twenty years ago there were citizens who would have turned your mother back out onto the Zernike plain when she carried you here as a child. And maybe they would have been right to do so, because even twenty years ago, when all was at peace, there was something about you that some never did trust. Well, that was then, and this is now. Just be happy Karel that your side has won. I say you should think yourself lucky we don’t take things further. As it is, I say leave us alone and go home. Go back up to your apartment and wait for your friends to arrive.’
There was more uneasy stirring in the crowd. Karel’s fury burned like a jet of white flame now, a flame intense enough to melt metal. But still he held himself in check.
‘I am as much a citizen of this place as you are, Garfel. More so, because I am staying here and not running.’
Garfel laughed. ‘Or are you staying here because you, at least, have nothing to fear?’
He turned to the assembled robots.
‘Come on, it’s time to move out. We need to reach the sea before dawn.’
Garfel’s words brought a momentary stillness to the robots in the hall. Karel understood why. For all of them, this was it. This was the moment when their flight became real. For these robots, Turing City was no more.
‘You could stay,’ suggested Karel.
‘No, you can stay,’ said Garfel. ‘But you can also be merciful. Send down Susan, we’ll take care of her.’
And the white flame was there again, threatening to melt Karel from the inside.
‘What about Axel?’ he asked.
‘He can stay. He’s half Artemisian after all.’
Something clicked in Karel’s mind. He lashed out, buckling and badly hurting his hand on the whale metal of Garfel’s chest. He didn’t care, he didn’t feel it. He was a storm of metal, kicking and gouging and scratching and stabbing, but he could find no purchase on Garfel’s new body. Still he didn’t care. Still he fought.
But Garfel was too strong. He’d always had so much lifeforce and now he was clad in heavy whale metal. Slowly, he pushed Karel to the floor, stepping onto Karel’s left arm, bending it out of true, wrenching the electromuscle with his hand so that it fed back, making Karel let out an electronic scream.
Garfel released him, and Karel struggled to get up again, to attack Garfel, but another robot kicked his arm away, and he rolled across the floor, anger and pain flooding through his mind. He tried to rise again and was tripped once more. And then they were all over him, stamping on his chest, denting the panelling. They wrenched at his arm so that the metal bent and the electromuscle twisted painfully over the tear in his own panelling. A heavy whalemetal foot stamped down on his hand, crushing three of his fingers.
Anger gave way to pain, pain was swamped by despair. Through the legs of his attackers he could see the sea-grey bodies of his former fellow citizens gradually draining from the hall. None of them looked back in his direction.
Eventually the beating ended. Finally they let him alone.
‘Traitor…’ said Karel from the ground, his voice an electronic whine. Garfel stood over him, gazing down with his pale grey eyes.
‘How long,’ whined Karel, ‘how long were you planning this?’
Garfel said nothing; he just continued to stare down at Karel, who lay listening to the heavy tread of robots filing from the room.
Olam made his way along the street, eagerly scanning the windows and doorways for further prey.
‘You’ve never been to Turing City before, boy?’
Doe Capaldi was there at his side. It seemed as if Doe Capaldi was always there at his side, checking up on him.
‘Never,’ said Olam. ‘I’ve read about it, of course. It’s a lot smaller than I expected.’
‘You’re not seeing the real city here. We’re heading into the residential area, not the centre. We’re coming in from the east, stopping anyone escaping out this way.’
‘I know what we’re doing,’ snapped Olam. ‘You’ve been to Turing City before, I suppose?’
‘Naturally,’ replied Doe Capaldi, swinging around for a moment to check a sign of movement down a side street. An Artemisian infantryrobot emerged from a doorway down there and gave them an okay sign.
‘Yes,’ continued Doe Capaldi, ‘I came here several times as part of the ambassador’s retinue. On one occasion I was presented with a breastplate of electrum. It was a fine piece of work.’ He was silent for a moment, lost in memory. ‘The paint shops in the galleries are particularly fine, too. A pity we were not sent to ransack those instead, boy!’
‘Don’t call me boy,’ said Olam. ‘We’re equal now, both soldiers of Artemis.’
‘I’m still your sergeant,’ Doe Capaldi reminded him.
‘You hate me, don’t you?’ said Olam. ‘I tried to have you killed.’
‘I understand why you did it,’ replied Doe Capaldi smoothly. ‘It’s all down to the way you were made. I would expect nothing else from one of your class.’
Just one day ago the insult would have goaded Olam. But not now. Olam had killed and he felt different now. He wasn’t a commoner any more.
He lowered his voice. ‘Don’t speak to me like that, Doe Capaldi. I’m watching you, you know. You should watch me. One dark night in the middle of battle…’
‘You’re making too much of the past, boy. We’re all Artemisians now.’
Olam laughed nastily. ‘Yes, and I bet that hurts you a lot more than it hurts me. You’ve lost far more than I have, Doe Capaldi.’
But Doe Capaldi wasn’t even listening. He gave a signal, and his patrol moved to either side of the street, lost themselves in its doorways and shadows.
Something was coming.
Olam waited in the shadow cast by an ornamental metal pillar that climbed the side of one building.
There was movement further up the street, and for a moment Olam was plunged back into the stories of his childhood, of ghosts that rose up and stalked the world at night. Ghosts, the empty metal shells of bodies from which the mind had been taken, or which had merely died. Ghosts! Bodies that did not need minds to make them move, they hunted the world at night, searching for wire that they could draw from a sleeping child’s head, winding it out inch by inch. As the child slumbered, their dreams were turned to darkness as their life was spooled away, to be bottled up and reawoken in the perverted nightmare of a ghost’s shell.
Olam almost let out a whine of fear, but then he realized that these were not ghosts but the living citizens of Turing City. He could see the light in their eyes, dim and green and almost dissolved by the light of Zuse.
Why do they look so odd? he wondered. Their bodies were grey and misshapen, they marched two abreast in silence through the streets, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings.
‘Where are they going?’ The words were spoken so softly that Olam momentarily imagined they floated from the hollow lands, borne to him on the cold breeze as if the ghosts of the north were speaking to him. But no, it was only Doe Capaldi, leaning close to him in the shadow.
‘I don’t know…’
The misshapen robots marched silently past, their strangely wide feet planting themselves solidly on the smooth concrete of the road, pressing firmly down into shadow. Adults, children, young and old, all making their way through the night, two by two. And now the tail end of the procession had passed. Doe Capaldi gave the signal, and his squad began to move through the shadows of the moonlit city, silently following the grey ghosts.
Susan
‘Karel!’ gasped Susan. ‘What’s happened to you?’
Karel dragged his way into the room. She took in his injuries with a terrified stare. He couldn’t move one leg properly, a hand was badly mangled.
‘Speak to me, Karel!’
His voice was nothing more than an electronic whine.
‘Oh Karel! Was it Artemis? Are they downstairs?’
‘No…’
The forge had gone cold now. Still, there was tin, there was a little gold. She could do something with those.
