The Star Fraction

17

Android Spiritual

‘Move and you’re dead!’

The cheerful Cockney voice of Esteemed Senior Eon Talgarth, Judge Resident at the Court of the Fifth Quarter, boomed from loudspeakers all around the hundred-metre square of his stockaded property. Enough of the guns mounted on the stockade were pointing inward to make the court an execution-ground for those in the centre. The neutrals who’d fled to the perimeter would be safe, but the opposing groups, each numbering a couple of dozen, confronting each other in front of Talgarth’s dais, were at the focus of the cones of fire. The situation became clear to all in that target-area within a few seconds.

‘That’s it, that’s it,’ coaxed Talgarth. ‘Now, good people, you will please put away your weapons nice and slow, know what I mean?’

The weapons were sheathed or shouldered. Jay-Dub’s crawler continued to roll forward. Talgarth waited until its tail was just clear of the gate, and raised his left hand. The vehicle stopped.

‘Right,’ he drawled. ‘The case is adjourned. Since David Reid’s side made the first move towards settling the matter by violence, it seems only fair to allow the other side to make a strategic withdrawal until another arrangement can be made.’

For a moment, nobody moved. Talgarth jutted his jaw at the group around Jonathan Wilde.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ he urged them. ‘Move it.’

They backed off slowly and then turned and made a run for the long, low, silvery shape at the gate. Reid and his group glared after them, muscles twitching, conscious of the continued cover of Talgarth’s guns.

‘This is a disgrace!’ Reid snarled. ‘Who’s going to trust your justice now, Talgarth?’

‘A damn’ sight more than would be impressed by my letting you start a slaughter in my court,’ Talgarth answered, his eyes following the running figures. Reid also was momentarily distracted, by some intelligence whispered in his ear.

‘You know whose truck that is?’ he demanded. ‘It’s the vehicle of the robot Jay-Dub.’

‘I know,’ said Talgarth evenly. ‘I’ve known it was in the vicinity for some time.’ He tapped his ear and grinned, suddenly seeming more a jailbird than a judge. Wilde’s group disappeared around the back of the crawler. Its engines thrummed and it began to inch backwards out of the gate. ‘When I saw how things were going, I called it in.’

‘You did what!’ Reid exploded. He looked around in appeal to his companions, and to the hovering remotes of the news services, now beginning to drift back to the centre of the court. ‘Why in the name of God did you do that?’

The gate closed with a rattling finality. Talgarth turned away from it and relaxed, and looked Reid in the eye.

‘You asked, back there, if my memory was so short,’ he said. ‘Rhetorical question, I suppose, but even so.’ He very deliberately lit a cigarette, and blew out smoke with every appearance of satisfaction. ‘It ain’t.’

Even after they’ve dropped off the rest of Wilde’s supporters, whom Ethan Miller is confident he can lead back to the human quarter without too much difficulty, it’s crowded in the back of Jay-Dub’s truck. It’s more of a cargo-hold than a passenger area, although it has some rudimentary provision for human occupancy. Ax is wedged into his place on the floor by the television feed, Dee and Jonathan Wilde are sitting on the padded fold-down bench on which Dee lay earlier, and Tamara’s clinging to one of the larger hooks suspended from the ceiling.

The crawler’s speed is anything but a crawl. They’re battering across the Fifth Quarter with radio and sonic sirens blaring, and scant regard for anything that remains in the way. Robots and other, less definable machines scatter before them. The screens are fully given over now to displays of the surroundings, and they’re full of alarming sights.

Dee glances at Wilde, and at the other version of Wilde in the illusory cab. Her eyes meet Wilde’s looking wonderingly from the older Wilde to her. She gives him a tentative smile.

‘I’m seeing ghosts,’ he says. ‘You’re…it’s strange now, being able to look at you.’ He laughs briefly. ‘Without you running away. I know you’re not Annette, but…don’t mind me looking at you, OK?’

‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I understand.’

His smile turns into a look of confidential puzzlement.

‘Who’s that woman up in the front with…Jay-Dub?’

‘Her name’s Meg,’ Dee whispers, ‘and she isn’t a woman, exactly.’

Meg turns around. ‘I heard that,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘Don’t you believe her. I’m as much a woman as she is, Jon.’

‘She’s a fast woman,’ the other Wilde yells back.

Ax observes this somewhat incestuous banter, and looks up at Tamara with a scornful roll of his eyes. Tamara catches this and looks away from Wilde and Dee, with something like a guilty start. Ax sighs and reverts to channelling the news.

‘How long have we got?’ Wilde asks. ‘Talgarth can’t keep Reid and his crew locked up for long, can he?’

‘Nah,’ says Ax, breaking his trance again. ‘Reid’s calling up reinforcements, appealing to other courts, and in general kicking up a stink. I reckon Talgarth will have to let him go within half an hour.’

‘And then he’ll come after us?’

Jay-Dub shrugs, removing his hands from the apparent steering-wheel to wave them about in a manner which Dee can’t help seeing as dangerous, even though she knows it isn’t. ‘He’s after us now,’ he says. ‘He – or his defence agencies – have one or two aircraft and at least a time-share on a spy-sat, and they’ve got us on their scopes if not in their sights. I doubt he’ll take any action until he knows which way the political or legal chips will fall. Unless –’

His attention is diverted by the need to clear a barrier.

‘Hold tight!’

The crawler slows, lurches, almost leaps over a burning junk-heap strewn across the road.

‘Unless what?’ Dee prompts as she recovers from the jolt.

‘Unless he finds out you’re with me,’ Jay-Dub says. ‘Remember those bounty-hunters who came after you? They got burned pretty badly, but they survived and they’ll make a full recovery.’ He grins over his shoulder at Wilde, or at Dee. She isn’t sure just who’s the target of his irony this time. ‘Amazing what medical science can do these days. As soon as they’ve got over the shock and have enough of their faces grown back to talk, they’ll talk. About the fugitives being rescued by a robot.’

Wilde frowns around the company. Dee already understands, but she can’t tell the others yet.

‘What’ll Reid do then?’ Wilde asks.

Jay-Dub is attending to the steering again, by necessity or choice.

‘He’ll destroy us,’ he says. ‘With whatever it takes, and whatever it costs.’

So we cut, as they say, to the chase.

The crawler dives into a dank tunnel under a canal, at the far side of the Fifth Quarter. It stops, engines throbbing, just long enough for Dee, Ax, Tamara and Wilde to get out. Dee is the last to leave. A hatch in the side of the hold slides open, and one of the small crawling-machines rolls over and presents her with a sealed plastic box. She slips it in her handbag.

‘Goodbye,’ says Meg.

‘Goodbye,’ says Jay-Dub, the elder Wilde. He notices her tears and gives her a grin and a broad wink.

‘It’s not so bad,’ he tells her. ‘I’ve been there, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Dee stumbles out. The tailgate slides shut, and the crawler accelerates away, hurtling out of the other end of the tunnel so quickly that, from above, no-one could have told that it stopped at all.

As the echoes of its passage die away, Dee sees tall, human-like figures emerge from the shadowed sides of the tunnel. Their bodies dimly reflect the faded, isotope-powered lights. Tamara and Ax tense, their guns bristling. Wilde has fallen into a dull stoicism, or delayed shock, and watches their approach without visible response. After all he’s been through, silently looming humanoid robots are too much – or too little – to take.

‘It’s all right,’ Dee says hastily. ‘Wilde – I mean Jay-Dub, told me about them. They’re friends.’

The robots gather around the humans, and jostle and peer with disturbingly human curiosity.

‘If you’re friends of Jay-Dub,’ one of them says proudly, in a resonant, high-fidelity voice, ‘you’re friends of ours.’ The eyes in its oval face brighten. ‘We have few friends. The humans here do not accept us, and the wild machines…’

Its shoulders have a human enough articulation to give the semblance of a shrug.

‘Wait with us,’ it suggests. Its eyes brighten again. ‘We have food.’

The humanoid robots – remnants of a bad production decision, decades back – do indeed have food, stored in the sidings of the tunnel. Their purpose in accumulating these cans and jars is obscure, as indeed is their activity. They themselves extract their sustenance from an electricity supply-cable that passes through the tunnel. Dee suspects them of having developed what some humans had once considered a defining feature of humanity: a religion.

They believe, against all the evidence, that they were created by the first man, Adam, who was a smith. Their scriptures are children’s texts about the ancient glories of Earth, barely more accurate than the tales that Story feeds to Dee. They speak of a strange rapture, the Industrial Revolution, and they revere a mediator between man and machine, the robot who was and is a man, Jay-Dub.

As the humans accept their hospitality they listen to the robots expound their beliefs, and sing their songs. The songs are almost incomprehensible. Ax calls them old android spirituals, Wilde insists they’re ancient heavy-metal hits.

Dee is almost petrified at the thought that they’ll make the connection between Wilde and Jay-Dub, whom they evidently saw at various times over the years as both a robot and a televisual or holographic fetch. Fortunately, their pattern-recognition is poor. Their minds are genuine, if crude, artificial intelligences, and not (as hers is) a knock-off copy from a human template.

They are also unsophisticated at detecting human emotion, and show no sign of being affected by the humans’ constant edgy watchfulness and muttered consultations. They busy themselves with the last task which Jay-Dub set them: dragging out the dismembered components of humanoid robot shells and assembling them into imitation-robot suits for the humans to wear. They seem to enjoy the task, measuring up the humans and fitting the metal armour to their bodies. Dee daren’t ask if these carapaces are the remains of dead robots, or spare parts, or products of the robots’ own attempts to reproduce their kind. She concentrates on making sure the joints don’t catch her skin.

Wilde and Tamara and Ax laugh with her as they fit the armour on and practise walking about. It’s all a distraction, and they know it. They all know what they’re waiting for, and although it seems long to them, they have only a couple of hours to wait.

The explosion is a long way off, and small, as such explosions go, and still it fills the tunnel with white light. Soldier can’t tell if it was a tactical nuke aimed from outside the truck or a civil-engineering device detonated from within, to avoid capture. It was self-destruction, either way.

‘Oh, Jay-Dub,’ Dee says. ‘Oh, Meg. That was so brave.’

The rumble of the first shockwave passes. Parts of the tunnel roof fall in…

‘I could never have done that,’ Wilde says. His face shows more awe than grief. ‘Whatever was in that truck, it wasn’t me.’