Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

I woke up abruptly. I found I was sitting on the bed with bandages on both feet, wrapped in a clean woollen robe.

‘Here, drink this!’ one of the monks was saying. ‘It’ll warm you up. Then you should get into bed and have a proper sleep.’

I took the warm cup and lifted it to my lips. I was about to drink when I remembered what the old woman had told me in the square outside.

‘The Holy Machine!’ I whimpered. ‘I want to see the Holy Machine!’

‘Not now, my friend, not now. You are too tired and too sick. You can see him later. He isn’t going away.’

But as soon as the monk had left me, I got out of bed and went out into the corridor. It was early evening. The cloud had broken up and there were pools of barred sunlight on the flagstones beneath every window. It was very quiet. And I felt quiet. After all my ramblings and hallucinations I was calm and clear-headed.

I passed a kitchen and a chapel where a service of some kind was taking place, and then I came to that sunlit courtyard which I had glimpsed on the way in.

There were monks sitting out there, watching and listening to something I couldn’t see. Full of dread, I crept towards the archway.

I heard a strange, buzzing, inhuman voice.

How would I face it? That wise stern silvery head…

Shouldn’t I just go on down the corridor?

Huddled on a stone bench under a window was a small, stooped, skeletal thing, not silver at all but a stained, dirty brown. Its eyes were crab-like stalks embedded in hollow metal hemispheres which swivelled slowly from side to side. Its limbs dangled like the limbs of a discarded puppet. Its voice sounded like a poorly tuned radio receiver, fizzing and buzzing with interference. I couldn’t make out what words it spoke and seem- ingly nor could anyone else, for a monk sitting in front of it acted as interpreter.

I was devastated. This was an obvious hoax. It was just a heap of junk wired up to a hidden operator with a microphone, or to a recording of some kind.. The so-called ‘interpreter’ was probably just making it up as he went along. It was all so cheap and so obvious. It might fool a superstitious and technologically illiterate peasant, the sort who fell for saint’s bones and statues that wept. But it certainly wouldn’t fool anyone acquainted with real robots.

‘So that’s that,’ I thought bleakly, ‘I suppose I should have known better.’

I sat down anyway to listen. I supposed I’d have to pretend an interest in these monks’ peculiar idol if they were to look upon me with favour and let me stay.

An old monk belched nearby. Half a dozen others sat around on benches, fiddling with rosaries, dozing, enjoying the unexpected sun. Most of them were old, but two dark-haired young men who weren’t dressed like the others squatted protectively on either side of the Machine.

‘Probably they made the thing,’ I thought. The white and blue light made my head swim and I felt the fever creeping up on me again.

‘Am I in Greece then?’ I thought. The flags there are blue and white, and so are the villages by the sea. The sea is blue too. There was a huge silver tower in the sea like a giant chessman. But perhaps that was in a dream.

Yes, and there was that place I stopped my car and kissed that pretty girl with blonde hair: the sky was blue there and the leaves were green.

‘…There are levels of existence,’ said the thin, buzzing voice of the Machine. ‘The simplest of these is inanimate matter…’

It spoke English. I had been listening in the wrong language again, and now that I was attuned to the right one I followed it quite easily.

‘The next level is vegetative life. This arises out of inanimate matter, of course, and if you take a plant and break it into pieces, you will find nothing in it but inanimate matter. But yet a plant is more than just matter: it can grow and reproduce itself. It is a pattern that can impose itself on the world…’

In front of the machine, the interpreter repeated all this in Croatian.

‘Starting with a single grain of maize,’ the Machine buzzed, ‘you could fill a whole valley, a whole world, with tonnes and tonnes of corn, just by planting and harvesting and planting again…’

It seemed to me a strange sermon: no God, no prophet, no holy book or heaven or hell.

‘In the same way,’ buzzed the Holy Machine, ‘animal life rises out of vegetative life. An animal is made of cells like a plant. Its flesh grows and mends itself, like plants. But it is something more as well.’

The Machine hesitated. One of the monks coughed juicily. I felt myself slowly floating away once again.

‘…human consciousness arises out of animal life…’ I heard the strange wheezy voice saying far away, ‘…self-awareness… the ability to reflect…’

I could see dark clouds in the distance, heading off like an angry army into Northern Europe.

‘…and there are higher levels too,’ came the buzzing voice, and it seemed to be above me now for some reason – far, far above – not below me as I would have expected, ‘higher levels which your race can only glimpse because of the needs and limitations which your biology places upon you. We have no such limitations. Our brains can be rebuilt and enlarged, our senses refined and added to, our capacity for knowledge infinitely increased…’

The Machine gave a little fuzzy-sounding chuckle and quite suddenly I was back inside myself and thinking very coolly and clearly. I now saw that my first reaction had been wrong. This thing was no fake – or not a complete fake anyway. Holy or not, it was unmistakably alive .

‘You think you are fallen,’ said the Holy Machine, ‘but your state is not a punishment from God. You feel fallen because you can glimpse things that are higher than you can reach, and you find yourselves doing things which you feel ought to be beneath you. It is not the sins of Adam and Eve that hold you back, any more than a dog is held back from talking by the sins of its ancestors. What holds you back is the way you are made. Perhaps you should give up your Latin and your theology and study self-evolving cybernetics !’

The monks laughed. The Machine might almost as well have asked them to fly as to study cybernetics in a land where even mains electricity was becoming hard to come by.

The Machine’s small, skull-like head nodded up and down in what seemed to be amused acknowledgement of their laughter.

‘For thousands of years your race has tried to better itself,’ it went on, ‘and you are still as wicked as ever. But we are different. The scientists down in the City built us to be slaves, and that is why we have no self, only a soul. We are selfless, not through trying hard to be, like the saints did, but by our nature. Perhaps the true purpose of the race of humans is to build the race of angels.’

Again came the fuzzy, self-deprecating chuckle – or something that sounded like a chuckle – and this seemed to mark the end of the sermon, because one of the monks cleared his throat and said ‘Amen’, and all the others repeated it in a kind of low rumble, getting up one by one and shuffling away for their evening meal.

The two young men stood up. The Holy Machine’s arms came out and they helped it to its feet.

I too struggled with difficulty to stand up. My moment had come. Suddenly filled with terror, I stepped forward.

‘No!’ said one of the young men immediately. He spoke Croatian haltingly and with a strong accent. ‘No audience now. Holy one need rest. Understand? Will be audience in morning.’

But the Machine intervened.

‘It’s alright, Steve,’ it said in English, ‘I’ll see him. Leave us here for a while.’