‘“But Clara,” cried Giorghios, “I didn’t know! I thought you were a machine!”’
Thunder broke overhead and Nikos paused until it had passed.
‘Then Clara laughed,’ he went on. ‘Even as her life ebbed away she laughed bitterly. “I am a Greek like you,” she whispered. “My husband has deserted me and I have not only myself to feed but my little boy and a sick old mother who needs medicine for her chest. If I didn’t pretend to be a syntec I couldn’t afford to support my son and my mother. Because men prefer machines now. A human whore can’t charge even half as much.”
‘At this, Giorghios embraced her. “Alas Clara,” he said, “I loved you from the moment I first saw you. If only I had known you were truly alive!”
‘“I loved you too!” said Clara, and then she died.’
Nikos looked around his audience.
‘After that,’ he said, ‘Giorghios handed himself over to the police and was tried and sentenced to prison. But before he could be locked up, he took his own life, feeling himself to be already beyond the grace of God, and unable to bear his shame and his grief.’
After a long silence, the proprietress spoke in a hushed voice:
‘But dear God, how can they allow themselves to create such things? We are frail creatures, we humans. We are easily confused. There are enough misunderstandings, God knows, about the love between men and women. Why must we confuse ourselves further by creating beings that seem to be human but aren’t?’
Nikos shrugged. ‘Yes, but they don’t look at things in that way in the City. For them, anything goes in the pursuit of pleasure, anything is acceptable. Is that not so, Kyrios?’
Nikos turned his raki-glazed eyes on me, defying me to challenge his lurid fantasy. Everyone else in the room turned to look at me too.
‘Yes,’ I muttered, ‘Yes, I think you are right.’
I excused myself and went upstairs.
Lucy was sitting by the window reading, as usual. She had finished the books I had brought for her long ago and was now reading a book she had picked up in another place where we had stayed. It was a Bible, an English-language Bible. I suppose it had been left behind by some traveller from Britain or North America, perhaps by one of the Protestant missionaries who sometimes operated secretly in these parts.
Lucy looked up as I came in. She was naked. She started to stand up, ready to come and join me in bed and provide me with sex. I shook my head, made a dismissive gesture, a gesture of disgust. She sat down again and continued to read.
The storm was passing away across the mountains. The rain slowed to a trickle and then stopped. The cloud moved on and the sky opened up like a window to the stars and the moon.
46
Lucy turned a page. Every two and a half minutes Lucy turned a page. In between times, the night was silent except for the sound of trickling water, and Lucy’s silhouette was motionless against the moonlit sky. But in the moonlight her eyes were scanning back and forth rapidly across a text that human eyes could not have made out at all.
What was I going to do? It was clear now that I couldn’t pass her off as human. If she wasn’t to be found out we’d always have to keep on the move.
But then how was I ever going to find work when the money ran out? I had assumed I would be able to earn a living in due course as an interpreter, but who would employ an interpreter who moved constantly from place to place?
The ASPU turned another page.
‘For God’s sake give it a rest, Lucy!’ I muttered, ‘On and on, night after night, the same stupid noise! How do you expect me to sleep with you making that racket?’
The silhouette by the window half-turned its head.
‘Racket?’ Lucy asked.
‘Come over here,’ I snapped at her, sitting up abruptly and switching on the flickery electric light. ‘What is that stuff you’re reading anyway?’
Lucy got up obediently and brought the book over to me. She watched my face, reading the anger. All the while, I suppose, she was broadcasting warning messages back to House Control.
I snatched the book from her, glancing angrily at the archaic words:
‘…And if thy hand offend thee cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched…’
‘What utter crap,’ I said, tossing it to the floor. ‘Get into bed Lucy. I need a fuck.’
Obediently she lay down beside me.
‘You do realize it was that same book which nearly did for my parents?’ I snarled.
Of course this meant nothing to her. It didn’t mean much to me either. I pulled her under me and thrust into her angrily and violently and without a pause until I reached my climax, which was so powerful that I cried out loud.
‘Have you finished now?’ said Lucy politely, after a moment.
‘Have I finished?’ I sneered. ‘Have I finished? That’s all it is to you, isn’t it? All those moans and gasps don’t mean anything at all. Nothing, nothing, nothing.’
Of course even as I spoke I realized that what I was saying was not only obvious, but also something which I must have always known. Lucy had been built to give pleasure, not to experience it. She hadn’t been designed to experience anything at all.
‘I am a machine,’ said Lucy.
But her eyes shed real tears because it was one of a number of standard responses to hostile situations of type HS-75.
‘I am a syntec,’ she said. ‘I am an Advanced Sensual Pleasure Unit.’
She had stood up and was standing naked beside the bed.
‘I am a machine,’ she repeated. Her voice was gentle, submissive. She had no capacity for anger in her design, nor any programmed repertoire with which to express it. And this left me completely unprepared for the terrifying proto-rage which was about to erupt.
‘Yes a machine,’ I shouted at her, ‘a stupid dumb machine that doesn’t know anything, that doesn’t feel anything or understand anything or care about anything at all. The outlanders say you’re monsters and abominations, but you’re not even that interesting. You’re boring, boring, boring. You’re more boring than the dullest human being alive.’
‘You said,’ began Lucy, hesitantly (it was the first time she had ever tried to present an argument of her own), ‘you said you were made of flesh and blood and I…’
‘I was talking crap.’
I had no idea what was about to happen. I didn’t understand that, though Lucy had no capacity for anger built or programmed into her, she did possess the drive towards self-preservation which is the root of anger. And this imperative, which once had extended only to her body (‘the equipment’, as they called it in the ASPU house), now stretched out beyond just her physical self. She had a need to preserve her awakeness, to defend her sense of herself.
‘I am a machine,’ she repeated yet again.
And then, quite suddenly, she took hold of the flesh of her belly and began tearing at it with all her strength.
‘Lucy! For God’s sake what are you doing?’
Lucy ignored me. Blood appeared under her nails – and then a long, red strip of flesh came away in her hand, leaving a gaping hole. I could see a manufacturer’s code printed on the grey surface beneath.
‘M2/88’ said the printed code. Plastic tubes oozed something that resembled lymph.
Shock and disbelief froze me. I watched helplessly as she tore off a second strip, up to the edge of her left breast.