Karel felt so vulnerable, his thin, brightly coloured panelling was scratched and dented. It seemed pathetic when compared to the utilitarian grey of the infantry that surrounded him and the other prisoners.
Their city was being stripped apart. In the half-light, grey infantryrobots could be seen, tearing foil and leaf from the façades of buildings. Blue engineers with heavy-duty cutters followed them, cutting away iron pillars and supports, piling up sheets of steel on the ground, ready for processing. The decorated windows of buildings were smashed with hammers, so that Karel found himself crunching through diamond and ruby and amber and jade fragments of broken glass. Walking down a wide boulevard, he and the other Turing Citizens saw the tin beading being pulled from the windows of a meeting house so that, one by one, the curved plate-glass panes toppled forward into the road, their shattered glass skittering along behind him.
The Artemisians worked so quickly. That’s what really amazed Karel. Bare hours had passed, and, as they approached the centre of the city, already some of the buildings were stripped down to skeletons.
They had machines there. Digging machines, long cylinders with spiral noses.
‘We need a mind,’ called out one of the blue-painted engineers. ‘He’ll do.’
The engineer was pointing directly at Karel.
‘No, he’s not to be touched,’ said Keogh, Karel’s guard.
‘Take this one,’ offered another guard.
A Turing Citizen was pushed forward.
‘No!’ he cried in terror, but the engineers seized him, popped open his skull and pulled out his mind, carefully detaching the coil. The mind was placed into one of the digging machines.
‘Keep going down,’ they said to the ear, built into the rear of the machine. ‘We need to get at the foundations of the building.’
‘I don’t know if these Turing City minds have enough power to run these machines,’ said one of the engineers. But then the screw at the front of the machine began to turn.
‘Looks like they can,’ said another engineer. ‘Okay, we need four more robots.’
Four more Turing Citizens were pulled from the crowd, and then the procession moved on. They heard the pleading shouts of the chosen abruptly cut off as their minds were detached.
They reached the railway station just as dawn was breaking. The reflected light from Zuse threatened to outshine the pale yellow sunlight that picked out the stripped carcases of the city buildings, the long shadows of which extended across the marble square in front of the station. Only a few hours earlier Karel had been standing there with Susan.
Susan. What had happened to her?
The square was full of Artemisians, so many of them now. New soldiers were pouring into the city on trains, Karel could see them freshly disembarked and already marching in lines into the stricken city. Along with them came engineers and surveyors and reclamation robots. Now the city had fallen Artemisian workers were pouring into Turing City to claim the spoils.
And there went the prizes of conquest. A steady stream of metal was being marched and rolled and trundled and carried back into the station. Girders and steel plate, bundles of foil and reels of wire, all being fed onto the waiting trains to be whisked away, back to the factories of Artemis.
Karel had a thought that disgusted him: the process was like organic life. It was as if the city was eating itself: the railway station was a mouth that was now sucking the rest of the body into itself, sucking up all that metal to leave nothing of Turing City but the empty spaces in the long-depleted mines.
Karel’s procession was now all the way through the square. He was made to join a growing crowd of other male prisoners. He looked around and wondered what had happened to the women. Most importantly, where was Susan?
And then he remembered the little body of Axel, lying broken on the ground.
Everything was gone.
Spoole
The marble flagstones of the parade ground were becoming abraded at the edges, stained and eroded by the acid rain. The thought gave Spoole pleasure: it was a sign that Artemis was a healthy, growing place. Even now, the three tall brick chimneys of the infantry factory belched smoke into the pale dawn, and a thin, cold breeze braided little curls of it across the clear morning sky. A team of robots scaling the chimneys, already two hundred feet up, were heading to repaint the white collars that encircled the tops.
Two newly manufactured battalions of infantryrobots formed squares on the parade ground. The doors of the factory had been flung wide open, and a company of Scouts were marching out, silver skins flashing in the pale light.
Gearheart leaned close to him. ‘Just think what I could do to one of their bodies,’ she murmured. ‘Just imagine the mind I could twist from their wire.’
‘Not another word.’
Gearheart annoyed him. Not her words so much, rather the fact that she tried to goad him. Everything about her seemed gauged to irritate him. She was wearing so little panelling today that the beautifully knitted electromuscles in her arms and legs were clearly visible, and Spoole realized how the soldiers, both male and female, would be looking at her.
‘My appearance is symbolic,’ she had claimed, ‘it’s an indication of your power, Spoole. A robot doesn’t need protecting in this state that you have built.’
‘You were woven to be attracted to me,’ Spoole had replied, just before they had come out here that morning. ‘It’s like you feel you have to annoy me, just to prove that you have some control over your life. Don’t think that I don’t know that you‘re playing games with me, Gearheart.’
Gearheart had just altered her pose, showing off even more of her body.
‘Playing games? I’m not the only one, Spoole. Look at Kavan. Where will he turn his attention next, now that he has taken Turing City?’
‘I will deal with Kavan just as I will deal with you if you ever cross the line with me.’
‘Oh, Spoole,’ she had said, reaching to touch his leg, so that he felt the wire stirring within him, ‘don’t be like that.’
Spoole focused his attention on the here and now. He counted two thousand and fifteen robots standing to attention before him, both polished silver Scouts and matt-grey infantry. Behind them soared the red-brick façade of the factory with its tall windows. Through the open doors he could see the glow of the forges, and he felt a glow of pride himself at what had been wrought.
‘Soldiers of Artemis,’ he called out, his amplified voice rolling over the parade ground.
‘Three weeks ago you entered the factory. Not as soldiers, but as robots of Bethe and Segre, of Stark and Born and Raman. Even of Artemis. And in the factory you stripped away your own metal and put aside your old form. Short or tall, wide or narrow, you have all built your new bodies to the same plan, and in this you are now all equal. You have each taken metal and beaten it to the same length, you have knitted electromuscle and threaded it into each other’s arms. You have assembled your own and each other’s bodies.’
He paused. The assembled robots stamped their feet, once, twice. Two thunderous cracks echoed across the parade ground.
‘You have placed the ultimate trust in your fellow robots, allowing them to remove your mind from its old body and to place it in the new. For, as we all know, Artemis is not about individuals, it is about Artemis.’
Stamp, stamp.
Spoole looked down at the marble chips broken from the flagstones by the continued stamping of metal feet. Such power. It was good.
Now he lowered his voice. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he continued. ‘You will have heard the rumours that Turing City has fallen. Well, let me tell you . . . those rumours are true!’
Stamp, Stamp.
‘. . . already metal from Turing City is being sent here! Already robots from Turing City are riding towards us, carried here on Artemisian trains! Soon they will march through this city to the factory, and those of you who are still here will look upon them and you will notice they already wear grey infantry
bodies. For those who chose to join Artemis have already been presented with an Artemisian body. And yet, on entering the factory, that body will be taken from them! Those of you still serving in the factory may become teachers in order to show these new robots what you have already learned – how to strip apart their grey infantry bodies and rebuild them anew, exactly the same as they were.’
He lowered his voice. ‘And you might wonder why this should be.’
‘You’re boring them,’ murmured Gearheart.
Spoole felt a stab of anger at her remark.
‘You might wonder why this should be,’ he repeated, ‘and yet, think for a moment. Think about how it would be if you too were presented with a body, ready made. Imagine if you were asked to wear a body over which you felt no real sense of ownership. You would no longer be an Artemisian soldier in the true sense of the word. You would be something apart: a mind with no feeling for its own body. You would think of the mind as something separate, something that did not truly belong to this state.’
Over the heads of the assembled multitude, the maintenance robots had finally reached the summit of the three chimneys. A band of clean white was now being drawn through the dirty paint. Spoole felt satisfied. High above them all, the city still functioned. He turned his attention back to the assembled soldiers.
‘There are states that don’t think as we do. There are states that believe that the mind is something special, something apart from the metal that it drives. I should say, rather, there were such states. The last of them fell this morning. Turing City is no more!’
As one, the soldiers drew up their right legs and stamped down hard on the marble surface. And then their left and their right again. The sound of stamping crashed through the city. It shook the painters on their towers, it shook the robots at their forges. Even out in the marshalling yards to the south, the engines and trucks echoed to the sound of stamping feet.
Spoole had to shout over the stamping. ‘Never forget this! How we build Artemis into ourselves. How we weave it into our children!’
The stamping grew louder still.
‘We are Artemis!’
Stamp, stamp, stamp.
He turned to Gearheart, in her half-naked, unpanelled state.
‘Do you think Kavan could do this?’ he asked. ‘Do you really think he could inspire his troops in this way?’
‘He doesn’t have to,’ came her infuriating reply.
Spoole turned back to the soldiers, raising his hands for silence. Instantly the stamping ceased.
‘Listen, fellow soldiers, I want to tell you something else. Look at this city. Look at the factory behind you. Look at the steel curves of the Basilica, the copper roofs, the iron galleries and walkways. Do you understand what you see? Remember the story of Nyro, and how this land was once empty of metal. Remember that everything that you see here comes from elsewhere in the continent.’
Stamp, stamp.
‘Everything! All the iron, stripped from the mountains to the north. All the gold and silver, carried here from the south. Everything! Look at me, you Borners and Bethers and Starkists – Artemisians now, all of you. Look at me! My mind may have been twisted here, but it was twisted of metal brought from your own former states! Remember, Artemis was an empty land. Everything that you see here did not happen by lucky chance; rather it was built solely by the will of Artemis.’
Stamp Stamp. Raised hands. Silence.
‘But why?’ asked Spoole. ‘Why do we do this?’
He paused. The only motion now was the billowing grey smoke and the growing white lines that wrapped themselves around the chimney tops. That and the clouds that moved over the clear sky.
‘Why do we do this? Why this urge to conquer? Why this urge to bring all the metal from across Shull to this place? After all, metal is metal. Does it really matter whether it remains hidden beneath the ground? Why not leave it locked in stone, or forced through the cracks in the rocks? Why not just leave it to rust in the rain and the sun?’
He felt unbalanced at the very thought.
‘You know why. You know the answer as well as I do. It feels wrong to let good metal oxidise. It feels wrong to let metal go to waste. So now I ask a question on a more basic level: why should some metal seek to make copies of itself?’
They were all staring at him now. Eyes that should be fixed directly forward had all swivelled to gaze at him.
‘Sometime in the past a piece of metal made another piece of metal just like itself. So why does some metal sit immobile, when other metal moves? Why does some metal seek to make copies of itself?’
‘Who cares?’ murmured Gearheart.
‘I will tell you why: because that is how it was twisted!’ roared Spoole. ‘Twisted metal seeks to make more twisted metal! This is the basic reproductive urge! What are these bodies that we wear but twisted metal’s way of twisting more metal? And now that same twisted metal, that wire twisted in the pattern of Artemis, controls the entire southern part of this continent! The wire, I say, not the bodies. Oh no, those bodies were built by the wire! You are the proof of this! So I ask you, what should you do now? Simply remain here, twisting dead metal into copies of yourselves?’
He pointed at the Scout nearest to himself: a silver woman, the blades at whose hands and feet were razor sharp with newness.
‘You!’ he demanded. ‘Tell me, should we remain here?’
‘No sir!’
Spoole was delighted.
‘No! Of course not! There is dead metal still on this planet, and if we do not twist it, then some other robots will. Dead metal does nothing, only twisted wire is. Inevitably the metal on this planet will be twisted, if not by us then by others. Well, I say, let it be us who twist it all!’
The stamping began again.
‘It does not end here, robots. To the north there are the mountains. But what lies beyond them? More states, grown rich and complacent on the metal that lies there? Are we to allow them to retain it, those who have never had to fight for everything that they now are, those who have not been tempered in the fire as Nyro’s people have been? I say no! We say no! Artemis says no!’
Stamp, stamp, stamp. Tiny pieces of marble all jumping in time on the flagstones.
‘It does not end here in the south of Shull. It does not even end when we have captured all of Shull! Even when the whole of this world of Penrose is ours, we will look to the moons, and then to the planets, and then to the stars!’
The stamping reached a crescendo. At that moment, Spoole felt invulnerable. That was the moment the robot chose to make its attack.
A flash of silver metal, a mercury stream falling through the air, metal claws on Spoole’s chest. He was falling backwards.
A gunshot sounded.
Up above, high in the sky, the billowing smoke drifted; the robots painting the chimney remained unconcerned, unaware of what was happening below.
Gearheart was lying on the ground, the electromuscle in her thigh sliced neatly in two. She was twitching convulsively while beside her lay the motionless silver body of a Scout.
Spoole was already moving forward. Three silver scratches shone across his chest, curls of swarf at their edges.
Now his personal guard were milling around, trying to push him to safety.
‘Let me through,’ he commanded. ‘I am no more important than any other robot here.’
The words came automatically. He wasn’t thinking properly. He crouched down by Gearheart’s side.
‘Spoole?’ she said. ‘Spoole, something’s wrong. I can’t move. I can’t feel anything.’
‘Stay still, Gearheart. You’ll be okay.’
‘She’s cut my coil, hasn’t she? She’s cut my coil.’
‘She can’t have done, or you wouldn’t be able to speak.’
‘Why did she do that? Why attack me?’
‘There are always one or two who get through,’ said Spoole. ‘Spies or maniacs, or those with a grudge. Don’t worry, she’s dead now.’
There was a cut at Gearheart’s neck, clearly visible on her unpanelled body. The electromuscle there was completely severed, sliced by the retractable metal blades on the Scout’s hand. The rod that formed her back had a silver slice taken out of it. And, there, Spoole caught a hint of blue wire. The blade had also cut into Gearheart’s coil. It hadn’t completely severed it, but there was a nick.
Spoole felt a static charge take hold of his chest, making his electromuscle twitch oddly.
The silver robot had crippled Gearheart.
Karel
The pale sun rose over the expanding square in the rapidly disassembling city.
Karel stood with the other captives at the edge of the great square, his left leg and arm sending shivering charges of pain through his body. The other robots had been similarly wounded, presumably to prevent them from moving too quickly and thus causing trouble.
Karel felt as if he had been dipped in a bath of crude oil. Everything seemed so slow and sluggish, immersed as he was in his numbing misery. He looked at the other captives, wondering why there were so few of them. Had many of his fellow citizens escaped into the sea, like Garfel and the rest? He scanned the other robots as they entered and left the square, looking for the women. He saw plenty of Artemisian females, but none from Turing City. Where were they? Where was Susan?
He did this partly to distract himself, but all the time his mind kept being drawn back to that scene the previous night. The sight of the suddenly shifting gun, of his son’s mind exploding in a cloud of wire.
And then he noticed the robot approaching them. Not an Artemisian, though, for this robot was taller than the standardized soldiers that busily worked the square. A Turing Citizen but walking free. Its body was of unpainted steel. But as Karel looked closer he saw the tell-tale flecks and stains at the edges of the body. Paint stripper. This robot had hurriedly removed its decorations, trying to blend in with the invading forces.
And now the robot was talking to one of the Artemisian soldiers. But not like a prisoner, more like it was one of them. Finally Karel understood what he was watching. A traitor!
Twisted Metal Page 19
