The Holy Machine (5 page)

12

I had my tour with Manolis the next day. He showed me all the tourist sites of Ioannina: the ruined castle of the Ottoman despot Ali Pasha, the churches, the dilapidated archaeological museum, the chapels and shrines on the little island in the lake.

I remember that the interior of one of the chapels was completely covered with murals from floor to ceiling, most of them depicting hideous scenes of saints being skinned alive, saints roasting over fires, saints being beheaded…

‘Look at the courage of our holy martyrs,’ said Manolis proudly, gesturing to a saint gazing steadfastly up to heaven while his tormentors disembowelled him. ‘It is faith in our Lord that gives them strength. You don’t understand that in that City of yours!’

And for a moment this idea humbled me, just as the fierce Greek interpreter had humbled me. I had a glimpse of what faith might mean: something strong for a person to hold onto beyond his own immediate needs and feelings…

But later, when we were back in Manolis’ taxi, it struck me that it wasn’t that simple. Scientific rationalism had steadfast martyrs of its own, after all, from Galileo to Mrs Ullman, who had suffered or died for refusing to pretend to believe in things.

* * *

Manolis showed me other things too, less exalted things, which he thought might tempt me. He showed me the town’s brothel, were several fat, bored-looking human whores were sitting outside in the sun. (‘I thought you might like a girl,’ he said, and I laughed coldly to myself at the very idea of being tempted by these wretched creatures, when I had Lucy waiting for me back home.) He took me on a tour of the town’s artisanal area. There was a street of tanners (with piles of discarded animal hooves outside each workshop), a street of potters, a street of mechanics…

He insisted on having me get out and look at a street where they repaired and sold firearms. There were not only shotguns and hunting rifles but automatics, machine guns and even improvised grenade launchers made by sawing the barrel off a rifle and welding onto it a cup made out of old olive oil cans.

‘They are used for fishing,’ he said. ‘You fire a grenade into the middle of a shoal and –
bang!
– thirty fat fishes in one go!’

I wondered what else they were used for, and why Manolis thought they might be of interest to a visitor from Illyria.

As we returned to the car an elderly woman accosted us. She was a Vlach, as Manolis told me afterwards disdainfully, an Aromune, one of a dwindling mountain tribe who speak a Latin language and are said to be the descendants of Roman soldiers. She wore colourful clothes, but her hands had been reduced by leprosy to blackened stumps.

‘Help me, please, in the name of mother Mary,’ she intoned in a kind of stylized whine which seemed to be common to Ioannina’s many beggars.

Manolis snorted.

‘No good talking about Mary, old woman. He’s from the City.’

‘In the name of the City, then!’ wailed the old woman. ‘In the name of the big silver tower in the sea!’

Manolis laughed, climbing back into the car and turning the key in the ignition. But I was touched by her invocation of the silvery Beacon. I gave her a twenty-drachma note as I got into my own seat.

As we roared off in a thick cloud of exhaust smoke, the taxi-driver gestured towards a small side street.

‘Down there are experts in documents. If you ever need a passport or an ID card… I’ve taken more than one of your compatriots down there who wanted to start another life.’

Why would any Illyrian want to start another life out here, I wondered? I’d never heard of such a thing. Illyria was entirely populated after all by refugees
from
this outer world. But it seemed that the Outlanders were privy to aspects of my home-land that were unknown to me.

Manolis seemed to sense my bewilderment.

‘I’ve been to your Illyria my friend,’ he said, ‘I worked there for a time. I know what it’s like. Clean streets, nice homes, no one goes hungry, no one has to be in pain… But in the end it will drive you crazy. Nobody can live like that forever.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose most of the rest of the world has come to the same conclusion,’ I began to say, then broke off with a gasp of pure horror.

We had come to a dusty square in the centre of which there was a kind of gibbet. It was festooned with dismembered bodies, severed limbs, heads…

Manolis laughed.

‘You see, even your
demons
can’t stand it there! Look how many of them we have caught!’

Only then did it dawn on me that the limbs and heads were not human, but parts of robots.

* * *

I made him stop so I could get out and look. There were the remains there of half-a-dozen machines. The sad silver heads of two big security machines were impaled on poles. Nailed below them were the pink bodies of a couple of smaller plastecs: the type used as shop assistants and janitors and waiters. One of them, deprived of all its limbs, was hanging precariously upside down, perhaps dislodged by stone-throwing children of which several were even then enjoying some target practice. Its head, with its mild pink face, dangled by a couple of wires from the rest of the frame.

It was Shirley!

Or if it wasn’t the robot janitor from our apartment block it was certainly an identical model.

Manolis was rolling another cigarette, watching my reaction with amusement.

‘How did they get here?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘You City people should take more care of your demons, my friend. They just wander over the border. I don’t know what they are looking for, but of course we destroy them.’

‘Why?’

He snorted.

‘Because they are blasphemies, mockeries of God’s creation.’

Epiros was a Greek Orthodox state, but the reason he had given me was precisely the same one that had been given, all those years ago, by the Protestant mobs in Chicago when they broke to pieces my mother’s beloved Joe.

Oily flames pouring upwards from a laboratory window…

A preacher with a megaphone in a white suit…

The poor, the marginal, the surplus to requirements, streaming in their thousands through the campus, seething with energy and rage…

‘God is not mocked, God is
not
mocked!’

There, there, Ruth, there, there…

13

The trade talks were supposed to resume at three, but when Manolis brought me to the Archbishop’s headquarters at 2.30 p.m., the two Illyrian negotiators were waiting anxiously outside. And to my surprise both men piled hastily into the back seat of the taxi.

‘Thank God you’ve finally got here,’ they said. (For Illyrians
did
still say ‘Thank God’). ‘We need to go straight to the airfield. The helicopter is on its way.’

Both of them were experienced middle-aged men (one a Japanese-Illyrian, the other of French origin), who up to now had seemed to be dealing quite calmly and competently with a slow and frustrating task. But both were now in a fever of agitation.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

The French-Illyrian, Claude, made frantic hand signals, pointing at Manolis.

I reassured him that the driver spoke no English at all.

‘There’s been trouble back home,’ said the Frenchman. ‘There’ll be a reaction here. It won’t be safe until we’re back in the City.’

Frowning, Manolis looked at me, glanced back at the negotiators and then frowned at me again. He was suspicious. He could sense the tension and he was wondering what he’d been excluded from.

‘Tell him to turn off his radio!’ said the other negotiator, Tojo. (Manolis had been listening to some crackly bouzouki music). ‘The news may come through any time now and then he won’t want to drive us.’

‘Tell him my colleague here has had a heart attack and we have to get home urgently,’ the Frenchman said.

I told the taxi-driver that the Japanese-Illyrian was very ill and needed quiet.

Manolis frowned, looked dubiously back at Tojo, and very reluctantly turned off the radio.

‘A thousand drachmai, to the airport,’ he said coldly.

We agreed without further argument.

‘There’s been a big squippy demonstration back home,’ Claude explained to me tersely (‘squippy’ was a derogatory term in those days for guestworkers, many of whom were Albanians, or
Shqips
). ‘Some people have died, most of them Greeks. We need to get out of Epiros before the news spreads.’

But the news was already spreading. We could actually
see
it, like a weather front moving across a landscape. For a little while the people in the streets were still just as they’d been all morning and over the last two days. Then there were more signs of agitation, more groups conferring, more glances towards our taxi and the three of us inside looking very Illyrian with our clean-shaven faces and our white, collarless suits.

Then someone threw a stone at us.

Then someone else shouted.

Then the car started to be jostled: fists were banged on the roof, doors were kicked, faces glared through windows.

Someone delivered a hard kick to Manolis’ door. He wound down his window and roared out abuse.

‘About thirty died,’ said Claude (he was listening to the news through an ear-set as he spoke), ‘Epirote Greeks, almost all of them.’

‘Atheists! Murderers!’ people were beginning to shout at us. A group of youths made to block our way.

Manolis put his foot down, scaring them out of his way by sheer ruthless speed.

He turned a corner and pulled up abruptly.

‘Right, get out now,’ he said.

Claude produced a wad of banknotes.

‘Ten thousand if you get us to the airstrip!’

Tojo produced a handgun and pointed it at Manolis’ head.

The driver grinned mirthlessly.

‘You don’t seem very ill to me!’ Then he shrugged. ‘Okay, ten thousand drachmai. But make sure everyone can see you pointing that gun at me.’

A lump of brick smashed a hole in the windscreen and sprinkled my suit with glass.

‘And keep the safety catch on,’ Manolis added through gritted teeth. ‘I won’t get you to the airport if you’ve blown my head off.’

He was sweating profusely. The Illyrian civil servants were sweating too. All three men were muttering a stream of obscenities in their respective native languages.

But as for me, oddly enough, for one so frightened of so many things, I felt completely unafraid. More than that, I actually felt elated. There was, I could see, a real possibility that the car would be stopped and we three Illyrians dragged out and beaten to death. But that prospect was quite eclipsed for me by the wonderful and unfamiliar feeling of really being alive.

Somehow we got through the town and on to the airstrip where the Illyrian Air Force helicopter was waiting with its rotor spinning, the unblinking, black-and-white Eye of Illyria painted on its side. Another helicopter, this one a ferocious gunship, was hovering overhead to ensure that no one interfered with our departure.

Soon we were safely on our way home above the Zagorian mountains. The helicopter crew filled us in on the day’s events.

More than twenty thousand guestworkers had come out onto the streets. They had demanded the usual things: religious freedom and full citizenship of Illyria, where they formed the majority of the population but continued to be treated as foreigners.

The police had ordered the demonstration to disperse under the Prevention of Bigotry Act. The crowd had refused and a riot had ensued in which shops were looted, vehicles burnt and several robots damaged. This was when a group of Epirote demonstrators had run amok and been shot by police machines.

Tojo snorted: ‘Their demands are ridiculous. Illyria has always made clear that it is a state for scientists and intellectuals, and that full citizenship will only be given to those who are properly qualified…’

He went on, his voice becoming louder and shriller. ‘Squippies came to Illyria out of
choice
! They
know
the rules! They’ve got no business trying to change them.’

He gave an angry snort. His face was all blotchy with emotion and his lip was trembling.

‘But what’s the point? They’ll never listen to reason. The sooner the entire guestworker population is replaced by robots, the better.’

‘Very pricey though,’ observed Claude with a shrug.

‘A price worth paying!’ snapped Tojo, ‘Really Claude, it is just
absurd
to talk about price!’

We were near the frontier. I looked down at the mountains and fancied for a moment that I saw a tiny single figure far below, struggling southward into Epiros across a snowfield. Oddly jerky movements it seemed to me. Was the figure human, or could it be…?

But I was distracted from taking a second look, by Tojo breaking down into convulsive sobs.

A young paramedic was in the helicopter and he administered sedation.

We crossed into Illyrian airspace in silence, but for the gradually subsiding sobs of Tojo as he settled into sleep, and the thrub-thrub-thrub of the helicopter blades.

Claude glanced at me.

‘The Reaction was bad in Japan,’ he said gruffly, by way of explanation. ‘Public beheadings, torture… you know. It reminds him.’

14

Needless to say, when I got home, Ruth was beside herself.

‘I told you shouldn’t go to the Outlands! Don’t you realize what this does to me? The squippies have gone crazy! In
Illyria
, George, even in Illyria – and there
you
were in
Greece
! Don’t you ever think of me? Don’t you ever think of me at all?’

A few little tears came starting from her eyes.

‘They were down there in the street George. Banners! Chanting! Crosses! Just like in… just like in…’

She didn’t like to say the word – or at any rate affected not to like saying it – so I said it brutally for her:

‘Yeah, yeah. Just like in Chicago.’

‘All over town. Even here in Faraday, George. You don’t seem to understand what this means… I’ve been on the net all day. I’ve mailed our assemblyman, and the President, and the Police Department, and… and… This mustn’t be allowed George. It’s got to be stamped out. And you go to
Greece
!’

The TV was on in the corner. I picked up the remote control and starting flipping to and fro across the day’s news. I was tired, and hungry, and very shaky, beginning to get the delayed shock reaction to my close shave back in Ioannina.

‘Get me a dinner, Charlie,’ I called to the robot, ‘I don’t care what it is. And a couple of beers while I’m waiting.’

I settled into an armchair. The X3 trundled mutely to do my bidding. His antique speech mechanism had seized up recently and we’d not been able to find anyone who could fix it.

‘Are you listening to anything I’m saying, George?’ Ruth demanded. ‘I’ve been half out of my mind and you don’t seem to care. In Greece, George, you were in Greece when the Greek squippies went crazy.’

I pulled the top off the first can of beer and let the TV settle on real-time news.

‘…
all around Illyria, sabres are rattling
’ a commentator was saying, ‘
The Islamic Republic of Albania has officially declared war. The Holy Autochthony of Epiros has suspended all contacts. The First Hearer of Herczgovina has called on all children of Light to suspend their differences and obliterate Illyria, which alone of all countries in the world is purely made of Darkness. The Pope has sent a message of condolence to his erstwhile bitter enemy, the Patriarch of Constantinople. Even the First Elect of America, Elisha Jones, has expressed his outrage, though of course Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Christians, just as much as unbelievers, are persecuted under his own Protestant rule…
’

Image after image showed angry crowds, angry religious leaders, in the diverse trappings of their faiths…

Then there were reassuring images of Illyria in readiness: jets marked with wide-open eyes streaking across the sky, Goliath fighting robots, three metres tall, patrolling the frontier, armed speedboats streaking across the mild blue sea with Illyrian flags fluttering behind them…

And then: more crowds, flashbacks to earlier that day in Illyria City itself.

I was shaking badly now. When Charlie brought me my meal I could barely hold it.

‘You see?’ Ruth demanded, pointing at the screen, ‘You see?’

I exploded then. ‘For fuck’s sake Ruth, just leave me alone for five minutes will you!’

She burst into tears and ran off to her room.

‘You never even asked me what happened to me today!’ I shouted after her, ‘I’m the one that was nearly killed, not you! Me! Me! Me!’

I felt a strange dull ache behind my eyes.

Hungry as I had been, I found that when it came to it I couldn’t bring myself to eat, or to follow what was happening on the TV screen, or even to sit still in one place. I grabbed my jacket and went out, heading for Lucy, through subways crawling with security machines and streets still littered with debris.