The Stone Gods Page 7

  ‘Well, of course not – y’know, like I said, you’re a robot.’

  ‘That isn’t why I don’t love him,’ said Spike, but Pink wasn’t listening.

  ‘What about you, Billie?’ she said. ‘What’s your story? Now that we’re in space we can say what we like. I feel much better since we left Orbus – I think maybe I was allergic to gravity. It’s kind of flattening.’

  Spike looked at me. I shrugged. ‘There was someone. It didn’t work out. If I’m truthful I would say that it’s never worked out. Almost, nearly, but not quite. And as we’re in space, and can say anything, you might as well know now that I’m here to avoid prison. I have been tried for Acts of Terrorism. I have since faked my data details and, yes, I am officially, as of now, on the run.’

  Pink McMurphy was staring at me with eyes the size of moons. ‘Did you murder someone?’

  ‘I was campaigning against Genetic Reversal.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because it makes people fucked up and miserable.’

  ‘Y’know, I’d be fucked up and miserable anyway – and if I’m going to be fucked up and miserable, I’d rather be young, fucked up and miserable. Who wants to be depressed and have skin that looks like fried onions?’

  ‘Pink, I just visited you on a professional basis and you wanted to refix from age twenty-four to age twelve.’

  ‘I have pressing personal circumstances.’

  ‘You have a husband who is a paedophile.’

  ‘He’s just sentimental. When we go shopping, he always likes to visit the toy store. Men, y’know, they don’t grow up – it makes sense that they like girls.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense to me. We have a society where routine cosmetic surgery and genetic Fixing are considered normal –’

  Pink interrupted me, patting my knee with a clear, unspotted, unaged and manicured hand. ‘It is normal … What was so normal about getting old? It’s great that we have Fixing and laser. I’m fifty-eight in old years, but I look and I feel fantastic.’ Pink demonstrated her great feel-good fantasticness by bouncing her silicon tits a little higher out of her dress. ‘Nobody has to look horrible any more – it’s been a winner for confidence.’

  ‘If you’re so confident, why do you want to be twelve years old?’

  ‘I told you a hundred times – I love my husband and I want his attention. I’ll never get it aged twenty-four. I even had my vagina reduced. I’m tight as a screwtop bottle.’ Fortunately there was no demonstration this time. I relaxed.

  Spike said to me, ‘What were these acts of terrorism?’

  ‘Do you remember the bombing at MORE-Futures?’

  ‘I remember that!’ said Pink. ‘That was world news! Wow!’

  ‘No one was injured. I had already activated the fire alarm and evacuated the building. It was the plant we wanted to destroy – as a way of getting attention.’

  ‘A bomb is a big way of getting attention,’ said Pink. ‘I only ever set fire to the shed.’

  ‘No one wanted to talk about the issues. I’m not anti-science – I’m a scientist – but you cannot have a democracy that is in default of its responsibilities. MORE is taking over the Central Power. MORE owns most of it, funds most of it, and has shares in the rest. There was never any debate about the ethics of Genetic Reversal – it just started to happen because MORE figured out how to do it.’

  ‘It’s a free country,’ said Pink.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s a corporate country.’

  ‘MORE is paying for this trip,’ said Spike. ‘It’s a Central Power Mission, but that’s for the press to report. In private, MORE pays, in return for concessions on Planet Blue.’

  ‘Can’t see why you want to blow a place up for making a woman look good on a date,’ said Pink.

  ‘I didn’t set off the bomb, in case you’re worrying. I was instrumental but not active. And I was acquitted.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Insufficient evidence against me.’

  ‘But you just said you did it!’

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell the prosecutor that, was I? I had the Access Codes to the building. I sheltered the bombers. I don’t regret it.’

  ‘I don’t think a convicted – well maybe not convicted, but guilty, y’know, bomber should be lecturing me about my personal life. If I’d known you were a bomber, I’d never have let you in the house. I got nice ornaments and things.’

  Pink got up and left. It was probably the first time in her life that she had sighted the moral high ground. Predictably, she occupied it.

  Spike leaned forward, took my hands, and said, ‘Billie, Handsome has orders to leave you behind on Planet Blue with the others.’

  ‘What others?’

  ‘There’s a breeding colony. Class A political prisoners. They can’t do any damage – they’re back living before the stone age – but they can breed.’

  ‘No one can breed any more,’ I said. ‘It’s womb-free.’

  ‘Unless you have refused intervention.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘It’s an experiment … Handsome dropped sixty prisoners – unofficially, of course – on his tracking mission. He was paid by MORE-Security on behalf of the Central Power. He should have taken another twenty-five with him this time.’

  ‘The twenty-five who were arrested?’

  ‘Yes. One of them tried to escape and threatened to talk, so the whole thing had to be covered up as a raid, as sabotage. They didn’t break into the Compound. They were already there – waiting to be shipped. The Enforcement Officer involved in the so-called break-in was the one who arrested you three years ago. He thought this was his chance to try again.’

  ‘Did Manfred know about this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything to me about not coming back.’

  ‘In a way he did you a favour. If you had known the whole story you might not have left – and if you had not left, they would have arrested you.’

  ‘And the farm?’

  Spike said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was over. That place. That time. That life. We were silent. I stood up, pacing the room like a bad joke. Like a cliché.

  ‘Spike – what exactly is the plan for Planet Blue?’

  ‘Destroy the dinosaurs and relocate.’

  ‘That’s the official story. What’s the real story?’

  ‘The rich are leaving. The rest of the human race will have to cope with what’s left of Orbus, a planet becoming hostile to human life after centuries of human life becoming hostile to the planet. It was inevitable – Nature seeks balance. ‘MORE is building a space-liner called the Mayflower. It will take those who can afford it to Planet Blue, where a high-tech, low-impact village will be built for them. MORE is recruiting farmers from the Caliphate to make a return to sustainable mixed farming to feed the new village. There will be free passage for key workers, including the Science Station crew, who will maintain the satellite link with Orbus.’

  ‘Strictly hierarchical, then.’

  ‘Rigid – and, of course, it will take several generations for a counter-movement to begin, and the feeling is that the planet is so big they can just be allowed to leave and form alternative communities elsewhere. Technology will be the golden key – without it, it’s going to be space-age minds living stone-age lives. That will be a powerful reason to stay within the system.’

  ‘But there will be no elections, no government – what are we going to have? A king?’

  ‘There will be a Board of Directors.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘MORE-Futures will be the on-the-ground presence, guaranteeing homes and food, development and security.’

  ‘So that’s the shape of the brave new world?’

  ‘For now. Life is unpredictable. Planet Blue is still evolving. We may have the smart technology, but she has the raw energy.’

  There was a pause. A long one.

  I had no idea what to do or what to say. My life had tipped
upside-down and I was trying to pretend that everything was still the right way up. It’s an optical illusion that happens to people in upturned boats.

  I walked over to the wide oval window. In space it is difficult to tell what is the right way up; space is curved, stars and planets are globes. There is no right way up. The Ship itself is tilting at a forty-five-degree angle, but it is the instruments that tell me so, not my body looking out of the window.

  In the days before we invented spacecraft, we dreamed of flying saucers, but what we finally built were rockets: fuel-greedy, inefficient and embarrassingly phallic. When we realized how to fly vast distances at light-speed, we went back to the saucer shape: a disc with solar sails. Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

  Sometimes, at the moment of waking, I get a sense for a second that I have found a way forward. Then I stand up, losing all direction, relying on someone else’s instruments to tell me where I am.

  If I could make a compass out of a dream. If I could trust my own night-sight …

  Spike came behind me and put her hand on my neck. Her skin is warm. ‘You are upset,’ she said. ‘I can feel the change in your skin temperature.’

  ‘The thing about life that drives me mad,’ I said, ‘is that it doesn’t make sense. We make plans. We try to control, but the whole thing is random.’

  ‘This is a quantum universe,’ said Spike, ‘neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.’

  ‘What do you suggest I do – to intervene?’

  Spike leaned forward and kissed me. ‘Bend the light.’

  ‘You’re a robot,’ I said, realizing that I sounded like Pink McMurphy.

  ‘And you are a human being – but I don’t hold that against you.’

  ‘Your systems are neural, not limbic. You can’t feel emotion.’

  Spike said, ‘Human beings often display emotion they do not feel. And they often feel emotion they do not display.’

  That’s a description of me all right. I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn’t matter at all.

  ‘There’s a planet,’ said Spike, ‘made of water, entirely of water, where every solid thing is its watery equivalent. There are no seas because there is no land. There are no rivers because there are no banks. There is no thirst because there is no dry.

  ‘The planet is like a bowl of water except that there is no bowl. It hangs in space as a drop of water hangs from a leaf, except that there is no leaf. It cannot exist, and yet it does. I tell you this so you know that what is impossible sometimes happens.’

  ‘I don’t want to get personal,’ I said, ‘but I’ll say it again – you are a robot. Do you want to kiss a woman so that you can add it to your database?’

  ‘Gender is a human concept,’ said Spike, ‘and not interesting. I want to kiss you.’ She kissed me again.

  ‘In any case,’ she said, very close, very warm, and I am responding, and I don’t want to, and I can’t help it, ‘is human life biology or consciousness? If I were to lop off your arms, your legs, your ears, your nose, put out your eyes, roll up your tongue, would you still be you? You locate yourself in consciousness, and I, too, am a conscious being.’

  Spike moved away into the shadows as Pink McMurphy appeared in the doorway in a gold bikini, gold wrap, gold sandals, gold Alice band and gold earrings. Her fingernails were painted gold. She must have registered my expression. ‘I wear gold in the evenings,’ she said, by way of explanation. Then she said to me, ‘I was hasty in my judgement. We’re all here in space. We all have to get along. I’m going to forget about your bomb. We all act hasty sometimes.’

  She was smiling like a New Age Guru. I don’t know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood. Pink poured herself some more champagne, and ripped into a bag of nuts. ‘What are you girls talking about?’

  ‘The fact that Spike isn’t a girl,’ I said. ‘We’re trying to work out the differences between Robo sapiens and Homo sapiens.’

  ‘You think too much,’ said Pink. ‘I’ll get you a drink. It’s obvious – cut me and I bleed.’

  ‘So blood is the essential quality of humanness?’ said Spike.

  ‘And the rest! The fact is that you had to be built – I don’t know, like a car has to be built. You were made in a factory.’

  ‘Every human being in the Central Power has been enhanced, genetically modified and DNA-screened. Some have been cloned. Most were born outside the womb. A human being now is not what a human being was even a hundred years ago. So what is a human being?’

  ‘Whatever it is, it isn’t a robot,’ I said.

  ‘Y’know, she’s right,’ said Pink, looking wise, or as wise as it is possible to look in a gold bikini.

  Spike wasn’t giving up. ‘But I want to know how you are making the distinction. Even without any bio-engineering, the human body is in a constantly changing state. What you are today will not be what you are in days, months, years. Your entire skeleton replaces itself every ten years, your red blood cells replace themselves every one hundred and twenty days, your skin every two weeks.’

  ‘I accept that,’ I said, ‘and I accept that you are a rational, calculating, intelligent entity. But you have no emotion.’

  ‘’S right, y’know, they don’t feel a thing. When I was having a nervous breakdown, my Kitchenhands – y’know, the pink ones I had specially done, you met them, Billie, when you came to see me – well, they just fetched and carried the Valium and the tissues, but there was no sympathy.’

  ‘I am not a pair of Kitchenhands,’ said Spike.

  ‘It was just an example,’ said Pink.

  ‘So your definition of a human being is in the capacity to experience emotion?’ asked Spike. ‘How much emotion? The more sensitive a person is, the more human they are?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘Insensitive, unfeeling people are at the low end of human – not animal, more android.’

  ‘I am not an android,’ said Spike.

  ‘I didn’t mean to insult you. I’ve worked with androids – they’re pretty basic, I know, but …’

  ‘I am a Robo sapiens,’ said Spike, ‘and perhaps it will be us, and not you, who are the future of the world.’

  ‘Aah, you’ll never replace humans,’ said Pink, getting up. ‘Let’s have more champagne.’

  ‘Humans are rendering themselves obsolete,’ said Spike. ‘Successive generations of de-skilling mean that you can no longer fend for yourselves in the way that you once could. You rely on technicians and robots. It is not thought that anyone in the Central Power could survive unassisted on Planet Blue. Pink, do you know how to plant potatoes?’

  ‘You mean like chips?’

  ‘Or how to cook them?’

  ‘Sure I do – the bag goes in the microwave.’

  ‘Can you sew? Can you plane a length of timber? Can you build a fire? Can you fish? Can you row a boat? Could you design and build a simple pulley?’

  ‘They’ll have figured all that out for us,’ said Pink.

  ‘They …’I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Spike, glancing at me. ‘Humans have given away all their power to a “they”. You aren’t able to fight the system because without the system none of you can survive. You made a world without alternatives, and now it is dying, and your new world already belongs to “they”.’

  ‘I never heard of an activist robot,’ said Pink.

  ‘It’s just one more thing we’re going to have to be on your behalf,’ said Spike.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I said. ‘Overthrow us?’

  Spike laughed. ‘Revenge of the Robots? No, but you see, Robo sapiens is evolving – Homo sapiens is an endangered species. It doesn’t feel like it to you now but you have destroyed your planet, and it is not clear to me that you will be viable on Planet Blue.’

  ‘
Robots can’t exist without humans,’ I said.

  ‘That was once true,’ said Spike. ‘It isn’t true any more. We are solar-powered and self-repairing. We are intelligent and non-aggressive. You could learn from us.’

  ‘Oh, this is funny!’ said Pink. ‘Learn from a robot? Honey, you may be able to get us across the universe and paddle a canoe when we reach the other side, but you don’t know anything about life.’

  ‘There are many kinds of life,’ said Spike, mildly. ‘Humans always assumed that theirs was the only kind that mattered. That’s how you destroyed your planet.’

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ said Pink. ‘I didn’t destroy it.’

  ‘But you have a second chance. Maybe this time …’

  Pink was singing, ‘Maybe this time, I’ll be lucky, Maybe this time he’ll stay … Maybe this time, for the first time, love won’t hurry away …’

  She began to dance with herself in front of the window, vast with stars.

  Spike turned to me, smiling. ‘We came the long way round. Look over here. I want to show you something and to explain something.’

  She stood up and went over to the pages pasted on the wall. She pointed at one of the yellowing texts: Nothing in this wide universe I call, save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all.

  She said, ‘On the official space mission, when we hung in our ship over Planet Blue, Handsome came aboard for the celebrations. While the crew were making the film record, the first shots to be replayed back to Orbus, Handsome got out his book of poetry. Everyone laughed at him, but he insisted that only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world. Underneath the digital images of Planet Blue, he wrote, She is all States, all Princes I, Nothing else is.

  ‘I can read several languages and I can process information as fast as a Mainframe computer, but I did not understand that single line of text.

  ‘I went to Handsome and asked him to show me the book. He sat beside me, our heads bent over the page, his hair falling against mine, and he explained first of all the line, and then the poem, then he put the book into my hands and looked at me seriously, in the way he does when he wants something, and he said, “My new-found land.”

  ‘He left, and I went back to my data analysis, and I thought I was experiencing system failure. In fact I was sensing something completely new to me. For the first time I was able to feel.’