The Holy Machine

12

I had my tour with Manolis the next day. He showed me all the tourist sites of Ioannina: the ruined castle of the Ottoman despot Ali Pasha, the churches, the dilapidated archaeological museum, the chapels and shrines on the little island in the lake.

I remember that the interior of one of the chapels was completely covered with murals from floor to ceiling, most of them depicting hideous scenes of saints being skinned alive, saints roasting over fires, saints being beheaded…

‘Look at the courage of our holy martyrs,’ said Manolis proudly, gesturing to a saint gazing steadfastly up to heaven while his tormentors disembowelled him. ‘It is faith in our Lord that gives them strength. You don’t understand that in that City of yours!’

And for a moment this idea humbled me, just as the fierce Greek interpreter had humbled me. I had a glimpse of what faith might mean: something strong for a person to hold onto beyond his own immediate needs and feelings…

But later, when we were back in Manolis’ taxi, it struck me that it wasn’t that simple. Scientific rationalism had steadfast martyrs of its own, after all, from Galileo to Mrs Ullman, who had suffered or died for refusing to pretend to believe in things.

Manolis showed me other things too, less exalted things, which he thought might tempt me. He showed me the town’s brothel, were several fat, bored-looking human whores were sitting outside in the sun. (‘I thought you might like a girl,’ he said, and I laughed coldly to myself at the very idea of being tempted by these wretched creatures, when I had Lucy waiting for me back home.) He took me on a tour of the town’s artisanal area. There was a street of tanners (with piles of discarded animal hooves outside each workshop), a street of potters, a street of mechanics…

He insisted on having me get out and look at a street where they repaired and sold firearms. There were not only shotguns and hunting rifles but automatics, machine guns and even improvised grenade launchers made by sawing the barrel off a rifle and welding onto it a cup made out of old olive oil cans.

‘They are used for fishing,’ he said. ‘You fire a grenade into the middle of a shoal and – bang! – thirty fat fishes in one go!’

I wondered what else they were used for, and why Manolis thought they might be of interest to a visitor from Illyria.

As we returned to the car an elderly woman accosted us. She was a Vlach, as Manolis told me afterwards disdainfully, an Aromune, one of a dwindling mountain tribe who speak a Latin language and are said to be the descendants of Roman soldiers. She wore colourful clothes, but her hands had been reduced by leprosy to blackened stumps.

‘Help me, please, in the name of mother Mary,’ she intoned in a kind of stylized whine which seemed to be common to Ioannina’s many beggars.

Manolis snorted.

‘No good talking about Mary, old woman. He’s from the City.’

‘In the name of the City, then!’ wailed the old woman. ‘In the name of the big silver tower in the sea!’

Manolis laughed, climbing back into the car and turning the key in the ignition. But I was touched by her invocation of the silvery Beacon. I gave her a twenty-drachma note as I got into my own seat.

As we roared off in a thick cloud of exhaust smoke, the taxi-driver gestured towards a small side street.

‘Down there are experts in documents. If you ever need a passport or an ID card… I’ve taken more than one of your compatriots down there who wanted to start another life.’

Why would any Illyrian want to start another life out here, I wondered? I’d never heard of such a thing. Illyria was entirely populated after all by refugees from this outer world. But it seemed that the Outlanders were privy to aspects of my home-land that were unknown to me.

Manolis seemed to sense my bewilderment.

‘I’ve been to your Illyria my friend,’ he said, ‘I worked there for a time. I know what it’s like. Clean streets, nice homes, no one goes hungry, no one has to be in pain… But in the end it will drive you crazy. Nobody can live like that forever.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose most of the rest of the world has come to the same conclusion,’ I began to say, then broke off with a gasp of pure horror.

We had come to a dusty square in the centre of which there was a kind of gibbet. It was festooned with dismembered bodies, severed limbs, heads…

Manolis laughed.

‘You see, even your demons can’t stand it there! Look how many of them we have caught!’

Only then did it dawn on me that the limbs and heads were not human, but parts of robots.

I made him stop so I could get out and look. There were the remains there of half-a-dozen machines. The sad silver heads of two big security machines were impaled on poles. Nailed below them were the pink bodies of a couple of smaller plastecs: the type used as shop assistants and janitors and waiters. One of them, deprived of all its limbs, was hanging precariously upside down, perhaps dislodged by stone-throwing children of which several were even then enjoying some target practice. Its head, with its mild pink face, dangled by a couple of wires from the rest of the frame.

It was Shirley!

Or if it wasn’t the robot janitor from our apartment block it was certainly an identical model.

Manolis was rolling another cigarette, watching my reaction with amusement.

‘How did they get here?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘You City people should take more care of your demons, my friend. They just wander over the border. I don’t know what they are looking for, but of course we destroy them.’

‘Why?’

He snorted.

‘Because they are blasphemies, mockeries of God’s creation.’

Epiros was a Greek Orthodox state, but the reason he had given me was precisely the same one that had been given, all those years ago, by the Protestant mobs in Chicago when they broke to pieces my mother’s beloved Joe.

Oily flames pouring upwards from a laboratory window…

A preacher with a megaphone in a white suit…

The poor, the marginal, the surplus to requirements, streaming in their thousands through the campus, seething with energy and rage…

‘God is not mocked, God is not mocked!’

There, there, Ruth, there, there…