It’s a trashy, tacky place, this joint. Lots of wood and metal. The music is a thumping noise in the background, like machinery. The ventilation isn’t coping well with the smoke, and somebody’s already had a poppy-pipe. Freshwater fish are grilling somewhere in the back. Low ceiling, dim lights. Her vision adjusts without a blink and it’s daylight, give or take the odd wavelength. Spy takes over fully for a staking-out, second-long sweep of the room. There’s surveillance, of course, but it’s just the hostelry’s own system, exactly as smart and dangerous as a dog. She pings it anyway, leaving it with a low-wattage conviction that this person who’s just walked in is nice and has just given it a pat on the head and can be safely ignored from now on.
There are a couple of dozen people in The Malley Mile: farmworkers and mechanics on bar stools, and office-workers – mostly young women – around the round tables. Looks like they’ve come in here for a drink on their way home from work, and stayed for a few more. Good. She sees a notice: no concealed weapons. She takes a pistol from the purse she’s carrying and sticks it in the waistband of her skirt and walks up to the bar. The girls around the tables notice her, the men on the stools notice her, but that’s just because she’s pretty, not because she looks out of place.
The barman’s another giant, some brain-boosted gigantopith or whatever (she’s never had occasion to sort out the hominid genera) and he’s slumped sadly on his elbows, wrists overhanging the near edge of the bar counter. He turns away from the gladiators on the television and smiles at her, or at any rate bares his yellow fangs.
‘Yesh?’
‘A Dark Star, please.’
Without getting up the barman reaches for bottles and mixes her a rum and cola.
‘Eyshe?’
‘Yes please.’ She’s careful with the sibilants; the urge to slide into mimicry (it’s a bug in Spy, actually) is hard to resist. She lets Spy handle the process of paying, selecting the right grubby note from her filched collection of promissories. Gold values she can handle in any of her frames of mind, but crops and machine-parts, land and labour-time are foreign to most of them.
The ice clinks as she takes her drink to an unoccupied table nearest to the end wall. She sits down with her back to that wall. She lays her purse, and her pistol, casually on the table. She sips her drink, lights a cigarette, and keeps an eye on the door as if waiting for her friends or boyfriend to turn up.
The two photofit faces currently hovering in her pattern-recognition and target-acquisition software might come through the door any minute now. If she’s lucky, they don’t know she’s armed. She’s almost certain they don’t know about Spy, and Soldier, and all the other routines she’s loaded up. They’re expecting Secretary, and Sex, and Self, who between them can’t raise more than a kick or bite or scratch. They can handle that, and as for the others here…once the heavies flash their cards the customers will watch her being dragged out of the place with all the empathy and solidarity and compassion and concern that they’d give to the recovery of a stolen vehicle.
But there are people in this district who don’t see things that way, and if the repossession guys – the greps, as the slang goes – don’t come in and find her, or if they do and she gets away, she’ll be off into the back streets to seek human allies.
That’s all as may be. Her owner might by now have discovered just what hardware and software she’s packing, and he’ll have someone and/or something more formidable on her tracks.
She keeps her eyes on the door and her fingers close to the pistol.
‘English spoken here?’
Wilde scuffed the surface of the canal-bank path – it had changed from trodden dust to a strip of fused sand which broadened and merged with the street ahead, the permanent way made from the same material as if the finger of a god had drawn the lines from space – and waited for the machine to reply.
The city had grown on the horizon as they got closer, eventually into a huge, vaguely organic-looking jumble of soaring spiky towers, their visible structure like the interiors of bones or the skeletons of sea creatures, their outlines picked out by lights. What had looked from a distance like some matted undergrowth was now resolved into a fringe of low buildings which – unlike all the other shantytowns Wilde had seen – appeared to extend in through the main body of the city on whose edge they now stood. To their right and left were fields. The bulky moving presences of machines in those fields were the only traffic they had so far encountered. Lights had passed over, but it was difficult to tell whether they were natural or artificial. Once, something huge and silent and leaving a green afterimage or trail had rushed above their heads, above the city and made a distant flash beyond.
‘Waterfall,’ the machine had explained, unhelpfully.
Now it shifted on its feet and answered Wilde’s question. ‘You’ll be understood,’ it said hesitantly. ‘English is the predominant language. Your usage and accent – and mine, I might add – may seem a little quaint.’
‘Before we go any farther,’ Wilde said, his gaze flicking from the buildings under the first street-lights ahead to the machine, ‘get me straight on a couple of things. First, is it normal to be seen talking to a machine? I mean, are – robots? – like you common around here?’
‘You could say that,’ said the machine dryly.
‘OK. Next item on the agenda as far as I’m concerned is getting something to eat and a drink and a place to crash out. Am I right in thinking that I’ll have to pay for it?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the machine.
‘And you don’t happen to have some money stashed away in that shell of yours?’
‘No, but I can do better than that. See the second building along the road? It’s a mutual bank.’
Wilde said nothing, although his mouth opened.
‘You do remember what that is, don’t you?’
Wilde laughed. ‘So I get to raise some cash by mortgaging my property?’ He gestured at the clothes he stood up in. ‘That’s not much help –’
The machine gave a creditable impersonation of a polite cough.
‘Oh.’ Wilde looked at it with a renewed, speculative interest. ‘I see.’
He set off along the road, ahead of the machine for the first time since they’d met. The machine lurched into motion after him.
‘Just don’t get the wrong idea,’ it said, its voice as stiff as its gait.
One of the girls at the nearest table is giving a rendering of the pub’s signature song in an authentically dire accent, full of maudlin yearning.
‘If Ayyyye could walk acraaawrse the ryyyinbow
that shiiiines acraaawrse the Malley Mile…’
Self knows that the Malley Mile is a real place, and that both the sense of loss and the rainbow effect refer to aspects of its reality that – strangely, or is it just part of the program? – bring tears pricking to even her cold eyes. Scientist is yammering on about it, but she doesn’t want to know right now.
She’s just settled down with her third drink, burning the alcohol straight to energy but remembering to emulate the effect, when the door bangs open and a girl walks in who sure isn’t some office-worker deciding the weekend starts here.
She’s tall and thin, though her flak-jacket makes her look broad. Narrow jeans, spacer boots, a big automatic holstered on her hip. On her other hip she’s carrying a large bag with a strap taking the strain to her shoulder. Short blonde hair lying close to her skull. Face too bony to be bonny. The main things going for it are her bright blue eyes and her big smile, which at this moment is turned on the men at – and the man behind – the bar.