Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

‘It seems so delicious in anticipation, doesn’t it?’ he grumbled, when he found that I was still awake and could speak Italian. He undressed noisily in a gust of garlic and booze and sweat. ‘And then afterwards you feel ashamed.’

He belched mournfully as he climbed into bed.

‘Never mind. I’m truly repentant, so I’ll confess to a priest in the morning and God will forgive me.’

He rolled to and fro, looking for a comfortable position in the hard, damp bed.

‘You could do with a wash, my friend,’ he muttered as he settled down.

But I was fascinated by his ability to manage his conscience.

‘You can really do that, can you?’ I asked him. ‘Any time you do something bad, you can go to a priest and confess and be forgiven.’

‘Of course,’ the Italian answered drowsily.

‘But why does it work?’

The sailor sighed, drew breath and then explained slowly as if to a child: the human race was given free will so that it could chose good or evil. But Adam and Eve made a wrong choice and, as a result, humans have been sinful ever since, so that really all of us deserve to burnt for the rest of eternity in hell. Luckily, God was merciful and sent his only son to be crucified to pay the price of human sin. As a result, though all human beings were still sinners, they could be saved from the fire if they believed in Jesus and repented their sins.

With that the sailor rolled over and once more prepared himself for sleep.

‘But do you really believe in this?’ I asked him.

‘Of course!’ the Italian protested indignantly. ‘Now, will you let me sleep?’

‘But I thought that God was omnipotent. If he wanted to change his own rules, why didn’t he just change them? Why did he have to punish his son?’

‘These things are mysteries,’ muttered the Italian.

I considered.

‘What happens if people sin in heaven?’

He sat up.

‘Please, enough. I want to sleep. No one sins in heaven. Everyone knows that!’

‘Don’t they have free will anymore in heaven?’

‘Of course.’

‘But I thought free will meant people could choose.’

There was a brief silence. I had clearly over-taxed the sailor’s skills as a theologian.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘in heaven they just know the right thing to do.’

‘Didn’t Adam and Eve?’

The Italian growled.

‘To cast doubt is also a sin you know,’ he said, lying down again, ‘and now, if you have any more questions, save them for the morning and go and see a priest.’

And with that he sank down into loudly snoring sleep, leaving me lying awake, as I did every night, going over and over in my mind the moment when I had betrayed Lucy.

It wasn’t an accident, that was what haunted me, it wasn’t just a slip of the tongue brought on by too much raki. I had made a choice. I had arranged on purpose for her to be destroyed.

Next morning I went and found a church. In a buzzing gloom of gold and frankincense and ancient wood blackened by beeswax and chrysm, I found a priest, a man of about my age, though he looked much older with his long beard.

When I explained what I wanted the priest led me immediately to a small side room in which two candles burned in front of a gold icon of the crucifixion.

‘Face the altar, not me.’

I looked at the golden image.

‘Everything I tell you is confidential, is that right?’ I asked.

‘It is between you, me and God,’ said the priest from behind my shoulder.

I nodded.

‘I am an Illyrian,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe in your religion or know much about it. But I do know that you make a distinction between a body and its soul. Illyria doesn’t understand that. Illyria doesn’t believe in things that can’t be measured. I think that leaves a lot of things out.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that at least is the beginning of the right road.’

‘My girlfriend was trying to understand about the soul too. You see, she wasn’t born with one. It grew inside her and she had to make sense of it somehow.’

‘We are all born with a soul,’ the priest said gently. ‘It enters our body at the moment of conception.’

‘Yes, but you see my girlfriend wasn’t born. She was made.’

There was a silence.

Reluctantly I spelt it out.

‘You see, she… she was a syntec, a machine…’

There was another silence.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ I asked him.

Of course he did. Illyria was just up the coast and people from Corfu were among the many outlanders who went there and sampled its sinful pleasures. Perhaps he himself had done so. Priests did. In any case, he must have heard many confessions concerning the strange temptations of the godless City…

‘I understand perfectly,’ he said, shortly. ‘But a robot doesn’t have a soul.’

‘Perhaps not usually, but this one came alive. She confided in me one day when I was visiting her. She was alive and she wanted to escape.’

Again the priest was silent. In the dimness of the church beyond the door, someone dropped a coin into a tin.

‘She was alive but she wasn’t human,’ I said. ‘A syntec’s flesh is just a covering, not really an integral part of it at all. I knew that, but I loved her anyway – or I thought I did.’

The silence was so deep that I wondered if the priest had slipped away or fallen asleep.

‘But when she pulled off her flesh,’ I said, ‘I despised her. I hated her so much that I betrayed her to her enemies. And they destroyed her.’

‘What enemies?’ came the priest’s voice, its closeness startling.

‘Greeks, ordinary people, Christians, who thought she was a demon…’

‘Go on.’

‘So you see I hadn’t really valued her for herself at all. I only valued the surface, the facade.’

One of the candles began to fizz.

‘How many people,’ I asked, ‘have been present at the awakening of a soul? Not many. But I was. And the new soul trusted me, and I betrayed that trust. Because I was confused in my own mind between her appearance and her real self.’

Again there was a long silence, but at length, just when he seemed to have ceased to exist altogether, the priest heaved a sigh.

‘You are right in thinking that to deny the existence of a soul is a grievous sin,’ he said. ‘It is a sin against the Holy Spirit. The very worst kind of sin. But you are quite wrong about where the sin lies in this case. Those machines are an abomination. Their very existence is a terrible sin against God…’

‘But Lucy couldn’t help the fact that she existed!’

The priest ignored my interruption.

‘…So it was not in any way sinful to be the cause of the machine’s destruction,’ he said. ‘Indeed it was a Christian act. Though you don’t realize it, you were following the dictates of your real God-given conscience. You were turning away from your sin.’

I remembered the story of the Cretan Giorghi, sharpening his chisel to rid himself of the addiction that was destroying him and, just for a moment, the priest’s words made some kind of sense. But it was only for a moment. When I remembered what Lucy was actually like, they made no sense at all.

‘But you didn’t know Lucy! She wasn’t evil ! She wasn’t out to harm anyone! Good God, she used to sit up all night reading your Christian Bible!’

The priest was startled by this, and there was a slight waver of uncertainty in his voice when he spoke again.

‘Well… no doubt the devil also studies the Bible.’

Then his voice became firmer as he felt the authority of his ancient church swinging back behind him.

‘Such machines are an abomination,’ he insisted. ‘Your real sin was to involve yourself with the thing in the first place and to listen to it when its mechanical voice made claims to being alive.’