The Holy Machine

by Chris Beckett

  ‘But Uncle,’ asked Marija, ‘do you actually believe that your way of thinking is right and everyone else’s is wrong?’

  Uncle Tomo and Aunt Nada exchanged amused glances. He shrugged.

  ‘Who can say? But I will say this. Everyone must have beliefs that can’t be proved. Even you City people must do secretly, because your science can’t tell you how to live or how to die. Do you agree?’

  Marija and I nodded. Such thoughts, after all, had led us into the Holist League and the AHS.

  ‘Well, there is a good deal to be said for a community having some sort of consensus about what those beliefs should be. We have that here and it’s peaceful. Down in Albania it’s different and there is terrible bloodshed. Not far to the west of here it is even worse: not only Catholics and Orthodox and Muslims, but Bogomili, Protestant sects, followers of new prophets and holy men, even some people who’ve gone back to Slavonic paganism – all at each other’s throats, all accusing one another of being in league with the Devil. Do you know, there are even stories that along the coast there is someone or something calling himself the Holy Machine!’

  ‘Yes Uncle,’ exclaimed Marija, ‘but don’t forget that until the Reaction, there were plenty of countries on Earth where people had different beliefs and all coexisted quite happily.’

  ‘Seemed to coexist quite happily. But in reality the scientific viewpoint with its apparent miracles was driving the others back. I don’t make excuses for some of the things that were done. I know your parents suffered, and probably George’s also. But the Reaction arose partly from a real fear that something valuable was being lost to the world.’

  Seeing glasses empty, Uncle Tomo passed round the wine.

  ‘As I understand it,’ he said, ‘when you City people want to decide whether a statement is true, you consider whether it is useful. That is the scientific method isn’t it? Is it useful to say the Earth revolves round the sun? Yes it is, because it makes a whole lot of other things fall into place. And yes, that test of truth makes a lot of sense. But shouldn’t we apply the test of usefulness to whole systems of thought and not just to single statements? Which is the more useful, the scientific worldview, with all its wonderful technical miracles, or the religious world-view, with its sense of purpose and belonging? It would be nice to have both, but suppose that isn’t possible? Which one should we keep? It’s not a straightforward question is it? Terrible things are done in the name of religion, without a doubt, but it was not religion but science that brought the world itself to the brink of destruction.’

  He handed the question over to us with a flourish.

  Marija laughed and turned to me: ‘A good arguer my uncle, isn’t he? What do you think?’

  I shrugged. The truth was that I’d been only half-listening. My thoughts had gone off on a completely different tack.

  ‘This Holy Machine,’ I said. ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘Not much more than I’ve told you,’ said Tomo, a little crestfallen that his carefully developed argument had been wasted. ‘I heard he preached in Neum. They say he is a robot, but I assume he is really a man dressed up. There was a fellow in Kosovo recently who claimed to have grown the wings of an angel, until finally someone managed to get close enough to pull one of them off.’

  ‘Sometimes robots run away from the City, I’ve heard,’ said Aunt Nada.

  ‘Yes,’ I snapped, ‘and then your fellow believers catch them, and they are crucified, impaled and burnt…’

  They all looked at me, startled by my sudden passion.

  63

  He was beautiful, the Holy Machine, a gentle, silver thing with a sad, wise, face. He sat in the warm shade of a flowering cherry tree, his right hand resting on a tortoiseshell cat, his left on an old grey dog. And fat honeybees buzzed from flower to flower above his head.

  I approached him fearfully, dreading the moment when I would have to meet those calm silver eyes. But when the Machine looked up, he was immediately welcoming, lifting his large silver hand from the cat and extending it towards me in friendly greeting.

  Slowly, reluctantly, I reached out to it.

  ‘I wanted…’ I began, ‘I wondered…’

  Then I woke up. It was still the middle of the night. From across the landing came the loud contented snoring of Uncle Tomo. I got out of bed and went to the window. Outside, the trees cast dim moonshadows. Cicadas sang. Secretly, silently, the universe blazed down.

  Who else could grant me absolution for my crime against Lucy if not a Holy Machine?

  I quickly dressed and crept out onto the landing. It resounded, I now heard, not only with Uncle Tomo’s snoring, but with a lighter, more feminine snoring from Aunt Nada, harmonizing peacefully with his.

  The door of Marija’s room was ajar. I peeped in. Oddly and touchingly, this woman who had always seemed to me so strong and confident slept with her thumb in her mouth like a small child. She looked very beautiful in the moonlight, with her dark hair all around her on the pillow. And the thought came to me with a sharp pang: what would it be like to lie in bed with a real woman beside me, a woman made, like me, of flesh and blood?

  A notebook lay open on her bedside table. It was a diary. I could just make out yesterday’s date at the top of the page, but it was impossible in the moonlight to read any of the scrawled writing that followed, though no doubt it contained her thoughts about me and my arrival.

  I tore a blank page out of the back of the notebook and wrote ‘GOODBYE THANK YOU.’

  Then I crept downstairs and out across the olive groves of Uncle Tomo. The road to the coast was empty and mysterious in the moonlight. I began to walk.

  64

  After only a day, my already threadbare shoes gave out and I continued with bare feet until a peasant woman took pity on me and gave me some boots that had belonged to her dead husband.

  I went on walking, limping, hobbling, through poor wild villages, over rocky passes, down into secret valleys, huddling in caves and ruins through the cold mountain nights.

  People watched me as I passed. Sometimes they offered me things: small coins, a piece of sausage, half a white cabbage. An Illyrian vagrant was a new phenomenon, almost a contradiction in terms, and they gave me food as much out of curiosity as out of pity, pressing it on me then backing off to a safe distance to watch me eat.

  ‘I’m looking for the Holy Machine.’

  I suppose I was taking a risk, showing an interest in a demon, but I didn’t care much about my own safety. Some did cluck their tongues and cross themselves. Others laughed. Some looked at each other and tapped their heads.

  ‘Have they finally addled their brains with their own wickedness down in that City of theirs?’ a devout old Muslim woman said to her friend. (I wasn’t supposed to hear, but she was deaf and she misjudged the volume of her whisper). ‘Do they even worship machines now?’

  But, as I went deeper into Dalmatia, I began to meet people who knew what I was talking about.

  ‘The Machine? I heard he was in Dubrovnik. I’ve never seen him myself.’

  ‘No, he isn’t in Dubrovnik. I was there two weeks ago, but someone there told me he’d seen the Machine on Korcula island.’

  ‘I heard he’d been in Ploce. The Abbot sent soldiers down to capture him, but the crowd refused to let them near.’

  Meanwhile, unknown to me, the great tectonic plates of history were grinding together. In Vienna, Catholic and Orthodox leaders from south east Europe gathered to discuss a suspension of their many wars, and the formation of a Holy Alliance against the godless City in their midst. Even the Muslim Bey of Novi Pazar had sent a delegation.

  I was travelling through lands against which my country was about to be at war.

  Then a rain began which continued almost without a break for many days. My clothes never had a chance to dry out. I never felt warm and my skin turned puffy and white. Cuts and blisters on my feet became infected and swollen. I developed a fever and become confused in my mind. I no longer t
ravelled through an external landscape. My world became the jagged mountains of my aching feet, the dark swamp of my throbbing head, the bitter gales of my frozen hands…

  But from time to time I would look down from this landscape and see, far below me, a tiny sodden figure, limping slowly along a muddy mountain road.

  ‘Why must I always watch this one?’ I complained. ‘Always, always him. Why this one and no one else?’

  Sheltering one day under an overhanging rock, I lapsed into a dream of Lucy. Somehow she had been transformed into a real human being. I was pleased at first and reached out to welcome her. And she smiled but then began once again to rip away her flesh. This time there was no plastic shell underneath. Guts, lungs, a throbbing heart, a liver – softly pulsating organs slid out of her with a soft plopping sound… Lucy laughed. I was suddenly woken by a bellow of rage from the sky.

  It was Illyrian jets, speeding north to Vienna to punish the holy conspirators with fire.

  Rain trickled down onto my face from the rock above.

  After a while I began to clamber painfully to my feet and it was then that I realized I wasn’t alone. Three hunters were also sheltering there, further along the overhang, beside a small fire. Until I moved, they hadn’t noticed me. Now they looked at each other and grinned.

  ‘Where are you from my friend?’ said the first one, coming over to me.

  ‘What are you carrying with you?’

  ‘Don’t you know that this is private land?’

  Their nicotine-stained gap-teeth were like fangs. They were like wolves surrounding me.

  ‘So you are a City boy are you?’

  ‘Your Chinky President has just declared war on us, my friend.’

  ‘So that makes you an enemy, doesn’t it? Eh? That makes you an enemy.’

  A boot crashed into my groin. The grey landscape of my head splintered into shards of nausea and pain. The small sodden figure gave a pathetic cry.

  And then the three men were suddenly all over me, pulling out my wallet, pulling off the old peasant’s shoes that the widow woman had given me.

  ‘Look at this! Good City dollars!’

  ‘This passport will be worth a few dinars.’

  ‘Yes, but now let’s teach this pretty City boy a real lesson.’

  The others laughed. Hands tugged once again at my clothing. I expected to be beaten. It was only at the last moment that I realized that I was going to be raped.

  I watched from a great height as one after the other they violated me. It was horribly painful I noticed. It felt as if my whole bowel was being split open.

  And then it seemed that this phase too had ended. They still seemed to be kicking me once in a while but that really didn’t matter. The world was quiet again and almost peaceful. Face down in the mud, my pants down to my knees, I lapsed back into dreams.

  Once again Lucy tore open her body, once again the organs came sliding out. I could feel the pain of it as though it was happening to me…

  I opened my eyes and realized that I was alone. Where were the hunters? I vaguely remembered the men kicking me after they had buggered me but what happened after that I wasn’t sure. Perhaps they had still been kicking me when I fell back to sleep? But at some point, in any case, the three hunters had left.

  Very possibly they had left me for dead.

  65

  I was lucky. The rocky overhang where I had sheltered was just below the top of a pass. And when I staggered up it I saw that there was a settlement not far below the ridge on the other side: a score or so of pantiled houses surrounded by trees and fields, and a large white religious building with a bell-tower, a monastery of some kind, at the village’s heart.

  Very slowly I made my way down the hill, dragging one leg like an old man. There was a lull in the rain, but water was everywhere. Streams gurgled and tinkled all around me. Muddy water ran in rivulets across the road. I remember I saw a lizard on the stony ground. Because of the cold, it moved away from me not with the normal darting motion of lizards, but in slow motion, one leg at a time.

  At the outskirts of the village I met a young man with a long, wet moustache.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I murmured, ‘excuse me…’

  I reached out to him and touched his sleeve. He pulled his arm away indignantly, then dived into a house and slammed the door.

  The clouds were breaking up overhead into rags of grey and white and the sun shone through in patches: a tree illuminated here, a ruined house there… The mountainside which I had just descended was now blazing with brilliant, yellow light.

  I passed closed doors and shuttered windows. A thin dog came trotting past. It paused to sniff at me, as if wondering whether there was any flesh left on me worth eating.

  At the centre of the village there was a square with single shop and a police station, both of them closed and shuttered up. There was a ruined building and some deserted-looking houses. The long, white wall of the monastery formed one whole side of the square. It had barred windows with pale blue stonework around them, and a single, large ornate door.

  I hesitated. Where was this? Bosnia? Montenegro? Dalmatia? Istria? Venetia? What alphabet was that above the door of the police station? What language did they speak? I swayed and tottered and nearly fell.

  And what religion was it here, I wondered (for I had noticed that geography was the main determinant of religious belief)? Which God did they follow? Should I ask for alms in the name of Allah, or Jesus Christ, or Bogomil, or… who? Some Slavonic god of plenty? To my confused, feverish mind, the question seemed both insoluble and frighteningly important. That dull, persistent aching feeling was pressing heavily against the inside of my eyes.

  Which God? Couldn’t I at least know which God?

  Help came in the form of a solitary figure in black hurrying across the square. It was an elderly widow, tightly clutching an enormous brown cockerel in both arms.

  ‘What kind of monastery is this?’ I asked her. ‘Who is it dedicated to?’

  I must have spoken something that at least approximated to her own language. She stopped and looked at me.

  ‘You poor boy! You must go in! The monks are good. They will give you help.’

  ‘But what kind of monks? Who do they believe in?’

  ‘They are kind and holy. They’ll help you.’

  ‘Please,’ I grabbed her arm. ‘Please tell me. What do they believe in?’

  She stared at me. Something in my face shocked her. She released the cockerel’s neck, so as to free her right hand to cross herself.

  ‘It is a monastery of the Roman Church,’ she said, ‘but now that it is given over to the Holy Machine, may the Lord bless his name, who knows what church it belongs to.’

  The cockerel, red wattles quivering, had twisted his neck round to stare at me with a fierce yellow eye. It suddenly emitted a loud, cold shriek.

  ‘The Holy… Machine?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Yes.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘A great miracle. He is a kind of robot, but God has given him a soul – and not an ordinary human soul either, but the soul of a saint or an angel!’

  ‘But… I thought robots were… bad…’

  ‘Yes, of course, and Mary Magdalene was a whore. To God, all things are possible.’

  The woman smiled and patted me on the arm.

  ‘Go in, young man. You’ve got a fever. They’ll get you dry and give you something to eat.’

  A sudden eruption of activity and noise made me cower and cry out with fear. But it was just the cockerel. It had worked one of its wings free and was beating it frantically.

  ‘No you don’t!’ snapped the old woman, grabbing it grimly by the throat.

  ‘Go in,’ she urged me over her shoulder as she dealt with the offending bird. ‘Go in!’

  The rain was starting up again. She hurried on.

  * * *

  Even just the time I had spent standing and talking with the widow had left my body stiff. I hobbled very slowly across the square, only to
quail in front of the blue double door. Here was food, warmth, rest. Here more importantly than anything was the possibility of forgiveness that had been the whole purpose of this journey. Somewhere within was that bright, silver being that I so longed to meet. But now I dreaded that encounter.

  Very reluctantly I lifted my hand to the knocker. A stab of pain ran through my body. I let the knocker fall.

  Thud!

  Silence.

  Silence.

  A cold gust of wind blew the rain across the empty square.

  I give up, I thought. Let me just crawl away to some hole in the ground and sink peacefully into oblivion.

  I had already turned away from the door when from within came the sound of sliding bolts. The left half of the big door slowly opened to reveal a small, fat, balding monk.

  ‘I am…’ I hesitated for a moment before I could recall my own name. ‘I am George Simling, an Illyrian. I wondered… I need food, somewhere to sleep. I want to see the Holy Machine.’

  ‘Come in then, come in.’

  66

  And then I found that the closed door was already behind me and I was in a pale, stone-flagged corridor. The monk took my arm. There were many small blue doors down one side. I caught a glimpse of a bright tree glistening in an empty courtyard. Then many more doors.

  I felt myself coming to from a labyrinthine dream of mountains, wars and roads… I woke up and remembered that reality was simply this: moving slowly along a corridor with calm blue doors. On and on. That was life. Why bother to open the doors? Why bother? Why not just carry on along here? It would be fine if it wasn’t so cold. It would be just fine.

  I came to again. There were voices. Another monk had appeared, this one tall and sandy-haired. The two men were conferring about me. I couldn’t understand the words at first. I think I was trying to listen to them in the wrong language.