few fragments are woven into the minds of children, along with other memories. Those memories contain the sign’ – Nettie’s finger made the symbol of the dot on the circle – ‘woven into them. We few who carry those memories are charged with the task of assembling the true knowledge back into the whole. Of rediscovering our true reason for being.’
Susan was silent for a moment, thinking.
‘But that’s not right,’ she said finally. ‘Robots weren’t built. We evolved, just like all the other life on this planet. There is no purpose, no reason for our existence. We just are!’
Nettie smiled sadly. ‘You can’t see it at the moment, Susan. Search your memories. It’s in there somewhere. You’ll see that I’m right.’
Susan didn’t think so, but she didn’t feel confident enough to disagree.
‘Tell me about the Book of Robots.’
‘Ah,’ said Nettie, pausing to examine her progress with the electromuscle. A loop of wire had popped out, further up the pattern. She tried to pull it back into place. ‘The Book,’ said Nettie, absently.
Suddenly, she seemed to remember where she was and took a look around the room, but no one now seemed to be paying them any attention. ‘Well,’ she continued. ‘Some people hold that assembling all the fragments of memory will be an impossible task. They are too diffuse and too much has been forgotten.’ She nodded. ‘I must admit, I can understand their point of view, but I am not so defeatist. My mother made me that way.’
Susan nodded.
‘But there are those who believe something else to be true. They hold that the memories are lost and that we should not waste our time trying to bring them together again. Instead, we should search for the Book of Robots, the design for the original robots. It contains the pattern in which the original minds were woven: the philosophy, the rules, everything. Find the book, they say, and we will know our purpose.’
‘Okay,’ said Susan, ‘where should we look?’
Again, Nettie drew a circle on the air.
‘Large circle,’ she said, ‘our planet of Penrose. Small circle,’ she drew a smaller circle on top, ‘Kusch. The continent on the top of the world. The birthplace of the robots. That is where we should be looking for the Book of Robots.’
Karel and Kavan
‘What’s your name, driver?’
Karel’s hands tightened around the brakes at the surprise of again hearing a voice. It didn’t matter, the train wasn’t moving. He had sat waiting in this valley for hours now, just watching the wet snowflakes melting into a slushy mess on the rails ahead.
‘I asked, what’s your name?’
‘Karel,’ he replied.
‘Karel, my name is Kavan. Do you know who I am?’
‘You’re the leader of the Artemis troops. You led the invasion of Turing City.’
‘That’s right. And you’re the robot who drove the train from which all those troops mysteriously disappeared. Tell me about it.’
‘I’ve already said all there is to say.’
Silence. Wet snowflakes falling on rock.
‘You’re very brave for a robot whose coil I could have crushed at a moment’s notice.’
‘I’m not being brave; I’m just telling the truth. I’ve been over this many times already.’
‘Hmm. Tell me, do you believe in ghosts, Karel?’
‘Ghosts? No. That wasn’t twisted into my mind. I’m not superstitious. We weren’t superstitious in Turing City.’
‘We aren’t superstitious in Artemis, either. We don’t need to be. We just believe in iron and the forge. But up here, up in the north, it seems that things are different. They twist the minds of the robots up here to look for patterns in everything. The snow blows down the valley and they look for a death. The day moon casts a shadow over the sun and they look for the coming of a stranger. They twist suspicion into the metal of their children’s minds and think nothing of it.’
Why is he telling me this? wondered Karel. Why does the leader of the Artemisian army want a lowly train driver to know this?
‘No wonder all the ghost stories come from the north,’ continued Kavan. ‘It is in their nature to believe in such things.’
‘Oh.’
‘But that makes me suspicious,’ said Kavan. ‘When I hear about what happened to the troops that were being carried on your train, it makes me think about war. Do you know, Karel, that one’s tactics reflect one’s philosophy? In Turing City you hid behind your supposed superiority of mind, and behind your City Guard with their superior bodies. Artemis has been so successful because we know that Nyro’s philosophy transcends the metal of our minds. And now we meet a state where the robots look for patterns in the night, and they attempt to fight us in that manner…’
‘I can’t help you,’ said Karel, impatiently. ‘I’ve told you all that I know.’
The slightest of pauses.
‘I’ve heard of you, Karel. Even before I entered Turing City, I had heard of you. Not by name, as such, but through the story of the robot with the hidden mind.’
‘Every robot’s mind is hidden.’
‘To a certain extent, yes. But there is something special about your mind. It is almost the embodiment of the fight between our states.’
‘There is no fight. Artemis has won.’
‘So we have. And I wonder how you feel about that?’
‘You killed my son. You took my wife from me. How do you think I feel?’
‘A true Artemisian would not care. Are you a true Artemisian, Karel?’
Karel was silent.
‘No reply? Not that I expected one. Well, we leave soon to head further north. Another kingdom to conquer. And then what, Karel, and then what? What would you do if you were in my position?’
The voice was soft, almost as if he were genuinely interested in Karel’s reply. Karel waited a moment before he gave it. ‘Well, I suppose, if I were you, if I had the chance, I would…’
‘Yes?’ asked Kavan. ‘Yes?’
‘I would crush my own coil and have done with it.’
Karel heard Kavan laughing loudly as he broke the connection.
Kavan
The torture chair sat in the middle of the stone room. It was quite ingenious in its own way: a little bowl into which the twisted metal of a mind was placed, a little hole for the coil to poke through and to be plugged into the taut wires that stretched down the chair’s arms and back. Wires like electromuscle that could then be plucked and strummed like a lute, and the delicious pain of feedback sent playing through the coil into the mind itself. An exquisite device, thought Kavan, and indicative of the minds of the robots that had inhabited this kingdom. A device entirely contradictory to Nyro’s philosophy, for it was not the Artemisian way to treat a mind as anything more than so much twisted metal.
The prisoner that Eleanor brought into the room still wore her original body: she had not yet donned the standard grey body of an Artemisian infantryrobot. She looked at the torture chair and wriggled her fingers slowly in fear.
‘Ignore it,’ said Eleanor. ‘This is Kavan. Tell him about the Kingdom of the North. You say you have been there.’
‘Once,’ said the prisoner. She was small, her legs too short in proportion to her body, her arms too long. Kavan had seen the locals climb the mountainsides, seen how they would fall forwards to scamper up on all fours. Idly, he had wondered if he should get some of his troops to adopt that same design for fighting in this terrain. He dismissed the thought for the moment: it would be something to discuss later with the forges of Artemis City, when and if he returned there.
The prisoner relaxed a little. She now ignored the chair and adopted the storytelling pose that Kavan had
