The machine turned and strode away.
Wilde scrambled after it.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Ship City,’ said the machine. ‘The nearest human habitation.’ It paused for a moment. ‘I’d come along, if I were you.’
The human-equivalent machine and the man it claimed to have made walked together along the bank of the canal. Every so often the man turned his head to look at the machine. Once or twice he got as far as opening his mouth, but he always turned away again as if the question or remark on his mind were too ridiculous for words.
After an hour and twenty minutes the man stopped. The machine stopped after another couple of strides and stood rocking slightly on its metal legs.
‘I’m thirsty,’ the man said. The water in the canal was sluggish, flecked with green algae. He eyed it dubiously. ‘D’you know if that stuff’s safe to drink?’
‘It isn’t,’ said the machine. ‘And I can’t make it safe, without using up an amount of energy I’d rather keep. However, I can assure you that if you go on walking, with perhaps the occasional rest, you’ll drink in a bar in Ship City tonight.’
‘Mars bars?’ Wilde said, and laughed. ‘I always wanted to hang out in Mars bars.’
Another hour passed and Wilde said, ‘Hey, I can see it!’
The machine didn’t need to ask him. Without missing a step, it smoothly extended its legs until it was striding along with its pod almost on a level with the man’s head, and it too saw what Wilde had seen: the jagged irregularities at the horizon.
‘Ship City,’ the machine said.
‘Give me a break,’ the man shouted, hurrying to keep up. ‘No need to go like a Martian fighting-machine.’
The machine’s steady pace didn’t slacken.
‘You’re stronger than you think,’ it said. The man caught up with it and marched alongside.
‘I like that,’ the machine added, after a while. ‘“Like a Martian fighting-machine”. Heh-heh.’
Its laugh needed working on if it was going to sound at all human.
They walked on. Their shadows lengthened in front of them, and the city slowly appeared above a horizon that, for the man, was unfamiliarly but not unexpectedly close. The irregularities differentiated into tall, bristling towers connected by arches and slender, curved bridges; domes and blocks became apparent between the towers, among which a matted encrustation of smaller buildings spread out from the city, obscured by a low haze.
The small sun set behind them, and within fifteen minutes the night surrounded them. The man stopped walking, and the machine stopped too.
Jon Wilde turned around several times, scanning from the zenith to the horizon and back as if looking for something he might recognise. He found nothing, and faced at last the machine, dim in the starlight that reflected like frost from its hull and flanks.
‘How far?’ The words came from a dry mouth. He waved a hand at the blazing, freezing, crowded sky. ‘How long?’
‘Hey, Jon Wilde,’ the machine said. It had got its conversational tone right. ‘If I knew, I would tell you. Same spiral, different arm, that’s all I know. We’re talking memory numbers, man, we’re talking geological time.’
The two beings contemplated each other for a moment, then hastened the last few miles towards the city’s multiplying lights.
Stras Cobol, by the Stone Canal. Part of the human quarter. A good place to get lost. Surveillance systems integrate the view –
A three-kilometre strip of street, the canal-bank on one side, buildings on the other, their height a bar-chart of property values in a long swoop from the centre’s tall towers to the low shacks and shanties at the edge of town where the red sand blows in off the desert and family-farm fusion plants glow in the dark. On the same trajectory the commerce spills increasingly out from behind the walls and windows, on to the pavement stalls and hawkers’ trays. All along this street there’s a brisk jostle of people and machines, some working, some relaxing as the light leaves the sky.
Among all the faces in that crowd, something focuses in on one face. A woman’s face, tracked briefly as she threads her way between the other bodies on the street. The system’s evaluation routines categorise her appearance swiftly: apparent age about twenty, height about one metre sixty – well below average – mass slightly above average. Her height is lifted within the normal range by high-heeled shoes, her figure accentuated by a long-sleeved, skinny-rib sweater and a long narrow skirt, skilfully slit so it doesn’t impede her quick steps. Shoulder-length hair, black and thick, sways around a face pretty and memorable but not flipping any switches on the system’s scalar aesthetic – wide cheekbones, full lips, large eyes with green irises and suddenly narrowing, zeroing-in pupils that look straight at the hidden lens that’s giving her this going-over. One eye closes in what looks like a wink.
And she’s gone. She’s vanished from the system’s sight, she’s just a blurry anomaly, a floating speck in its vision and a passing unease in its mind as its attention is turned forcibly to a stall-holder wheeling his urn of hot oil across a nearby junction without due care and attention and the we-got-an-emerging-situation-on-our-hands program kicks in…
But she’s still there, still walking fast, and we’re still with her, for reasons which will sometime become clear. We’re in her space, in her time, in her head.
Her pretty little head contains and conceals a truly Neo-Martian mind, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic as the man said, and right now it’s in combat consciousness. She’s running Spy, not Soldier, but Soldier’s there, ready to toggle in at the first sign of trouble. Body movement’s being handled by Secretary, in leisure-time mode: her walk is late-for-a-date hurry and doing fine so far. Except she’s walked farther and faster than any girl in such a circumstance normally would, and the skin over her Achilles tendons is rubbing raw. She sets a Surgeon sub-routine to work and – its warning heeded – the pain switches sensibly off.
She allows herself a diffuse glow of pleasure at having spotted and subverted the surveillance system. Her real danger, she knows, comes from human pursuit. She can’t see behind her because she daren’t switch on her sonar and radar, but she uses every other clue that catches her eye. Every echo, every reflection: in windows and bits of scrap metal and the shiny fenders of vehicles, even in the retinae of people walking in the opposite direction – all go to build an all-round visual field. Constantly updated, an asynchronous palimpsest where people and vehicles in full colour and 3D pass out of her cone of vision and into a wider sphere where they become jerky cartoon figures, wire outlines intermittently blocked in with colour as a scrap of detail flashes back from in front. (She could keep the colour rendering if she wanted to, let the visual and the virtual merge seamlessly, but she doesn’t have the processing power to spare right now. Spy is a demanding mind-tool and it eats resources.)
It tags a warning, unsubtle red arrowheads jabbing at one face, then another, both far behind her. She throws enhancement at those distant dots, blowing them up into something recognisable, and recognises them. Two men, heavies employed by her owner. Their names aren’t on file but she’s glimpsed them at various times over the years.
Spy analyses their movements and reports that they haven’t spotted her: they’re searching, not tracking. Not yet.
She sees a bar sign coming up on her left, ‘The Malley Mile’ spelled out in fizzing rainbow neon. By good luck the nearest pedestrian coming her way is huge and walking close to the sides of the buildings. She lets the two-metre-thirty, two-hundred-kilo bulk of the giant pass her – the only noticeable thing about him is the inappropriately floral scent of the shampoo he’s most recently used on his orangey pelt – and as he occludes any view of her from behind she nips smartly through the doorway.