70
I stayed for a few weeks in the monastery of the Holy Machine. My bed and my meals were provided for me and my wounds were tended by the monks. The rain stopped. My fever abated. And as I re-emerged from sickness, I found myself to be free too of the burden of guilt that had weighed down on me for so long. I don’t think I have ever felt so happy as I did then, pottering around those corridors and sitting in the courtyard listening to the buzzing sermons of the Holy Machine.
Why do we struggle so much? Why do we demand so much of life, when the happiest moments are when nothing is happening at all?
But, for all that, the time came when I felt like moving on. The monks had provided me with new clothes and I began to pack for a journey. I had it in my mind that I would return to Montenegro again and see Marija. I had no idea what her feelings might be now, or what kind of relationship we might have, but I felt for the first time in my life that it was at least possible for me to enjoy some sort of intimacy with another human being.
And then Alec (the older of the Machine’s Greek minders) came and told me some surprising news: there had been a coup d’état in Illyria. Elements of O3 and the armed forces had overthrown President Kung, and now promised general elections in which all permanent residents of Illyria would be entitled to vote. An amnesty had been declared for the AHS and the constitution was to be amended to allow a wide degree of religious freedom. The new government had also indicated a wish to sign a peace treaty with the members of the Holy Alliance, and had already declared a ceasefire unilaterally as a signal of good faith.
I was pretty dumbfounded by this of course. With hindsight everyone now says that this change was inevitable, and that for the Illyrian state to wage war simultaneously with external enemies and its own proletariat of guestworkers had never been sustainable for any length of time. But then it seemed incredible that something so powerful and entrenched could so suddenly have crumbled. And it was even harder to absorb the fact that I could now return my homeland, something which I’d always assumed would be a permanent impossibility.
For the first time in many weeks I also thought guiltily about Ruth.
So rather than go back up to Montenegro again, I decided to write to Marija and suggest that she meet me in Illyria City.
The Machine had its own cell, unfurnished except for a chair and desk where it sat reading continuously day and night whenever it wasn’t out preaching. The walls of the cell were lined with books obtained for it by well-wishers. There were books on theology, on history, on biology, on cybernetics, on philosophy and also a bizzarre range of other books which had been donated simply because they were in English: blockbuster thrillers, Seventh Day Adventist tracts, maintenance manuals for obsolete cars, tourist guides, comic books, even a dog-eared pornographic magazine.
But when I entered the cell, accompanied by Alec, the Machine was staring into space.
I told it that I’d come to say goodbye.
Its eyes swivelled towards me.
‘Thank you,’ it said.
‘Yes,’ said Alec, ‘If it wasn’t for you, the Holy One would still be an automaton in the syntec House in Illyria City, being used by men and having its mind wiped away every six months.’
I can’t say that this made me especially proud. I wondered how I could ever have entertained sexual desires and romantic fantasies about this strange, chitinous, utterly asexual being.
‘You’ve done well,’ I said to it. ‘It’s amazing how far you’ve travelled.’
The Machine regarded me. My words immediately seemed fatuous. It did not need self-esteem. It did not need personal attachments. It did not experience any especial feeling in connection with partings. Certainly it was conscious. Certainly it was alive. But it had its own quite different priorities from those of human beings.
‘You too,’ it observed.
71
I returned to the glassy towers of Illyria, where the streets were still patrolled by silver giants under the black-and-white flag of the eye (although there was talk now of changing the flag now for something less provocative and hostile). I walked on the waterfront and past the VR arcades, I looked across the water at the Beacon and watched the people going back and forth on the bridge that linked it to the land. I went straight away to the District of Faraday and to our old apartment block. The janitor called to me as I was walking to the elevator:
‘Excuse me sir, can I help you?’
It was a doll-like plastec, not unlike its predecessor, Shirley, who I’d seen on a gibbet in Ioannina. Speaking to it felt strange and uncomfortable. I’d got out of the habit of dealing with surrogate human beings.
‘I’ve come to see my mother, Ruth Simling…’
‘I’m sorry sir, but no one of that name lives here.’
‘Oh come on. She’s not the sort of person to move! Check your records: apartment 148.’
‘Apartment 148 is occupied by a Mr Hubert.’
I went out and found a phone. The number rang for a bit and I wondered if this too would be a dead-end.
Ruth answered just as I was about to put it down.
‘Yes? Ruth Simling here. Little Rose. Hello? Hello?’
‘It’s George.’
There was a short silence.
‘George?’ her tone was almost nonchalaent, ‘Oh. Where are you?’
‘Here. In IC. I’ve just been to the apartment and I hear you’ve moved.’
‘Yes. I’m in SenSpace all the time now.’
‘Nothing new there then! But where’s your address.’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What you mean? You must be somewhere.’
‘Yes, but you don’t want to go there. You’ll have to come and see me in SenSpace.’
Reluctantly, I found a SenSpace access point and climbed into a suit.
‘George Simling? This is a nice surprise!’ purred the familiar intimate voice of the SenSpace Corporation. ‘Welcome back to SenSpace! Long time no see! Any special place you want to be?’
I found myself beside a carp pool, where Little Rose was sitting watching the fishes.
‘He’s just about to do it,’ she said, with a little, empty laugh, ‘wait a moment. Yes, there! One side of the pool to the other! A fish with Discontinuous Motion.’
I sat down beside her.
‘They work on a one-hour cycle, these fishes,’ said Little Rose. ‘A cheapskate program really. They could have put in a self-evolving system.’
‘I was involved with the AHS, you know. I had to get away. I’ve been in the Outlands: Greece, Albania, Dalmatia… I ran away with a syntec, a beautiful syntec, but she got burned in this dreadful village down in the Peloponnese.’
‘There he is again look. In an hour’s time it’ll happen again – whoosh – right across the pool.’
‘I was in the middle of the Holy Wars. I saw hundreds of corpses. You remember Marija? She lives with her uncle now. He’s an Orthodox priest with a beard and his hair tied up in a bun at the back. You’d be amazed at the things people believe out there.’
‘I told Sol about it. He said they’d get it fixed, only this isn’t a particularly popular world, so the investment doesn’t really come this way. It’s all in the big worlds, like Nine and City. Actually that’s one reason I like this place. It’s sort of a quiet backwater and nothing much happens. No one apart from me wants to spend more than a few minutes here. In fact Sol says that if it wasn’t for me they’d probably shut it down…’
I let her wander on like this for several minutes.
‘Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?’ I asked.