She has her pistol in both hands in front of her and the table’s kicked over and Tamara’s beside her. The bar falls silent except for the thudding music and the baying of a stadium audience on the television.
‘Out the back!’ Tamara says through clenched teeth. She shifts, guiding Dee to the right, walking backwards, pushing through a door that swings shut in front of them. They’re in a corridor, dark except for smudges of yellow light and thick with smells of beer and fish.
Dee enhances her vision and sees Tamara blinking hard as she whirls around. From the way she’s moving it’s obvious that Tamara can see in the dark at least as well as Dee can.
‘Come on!’ Tamara calls, and plunges along the corridor. Dee kicks off her shoes, snatches them up and races after Tamara, down a flight of steps and around a couple of corners into an even darker, smellier corridor, in fact a tunnel. Dee can hear the traffic overhead and taste the water-vapour in the air increasing with every step. She glances back and there’s no indication of pursuit. The water in the air tastes rusty as they slide to a halt before a heavy metal door at the end. Tamara fumbles with bolts at the top and bottom of the door until they clang back. She pauses, listening, then pulls the door slowly open, keeping herself behind it until it’s almost parallel to the wall. She peers around it all the while, looking out and not behind.
‘Wait,’ she whispers. The warning isn’t necessary: Soldier has kicked in and Dee is standing flat to the wall of the tunnel two metres from the doorway and only very slowly edging forward. As her cone of vision widens she sees that the door opens on to a narrow stone shelf barely above the surface of the canal, which is about fifty metres wide at this point. The lights from the opposite street, Rue Pascal, are reflected in the canal’s choppy black wavelets, stirred up by the frequent wakes of plying boats. From the sound of the slap and sigh of water she knows that the outboard motor, just at the edge of her view, belongs to a small dinghy moored close to the door.
On the metre-wide quay a shadow moves – her own.
She turns to look back down the tunnel. A light, far back in the corridor, has just come on and something is moving between here and the source. Tamara, a moment later, notices it too and she steps from behind the door. She glances at Dee, points outwards, and then makes a two-fingered chopping motion to left and right. Together they jump out of the door, turning in opposite directions as they steady themselves, crouching on the quay.
Dee sees the walled bank of the canal rising three metres to street level, and the quay running alongside the canal to a junction a few hundred metres away. Boats and barges are moored along it, doors and tunnel-mouths punctuate it. There’s nobody moving on it at the moment.
Over her shoulder she sees a similar view in the opposite direction, except that the canal extends out to the dark of the desert. She hears at least one set of running footsteps, now about half-way along the tunnel. She gestures frantically to Tamara.
‘Get in the boat!’ Tamara says. She hauls the rope and the little inflatable bumps against the quay’s lip. It barely rocks as Tamara steps in, sways wildly as Dee follows. She finds herself flat on her back in the wet well of the boat on top of her purse and shoes, her feet getting in the way of Tamara’s as the human woman casts off and starts the engine. Dee’s glad she’s in this undignified position as Tamara opens the throttle and the engine’s whine rises to a scream and the front of the boat lifts. The boat surges out across the water and Tamara brings it over in a long curve that has them shooting straight along the middle of the canal to yells and curses from other boats by the time a distant figure appears at the mouth of the tunnel.
It’s the man who recognised her. He shouts after them, but whatever he says is lost in the engine’s note. Tamara slews the tiller again and they swing around in a wall of spray and head for an opening, passing under Stras Cobol and into a branch canal that runs between high windowless walls less than five metres apart. Tamara eases off the engine and Dee cautiously sits up.
‘Lucky for us the boat was there,’ she says.
Tamara snorts. ‘It’s my boat! I left it there an hour ago when I started my round of the bars.’
Dee smiles wanly. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Circle Square,’ Tamara says. ‘Precinct of the living dead. Crawling with bad artists, freethinking machines, and anarchists arguing about what to do in an anarchy. Safe.’
Dee isn’t sure how to take this.
‘Thanks for getting me out.’
Tamara looks past Dee, at the dark water. ‘Yeah well…I gotta admit I’m not sure what I got you out from. That guy and the robot didn’t look like greps to me. Did you recognise them, or what?’
Dee’s already been through this in her head. ‘No,’ she says, her voice cold. ‘But he recognised me. I’m certain of that.’
‘Me too,’ Tamara says dryly. ‘Just I don’t think it was from a pic. He looked like he wanted to kill you, that first moment. Kill somebody, anyway, but shit, coulda been shock or some’ing – hey!’ She stares at Dee’s face. ‘You ain’t dead, are you? You and him might’ve had previous.’ She looks quite pleased at this speculation. ‘It’s all right, you can tell me. We’re cool about the dead as well as machines, OK?’
Dee doesn’t know much about the dead. Once, when she was new, she’d thought that she could hear the dead: press her ear to the wall and hear them talking, furiously, in dead languages. But it was just the sough of the machinery, the ’ware, the marrow in the city’s cold bones.
So her owner had told her, his laughter almost kind. With a harsher tone in his voice he’d added: ‘The dead are gone. And they aren’t coming back. Most of them…ah, forget it.’
And obediently, she had.
She isn’t sure whether to be annoyed at Tamara’s speculation, but it’s just the woman’s human limitations after alclass="underline" in a way she’s making the same animistic mistake – thinking that machinery that sounded alive must at the very least be dead – that she herself had made way back when she was just getting her brain into gear.
So she gives Tamara a smug smile and says, ‘You can scan my skull if you like, and you’ll see me for yourself.’
‘S’pose your body’s a copy? A clone?’
Dee hasn’t thought of this before, and the idea shakes her more than she cares to show. She shrugs. ‘It’s possible.’
‘There you go,’ Tamara says. ‘That’d make whatever it was with that guy just a case of mistaken identity. No worries.’
She guns the engine again. Swept from the walls’ dank ledges, seal-rats squeak indignantly in their wake.
‘It isn’t her,’ said the robot, its voice more like a radio at low volume than a human speaking quietly. ‘So forget it. Chasing after her won’t get you anywhere. She’s just a fucking machine.’
Wilde had trudged back up the tunnel, apologised to the barkeeper, paid for the breakages and ordered a stiff drink as well as a large beer to accompany his grilled fish. The robot, propping itself up with a chair opposite him, had attracted no comment.
Wilde wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glared at the machine.
‘She didn’t look like a machine. She looked like a real woman. She looked like –’
He stopped, in some distress.
‘Cloned,’ the machine said implacably.
‘But why? Why her? Who would –?’
He stared at the impervious pod. ‘No!’
‘Yes,’ said the machine. ‘He’s here.’
2
Pleistocene People
I remember him leaning his elbow on the bar in the Queen Margaret Union, waiting for our pints, and saying: ‘We’ll be there, Wilde! We’ll see it! One fucking computer, that’s all it’ll take, one machine that’s smarter than us and away they’ll go.’