The sun glinted on its silver skin. It was a Cyclops, a state-of-the-art model, many times stronger and faster than a human being and with senses many times more acute.
‘Vacation,’ I said, as the machine ran its thumb over my passport and my credit bracelet.
Then it hesitated and became completely motionless in that eerie reptilian way that robots have.
‘It’s sensed Lucy’s magnetic field,’ I thought. Yes, that was it. It had detected her field and was now savouring it, slowly sliding its readings up and down the electro-magnetic spectrum…
Or perhaps it was my credit number it was savouring. Perhaps it had radioed the number through to my bank and was now slowly considering the curious fact that over the past few weeks I’d withdrawn all my savings…
Or perhaps it had checked with O3, and found that I was listed as a possible AHS sympathizer…
Or perhaps the ASPU House had reported me to the police in connection with Lucy’s disappearance, and all frontier posts had been given my ID code…
Or…
‘Thank you sir. Would you mind opening the trunk please?’
‘Er… no… sure…’
I opened the car door and walked round to the back. It seemed to take a very long time, during which I was able to review every little detail of my plan for this escape and to see very clearly just how shoddy and amateurish it had all been. There were so many other angles I should have covered. It was as if I hadn’t truly grasped the terrible consequences of failure until now.
I slowly opened the trunk of the car. The Cyclops looked in.
There were two suitcases, a bag, a rug – and, poking clearly from beneath it, a corner of Lucy’s denim skirt.
A lark twittered in the blue sky overhead. Every fold and crack of the mighty limestone escarpment stood out sharply in the sun. The world carried on regardless, as it always does.
‘Open this suitcase please.’
I complied with difficulty. My hands were almost too slippery to operate the catch.
The android lifted the corner of a tee-shirt.
‘And this bag…’
I opened the bag. I waited for the next request. The sun shone. The Cyclops – very slowly – reflected.
After an immense silence, it spoke again.
‘Thank you sir, that will be all. Have a pleasant trip.’
Struggling to appear casual, I slammed the suitcase and zipped the bag, all the while thanking the Cyclops profusely, blessing it, wishing it an existence free from all sorrow and pain… (Which, thanks to wipe-clean, would probably indeed be its fate.)
I climbed back into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. Slowly the automatic barrier lifted…
‘Just a minute sir,’ called the human officer, coming forward for the first time from the shade of his post. I wound down the window again. The customs man smiled. I stared at him, swallowing.
‘Your luggage is hanging out.’
‘I’m sorry? Oh, I see! Thank you.’
I got out again, my knees nearly giving way as I repeated the long, long journey to the back of the car. The lark twittered. Something glinted at the top of the escarpment.
From the corner of the trunk hung that same triangle of blue denim. The customs officer stood and watched me as I opened the trunk, pushed Lucy’s skirt inside and slammed it shut again, whirling around hastily to give him a much too fulsome smile.
‘Hey!’ the officer said suddenly. ‘I know you! George Simling isn’t it? Well, well, small world. We were at school together. Remember me? John Wilson?’
I stared. Yes I did dimly remember him. He hadn’t been very bright at schoolwork. He was what in Illyria was cruelly called a ‘worthy’ – an Illyrian whose citizenship was derived from his parents’ educational achievements and not from his own.
I smiled palely.
‘John. How are you doing? Small world.’
‘Yep. Small country anyway. Strangest report has just come through on the radio. One of those syntec whores has just gone rogue and run off. Imagine that!’
‘Imagine!’
A ten-dollar tip in my passport took me through the Archbishop’s border post without any problems at all and, still hardly believing my own luck, I continued on the potholed Outland road which seemed to head straight towards the mighty wall of the escarpment.
The closer I got to it, the more utterly impenetrable the rock seemed, right up until the moment that it was almost on top of me. And then suddenly a narrow opening came into view. I entered a gorge that had been cut right through that immense mass of limestone over many millions of years by the quiet little stream that still flowed along its base.
As soon as the border posts were no longer visible in my rear view mirror I pulled over and released Lucy from her hiding place.
She looked around her. Her face was blank.
‘There appears to be some malfunction,’ she murmured, ‘please can you contact House Control…’
I laughed. ‘No, Lucy, no, you can forget House Control now. We’re free!’
I put my arms round her and kissed her beautiful face.
She smiled.
‘That’s nice George. Maybe you’d like a hand relief? Or perhaps you’d like me to…’
35
The road wound along the gorge, next to the small stream that had carved it out. Goats grazed on the grassy bank under small bright trees. Far above us crows wheeled around nests in the crumbling walls of limestone that towered on either side, up and up and up, through all those millions of years of geological time.
Life was bursting out everywhere. There were swallows hunting over the stream, wild irises in the grass, spiders laying traps between the grass stems. Even the rock that dwarfed everything was itself made entirely of the remains of living things settling over millions of years in the warm depths of some tropical Jurassic sea.
This was not a SenSpace dream or a cleverly constructed display in the Beacon. These were the bones of a real planet, spinning in space. This hot sun above was a real star. This was the world. This was life, that strange cross-current in the steady downward flow of entropy: implausible, pointless, but undeniably there.
And I was part of it. The irises, the spiders, even those Jurassic coral polyps were all of them my own distant kin…
But Lucy sat rigid in her seat, looking straight ahead. These cliffs and trees meant nothing to her. She had nothing to compare this scene with, no vocabulary with which to interpret it.
And in a brief, cold moment of insight, which I immediately put out of my mind, I saw that, even if she one day learnt to see it for what it was, even then she would not be part of it. She would not be kin to it at all.
36
‘Oh Sol, roses, how lovely! You really shouldn’t have! You put yourself to so much trouble!’
‘Don’t mention it my dear! I’ve got to have some excuse to come and see you! How are you? You seemed a little down last time I saw you!’
There are parts of this story that I didn’t discover until a lot later on, and one of them was this:
In the months before I escaped from Illyria, Ruth had fallen in love. She had fallen in love with a handsome Jewish-American man called Solomon Gladheim, who every day visited her with a fresh bunch of flowers.
Mr Gladheim was about fifty-five years old. He had a fine physique and a magnificent head of grey hair. He had the demeanour of one who has been through struggles and looked tragedy in the face but emerged strengthened, setting the past behind him and looking forward to whatever the road ahead might bring. Perhaps he had lost some loved one? Or maybe he had built up a prosperous business out of nothing by sheer hard work, only to have it all taken from him by a crooked business partner in whom he had mistakenly placed his trust? He wouldn’t say. He wouldn’t impose his troubles on others. Whatever had happened to him in the past, Sol Gladheim was never bitter, never self-absorbed. He hardly ever talked about himself at all. And his kind friendly smile was never far away.