‘It must be even harder,’ I said, ‘when only a few kilometres away there are villages where they all believe in Mohammed and dismiss the Trinity as polytheism.’
‘Of course. And harder still when not so very far down the coast is that wondrous City of yours which claims to have made religion itself obsolete and can produce amazing miracles to demonstrate the power of its own way of thinking, like machines that can talk and planes that vanish into thin air.’
‘But Uncle,’ asked Marija, ‘do you actually believe that your way of thinking is right and everyone else’s is wrong?’
Uncle Tomo and Aunt Nada exchanged amused glances. He shrugged.
‘Who can say? But I will say this. Everyone must have beliefs that can’t be proved. Even you City people must do secretly, because your science can’t tell you how to live or how to die. Do you agree?’
Marija and I nodded. Such thoughts, after all, had led us into the Holist League and the AHS.
‘Well, there is a good deal to be said for a community having some sort of consensus about what those beliefs should be. We have that here and it’s peaceful. Down in Albania it’s different and there is terrible bloodshed. Not far to the west of here it is even worse: not only Catholics and Orthodox and Muslims, but Bogomili, Protestant sects, followers of new prophets and holy men, even some people who’ve gone back to Slavonic paganism – all at each other’s throats, all accusing one another of being in league with the Devil. Do you know, there are even stories that along the coast there is someone or something calling himself the Holy Machine!’
‘Yes Uncle,’ exclaimed Marija, ‘but don’t forget that until the Reaction, there were plenty of countries on Earth where people had different beliefs and all coexisted quite happily.’
‘Seemed to coexist quite happily. But in reality the scientific viewpoint with its apparent miracles was driving the others back. I don’t make excuses for some of the things that were done. I know your parents suffered, and probably George’s also. But the Reaction arose partly from a real fear that something valuable was being lost to the world.’
Seeing glasses empty, Uncle Tomo passed round the wine.
‘As I understand it,’ he said, ‘when you City people want to decide whether a statement is true, you consider whether it is useful. That is the scientific method isn’t it? Is it useful to say the Earth revolves round the sun? Yes it is, because it makes a whole lot of other things fall into place. And yes, that test of truth makes a lot of sense. But shouldn’t we apply the test of usefulness to whole systems of thought and not just to single statements? Which is the more useful, the scientific worldview, with all its wonderful technical miracles, or the religious world-view, with its sense of purpose and belonging? It would be nice to have both, but suppose that isn’t possible? Which one should we keep? It’s not a straightforward question is it? Terrible things are done in the name of religion, without a doubt, but it was not religion but science that brought the world itself to the brink of destruction.’
He handed the question over to us with a flourish.
Marija laughed and turned to me: ‘A good arguer my uncle, isn’t he? What do you think?’
I shrugged. The truth was that I’d been only half-listening. My thoughts had gone off on a completely different tack.
‘This Holy Machine,’ I said. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘Not much more than I’ve told you,’ said Tomo, a little crestfallen that his carefully developed argument had been wasted. ‘I heard he preached in Neum. They say he is a robot, but I assume he is really a man dressed up. There was a fellow in Kosovo recently who claimed to have grown the wings of an angel, until finally someone managed to get close enough to pull one of them off.’
‘Sometimes robots run away from the City, I’ve heard,’ said Aunt Nada.
‘Yes,’ I snapped, ‘and then your fellow believers catch them, and they are crucified, impaled and burnt…’
They all looked at me, startled by my sudden passion.
63
He was beautiful, the Holy Machine, a gentle, silver thing with a sad, wise, face. He sat in the warm shade of a flowering cherry tree, his right hand resting on a tortoiseshell cat, his left on an old grey dog. And fat honeybees buzzed from flower to flower above his head.
I approached him fearfully, dreading the moment when I would have to meet those calm silver eyes. But when the Machine looked up, he was immediately welcoming, lifting his large silver hand from the cat and extending it towards me in friendly greeting.
Slowly, reluctantly, I reached out to it.
‘I wanted…’ I began, ‘I wondered…’
Then I woke up. It was still the middle of the night. From across the landing came the loud contented snoring of Uncle Tomo. I got out of bed and went to the window. Outside, the trees cast dim moonshadows. Cicadas sang. Secretly, silently, the universe blazed down.
Who else could grant me absolution for my crime against Lucy if not a Holy Machine?
I quickly dressed and crept out onto the landing. It resounded, I now heard, not only with Uncle Tomo’s snoring, but with a lighter, more feminine snoring from Aunt Nada, harmonizing peacefully with his.
The door of Marija’s room was ajar. I peeped in. Oddly and touchingly, this woman who had always seemed to me so strong and confident slept with her thumb in her mouth like a small child. She looked very beautiful in the moonlight, with her dark hair all around her on the pillow. And the thought came to me with a sharp pang: what would it be like to lie in bed with a real woman beside me, a woman made, like me, of flesh and blood?
A notebook lay open on her bedside table. It was a diary. I could just make out yesterday’s date at the top of the page, but it was impossible in the moonlight to read any of the scrawled writing that followed, though no doubt it contained her thoughts about me and my arrival.
I tore a blank page out of the back of the notebook and wrote ‘GOODBYE THANK YOU.’
Then I crept downstairs and out across the olive groves of Uncle Tomo. The road to the coast was empty and mysterious in the moonlight. I began to walk.
64
After only a day, my already threadbare shoes gave out and I continued with bare feet until a peasant woman took pity on me and gave me some boots that had belonged to her dead husband.
I went on walking, limping, hobbling, through poor wild villages, over rocky passes, down into secret valleys, huddling in caves and ruins through the cold mountain nights.
People watched me as I passed. Sometimes they offered me things: small coins, a piece of sausage, half a white cabbage. An Illyrian vagrant was a new phenomenon, almost a contradiction in terms, and they gave me food as much out of curiosity as out of pity, pressing it on me then backing off to a safe distance to watch me eat.
‘I’m looking for the Holy Machine.’
I suppose I was taking a risk, showing an interest in a demon, but I didn’t care much about my own safety. Some did cluck their tongues and cross themselves. Others laughed. Some looked at each other and tapped their heads.
‘Have they finally addled their brains with their own wickedness down in that City of theirs?’ a devout old Muslim woman said to her friend. (I wasn’t supposed to hear, but she was deaf and she misjudged the volume of her whisper). ‘Do they even worship machines now?’
But, as I went deeper into Dalmatia, I began to meet people who knew what I was talking about.
‘The Machine? I heard he was in Dubrovnik. I’ve never seen him myself.’