‘They’re already talking about him,’ said Liza. ‘Llywber and the rest – I heard them.’
‘They don’t mean anything,’
‘They do. Oh, Echecs, what is he going to do? He’s going to grow up all alone. They’ll never accept him.’
‘Liza, you could just end all this now. Why don’t you tell them exactly how you twisted his mind?’
Liza’s yellow eyes seemed to be looking somewhere else.
‘Will they believe me, whatever I tell them?’
Echecs didn’t answer.
‘You see? Bad enough that this thing happened to me. Now they will punish my son for my misfortune.’ Her gaze returned to the corner of the room, the little iron body of baby Karel. ‘My poor son…’ she repeated.
Echecs didn’t speak. Susan could tell she was thinking hard, coming to a decision. She knew what it was going to be…
‘Liza,’ said Echecs.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you heard of the Book of Robots?’
‘No.’ Liza didn’t care; she was lost in the contemplation of her son. Echecs continued anyway. ‘The Book of Robots contains the philosophy that all robots should have woven into them by their mothers.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘One of the things it says is that robots should take care of one another. They will survive and prosper better that way.’
‘Oh.’
Even from a distance of twenty-two years, Susan recognized the state of mind Liza was in. She knew that soon Liza would leave this room and walk to one of the great hydraulic pistons that Llwbyr was constructing and then place her head beneath it.
She would never be aware of the offer that Echecs was making her, that her son would be looked after. That Echecs was offering to weave him a wife.
The signal for the attack came.
Olam and the rest ran forward, scrambling up the rocky slope before them, metal hands grasping stone, eyes always fixed on the summit, scanning for the defenders.
There was nothing there to see.
Dropping for cover behind rocks, rifle at the ready, covering your comrades, then up and forward again, feet slipping on the packed snow. More snowflakes spiralling down towards you in that eerie glow that distorted vision. Darker clouds moving in above, blown south by the rising wind. Someone firing, a dark shape at the summit, drop and shoot. Back up and run, everything was becoming so fuzzy.
‘Ch**!’ called Doe Capaldi. ‘Ch***!’
What was that? Ears so fuzzy, eyes so fuzzy, then he understood. Chaff! Blown over the summit by the wind, tiny metal particles filling his muscles, his eyes and ears, his mind. Unstick a magnet grenade, throw it forward to attract that chaff, run up in its lee. Slipping when you ran, no grip, metal body sliding backwards, cold snow slipping into his chest, melting on the electromuscle.
No fear. Just a mounting sense of excitement, hot fury building within him. Hand tightening on his rifle. Scan the summit, look for someone, something to shoot at.
Past the grenade, out of its magnetic lee, chaff creeping back in again. Parmissa had reached the summit.
Doe Capaldi picking something up from the ground. Chaff grenade. Janet already at the summit.
One last push. Then, looking down into the North Kingdom…
The sky was darkening; the wind howling as it whipped through the jagged passage the atomic bombs had ripped through the mountainside. Kavan marched through in the midst of an infantry platoon, Eleanor close by.
Rock was still falling, skittering, bouncing down the sheer walls. Sometimes a larger stack of stone would suddenly slip and crash down in a cloud of dust and snow. Ahead, the Storm Troopers were an unstoppable mob rolling forward. All around them Scouts flickered past, their silver bodies reflecting the light in crazy patterns. Gunfire crackled ahead, interspersed with the heavier crump of grenades and bombs: the attack had begun in earnest.
‘Almost there,’ said Eleanor.
Kavan nodded. ‘Get a team of engineers to follow us in here,’ he said. ‘I want railway lines laid as soon as possible. I want Artemis to be seen to be plugging its way right into the heart of this state.’
The message was relayed back along the line…
Olam crested the summit and looked down on the North Kingdom. His gyros lurched at the sight, and he struggled to keep his balance.
The rumours were true; they had come to the land of ghosts. He could feel the emptiness below him, a place of too much rock and too little metal. He was looking over a stone bowl filled with old mounds of snow-blown rubble. It was a broken land, long fallen into neglect.
And then the image resolved itself, and a sense of order became apparent.
Those mounds were not piles of rubble, rather a regular array of buildings carved directly from the rock or put together from loosely fitting brick. A series of roads and tracks ran between them, radiating out from the very centre of the bowl.
What he had mistaken for neglect was the result of scarce metal being stretched to its very limit. This kingdom reeked of poverty and starvation of resources, but in its midst and in its layout there were obvious signs of order and control.
That control radiated from the centre of the kingdom, and the wealth of the kingdom, such as it was, was on display there in a tower of metal. A copper sphere sitting on a skeletal tower, it rose over the surrounding mounds, dark in the approaching night, the snow whipping around it and hurling itself towards the invaders.
All around him, Olam’s fellow Artemisians were cresting the summit and pausing at the sight.
Doe Capaldi did not hesitate. He was there, shouting into the wind.
‘Attack! Attack!’
And the spell that had taken hold of the troops was broken. Olam gripped his rifle tightly and felt the killing lust rising within him like hot oil pumping up inside his body. He began to slip and skid down the hillside, his metal feet tearing out long dark gouges in the mud. The mud and something else… Organic life! Growing from the mud! And now his hatred boiled. What sort of creatures could live here, to let their environment be polluted so?
He ran on downwards, the killing lust rising higher, plunging on towards a line of what he thought at first were abstract sculptures. And the realization dawned: trees! Organic trees planted in a line! These rust-ridden robots actually cultivated them! He kicked at one with his foot as he passed, shaving a white weeping wound across its surface.
And now he was past the trees and upon the outer edge of the little kingdom. A row of ramshackle stone mounds stretched to the left and right. There was an opening directly ahead of him: the entrance to a hovel. He had lost sight of his section in the swirling confusion, and he ran forward without thinking, plunging into the hovel without further thought.
He found himself in a small, dome-shaped room, its two occupants cowering against the far wall. Thin, pathetic things, they looked up at Olam, holding out their hands in supplication. Poorly made hands of impure metal, blotched and stained. Bodies shaking and quivering from badly tuned electromuscle.
‘Please…’ said one of them, whether man or woman, Olam couldn’t tell. His rage surged up through the electromuscle. They didn’t even deserve a bullet, it told him. His awl was already in his right hand, striking down through the skull of the pleading robot: it tore through the thin metal without any difficulty, tangling in the sick green-blue wire that lay beneath. The other robot began a pitiful wailing; it clung to Olam’s legs. He kneed it, felt the metal of its chin crack, then with a savage joy he brought down the awl once more, splitting open the second skull.
They were both dead. That’s when the frenzy overtook him. He began to tear apart their pathetic bodies, scattering them around the room. He tore electromuscle, he snapped metal bones riddled with impurities. Blue-green twisted wire unravelled on the floor, and he looked at it with disgust. There was a little fire in the corner of the room, barely fit to be described as a forge. He pushed twisted metal towards the flames with his foot, watched it begin to glow and then collapse in on itself.