New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  ‘They’ll put it to the Sorority Council,’ Seyamang said on her return, three fraught hours later.

  ‘When will that be?’ Johnny asked.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Johnny shouted, hearing the click-clatch of shotgun hammers cocking. Seyamang cringed away from his male anger. ‘Jesus, Seyamang ... ‘

  Tomorrow.

  ‘They’ll do it,’ Seyamang said, after another dreadful three hours out on the naked streets while Johnny sat in the exact centre of the glass flat, waiting, waiting, waiting for the silent supersonic impact of a high-velocity round in the back of his skull. ‘They’re not happy about it - the less humans know of our technology, the better, is the official line - but Manblong has some weight in the Sorority. They’re reconfiguring a stasis coffin for human biological parameters.’

  ‘How long?’ Always, that question.

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Always, that answer.

  She wanted sex with him that night. He could not. He would not. Depression, dread, had unmanned him. She was hurt, she felt failed by human sexuality, but he could not help himself. No one who is to be hanged in the morning can expect a hard-on.

  He dreamed that night that the lid of a stasis coffin closed on him and turned into the safety bars of the car in Space Mountain, holding him down, holding him in through the fear and the blackness and the hurtling into Christ knew what after all the Chicken Gates were passed. He had been given his ways out, his passages back; he had seen them, acknowledged them, refused them. Always Seyamang.

  ‘Johnny?’ Her voice. Her words, her heat, her smell. ‘You ready?’

  That time already? No. Jesus, no.

  ‘I’m ready.’ Truth be told, after days of house arrest, keeping away from the windows - how could he? The place was all windows, it smelled of windows - he was glad to be out in the open. The rain was never-ending, the early light dirty grey, but it tasted like wine. Perhaps a touch more acidic. Child of the air-conditioning, Seyamang was engagingly gamine in layers of tights and pullovers and quilted jackets; like an orphan in too-large hand-me-downs. She locked the door and slipped the key into the store-owner’s letterbox.

  ‘Hope someone else is as happy as we were,’ she said, unpretentiously. Her photographs were the only thing she had chosen to take with her, packed in two black corrugated plastic A3 folios. ‘All my children. Let’s go.’

  The streets were quiet and empty under the dawn rain; a few early deliverers the only traffic. Seyamang ran her finger along the rain-speckled flanks of cars parked up on the kerb. Suddenly elated, Johnny turned out of Mitre on to Newell.

  They were waiting for him at the end of the street. Two green-helmeted black-visored mantises in cling leather on a black and green scrambler. The explosion of sound as the engine was kicked into life sent pigeons clattering from their roosts. Johnny threw Seyamang away from him. She sprawled across the wet tarmac. The cheap folders split open, her monochrome children scattered across the street.

  ‘It’s me they want, not you,’ Johnny shouted. ‘Get out of here. Go!’

  He could not hope to outrun a scrambler bike, but he would try. He ran. They pursued. He led them down every alley, into every entry, through every courtyard. He darted, he dazzled, he confused. It was a game now, and both played it to the end. Out of Shi’an town, into the streets of the humans. Human landmarks: the church tower, Moe’s Diner and Bar. All Day Breakfast fluttered like a neon butterfly in his peripheral vision. Distracted, his foot caught a tilted flagstone and he fell crashing to the pavement. The motorbike screamed in triumph and the playing was ended.

  The scrambler gobbled hydrocarbons across the street. From inside his black biker’s jacket the pillion passenger produced a pistol-grip shotgun. He dismounted and walked carefully, cautiously, over to the helpless Johnny.

  ‘In the name of the Irish Republican—’

  His head exploded.

  Johnny thought that the gun had gone off, that it was his body that detonated in a rain of pulverized meat and blood and bone and plastic, that his mind, at the instant of death, had frozen in terminal agony for all eternity. Then he saw the headless body topple and fall. Then he saw Seyamang at the street comer, the sensuous black Shi’an maser gripped in her two hands. She was smiling.

  ‘Seyamang! The bike! ‘ he shouted. Man-machine centaur, the scrambler’s rider drew a heavy revolver.

  Seyamang moved an instant too slow. The bullet blew a red blossom through her layers of wool and quilting. She stared at the hideous belly wound with childlike wonder and the second shell took her in the right shoulder.

  She raised the Shi’an weapon one handed and sighted it. Tethba. No human could have accepted such punishment and remained standing: again she had summoned dark rage to save Johnny.

  The scrambler spun around on the rain-wet street to give its master a clearer aim. The revolver fired a third time. And the upper left quadrant of the rider’s body - chest, shoulder, upper gun-arm - erupted in a spray of boiling blood and flesh. Johnny howled. Seyamang was smashed into a metal shop shutter, shot through the belly.

  The fallen motorbike spun its wheel and screamed and screamed and screamed.

  A few cautious souls ventured out of Moe’s into the rain, scarcely able to believe what had happened. Belfast, England.

  ‘An ambulance!’ Johnny screamed at them. ‘Get a fucking ambulance!’

  Seyamang sat like a broken doll against the shutter. The graffittied steel was smeared with her dark alien blood. Rain slowly washed it clean. Her face was gentle, faintly puzzled. The Shi’an weapon fell from her gloved fingers. Human gloves. One finger on each hand dangled uselessly. Dabbing at the pumping blood, not knowing what else to do, Johnny took her hand. Beneath the knitted wool it felt as fragile as sparrow bones.

  ‘So, was I a good human, then, Johnny? See, we can do it when we have to. Sharks and Jets. Kill for love, die for love. Oh fuck, Johnny, it hurts.’

  ‘Sh sh sh, don’t try to speak, Seyamang. Help’s coming.’ Sirens, fast approaching. Ambulances. Peelers.

  ‘Go Johnny. The police—’

  ‘Fuck the police.’

  ‘I think I understand now, Johnny.’ Her voice was failing, her impossible tethba strength leaking out of her. Candy-striped ambulances arrived in a Doppler-wail of sirens and strobing electric blue. The police came after. The police always come after. ‘How it works. Human love. How can you live that way, Johnny Considine, you lucky, lucky thing?’

  Green coveralled paramedics swept in with their chrome things and plastic things and things that made ominous electronic noises, and pushed Johnny gently away.

  ‘Oh Jesus, a Sheenie,’ said a female medic.

  ‘Let me in with her!’ Johnny screamed as they loaded Seyamang tubed and taped and tapped into the back of the mobile trauma unit. ‘I have to be with her, I love her.’

  She died in the ambulance.

  ~ * ~

  The police held Johnny Considine for three days under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Legally they were entitled to hold him for seven days pending charges, but on the third day Knock Headquarters Belfast sent over the Judas contract he had signed with the RUC and they turned him out on to the streets.

  ‘Get out of here, Paddy,’ they told him. ‘Go back to your own people.’

  He did. He hoped they would accept him. He hoped they could forgive him, though his sin was mighty.

  The bus went by ways too close and painful for one who had betrayed the only promise he had ever held dear. He closed his eyes until the distant rush of Boeing engines told him it was safe to open them. The navigation beacons burned atop the mirrored obelisk of Canada Tower; aircraft lights formed strange, brief constellations, like the riding lights of interstellar vessels.

  The freefall shaft took him up. He walked among the stasis coffins, touching their cool, smooth skins. Easy, so easy to step out of his clothes, slip inside, awake in another lifetime.

  He had always refused the Chicken Gates.


  Beyond, the aliens were waiting.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Nerves of Steel

  Garry Kilworth

  ‘You want what?’ asked the doctor’s image, looking confused.

  ‘I want a new right arm,’ I said. ‘One of flesh, blood, muscle and bone.’ I dangled my useless metal limb in front of his image in the commbooth.

  My arm had been crushed in a jig by a dumb robot at the factory the day before. Not purposely, because obviously dumb robots simply follow a set pattern of actions and have no self-control. I experienced damage signals in my head, but of course I felt no pain.

  ‘Surely,’ replied the doctor, who was a young human, ‘you should be applying to Citizen Robot Replacement Spares? I’, his image smiled condescendingly and waved a hand, ‘am a doctor - for real people. You shouldn’t have called this number.’

  They always had to add that word ‘real’ for some reason, as if there were another kind.

  I could see a Citizen robotic nurse standing close to the doctor. It shifted its feet. It was looking at me blankly, but I knew it was as puzzled as the doctor by my request. I reached out and dimmed their images a little while I gathered my thoughts to reply.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you can see that I’m a Citizen robot.’

  The young doctor smiled. ‘We wouldn’t be talking if you were a dumb robot, now would we?’

  ‘Then what’s the problem? CRs have got full civil rights.’

  ‘With one exception as I recall. You’re not permitted to vote. You still don’t have that,’ he said, clinging like most humans to the one consolation left to their race.

  ‘I’m not asking you to give me the vote,’ I said. ‘All I want is a new arm - a human arm. I have the same rights as you or anyone else in this matter.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t actually agree with giving you peo— giving CRs civil rights,’ said the doctor candidly. ‘I voted against it in the World Referendum.’

  ‘Whether you voted for us, or against us, it makes no difference to the law now. We won. There were people out there whose consciences told them we had been treated as non-citizens for long enough.’

  ‘See here,’ snapped the doctor, ‘I don’t want a political speech from you. I’m getting a little tired of arguing. I have patients to see.’

  ‘I’m a patient,’ I said, ‘and you’ll see me. I have a right to medical treatment. The law states that. I have a right to all the things enjoyed by a normal human citizen.’

  The doctor’s image began to display the symptoms of anger at this point and the CR nurse reached for the control panel. I could see it was about to cut the connection.

  I said to the nurse, ‘Don’t do it. I’m entitled to be calling and your boss knows it. I’ve got your number. Don’t do anything you might be arrested for later. I intend to stay connected until I get my rights.’

  ‘You keep talking about your rights,’ said the doctor, exasperated now. ‘Who sent you here? Are you a part of some CR action group? What is it? You want the vote now?’

  ‘I want a human arm,’ I said. ‘Plain and simple.’

  It was the nurse who spoke to me now, in a low, puzzled but controlled tone. ‘Why would you want a human arm?’

  ‘Yes, why?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘I see no reason why not,’ I countered. ‘We’ve got humans with electromechanical body parts - cyborgs, cybermen, whatever you like to call them. No one would think twice about giving me a new plastimetal fully functional arm if I were a human with a crushed limb, now would they? All I would have to do would be to ask.’

  ‘If you were a human,’ said the doctor, ‘you would ask for a human arm.’

  ‘You know that’s not true,’ I said.

  The teledoc sighed. ‘Well, obviously some humans choose to have robotic limbs when they lose their own

  He made it sound as if these humans were freaks, eccentrics, but it was common knowledge that a robotic arm was stronger, had more functions than a human arm and was generally more trustworthy in an emergency. I had also been told by human acquaintances that there was a squeamishness amongst them about having another person’s flesh-and-blood arm attached to their bodies: the limb of some sweaty, unclean person they might not have wished to shake hands with in the whole. More importantly there was the fear that spare human limbs might be carrying some kind of latent virus.

  I said evenly, ‘Listen, doctor, you know as well as I do that some humans even go in for cosmetic surgery - they have perfectly good flesh-and-blood limbs removed and replaced by robotic ones, which they consider superior.’

  I didn’t add that these cyberfreaks sometimes came to live amongst us CRs, copying our lifestyle and culture, trying to become like us.

  The doctor suddenly muttered, ‘I can’t waste any more time on this. Look, I’m contacting a surgeon at the hospital. You call the General Hospital, give your ID, and they’ll put you through - next Thursday at ten o’clock, you understand? You’ll have to work it out with them. I’m telling you, number—’

  ‘XL397 - I have letters too in my registration identity.’

  The doctor gritted his teeth. ‘XL397, you’re not going to get anywhere with this idiotic game. The consultant surgeon will kick out your lights-figuratively speaking of course.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ I said, reaching for the switch. ‘Good day to you, doctor.’

  As the images faded, the nurse called, ‘What are you trying to do?’

  ‘Control my own destiny,’ I said to the now blank space in front of me.

  There was no need to go back to the factory during the following week, because I was useless without my right arm. I took the week off and wandered through the city, enjoying a few of the sights. I went to the art gallery, the museum and various other similar places. I wasn’t the only CR visiting these establishments. It had become fashionable amongst us to be seen to be interested in human culture. Humans seemed to like the idea too that we were taking advantage of our new status in society. It was a harmless enough occupation. They watched us curiously as we approached paintings to stare at them and appear to study the techniques of the human artists. I expect they wondered what was going through our thinking circuits. I believe they got a kind of kick out of seeing us there for the first time, in the way that they might an intelligent panda or a teddy bear brought to life. Ahh, look at that, isn’t that sweet? It’s come to see the paintings.

  Actually, there were only two paintings that interested me. The first was Masaccio’s The Expulsion from Paradise, showing a distraught Adam and Eve walking away from Eden. The second was Mantegna’s St Sebastian, depicting the martyr shot full of arrows and dying in agony. To me, they represented two (possibly separate) forms of suffering: one spiritual the other physical. I moved from one to the other of these two works of art, studying the faces intently, understanding one but not the other. I asked myself: were they the same?

  I went to the national park too, to find a bit of peace and quiet. I enjoy nature as much as any human. For a start, a robot like me doesn’t have to fear snake bites or savage predators. I can walk right up to a timid wild deer sometimes. I once witnessed a wildcat killing a squirrel. I was close enough to see into their eyes. It was a strangely troubling experience, being so close to such basic savagery. To the wild animals we’re like vehicles. We don’t smell of human sweat or other body odours.

  A man watched me studying the ducks on the lake and said, ‘You won’t find no robot birds here. What do you CRs want to come for?’

  It was all right for us to go to the art gallery and museum, but the park was for living creatures.

  ‘I like it here,’ I said.

  ‘You should stick to your own kind,’ said the man. ‘You’ll be happier that way.’

  To his way of thinking he wasn’t being nasty. He was just offering me sound advice. Men and birds were flesh and blood together, so they had more in common than robots and birds.

  However, what peop
le like him conveniently forgot was that our minds are consistent with that of a human. Basically, they took the processes of a human brain and transferred them to a robot’s circuits. They had simply swapped an organic container for an inorganic one. With the swap came unexpected additions, among them a range of emotions.

  This was one of the reasons for our elevation in status, since certain politicians argued that if CR minds worked in the same way as human minds, we were in effect inorganic humans and entitled to the same privileges. There was a fierce political row in Euro-Parliament over the issue, some of the antirobot lobby arguing that there was a doubt about the ability of CRs to make moral judgements, since no one could tell whether or not we had a conscience. That one was quashed when a well-known Scandinavian member asked for proof of the existence of a conscience or soul (‘Either will do,’ he stated, drily) amongst the human members of the anti-robot lobby.