Marija considered.
‘But why do they wander out there?’ she exclaimed after a moment. ‘Think of the – the determination involved: crossing the border and then just walking and walking and walking until some outlander finds them and kicks them to pieces. Isn’t there something tragic about it?’
I agreed with her, but Paul Da Vera gave a derisory snort.
‘Now you’re being sentimental, Marija. You shouldn’t waste your pity on machines! If you want to pity someone, pity the poor guestworker who’s chucked out of the territory when they build a robot to do his job! Pity the janitors, the nightwatchmen, the dustcart drivers. My God, even the whores have been put out of business now! We live in a country where we even fuck machines!’
Everyone else laughed. I shrank back inside myself, like a snail pulling back into its shell.
‘I actually think the outlanders have got basically the right instincts about this,’ Paul said. ‘There is something really abominable about building a machine to mimic a human being.’
Marija shrugged.
‘Well, perhaps, but I still feel sorry for them,’ she said, and she looked at me, almost as if I was one of the robots she felt sorry for: this stiff creature, struggling to find the spark of spontaneity, of naturalness, of life…
19
I ran to Lucy’s. I wanted the feeling that Lucy gave me, however illusory, however temporary, of being welcomed, of being accepted, of being let in.
But when I got there, Lucy wasn’t free.
‘Perhaps you’d like to choose someone else for a change?’ the syntec receptionist suggested.
‘I don’t want anyone else!’ I snapped. I was shocked by the dangerous edge in my own voice, the scale of my rage at being thwarted.
‘I’m very sorry, sir, but I’m afraid she’s engaged.’
‘That’s no fucking use is it?’
I took a pace or two away, my fists clenched, my head fizzing with violence. Then I came back to the receptionist.
‘Okay, I’ll wait then. How long will she be?’
The robot receptionist passed on my query, via House Control, to Lucy up there in her room:
‘Another subject is enquiring after you. Please give estimate of time with present subject.’
‘Subject is using special facilities,’ Lucy replied in her batsqueak machine voice, quite inaudible to the customer, who only heard her simulated gasps of pleasure as he played with her surface layer of flesh. ‘For your reference re duration of earlier visits, subjects credit code is 4532 7865 6120. Own estimate of remaining time: forty-five minutes.’
House Control checked the estimate with its own records, and found it to be accurate. It relayed this back to the receptionist.
‘About forty-five minutes sir,’ said the receptionist, hardly more than a second after I had asked my question, ‘You could wait in the bar, or you could make another selection in the lounge…’
I hesitated. Absurdly I felt murderously angry with Lucy for not being there for me.
‘I’ll pick another one,’ I said.
I chose one as different from Lucy as possible: a syntec in the likeness of a large black woman called Sheba. She had huge silky-skinned breasts, broad, muscly thighs and a wonderful thick dark mat of pubic hair into which I plunged greedily.
Yes, greedily is the word, for I seemed then to fall into a kind of feeding frenzy. No sooner had I finished with Sheba than I went straight back down to the lounge and picked up another ASPU called Lady Charlotte, made to look like a sophisticated aristocrat from eighteenth century Europe, complete with beauty spot and layers of petticoats.
And when I’d finished under those petticoats, I went down for still more. It was as if the emptiness left behind by one ASPU could only be filled by another – and so on and on and on. I picked out a machine called Helen, in the likeness of a worldly schoolgirl with a small scar on her upper lip, and screwed her from behind in a place made out to look like a high school locker room.
On the way down, I met Lucy coming up with another man.
The syntecs were programmed to recognize regular customers. She looked at me and smiled. And her sweet smile went right through me like a knife.
‘Oh Lucy, I do love you,’ I whispered.
And I kept on whispering it to myself outside in the street, with that dull ache pressing out from behind my eyes: ‘I love you Lucy, I love you, I love you, I love you…’
When I’d walked a couple of blocks, I was startled by the sound of an explosion not very far away. Even the ground seemed to tremble – and somewhere behind me in the street some small glass object fell to the ground and smashed.
A silence fell on the city.
And then from the distance, in several directions, came the sound of emergency vehicles, drawing quickly nearer and then rushing whooping through the blocks on either side of me.
I didn’t know it then, of course, but the front of the Fellowship of Reason building had just been blown away by a bomb. It was the first ever action of the AHS – the Army of the Human Spirit.
20
I remember that night, or a night soon afterwards, I had a vivid dream.
I was in a dark building searching along corridors and up and down stairs for a room which I knew I’d found there once before. It was a quiet light room, with chairs and a window overlooking a courtyard. But I couldn’t seem to find it, and the wider I searched the more forbidding the building became. Corridors were narrower. Staircases had missing railings or gaps where steps should have been. My hands became clammy with vertigo as climbed them. And the rooms that I found were either windowless or bare or were already occupied by other people.
Tony Vespuccio was in one, the playboy of the Word for Word office, whiling away an afternoon with a pretty young woman and a bottle of champagne.
‘Your own room?’ he laughed incredulously. ‘That needs a lot more guts than you’ve got George.’
In another a group of women were bathing in a plunge pool. When they saw me they looked at one another and shrieked with merriment.
In another room I peeked through a doorway and saw Marija naked on a bed, with Paul Da Vera moving above her.
And then I found myself in the basement, where it was cold and damp. There was a big room there like the lounge in the ASPU House, but it smelt of urine and drains. And the syntecs in there didn’t even vaguely resemble humans. They were just wooden marionettes with genitals painted on in red, jerking around on strings…
I ran from them, climbing a narrow, grubby little spiral staircase that led nowhere at all except to a single door at its top.
When I opened the door, there was Ruth dangling in her SenSpace suit.
21
I was at my desk at Word for Word a few weeks later, just before lunchtime, when the receptionist called me to say I had a visitor. We still had a human receptionist in those days, and she sounded oddly excited.
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
‘Well, she says it’s a surprise.’
‘Are you sure it’s me she wants to see?’
‘Definitely.’
This time the receptionist could not quite prevent herself from giggling.
I went down to the reception area. There was only one person waiting there, a very elegant young woman. She looked up at me and gave a warm smile of recognition. My blood froze.
It was Lucy!
…or so it seemed for a moment. After a second or so I realized that, although my visitor was blonde like Lucy and had the same kind of gentle, flawless beauty, she did not have the same face.