Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

‘My friends,’ the Machine said, and again it paused. For the first time it looked upwards. It saw the tense faces of two imams watching from high up in the minaret of the Etem Bey mosque, and it lost its train of thought.

‘Is it just straight sex you’d like?’ it asked, ‘Or was it something special?’

(The Albanian interpreter looked round in consternation, hesitated, then decided he couldn’t have heard correctly. ‘It’s a very special occasion today,’ he translated, ‘with so many people of both sexes here to see me.’)

Something went wrong there, thought the Holy Machine, and it began to squeak out a message, far above the highest frequency of human hearing, to House Control, far away in Illyria City:

‘ Please note equipment malfunction: there are some discontinuities of… ’

It stopped, realizing the futility of what it was doing, and struggled again to collect its thoughts.

‘My friends. If you read the history of your religions, much of it is about a struggle to rid yourself of the limitations of your bodies, and to live and to see and to understand the world as much as possible as if you were disembodied spirits. For bodies can seem like arbitrary and stupid things whose wants and desires drag the spirit down. Sometimes in the past, I myself may have seemed to have been saying this…’

Again the Machine paused.

‘I may have become awake, George,’ it mumbled to itself, while the interpreter was speaking, ‘but I am still a robot. I am still a machine…’

The Machine lifted its head. It saw a pretty young woman with blonde hair watching it from the plinth of the equestrian statue of Skanderbeg. She looked very much like Lucy, but she held in her arms a pump little fair-haired child.

‘I do not wish you to despise your bodies,’ it went on, ‘or to despise the animal part of your nature, or your instincts. I do not possess a body as you do. This body of mine is almost irrelevant to my actual nature. But I am a different kind of thing to you. Beings like me could not appear in the world without beings like you. I would not exist if I was not made by human beings…’

The Machine hesitated. It noticed an officer of the Albanian National Army, with twirled moustache and fierce blue eyes.

And then its vision failed again.

‘ Please note equipment malfunction… ’ it squeaked again.

‘I’m sorry,’ it said out loud. ‘You won’t be charged for this session. Please report to House Control who will be glad to provide a replacement.’

(The interpreter took a deep breath. ‘My words are free and for everyone,’ he translated, ‘and when I am gone, God will send another in my place.’)

Now totally blind, the Machine groped in the darkness for the thread of its speech.

‘The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,’ it said into the void. ‘Biology is a bridge, a slender bridge, the only bridge…’

And then: ‘I can put on something special for you if you…’

The interpreter turned round anxiously. Alec and Steve, at the foot of the dais, looked up in alarm and then rushed up the steps as the Machine slowly toppled to one side. Before they could reach it, it had crashed to the wooden stage.

The crowd went wild. In a matter of minutes, the whole stage was swarming with people. Alec and Steve were thrust aside and the plastic shell of the Machine was torn into pieces, not out of anger, but out of grief.

Then the dais collapsed. Several people were crushed. I believe four people died that day in the scrum. But I was near the back and got out without much difficulty, back again to the City.

As to the pieces, they became holy relics, cherished and quarrelled over by the many rival cults which were to grow up in the name of the Holy Machine.

Fakes came into circulation too. There were plenty of broken robots to hand.

It is said that if you were to gather together all the Machine’s extant fingers they would number more than thirty.

I had told Marija that, at midday on the 1st of October, I would be in the observation gallery at the top of the Beacon. I really had no idea if she’d come. But she did, at five past twelve, looking harassed and flustered and ready for a fight.

‘I’m getting really fed up with you, George Simling,’ she said, without even pausing to say hello, ‘I just hope you’re going to tell me what the hell you’ve been up to all this time, and why you’re so damned secretive, and why you keep running away.’

I smiled. Below us the towers of Illyria stood clear and bright in the autumn sunshine, and the distant mountains of the Outlands stretched away on every side, north and south and east, until they gradually disappeared into the haze.

First published in the United States of America in 2004 by Wildside Press.

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2010 by Corvus, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Chris Beckett 2004.

The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-0-857-89049-8

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