Another ritual is the leaving of the important-looking wing-nut or brass bolt in the shadow of a chair or table leg where it too will only be discovered some time after the repairman has gone: this leaves the customer worrying whether something is about to drop off their precious machine. A worried customer is quick to call the repairman out again when even the slightest problem is noticed, or even imagined. But of all the ritualistic actions handed down from generation to generation there is one which is so fundamental that it has become part of the repertoire of even the amateur repairer. It is the all-important First Move. The first thing any repairman worth his salt does when faced with a faulty machine is to hit it. Occasionally he will perform a variation on this move, and he will pick up the machine and drop it. Throughout history, since the first primitive mechanical devices came into being, men in overalls and greasy caps have been hitting them and dropping them to the ground from shoulder height. Sometimes a small tap with a hammer can cure an intermittent fault in a device. Sometimes a large tap with a hammer can make you feel better when the small tap doesn't work. If asked to explain the First Move, a repairman might say that he was trying to shake loose the bolt or wire that was causing the problem; but if he was a seasoned veteran, he would just treat the customer to a withering glance, effectively informing them that they could never understand even if he did explain to them, which he had no intention of doing.
I followed the directions Phyllis had scrawled on the paper, and I didn't much like where they took me. It was a tough neighbourhood. Not the kind of streets to be found alone in after dark. But I guess when you get a serious attack of the munchies, you just have to go out in search of a takeaway: or better still, you send someone else out to find one for you. That was the story so far, apparently. Mindy Harper, known to her friends as 'The Harpy,' had sent Seymour out to Kung's Food Chinese Takeaway. Kung's Food wouldn't deliver to Mindy's neighbourhood. The Harpy was bigger and meaner than Seymour, but that's not the reason Seymour agreed to venture out onto the mean streets: he was a robot, he just didn't have any choice. Seymour wasn't afraid, he was too stupid to know what fear was. Besides, what did he have to be afraid of? Apart from The Harpy, of course. She frequently threatened to remodel his face with a baseball bat; especially if he brought rice instead of noodles. "How come that numbskull never remembers?" She'd asked Phyllis. "I hate rice, it gets everywhere. I'm brushing it out of the bed for weeks." Maybe Seymour brought rice on purpose.
The streets were deserted. The buildings were either boarded up and papier-mâchéd by decades of bill posters, or closed up tight with steel shutters wired to alarms. It had rained earlier in the evening, and the yellow sodium street lights reflected in pools in the cracked tarmac. It was all very film noir, but I was too nervous to appreciate it. I just wanted to pick up the robot and get out of there. Seymour had been set upon by a gang on his way back from the takeaway and left for dead in a gutter. The Harpy wanted us to pick him up, fix him and take him home. Oh, and if he hadn't managed to pick up her order, could I collect her King Prawn Chop Suey. Apparently she'd already tried reporting the attack on Seymour to the police, and they'd just laughed. It's always nice to know that you're someone's last resort.
I found the takeaway and retraced Seymour's journey home. I found the robot – well, most of him – not far from an old cemetery which looked like it had once been the scene of a gang war. The location didn't make me feel any less nervous. I loaded Seymour's corpse into the back of the Land Rover: he'd been neatly decapitated, and there was no sign of the head. He'd also been eviscerated in a less than neat manner. The rain began to fall once more, washing away the pool of hydraulic fluid which had formed under the robot's shattered body, a tiny rivulet carrying away a few remaining rice grains. I scanned the road for some sign of the robot's head, figuring it had gone skittering across the wet asphalt after being hacked off by the machete or whatever had been used. Just as I was opening the car door, ready to give up, I spotted Seymour's head: it had been mounted on a spike on the iron railings beside the graveyard gates. I felt very vulnerable climbing up there to retrieve it.
It was gone eleven when I got back to the repair shop – too late to go and see the band now, so I unloaded Seymour and carried him inside.
Chapter Eleven
I didn't tell Raoul I'd kept the police exo-suit, but I think he guessed where the components I gave him had come from: we don't usually get hardware that fresh. He picked up the arm and seemed surprised at the weight.
"Heavy duty herdware," he said.
"Think you can convert it into a prosthetic?" I asked.
He looked down at the arm: it was a left arm, so he knew what I had in mind. I also had the stainless steel bone structure from the arm of a late model robot which had fallen down the stairs in a shopping mall. With a little help.
"What about skin?" Raoul said. With these components, he could put together a top of the range prosthetic, which would look almost human if it was given a decent skin covering. But I shook my head.
"He wouldn't want that," I said, and Raoul nodded. He spread the components out on his worktop.
"You could do this yourself, you know," he said. I nodded, accepting the compliment.
"There's something else I have to do," I said. "You need anything from the guys at the Tin Man's Head?"
"Nothing at the moment," he said. He was already at work on the arm. I left him to it.
I was stashing a few components under a tarp in the yard when Nathan turned up.
"You've been tidying up," he said. "Place looks good."
I looked round at the bomb-site that was the scrapyard and had to laugh. Nathan was standing with his hands in his pockets, eyes cast down.
"About the other day..." he said.
"Forget it," I said. "It's good to see you."
"It's just a flying visit," he said.
"Funny you should say that," I said.
"How's that?"
"I was just wondering what to do with that CG unit we boosted from the cop's suit."
Nathan looked uncomfortable. "You kept the suit?"
"I kept the counter-grav," I said. "I was talking to a couple of the guys at the Tin Man, asked them if they had firmware for it..."
"Of course they did," Nathan said. "That's where the kids with the sky bikes get their units flashed."
"That's what I figured," I said. "The unit we boosted is ready to go, but it may take you a while to sort out the rest of it."
"Rest of what?"
I pulled aside the tarpaulin and revealed my latest bits of salvage.
"Is that a Triumph?"
"It's about two thirds of one – it needs some work. And I think the rest is from a Ducati. And that's a washing machine."
"You're going to build a sky bike?"
"No, I'm going to repair the washing machine," I said.
I knew I had him hooked when he pulled his hand out of his pocket and ran his fingers over Triumph's crooked handlebars. Raoul was standing by ready to reel him in.
"I hev a spare tool roll inside," Raoul said. He was standing in the doorway, holding something wrapped in hessian. "And you'll probably need this too." He held out the package towards Nathan.
Nathan frowned, and then his face relaxed as the sack-cloth fell open and revealed the arm Raoul had built. There was a Triumph badge welded to the upper arm, about where a tattoo would have been.
"If you two are trying to make me cry, you're wasting your time," Nathan said. He grinned to prove his point, but his eyes were shining and his lower lip quivered.
"Let's get you fixed up with this thing," Raoul said.
"Then you can test it out by making some coffee," Phyllis called over Raoul's shoulder.
Nathan's new left arm was heavy – three or four times heavier than the old one. It was attached to a carbon fibre back plate and a harness of nylon webbing that distributed the weight across his shoulders and hips. It took a while for him to adjust to the weight, and to get used to th
e more sophisticated pick-ups that translated the messages sent by his brain to his shoulder into movement of the arm and fingers. But eventually he could pick up a glass without breaking it. And crush a house brick without apparent effort. Once he'd gained control of it, I knew Nathan was proud of it. He started wearing sleeveless sweatshirts.
People call it being in the 'zone' or they call it the 'flow,' those moments when you're so involved in what you're doing that you lose track of time and forget about everything else. It doesn't matter whether you're a sportsman or a craftsman, a musician or a painter, it is that feeling that your own knowledge and abilities are perfectly suited for the task in hand, and when you feel that there's nothing in the world you would rather be doing. For me it was when I was fixing a robot – restoring the machine to its proper function, making order from chaos. Watching Nathan work on the bike, I knew he'd found the zone too – this was what he should be doing, what he had to offer to the world: he was a mechanic, and a damned good one.
* * *
"Where have you been?"
Nathan's skybike touched down in the yard, throwing up a cloud of dust and bits of crud. Through the faceplate of the helmet I could see that he was grinning like a loon.
"What?" He pulled off the helmet. He'd been letting his hair grow recently, and he shook it out, even though it wasn't quite long enough yet.
"Janine's been phoning here all afternoon worried about you," I said.
"I know, she just chewed my ear off when I dropped Bobby off." He was still smiling, so I guessed Janine hadn't been too annoyed with him. Bobby was her son: a cute little kid with red hair and freckles. I wasn't sure whether Nathan was using the boy to get to Janine, or whether he just enjoyed being Uncle Nate to a six-year-old. Maybe it was both.
"You took the kid out on your bike?"
"Yep. Bobby wanted to see where Robin Hood lived, so we flew out over the forest and tried to find that big old oak. And we saw deer – you ever seen the wild deer?"
"No, dear," I said.
"You should have seen his face. When we got back he said: That was AWESOME Uncle Nate!" Nathan's damned grin was infectious.
"Sounds like you had fun," I said.
"I'll take you up for a ride if you want."
"You'll never get me on the back of that death-trap."
"That's what Janine said, but I think she'll weaken. I'm starving," he said. "You want a burger?" He had a huge bag of takeaway food and a jug of bootleg bourbon.
"Gee, you're the bestest Uncle Nate!" I said in my best Mickey Mouse voice.
Nathan belched and giggled. The burgers were gone, and we were sitting under the stars working our way down the bourbon.
"I saw the piece on the news about the Insurgents," I said. "The video of the explosion looked great."
"Yeah, I got the bike in just the right position to film it – felt the heat wafting over me like a wave."
"The truck was completely destroyed..."
"Yeah, score one more for the good guys," Nathan said flatly. He took a swig and then passed the jug to me. "I think this stuff has taken the enamel off my teeth."
I watched him running his tongue over his front teeth, waiting for him to say what was really on his mind. We passed the jug a few more times before he finally gave a deep sigh and looked directly at me.
"All they want to do is blow stuff up," he said.
"Explosions are fun," I said.
"Yeah, but it's just kids' stuff. We get what, forty-five seconds on the news? And we're regarded as two steps up from graffiti artists. We're never going to be taken seriously as a political movement." He swirled the whisky in the stone jug. "Remember when we hijacked every robot taxi and rickshaw in the city and had them converge in Market Square, had them going round and round in circles...?"
"It didn't really make much of a political statement though, did it?" I asked.
"No, but it was bloody impressive!"
It was only a few months ago we'd messed with the taxis, but it felt like half a lifetime ago. The taxis had been Nathan's idea. He had the imagination to allow him to see something like that in his head. Me, I just launched robots off high places and let them try to fly. It had been Nathan who'd come up with the idea for the robot song and dance routine that we'd implanted in those robots the night we first met the Insurgency. He was still miffed that people had never got to see all those robots stop whatever they were doing at that moment, and launch into the Merrie Melodies soft-shoe shuffle.
"You should come up with another song and dance routine," I said.
"They'd never listen to me," Nathan said.
"By 'they,' you mean Dale?"
Nathan nodded. Dale Reuben was the self-styled leader of the Insurgency. I'd met him the once, and hadn't been impressed. He regarded himself as a terrorist or an anarchist or some other kind of revolutionary leader. But it was just a role he played. He was full of pee and vinegar, and anger for 'The System.' Red-haired, with his little Vlad Lenin beard and Che Guevara beret, black Levis, DMs and a scuffed flying jacket made of non-animal products, he was a walking cliché. Reuben was also the father of Janine's little boy, and though the two of them were no longer officially a couple, he wasn't exactly welcoming 'Uncle Nate' to the family with open arms.
"The taxis were fun, though..." Nathan mused.
"And the lion," I said. Aslan had been another Nathan brainchild. He'd looked exactly like the two stone lions in the market square, and had sat there all morning without anyone really being aware that he didn't belong there. And then he'd started moving – stalking his prey...
Nathan smiled, but it didn't last long.
"Not one of them could rewire a plug, never mind help me hack a robot control system."
"Then bring in an external consultant," I said. Nathan raised a quizzical eyebrow. His eyes were shining and his pupils were wide. And I was pretty far gone too. "I don't want to join Reuben's Merrie Men," I said, "but I might work with you on a project once in a while..."
Nathan thought about this, but then shook his head.
"Why would they ever listen to me?" He said.
"Remember how you and I ended up here?" I asked, waving the jug grandly to take in the repair shop and dump around it. Nathan frowned. "The Strider...?" I prompted.
"A challenge?" Nathan asked. I nodded.
"Or a bet," I said. "Who can get the Insurgency on the news first, or get them the most air-time, or something like that..."
"And you'd help me?" Nathan asked.
"I'm not entirely reformed," I said.
He wrapped his good arm round my shoulders in a rough hug.
"Awesome, Uncle Stevie!"
*
The neon in the window said THE OAS S in red, the 'I' flickering intermittently: it was probably designed to do that. Next to the words, a palm tree with an orange trunk waved green foliage slowly back and forth in a three-step animation. The Oasis was a twenty-four hour restaurant and bar that served above average food and alcohol at reasonable prices. It aimed to be a haven of tranquillity, a place to escape from the stress of city life. It may have originally been modelled on Bogart's place in Casablanca, or it may once have been just a tacky Indian restaurant, but now it consisted of a mix of Western and Eastern styles. The air was always cool, stirred by large ceiling fans, and plants filled every available space, in troughs, pots and intricately knotted macramé hanging baskets.
The restaurant area was separated into individual booths, each completely private, with screens of frosted and patterned glass between them. The soft greenish light came from glass-shaded lamps and everything had a shadowy, underwater quality, making details hard to distinguish. Anyone was welcome at The Oasis, as long as they minded their own business and paid their bill. The place was widely acknowledged as a sanctuary, a sort of no-man's-land, where rival gang leaders could meet in peace, and where lawmen and criminals could mingle freely. There were concealed back entrances for those who needed them.
"W
hy is it that you do not use the tradesman's entrance?" Kareem asked as I entered.
"Because, my friend, I like to eat here," I said. "I like to eat here because I have never seen what goes on in your kitchen: if I saw what it was like back there, the kind of things your cousins get up to, well..." I shrugged.
"You think my kitchen is not clean? I take that as an insult personally!"
I grinned.
"You do this to me on purpose! Why do you like to upset me?" He asked.
"I used to do it because it was fun. Now it's so easy, it's just a habit."
"You have too many bad habits," Kareem said.
"Who told you that, my mother?"
"You have a mother? I pity the woman."
"You should, actually." I shook my head sadly. I was an Oasis regular, and had been since before its recent popularity: it's owner was a sort of friend, and a sometime client of the repair shop. Kareem Jampur claimed to be descended from Persian royalty, though others would have it that his great-great grandparents came to England from India to set up a take-away curry house in Bradford. Kareem himself was a self-made man, and never tired of telling people about his creation: if I had a quid for every time I'd heard him begin Of course, I was not always the successful restaurateur you see before you today: I began with nothing. I built for myself a street-side hot food kitchen, and slept by my stove through the cold winter nights... He'd go on to say that he had worked eighteen hours a day, collecting fresh food from the markets at dawn, preparing it himself by hand, and cooking it using recipes handed down to him by his grandmother.
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