The Island of Hope (6 page)

The girl didn't move. The momentary fright in her face gave way to surprise.

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "Release Andor, now!"

The lying robot struggled a few times as if checking the strength of his opponent, then jumped to his feet.

Simeon was thrown into a corner, but so gently and accurately that he wasn't hurt. Horrified, he squeezed his eyes shut, shrinking into the wall. He was ready to die.

Instead of a gunshot, he heard the same voice rumbling over his head. "Sir, may I inquire about the reason for your discontent?"

Simeon forced his eyes open. The robot was kneeling beside him.

"I hope you didn't hurt yourself?" he asked.

Simeon heard a sob behind as Yanna couldn't take the strain.

Simeon was staring at the android kneeling beside him. He couldn't believe it. The Universe had collapsed. He had just struck a robot, but the latter hadn't killed him in return! This was too illogical — beyond his comprehension. Himself, he'd learnt to walk and to shoot at the same time.

"Simeon!" Yanna's voice broke, her breathing uneven. "Andor won't hurt you. Trust me." She walked over to the android and took him by the hand. "Look, he isn't scary. Andor is my teacher. He used to feed me when I was a baby. He told me about people."

That was apparently too much for her. Yanna burst into tears.

Simeon would have loved to believe her, but he couldn't help feeling the way he did. A robot was a robot. Standing next to one scared the hell out of him. Simeon glanced over the robot's chromium-plated body but saw no sign of a weapon. It looked like Yanna was telling the truth. The thought puzzled him. An unarmed robot! This glaring contradiction with all his life experience confused him. It was so absurd that he almost burst out laughing.

"I can't harm a human," the flat voice broke the silence, "even if you ordered me to do so, Sir."

Andor rose and demonstratively stepped aside.

Simeon felt he was going mad. He didn't lose sight of the android for a second. He was shaking. There was hell in his heart.

"What is
sir
?" he asked, scrambling back to his feet, just to say something.

"It's a polite form of addressing human males," Andor quietly explained. "A woman is addressed
lady
."

Simeon felt sorry for himself. Why had this creature had to come and stand between them? "I'm off," he said coldly, picking up his suit.

Yanna startled as if he'd struck her. "But why?" she demanded. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"I don't know," he turned round and went out.

Having returned to the central room, he picked up his
MG
and squeezed its cold plastic hard.

Yanna walked in.

"I'm short of oxygen," Simeon said gloomily, avoiding looking at the android that lurked in the doorway. It was obvious Yanna liked this machine for some reason, and now, holding a weapon, he was afraid of upsetting her even more by shooting the robot down.

"Come here," Yanna called in a low voice.

There were four other doors leading out of the airlock, and the girl opened one of them. Simon saw tall racks piled with sealed containers. Simeon followed her and froze, rooted to the floor.

Talk about Aladdin's cave.

Fascinated, he stared at the neat stacks of spacesuits, sorted by size. A unified model, used by Earth commandos. Until now he had only heard his father speak about it.

"Are they in working order?" he asked, his voice trembling.

Yanna raised a surprised eyebrow. She couldn’t understand his emotion: the girl hadn’t had to struggle for survival, she had never choked to near death because of lack of oxygen, had never turned blind because of jammed light filters; she hadn't had to patch a spacesuit nor been frozen to near death because of a failed thermostat.

“Sure. Everything's in good working order here,” she answered. Yanna had never entered the storeroom before, it was Andor's job, but she trusted him. She glanced at Simeon and added, “You can take all you need.”

He couldn't resist the temptation. Then again, what temptation? His spacesuit was bursting at the seams. At the time, Father and himself had spent ages looking for the right size but never found it. How many times had Andrei dreamed of a spacesuit equipped with a converter for his son! Simeon didn’t know about it, but he remembered his dad explaining to him patiently time and time again, the principle of the converter's work as he described the equipment.

Now Simeon reached for it with confidence. The surprisingly light and strong spacesuit felt as if he'd known it for ages, up to the smallest wire and tiniest indicator. Father kept helping him, even after his death.

Yanna looked at him, uncomprehending as he froze, lifeless, his heart overtaken by memories that took him far away from the storeroom.

At last he started, getting rid of a vision, and turned to her. His expression was pained.

“Why?” she asked, faltering. “Why are you going?”

Simeon sighed and began to pull on the spacesuit. He clicked the weapon belt on, fastened the
MG
to it and moved his shoulders. Not sensing the usual weight of an oxygen cylinder felt weird. He put his finger on the converter’s button. His lungs filled with the air mix that the device made from pills stacked up in its holders. A stack the size of his hand was sufficient for a day’s breathing.

Right until now Simeon hadn’t traveled further than a couple miles from home, except for emergencies. One oxygen cylinder that he could use with his light spacesuit only lasted him seven hours. And now he could take on the world!

“Thanks,” his heart was breaking.

Yanna burst out crying again. “Why?” she repeated obstinately, sobbing.

He couldn't explain. He himself didn’t understand what it was that made him do it. He couldn't define it, let alone explain it to Yanna. He simply knew that he had to leave the place inhabited by a machine. At a certain point, he very nearly stayed, but then his heart filled with such icy cold that he almost screamed.

A twelve years’ life in a vacuum, amid the constant combat between cybernetic systems. Some of the adults who'd lived their entire lives on their peaceful little planets had lost their sanity witnessing it. He'd grown up here. He was a part of this nasty, impossible world, and no sooner had he begun to perceive the most elementary notions of the world than he got the cruel rules of the game. Now he would like to break them, but he couldn’t. To consider the situation from a
normal
point of view and understand it, to believe Yanna he would have had to grow mad. And to forget his dad.

Then he sighed as if he had found a way out, grasped another spacesuit and held it out to the girl.

She got shy, but quickly controlled herself.

Yanna’s trembling fingers at once got tangled in locks and fasteners. Simeon helped her, carefully checked the function of life support systems and shut her helmet himself.

“Let’s go,” he said through the communicator, taking her by the hand.

Yanna nodded, unable to utter a word. Maybe, for the first time in her life she was properly frightened.

Andor appeared in the door opening. He silently watched the preparations while Simeon was loading the pack with holders containing oxygen tablets and with charged compact generating sets.

“Good-bye, sir,” the android uttered calmly when they moved towards the airlock. “Yanna, will you return?”

“Sure, Andor.” She replied, though being in that moment quite unaware of any further development of events.

They passed the airlock.

In fact, Yanna had never left her protected apartments. Simeon saw the girl’s face turning pale and growing a sallow hue once they stepped into the gloom and walked through an enfilade of ruined halls.

Yanna’s breath became intermittent and accelerated. She was shivering, Simeon felt it even through the thick material of pressurized gloves.

The flashlights of their helmets sliced through the darkness, revealing more chilling details of a combat between men and machines that had unfolded here in former times.

Finally they saw the airlock next to which Simeon, almost suffocating, had noticed the glowing sign that had saved his life. The same sign was repeated on the inner side, but here the characters glowed red, as if dooming anyone who dared exit to certain death.

END OF PRESSURIZED PREMISES

Simeon was aware that he was probably being cruel, but he didn’t see any other way of revealing his feelings to her, of making her understand the true meaning of the phrase about the impossibility of the truce between man and machine.

He led the girl into a vestibule. The light of their two flashlights illuminated the eerie contents of the cramped cabin.

“There,” Simeon said hoarsely when she suppressed a shriek at the sight of two charred corpses. “That's what happened to my father," he managed, suppressing his hatred. “They tried to do the same to me hundreds of times!”

* * *

The way home proved to be long.

For the first time in his life, he was not in a hurry to return. This was unbelievable: only a few hours ago he'd been suffocating, but now there was plenty of oxygen. He could do what he wanted. By simply touching a button inside the pressure helmet with the tongue he could drink some water or get a food pill.

Nevertheless Simeon was moody.

Only yesterday a similar spacesuit would have been his dream come true.

Then why wasn’t he happy now?

Hundreds of questions ripped his mind apart. The world around him was imperceptibly changing; existence as he knew it was slowly but inevitably collapsing.

Father’s tales about human beings had turned to reality.

'Where did Yanna come from? Who are the people that died when defending her shelter? What is Andor and, generally speaking, how is it possible that there’s a robot not trying to kill me? Perhaps it’s faulty?'

Slowly Simeon scrambled through the sinister interiors of the gutted spaceships that used to belong to his ancestors, trying for the first time to comprehend the eerie world of mechanical wreckage.

The corridor arched.

He turned a corner and found himself in front of a mangled doorway.

A massive hatch had been torn off its hinges by the old explosion and now hung overhead, stuck in the wall just under the ceiling. A wide crack gaped alongside it. Its edges were blocked with debris, half-sucked in by depressurization: deformed seats, crumpled paperwork, crushed memory crystals, some rags and fragments of devices and weapons.

Approaching the door, he caught sight of a human torso. Still clad in a tattered uniform, it was pinned to the hole with the rest of the debris. No spacesuit. The man's glazed-over eyes were distorted with agony.

Simeon shrank back. His father’s body must have been floating somewhere in the vacuum, looking exactly as this one.

The feeling shattered him. All the corpses filling the spheroid had at one time been living men.

* * *

He was deeply shaken by his epiphany.

The boy’s mind was still unable to grasp the full horror of reality, but the understanding that had just dawned upon him was sufficient enough to plunge him into shock.

He aimlessly trudged along tangled passages for a long time, mechanically hopping from one shell-hole into another. The clear and familiar world of the steel labyrinth had unexpectedly changed, as if the mask of the ordinary had been torn off it. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Simeon was aware of something new, horrid and incomprehensible, intruding into his life, making it yet less comfortable, yet more complicated and lonely, as if he hadn’t so many other troubles.

He would grow up first, and only then would he realize: just in those days, after his father’s death, his meeting Yanna and Andor, his intellect really began to produce new ideas, although the process was rather distressing. The facts and notions that Andrei had sought to transfer to Simeon, became clearer and yet clearer to him, and these separate bits of other people’s experience that he inherited, would eventually help him to fit together a fragile and awful mosaic of the reality surrounding him.

* * *

For the next three days, he was busy. He'd finally found his way home and caught some sleep in his cramped room. Then he ventured out to the nearest stores to fill up on water and food, but the usual excitement of ++++a challenge had gone.

Not quite understanding what was happening to him, he got angry.

Several times he'd abandon whatever he was doing and climb out onto the surface of the spheroid. He'd sit there for hours, gazing at the crimson nebula and the rampant contours of battleships amid the distant stars.

Simeon was overwhelmed with melancholy as he knew that there was life not very far from his shelter. And even the existence of Andor didn’t bother him as much as before.