The Holy Machine

41

Lucy didn’t eat. She took everything she needed in liquid form: sugar for energy, lemon and egg-white to feed her living skin. So I ate alone that night in a small, dusty hotel in a village some twenty or thirty kilometres outside Ioannina.

It was good to get away from the city and the crowds. There were still plans to be made, but they could wait. I had enough money to live comfortably for several years in the Outlands. I could afford to relax over my casserole of lamb and my bottle of wine, knowing that my beautiful Lucy was waiting for me upstairs, and that she would hold me and give herself to me all night if I wanted, and all the next night and all the next…

Things were not so bad after all. It was just in Ioannina that it had got difficult, but we’d finished our business there now: paying money into various Greek banks and acquiring for Lucy, with the help of Manolis’ counterfeiter friend, a fake British passport to match her accent. (Illyrian passports, it seemed, were too high-tech for the counterfeiter’s skill.)

‘So you are from Illyria?’ enquired our host, a small, rotund ingratiating man, as I wiped the rich juices from my plate with a chunk of bread.

‘That’s right. From Illyria, but I’ve decided that I don’t like the place. Now Epiros, Greece, that is another thing.’

He smiled.

‘My wife is actually British,’ I went on, for no especial reason except to try out how it sounded to say it.

‘British!’ exclaimed the hotelier. ‘My sister-in-law is British. She only lives in the next village. She would love to meet your wife I’m sure, if you are staying here for a while.’

‘That would be nice,’ I said, vaguely. I wasn’t planning to stop long, anyway, and the man had just given me a very good reason for leaving first thing in the morning.

I finished my wine, wished him goodnight and went upstairs.

Lucy was lying on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. She smiled when I came in, reached up to me. I laughed, throwing off my clothes and diving happily into her arms.

‘Oh Lucy, this is good, this is good… Are you glad to be free? I am. I am so glad!’

After sex, we lay companionably side by side, while I enthused at length over the life that lay ahead of us. I felt so optimistic, so proud, so fond of Lucy.

‘Listen Lucy,’ I said to her, ‘I want to say this, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. Yes I know you are a machine, but why should that make a difference? I am a machine too really, so are we all. It’s just that I’m a machine made of flesh and bone…’

Yes, and if someone cut me open they’d find components inside me: a liver, lungs, kidneys, a spleen, a brain that was a mess of grey jelly… strange things, things I’d never seen, which were just as alien to me and to my conception of myself as any components that Lucy might contain.

‘It makes no difference, Lucy. It makes no difference to me at all. I love you just the same.’

‘I love you too, George. I love you so much!’

I knew quite well that these words were just part of her programmed routines, but they still excited me. I pulled her to me again.

‘Have you finished now?’ Lucy suddenly asked me, when I was really sated and was settling down contentedly for my night’s rest.

‘Yes, I’m going to sleep.’

‘Sleep. Sleep is…’

I sat up. ‘Is there a problem Lucy? You seem to worry about this every night!’

‘Sleep. Sleep is… What is it?’

I laughed.

‘I bet I know what your problem is. I bet you were supposed to wake the men up if they went to sleep back in the ASPU House. Isn’t that right? You had to wake them up and tell them their time was up. Is that right? Well, you don’t have to now. We just have to lie down and sleep.’

She lay rigid beside me.

‘But what is sleep?’

‘Sleep? It’s when we lose consciousness for a bit. Rest. Download. Don’t you have to download at night back at the ASPU House?’

Actually every night that we were in Epiros she did still download, broadcasting all the day’s input in digital ultrasound to a House Control that could no longer hear her, a little like an Outlander dutifully praying at night to a nonexistent God. But it was an operation that she could complete in a few seconds.

Lucy said nothing, so I settled myself once more and was wandering away in my mind through the streets of a labyrinthine city, partly Illyria, partly Ioannina, when she suddenly spoke again.

‘I will read,’ she said flatly.

‘You what?’

‘I will read,’ she repeated, getting out of bed and going to sit on a chair in the corner of the room.

I had brought her some stuff to read – elementary science books, things like that – and she had been looking at one earlier. She picked it up and began methodically working through the pages. She didn’t need a light. Her eyes were different from ours.

Well why not? I thought. She doesn’t need to sleep. So why not use the night-time for reading?

I settled down again, down into the strange yet familiar city, down into the deepest of sleeps.

Some hours later I woke up with a full bladder. The bed beside me was still empty. From across the room, in the darkness, came the sound of a turning page.

There was something eerie about it.

But I was still half asleep. My uneasiness was transient. I pissed in a chamberpot, climbed back into bed and slid back down again into sleep.