There was still energy within his electromuscles ready to be spent.
‘I have decided,’ he said. ‘Raise a battalion. We ride to Artemis.’
There was a change in the air. Every robot assembled in the square could feel it. The Turing Citizens that were huddled up around Karel; the Artemisian troops; the cutters and the lifters and the folders; all the robots who worked to disassemble the city and to turn it into folded metal to be transported across the plain to be eaten by the forges of Artemis, they felt it too.
The soldiers, the Storm Troopers, the commanders.
And Noatak, the traitor. Especially Noatak, the traitor. She felt it more than anyone.
There had been a shift in the engine, the sound of a changing of gear in the Artemis machine. Karel gazed at Noatak, watching how the robot shifted nervously, how she jumped and turned at the slightest sound, her newly bare metal panelling glinting in the weak sun.
Something was happening. Identical grey soldiers, the lapping waters of the Artemisian army, were receding into the station. What was happening?
The Artemisian engine had changed gear, but still it worked with relentless efficiency. The buildings of the city were still being stripped of their metal, the spoils of war taken away to be processed. Only now it was the turn of another sort of metal.
On command, Karel’s line of robots stepped forward. He found himself standing in the front row. A grey Artemisian infantry-robot walked the length of the line, inspecting them. And there was Noatak with them, speaking to the Artemisian commander, telling her the names of the assembled citizens, informing her of their jobs and their family details, yet jerking nervously at the sound of the troops marching into the station.
Karel felt hollow, like a northern ghost. There was nothing inside him but the emptiness of his dead son, the emptiness of his lost wife. A single raindrop fell on his metal shell, and his body rang like a bell. Another raindrop fell, and another. Karel heard the ringing as if from a great distance away.
‘And this one?’
The Artemis commander wore a silver flash on her shoulder. Apart from that, she was identical to the other infantryrobots that she commanded. But she could not compare with Noatak the traitor, who hovered at her shoulder in her bare metal body still stained with paint stripper; Noatak whose body panelling was hammered so smooth that the seams barely showed – how that contrasted with the cheap tin solder of the commander.
More rain drops fell on them all. Plink plink plink. Plink plink on Karel’s head.
‘This is Karel, ma’am,’ said Noatak.
‘Karel?’ The commander’s voice was strange. Or maybe it was just the rain, dripping down onto their bodies.
‘That’s right. Karel worked in Immigration. He controlled who entered our state…’
Once. Yesterday. Was it only yesterday?
‘So this is Karel,’ said the commander, thoughtfully.
‘Yes, ma’am. Do you know of him?’ Noatak looked uncertain, nervous.
As well she should. What was she doing, standing here, when Axel was lying dead, back in their flat? If their flat was still even there
…
‘He is unusual within this city,’ continued Noatak. ‘His mother was…’
‘No matter,’ said the commander, turning to watch the soldiers still marching into the station. ‘We need transport.’
Axel dead on the floor.
‘Noatak,’ said Karel, quietly, his voice almost unheard below the pattering of the raindrops.
‘Now this is Beryl,’ said Noatak, anxious to move on. Karel moved as fast as a spring snapping back. He shoved the traitor, tripped her, seized her head and smashed it onto the wet slippery ground, badly denting the skull. Noatak made to get up, but Karel kicked her feet away, slammed her head on the ground again. That was it: he felt himself being pulled away, hauled up by two infantry-robots.
The commander was standing before him again.
‘I had heard that he had a temper,’ she was saying. ‘Better not let him give vent to it. Take him into the station now.’
Karel heard Noatak emitting an electronic whine.
‘Turn it off,’ ordered the commander. ‘Or, if it’s a fault in your voicebox, get it fixed. Swap it for the voicebox from one of these Tokvah. Now get back up. We have to get all these processed.’
Karel twisted, lashed, kicked at his captors to no avail. As he was dragged backwards into the station he saw Noatak, head badly dented, still working her way down the line of robots.
The well-oiled machine of the Artemis invasion processed Karel.
He thought of his conversation with Banjo Macrodocious, just a few days ago.
Don’t you realize that if you had emerged in Artemis we wouldn’t even be having this conversation? You would already be owned by the state! Every item there, every rock, every mine, every robot is nothing but property.
And now he, Karel, was nothing but property. Nothing more than metal, and Artemis did not distinguish between the metal of the body and that of the mind.
The infantryrobots twisted free his arms and his legs, the easier to control him. They laid his body on the station floor. He craned his head this way and that, trying to see what was going on.
Engineers brought forward metal and bent it to make a chassis. They worked so quickly, following a well- practised drill. Metal wheels were then rolled up on the rails, the chassis fixed over them.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Karel. No one answered him.
Six engineers approached carrying a shiny diesel engine, no doubt freshly unloaded from an Artemisian truck. They took it over to the half-built frame and slotted it into place. It fitted perfectly. Karel was impressed, despite himself, by this Artemisian efficiency. Already, side panelling was being pop-riveted into place, and the engine was being coupled to the wheels.
A diesel locomotive was taking shape before his eyes.
Someone took hold of Karel and rolled him onto his front. They started to strip the panelling from his body. They rolled him onto his back and completed the operation, leaving his head and naked body lying helpless on the floor, whilst next to him they went on constructing the train. His bare electromuscle touched cold stone. It ached.
They were welding the seams of the locomotive now: sparks dripping down onto the floor near his head.
And then he felt himself being moved again. He felt hands inside his body, someone touching his coil, unplugging his mind from his body.
Nothing.
Turing City changed shape by the hour. The broken-rock roads grew a block at a time, stamped into the ground by the Artemisian troops as they marched. Crossroads appeared, sending new twisted metal branches of tracks and thoroughfares reaching through the heart of the city. They were foreign roads, alien roads, made of stone from broken buildings, gravel and shattered concrete stirred up from foundations, all stamped flat by the pounding feet of the invaders.
These roads spread through the city like organic life, creeping through the cracks, tipping over buildings that had stood for decades. Like organic life they sucked the life of the city away: on Artemisian carts loaded with the stacked metal that had been columns, the folded metal that had been decorative panelling, the bundled metal that had been minds…
The galleries with their intricate iron work, their stained glass, their leafwork… all were now empty shells, the ground a pointillistic nightmare of broken and trodden paint tubes scattered here and there by the invading forces. Dislodged marble rubble from broken fountains rolled multicolour tracks through the colours that were being
