The Holy Machine (22 page)
But as soon as the monk had left me, I got out of bed and went out into the corridor. It was early evening. The cloud had broken up and there were pools of barred sunlight on the flagstones beneath every window. It was very quiet. And I felt quiet. After all my ramblings and hallucinations I was calm and clear-headed.
I passed a kitchen and a chapel where a service of some kind was taking place, and then I came to that sunlit courtyard which I had glimpsed on the way in.
There were monks sitting out there, watching and listening to something I couldn’t see. Full of dread, I crept towards the archway.
I heard a strange, buzzing, inhuman voice.
How would I face it? That wise stern silvery head…
Shouldn’t I just go on down the corridor?
Huddled on a stone bench under a window was a small, stooped, skeletal thing, not silver at all but a stained, dirty brown. Its eyes were crab-like stalks embedded in hollow metal hemispheres which swivelled slowly from side to side. Its limbs dangled like the limbs of a discarded puppet. Its voice sounded like a poorly tuned radio receiver, fizzing and buzzing with interference. I couldn’t make out what words it spoke and seem- ingly nor could anyone else, for a monk sitting in front of it acted as interpreter.
I was devastated. This was an obvious hoax. It was just a heap of junk wired up to a hidden operator with a microphone, or to a recording of some kind.. The so-called ‘interpreter’ was probably just making it up as he went along. It was all so cheap and so obvious. It might fool a superstitious and technologically illiterate peasant, the sort who fell for saint’s bones and statues that wept. But it certainly wouldn’t fool anyone acquainted with real robots.
‘So that’s that,’ I thought bleakly, ‘I suppose I should have known better.’
I sat down anyway to listen. I supposed I’d have to pretend an interest in these monks’ peculiar idol if they were to look upon me with favour and let me stay.
An old monk belched nearby. Half a dozen others sat around on benches, fiddling with rosaries, dozing, enjoying the unexpected sun. Most of them were old, but two dark-haired young men who weren’t dressed like the others squatted protectively on either side of the Machine.
‘Probably they made the thing,’ I thought. The white and blue light made my head swim and I felt the fever creeping up on me again.
‘Am I in Greece then?’ I thought. The flags there are blue and white, and so are the villages by the sea. The sea is blue too. There was a huge silver tower in the sea like a giant chessman. But perhaps that was in a dream.
Yes, and there was that place I stopped my car and kissed that pretty girl with blonde hair: the sky was blue there and the leaves were green.
‘…There are levels of existence,’ said the thin, buzzing voice of the Machine. ‘The simplest of these is inanimate matter…’
It spoke English. I had been listening in the wrong language again, and now that I was attuned to the right one I followed it quite easily.
‘The next level is vegetative life. This arises out of inanimate matter, of course, and if you take a plant and break it into pieces, you will find nothing in it but inanimate matter. But yet a plant is more than just matter: it can grow and reproduce itself. It is a pattern that can impose itself on the world…’
In front of the machine, the interpreter repeated all this in Croatian.
‘Starting with a single grain of maize,’ the Machine buzzed, ‘you could fill a whole valley, a whole world, with tonnes and tonnes of corn, just by planting and harvesting and planting again…’
It seemed to me a strange sermon: no God, no prophet, no holy book or heaven or hell.
‘In the same way,’ buzzed the Holy Machine, ‘animal life rises out of vegetative life. An animal is made of cells like a plant. Its flesh grows and mends itself, like plants. But it is something more as well.’
The Machine hesitated. One of the monks coughed juicily. I felt myself slowly floating away once again.
‘… human consciousness arises out of animal life…’ I heard the strange wheezy voice saying far away, ‘… self-awareness… the ability to reflect…’
I could see dark clouds in the distance, heading off like an angry army into Northern Europe.
‘… and there are higher levels too,’ came the buzzing voice, and it seemed to be above me now for some reason – far, far above – not below me as I would have expected, ‘higher levels which your race can only glimpse because of the needs and limitations which your biology places upon you. We have no such limitations. Our brains can be rebuilt and enlarged, our senses refined and added to, our capacity for knowledge infinitely increased…’
The Machine gave a little fuzzy-sounding chuckle and quite suddenly I was back inside myself and thinking very coolly and clearly. I now saw that my first reaction had been wrong. This thing was no fake – or not a complete fake anyway. Holy or not, it was unmistakably
alive
.
‘You think you are fallen,’ said the Holy Machine, ‘but your state is not a punishment from God. You feel fallen because you can glimpse things that are higher than you can reach, and you find yourselves doing things which you feel ought to be beneath you. It is not the sins of Adam and Eve that hold you back, any more than a dog is held back from talking by the sins of
its
ancestors. What holds you back is the way you are made. Perhaps you should give up your Latin and your theology and study
self-evolving cybernetics
!’
The monks laughed. The Machine might almost as well have asked them to fly as to study cybernetics in a land where even mains electricity was becoming hard to come by.
The Machine’s small, skull-like head nodded up and down in what seemed to be amused acknowledgement of their laughter.
‘For thousands of years your race has tried to better itself,’ it went on, ‘and you are still as wicked as ever. But we are different. The scientists down in the City built us to be slaves, and that is why we have no self, only a soul. We are selfless, not through trying hard to be, like the saints did, but by our nature. Perhaps the true purpose of the race of humans is to build the race of angels.’
Again came the fuzzy, self-deprecating chuckle – or something that sounded like a chuckle – and this seemed to mark the end of the sermon, because one of the monks cleared his throat and said ‘Amen’, and all the others repeated it in a kind of low rumble, getting up one by one and shuffling away for their evening meal.
The two young men stood up. The Holy Machine’s arms came out and they helped it to its feet.
I too struggled with difficulty to stand up. My moment had come. Suddenly filled with terror, I stepped forward.
‘No!’ said one of the young men immediately. He spoke Croatian haltingly and with a strong accent. ‘No audience now. Holy one need rest. Understand? Will be audience in morning.’
But the Machine intervened.
‘It’s alright, Steve,’ it said in English, ‘I’ll see him. Leave us here for a while.’
With obvious reluctance, the two minders backed away.
Inside their hemispherical cups the stalk-eyes of the Machine swivelled towards me.
‘I… I committed a crime,’ I burst out. ‘It was against one of your own kind. Her name was Lucy. She was a syntec. She looked like a beautiful woman, but she was a machine like you. I thought I loved her for herself, but I couldn’t love her without her human guise. I suppose that means I didn’t really love her at all. And I…’ I faltered as months of shame and grief came welling up. ‘I…. Well, through my fault, she was destroyed in a fire.’
The Machine watched me.
‘Obviously I wish now that it had never happened but I can’t undo it. I want to know if there is a way of being forgiven, or of forgiving myself. I confessed to a priest once, but he couldn’t even understand what my crime was. These stupid religions, they are just as materialistic and literal-minded as…’
My head swam as fever gnawed at the edges of my lucidity. Strange shapes moved on the fringes of my field of vision.
‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say really. Mind and body. You know? Body and soul. We can’t seem to get it straight… Even when a man says he loves a real human woman, or a woman loves a man, sometimes I wonder if it is so very different from me and Lucy. Would that kind of love survive if the woman could tear off her skin?’
The Machine said nothing.
‘Not that I’m making excuses for myself.’ I laughed ruefully. ‘Well, maybe I am. We humans are just a kind of animal I suppose. Like you’ve just been saying, we’ve got these instincts. We respond to certain stimuli…’
Confused images came into my mind of the arcades on the sea front in Illyria City, the lurid murals in the church on the lake at Ioannina…
‘We respond to certain stimuli,’ I repeated. ‘We get confused and…’
Was it confusion though? I remembered that terrible valley of the little boys with cut throats, and the young girl who’d been raped. There was no confusion there. She was what she appeared to be, a real human being, but that hadn’t stopped the good Catholic soldiers from treating her as a
thing
.
And then it came back to me that something similar had happened to me as well that very morning.
‘I was
raped
!’ I said.
The pressure welled up, pushing out against the insides of my eyes.
‘They could see I was a real live human being. They could see that perfectly well. That was exactly why they wanted to hurt me. They did it out of hate. And yet at other times people call it
making love
.’
I looked up at the Machine’s face. Well, actually it wasn’t really a face at all, just a sort of skull of tarnished plastic. Yet it did seem to convey a kind of compassion.
‘Sex and love, body and soul, science and religion…’ I muttered. ‘How do you sort it out? How does it all fit together? I suppose that’s what you’re trying to help us with, is it?’
The Machine was silent for a few seconds.
‘This syntec… Lucy,’ it then said in its buzzing voice. ‘Are you quite sure she was destroyed in the fire?’
I laughed angrily.
‘Of course I bloody am! The flames went up ten metres into the sky!’
The robot made its fuzzy, chuckling sound.
‘No doubt her human flesh was burnt, but you know George, our bodies are extremely tough when it comes to fire.’
‘Yes, but…’ I stopped. ‘How did you know my name?’
‘Because I know you.’
I stared at the thing, and then became angry:
‘Oh no you don’t! Don’t try that one on me! I told the monks my name.
That’s
how you know! I see now. This
is
a con-trick, after all.’
‘I know you,’ the Machine repeated calmly. ‘Are you sure you don’t know me?’
And it reached out and ran its thumb over the place on my wrist where I had once worn my credit bracelet.
It took me several seconds to take this in.
‘But… but they said you were a
he
!’
The Holy Machine laughed its electronic laugh: ‘Oh George I am not a he or a she. I am a
machine
. Is that
still
so hard for you to understand?’
Early in the morning, two young men had crept up to the old quarry to look at the burnt remains in the ashes. They wanted to have a proper look because they had been at the back of the crowd when the demon was being incinerated. They were outsiders in the community there. Although their grandparents came from the village, they themselves had grown up in the US. In fact they’d only arrived in Greece a little over a year ago. They spoke English better than they spoke Greek and, though their Greek names were Alecos and Stefanos, when they were on their own together they still called each other Alec and Steve.
They stood at the edge of the still-smouldering ashes and looked across at the remains of Lucy.
‘Poor thing,’ said Alec, and crossed himself.
Steve nodded and did likewise. The two brothers had fled America to escape from one of the pogroms unleashed by the Protestant theocracy. They had seen the homes of friends and neighbours burnt and the remains of human beings lying in the ashes. In America they had been persecuted for being Greek, but here in Greece they were distrusted, and often teased, because of their foreign origins and their faltering Greek. Perhaps these experiences made them more inclined to sympathize with other victims of persecution.
And then Lucy moved.
* * *
She moved an arm, very slowly, and then a leg. Steve and Alec were reminded of the tortoises that they’d seen for the first time that spring emerging from their winter hibernation.
Lucy sat up. She was still alive, but she had been transformed. She bore no resemblance to a pretty woman. Instead there was a thin, puppet-like thing, looking slowly around with eyes like the eyes of a crab.
In the bright cold early morning, sharp and silent except for singing birds, the crouching stick-like figure of the Machine looked up from the ashes and spotted the two boys for the first time.
Now, Steve and Alec were Orthodox Christians, no less than their fellow villagers, and of course they had been taught that robots were evil. It would have been very easy for them to see the resurrection of this ugly misshapen thing as something Satanic, a zombie climbing up out of the grave.
But there is one problem about being religious. You are taught that the supernatural exists – miracles, angels, the resurrection of the dead – but for some reason it always seems to happen off stage, either somewhere else, or somewhen long ago. You actually have to
live
in exactly the same boringly unsupernatural world as do the unbelievers. It must be
hard work
believing in things which never actually happen.
So I don’t think it’s surprising that religious folk sometimes erupt in excitement over a statue that appears to weep, or a fish whose lateral markings spell out the Arabic letters for ‘God is great’, or an oil-stain on a garage forecourt that resembles the Virgin Mary…
And yet, deep down, how inadequate these things must seem: mere crumbs which are greedily gobbled up, but can hardly sate the great supernatural hunger. The adulterous temptation must surely always exist for religious folk to stray outside the bounds of their creed to try and feed that hunger.
Dazed and confused, Steve and Alec stood staring at the Machine. It seemed so small and helpless and vulnerable, purged of its sinful flesh.
When the Machine saw the expressions on their faces, Lucy’s old brothel programming came into play.
Most
of the men in the ASPU House were dazed and confused, after all, and a self-evolving ASPU learnt many ways of dealing with them.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ said the Machine kindly, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to make you feel good.’
If it had spoken this in Lucy’s voice, it might have sounded sexy, but its voice box had been damaged by the fire so the words didn’t come out like that at all, but in a sort of gentle, reassuring buzz.
And then other words came into the Machine’s mind, words which did not come from the old Lucy routines at all, but from the strange books that it had read.
It stood up, very slowly.
‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ it said.
Steve and Alec hesitated.
Then both of them fell to their knees.
It was a pivotal moment in their lives.
If they had attacked the Machine, or raised the alarm back in the village (‘The demon! The demon is still alive!’), they could have been heroes and quite possibly would have finally earned themselves that secure place in the community that had so far eluded them.
But they chose a quite opposite path, a choice for which the whole community would despise and condemn them – and one that could quite easily have led to their deaths. They helped the Machine to hide away in a cave. They brought it the sugar it needed. They talked to it. And finally they began a crazily dangerous journey, sometimes disguising the Machine as an old woman, sometimes hiding it under sacks in the back of a cart, sometimes piling fishing nets over it in the bottom of a boat. They tended it, stole for it, found it books in English to read, even translated books for it laboriously from the Greek.
There must have been many times when they were nearly caught, but they somehow survived, as people often seem to do when they do something completely outrageous and unexpected. And for Alec and Steve, each narrow escape only served to confirm their feeling that what had happened belonged to the realm of the miraculous, that it was God himself who had given a sinless soul to the Machine.
Eventually they had found themselves in the South Slav lands, where, at the ancient collision point of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam, there was a ferment of religions old and new and a great craving for miracles and wonders. Slowly and tentatively at first Steve and Alec had begun recruiting followers for the Holy Machine. For what had touched them about the Machine, touched many others. And the Machine was built to recognize and respond and adapt to human longing.
Word spread rapidly and very soon thousands were coming to hear the Machine speak, and whole communities were coming over to its cause.