Anger gave way to pain, pain was swamped by despair. Through the legs of his attackers he could see the sea-grey bodies of his former fellow citizens gradually draining from the hall. None of them looked back in his direction.
Eventually the beating ended. Finally they let him alone.
‘Traitor…’ said Karel from the ground, his voice an electronic whine. Garfel stood over him, gazing down with his pale grey eyes.
‘How long,’ whined Karel, ‘how long were you planning this?’
Garfel said nothing; he just continued to stare down at Karel, who lay listening to the heavy tread of robots filing from the room.
Olam made his way along the street, eagerly scanning the windows and doorways for further prey.
‘You’ve never been to Turing City before, boy?’
Doe Capaldi was there at his side. It seemed as if Doe Capaldi was always there at his side, checking up on him.
‘Never,’ said Olam. ‘I’ve read about it, of course. It’s a lot smaller than I expected.’
‘You’re not seeing the real city here. We’re heading into the residential area, not the centre. We’re coming in from the east, stopping anyone escaping out this way.’
‘I know what we’re doing,’ snapped Olam. ‘You’ve been to Turing City before, I suppose?’
‘Naturally,’ replied Doe Capaldi, swinging around for a moment to check a sign of movement down a side street. An Artemisian infantryrobot emerged from a doorway down there and gave them an okay sign.
‘Yes,’ continued Doe Capaldi, ‘I came here several times as part of the ambassador’s retinue. On one occasion I was presented with a breastplate of electrum. It was a fine piece of work.’ He was silent for a moment, lost in memory. ‘The paint shops in the galleries are particularly fine, too. A pity we were not sent to ransack those instead, boy!’
‘Don’t call me boy,’ said Olam. ‘We’re equal now, both soldiers of Artemis.’
‘I’m still your sergeant,’ Doe Capaldi reminded him.
‘You hate me, don’t you?’ said Olam. ‘I tried to have you killed.’
‘I understand why you did it,’ replied Doe Capaldi smoothly. ‘It’s all down to the way you were made. I would expect nothing else from one of your class.’
Just one day ago the insult would have goaded Olam. But not now. Olam had killed and he felt different now. He wasn’t a commoner any more.
He lowered his voice. ‘Don’t speak to me like that, Doe Capaldi. I’m watching you, you know. You should watch me. One dark night in the middle of battle…’
‘You’re making too much of the past, boy. We’re all Artemisians now.’
Olam laughed nastily. ‘Yes, and I bet that hurts you a lot more than it hurts me. You’ve lost far more than I have, Doe Capaldi.’
But Doe Capaldi wasn’t even listening. He gave a signal, and his patrol moved to either side of the street, lost themselves in its doorways and shadows.
Something was coming.
Olam waited in the shadow cast by an ornamental metal pillar that climbed the side of one building.
There was movement further up the street, and for a moment Olam was plunged back into the stories of his childhood, of ghosts that rose up and stalked the world at night. Ghosts, the empty metal shells of bodies from which the mind had been taken, or which had merely died. Ghosts! Bodies that did not need minds to make them move, they hunted the world at night, searching for wire that they could draw from a sleeping child’s head, winding it out inch by inch. As the child slumbered, their dreams were turned to darkness as their life was spooled away, to be bottled up and reawoken in the perverted nightmare of a ghost’s shell.
Olam almost let out a whine of fear, but then he realized that these were not ghosts but the living citizens of Turing City. He could see the light in their eyes, dim and green and almost dissolved by the light of Zuse.
Why do they look so odd? he wondered. Their bodies were grey and misshapen, they marched two abreast in silence through the streets, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings.
‘Where are they going?’ The words were spoken so softly that Olam momentarily imagined they floated from the hollow lands, borne to him on the cold breeze as if the ghosts of the north were speaking to him. But no, it was only Doe Capaldi, leaning close to him in the shadow.
‘I don’t know…’
The misshapen robots marched silently past, their strangely wide feet planting themselves solidly on the smooth concrete of the road, pressing firmly down into shadow. Adults, children, young and old, all making their way through the night, two by two. And now the tail end of the procession had passed. Doe Capaldi gave the signal, and his squad began to move through the shadows of the moonlit city, silently following the grey ghosts.
Susan
‘Karel!’ gasped Susan. ‘What’s happened to you?’
Karel dragged his way into the room. She took in his injuries with a terrified stare. He couldn’t move one leg properly, a hand was badly mangled.
‘Speak to me, Karel!’
His voice was nothing more than an electronic whine.
‘Oh Karel! Was it Artemis? Are they downstairs?’
‘No…’
The forge had gone cold now. Still, there was tin, there was a little gold. She could do something with those. She felt the electronic pulse throbbing from his leg, turned him over and saw the way the electromuscle there was caught on the external metal.
Gently, she set about easing the panelling away.
‘Easy,’ she said. ‘It will be all right.’
She looked over to where Axel lay sleeping, dark despair filling her like oil.
Olam
Olam fixed his gaze on the two robots that brought up the rear of the grey procession ahead.
‘Why don’t we attack?’ he asked. ‘All that metal should belong to Artemis. You’re letting it get away!’
‘Let’s see where they’re going first,’ replied Doe Capaldi, giving him a questioning look. ‘They’re not going to move very fast. There are children with them.’
‘We should shoot the children first. Let the parents see them die. That will break their spirit.’
Silence.
‘It’s true,’ said Olam.
‘We follow them for the moment.’
‘But they’re heading out into the darkness!’
Olam looked down his rifle sights, turned the gun to bear on a grey child, took aim at the oddly shaped head that swayed back and forth as it walked. Doe Capaldi pushed the rifle to one side.
‘I wasn’t going to shoot.’
‘Weren’t you?’ Doe Capaldi gave him another questioning look. ‘You know, the upper classes of Wien used to debate about behaviour like yours.’
‘Wien is no more,’ said Olam, with bitter satisfaction.
‘That may be,’ said Doe Capaldi, unperturbed. ‘But the debate remains. You see, some argued that we are all just metal, that in the end we are all equal.’
‘But we aren’t, are we?’
‘You’re missing the point,’ replied Doe Capaldi smoothly. ‘That was one side of the debate, but there was another. There were those who said that the upper classes were needed. They said that we were the necessary check on society, that which kept things functioning within reasonable bounds.’
‘Wien is no more.’
The land outside Turing City was pitted with opencast mines; it was scored with the lines of abandoned ditches and valleys that had followed the veins of ore to their end. The heavy black exhaust gases of the city forges settled out here, the sea wind rippling the oily surface of the stagnant pools and agitating the sluggish rivers of smoke.
The Turing City robots marched out of the city, and Olam watched as they waded into a stream of black smoke, waded deeper and deeper until they were lost beneath its surface.