‘If you want to tell me.’
I shrugged. We fell to watching the fishes once again.
‘So how much time do you spend out of SenSpace now?’ I eventually interrupted.
‘I never leave it.’
It took me a little while to grasp what she meant. And when I finally did, I got angry.
‘And now you’re going to tell me it’s all my fault I suppose! If I hadn’t gone away and left you it would never have happened, is that right? It was all because of George being selfish as usual! Well you listen to me. It wasn’t my job to look after you. You were the parent not me. I tucked you up in bed and I held your hand when you cried, but it wasn’t my job! It wasn’t my job.’
But Little Rose completely ignored this unprecedented outburst.
‘I didn’t think it was so terrible at first,’ she said. ‘In fact I thought to begin with that it was just what I always wanted: to be able to live in SenSpace and never come out. But I’m tired of SenSpace now. I do hire a Vehicle sometimes and walk around outside a bit, but I haven’t really got anywhere to go. No one to visit. And anyway a Vehicle isn’t the same. You can’t feel the air for one thing.’
We watched the electronic fishes swimming around in their pool.
‘Charlie got thrown out when they cleared the apartment.’
‘I suppose that was going to happen sooner or later.’
‘Yes,’ Little Rose exclaimed with real indignation, ‘but they shouldn’t have just thrown him out without asking me.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I want to get out of SenSpace,’ Ruth said, after some time had passed.
‘Well that’s impossible now, isn’t it?’
‘No, not impossible. You see, I’ve got a plan…’
The plan surprised me. It took more courage than I thought Ruth possessed.
‘But that will mean,’ I said, ‘that will mean that you…’
Little Rose laughed. ‘The hour’s up. Look! Whoosh! There he goes again!’
72
I met Ruth in a Vehicle Centre. She wasn’t recognizable as Ruth of course. The vehicle was a syntec in the form of a pretty young woman with long red hair.
‘Walk up and down the room a bit,’ said the technician, ‘it always feels a odd at first when you’re used to a virtual body.’
‘Yes, I know, I’ve used Vehicles before,’ said the redhead, taking a few steps.
‘This downward pull!’ she said to me, ‘this planet, this mass of rock pulling you towards it! You forget what gravity really means in there!’
It was strange to hear her talk like that, as if for the first time she was actually trying to savour her existence.
‘You can’t trip up in SenSpace,’ she said, ‘you can’t experience an impact that causes pain, you can’t…’
She broke off and went over to the window. The Vehicle Centre was on the tenth floor of the SenSpace Corporation offices, one block away from the sea front.
‘The towers always seem so small!’ she exclaimed.
‘Everyone says that!’ laughed the technician. ‘Even though they are the tallest towers in the world. Like you say we have to take account of gravity out here in dull old Reality.’
Ruth sighed.
‘I used to think it was dull old reality, but you know it’s good looking at a tower and knowing that every tonne of concrete had to be lifted into place against the pull of gravity. In SenSpace making a building is nothing – like doodling on a bit of paper.’
We went down in the elevator and out into the street. It was a bright, hot, summer day. For a while we just stood and watched the people go by. To me, having been so long in the Outlands, they looked well fed, well cared for and shockingly sexy in their scanty summer clothes. But to Ruth, used to the physically perfect denizens of SenSpace, they looked exactly the opposite: clumsy, overweight, ill-proportioned, with clothes that didn’t fit properly or crumpled in the wrong places.
‘Real people are so ugly!’ she said, smiling.
We joined the human stream. Ruth was looking round at everything, taking it all in. She had no sense of smell, no sensation of breathing and – since all her sensations were being transmitted to her brain via SenSpace – her visual field had the same slightly grainy quality that it had within SenSpace itself. But still, she could look around at the people and know that, for them, this truly was reality.
We walked the streets for a little while, and along the sea front. At the head of the Beacon the Ferris wheels extended, gathered speed, drew in again, stopped.
We turned into the Avenue of Science.
‘ROBOT MESSIAH BRINGS SKOPJE TO STANDSTILL’, said the headline outside the News Building, and the huge screen showed a picture of vast crowds in the Macedonian capital, and then a library picture of the Machine itself. ‘NEXT STOP TIRANA’
I smiled. Tirana was not to far away and I decided I would go there to hear it preach. After all, if was not for me the Holy Machine would not exist, and all those hundreds of thousands of excited people wouldn’t even now be heading towards the capital of Albania. I might be alone in this world but I had certainly made a difference to it.
A security robot walked by.
‘What do you make of the robot messiah?’ I asked it.
‘Beg your pardon, sir?’
‘Leave the poor thing alone,’ said Ruth with a giggle.
We went into a department store and bought a garden trowel. Then we hired a car. Ruth paid. I drove. Ruth, in the form of the redhead, got into the passenger seat: a hired Vehicle climbing into the vehicle it had hired.
We headed for the southern side of town, where the Body Maintenance Facility was located.
As we walked from the car to the main entrance, Ruth suddenly stopped.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘What do you mean, what am I doing?’
Then I realized she wasn’t talking to me. She was looking straight in front of her at some figure that was invisible to me.
‘No,’ she said, ‘please don’t try and persuade me. I’ve made up my mind.’
The figure must have said something back to her.
‘No, I am within my legal rights and so is he. I checked up on that. It’s not his responsibility, it’s mine. And I’m entitled to do it.’
Again, there must have been some reply.
‘No Sol,’ Ruth said, ‘I don’t want that anymore. You are not “fond” of me. You are not really even a person. I don’t want those games anymore.’
She turned to me.
‘Come on George. It’s just the SenSpace corporation poking their nose in.’
We carried on.
‘You have changed, Ruth,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘It was when City without End seized up,’ she said. ‘It just came to me that there isn’t a safe place anywhere, so there’s no point in looking.’
We went up the steps into the Facility, and were greeted by a stunningly beautiful receptionist.
‘Good morning! What can I do to help?’
She was a syntec of course. She was too beautiful to be a human being, and her desk was completely free of phones, screens or keyboards.
‘My name is Ruth Simling. I’ve come to collect my property.
A moment passed, while the receptionist checked the diary in her head.
‘Yes, Ms Simling, Dr Hammer is expecting you. He’ll be right down.’
‘I didn’t want to see a doctor. I just want to collect what’s mine and go.’
‘Yes, of course. The doctor understands.’
Ruth was about to say something else, then changed her mind and shrugged.
‘We’re two syntecs together, you and me,’ she said to the receptionist after a while.