She’s just sat down in the boat and in the middle of manoeuvring the grapple and its load, awkwardly trying to keep her distance from it (at less than two metres the tickle in her geiger-sense is becoming a pain) while selecting and opening a container, when there’s a ringing in her left ear.
‘Damn,’ she says loudly. She tenses her throat-muscles to turn on the mike, winks up the phone-screen, and with a rightward flick of her eyes accepts the call. The first screen to come up is clunky, even as it hangs with hallucinatory vividness in the space between her and the end of the grapple. It’s like a camera is looking at a monitor screen, in some primitive glimmer of machine self-awareness. Text scrolls down it, a voice-over spell-checks itself along.
‘Invisible Hand Legal Services,’ it intones. ‘Incoming challenge call from –’ and here it hesitates, as if even this august implementation of the voice of the IBM is amazed at its own temerity ‘– David Reid. Will you accept?’
‘Yes,’ gulps Tamara.
The screen is instantly minimised to the corner of her eye, and the main view is taken by a solid image of a face she’s seen many times before, but never before speaking to her. The window floats in front of her eyes, with Reid’s head and shoulders at a comfortable speaking distance behind it. Behind him, she can see different parts of a room, a bright window (real, apparently). He’s pacing about as he talks.
‘Tamara Hunter?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
He grins, peering past her.
‘I can see why you call yourself that. Well, to business m’lady. You’re currently in possession of one of my machines, a Model D gynoid, and I want it back. Now.’
Tamara takes a deep breath.
‘I’m not in possession of it – her. She’s claiming self-ownership and I’m defending her. So are several sworn allies of mine, and other clients of Invisible Hand.’
‘Crap,’ Reid retorts. ‘She doesn’t even have the wit to claim self-ownership.’
‘She does now, and did, before witnesses.’
‘To a fucking IBM, you mean. Your legal expert-system couldn’t pass the Turing itself, let alone administer it.’
‘I RESENT THAT.’
‘Shaddap,’ says Tamara, still struggling with the grapple. The thing on the end is rolling like a badly held forkful of spaghetti. ‘Sorry, Reid. That wasn’t for you.’
‘I appreciate that,’ says Reid dryly. ‘You were saying?’
‘I can get human witnesses to testify before any court you like. The gynoid ain’t your pet zombie any more.’
Reid’s eyes narrow. ‘That’s because she’s been hacked. It’s still not an autonomous development, even if that matters, which it doesn’t.’
‘It’s time it did,’ Tamara says levelly. ‘I’m willing to fight you on this.’
‘Have it your way,’ says Reid. ‘In court, then.’
‘It’s your challenge,’ Tamara points out.
‘OK, the first bid’s yours.’ He bows.
Tamara winks up the Invisible Hand screen again. It displays a list of courts in descending order of preference. It’s a short list. She goes for the first, but her voice is not hopeful as she says: ‘Eon Talgarth, Court of the Fifth Quarter.’
‘Accepted,’ Reid says at once.
Tamara shrinks the IBM screen and stares at Reid, who looks blandly back.
‘What?’ she says. Then: ‘Confirm, please.’
‘I accept,’ Reid says, with emphatic formality, ‘that the decision be put to the Court of the Fifth Quarter in the case of myself versus Tamara Hunter and allies as represented by Invisible Hand Legal Services and-stroke-or themselves, to be held at the earliest convenience of all parties.’
‘And I too,’ says Tamara.
The IBM repeats what they’ve said.
‘And meanwhile, no grepping?’ Tamara asks suspiciously.
‘Of course, no grepping,’ says Reid. He gives her a smile that, despite everything, despite herself, brings a slight warmth to her cheeks. ‘See you in court, lady.’
The screen vanishes in time for Tamara to see the black biomech unwind itself smoothly from the grapple, drop into the canal and, with a sinuous motion of its flail, swim away.
‘All right,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘Have it your way. I suppose I can work something out.’ It stopped at the junction of the pier and the street. ‘But before we go rushing off, I have a couple of suggestions.’
Wilde stopped and looked back. ‘Yes?’
‘Get yourself a gun,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘And some better clothes. You look like you’ve just walked in off the desert or something. Also, if you want to head for the main abolitionist hang-out, it’s quicker by boat.’
‘You have a point there,’ said Wilde.
An hour later he was wearing a baggy black jacket, shirt and trousers, all of some warm fabric that he’d been assured was knife-proof, and studying a bulky metal automatic as he sat in a crowded vaporetta. The other passengers, mostly young, paid him a gratifying lack of attention. Wilde sat, aloof by the side of the boat, and looked at the canal-bank scenes and cocked his ears to his fellow-passengers’ slangy, accented English. Jay-Dub, limbs retracted, lay at his feet like luggage. It was the only robot on board, apart from the helmsman, a chunk of solid-state cybernetics on the prow.
Scoop-nets on the side of the boat trawled bobbing balls of plastic from the water, and flicked them, rattling, into a hold beneath the deck. The boat left the commercial gaiety of the Stone Canal and passed into a succession of tunnels and narrow, high-banked canals. Here, in the green algae soggy on the walls, smaller balls could be seen. They moved downwards very slowly, but their course could be inferred: the closer to the water they sank, the larger they grew, until they dropped off and floated away. Wilde refrained from asking the machine about the economics and ecology of this bio-industrial process.
They reached their destination forty minutes after leaving. The boat pulled up with much coughing of engine and thrashing of propellers alongside a little jetty with steps leading to a narrow canal-side street. The boat’s only human crew-member, who’d done nothing but collect the fares, opened his eyes and waved a hand.
‘Circle Square, two hundred metres,’ he announced, and laid a short gang-plank to the steps. Wilde took care to be the last off the boat. He smiled at the boatman.
‘You’re a Kazakh Greek,’ he said.
The man’s eyes widened. He gripped Wilde’s hand, and said something in another language.
‘We’ve all come a long way,’ Wilde said.
‘Win friends and influence people,’ Jay-Dub sneered, sotto voce, at the top of the steps. ‘Always the goddamn agitator, eh?’
About thirty people walked along the street, Wilde and the robot a few metres behind the rest. Ahead, Circle Square’s market island was just tuning up to its daily discord. The street was lined with tiny pavement cafés and stalls, and broken by alleys down which even tinier shops plied some kind of trade from windows and doorways.
They were a few steps away from one such alley-mouth, at the opposite corner of which a couple of perilously small tables were in use for serving coffee in proportionately minute cups, when Jay-Dub said urgently, ‘Stop!’
At the same moment Wilde too noticed the two men – the same two men who’d come searching in the pub. They sat at one of those little tables, staring back at him from behind dark glasses. His hand froze in the act of reaching for his new gun as the others did so for theirs.
Into this momentary impasse came a peculiar vehicle: a platform on wheels, with a crane-like handling-apparatus at either end. It nosed out of the alleyway without warning. Wilde jumped back. Mechanical arms unfolded from the cranes and snatched past him. He turned in time to see the claws of those arms clamp around Jay-Dub’s lower limbs. They lifted the struggling machine right over his head, and placed it firmly on the flatbed’s platform.