Only Human (27 page)

There was an awkward lull in the dialogue, spoons being a contentious issue among these folk, with particular reference to the length of the handle.

‘Anyway,' said the female, brisk with sledgehammer cheerfulness, ‘it's a bit of luck for us, so I suggest we pack in the gift-horse dentistry and talk about what we're going to do next.'

Various free-floating voices mumbled agreement, with only Bumble pointing out that if certain people Upstairs who should remain nameless were going to make a habit of doing evil by stealth in this way, there didn't seem to be an awful lot of point.

‘Before we go charging in with both hooves,' the female demon continued, ‘we'd better just stop for a moment and make sure we all know exactly what it is we're setting out to do. Agreed?'

A muted chorus indicated their support for the proposal, and the female demon, having cleared where her throat would have been if she'd had one when wearing her true shape, continued.

‘The game plan,' she said, ‘is this. At the moment, Himself upstairs has the monopoly on Creation. Result: stagnation, decadence, decline, all research and invention in atrophy, and we're not making a penny out of a potentially lucrative market. Can this state of affairs be allowed to continue? we ask ourselves. No, it can not.

‘Which is why,' she went on, ‘we've formed a syndicate to design and build an alternative life form with which the landlords of habitable planets can stock their worlds. Now there's no point in mucking about with sentient rocks and super-intelligent electrical currents and things that look like failed soufflés; in physical terms, there's nothing to whack the upright two-armed biped with its brain in its head and the good old opposable thumb. What we've got to do is find some way of
improving
on Old Reliable; and it's not the hardware that needs updating so much as the software. The programming. The hard disk. Agreed?'

Another round of muted approval, tempered only by a suggestion that there had to be a better way of producing more of them than
that
. Something neat and quick and quiet, the voice recommended, where you just add water or take a cutting or something.

‘The software on the present model, however,' she continued, ‘is an absolute bloody disaster; I don't think anybody would disagree with that, least of all the little perishers themselves. In fact, we'd be doing our prospective creations a favour. All right so far? Good.

‘What we've now got to do,' she went on, ‘is find a better set of systems, one that'll be compatible with the hardware but which won't end up self-destructing the whole production run and taking the planet with it. And that's why recent events have given us an opportunity we just can't afford to miss. Because, thanks to our unwitting friend in a high place, there are now five human bodies walking around up there with non-human systems running them; and the very fact that they're still walking around several weeks later proves to me that these systems work. What we've got to do now is analyse them, pull out the bits that we want to incorporate in our product and combine them, along with a few herbs and spices of our own, to make something we can flog to planetholders everywhere. Everyone happy with that?'

‘Sure,' growled a voice in the middle darkness. ‘Except, with all due respect, we haven't exactly got very far, have we? Two direct approaches, two washouts. Three, if you include the painting.'

There was nothing in the tone of the female demon's reply to suggest a shrug of a pair of notional shoulders, but it was there all right. ‘So we went about it the wrong way. We asked first. This time, we don't bother asking. And before you say
We can't just go grabbing 'em off the surface and taking them to bits with a damn great spanner, someone's sure to notice
, I'd like to point out that that's exactly what we can do, now that Our Kid's gone and switched off the security cameras.'

 

‘Hello and good morning, you're listening to the Early Bird show, my name's Danny Bennett and today's big story is the total and completely unexpected eclipse of the sun, which none of the world's great scientific institutions managed to predict. And the question we all should be asking is, if they didn't know, who did? Is this just a perfectly innocent natural disaster, as a Home Office spokesman was at such pains to assure us earlier this morning? Or, with the US Presidential elections less than four years away and tension further escalating in the strife-torn Gulf, is there more to today's outbreak of total darkness than meets the eye? With me in the studio this morning we have . . .'

If
Homo sapiens
had been deliberately trying to prove the First Voice's point, they couldn't have made a better job of it. Their ability to scuff up the patently obvious, to the point where any other explanation than the true one would be more acceptable, had never been more brilliantly displayed. Thanks to Danny Bennett and hundreds of thousands of steely-eyed newshounds like him right across the now unexpectedly pitch-dark planet, humanity was divided into two roughly equal groupings: those who were hysterically convinced that it was some ghastly manoeuvre by the Americans (especially numerous, needless to say, in America), and those who had long ago learnt that anything they say on the news is bound to be the exact opposite of the truth, who therefore dismissed the eclipse as One of Those Things and contented themselves with digging out the candles left over from last winter's electricity strike.

In their defence, it has to be said that none of them could be expected to realise what was going on since none of them actually knew what the Sun and Moon are for.

In the security room Topside, meanwhile, the seemingly endless array of monitors suddenly went blank.

‘I
t's gone dark,' said the robot, peering out of the window.

‘So it has,' Len replied. ‘Is it supposed to do that? Remember, I used to live in a factory.'

The robot accessed some relevant data. ‘Not really,' it replied. ‘Or at least, not right now. You see, there's this thing called the sun, it's a big burning thing in the sky—'

‘I'll take your word for it,' Len replied hastily. It hadn't taken him long to discover that asking the robot to explain things was really only something you dared to do if you had a spare week. ‘Fuse blown, I expect. That or a couple of wires come loose. I expect they'll get it fixed in a minute.'

The robot hummed for a second or so as information sloshed into it from data stores in five continents. ‘I doubt it,' it said, considered whether or not it should explain, assessed its master's mood to nine decimal places and added, ‘apparently it's not quite as simple as that.'

‘Oh come on,' Len replied impatiently, ‘it's just a big light, that's all. If it's not a fuse or a loose connection, what can it be? Might be a flat battery, I suppose.'

‘It hasn't got batteries,' the robot said. ‘It's, um, solar powered. Look, to cut it short, there's something between it and us. All we do is wait for the obstruction to go away. These things happen, apparently.'

Len shrugged. ‘No skin off my nose, anyway,' he replied. ‘We've got work to do, remember? Now let's see, we've got the paint and the scaffolding poles, that just leaves the—'

Outside in the street there was a screech of rubber on asphalt, a loud bump which made the ground shake, and the tinkling of glass, soft and musical as the laughter of malicious elves. ‘Hello,' Len said, turning his head. ‘What's that noise?'

‘Car accident, probably,' the robot said. ‘That's when two internal-combustion-propelled road-going vehicles - sorry, I don't suppose you're in the mood.'

‘Sounded a bit drastic,' Len mused. ‘Is that perfectly normal too?'

The robot nodded. ‘Very much so,' it said. ‘More people are killed and injured on the roads of Britain every year than died in the Battle of—'

‘Killed?' Len turned and scowled at the robot. ‘Thought you said it was perfectly normal.'

‘It is. One minute you're driving along quite happily, then next you're staring up at a white ceiling and they're giving you your lunch through a tube up your nose. It's amazing what your lot - I mean their lot, sorry - are prepared to get used to.'

Another screech, bump, tinkle. And another. Len put down the hacksaw he'd been adjusting and stood up. Something, his machine's sense of harmony told him, was out of alignment here; there was a jib strip loose or a lock nut in need of adjustment, and machines abhor that sort of thing in the way that Nature abhors a vacuum. ‘Altruism,' he said.

‘Sorry?'

‘That stuff you were telling me about. Could we do some of it and stop these internal-combustion-propelled road-going vehicles bopping each other?'

The robot ran a feasibility scan. ‘I don't see why not,' it replied. ‘Speaking of which, there's a substantial probability that what's causing all these accidents is the eclipse. Because it's dark, you see.'

‘So they can't see where they're going. Haven't they got lights?'

The robot tilted its head, noticing as it did so that the left-side integral oil reservoir in its neck would need topping up in approximately sixteen months' time. ‘Sure they have,' it replied. ‘But it's not night-time.Which means it's not supposed to be dark. So some people aren't switching their lights on. And before you ask—'

‘Don't tell me, that's perfectly normal too.' Len's brow furrowed. ‘I tell you,' he said, ‘most of these human buggers couldn't get a job as a screwdriver, let alone a milling machine or a turret lathe. Thick as bricks, the lot of 'em. All right then, let's go and altruise. These internal-combustion-propelled—'

‘Call 'em cars,' suggested the robot. ‘It's easier.'

‘Cars, then. They're machines, I take it?'

‘You bet. Pretty neat bits of engineering, some of them.'

Len relaxed. ‘That's all right, then. At least there's somebody intelligent we can talk to about this.'

The robot, needless to say, was fitted with a 250,000-candlepower halogen searchlight right between the sensor heads that served it as eyes. Once they reached the street, the beam from this magnificent accessory illuminated a thoroughly depressing scene. Just in case someone might ask for an exactly appropriate word to describe it, the robot ran a quick dictionary check and came up with ‘shambles'.

‘Idiots,' Len muttered, as a car whipped past him at high speed, narrowly missing the corpse of a small van. ‘They've all got perfectly good headlamps. Why don't they . . .?'

At the robot's request, all the component data stores of the Net thought about that one for approximately a sixth of a second. ‘It's quite obvious,' the robot said, ‘once you take into account modern human operational protocols. You see, it isn't against the law to drive around without your lights on during a total eclipse of the sun. It's only not illegal because nobody's thought to make it illegal, but since it isn't, they aren't. Turning their lights on, I mean. The idea is, they've got the Government to tell them what to do and what not to do. Until the Government tells them they've got to switch on the lights during an eclipse, they can't. Even if they want to. All they can do is wait till the next election and vote in a different government who
will
tell them to switch their lights on when the Earth's orbit around the sun coincides with the orbit of the moon around the Earth. And according to my data, there isn't another election due for up to four point two years.' The robot paused to reflect on this. ‘Let's hope for their sakes,' it added, ‘that it's not going to be a very long eclipse.'

Len tried to get his head around that one, but it wasn't that bendy. ‘Stuff that,' he said. ‘Oh look, here comes another—'

It was a new-model Escort, and it hadn't seen the van. Just at that crucial moment when impact could still just about be avoided, Len took a deep breath and shouted.

The driver of the Escort, suddenly seeing a van directly in front of him, swerved, yanked the wheel back, swore and carried on. He hadn't heard anything, of course, because when Len yelled:
he'd yelled it in Machine; admittedly with a thick Engineering accent, whereas the car only spoke Automotive, but it managed to get the gist.

‘It worked,' muttered the robot.

Len shrugged. ‘Well, there was obviously no point talking to the human. Oh for pity's sake, here's another.'

An hour and a half later, Len was still yelling at passing cars and averting fatal collisions, when something remarkable happened. The cars started turning their lights on, even though it wasn't lighting-up time yet.