The Holy Machine

50

All the mountain roads were decayed and rutted. The way into the village of Anachromia was little more than a stony track climbing over a narrow pass and down into a stony valley. There were a few fields at the bottom of it but the crops grew so sparsely there that at first sight they didn’t seem to be cultivated at all. Overhead the sky was a leaden grey.

The streets of the village were empty, except for a few chickens and goats wandering the potholed paths between the rough stone houses. There were no children playing, no faces at windows looking out. The entire human population of the village – a hundred or so men, women and children – were gathered in the small village square. Under the supervision of a white-bearded priest holding aloft a silver crucifix, an adulteress was being publicly flogged by two sweating soldiers of the Greek Christian Army. Beside the priest stood the woman’s tiny, bewildered, husband, a meaningless smile on his face.

The woman cried out with each blow. Her husband winced. The priest muttered prayers. Some villagers smiled, some wept, some shouted abuse. In some way or another, everyone was busy with the ritual that was taking place.

But when the car appeared, the whole village turned to stare. A hundred gaunt and malnourished faces watched silently as the vehicle passed among them. Even the soldiers and the cuckolded husband stared, even the victim herself hanging from the whipping post. They all stared with the same blank incredulity as the foreigners went by: Lucy and I sitting stiff and upright as we approached them, passed through them and then proceeded slowly out of the village again, along another rutted track.

I think it must have seemed to those villagers that they were watching ghosts, visitants from a mythical age when there were televisions, Coca-Cola, a weekly bus down to Sparta – and there were tourists, those strange stiff wealthy beings who came down from Northern lands, and stared and took photographs, and seemed so stiff and inhibited, yet wore hardly any clothes.

The villagers watched until we had vanished from sight.

And then, no doubt, everyone assumed his or her part in the drama they had been playing out – weeping, shouting, praying, leering, looking stern…

In the car, as we bumped slowly out of the village and back onto the mountainside, we were both silent. Lucy stared straight ahead of her. I stared straight ahead of me. Every once in a while Lucy would ask a question in a flat, empty voice:

‘What are Greeks?’

‘What is hate?’

‘What are men?’

Occasionally I would give a surly answer. Usually I ignored her. Back in the ASPU House I had once told Lucy to ‘be herself’ and her face had suddenly drained of all semblance of humanity. She may not have understood my instruction, but in fact she had faithfully carried it out. The syntec’s real self was that blank thing. She was dreary, she was duller than the most dreary and vacuous human being.

And yet there was determination in her. She was ruthlessly indifferent to the loss of her flesh. But there were things, many things, that she wanted to find out.

‘What are women?’

‘Why are those people doing that?’

‘Why were syntecs made?’

Sometimes she’d ask questions about things she’d read.

‘What is flesh?’ she asked me several times. ‘What is flesh?’

The sky was dark. There was going to be another storm.

The track climbed down into a larger valley and we passed through a small town. Small boys chased after the car, banging on the door and demanding coins.

Outside the town hall, a huge face gazed down. Painted in lurid colours the local ruler, Archbishop Christophilos, marched triumphantly forwards under the Holy Cross, with brave moustachioed soldiers in bandoliers on either side of him and his enemies perishing all around: Muslims above, schismatics below, heretics to the left… And to the right the beacon in Illyria had been set ablaze and stern Greek soldiers were smashing goggle-eyed robots in the streets…

Epiros had once seemed exotic and dangerous to me, but it was really a client state of Illyria. This was the Peloponnese, the heartland of the Greek Christian Army. This was really the Outlands.

‘Where are we going?’ Lucy suddenly asked as we drove out of the far side of the bleak little town.

The very sound of her voice now infuriated me, so hollow, so completely devoid of the resonances of human experience. Several times I had dreamed of copying my Cretan namesake in that guestworker’s tale and ending Lucy’s pointless existence with a chisel driven through the computer in her chest.

But in real waking life, I could never forget that I was the one who had brought Lucy here, and I was the one who told her that it made no difference that she was a syntec and not a real human being. I couldn’t destroy her. I couldn’t even abandon her, because out here that would amount to exactly the same thing.

‘Where are we going? To some damned village of course. Somewhere to eat and spend the night and find some more gas for the car so we can drive onto another damned village tomorrow.’

Lucy considered.

‘You said we’d stop after a time.’ Her attempts to frame original statements were always agonizingly slow. ‘You said you would have to stop… to make more money.’

‘Well we haven’t got to that stage yet.’ I snapped.

I had no idea at all what to do, other than keep wandering.

‘You shouldn’t travel in those mountains,’ I had been told by more than one well-meaning local, ‘There are bandits there who think nothing of raping women and cutting the throats of men. They will do it to Christians even, let alone atheists like you.’

But I ignored the advice, perhaps even half-hoping that an encounter with the bandits might provide a way out of my dilemma.

‘Well, you can’t earn us any money can you?’ I sneered at Lucy. ‘You’ve gone and destroyed the tools of your trade!’

Lucy said nothing, recognizing a hostile situation type HS-56.

I drove on. I wouldn’t stop until darkness came. Then I would find a room somewhere where Lucy could hide and moon over her books in the darkness.