Spoole stood at the top of the city and looked out at a landscape turning to metal.
‘He’s coming, Spoole,’ said Gearheart. ‘Your son is coming home. How does that make you feel?’
‘My son?’ said Spoole.
‘Oh, Spoole, we both know who Kavan is. Don’t you feel proud? That your wire is strong? Does that satisfy your virility? Does it make you feel like a man? Or don’t you like it, the fact that you are no longer the greatest?’
‘Be quiet, Gearheart.’
Gearheart slammed down her spoon-shaped arm. Her battered, misshapen body was so ugly now. Spoole noted the lightest speckling of rust beading on her chest panelling, and he felt disgusted.
‘Don’t tell me to be quiet,’ snapped Gearheart. ‘You call yourself an Artemisian? Look at you skulking here in this Basilica while better robots than you are off changing the world. All that metal flowing into this state, and what are you building? More troops? More weapons? More railway lines? No! You are expanding Artemis City to your greater glory. Spoole, you have forgotten Nyro.’
Spoole looked down at Gearheart, her battered shell lying on the floor nearby. She couldn’t see the view from up here, but she didn’t care. She didn’t seem to care about much at all, any more.
‘Forgotten Nyro?’ said Spoole. ‘You know, maybe I have. Or maybe not. Maybe Nyro’s philosophy wasn’t woven into my mind as strongly as into others’. Remember, I was made to lead. I wonder if we leaders can ever consider ourselves truly expendable? I think we will always see ourselves as different to the metal around us.’
‘Kavan doesn’t think so,’ said Gearheart. ‘And he has conquered all of Shull. He’s a better Artemisian than you, Spoole.’
‘Maybe he is,’ said Spoole.
He looked out again over the expanding city. Cold metal in the pale sun.
‘Does it really matter, Gearheart?’ he asked. ‘Someone takes some metal. She twists it, and it thinks for forty or so years, and then it dies. Look at this city. Some of the metal that makes up these buildings would once have been minds, would once have thought. It may do again sometime in the future. Minds live and die, and all the while metal twists its way across the surface of Penrose, in the form of cities and railway lines and body plating. Once the metal is extracted from its ore, it will dance its way across this planet for all time. Sometimes it will think, and sometimes it will not. But all the while it will just be metal.’
As he spoke he knelt down by his consort’s body. There was rust here at her neck too, he noticed. Red speckles of it. The Gearheart of old would never have allowed herself to have sunk to these depths. And yet she was the same Gearheart, the same metal in every respect, save for those few tiny cuts that the Scout had made.
‘What is the matter with you, Spoole? What are you doing?’ Gearheart sounded worried.
Spoole was crying, he was shocked to discover, a faint electric whine emerging from his voicebox. But that was silly. There was nothing here but metal. Why should one piece of twisted metal feel anything for another piece?
He had an awl in his hand. All it would take would be a quick jab to the soft metal of the skull. He had done it so many times before, back when he was younger. On the battlefields of Zernike and Stark and Bethe.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ asked Gearheart, wonderingly. And then her voice hardened. ‘Do it, Spoole. It’s what Nyro would have done.’
Nothing but metal, thought Spoole. And some day his lifeforce would give out too. The pair of them would be melted down and perhaps the metal of their minds would flow together. Gearheart was right: it was what Nyro would have done. But was Nyro right?
‘Gearheart?’ he said.
There was no reply.
Spoole looked down at the blue wire that trailed from his awl, down his hand, over his arm.
‘Gearheart,’ he said, one last time.
He allowed the empty metal shell to tumble to the ground. He looked up at the city growing around him.
Spoole stood alone. Just as had been woven into his mind, a leader stood alone: a leader did not worry about procreation. This way Artemis was strong.
In the meantime, metal was raised on the land, metal would march and metal would die.
He looked down again at the empty metal body at his feet. Once it had contained a mind called Gearheart, now all there was was twisted metal.
Once there had been so many minds, and some day all there would be would be metal. Did it really matter in the end? Did it matter whether it was he or Kavan who led Artemis?
He heard the Scout entering the room behind him. He turned.
‘Yes, Leanne?’
‘Spoole, I have news of Kavan. He has left what remains of the army and has travelled north alone.’
‘What? Why?’
The Scout was deliberately not looking at the broken body of Gearheart.
‘No reason was given.’
What is Kavan doing? wondered Spoole. To leave his troops at this moment. What is he planning now?
Metal flowed across the world, he reflected. Kavan and Spoole, did it matter who led Artemis? Yes, he decided. Yes it did.
So Kavan had left his troops? More fool him, since his strength had lain in his ability to command. Who would he command now?
‘Leanne,’ he said. ‘I think it is time that we took a look at the new extent of our Empire. I think it is time that we met with Kavan. Notify General Sandale that we shall be travelling north. Make ready a train and two thousand troops.’
‘Yes, Spoole.’
And when I meet Kavan, it will be from a position of strength. And I will ask him, who will be the leader of Artemis now, Kavan?
It was morning, and yet Zuse, the night moon, still hung in the sky, late in setting this day.
Spoole looked up towards it, and the moon looked back down on a world of flowing metal.
Kavan
The wind was dying: occasionally it mustered the strength to drive furrows through the wet snow, to send a white spray of flakes tumbling down into the sea that sucked at the dark rocks below; but for the most part it just cooled the metal of his shell, blew patterns of salt crystals across the paint.
The sky was grey with low clouds, the sea iron-grey as it stretched to the northern horizon, and Kavan felt as if he was at the end of the world.
Eleanor and Karel stood beside him, gazing out over the water-slicked rock shelf that slid into the sea.
‘Why are you here, Kavan?’ asked Eleanor. ‘Would Nyro have come here looking for answers?’
Kavan didn’t reply. Eleanor was teasing him, he knew. She was goading him as she always did. Shull wasn’t conquered. They may have pushed troops to the four corners of the continent, but that didn’t mean that they truly possessed the lands they had occupied. That didn’t mean that Nyro’s philosophy yet operated in the minds of all the robots of Shull.
‘I think we need to be a little to the east,’ said Kavan. He turned and began to walk down the rocky slope, following the path of the land as it twisted around the hungry sea.
He saw it almost immediately. The land there ran down a slope to a shingle beach, and then back up again to a rocky island, almost cut off from the mainland by the waters that noisily sifted through the shingle.
A stone building stood at the summit of the island, red stains of long-rusted iron running down its sides.
‘What is it?’ asked Karel softly, the first time the robot had spoken that day.
Kavan didn’t know. The white stone of the building was like nothing he had seen before: more lustrous than marble, it almost seemed to glow in the grey morning light.
They walked down to the shingle beach. Opposite them, a worn set of steps, cut directly from the rock, rose out of the shingle and made their way up to the building.
‘The path must have been covered by the beach,’ observed Eleanor. ‘Just how old is that building, do you think?’
They climbed the path, and Kavan noticed how the orange-and-white stains of lichen covered its surface. The shells of the organic life forms that inhabited this land were stuffed into every crack, lining the walls below the tideline in obscene profusion.