Robots

by Jack Dann

  When the cloth had disappeared into the boy's pocket, Jimmy Guang stepped back into the center of the arena and said, "In Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech, everybody gets along."

  He didn't find out until the next day that Marta had been in the audience that night. They were swimming, or at least she was. He, as he had in his fantasy, sat a little away from the water, hat low over his eyes against the glare and a fine macanudo between his fingers. She swam, sleek as a dolphin, out into the reservoir. Jimmy Guang saw a gleam from the dam: soldiers' binoculars. Anger swelled in his chest as he thought of Marta's missing teeth, what she had suffered. The marvelous strength of her. He was beginning to love that strength.

  Later, as they ate supper back in Osh, she was distant, preoccupied, a bit cold. For twenty minutes he pried gently, and at last she came open.

  "All the Russians in your audience."

  "Russians, Kirghiz, Uzbeks," said Jimmy Guang. "They all pay the same, and they don't kill each other in the stands."

  "They didn't this time," she said. "But if you keep doing this, it will happen. You can bet on it. And then you can bet on one other thing."

  "What's that?"

  Her face was to the window, her reflection a woman-shaped vacancy against a field of stars. "That the Russians will come after you, and I'll be alone again."

  The next Tuesday, the Russian captain found Jimmy Guang drinking coffee on the patio of a restaurant called Fez that faced a broad square in one of the older parts of Osh. He introduced himself as Vasily Butsayev, and shook Jimmy Guang's hand. Jimmy Guang offered him a cigar, and Captain Butsayev politely declined.

  He had come alone, which piqued Jimmy Guang's interest. Solitary Russian officers had a tendency to disappear in Osh, reappearing piece by piece in family mailboxes back in Petersburg or Komsomolsk. Either Captain Butsayev was more courageous than the average Russian, or he knew the right people in Osh and therefore had no reason to be afraid. It was this second possibility that had provoked Jimmy Guang's offer of a cigar.

  "Is Slava Butsayev a relation of yours?"

  A strange look passed across the captain's face. "He is my younger brother. I understand he is spending his spare time working on your robots."

  "He is an energetic and knowledgeable young man," said Jimmy Guang. It was the truth. He had come to enjoy the young blond Russian's company around the hangar, and without a doubt Slava kept the mechs in better condition than Jimmy would have been able to. "I am fortunate that he agreed to work for free."

  "Better than some other things he could be doing," Butsayev said with a thin smile. The waiter appeared, and he ordered coffee. "A good show you put on last night," he said when it had arrived.

  Jimmy Guang shrugged modestly. "Considering what I had to work with."

  "This is why I am here. You are known to us as a broker of deals."

  Those words opened up a huge pit in Jimmy Guang's stomach. He swallowed and said with great delicacy, "I seek only to make things a little more bearable for those who must spend much of their time amid the horrors of war."

  Captain Butsayev smiled. He had good teeth. "Do not be afraid, Mr. Hamid. I'm not here to arrest anyone for profiteering, and if I were," he glanced at Jimmy Guang's threadbare suit, "there are others I would visit before you."

  The pit closed, and Jimmy Guang breathed a little easier. Butsayev wanted to deal.

  "If I can get you more robots," the captain went on, the tone of his voice lightening, "can you set up more matches?"

  "If you get me more robots," said Jimmy Guang, "there would of course be more matches. But I am not certain that my finances are up to purchasing quantities of robots. These are hard times."

  "They are," agreed Captain Butsayev. "But let us be clear about something. We know, and the Islamic Federation knows, and the Kirghiz militias up in the mountains know that this war solves nothing. The IF continues because fighting us keeps their donations flowing from the rich fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. The - Kirghiz fight us because they are always fighting someone. And we Russians, why are we here?" Butsayev looked pained. "I fear that the civilian government of Mother Russia is uneasy at the prospect of half a million discharged soldiers returning home at once."

  Jimmy Guang thought of Marta. He tried not to let it show. Captain Butsayev studied him for a moment. The Russian had hard blue eyes and heavy bones in his face. It was the face of a man who knew that the war would leave him with bad dreams and loneliness in his old age.

  "When I said you put on a good show last night," Butsayev said at last, "I didn't mean the robots."

  Jimmy Guang's shoulders twitched. Even after a week, he could still feel the Russian soldier's gaze boring through him to the thin teenager with eyes hardened by privation. People walking through the square did not notice him, did not know how difficult and frightening it was to be talking to a Russian captain without knowing what the Russian captain wanted him to say. The collar of his shirt pinched under his chin when he opened his mouth.

  Captain Vasily Butsayev held up a hand, and Jimmy Guang's mouth shut. "I am not a peacenik, Mr. Hamid. And I am not a soft man. But I do not love war for its own sake." He stood. "I believe you know Master Sergeant Yevgeny?"

  Since there was no way to deny this, Jimmy Guang nodded.

  "Good. Speak to him." With that, Captain Butsayev touched the brim of his cap and left Jimmy Guang trying not to hyperventilate at his sidewalk table that was suddenly not nearly far enough away from the war.

  The next day, though, he talked to Yevgeny, and four days after that he staged another round of matches with Indian-made salvage mechs whose cutting torches glowed in the eyes of eight hundred Kirghiz and two hundred Russian spectators, none of whom killed or tortured or assaulted any of the others while within earshot of the old heavy-equipment shed. And the week after that was the same, only with two Chinese riveters pitted against a walking scrapheap of domestic-service units. This was such a success that Jimmy Guang went looking for a larger venue, and found a hangar outside the Russian security perimeter at Osh's airport. It was three or four times the size of the university shed, and Jimmy Guang made sure that his gladiator fans knew that there was now room to bring their friends, and he painted large signs to hang on all four of the hangar's walls. JIMMY GUANG'S HOUSE OF GLADMECH, the signs proclaimed, "gladmech" being Jimmy Guang's zippy coinage for the mayhem that occurred inside. And beneath that, NO VIOLENCE EXCEPT BETWEEN MECHS. Jimmy Guang had made it clear to Captain Butsayev, and to the local IF commander he knew only as Fouad, that the first killing or serious maiming that occurred at one of his matches would be the last. All agreed that the airport hangar should be a war-free zone.

  And thus it was that Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech became the only place in Kyrgyzstan where Russians and locals could meet without violence.

  Thi were ooíng well for Jimmy Guang. He was making enough money to have his suit mended and take Marta for dinners at Fez and the odd German-Chinese restaurant near the destroyed municipal building, the Russians and the Kirghiz and the IF would all do business with him, and he was discovering that it in fact felt good to be doing a little good in the midst of so much misery. He imagined that somewhere, someday, militant robot-rights types would hear of his activities and pillory him as the worst kind of murderous slaver; but it seemed to him that if he could carve out a space wherein enemies could meet without killing, it was worth the loss of a bunch of mechs who would soon have been rusting in a boneyard anyway.

  And he was falling deeply in love with Marta.

  Wartime romances are odd things, Jimmy Guang considered one day after Marta had left his office in a smoldering fury. Lovers are hard to each other, as if angry words and bitter actions can test one's ability to weather war. As if one must worry not just about stray bullets or microorganisms, but about one's lover being emptied of humanity by the proximity of war.

  Marta had been testing him, he thought. It was unclear whether he had passed.

  Yevge
ny had stopped into his office while she was visiting, and a long look had passed between him and Marta before she disappeared behind the curtain into his small personal space. "I've found some real prizes for you," Yevgeny said. "American seafloor mining mechs, complete with cutting torches and shaped charges."

  "In the name of the Prophet," said Jimmy Guang, "I can't let shaped charges into my arena. What happens if one isn't aimed exactly at the opponent and I lose a whole section of spectators? I'd be ruined."

  Yevgeny shrugged. "Okay, if you don't want them."

  "No, I do want them. But take out anything explosive. Cutting torches, okay. Those aren't going to hurt anyone. But no bombs."

  - "Whatever you say. You Muslim?"

  Jimmy Guang hesitated. Religion was not a topic he wanted to broach with Russian soldiers, even one he'd done business with. "My father," he said slowly.

  Yevgeny looked more closely at him. "Right," he said, nodding. "Thought you were just Chinese, but I can see the Arab in you now." Another long look, then the Russian scratched his nose. "I'm surprised the captain does business with you."

  Jimmy Guang waited. If Yevgeny couldn't tell Persian from Arab, Jimmy Guang wasn't going to give him a lesson.

  "Not that Butsayev has anything against Muslims, but he's got a brother who," Yevgeny clicked his tongue, "isn't reasonable on the topic." Yevgeny grinned as if he was about to let Jimmy Guang in on a great private joke. "Captain's brother Slava, he collects the teeth of the women he catches alone on the street at night. He practically rattles, all the teeth in his pockets."

  "When can I pick up these American robots, Yevgeny?" asked Jimmy Guang. Tomorrow, answered Yevgeny, and then he left the shop.

  Jimmy Guang felt as if invisible tar had been poured over him. Blood roared in his ears, and every sound that came from the street—voices, the grinding of ancient transmissions, the coo of the pigeons that roosted under his waning—was subtly deformed. When Marta touched his shoulder, he was too thickly entangled to move.

  "I know what you're thinking," she said softly. "But don't."

  With great effort he turned his head. Marta's eyes spitted him, and he felt crushed between her terrible anger and the ferocity of his own hate for this Russian who collected women's teeth.

  Slava Butsayev, he thought. Who fixes my robots. Who drinks my vodka and shares my cigars. Slava Butsayev whose company I have grown to enjoy.

  "Don't," Marta said again.

  He could not answer.

  "Jimmy," Marta said. "Too many people are dying." "Or perhaps the wrong people," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  She held his gaze for another long moment, then looked away from him. "Do you ever think about what your gladiator robots really are?"

  The change of topic threw him off balance. "They're robots," he said.

  "They're stand-ins, Jimmy. The Russians look at them and see my brothers. The Kirghiz look at them and see Russians. The whole thing makes a sport of killing, makes it something to wager on."

  Jimmy Guang checked his temper. He went to the window and spoke to it since he was for the moment too angry to speak to her. "Two men run into each other in the bush, up in the mountains. One is Russian, one Kirghiz, or Afghan, or Pakistani. Nobody else around. They sight down the barrels of their rifles at each other, and then they recognize each other. From where? From Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech. And they lower their guns and walk on and they forget it ever happened, and when their superiors ask for a report, they lie." He turned to Marta. "If that happens just once, what do robots matter?"

  "But you're just substituting death for death," she said, her voice rising. "You create this false oasis for people. It doesn't stop anyone wanting to kill, it just makes them want to kill for sport. The men in the hangar, don't you think that each of them imagines that it's his enemy dismembered and leaking into the sand?"

  "What if they do?" he shouted. "What if they do? They're not killing each other right then, at that exact moment, and that's all. That exact moment."

  Marta had withdrawn from him when he raised his voice. "Some of them don't deserve that, Jimmy," she said, shrunk deep into her coat. The cold fury in her voice frightened him because he could not tell whether he was its object. "They think about nothing but killing, and they deserve nothing but killing themselves."

  She stormed out onto Lenin Street. Jimmy Guang straightened his tie and stood staring at the wall for a long time trying to pick apart Marta's knotty contradictions. His shop smelled like dust blown in from the street. Late that night he still hadn't decided whether she had left him with permission or a command, or which command.

  The Russians' electronic surveillance was generally several generations more sophisticated than what most of the IF rebels in Kyrgyzstan had, but there were exceptions, and one of them was a thin, pigeon-toed young Afghan named Pavel, who had studied at Moscow University before becoming radicalized by the news that the Russians had exterminated his family in what became known as the Centennial Offensive, a bulldozing push through Kandahar in 2079. Like all large cities, Moscow had a carefully-disguised IF presence, and before long Pavel and his excellent education were on their way to the Tien Shan, where every night guerrillas set up remote rocket launchers and every morning the Russians came to destroy them. Picking through the rubble of launchers, automated Russian hunter-killers, and the occasional aircraft, Pavel put together an information-gathering apparatus that was without peer in the Ferghana Valley.

  Jimmy Guang found Pavel in the city, deep in the subbasement of the university's administration building. The building itself had long since collapsed, but the subbasement was intact and the underground campus data network largely intact. From the sub-basement, Pavel could receive information safely from a number of remote sensing stations he had arranged in the foothills surrounding Osh. He could not broadcast for fear of detection, but he could transmit via the university network, which had surviving cable strung as far as the airport and an observatory some twenty kilometers to the east.

  What a strange war this is, thought Jimmy Guang as he patiently endured the search inflicted by Pavel's guards. The Russians have satellites, infrared detection, missiles beyond counting, automated helicopters. The IF rebels have, by and large, weapons out of the twentieth century, except when their benefactors in Riyadh or Kuala Lumpur or Tripoli manage to sneak newer equipment through the Kashmir and over the Tien Shan. Still no one is going to win any time soon.

  "Jimmy Guang," Pavel said. They had traded on several occasions, and Jimmy Guang had come to like this pallid fanatic whd fought not because he believed that he could redress the wrongs done him, but because he did not know what else to do with his grief.

  "Pavel." Next to Pavel's voice, Jimmy Guang's sounded like the croak of a crow. Pavel had a beautiful voice, rich and liquid. In another time, he would have been in a university sub-basement broadcasting on the college radio station. "I need you to track a Russian for me, Pavel. And I need a gun."

  Pavel looked at him with new interest.

  "An old gun. A Colt .45 automatic, or perhaps a Smith and Wesson. From before World War Two."

  "I thought you were the man who could get things," said Pavel.

  Jimmy Guang took off his belt, unzipped its interior pocket, and counted out three thousand American dollars in twenties and fifties. "I cannot be seen inquiring after this item," he said. "Already I have put my life in your hands finding you things for your little electronic cerebellum here. You have done the same for me, and we Chinese have a saying: when you save a man's life, you become responsible for him. So we are responsible for each other."

  "You are Chinese at your convenience," Pavel said. "Is your Islam so convenient?"

  Jimmy Guang's hands began to tremble. But when he spoke, his voice did not. `They scheme and scheme: and I, too, scheme and scheme. Therefore bear with the unbelievers, and let them be a while."

  The verse was from the surah of the Koran called The Nightly Visitant. Jimmy Guang
had read it when he was a small boy, and been horrified by it, by the way, its patient hatred spoke to him across centuries. Quickly he turned to other, more comfortable passages, and he asked his father about the verse. "The Koran was written by men," Reza Hamid had said, "and it contains them at their worst as well as at their best. It is a human book that aspires toward God."

  A small part of Reza Hamid's son was saddened that the verse no longer seemed so horrible to him.

  Pavel looked at the money for as long as it took Jimmy Guang to get his heart rate under control. Then he picked up the bills, tapped them even like a deck of cards, and slipped them into his pocket.

  "Why an old gun?" he asked.

  "Pavel," said Jimmy Guang with grim humor. "Please. I do not ask you why you need to track satellites."

  By the time he left the university campus, Jimmy Guang knew that after his patrol shift and time spent puttering among robots at the House of Gladmech, Slava Butsayev drank in a nameless bar near the bazaar, and that some nights he set out from there looking for solitary Kirghiz women. This last activity was said to be less and less frequent over the recent months, a fact that gave Jimmy Guang momentary pause.

  That night, Jimmy Guang watched as the excellent American mining robots destroyed each other for the enjoyment of perhaps eighteen hundred windburned and war-hardened Russians, Kirghiz, Uzbeks, Afghans, and miscellaneous others, including a wary knot of sharply dressed Russians who could only be government observers. Captain Butsayev sat with them. These new mining mechs were sophisticated enough to improvise, and early in the evening one of them began taunting its opponents. Quickly it became the crowd favorite, and when it had survived the destruction of its fellows, Jimmy Guang realized he had his first returning champion.