‘Please!’ cried the woman. ‘No.’
Olam looked at the shiny black spike in his hand.
‘Do you want them to shoot us?’ asked the tall robot. ‘Use it!’
‘No!’ said the woman, eyes wide with fear. ‘Please, no!’
‘It’s you or us,’ explained the aristocrat. ‘This isn’t personal.’
‘But I have two children…’
Olam weighed the spike in his hand. He looked at the tall robot, looked at the whale metal covering his body. The tall robot knew what he was thinking.
‘There’s no point attacking me,’ it said. ‘That awl would never pierce my body. I’m covered in whale metal. Look at you, with your pig-iron plating. I could defeat you with ease, but this woman is weaker. And you have a weapon. So use it on her.’
The woman gazed at him, eyes pleading.
‘What did you expect?’ asked the aristocrat. ‘This is Artemis we are dealing with. Only the clever and the strong serve it. That is why it’s so powerful.’
Olam looked around the stadium. He could see that most groups were, like his own, gripped by indecision. But in some of them a fight was taking place. In a few, robots already lay dead. One lay nearby on the magnetic track, arms and legs pulsing as two young women repeatedly smashed his head on the ground. Olam watched as the unfortunate robot’s skull was buckled and torn. The women pulled blue wire from the widening cracks in great loops, their mouths emitting excited electronic squeaks as they did so.
‘I can’t,’ said Olam, sickened. But maybe also a little excited, he realized. ‘I won’t,’ he said firmly.
‘Then give me the awl and let me do it!’ The tall robot’s voice was cold. There was no anger there, no passion. Nothing but pure logic.
Seemingly without his volition, Olam’s arm reached forward, the awl offered up on his palm.
‘No!’ screamed the woman, her body rattling with fear. ‘Please!’
Olam came to his senses and snatched his hand back.
‘You’re a fool, man,’ said the tall robot coldly. ‘Do you mean to tell me you’ve never come here to watch the fighting?’ He saw the answer in Olam’s stance. ‘I thought as much. Lower-class voyeur. You can watch it, but can you do it? Well, here’s your chance to join your betters! I killed my first robot when I was just ten! You should know what to do; you’ve seen it happen often enough. Come on! We’ve only got a couple of minutes left! Do you want to be killed too? It’s the logical thing. Only she dies, or we all die. Either way she will be dead. You’re condemning both of us as well.’
The woman began to sob.
‘Don’t do that,’ said the tall robot, dismissively. ‘You’re being selfish. Die like a true Wiener.’
He meant it, realized Olam and, out of nowhere, a mad laughter bubbled up inside him.
‘But we aren’t Wieners any more,’ he cried. ‘We’re all Artemisians now!’
And at that, he gripped the awl in his fist, point down, and leaped at the tall robot. The sun was at his back: he saw their shadows stretching out on the ground before them. He saw himself gripping the tall robot around the neck, bringing the point of the awl down again and again on the aristocrat’s skull.
‘You can’t hurt me,’ said the tall robot patiently. ‘I’m made of whale metal.’
He was right. They all three struggled in vain, Olam blunting the point of the awl on the beautiful grey metal of the aristocrat’s skull, the woman desperately fighting to be free.
‘I’m growing impatient, prole. Only one minute left. Kill her!’
Olam gave up on the man’s skull. He brought the awl around and stabbed at an eye. The man raised an arm to defend himself, and the woman finally broke free of his grip.
‘Hold him!’ called Olam.
The woman grabbed an arm and held onto it. Olam stabbed at the aristocrat’s eye once more, grazing it.
‘You see!’ The tall robot was almost laughing. ‘You have got the motivation. You can kill…’
With a gyroscopic lurch, Olam realized that the tall robot was right. So this is what those robots on the killing floor felt. It felt good! The feeling rushed through his electromuscle, and he stabbed at the aristocrat again. The eye flared and died. A sharp current ran through the awl into Olam’s hand.
The woman screamed. The tall robot had reached through the damaged plating at her thigh and grabbed the electromuscle there. Now Olam stabbed at the tall robot’s hand.
All around them, he was vaguely aware of more and more robots lying dead on the track.
‘Stop wasting time,’ snapped the tall robot. ‘Kill her!’
The aristocrat honestly believed he could still order him about! Fury overtook Olam. His arms functioned of their own accord. He stabbed for the tall robot’s other eye and was batted away, flung to the ground. He rose and charged forward, just as a volley of shots rang out.
A series of sharp cracks. The spang and whiz of ricochets. Olam looked at the woman, at the tall robot. They looked back at him, at each other, both waiting. There was another volley, and another. Still they waited.
Silence. And then the light faded in the woman’s eyes. She slumped to the ground.
The tall robot gazed at Olam with disgust.
‘They shot her,’ he said. ‘So apart from me losing my eye, what have you achieved?’
Olam felt the lurching inside him come to a halt. It was replaced with a smooth calmness and a cold certainty.
What have I achieved? he wondered. The answer came in a hot charge of current. The knowledge that I can kill, if I need to.
Eleanor
Eleanor didn’t pay much attention to what was going on on the stadium floor. The weak and the unlucky would die, and in that way the overall quality of the new recruits would be raised. It wasn’t as if they were Artemisians yet. At the moment they were nothing more than talking metal.
She resented Kavan sending her here. Her talents were not best serving Artemis by being stuck in this stadium: she would be better with Kavan, discussing their next move. Could they seriously attack Turing City now, this soon after their near-defeat in Wien? Why had he sent her away? Did he fear her? Zuse knew that Eleanor craved power too, but Kavan was the better leader. She knew it. Surely Kavan knew it as well?
But it was time to speak again. She returned to the balcony and reached for the microphone. The Wieners had used a speaker jack which they plugged directly into their bodies, thus connecting them to the speaker system. Eleanor had found the idea vaguely distasteful, so she had built a microphone onto the end of the jack with parts taken from the head of a dead Wiener.
‘Well done, survivors,’ she said. ‘Your numbers are now two-thirds what they were. I estimate that half of you will be suitable for conscription. Now, before we continue with the process, I think it is important that you understand exactly what Artemis is. You will have heard stories, you will have heard lies, and you will have heard the truth and misunderstood it.’
The sun beat down on the arena. Oil slicked the magnetic track, overworked and heated metal could be heard plinking along with the whirring and sparking of broken machinery.
‘Artemis begins with Nyro, of course. But who was Nyro? Where did she come from? There are stories, that she came from Born, that she killed her own child. Yes, we’ve all heard the ballad. We’ve heard that she murdered her own husband, tangling him in the wire of his own mind. Are these stories true? No. Nyro was none of these things. She was just a woman who lived in a barren land. She had nothing. Nothing but her mind.’
The True Story of Nyro
Artemis in those days was nothing but a barren plain. It held no metal; there was nothing there but organic life and empty rock.
But there was metal in the mountains: iron and phosphorus.
But there was metal on the coast: nickel, gold, silver and copper.
But the robots who lived there kept their metal to themselves, so that the robots who lived in the centre were left to forge bodies out of wind and dust.