dear,’ said Stacey, after ten minutes or so, ‘don’t I go on? Tell me about yourself, Lucy. Where do you come from?’
What could I do? It wasn’t like with Manolis. I couldn’t give Lucy prompts in English. I just had to hope she wouldn’t make a serious blunder.
Lucy hesitated. Stacey beamed at her. Stacey’s Greek brother-in-law beamed just as broadly from behind her, in chorus, in solidarity, though he hadn’t understood a word. Even the salesman across the room was smiling benignly over his lowered newspaper.
HOLY CONSTANTINOPLE IS…
Lucy smiled, meltingly.
‘I come from Wiltshire,’ she said, in that sweet sexy rustic English voice of hers. (Well done, Lucy, I thought, well done.) ‘Our dad was village postmaster,’ she went on, ‘and I had three sisters. We were very naughty girls. We liked to wind up the boys. Sometimes when we went to school, we used to leave off our…’
But luckily Stacey wasn’t listening any more.
‘Wiltshire!’ she exclaimed, ‘Well, well! My granny lived in Wilton. And we only lived in Dorset. So whereabouts in Wiltshire was it that you grew up, Lucy?’
Lucy stared at her, long enough for Stacey’s determined smile to become less certain. Then, having no answer to the question, Lucy responded to the smile. A smile was encouragement. A smile meant she was doing something right.
‘Sometimes when we went to school we used to…’
‘It was Faraday, wasn’t it, Lucy?’ I broke in. ‘Your village was Faraday.’
‘Faraday?’ said the lonely Englishwoman. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of that. Where is that near to then?’
I am an American-Illyrian. I had no idea whether Wiltshire was north, south, east or west, or even what kind of geographical entity this Wiltshire was.
‘Quite near Liverpool,’ I hazarded. It was one of only four or five British cities that I could name.
Stacey looked troubled. Even standing behind her, the hotelier Takis could sense this, and his face too became more uneasy and less friendly. The salesman had ceased to smile. He was just staring, his paper in his hands.
HOLY CON…
Lucy saw that Stacey had lost enthusiasm. Something else was needed to cheer her up again.
‘Would you like me to undress?’ she sweetly asked.