“What do I do?”
“You need do nothing. They will either talk to you or ignore you. They already know that you are here.”
He disembarked from the vehicle. He looked up at the goggle-faced creature that had become his companion, fully aware that if Gris abandoned him here◦– and the Totalists disdained to help◦– he would be in a great deal of trouble. They had come much too far for the range of his suit.
“I would not be too long about it,” Gris warned.
So Oleg wandered across the black Playa. His suit projected a terrain overlay. It was still functioning properly. He kept looking back, making sure the vehicle and the cyborg still waited. But Gris remained. And as the Totalist camp loomed larger, so one of the neon forms broke away from the blaze of colour and came loping over to meet him.
The thing had arms and legs, a body and a head in roughly the right proportions, but there was no possibility that it was anything but a robot. There was no room in it for anything human. The thing’s chassis was an open exoskeleton, offering an easy view of its internal mechanisms. Oleg saw lots of machinery in there, much of it lit up and flashing in pretty colours, but there was nothing that looked biological. Its head was a cage that he could see all the way through, only loosely stuffed with instruments and modules.
“I’d like to speak to Rhawn,” Oleg said confidently.
“Who are you, and why have you come?” The robot’s voice, picked up by his helmet, was lighter in tone than that of Gris.
“I am Oleg. I’ve come from Jupiter to offer Rhawn a moon of her own and the chance at reverse cyborgisation◦– to become fully human again.”
The robot emitted a noise like fading static. It took Oleg a moment to realise he was being laughed at.
“Go home, meat boy. Be on your merry way.”
“I realise that my offer’s likely to be rejected. But my masters won’t be satisfied until I have the answer from Rhawn herself. She’s here, isn’t she? I won’t take more than a few minutes of her time.”
“Your timing,” the robot said, “is either very fortuitious or very poor.”
“My timing is sheer luck,” Oleg said. “Until just now I didn’t even know that Rhawn had joined the Totalists.”
“She hasn’t.”
“I was told …”
“Rhawn has commenced her second crossing. But until it is complete, she will not be one of us. It will happen soon, though. We are confident in the force of her conviction. It is certainly much too late for reversal.”
“Can I at least talk to her?”
Again Oleg had the sense that matters were being discussed. Lights flickered and strobed in the cagelike enclosure of the robot’s head. Oleg risked a glance back, satisfying himself that the vehicle and its driver were still there.
“Rhawn is … receptive,” the robot said. “You will have your audience. But it will be brief. Rhawn has readied herself for the final phase of the crossing. She will not be detained.”
“I only need an answer.”
The robot brought him into the encampment. Up close, he saw that it was not as similar to the caravan as he had first assumed. There were hardly any enclosed spaces◦– just a few sealed modules which may or may not have been airtight. The remainder of the structures◦– most of them wheeled or skid-mounted, even as they were now parked around the Bone Cathedral◦– were for the most part skeletal frames. Their roofs were parasols and solar-collectors, their walls either absent or no more than concertina-hinged magnetic screens which could be drawn across when required. Gathered around and inside these treehouse-like forms were many similar-looking robots, lounging or reclining like overfed monkeys. They were plugged into bits of architecture via their abdomens◦– recharging from stored power, Oleg supposed, or perhaps pushing energy back into the community. There seemed little in the way of artistic creation going on. But perhaps the robots had been furiously preoccupied before his arrival.
“Is Rhawn one of these?”
“They are what Rhawn will become. It will not be long now.”
“You all look the same.”
“You all look like tinned meat.”
Through the thicket of skeletal structures Oleg was at last brought to an upright green block the size of a small house. It was a round-ended cylinder that might once have been a fuel tank or reactor chamber, before being anchored to a moving platform and gristled over with access ladders, catwalks and power conduits. In contrast to its surroundings this dumpy, windowless flask seemed entirely enclosed. Oleg’s robot host spidered up a ladder and looked down as Oleg completed his clumsy ascent. The robot opened a door in the side of the chamber, then stood aside to allow Oleg to pass through first.
It was not an airlock, for the interior of the green flask was still depressurised. Oleg had emerged onto a platform running around the circumference of the interior, with a circular gap in the middle. Supported in the chamber’s middle, with a large part of it beneath the level of the platform, was a hefty piece of biomedical machinery. Many cables and pipes ran into the upright, wasp-shaped assemblage. Three robots, much like his host, were stationed around the machinery at what Oleg took to be control pedestals. They were not moving, but the robots had plugged in to the pedestals via their abdomens. Oleg presumed that they were directing whatever complicated procedure was going on inside the machine.
The wasp-shaped machine culminated in a glass dome. Inside the glass was a beaked and goggled head much like that of Gris, except that it was encased within a bulky surgical clamp. Beneath the head, enclosing the neck, was a tight metal collar separating it from the rest of the machine.
Oleg surveyed the beaked and goggled face with deep dread and apprehension.
“Rhawn will speak to you now,” the robot said.
“Thank you, Rhawn, for agreeing to listen to me,” Oleg said hastily. “I have come from Jupiter, with …”
“I know where you came from, you spineless little shit.”
Oleg bristled. He had listened to enough recordings to recognise the voice as belonging to Rhawn, despite a deliberate machinelike filtering.
“I …” he began.
“Stop cowering. What are you, bacteria? A vegetable? The Totalists horrify you, but you are the puppet, the thing with no free will.”
“I only need an answer.”
“I studied your background, when I knew you were approaching. Oleg the failed artist. Oleg the supine instrument of market forces. Oleg the pliable little turd, shat out by Jupiter. Why do you imagine your insolent little piss-streak of an offer would be of the remotest interest to me? Why should I not have your suit drilled through now?”
“My masters thought …” His throat was as parched as the sunlit Playa itself. “They didn’t know that you’d left the Collective. They thought there might still be a possibility to …”
“To do what? To make me normal again? To bring me back to the condition of meat?”
“To undo what has been done.”
“As if it were a mistake, that I now regretted?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“But your masters did. Did it never occur to question this mission? To doubt its idiotic purpose? To show the slightest sign of independent thought?”
One of the robots at the control plinths turned its head slowly in his direction.
“Things have changed since you came to Mercury,” Oleg persisted, refusing to waver under the robot’s eyeless regard. “No one knew what to make of your art, when you joined the Collective. It was too different, too hard to assess.”