Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

  Spoole

  ‘Even back then, you were a traitor,’ said Gearheart. ‘That child was just a bundle of twisted metal. You should have lifted it up and smashed it to the ground. You treated it like it was something special.’

  ‘It might have been an Artemisian.’

  ‘Should that have made a difference?’

  ‘No! But, Gearheart, you’ve got to understand it was different back then. Artemis was a lot less powerful. We didn’t really believe we could take on Turing City. Zuse, even a few weeks ago we weren’t really sure we could do it!’

  Spoole looked down at her, with her twisted, crippled shell of a body.

  ‘Surely you must understand, Gearheart, you of all people? Take a look at yourself! Surely you can’t believe that a mind is nothing more than twisted metal!’

  Gearheart spat static at him, white noise hissing.

  ‘And she was taunting me, Gearheart. Even though I held a gun to her head, Liza was taunting me. I was made to lead, yet even that Tokvah woman doubted my authority. And so I wanted to know. I wanted to know what she had done, what she believed – when I felt that I didn’t believe anything myself.’

  ‘So what did you do? How did you find out?’

  ‘I gave her Nyro’s choice. I set her to work making a second child. Making a child with my metal. I told her she had better twist it the same as the first, exactly the same, because at the end I would take one child for myself. I would place it in the nurseries at Artemis and see for myself whether it thrived or not.’

  ‘And did it thrive?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Spoole. ‘Oh yes.’

  Eleanor

  The ground shuddered, and a small avalanche slumped over the feet of a nearby troop of infantryrobots, much to Eleanor’s amusement.

  ‘Second bomb,’ she counted. ‘Next one in fifteen seconds.’

  Kavan looked down at the ground, lost in his own thoughts. Eleanor wanted to say something to him, but already the alert was travelling down the lines of the assembled troops. Ears down, eyes averted. The third bomb exploded, sending a hammer blow into the earth.

  ‘The path through the maze should be wide enough now,’ said Wolfgang.

  There was a weird sort of light to this place, thought Eleanor. It was dimmer this far north anyway, the sunlight not as strong. But there was something about the falling snow, the dull white clouds. It lit up the valley in an eerie electric glow.

  ‘We hold position until the fifth bomb explodes,’ said Kavan.

  ‘Shouldn’t we send in the new conscripts first?’ asked Wolfgang. ‘We don’t want to expose regular troops to radiation.’

  ‘Why?’ replied Kavan. ‘Aren’t we all Artemisian?’

  The call was travelling down the lines again.

  ‘Five seconds,’ said Eleanor. Four, three, two, one . . . Nothing happened.

  She looked at Kavan. He remained staring at the ground, snowflakes settling on his painted shell. What was he thinking? It struck her then. Banjo Macrodocious’s first warning: First their artefacts will fail . . .

  ‘They found the bombs, that’s all,’ said Kavan, reading her thoughts. ‘So we adapt our plans.’

  He gazed at Eleanor.

  ‘Begin the attack.’

  Spoole

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ said Gearheart. ‘Why two children? Why make her weave the second? Why not just keep the first for your own?’

  ‘She didn’t understand either, Gearheart. I wonder if a woman ever could.’

  ‘You wonder if a woman can understand? What are you talking about?’

  ‘About twisting wire. A mind is formed just by the way in which a woman twists wire! Does the man play no part at all?’

  ‘A man’s wire provides the lifeforce. You know that!’

  ‘I know that, but I don’t understand it. But women do! They understand the patterns that they weave. This woman, this Liza, had woven a mind that expressed the battle that was raging at the time! And there I stood, so impotent . . .’

  ‘So you made her weave a second mind. You raped her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would make no difference, you know. Any woman could have told you that. It’s all about the way that the metal is twisted. There is nothing else. There’s nothing special about the metal.’

  ‘I know that now.’

  ‘But you made her submit. You found your answer.’

  ‘Not exactly. The gar still managed to trick me, right at the end.’

  Susan

  Nettie went on with her lecture.

  Susan placed her hand on her own thigh, stroked the current in the electromuscle there, just like Karel used to do to her. She thought about how she would gently twist his joints and parts back into true, smartening him up, making him run so much more smoothly. These were the reciprocal things that lovers did for one another.

  Susan loved Karel. She had known him since childhood: back when he was the child that other children were kept away from. The suspicion about the way his mind was twisted had been there from the start, the way he’d grown up in such a strange way: always building his body efficiently, but with the simplest of materials and a minimum of ornamentation. Even as a child he’d stood out amongst the ostentation of the other Turing Citizens.

  She thought of Karel as he used to be, seventeen years ago: a small child, dressed in iron, with such a quick temper. No wonder the parents used to talk. They had seen it, noticed it, even if she hadn’t.

  Why hadn’t she seen it? Because her mother had woven her not to?

  But surely that wasn’t why she loved him? Could no one else see that other side to him? That depth, that inner belief? That seriousness that was so unusual in a child, it had attracted her even then.

  Did it matter? She had been happy – happy at least until Artemis had invaded. But why?

  Absently she drew a circle on her thigh, a smaller circle at the top. That was enough to unlock the memory.

  Liza

  ‘I don’t know if I did the right thing, Echecs.’

  The memory was so vivid. Susan was there: she was Echecs, taking Liza’s hand. The child – Karel, her husband – was sleeping in the corner of the room . . .

  ‘You made a mind, Liza,’ said Echecs. ‘There is no right or wrong, just a child to take care of.’

  Liza looked up at Echecs, and Susan was struck by just how yellow her eyes were – the same shade as Karel’s.

  ‘They’re already talking about him,’ said Liza. ‘Llywber and the rest – I heard them.’

  ‘They don’t mean anything,’

  ‘They do. Oh, Echecs, what is he going to do? He’s going to grow up all alone. They’ll never accept him.’

  ‘Liza, you could just end all this now. Why don’t you tell them exactly how you twisted his mind?’

  Liza’s yellow eyes seemed to be looking somewhere else.

  ‘Will they believe me, whatever I tell them?’

  Echecs didn’t answer.

  ‘You see? Bad enough that this thing happened to me. Now they will punish my son for my misfortune.’ Her gaze returned to the corner of the room, the little iron body of baby Karel. ‘My poor son . . .’ she repeated.

  Echecs didn’t speak. Susan could tell she was thinking hard, coming to a decision. She knew what it was going to be . . .

  ‘Liza,’ said Echecs.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you heard of the Book of Robots?’

  ‘No.’ Liza didn’t care; she was lost in the contemplation of her son. Echecs continued anyway. ‘The Book of Robots contains the philosophy that all robots should have woven into them by their mothers.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘One of the things it says is that robots should take care of one another. They will survive and prosper better that way.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Even from a distance of twenty-two years, Susan recognized the state of mind Liza was in. She knew that soon Liza would leave this room and walk to o
ne of the great hydraulic pistons that Llwbyr was constructing and then place her head beneath it.

  She would never be aware of the offer that Echecs was making her, that her son would be looked after. That Echecs was offering to weave him a wife.

  Olam

  The signal for the attack came.

  Olam and the rest ran forward, scrambling up the rocky slope before them, metal hands grasping stone, eyes always fixed on the summit, scanning for the defenders.

  There was nothing there to see.

  Dropping for cover behind rocks, rifle at the ready, covering your comrades, then up and forward again, feet slipping on the packed snow. More snowflakes spiralling down towards you in that eerie glow that distorted vision. Darker clouds moving in above, blown south by the rising wind. Someone firing, a dark shape at the summit, drop and shoot. Back up and run, everything was becoming so fuzzy.

  ‘Ch**!’ called Doe Capaldi. ‘Ch***!’

  What was that? Ears so fuzzy, eyes so fuzzy, then he understood. Chaff! Blown over the summit by the wind, tiny metal particles filling his muscles, his eyes and ears, his mind. Unstick a magnet grenade, throw it forward to attract that chaff, run up in its lee. Slipping when you ran, no grip, metal body sliding backwards, cold snow slipping into his chest, melting on the electromuscle.

  No fear. Just a mounting sense of excitement, hot fury building within him. Hand tightening on his rifle. Scan the summit, look for someone, something to shoot at.

  Past the grenade, out of its magnetic lee, chaff creeping back in again. Parmissa had reached the summit.

  Doe Capaldi picking something up from the ground. Chaff grenade. Janet already at the summit.

  One last push. Then, looking down into the North Kingdom . . .

  Kavan

  The sky was darkening; the wind howling as it whipped through the jagged passage the atomic bombs had ripped through the mountainside. Kavan marched through in the midst of an infantry platoon, Eleanor close by.

  Rock was still falling, skittering, bouncing down the sheer walls. Sometimes a larger stack of stone would suddenly slip and crash down in a cloud of dust and snow. Ahead, the Storm Troopers were an unstoppable mob rolling forward. All around them Scouts flickered past, their silver bodies reflecting the light in crazy patterns. Gunfire crackled ahead, interspersed with the heavier crump of grenades and bombs: the attack had begun in earnest.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Eleanor.

  Kavan nodded. ‘Get a team of engineers to follow us in here,’ he said. ‘I want railway lines laid as soon as possible. I want Artemis to be seen to be plugging its way right into the heart of this state.’

  The message was relayed back along the line . . .

  Olam

  Olam crested the summit and looked down on the North Kingdom. His gyros lurched at the sight, and he struggled to keep his balance.

  The rumours were true; they had come to the land of ghosts. He could feel the emptiness below him, a place of too much rock and too little metal. He was looking over a stone bowl filled with old mounds of snow-blown rubble. It was a broken land, long fallen into neglect.

  And then the image resolved itself, and a sense of order became apparent.

  Those mounds were not piles of rubble, rather a regular array of buildings carved directly from the rock or put together from loosely fitting brick. A series of roads and tracks ran between them, radiating out from the very centre of the bowl.

  What he had mistaken for neglect was the result of scarce metal being stretched to its very limit. This kingdom reeked of poverty and starvation of resources, but in its midst and in its layout there were obvious signs of order and control.

  That control radiated from the centre of the kingdom, and the wealth of the kingdom, such as it was, was on display there in a tower of metal. A copper sphere sitting on a skeletal tower, it rose over the surrounding mounds, dark in the approaching night, the snow whipping around it and hurling itself towards the invaders.

  All around him, Olam’s fellow Artemisians were cresting the summit and pausing at the sight.

  Doe Capaldi did not hesitate. He was there, shouting into the wind.

  ‘Attack! Attack!’

  And the spell that had taken hold of the troops was broken. Olam gripped his rifle tightly and felt the killing lust rising within him like hot oil pumping up inside his body. He began to slip and skid down the hillside, his metal feet tearing out long dark gouges in the mud. The mud and something else . . . Organic life! Growing from the mud! And now his hatred boiled. What sort of creatures could live here, to let their environment be polluted so?

  He ran on downwards, the killing lust rising higher, plunging on towards a line of what he thought at first were abstract sculptures. And the realization dawned: trees! Organic trees planted in a line! These rust-ridden robots actually cultivated them! He kicked at one with his foot as he passed, shaving a white weeping wound across its surface.

  And now he was past the trees and upon the outer edge of the little kingdom. A row of ramshackle stone mounds stretched to the left and right. There was an opening directly ahead of him: the entrance to a hovel. He had lost sight of his section in the swirling confusion, and he ran forward without thinking, plunging into the hovel without further thought.

  He found himself in a small, dome-shaped room, its two occupants cowering against the far wall. Thin, pathetic things, they looked up at Olam, holding out their hands in supplication. Poorly made hands of impure metal, blotched and stained. Bodies shaking and quivering from badly tuned electromuscle.

  ‘Please . . .’ said one of them, whether man or woman, Olam couldn’t tell. His rage surged up through the electromuscle. They didn’t even deserve a bullet, it told him. His awl was already in his right hand, striking down through the skull of the pleading robot: it tore through the thin metal without any difficulty, tangling in the sick green-blue wire that lay beneath. The other robot began a pitiful wailing; it clung to Olam’s legs. He kneed it, felt the metal of its chin crack, then with a savage joy he brought down the awl once more, splitting open the second skull.

  They were both dead. That’s when the frenzy overtook him. He began to tear apart their pathetic bodies, scattering them around the room. He tore electromuscle, he snapped metal bones riddled with impurities. Blue-green twisted wire unravelled on the floor, and he looked at it with disgust. There was a little fire in the corner of the room, barely fit to be described as a forge. He pushed twisted metal towards the flames with his foot, watched it begin to glow and then collapse in on itself.

  And then rage passed, and in the lull that followed his attention was caught by a sheet of metal hanging on the wall above the forge. A sheet of steel, the quality of this metal easily superior to anything else in the hovel, and yet it had been hung there on the wall rather than used to improve the build of a body.

  Olam moved closer to the sheet, puzzled. There was a symbol engraved on its face: a large circle, a smaller circle on the top of its circumference. What did it mean?

  He heard more noise, the sound of gunfire, and that brought him back to his senses. Outside, the attack continued.

  He tore the sheet from the wall, crumpled it and dropped it on the fire. The lust was rising again.

  Karel

  Karel had no ears to hear what was happening around him; his eyes could only see the railway lines in front. Even so, he knew that the attack had begun. He could tell by the purposeful movement of those robots around him. He saw the grey troops piled on the trains pulling out of the valley ahead of him.

  He was impressed, despite himself. They worked quickly, the Artemisians. Fast and efficient.

  Karel waited in a shallow valley, twilight falling with the swirling snowflakes. He counted eight sets of lines squeezed between the valley walls, all for the benefit of the constantly moving traffic of Artemis as it prosecuted another war.

  Karel had drawn his train up amongst all the others that morning, and had spent the long day waiting, watching the
snow piling up around the tracks. He had watched the other trains leaving the temporary marshalling yard, their wagons stacked with rails and sleepers, hoppers filled with ballast, and he had pondered the fact that Artemis was moving north again and another state was about to fall.

  All day long, Karel had revved his engines, felt the rumble of the diesel shaking his frame. He had been told to keep his engine running, to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. But that moment had not come, and as the day progressed the shallow valley had slowly emptied. He began to hope – and to fear – he had been forgotten about.

  He watched the wind chase a flurry of snowflakes down the tracks towards him, and then realized that there was movement to his right. The long line of ballast hoppers that had been parked there since lunchtime was moving forward, red-rimmed wheels spinning slowly.

  Again, Karel wondered if he had been forgotten.

  He watched the hoppers departing to the north, leaving him alone in the valley.

  Artemis was on the move.

  Eleanor

  Eleanor stood at the edge of the North Kingdom, looking down over a view that she almost recognized from the stories she had heard as a child. Not that there had been that many tales, growing up in Artemis, but robots talked, and sometimes the infantry that returned to the forges to rebuild themselves would tell what they had seen and heard on their travels over the continent.

  But even those stories had not prepared her for this. She had never seen a land so desolate. She felt something almost like pity for the robots that lived here.

  ‘I never realized,’ she began.

  ‘The poverty?’ said Kavan. ‘I suppose it provides an answer . . .’

  ‘An answer? To what?’

  But Kavan didn’t reply, and Eleanor felt a stab of annoyance at his recent attitude. There had been a time when Kavan had shared his confidence with Eleanor. As he rose in importance he seemed to regard her more and more as a threat.

  Irritated, she turned her attention back to the scene before her.