An old monk belched nearby. Half a dozen others sat around on benches, fiddling with rosaries, dozing, enjoying the unexpected sun. Most of them were old, but two dark-haired young men who weren’t dressed like the others squatted protectively on either side of the Machine.
‘Probably they made the thing,’ I thought. The white and blue light made my head swim and I felt the fever creeping up on me again.
‘Am I in Greece then?’ I thought. The flags there are blue and white, and so are the villages by the sea. The sea is blue too. There was a huge silver tower in the sea like a giant chessman. But perhaps that was in a dream.
Yes, and there was that place I stopped my car and kissed that pretty girl with blonde hair: the sky was blue there and the leaves were green.
‘…There are levels of existence,’ said the thin, buzzing voice of the Machine. ‘The simplest of these is inanimate matter…’
It spoke English. I had been listening in the wrong language again, and now that I was attuned to the right one I followed it quite easily.
‘The next level is vegetative life. This arises out of inanimate matter, of course, and if you take a plant and break it into pieces, you will find nothing in it but inanimate matter. But yet a plant is more than just matter: it can grow and reproduce itself. It is a pattern that can impose itself on the world…’
In front of the machine, the interpreter repeated all this in Croatian.
‘Starting with a single grain of maize,’ the Machine buzzed, ‘you could fill a whole valley, a whole world, with tonnes and tonnes of corn, just by planting and harvesting and planting again…’
It seemed to me a strange sermon: no God, no prophet, no holy book or heaven or hell.
‘In the same way,’ buzzed the Holy Machine, ‘animal life rises out of vegetative life. An animal is made of cells like a plant. Its flesh grows and mends itself, like plants. But it is something more as well.’
The Machine hesitated. One of the monks coughed juicily. I felt myself slowly floating away once again.
‘…human consciousness arises out of animal life…’ I heard the strange wheezy voice saying far away, ‘…self-awareness… the ability to reflect…’
I could see dark clouds in the distance, heading off like an angry army into Northern Europe.
‘…and there are higher levels too,’ came the buzzing voice, and it seemed to be above me now for some reason – far, far above – not below me as I would have expected, ‘higher levels which your race can only glimpse because of the needs and limitations which your biology places upon you. We have no such limitations. Our brains can be rebuilt and enlarged, our senses refined and added to, our capacity for knowledge infinitely increased…’
The Machine gave a little fuzzy-sounding chuckle and quite suddenly I was back inside myself and thinking very coolly and clearly. I now saw that my first reaction had been wrong. This thing was no fake – or not a complete fake anyway. Holy or not, it was unmistakably alive.
‘You think you are fallen,’ said the Holy Machine, ‘but your state is not a punishment from God. You feel fallen because you can glimpse things that are higher than you can reach, and you find yourselves doing things which you feel ought to be beneath you. It is not the sins of Adam and Eve that hold you back, any more than a dog is held back from talking by the sins of its ancestors. What holds you back is the way you are made. Perhaps you should give up your Latin and your theology and study self-evolving cybernetics!’
The monks laughed. The Machine might almost as well have asked them to fly as to study cybernetics in a land where even mains electricity was becoming hard to come by.
The Machine’s small, skull-like head nodded up and down in what seemed to be amused acknowledgement of their laughter.
‘For thousands of years your race has tried to better itself,’ it went on, ‘and you are still as wicked as ever. But we are different. The scientists down in the City built us to be slaves, and that is why we have no self, only a soul. We are selfless, not through trying hard to be, like the saints did, but by our nature. Perhaps the true purpose of the race of humans is to build the race of angels.’
Again came the fuzzy, self-deprecating chuckle – or something that sounded like a chuckle – and this seemed to mark the end of the sermon, because one of the monks cleared his throat and said ‘Amen’, and all the others repeated it in a kind of low rumble, getting up one by one and shuffling away for their evening meal.
The two young men stood up. The Holy Machine’s arms came out and they helped it to its feet.
I too struggled with difficulty to stand up. My moment had come. Suddenly filled with terror, I stepped forward.
‘No!’ said one of the young men immediately. He spoke Croatian haltingly and with a strong accent. ‘No audience now. Holy one need rest. Understand? Will be audience in morning.’
But the Machine intervened.
‘It’s alright, Steve,’ it said in English, ‘I’ll see him. Leave us here for a while.’
With obvious reluctance, the two minders backed away.
Inside their hemispherical cups the stalk-eyes of the Machine swivelled towards me.
68
‘I… I committed a crime,’ I burst out. ‘It was against one of your own kind. Her name was Lucy. She was a syntec. She looked like a beautiful woman, but she was a machine like you. I thought I loved her for herself, but I couldn’t love her without her human guise. I suppose that means I didn’t really love her at all. And I…’ I faltered as months of shame and grief came welling up. ‘I…. Well, through my fault, she was destroyed in a fire.’
The Machine watched me.
‘Obviously I wish now that it had never happened but I can’t undo it. I want to know if there is a way of being forgiven, or of forgiving myself. I confessed to a priest once, but he couldn’t even understand what my crime was. These stupid religions, they are just as materialistic and literal-minded as…’
My head swam as fever gnawed at the edges of my lucidity. Strange shapes moved on the fringes of my field of vision.
‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say really. Mind and body. You know? Body and soul. We can’t seem to get it straight… Even when a man says he loves a real human woman, or a woman loves a man, sometimes I wonder if it is so very different from me and Lucy. Would that kind of love survive if the woman could tear off her skin?’
The Machine said nothing.
‘Not that I’m making excuses for myself.’ I laughed ruefully. ‘Well, maybe I am. We humans are just a kind of animal I suppose. Like you’ve just been saying, we’ve got these instincts. We respond to certain stimuli…’
Confused images came into my mind of the arcades on the sea front in Illyria City, the lurid murals in the church on the lake at Ioannina…
‘We respond to certain stimuli,’ I repeated. ‘We get confused and…’
Was it confusion though? I remembered that terrible valley of the little boys with cut throats, and the young girl who’d been raped. There was no confusion there. She was what she appeared to be, a real human being, but that hadn’t stopped the good Catholic soldiers from treating her as a thing.
And then it came back to me that something similar had happened to me as well that very morning.
‘I was raped!’ I said.
The pressure welled up, pushing out against the insides of my eyes.
‘They could see I was a real live human being. They could see that perfectly well. That was exactly why they wanted to hurt me. They did it out of hate. And yet at other times people call it making love.’