‘Does it indeed?’ Wilde got out of bed, looked down at his body with a flicker of renewed surprise, smiled and washed his face and neck and put his clothes on.
‘So tell me, machine,’ he said as he tugged on his boots, ‘what am I to call you? Come to that, what are you?’
‘Basically,’ said the machine, detaching a filament from a wall socket and winding it slowly back into its casing, ‘I’m a civil-engineering construction rig, autonomous, nuclear-powered, sand-resistant. As to my name.’ It paused. ‘You may call me anything you like, but I have been known as Jay-Dub.’
Wilde laughed. ‘That’s great! That’ll do.’
‘“Jay-Dub” is fine,’ said the machine. ‘Not undignified. Thanks, Jon Wilde.’
‘Well, Jay-Dub,’ Wilde said with a self-conscious smile, ‘let’s go and get breakfast.’
‘You do that,’ Jay-Dub said. It unfolded its limbs and stood up, revealing a litter of torn foil carapaces with now-stilled tiny legs and dulled lenses. ‘I’ve eaten.’
The Malley Mile was silent, the bar shuttered and swept and polished and hung with damp cloths when they picked their way downstairs and out through a one-way-locked door.
‘Trusting,’ Wilde remarked, as he let the door click back.
‘It’s an honest place,’ Jay-Dub said. ‘There’s little in the way of petty crime. For reasons which I’m sure you know.’
The small sun was low above the towers, laying lacey shadows on the street. Boats and barges floated down the canal, heading out of town.
‘Where are they going?’ Wilde asked. The man and the robot were strolling towards a small dock a hundred or so metres up the street. There were food-stalls on the dock.
‘Mines or farms,’ the robot said. ‘They aren’t entirely distinct, here. They’re both a matter of using nanotech – natural or artificial – to concentrate dispersed molecules into a usable form.’
‘And people work at that? What are the robots doing?’
‘Heh-heh-heh.’ Jay-Dub’s voice-control had advanced: it could now parody a mechanical laugh. ‘Robots are either useless for such purposes, or far too useful to waste on them.’
The small dock was busy. People – mostly human, but with a few other hominid types among them – were embarking, or unlading sacks of vegetables or minerals from long narrow barges. Electric-powered trucks were backing on to the quay, loading up. A family of what looked like gibbons with swollen skulls hauled a net-full of slapping, silvery fish along the quay and spilled them into a rusty bath behind one of the stalls, where a burly woman immediately began to gut and grill the fish. Wilde stopped there and, somewhat hesitantly and with a lot of pointing, got her to put together fish and leaves and bread. Coffee was for sale in glass cups, deposit returnable.
Wilde took his breakfast to the edge of the quay and sat down, legs dangling, and slowly ate, looking all around. The robot hunkered down beside him.
‘Time you told me things,’ Wilde said. ‘You said you made me. What did that mean?’
‘Cloned you from a cell,’ the machine said. ‘Grew you in a vat. Ran a program to put your memories back on your synapses.’ It hummed, remotely. ‘That last could get you killed, so keep it to yourself.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘I needed your help,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘To fight David Reid, and to change this world.’
Wilde looked at the machine for a long time, his face as inscrutable as the machine’s blank surface.
‘You’ve already told me what you are,’ he said. ‘But who are you? The truth, this time. The whole truth.’
‘What I am,’ the machine said, so quietly that Wilde had to lean closer, his ear to a grille between its metal shells, ‘is a long and complex question. But I was you.’
4
Catch
‘If you’re interested, you’ll be there.’
The train lurched. Carlisle’s sodium-lit brown buildings began to slide by.
‘What?’ Startled out of a train-induced trance, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed the remark. The man on the opposite side of the so-called Pullman table wore a cloth cap and a jacket of some shiny substance that might once have been corduroy. His faded check shirt looked like a pyjama-top. He’d been drinking with silent determination from a half-bottle of Bell’s all the long afternoon from Euston.
Now he rubbed a brown hand along his jaw, rasping white stubble over sallow skin, and repeated his utterance. I smiled desperately.
‘I see,’ I lied. ‘Very true.’
‘You’ll be there,’ he said. He reached for the bottle, judged its remaining contents by weight and replaced it on the table, then began to roll a cigarette with the other hand. His gaze, sharp with an occasional lapse into bleariness, stayed on me all the while.
‘Where?’ I looked away, flipped open a packet of Silk Cut (my gesture towards healthy living). My reflection flared in a brief virtual image outside the train. The sodden February countryside seeped past.
‘Disnae matter,’ the man said, exhaling smoke and the sour odour of digested whisky. ‘Wherever. Ah kin tell. You’re interested.’ He paused, cocked his head and gave me a cunning look. ‘You’re one a they international socialists. Ah kin tell.’
I smiled again and shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken, I’m –’ I stopped, helpless to explain. I’d spent a week researching in the LSE library and arguing with my father. My head was buzzing with Marxisms.
‘Ach, it’s aw right son,’ he said. ‘Ah ken youse have aw kinds i wee divisions. I dinnae bother about them. You’re an intellectual and Ah’m just a retired working man. But you’re wannay uz.’
With that he opened the bottle, took a sip from it and passed it to me, kindly wiping his hand on his thigh and then around the rim as he did so, to remove any harmful germs.
‘And then what happened?’ Reid asked.
We turned, hunched against the drizzle, into Park Road, past the pseudo-Tudor frontage of the Blythswood Cottage pub and ducked into the doorway of Voltaire & Rousseau, the best second-hand bookshop in Glasgow. I’d run into Reid at lunchtime, after not having seen him for some weeks – partly because I was working hard on my dissertation and partly because Reid was either politically active or out with Annette. In the first month of their relationship I’d once or twice had a few drinks with both of them, but I’d found it too awkward to continue.
‘He fell asleep,’ I laughed. ‘I left the bottle severely alone and woke him up at the Central. He seemed to have forgotten the whole incident. Looked like he didn’t recognise me.’
By this time we were both moving crabwise, heads tilted, systematically scanning the shelves that covered the narrow shop’s walls. First we’d scour the politics and philosophy section, then – if we had any spare cash left – move on to the back room to hit the SF paperbacks. One of the shop’s owners – a tall, tubby, cheerful chap with thin hair and thick glasses – looked up from his book at the till with a smile and a nod. He, I’d decided, must be Rousseau; his gaunt and gloomy partner, Voltaire.
‘Probably an old ILP’er or something,’ Reid muttered, pouncing on a blue Charles H. Kerr & Co. volume of Dietzgen. He blew dust off it and sneezed.
‘One pound fifty!’ he said in a low voice, so that Rousseau couldn’t overhear his delight and guess what a bargain they’d let slip. He twisted back to his search, a read-head moving along the memory-tape of shelves.
‘You know,’ he went on, ‘it makes me sick sometimes to think of all those old militants selling off their libraries to eke out their pensions. Or dying, and their kids – God, I can just imagine them, middle-aged, middle-class wankers who’ve always been a bit ashamed of the bodach’s rambling reminiscences – rummaging through his pathetic stuff and finding a shelf of socialist classics and about to heave them on the tip when suddenly the little gleam of a few quid lights up their greedy eyes!’