The Island of Hope (7 page)

'I'll kill him,'
Simeon thought. So, he chose the simplest solution for the robot problem.

Finally, by the end of the third day, he couldn't stand it any longer. He headed back to see the girl.

6.

"O
h, Simeon! Simeon! I'm so happy you're back!" Yanna rushed out to meet him and threw her arms round his neck, the shock of her silky hair covering the boy's helmet like golden tinsel.

He was taken aback for a second, but Yanna's sincere joy broke the fragile ice. Simeon raised his visor. The hatch behind his back hissed shut.

The girl's eyes sparkled. "Andor and I were so worried," she admitted.

The boy tensed up. His right hand lay on his gun. "Where is he?"

Yanna followed his gesture. Her gaze betrayed fear. "Don't know. He went out. He didn't say when he'd be back."

Simeon's fingers released the handle of the weapon. It was of little consequence. The android wouldn't catch him unawares again. As far as Simeon was concerned, he was as good as dead. He didn't want to think of the robot now – Yanna's joy filled him
with the exciting and unfamiliar sensation of happiness. It was a new, pleasant and strange feeling, even better than the taste of oxygen or an accurate shot.

"Will you go again?" Yanna asked with badly concealed anxiety.

"No," Simeon shook his head. "I've come to stay."

He removed his helmet and followed Yanna to the community room. On a table next to a wide open bookcase lay a book open in the middle, next to a glass filled with pink liquid.

Yanna sat down on the couch. "I was worried," she admitted as she watched Simeon remove his spacesuit. "Andor said you'd be back, but I didn't believe him."

Simeon frowned. The idea of the robot was quickly becoming as obsessive as a toothache.

They kept silent for some seconds, unable to control the feelings overwhelming them both and not knowing what to say. Both were too grown up for their age. Their daily problems would have broken any child of ten or twelve. But subconsciously they remained children. Their world was simple to the point of absurdity, bot at the same time excruciatingly complex.

They knew no grown-up tricks: they didn't know how to lie or deceive, their consciousness was free from all the complexes and conventions developed by our millennia-old civilization.

They could only say what they felt, which made their hearts sensitive like live wires. Their lives had been shattered; their world was collapsing while fusing their two hearts together: the unity of two experiences and two identities.

Yanna watched Simeon fold his spacesuit. He'd intruded into her life amid all the ideas and reveries she'd borrowed from films and books. He had destroyed her world, showed her the vacuum and the gloom reigning behind the walls of her dwelling — so fragile and accident prone.

Terrified, she was on the brink of tears. She didn't remember how she'd got home that day; the silence and emptiness surrounding her after Simeon's departure had stupefied her.

He too had experienced something similar. Simeon wouldn't say why he was attracted to this place. Now the tense silence was hurting them both.

They were too pure, too naïve — too wise. But also cruel: two little living beings lost in the boundless dark of the Universe amidst the cold and deadly chaos of metal drifting through a vacuum.

Simeon gave a faint smile. All of a sudden his face lit up. He was about to say something but Yanna, noticing the change, couldn't restrain herself any more. Joy, relief, an incomprehensible bitterness and a tenderness strange in a ten-year-old girl – all these flooded over her as she ran up to Simeon, flung her arms round his neck and clung to him, shaking with sobs.

Somewhat scared, he moved back and looked in her face.

A tearful Yanna gave him a happy smile.

* * *

Yanna woke up early in the morning before the artificial daylight ceiling fixtures had lit up, replacing the dim night lighting in the compartments. She stayed in bed for a while, half-believing what had happened the day before.

Then she felt anxious. Andor had been absent for two days. It had happened before that her instructor left the protected modules for a long time, but Yanna, not knowing what dangers lay behind the main airlock, had never been really anxious for him. Or rather, she knew it theoretically, but to hear of something and to see it with one's own eyes are two different things.

She sighed and got up. She took a peek into the adjacent room and stood for a while in complete darkness, listening to Simeon's broken breathing. Then she went to the galley and began making breakfast. For the first time in her life, Yanna had no idea what the coming day had in store for her. What if Simeon would make her suit up again and step out of the main airlock? The thought was awful. The contents of hundreds of books she had read kept intruding upon her mind. What once had sounded like fiction or looked like a collection of stage props was now turning into reality. There were other people besides her. There were huge spheres called planets out there. She wasn't unique, nor was her room the center of the Universe.

Immediately she thought of Andor. Where was he? She couldn't help worrying about her old mentor.

And her parents? Simeon had told her that he'd had a father who'd been killed by a battle machine. Then, where were her own father and mother?

But what if...

Yanna's legs gave way under her as she realized clearly: Simeon's father had been killed by a robot. What if her parents, too... Whose carbonized corpses were those in the battered airlock?

So gradually, the war mentality began to creep into her mind.

After breakfast Yanna dragged Simeon off to the library. He followed her reluctantly. They hadn't heard from Andor yet, but quite a few other machines aroused his suspicion, including an odd motionless apparatus with two opal-black screens placed in the library.

Yanna laughed sincerely, not understanding how one could be afraid of a universal library processor.

The two children like two halves of one large mind. Simeon's part contained all the hands-on survival experience in the inhuman conditions of the spheroid. His mind stored only the knowledge he could have obtained during everyday struggle. Yanna, on the contrary, knew lots of things; she was literally crammed with all sorts of information, but she was unable to apply it and would for certain have perished had she had to venture outside.

Yanna approached the computer in the middle of the room. Its indicator lights kept flashing cheerfully, but the two monitors in front of the seats remained black. Warily Simeon walked around the machine, keeping his hand on the handle of his weapon just in case.

Yanna opened the central panel and produced a thin plastic headband hooked up to the machine with wires.

"Put it on," she said, "and sit down."

Simeon tensed up. "Why?".

Yanna smiled; dimples appeared on her cheeks. "Don't be afraid. I want to show you
people
. This headband helps me learn."

After a second's hesitation Simeon obeyed. He didn't want to disappoint Yanna. Besides, he kept his right hand closed around his
MG
, so it wouldn't be a good idea for the machine to suddenly spring to life and point a weapon at them.

"Close your eyes," the girl sank into the opposite seat. Yanna was unaware that she was performing a revolution in his life – how could she have known the wonderful potential of the ordinary processor so familiar to her?

Simeon put on the headband and lowered his eyelids. He felt a weak prickle in his temples.

He didn't see the opposite monitor light up, streaming with incomprehensible messages. Yanna had never seen anything like that, either.

POTENTIAL INTELLIGENCE TEST: 170 POINTS

REAL KNOWLEDGE TEST: 28.1 POINTS

PERSONALITY TESTED. ANTISTRESS INDEX: 127 UNITS

AUTOMATIC TRAINING PROGRAM ACTIVATED

Simeon felt something pierce his arm. He tensed up, about to spring back to his feet, then succumbed to a pleasant weakness overtaking him. A

A soft female voice echoed in his mind,

"Relax. Don't open your eyes. Now you will hear a brief course on the history of the Galaxy. The information will be transmitted directly into your brain."

Later Simeon could barely remember what happened next. He seemed to have lost all will of his own.

Yanna wasn't surprised seeing him sunk into a trance. Admittedly she was disappointed he couldn't talk to her for some time. The girl had experienced similar phenomena more than once and didn't consider a direct neurosensory contact with a machine to be something supernatural or dangerous.

The primary course lasted four days. Simeon ate and slept without in fact realizing what he was doing and then returned to his seat, which was actually a very complex diagnostics and life support machine.

The sophisticated automatics of its teaching module could not make him a genius. Having determined his brain's potential, the machine's processor simply uploaded to it a certain amount of general education information. The teaching module didn't pursue any concrete aim; its actions were akin to the behavior of a wave rolling onto a desolate beach where, half-buried in sand, lay an empty bottle. The wave would fill it with brine and recede, totally indifferent to the change in its contents or in the bottle itself.

Yanna quietly entered the library.

Simeon slumped in his seat in front of the computer terminal, his white-knuckled fingers clutching the armrests.

She cautiously went round the machine.

Simeon was asleep. His hair was tousled; his head drooped to one side. Yanna's heart sank. She remembered at once what he'd told her about machines; overcome with fright, she looked at the chrome-plated teaching module with its gleaming polished plastic panels.

What if... what if the machine had harmed Simeon? Fear touched her chest with its cold sharp-clawed fingers. Yanna was not devoid of imagination. While listening to Simeon's accounts she'd had the impression that she watching a movie.

She looked around her, desperate. What if something had actually happened to Simeon? Andor had been out for more than a week. She'd be left here all alone...

The terrible, gloomy, dangerous world opened up before her as an icy abyss swarming with the ominous shadows of battle machines.

Simeon emitted a weak sigh. His eyelids began to tremble.

He opened his eyes.

Yanna was sitting on the armrest of his seat, white as a sheet. Her lips quivered.

"What happened?" she asked with genuine anxiety.

Slowly Simeon came round.

"I have a headache," he pressed his hands to his temples where the electrodes had sunk into them. The indicator lights on the teaching module control panel kept flashing happily at each other. He stared at their patterns. For the first time in his life, he wasn't afraid of them. He was trying to remember and bring back the sensation of
real time
.

Two children and machines.

Some of them had tried to kill them. Others helped them survive. Yet others didn't do anything at all. But they all controlled their lives. That was one thing Simeon knew. But why? He was shocked by the revelation that all machines as well as the steel spheroid itself had been created by people; directed by their will and actions.

He wouldn't be able to explain what it was that he felt. The understanding had come, making him quite grown-up, making his soul and mind ten years older, but all that was still deep in his subconscious. In fact, the whole process had resulted in resentment, confusion and anger. Now he began to grasp the significance of the ships' cemetery, seeing clearly that it was a place resulted from cruelty and madness. This place had never been intended for living. Yanna and himself were machines' slaves. Every breath, every second of their life could be granted or taken away by these inanimate devices.

"No," he whispered.

Yanna turned to him in surprise.

Simeon had finally emerged from his slumber. He refused to believe that his father had been one of those who initially doomed him to this kind of life. And he also understood that he wasn't a machines' slave. He was their master. He belonged to the race of creators.

Simeon couldn't yet explain it, the ideas still growing within him to become his personal experience. His anxiety culminated in a bitter sensation of injustice, of humbleness; then, by a sort of chain reaction, that sensation aroused more feelings, more malicious, cold and practical.

"Let's go and have dinner," Yanna said, fingering his tangled hair.

Simeon leaned back, placing his head on the headrest and almost sinking in the huge cushioned seat.

"Don't want to. Maybe later?"

Yanna nodded, looking asquint at Simeon. It was as if she saw this thoughtful expression on his face for the first time. She was neither hurt nor surprised, knowing by experience how difficult it might be to return to reality after getting an injection of the antistress drug used by the life-support automatics. She had also many times recovered her senses sitting in the same armchair and feeling her head bursting with new information. But she was unaware of this difference between them: Simeon's mind, geared toward survival, had already linked all the new data about the Universe and people with the spheroid and drawn some obvious conclusions that had never entered her head.