Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

The little musty room seemed suddenly stifling and I turned angrily to face the priest.

‘You’re not listening to me! You’re actually just like an Illyrian atheist. You look at the appearance and not at what’s inside!’

I pushed past him to the door of the little room. The main church was like a beehive, brown and warm and dim, full of wax and honey and fat dark softly buzzing bodies. Kneeling in front of dripping candles, plump old women in black turned to see what the noise was about.

The priest hurried after me.

‘My son…’ he said, very kindly and gently, laying his hand on my arm.

He seemed really troubled. (Who knows? Perhaps he really had visited the ASPUs in Illyria and his own sins were weighing heavily on him.)

But I pulled angrily away.

The street was so bright that it hurt my eyes.

I got a taxi to take me up to the north of the island. Again it seemed at the time like an almost random act, yet I knew exactly where I was going. The taxi took me high up the slopes of the great massif of Pantocrator that towers over the whole island. When the track got so rough that the driver wasn’t prepared to go any further, I paid him to wait for me and continued on foot up to the peak.

You could see the whole length of the island from up there, and across the straits far into the mainland. But I looked north. There in the distance I could see the little towers of Illyria City rising up between barren mountains and blue sea, with the silvery Beacon, like a pawn from a chess set, floating on the water, mysterious and playful – and as alien to everything around me as a starship from the Andromeda galaxy.

I couldn’t go back there. The police and O3 would have put everything together by now: the stolen syntec, the money withdrawn from the bank accounts, the Holist League membership… And the AHS would have marked me as a dangerous deserter.

But I wanted to look, and remind myself that it was real, and that up there people were still living out their ordinary lives: the VR arcades bleeping and humming along the esplanade, the subway trains hissing into Main Station, the headlines rolling by outside the News Building, the security robots watching the streets with their sad, blank eyes…

Only a few months had gone by after all.

I turned away from the City and looked around at the rest of the huge panorama stretched out beneath me: the sea, the sky, the human settlements scattered like handfuls of dice.

Somewhere up the coast there, just out of sight, was the little cove of Aghios Constantinos where I used to go with Ruth when I was a child, the place where we’d once found a tortoise.

I was looking out at all this, but I wasn’t a part of it. It seemed to me that I had lost all possibility of ever feeling part of it again.

I remember two Illyrian fighters came darting noiselessly overhead, Deltas, with the cold Eye of Illyria in their bellies glaring down at me accusingly, as fierce and as harsh as the eyes of Archbishop Christophilos glaring out on the impoverished towns and villages of the Peloponnese.

There is no soul , the jets seemed to say,

Only the measurable is real…

Then they jumped sideways and were streaking away in another direction over the mountains of the mainland.

When I got back to the town I went to the Post Office and tried to make a telephone call. I had it in my mind to speak to Marija, but when I got through to her number a strange male voice answered.

‘Marija Mejic? No, she moved out a month ago. No, sorry, I’ve no idea where she’s gone.’

With more reluctance I tried another number.

‘Hello,’ came a familiar voice, fragile, artificially bright. ‘This is Ruth Simling, Little Rose…’

I opened my mouth to speak, but found I had nothing at all to say.

I put down the receiver.

‘Hey! Flower! We’re going down to level Nine, why don’t you come?’

Five figures stood on a giant scallop shell, floating in mid-air. They were beautiful, with brilliant hair billowing around their heads. Two were quite naked, the others wore marvellous shimmering garments whose colours were constantly changing.

‘Flower’ looked up at them. She was two metres tall with dazzling blue eyes. Her robes were decorated with a design of coloured birds that really moved, beating their wings and turning their heads as they flew round and round her body.

‘Oh no, not Nine. I’m tired of Nine. Why’s everybody always going there?’

‘Because that’s where everybody’s going, of course!’ laughed one of the naked ones. She looked like Botticelli’s Venus.

The scallop and its passengers disappeared and reappeared again, disappeared and reappeared, restlessly slipping in and out of the world.

‘Well, I’m not,’ sulked Flower, looking away from them into the distance, where another group of beautiful people were dancing around a enormous golden phoenix, its fierce beaked face glaring down at them from the midst of brilliant flames.

‘Alright, be like that,’ sniffed Venus. ‘Has anyone told you yet, Flower, that you’re no fun any more? You’re just…’

But the sentence was never finished because Venus, her scallop, and the rest of its crew all vanished from the world.

Flower sniffed, looked towards the phoenix and gave a little snort of impatience, then looked in the other direction, where a group of naked figures were gambolling in an enormous fountain. Then, with another sniff, she too vanished from the world.

Not far away stood Little Rose. She had a fine-looking body herself, but even in SenSpace, though you could chose any body you wanted, you still had to provide the animation, and it is animation that really makes a body seem beautiful. Even with her pretty face and nice figure, Little Rose seemed cowed and drab by comparison with the beautiful beings all around her.

She no longer liked the City without End TMso she had taken to wandering the SenSpace worlds. This was Fantasia, where young Illyrians tended to gather when they accessed SenSpace from VR arcades. It was a show-off place, a place where SenSpace technology exploded in pyrotechnics of electronic virtuosity.

Little Rose sighed.

She crossed to another SenSpace world called Mountain, full of flower meadows and snow-capped peaks and extras in lederhosen singing and dancing by bubbling streams.

She crossed over again to a place called Alhambra, where there were endless fountains and cloisters and rectangular ponds full of colourful fish. She sat down to watch them gliding through the water, gold, red, white. There was a piebald one that always amused her. Some glitch must have crept into the program, because every hour this piebald fish leapt instantaneously from one side to the other of the pool.

A familiar figure appeared in the distance and came towards her.

‘Little Rose, where have you been?’

‘Oh it’s you Sol.’

‘Yes, it’s me. What’s the matter? Aren’t you going back that lovely home of yours?’

‘No, I’m not. I’m bored of that place.’

‘Oh well, I’m sure there’s somewhere else where you could feel at home. Maybe somewhere more rural, or…? But I don’t know. You tell me. You’ve been through a lot of worlds recently.’

Little Rose shrugged. ‘I don’t want to live in any of them.’

She laughed wryly, ‘George would be amazed to hear me say this, but I’m sick of SenSpace.’

‘Are you missing George?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

Undetected by Little Rose, a new and senior welfare officer now took charge of the electronic projection called Sol Gladheim. The SenSpace Welfare Service was quite worried about Little Rose. There had been case conferences about her, and strategy meetings. Perhaps it was time, people had said, to take a firmer line?