The Holy Machine

71

I returned to the glassy towers of Illyria, where the streets were still patrolled by silver giants under the black-and-white flag of the eye (although there was talk now of changing the flag now for something less provocative and hostile). I walked on the waterfront and past the VR arcades, I looked across the water at the Beacon and watched the people going back and forth on the bridge that linked it to the land. I went straight away to the District of Faraday and to our old apartment block. The janitor called to me as I was walking to the elevator:

‘Excuse me sir, can I help you?’

It was a doll-like plastec, not unlike its predecessor, Shirley, who I’d seen on a gibbet in Ioannina. Speaking to it felt strange and uncomfortable. I’d got out of the habit of dealing with surrogate human beings.

‘I’ve come to see my mother, Ruth Simling…’

‘I’m sorry sir, but no one of that name lives here.’

‘Oh come on. She’s not the sort of person to move! Check your records: apartment 148.’

‘Apartment 148 is occupied by a Mr Hubert.’

I went out and found a phone. The number rang for a bit and I wondered if this too would be a dead-end.

Ruth answered just as I was about to put it down.

‘Yes? Ruth Simling here. Little Rose. Hello? Hello?’

‘It’s George.’

There was a short silence.

‘George?’ her tone was almost nonchalaent, ‘Oh. Where are you?’

‘Here. In IC. I’ve just been to the apartment and I hear you’ve moved.’

‘Yes. I’m in SenSpace all the time now.’

‘Nothing new there then! But where’s your address.’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘What you mean? You must be somewhere.’

‘Yes, but you don’t want to go there. You’ll have to come and see me in SenSpace.’

Reluctantly, I found a SenSpace access point and climbed into a suit.

‘George Simling? This is a nice surprise!’ purred the familiar intimate voice of the SenSpace Corporation. ‘Welcome back to SenSpace! Long time no see! Any special place you want to be?’

I found myself beside a carp pool, where Little Rose was sitting watching the fishes.

‘He’s just about to do it,’ she said, with a little, empty laugh, ‘wait a moment. Yes, there! One side of the pool to the other! A fish with Discontinuous Motion.’

I sat down beside her.

‘They work on a one-hour cycle, these fishes,’ said Little Rose. ‘A cheapskate program really. They could have put in a self-evolving system.’

‘I was involved with the AHS, you know. I had to get away. I’ve been in the Outlands: Greece, Albania, Dalmatia… I ran away with a syntec, a beautiful syntec, but she got burned in this dreadful village down in the Peloponnese.’

‘There he is again look. In an hour’s time it’ll happen again – whoosh – right across the pool.’

‘I was in the middle of the Holy Wars. I saw hundreds of corpses. You remember Marija? She lives with her uncle now. He’s an Orthodox priest with a beard and his hair tied up in a bun at the back. You’d be amazed at the things people believe out there.’

‘I told Sol about it. He said they’d get it fixed, only this isn’t a particularly popular world, so the investment doesn’t really come this way. It’s all in the big worlds, like Nine and City. Actually that’s one reason I like this place. It’s sort of a quiet backwater and nothing much happens. No one apart from me wants to spend more than a few minutes here. In fact Sol says that if it wasn’t for me they’d probably shut it down…’

I let her wander on like this for several minutes.

‘Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?’ I asked.

‘If you want to tell me.’

I shrugged. We fell to watching the fishes once again.

‘So how much time do you spend out of SenSpace now?’ I eventually interrupted.

‘I never leave it.’

It took me a little while to grasp what she meant. And when I finally did, I got angry.

‘And now you’re going to tell me it’s all my fault I suppose! If I hadn’t gone away and left you it would never have happened, is that right? It was all because of George being selfish as usual! Well you listen to me. It wasn’t my job to look after you. You were the parent not me. I tucked you up in bed and I held your hand when you cried, but it wasn’t my job! It wasn’t my job.’

But Little Rose completely ignored this unprecedented outburst.

‘I didn’t think it was so terrible at first,’ she said. ‘In fact I thought to begin with that it was just what I always wanted: to be able to live in SenSpace and never come out. But I’m tired of SenSpace now. I do hire a Vehicle sometimes and walk around outside a bit, but I haven’t really got anywhere to go. No one to visit. And anyway a Vehicle isn’t the same. You can’t feel the air for one thing.’

We watched the electronic fishes swimming around in their pool.

‘Charlie got thrown out when they cleared the apartment.’

‘I suppose that was going to happen sooner or later.’

‘Yes,’ Little Rose exclaimed with real indignation, ‘but they shouldn’t have just thrown him out without asking me.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I want to get out of SenSpace,’ Ruth said, after some time had passed.

‘Well that’s impossible now, isn’t it?’

‘No, not impossible. You see, I’ve got a plan…’

The plan surprised me. It took more courage than I thought Ruth possessed.

‘But that will mean,’ I said, ‘that will mean that you…’

Little Rose laughed. ‘The hour’s up. Look! Whoosh! There he goes again!’