The villagers watched until we had vanished from sight.
And then, no doubt, everyone assumed his or her part in the drama they had been playing out – weeping, shouting, praying, leering, looking stern…
In the car, as we bumped slowly out of the village and back onto the mountainside, we were both silent. Lucy stared straight ahead of her. I stared straight ahead of me. Every once in a while Lucy would ask a question in a flat, empty voice:
‘What are Greeks?’
‘What is hate?’
‘What are men?’
Occasionally I would give a surly answer. Usually I ignored her. Back in the ASPU House I had once told Lucy to ‘be herself’ and her face had suddenly drained of all semblance of humanity. She may not have understood my instruction, but in fact she had faithfully carried it out. The syntec’s real self was that blank thing. She was dreary, she was duller than the most dreary and vacuous human being.
And yet there was determination in her. She was ruthlessly indifferent to the loss of her flesh. But there were things, many things, that she wanted to find out.
‘What are women?’
‘Why are those people doing that?’
‘Why were syntecs made?’
Sometimes she’d ask questions about things she’d read.
‘What is flesh?’ she asked me several times. ‘What is flesh?’
The sky was dark. There was going to be another storm.
The track climbed down into a larger valley and we passed through a small town. Small boys chased after the car, banging on the door and demanding coins.
Outside the town hall, a huge face gazed down. Painted in lurid colours the local ruler, Archbishop Christophilos, marched triumphantly forwards under the Holy Cross, with brave moustachioed soldiers in bandoliers on either side of him and his enemies perishing all around: Muslims above, schismatics below, heretics to the left… And to the right the beacon in Illyria had been set ablaze and stern Greek soldiers were smashing goggle-eyed robots in the streets…
Epiros had once seemed exotic and dangerous to me, but it was really a client state of Illyria. This was the Peloponnese, the heartland of the Greek Christian Army. This was really the Outlands.
‘Where are we going?’ Lucy suddenly asked as we drove out of the far side of the bleak little town.
The very sound of her voice now infuriated me, so hollow, so completely devoid of the resonances of human experience. Several times I had dreamed of copying my Cretan namesake in that guestworker’s tale and ending Lucy’s pointless existence with a chisel driven through the computer in her chest.
But in real waking life, I could never forget that I was the one who had brought Lucy here, and I was the one who told her that it made no difference that she was a syntec and not a real human being. I couldn’t destroy her. I couldn’t even abandon her, because out here that would amount to exactly the same thing.
‘Where are we going? To some damned village of course. Somewhere to eat and spend the night and find some more gas for the car so we can drive onto another damned village tomorrow.’
Lucy considered.
‘You said we’d stop after a time.’ Her attempts to frame original statements were always agonizingly slow. ‘You said you would have to stop… to make more money.’
‘Well we haven’t got to that stage yet.’ I snapped.
I had no idea at all what to do, other than keep wandering.
‘You shouldn’t travel in those mountains,’ I had been told by more than one well-meaning local, ‘There are bandits there who think nothing of raping women and cutting the throats of men. They will do it to Christians even, let alone atheists like you.’
But I ignored the advice, perhaps even half-hoping that an encounter with the bandits might provide a way out of my dilemma.
‘Well, you can’t earn us any money can you?’ I sneered at Lucy. ‘You’ve gone and destroyed the tools of your trade!’
Lucy said nothing, recognizing a hostile situation type HS-56.
I drove on. I wouldn’t stop until darkness came. Then I would find a room somewhere where Lucy could hide and moon over her books in the darkness.
51
52
Lucy sat near the window in a tiny room that had been vacated for us by the owner of the local store in yet another village. She had taken off her dress because it chafed against the raw flesh at the top of her arms and legs. (I don’t think this hurt in exactly the human sense, but sensors embedded in the damaged flesh clamoured constantly to the silicon brain in her chest, and took away information-processing capacity from elsewhere.)
Through the window came faintly the mournful rise and fall of the Orthodox liturgy. It was a day dedicated to the local saint, and most villagers, having crowded round to ogle at Lucy on our arrival, were now in church, where the services continued from morning to night. The storekeeper had left his fourteen-year-old son, Spiro, in charge of the tiny store which doubled as café, restaurant and bar.
I was down there drinking steadily, but already dreading the prospect of returning to Lucy: the stale smell of her suppurating flesh, her dull blank face stooped over some book or gazing into space as it pursued its slow, dull, ponderous thoughts…
There were two shepherds in the store as well as me. They had done their praying earlier in the day. One of them – Petros – was a man in his forties. Andreas, his nephew, was about my age. Both had large moustaches and were lean wiry men with sinews hardened by the daily journey up and down from the village to the stony pastures hidden away in the mountainside above.
I fascinated them. My fair skin and strange accent seemed to them uncanny. I think they would have liked to have poked at me and undressed me just to see how I was made, though not half as much as they would like to have done it to my beautiful wife. (Both had watched her silently under heavy-lidded eyes, undressing her in their minds, imagining a soft and yielding nakedness, and never guessing that under her pretty dress there was nothing but a hard plastic shell, with broken nutrient tubes and a printed manufacturer’s code).
It being impossible to undress Lucy or me, they did the next best thing: they plied me with raki to loosen my tongue, and besieged me with questions:
‘Do you really not believe in Christ?’
‘Do you admit that Constantinople is rightfully Greek?’
‘Which is the greatest country on Earth?’