and copper, gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and so they went away and they mined ore and they smelted it and they made wire, just like that in their own heads. But the wire they made was straight and smooth and unthinking.
‘“How do we twist it?” asked Gamma, holding the wire in her hands. “Where do we begin? This is just a piece of wire. I see nothing here. No sense of love or fear, no happiness or sadness or yearning or satiety…”
‘But Alpha looked at the wire in another way.
‘“I see none of those things,” he said. “But I can do this…” and he bent the wire around, twisting it over itself.
‘“Now a current flows,” he said, and he twisted again, “now it doesn’t.” And he repeated the movement over again. “Off and on,” he said.
‘“Life and death,” said Gamma. “But there is no emotion there.. .”
‘“Maybe not,” said Alpha. “But emotion is not all there is to a mind. I can do this…”
‘He twisted the wire some more, making two living twists, one larger than the other.
‘“Now it recognizes, more or less,” he said.
‘“More or less?”
‘“Five twists are more than four. Seventy is less than one hundred. More or less.”
‘“More or less? What sort of a mind is that? That’s just numbers. Does it understand that love is more than justice, or that sorrow is more than pain?”
‘“No, but…”
‘“Then stop wasting my time!” And she walked from the mountain ledge where Alpha worked, out into the golden sunset. (For I should say that in those days all sunsets were golden, and the world was beautiful and that metal ore littered the ground.)
‘Alpha sat for some time, but the idea had taken hold of him, as such ideas do with men, and he worked through the night, twisting the wire back and forth. He found he could twist the wire to one hundred positions by rotation around the axis of the wire, and a further one hundred positions by pitch. He could make it add, subtract, multiply and divide; it could look at different parts of its own extent; it could loop around itself and remember. He found that he could string these functions together, but he could do no more than that.
‘And in the end he saw that Gamma was right, that the task was pointless, and as morning dawned, he threw the wire to the floor and walked off in search of his wife so that he might apologize.
‘He looked for her to the north and south, to the east and west, but could not find her. In the end he returned to the ledge to see Gamma sitting there, the length of wire in her hands, and she looked up at Alpha, her eyes shining with awe and wonder.
‘“How did you do it?” she asked.
‘“I did nothing,” he bitterly replied.
‘“Did nothing? You brought life to this wire! It doesn’t feel, it doesn’t know, but the rudiments are there!’’
‘“The rudiments? It does nothing but add and take away!”
‘She stared at him.
‘“Alpha, please, don’t be like that to me. I am sorry for the way I spoke.”
‘“Be like what? I did my best, but I failed.”
‘“Failed?” She looked deeper into his eyes, and saw no deceit there. “Alpha, you did the hardest part! It is almost finished! Look, twist it here, twist it back on itself, see, and it will know itself. Twist it again, and it will know others…”
‘Alpha stared at her.
‘“I don’t see what you mean.”
‘So she showed him again, but he still didn’t understand.
‘And it has ever been thus, that men and women work together to make a child, but neither understands what the other has wrought, nor shall they ever.’ ‘And that is the story of Alpha and Gamma and how they made the first child.’
Simrock beamed at them, delighted.
‘Hold on,’ said Karel, ‘what about Beta?’
‘Oh yes, Beta. In some stories, it is said there was a third robot, Beta, who sat between Alpha and Gamma and placed the extra twists in the metal that moved it from the male understanding to the female understanding. Some say that Beta crept to the ledge in the night and added the extra twists. And some say that Alpha and Gamma never existed, there was only Beta.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Melt. ‘You’re Spontaneous, you have only just arrived here. How do you know all this?’
‘I don’t know.’
Karel was wondering aloud. ‘Where do these stories come from?’ he asked. ‘Stories of Four Blind Horses, of Valerie of Klimt, stories of Alpha and Gamma, of Nicolas the Coward. This world is built on stories, some of them we know, some of them we don’t even understand! Where do they come from?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Why does no one ever ask?’
‘It’s not woven into people’s minds to ask,’ said Melt. ‘Why should it be? They’re only stories.’
‘I’m asking!’
Karel was suddenly shaken, as if by a bolt of electricity. Morphobia Alligator had spoken of this. Robots like Karel, robots who could choose to do things that weren’t woven into their minds.
Robots who saw things that other robots did not.
Karel looked around. Melt, the robot who claimed to have forgotten his past, sat on one side, Simrock the Spontaneous robot on the other. All three of them on a forgotten road through the high mountains. He had once thought that that life in Turing City was liberal and edgy and cosmopolitan. Now it all seemed so safe and predictable, a tiny little island in a far corner of the world.
He had had to come up here to realize just how strange his world really was.
Was he the only one who saw it?
Wa-Ka-Mo-Do made his way from the radio room and out into Smithy Square, his gyros spinning. What was going on? What had happened in Ell?
Wa-Ka-Mo-Do imagined walking through that city. Ell was a beautiful place, set with towers tiled in blue, green and gold. The city was famous for its ceramics, it was said there wasn’t a surface in the city that wasn’t tiled. The robots of Ell made a red iron oxide glaze of a colour unsurpassed throughout Yukawa.
Now he imagined those tiled streets filled with the dead bodies of robots. Bodies slumped on the ground, their arms and legs entangled, their eyes lifeless and faint smoke emerging from their heads. What had the humans done there? What would they be doing in Ka? Jai-Lyn had asked for his help. There was something so pathetic about that request. They had only met for a few hours, and yet she had turned to him. Was that a surprise? Wa- Ka-Mo-Do was probably the most important robot she had ever met.
He walked from the Copper Master’s house into the daylight. The sun was bright, it thinned the black smoke, it threw the scorch marks across the tiled square into harsh relief.
The sight of the humans clustered around one of their cannons at the edge of the square irritated him. La- Ver-Di-Arussah was there, speaking to one of them.
She beckoned him to join her.
‘Honoured Commander, the humans have requested that we remove ourselves from the Copper Master’s house and relocate lower down the city.’ La-Ver-Di-Arussah was buzzing with energy. ‘I’ve already sent Ka-Lo-Re- Harballah down to secure an area around the Copper Market.’
Wa-Ka-Mo-Do looked at the broken roof of the Emperor’s palace, looked at the strange cannons that the humans were erecting all around the perimeter of the square. They seemed to move of their own accord, their strange metal muzzles constantly scanning the sky.
‘How are the robots of the city?’ asked Wa-Ka-Mo-Do.
