Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

The preacher embraces him. ‘Easy, Brother Schmidt, easy! Jesus loves you. He has loved you for all eternity…’

Schmidt clings to his tormentor, sobbing like a child.

‘There, there, Ruth, there, there…’

A sociologist called Carp confesses to questioning the institution of marriage, to defending homosexuals, to teaching the satanic doctrine of cultural relativity…

The crowd explodes with rage.

‘I know, I know,’ sobs Carp. ‘I have sinned against the God of my fathers. I have sinned against Jesus. I have sinned in a way against America. I have denied the Lord. But I do repent brothers and sisters. Pray for my soul. Help me to bear the righteous wrath of God…’

There are cheers. The crowd likes this display. But the preacher is frowning.

‘Methinks he doth protest too much, brothers and sisters, methinks he doth protest too much . This is false repentance , my friends, thrown to us as a sop, while in his heart this unbeliever, this sinner, still nurses the viper of sin and atheism!’

Carp stares at him in terror, ‘No sir, I really do… I mean…’

He is led away to where the tar smokes and bubbles in its black pots.

And it is Ruth’s turn.

A cold wind blows across the lake.

Poor Ruth. Poor little Ruth. All alone up there, facing that dark sea of rage…

She had managed at last to get to sleep. I tiptoed to my own room, and Charlie brought me my own knockout pills.

How excited Ruth and I were all those years ago when we unpacked dear Charlie, all shiny and new from his box lined with polystyrene. How thrilled we were when we found out we could personalize all his store of friendly messages with our own names.

‘Goodnight,’ he said in his raspy electronic voice, ‘Goodnight George’.

I took a different route home from work the next day, walking through the Commercial Centre, rather than taking the subway as I normally did to the District of Faraday where we lived. I told myself I needed the exercise.

All along the seafront the crowds streamed, checking out the VR arcades with their garish holographic signs. Under the eye of robot police – two metres tall, with sad, silvery, immobile faces – the children of Illyria made their choices of the countless electronic worlds waiting to entertain them with surrogate adventure, surrogate violence, surrogate sex…

Below the railings, the mild Adriatic sea sucked gently on the stones. I kept walking, steadily, quickly, careful not to ask myself where I was going.

Ahead of me the Beacon of Illyria rose from the sea, Illyria’s cathedral of science, that huge silver tower like a gigantic chess-pawn that seemed to hover weightlessly above the water, though it was the tallest building in the world. People were going across the thin steel bridge that linked it to the land, heading for the delights within. Far up at its huge spherical head, there were four Ferris wheels, one for each point of the compass. They were much bigger than any fairground wheel, but they looked tiny up there. One was pulling in to unload, another was building up to full speed.

I liked the Beacon. When he was alive my father sometimes used to take me there, on the monthly Saturdays when I spent the afternoon with him. It was a relief when we went because it was a genuine treat, a time when I could go home and tell Ruth quite truthfully that I’d had fun, wandering through the intricate maze in there that took you, each time by a different route, through the history of scientific knowledge. He even let me ride on one of those Ferris wheels, though it was understood between us that he would not ride with me. On other monthly visits, he left me to entertain myself and I had to lie to Ruth about what we’d done so as not to have to hear her say what a bad man my father was. He was a great scientist after all, the inventor of Discontinuous Motion no less, and really he had no time for children, least of all a child like me.

(He died when I was ten, incidentally. It was an accident at work and his body was never found. He was working on new applications for Discontinuous Motion at the time, finding ways of punching holes through space to arrive at distant places, so perhaps his body is lying out there somewhere, on some planet orbiting some distant sun.)

But now I turned away from the Beacon, away from the seafront, and along the grand Avenue of Science. I walked past the News Building with its gigantic screen, where President Ullman’s face, forty storeys high, was shown making his annual speech on the occasion of the Territorial Purchase, which he himself negotiated in order to found our unique scientists’ state. After that was the Fellowship of Reason Tower and the gleaming headquarters of IBM, Sony, Esso, Krupp and a score of the other giant corporations that moved here with the refugees. Every ten metres there was a flagpole from which fluttered alternately the many flags of the extinct secular nations from which our people came, and the black-and-white flag of Illyria. Its emblem was a wide-open eye, in contrast to the closed eyes of blind faith which surrounded us on every side.

I kept walking, refusing to tell myself where I was going.

Outside the Senate House there was some kind of disturbance. A little group of Greek guestworkers were holding a demonstration. They were sitting down in the road holding up placards in poorly spelt English:

Around them a hostile crowd of Illyrians were shouting abuse while a dozen robot police, silent silver giants, were picking up the protestors two at a time and loading them into vans with as little fuss and as little acrimony as if they were tidying away discarded food cartons.

‘Throw them all out!’ suddenly screamed a thin little middle-aged woman just by me. (She reminded me of Ruth, though she had a British accent). ‘Christians! Jews! Muslims! Throw out all the treacherous little bigots!’

Her eyes were bulging with hate and fear.

‘Or gas the lot of them even better,’ wheezed the stooped, trembling man who was with her.

Who knows what ghosts were haunting them? The Oxford Burnings? The Science Park Massacre? While the Elect established their American theocracy, the British tried for a time to keep the Reaction at bay by shutting their dispossessed classes away, surrounded by high fences. But in the end, their dam too had burst.

I turned away from all of this, down Darwin Drive, into the Night Quarter where the restaurants were and the theatres and the cinemas, and…

But still I would not allow myself to know my destination.

And then I was there, in the lobby, standing on the red carpet, smelling the sickly smell of scent and disinfectant, hearing the dreamy muzak.

‘Good evening, sir. Do you have an appointment?’

The receptionist was a syntec in the likeness of a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman.

My mouth was so dry I could barely form the words.

‘No… I…’

‘Would you like to choose from the menu – or from one of our special offers? Or would you like to go through to the lounge and make your own selection personally?’

‘I… the… lounge.’

‘That’s fine sir. You’ll see it’s just through the door there. Have a nice evening!’

I glided like a sleepwalker across the corridor.

There were thin women and fat women, black women and white women, barely pubescent girls and handsome motherly women of forty. Some of them were almost naked, others dressed as nurses, as teachers, as housewives, as schoolgirls… There were boys too, and muscly men in posing pouches… And even stranger things: boys with breasts, girls with penises, elfin creatures, impossibly slender and covered in smooth fur, with pointy cat-like ears and narrow cat-like eyes…