Despite her original annoyance at his intervention, Eleanor felt a thrill at Kavan’s words.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Dorore, who didn’t understand.
‘I mean that the last state that Artemis will conquer may well be Artemis itself.’ He seemed to come back to the present. ‘But now, for you, it is time to get on the train.’
And at that Dorore lost her temper. She had nothing else to lose.
‘You! I know your sort! You are like Nicolas the Coward! You turn away from anything new. You fear it. You fear my mind!’
Kavan didn’t seem to care. ‘You will set off in five minutes.’
‘Why not now?’
‘You will give my troops sufficient time to climb upon the back of the train. Four and a half miles should be sufficient to keep us all clear of the blast.’
And at that he turned and began to walk back along the length of the train.
Dorore turned and looked at Eleanor, pleadingly. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked.
‘Do what he says,’ said Eleanor, turning to glare at Kavan’s retreating back. ‘That’s what we’re all doing.’
‘Where are you going?’
Karel looked up at her from where he knelt, feeding coal into the forge.
‘I’m going to the railway station,’ said Susan, pained by the suspicion in his voice.
‘The station? Why?’
The look he gave her was so hard and unforgiving that she felt as if she were rusting from the inside. She couldn’t even meet his eyes.
‘I need to think. I need ideas to make our child, Karel. There are concepts collected there from all across the continent. Oh, Karel, please don’t be like this. I’m sorry.’
And, just like that, the spell was broken. He rose to his feet and crossed the room and was holding her hands, his body close so she could feel the currents running through his electromuscle, the edge of his lifeforce.
‘I’m sorry too, Susan.’
They held on to each other, tight.
‘You’re a good man, Karel, I never doubted it.’
‘I know, Susan. Come on… Oh!’ He stared at her body and laughed guiltily. He had smudged ash from his dirty hands all down her powder-blue panelling.
Susan saw it and started to laugh too. She reached for a clump of twisted metal and gently wiped herself clean.
‘Let me come to the station with you,’ said Karel.
‘No, it’s okay, you don’t have to.’
‘I want to.’
‘What about Axel?’
‘He’ll sleep for another one hundred and twenty-seven minutes. He’s fine. I want to come.’
‘I’d like that. Thank you.’
Karel gently wiped her hands clean with his. She could feel the current in the electromuscle of his fingers as he did so.
The marble flagstones of the residential area were covered in a fine dust, carried by the cold wind that blew from the north. Oily black clouds were spreading across the sky like a slick over water; the sun seemed to shine a muddy brown that day. Susan rejected this image instantly; she didn’t want her child to grow up thinking of this.
‘I want to hear the ocean,’ she announced.
‘The wind’s the wrong way,’ said Karel. ‘Do you want to catch a train to the coast?’
‘No, Axel will wake before then.’
‘What are you looking at?’
Susan was staring at the white walls of the fort of the City Guard, clearly visible in the distance above the glass-and-iron roofs of the railway station.
‘The fort,’ she said.
Karel said nothing, just squeezed her hand, made her electromuscles pulse in time with his own.
The railway station was set at the head of a wide, shallow valley that cut through the hills at the northern edge of Turing City State. The valley had been excavated centuries ago by porphyry worms, copper animals that had ground away at the fissured rock of the land, sifting through the residue for the frills of copper that had been left behind when acidic magma had bubbled up from deep beneath the world.
Susan had never seen the worms herself, but their memory was woven into the wire of her mind: a memory she intended to pass on to her child.
The worms had been small to begin with, but long years of dining on the thin veins and frills of copper had allowed them to grow fat and huge. By the time the first robots had walked south into southern Shull, the worms stood taller than a robot and were as long as a whale. They had eaten the rock away down to a depth of a hundred metres. Those robots who had first viewed the land that would become Turing City State found a valley filled with porphyry worms, their beaten-copper bodies dull in the sunlight. They watched in wonder as the worms reared up high to nibble at the rocks of the valley walls. Susan now had that image in her mind. It was strange and gorgeous and filled her with a ravenous feeling.
Those first robots had felt the same. A base greed had come upon them, and they had lost control of themselves, falling on the defenceless worms without restraint. Robots had melted their way into the bodies of the worms and had gazed in lust at the brass and copper and tin of their interiors. They had walked through the ringing tubes of their bodies to their minds woven of electrum wire, and a frenzy of greed had overtaken them. They ripped those minds apart, spooling out the electrum wire into the daylight. They had mounted the carcasses with sharp knives and shears and cut the worms’ bodies open lengthways and then peeled them apart, laid them flat and plated the valley floor with copper, the remaining worms looking on, uncomprehending. They had taken those worms and built themselves castles with copper walls. They had unwound the electrum wire of the porphyry worms’ minds, and with it they wove children with golden minds.
They did all this without restraint, without guilt, and in doing so they rendered the porphyry worms extinct.
Only then did they look out at the once beautiful valley and see what they had done…
And this memory I will weave into you, my child, Susan thought to herself, for this was Turing City’s darkest moment, and it was as a reaction to the horror of this that we became what we became. This was where we learned to respect the mind as something more than just metal.
‘Are you okay, Susan?’ Karel was looking at her with such concern. ‘Are you thinking of the child?’
‘I was.’
They looked down at the valley now. Its rocky walls had long since been mined away, leaving a series of terraces. Bridges from one level led to the roofs of houses on the next level down. A maze of metal walkways and steps led them down to the railway station below. Many silver rails set in white concrete sleepers led north from the station, heading out over the Zernike plain beyond. A wide river, green with copper, ran southwards between brick embankments, twisting slowly underneath the pattern of the railway lines.
And then there was the railway station itself. Seen from above, it resembled an iron-and-glass sphere, cut into segments and then pressed flat on the ground. Arched glass canopies ran in all directions: they covered platforms serving railway lines that ran to all the former countries of southern Shull. Over to one side there were platforms for Bethe and Segre and Stark, the three of them crowded together, made of good steel and pale green glass. And over there was the wide arch of the Wien terminal, the long thin platform that jointly served Raman and Born, twisting like a snake in a north-westerly direction. And last, but by no means least, there was the Artemis terminal. Plain and functional in clear glass and dull iron it may have been, but it was by far the most impressive. Its utilitarian shape dominated the head of the valley, a visible proof of the power of the two states that it joined. Robots streamed into it, and a constant array of goods rolled in and out. Plain, functional machinery from Artemis exchanged for the delicate and quirky metalwork of Turing City.