They reached the railway station just as dawn was breaking. The reflected light from Zuse threatened to outshine the pale yellow sunlight that picked out the stripped carcases of the city buildings, the long shadows of which extended across the marble square in front of the station. Only a few hours earlier Karel had been standing there with Susan.
Susan. What had happened to her?
The square was full of Artemisians, so many of them now. New soldiers were pouring into the city on trains, Karel could see them freshly disembarked and already marching in lines into the stricken city. Along with them came engineers and surveyors and reclamation robots. Now the city had fallen Artemisian workers were pouring into Turing City to claim the spoils.
And there went the prizes of conquest. A steady stream of metal was being marched and rolled and trundled and carried back into the station. Girders and steel plate, bundles of foil and reels of wire, all being fed onto the waiting trains to be whisked away, back to the factories of Artemis.
Karel had a thought that disgusted him: the process was like organic life. It was as if the city was eating itself: the railway station was a mouth that was now sucking the rest of the body into itself, sucking up all that metal to leave nothing of Turing City but the empty spaces in the long-depleted mines.
Karel’s procession was now all the way through the square. He was made to join a growing crowd of other male prisoners. He looked around and wondered what had happened to the women. Most importantly, where was Susan?
And then he remembered the little body of Axel, lying broken on the ground.
Everything was gone.
The marble flagstones of the parade ground were becoming abraded at the edges, stained and eroded by the acid rain. The thought gave Spoole pleasure: it was a sign that Artemis was a healthy, growing place. Even now, the three tall brick chimneys of the infantry factory belched smoke into the pale dawn, and a thin, cold breeze braided little curls of it across the clear morning sky. A team of robots scaling the chimneys, already two hundred feet up, were heading to repaint the white collars that encircled the tops.
Two newly manufactured battalions of infantryrobots formed squares on the parade ground. The doors of the factory had been flung wide open, and a company of Scouts were marching out, silver skins flashing in the pale light.
Gearheart leaned close to him. ‘Just think what I could do to one of their bodies,’ she murmured. ‘Just imagine the mind I could twist from their wire.’
‘Not another word.’
Gearheart annoyed him. Not her words so much, rather the fact that she tried to goad him. Everything about her seemed gauged to irritate him. She was wearing so little panelling today that the beautifully knitted electromuscles in her arms and legs were clearly visible, and Spoole realized how the soldiers, both male and female, would be looking at her.
‘My appearance is symbolic,’ she had claimed, ‘it’s an indication of your power, Spoole. A robot doesn’t need protecting in this state that you have built.’
‘You were woven to be attracted to me,’ Spoole had replied, just before they had come out here that morning. ‘It’s like you feel you have to annoy me, just to prove that you have some control over your life. Don’t think that I don’t know that you‘re playing games with me, Gearheart.’
Gearheart had just altered her pose, showing off even more of her body.
‘Playing games? I’m not the only one, Spoole. Look at Kavan. Where will he turn his attention next, now that he has taken Turing City?’
‘I will deal with Kavan just as I will deal with you if you ever cross the line with me.’
‘Oh, Spoole,’ she had said, reaching to touch his leg, so that he felt the wire stirring within him, ‘don’t be like that.’
Spoole focused his attention on the here and now. He counted two thousand and fifteen robots standing to attention before him, both polished silver Scouts and matt-grey infantry. Behind them soared the red-brick facade of the factory with its tall windows. Through the open doors he could see the glow of the forges, and he felt a glow of pride himself at what had been wrought.
‘Soldiers of Artemis,’ he called out, his amplified voice rolling over the parade ground.
‘Three weeks ago you entered the factory. Not as soldiers, but as robots of Bethe and Segre, of Stark and Born and Raman. Even of Artemis. And in the factory you stripped away your own metal and put aside your old form. Short or tall, wide or narrow, you have all built your new bodies to the same plan, and in this you are now all equal. You have each taken metal and beaten it to the same length, you have knitted electromuscle and threaded it into each other’s arms. You have assembled your own and each other’s bodies.’
He paused. The assembled robots stamped their feet, once, twice. Two thunderous cracks echoed across the parade ground.
‘You have placed the ultimate trust in your fellow robots, allowing them to remove your mind from its old body and to place it in the new. For, as we all know, Artemis is not about individuals, it is about Artemis.’
Stamp, stamp.
Spoole looked down at the marble chips broken from the flagstones by the continued stamping of metal feet. Such power. It was good.
Now he lowered his voice. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he continued. ‘You will have heard the rumours that Turing City has fallen. Well, let me tell you… those rumours are true!’
Stamp, Stamp.
‘… already metal from Turing City is being sent here! Already robots from Turing City are riding towards us, carried here on Artemisian trains! Soon they will march through this city to the factory, and those of you who are still here will look upon them and you will notice they already wear grey infantry bodies. For those who chose to join Artemis have already been presented with an Artemisian body. And yet, on entering the factory, that body will be taken from them! Those of you still serving in the factory may become teachers in order to show these new robots what you have already learned – how to strip apart their grey infantry bodies and rebuild them anew, exactly the same as they were.’
He lowered his voice. ‘And you might wonder why this should be.’
‘You’re boring them,’ murmured Gearheart.
Spoole felt a stab of anger at her remark.
‘You might wonder why this should be,’ he repeated, ‘and yet, think for a moment. Think about how it would be if you too were presented with a body, ready made. Imagine if you were asked to wear a body over which you felt no real sense of ownership. You would no longer be an Artemisian soldier in the true sense of the word. You would be something apart: a mind with no feeling for its own body. You would think of the mind as something separate, something that did not truly belong to this state.’
Over the heads of the assembled multitude, the maintenance robots had finally reached the summit of the three chimneys. A band of clean white was now being drawn through the dirty paint. Spoole felt satisfied. High above them all, the city still functioned. He turned his attention back to the assembled soldiers.
‘There are states that don’t think as we do. There are states that believe that the mind is something special, something apart from the metal that it drives. I should say, rather, there were such states. The last of them fell this morning. Turing City is no more!’
As one, the soldiers drew up their right legs and stamped down hard on the marble surface. And then their left and their right again. The sound of stamping crashed through the city. It shook the painters on their towers, it shook the robots at their forges. Even out in the marshalling yards to the south, the engines and trucks echoed to the sound of stamping feet.
Spoole had to shout over the stamping. ‘Never forget this! How we build Artemis into ourselves. How we weave it into our children!’