The Holy Machine

20

I remember that night, or a night soon afterwards, I had a vivid dream.

I was in a dark building searching along corridors and up and down stairs for a room which I knew I’d found there once before. It was a quiet light room, with chairs and a window overlooking a courtyard. But I couldn’t seem to find it, and the wider I searched the more forbidding the building became. Corridors were narrower. Staircases had missing railings or gaps where steps should have been. My hands became clammy with vertigo as climbed them. And the rooms that I found were either windowless or bare or were already occupied by other people.

Tony Vespuccio was in one, the playboy of the Word for Word office, whiling away an afternoon with a pretty young woman and a bottle of champagne.

‘Your own room?’ he laughed incredulously. ‘That needs a lot more guts than you’ve got George.’

In another a group of women were bathing in a plunge pool. When they saw me they looked at one another and shrieked with merriment.

In another room I peeked through a doorway and saw Marija naked on a bed, with Paul Da Vera moving above her.

And then I found myself in the basement, where it was cold and damp. There was a big room there like the lounge in the ASPU House, but it smelt of urine and drains. And the syntecs in there didn’t even vaguely resemble humans. They were just wooden marionettes with genitals painted on in red, jerking around on strings…

I ran from them, climbing a narrow, grubby little spiral staircase that led nowhere at all except to a single door at its top.

When I opened the door, there was Ruth dangling in her SenSpace suit.