The Holy Machine

47

Little Rose was sitting at her kitchen table having coffee with Sol Gladheim.

‘You know,’ she was saying, looking out of the window at her garden, ‘I’ve half a mind to take out all those red rose bushes down there and have a little apple orchard instead. What do you think?’

‘I think that would be very nice,’ said Mr Gladheim. ‘It would be a nice place to go out and sit sometimes. Perhaps you could– ’

Little Rose turned round in surprise. Mr Gladheim had frozen, his mouth open in mid-sentence.

‘Sol?’

A horizontal section slid sideways out of the middle of his body – and disappeared.

‘Sol!’

Another section slid away – and his legs disappeared below the knee.

‘Sol!’

She jumped up and rushed to him but his face vanished. Then the rest of his body slid away in three successive horizontal slices. There was nothing left of him at all.

Little Rose ran to the window.

The garden had changed. All the alterations and improvements she had made had vanished. It had reverted to the form it had when she first moved in. And, leaning on a spade and talking over the fence to her neighbour, Mr Topalski, was the ‘extra’ who had inhabited her house before she arrived, in the shape of an elderly man called Mr Philips.

‘Mr Topalski!’ Little Rose called, running out of her back door. ‘What’s happening?’

She knew the old Pole was also an extra and not a real person, but he had always been a good neighbour to her all the same. (Nothing was too much trouble. He was always willing to help out.) Now he didn’t show any sign that he had even heard her. Nor did Mr Philips. Their voices rose and fell conversationally, but as she drew near to them, she realized their words meant nothing at all.

‘Yabbly yibbly yabbly yibbly,’ went Mr Philips.

‘Yibbly yabbly yibbly yabbly,’ went Mr T, with an authentic Slavonic accent.

Two gardens away a little boy was riding round his garden on a bicycle.

‘Jimmy!’ screamed Little Rose, ‘JIMMY!’

Jimmy took no notice at all.

And, far overhead, huge symbols went streaming across the sky:

Poor Little Rose. When she turned round, she found her kitchen too had changed. All the alternations she had made, the tiles, the paint, the furniture, had vanished. The fabrics and fittings had all reverted to their default settings. The house was identical again to the copies of it that recurred every five kilometres, north, south, east and west.

‘There’s some technical glitch,’ she told herself, ‘that’s all it is. The SenSpace system is temporarily down. That’s all. They’ll fix it in no time.’

And she reached up to lift the SenSpace helmet off her head.

But of course there was no helmet. She wasn’t wearing a SenSpace suit, she wasn’t in a SenSpace room and she had no corporeal arms to remove a helmet even if it had been there. The nerves that once operated the flesh and blood limbs of Ruth Simling, were now wired directly into a SenSpace radio transmitter and from there were connected to the SenSpace net. The muscles they had once controlled had long since been removed and incinerated.

Little Rose ran through her house and out into the street. A policeman was out there going about his rounds.

‘Help me!’ she called out to him. ‘What’s going on? Help me please!’

But he took no notice at all.

She began to run. The City went on forever.

It went on forever, but it repeated itself every five kilometres. After the Residential Area where Little Rose lived, there was Park, with fountains and trees and a lake. A group of children were dancing ring-a-roses on top of a small green hill. They danced round and round, singing in bright voices, and taking no notice at all of Little Rose as she went running by.

All across the sky, the giant symbols marched:

After Park was Downtown where illuminated signs flooded the streets with reckless colour. Last time Little Rose was in her nearest Downtown those coloured lights had advertised shops and services but now they too had gone back to their default settings and had nothing to say but their own names:

‘RED!’ one sign shouted, flooding a street in crimson, ‘RED! RED! RED!’

‘B – L – U – E ! ! !’ another proclaimed, letter by letter.

Another flickered between two colours:

‘Green. ORANGE Green. ORANGE….’

Little Rose glimpsed a reflection in an orange-drenched window. It vanished, then reappeared again in green, a strange stick figure, a diagramatic woman, a mere lattice of lines without flesh or substance.

It was her. It was Little Rose. It was all that was left of her.

‘RED! RED! RED!’

‘Green. ORANGE Green. ORANGE….’

‘B – L – U – E ! ! !’

After Downtown was Rough Area. This was the place where City without End^TM residents could go to smash windows and visit strip clubs and get into fights with gangsters without ever getting hurt. None of the windows were broken now. Pimps and gangsters’ molls talked gibberish to each other on the street corners without even looking at the strange stick-woman running by.

‘Yibble yabble yibble yabble…’

It was the same in the Millionaire Zone and the Artists’ Quarter. It was the same when she came to the next Residential Area. A blackbird trilled in the branches of a Chinese plum tree. A ginger cat crossed her path. The peaceful sound of unseen extras mowing unseen lawns wafted through the imaginary air as she came to the exact counterpart of her own street, the exact replica of her own house, the exact replica of Mr Topalski, washing his Buick in his front yard, under a sky full of meaningless signs.