Twisted Metal (31 page)

She wondered where he was, or if he was even still alive.

Eventually the door to the wagon slid open, and the dim rain-filled daylight flooding into the interior seemed impossibly bright. The women turned down their eyes as they were led, one by one, out of the wagon and across a narrow cobbled strip. They couldn’t see properly, couldn’t make out their surroundings. There was only the suggestion of tall buildings covered in soot. And the feel of metal all around. So much metal.

Through a door, they were marched along one long corridor after another, then down steps, descending deeper and deeper underground. They could hear voices, many, many voices. Nearly all of them female, they echoed from the bare metal walls of the seemingly endless corridors through which they marched.

Finally they came to a room that was just a bare metal box furnished with rows of benches. Susan waited her turn as the line of women took their places. When they were all seated, an Artemisian woman entered the room and took up position facing them all. A lecture, Susan realized. This was going to be a lecture.

The woman at the front was nothing to look at. Her body was simply made: efficient, but with no line of style and no grace. Iron and steel panelling, copper fingers and toes, she was a little smaller than Susan, but then again, most Artemisians were. They had built themselves small when metal was scarce, and the old habit still remained.

‘Call me Nettie,’ she began. ‘Ladies, welcome to Artemis City. Welcome to your glorious futures as mothers of Artemis!’

So it was going to be rape after all, thought Susan. She wasn’t surprised, and at that moment she couldn’t bring herself to care.

Nettie carried a steel stylus which she used to write on the smooth metal panel set on the wall behind her. The robots in the room watched silently as she formed the letters.

A Child Every Night
.

The women of Turing City stirred in their seats, murmured to each other.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Nettie, turning back to face them. ‘It can’t be done. Well, trust me, I’ve been there. I’m a Bether and I once thought as you did. Now I know better. It
can
be done. You
can
twist a mind every night. Do you want to know how?’

No, thought Susan.
No, I don’t. I don’t want to know anything about this
.

‘Nyro,’ explained Nettie. ‘Nyro’s pattern. Ladies, who here has twisted wire already?’

No one spoke. No one raised a hand. The women all looked down at the floor, no one wanting to volunteer anything.

‘Come on, ladies,’ said Nettie, ‘you’re safe in here. Forget your troubles, they are now at an end. Tell me, who has twisted wire? No one? Well, I’m sure that’s not true, but I can understand your reticence.’

She smiled at the assembled women. She wanted to be their friend, Susan realized. She wanted them to like her.

‘Well, let me try to talk this through,’ continued Nettie. ‘When a
Tokvah
twists wire, she will spend some time thinking of the mind she will create. Maybe she takes a walk, storing experiences, remembering certain sights and sounds.’

Susan gazed harder at the floor.
If she sees me, she will know that’s exactly what Karel and I were doing
. . .

Nettie continued: ‘Any Tokvah woman wishing to twist wire will invest a lot of time and thought in exploring what she believes to be the best pattern for her child. She will want to make a child that has the best chance of survival in the world, a child that will have the best chance of reproducing in the future. She wonders, therefore, should the child be helpful, or selfish, or trusting, or sharing? Should it be brave and take foolish risks, or instead a coward and risk nothing? Should it be an optimist or a pessimist?’

She paused to smile round the room again.

‘Ladies, these are all hard decisions – decisions that no mother ever feels that she gets completely right. Isn’t it true that guilt is a natural part of motherhood?’ She laughed at that. No one else did.

‘Well, here in Artemis, a woman is spared such doubt. Here she is free to devote her time to more productive activities, for, when it comes to twisting a mind, there is only one pattern: Nyro’s.’

Susan felt her gyros lurch at Nettie’s pronouncement. The poster put up in the railway station flashed through her mind.

‘Nyro’s pattern. This is how you will weave a child every night. By following Nyro’s pattern. Once you have learned it, there will be no need for thought or concentration. Your hands will weave the pattern unaided! Is that not wonderful? Is that not freedom? Freedom from thought, from guilt, and from unnecessary labour?’

The women were stirring.

Somebody speak out
, thought Susan.
Someone only speak out and I will join in too. I have lost my son and husband. I have nothing to live for. Just one person speak out and I will join in with the chorus of voices that will surely arise
.

She waited in the whirring silence, nothing but the hum of robots and their pulsing lifeforce. But nobody spoke.

Nettie clasped her hands together, her plain copper hands.

‘Is this not wonderful, ladies? Is it not too wonderful? We shall become the mothers of the world. Metal pours into Artemis City from the four corners of the continent. Iron and copper and tin and gold, silver and titanium and tungsten. Now that the railways pass even through the mountains, soon the metal from the northern states will come rolling back here into Artemis. All that metal, pouring into here, into the nurseries. You are here at the centre of the world, ladies, twisting metal into new minds! This building will be the womb from which all life on Penrose will eventually originate!’
A womb?
thought Susan.
What is a womb?

Maoco O

In a hidden room within the fort, deep beneath what remained of Turing City, Maoco O began.

First he slid the panelling from his body, pushed down on the seams and slid the silver shining metal along the grooves hidden beneath his skin.

He laid the separate pieces on the black stone floor, an intricate jigsaw that formed the broken pattern of his once indestructible body.

He stood in the glow of the forge, looked in the mirror and saw himself standing naked in the red-glowing darkness.

His electromuscles stretched in bands around his body, so thin and so finely knitted that he could barely see the weave. So many muscles, twisting in all directions, over and under each other. More than one mind could comprehend the pattern of.

He reached down and began to unhook them, picking them off one by one and dropping them in their appropriate place on the floor amongst the panelling. He kept on doing so until his legs finally gave way and he collapsed.

He unhooked his legs, unhooked his superlight alloy bones. Then he lifted himself up on his powerful arms and, in that way, walked himself across the floor to the forge. There was metal waiting for him there. Simple iron plate and wire, glowing red in the heat.

A pair of tongs hung waiting in a rack. A hammer and an anvil. A trough of water, a trough of acid.

Maoco O took hold of the tongs, heard their clinking as he pulled metal from the fire. He took hold of the hammer and beat at the metal in a starburst of sparks, molten flakes dropping to the floor.

This is what Nicolas the Coward did
, he thought.
He gave up his powerful body so he could walk away unnoticed and unchallenged. But I have no choice. This body is damaged. The engineers and the mothers are gone. There is no one to repair it but me
.

There was something else, however. Swinging the hammer, feeling the ringing percussion of metal on metal: it felt so good. It felt right.

Clumsily, uncertainly, Maoco O set about reinventing himself.

Susan

The women sat in the room for hours, listening to Nettie lecturing them on the twisting of wire. The base knot, the deep brain, the emotion vectors – all those things that Susan had known instinctively were rendered obscene by the act of verbalizing. It was like the laying bare of lovers’ secrets; spoken out loud they became nothing more than a series of mechanical motions.

Worse than that, under it all, like a throbbing bass pulse, was Nyro’s philosophy, the skewed beat that drove the whole mind.

Susan’s gyros couldn’t spin properly, she felt dizzy and disoriented, as did all the others, but still nobody spoke. No one but Nettie, standing at the front of the room, declaiming in that thrilled, excited voice, laying down the pattern of Nyro‘s mind.

But the worst was still to come.

The lecture finally ended, and they were led from the room, heads spinning, and taken down the metal corridors to another room, one which was sealed with a great steel door.

The women stiffened, their electromuscle shorting with tension. They could sense something in the room beyond.

Something different.

Men.

The door opened, and they were led into the making room.

Twenty-four men were waiting there: young infantry-robots, standing in two rows before the chairs that lined both walls of the long room. The women were made to walk up the lines and forced to take their own places, kneeling before them.

Someone speak
, thought Susan, as she knelt herself. The floor in here was covered in black plastic, which gave beneath her knees a little. The robot that stood before her wore a clean, unscratched body. A thin smear of oil leaked out at the joints of his knees; the plastic soles of his feet were fresh and unworn. He looked as if his body was newly built.

Nettie had followed them into the room. Her voice was more thrilling than ever, and then Susan realized that Nettie was ashamed and embarrassed too. She was trying to hide it.
Well rust her
, thought Susan,
she’s not the one forced to kneel here
.

‘Now, ladies, let us practise the first few movements! The base knot and the deep brain! Take hold of the wire and think on Nyro’s pattern as you begin the making of a mind.’

Susan looked up at the young man who stood before her. He gazed down at her awkwardly.

He doesn’t want to do this either
, she realized, and then, for the first time since Axel’s death, she felt something else other than numb despair. Anger rose inside her like the bubbling, spitting steam that hisses from hot metal thrust into water.
He doesn’t want to do this? So rust him! He’s part of this twisted state, but I’m not. I’m not going to do this any more. I’m going to speak up
. . .

‘No!’

The voice wasn’t Susan’s. Another woman, down the other end of the line had stood up.

‘No!’ she repeated. ‘I’m not going to do this. I will not do this!’

Another Turing Citizen. Susan began to stand up; ready to join in with a voice of dissent, but it was already too late.

No one had noticed the Scout, polished and gleaming, who had been resting quietly in the corner of the room. Now she sprang forth, light flashing down the length of her body, her eyes extending, the blades on her hands and feet sweeping out and slicing through the body of the woman who had spoken, right down through her head. That same brave woman whose voicebox still went on speaking even as the top of her head fell to the ground.

‘Join me,’ she was saying. ‘They can’t make us allllll . . .’ Then her voice faded to nothing as the top of her head spun to a rest on the rubber floor, the coil of blue wire inside clearly visible, popping and curling out, ends shiny where they had been cut.

Then there was no sound but that of the stricken woman’s body collapsing to the ground in a grinding of metal.

No one spoke. All the other women looked on in horror.

‘Anyone else want to speak?’ asked the Scout, her voice thin like a blade.

The prisoners looked at each other, terrified. Susan felt her anger shrivel inside her.
They can’t kill us all
, she thought.
Yes, they can
, she realized.

‘This one moved too.’

Susan looked up in horror, yet contempt too unfolded inside her. It was
her
man that had spoken. The robot had looked so awkward and afraid she had almost felt sorry for him, but now she saw him for what he was: a coward and a bully, using another’s misfortune to hide his own fear, to massage his own ego.

‘You little coward,’ said Susan, her contempt now greater even than her fear. ‘You
Nicolas
.’

The Scout was behind her. She could feel the current from its electromuscle, so strongly. A blade hooked around her neck.

‘Shall I remove your coil too?’

A pause. Then Nettie was there. Susan didn’t turn around; conscious of the metal blade touching the wire of her coil, straining to hear the words Nettie urgently spoke to the Scout. There was a pause, and then Susan felt the blade withdraw. She heard footsteps as the Scout walked away.

Relief washed over her. She had been spared. But why?

The woman kneeling next to her was staring in her direction. Why was she looking like that? Susan had almost been killed. Why was she gazing at her with such hatred? The woman spoke, so softly that Susan barely heard the word.