He had an awl in his hand. All it would take would be a quick jab to the soft metal of the skull. He had done it so many times before, back when he was younger. On the battlefields of Zernike and Stark and Bethe.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ asked Gearheart, wonderingly. And then her voice hardened. ‘Do it, Spoole. It’s what Nyro would have done.’
Nothing but metal, thought Spoole. And some day his lifeforce would give out too. The pair of them would be melted down and perhaps the metal of their minds would flow together. Gearheart was right: it was what Nyro would have done. But was Nyro right?
‘Gearheart?’ he said.
There was no reply.
Spoole looked down at the blue wire that trailed from his awl, down his hand, over his arm.
‘Gearheart,’ he said, one last time.
He allowed the empty metal shell to tumble to the ground. He looked up at the city growing around him.
Spoole stood alone. Just as had been woven into his mind, a leader stood alone: a leader did not worry about procreation. This way Artemis was strong.
In the meantime, metal was raised on the land, metal would march and metal would die.
He looked down again at the empty metal body at his feet. Once it had contained a mind called Gearheart, now all there was was twisted metal.
Once there had been so many minds, and some day all there would be would be metal. Did it really matter in the end? Did it matter whether it was he or Kavan who led Artemis?
He heard the Scout entering the room behind him. He turned.
‘Yes, Leanne?’
‘Spoole, I have news of Kavan. He has left what remains of the army and has travelled north alone.’
‘What? Why?’
The Scout was deliberately not looking at the broken body of Gearheart.
‘No reason was given.’
What is Kavan doing? wondered Spoole. To leave his troops at this moment. What is he planning now?
Metal flowed across the world, he reflected. Kavan and Spoole, did it matter who led Artemis? Yes, he decided. Yes it did.
So Kavan had left his troops? More fool him, since his strength had lain in his ability to command. Who would he command now?
‘Leanne,’ he said. ‘I think it is time that we took a look at the new extent of our Empire. I think it is time that we met with Kavan. Notify General Sandale that we shall be travelling north. Make ready a train and two thousand troops.’
‘Yes, Spoole.’
And when I meet Kavan, it will be from a position of strength. And I will ask him, who will be the leader of Artemis now, Kavan?
It was morning, and yet Zuse, the night moon, still hung in the sky, late in setting this day.
Spoole looked up towards it, and the moon looked back down on a world of flowing metal.
Kavan
The wind was dying: occasionally it mustered the strength to drive furrows through the wet snow, to send a white spray of flakes tumbling down into the sea that sucked at the dark rocks below; but for the most part it just cooled the metal of his shell, blew patterns of salt crystals across the paint.
The sky was grey with low clouds, the sea iron-grey as it stretched to the northern horizon, and Kavan felt as if he was at the end of the world.
Eleanor and Karel stood beside him, gazing out over the water-slicked rock shelf that slid into the sea.
‘Why are you here, Kavan?’ asked Eleanor. ‘Would Nyro have come here looking for answers?’
Kavan didn’t reply. Eleanor was teasing him, he knew. She was goading him as she always did. Shull wasn’t conquered. They may have pushed troops to the four corners of the continent, but that didn’t mean that they truly possessed the lands they had occupied. That didn’t mean that Nyro’s philosophy yet operated in the minds of all the robots of Shull.
‘I think we need to be a little to the east,’ said Kavan. He turned and began to walk down the rocky slope, following the path of the land as it twisted around the hungry sea.
He saw it almost immediately. The land there ran down a slope to a shingle beach, and then back up again to a rocky island, almost cut off from the mainland by the waters that noisily sifted through the shingle.
A stone building stood at the summit of the island, red stains of long-rusted iron running down its sides.
‘What is it?’ asked Karel softly, the first time the robot had spoken that day.
Kavan didn’t know. The white stone of the building was like nothing he had seen before: more lustrous than marble, it almost seemed to glow in the grey morning light.
They walked down to the shingle beach. Opposite them, a worn set of steps, cut directly from the rock, rose out of the shingle and made their way up to the building.
‘The path must have been covered by the beach,’ observed Eleanor. ‘Just how old is that building, do you think?’
They climbed the path, and Kavan noticed how the orange-and-white stains of lichen covered its surface. The shells of the organic life forms that inhabited this land were stuffed into every crack, lining the walls below the tideline in obscene profusion.
The three robots drew abreast as they approached the structure, metal feet rattling on stone. It was such an odd shape, its walls rounded, not straight like that of normal robot construction. They curved up and over to form the roof, giving the building an organic shape. There were strange symbols carved in a line around it, just higher than a robot could reach. Kavan stared up at them, trying to make sense of them.
‘They look so familiar,’ said Eleanor, but Kavan didn’t think so. They just looked like a tangled mess to him.
They walked around the building, searching for an entrance. They found it on the far side, facing the north. A metal door, three symbols above it, engraved in the stone of the building. These symbols were larger than the others. Kavan stared at them for some time, trying to understand them. He couldn’t hold them in his mind.
‘What are they?’ he heard Karel wonder out loud.
Eleanor laughed. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ she said, disbelievingly. ‘You really don’t know?’
‘No,’ said Kavan. ‘I have never seen them before. Have you?’
‘No, I’ve never seen them before either, but I know what they are.’
‘How could you?’ demanded Karel.
‘Any woman would know,’ said Eleanor. ‘That one is the pattern that you twist to make a girl, and this is the pattern you twist to make a boy.’
Kavan gazed at the patterns.
‘What about the one in the middle?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. That one doesn’t make sense. A mind twisted that way wouldn’t think properly. It would have no sense of itself.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘The other carvings, the ones around the side of the building, they all make sense now. Or rather they don’t. They are all minds, after a fashion, but they wouldn’t work.’
They gazed at the symbols for a while longer, to the sound of the waves crashing below.
Eleanor had lost interest. ‘What sort of metal is this?’ she asked, touching the door. Kavan placed his hand on it. He could feel a little iron there, a little gold, a little tungsten. But there was something additional in the alloy, something that he had never felt before.
‘I don’t know,’ he confessed, looking at Karel, the Turing City robot who had grown up surrounded by a richness of metal.
‘You. Come and feel this. Do you recognize it?’
The other robot touched the door.
‘It feels like…’ he said. ‘No, I don’t know. But it’s like something I half remember…’
The waves crashed around the island. A shaft of watery sunlight fell down upon them. The wind had turned east; it curdled the clouds, breaking them up.
Kavan pushed at the door with all of his strength. It didn’t move.
‘It feels different here,’ said Karel.
