Twisted Metal (47 page)

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.

The three robots drew abreast as they approached the structure, metal feet rattling on stone. It was such an odd shape, its walls rounded, not straight like that of normal robot construction. They curved up and over to form the roof, giving the building an organic shape. There were strange symbols carved in a line around it, just higher than a robot could reach. Kavan stared up at them, trying to make sense of them.

‘They look so familiar,’ said Eleanor, but Kavan didn’t think so. They just looked like a tangled mess to him.

They walked around the building, searching for an entrance. They found it on the far side, facing the north. A metal door, three symbols above it, engraved in the stone of the building. These symbols were larger than the others. Kavan stared at them for some time, trying to understand them. He couldn’t hold them in his mind.

‘What are they?’ he heard Karel wonder out loud.

Eleanor laughed. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ she said, disbelievingly. ‘You really don’t know?’

‘No,’ said Kavan. ‘I have never seen them before. Have you?’

‘No, I’ve never seen them before either, but I know what they are.’

‘How could you?’ demanded Karel.

‘Any woman would know,’ said Eleanor. ‘That one is the pattern that you twist to make a girl, and this is the pattern you twist to make a boy.’

Kavan gazed at the patterns.

‘What about the one in the middle?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. That one doesn’t make sense. A mind twisted that way wouldn’t think properly. It would have no sense of itself.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘The other carvings, the ones around the side of the building, they all make sense now. Or rather they don’t. They are all minds, after a fashion, but they wouldn’t work.’

They gazed at the symbols for a while longer, to the sound of the waves crashing below.

Eleanor had lost interest. ‘What sort of metal is this?’ she asked, touching the door. Kavan placed his hand on it. He could feel a little iron there, a little gold, a little tungsten. But there was something additional in the alloy, something that he had never felt before.

‘I don’t know,’ he confessed, looking at Karel, the Turing City robot who had grown up surrounded by a richness of metal.

‘You. Come and feel this. Do you recognize it?’

The other robot touched the door.

‘It feels like . . .’ he said. ‘No, I don’t know. But it’s like something I half remember . . .’

The waves crashed around the island. A shaft of watery sunlight fell down upon them. The wind had turned east; it curdled the clouds, breaking them up.

Kavan pushed at the door with all of his strength. It didn’t move.

‘It feels different here,’ said Karel.

Kavan waved his own hand over where the other had indicated, near the door jamb. He felt iron underneath.

‘Could be the latch?’ he wondered aloud. He concentrated hard, sent his lifeforce down into the metal of his hand, felt at the iron there, felt it click into place.

‘Got it,’ he said. He pushed at the door, and it swung open easily.

‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Eleanor, you keep watch out here.’

‘I want to go in.’

‘Later.’

‘What about the symbols? Can you be sure you will understand what you see?’

‘Later,’ repeated Kavan.

There was a crowd of people standing in the depths of the building, frozen in a dim half-light that filtered down from the roof to part-fill the single room. Kavan closed the door and turned up his eyes, waited for them to adjust.

The roof was sea-green and translucent: a thick old plastic faded by the elements. Not the original roof, reckoned Kavan, but something added much later by . . . who? It now looked so worn and weathered. A muted light filtered through it, illuminating the crowd that waited in patient silence below.

So many robots, arranged in rows, all facing the door, sightless eyes gazing into eternity. All of them dead, the lifeforce long drained from their minds, the current long gone from their electromuscle.

Slowly, carefully, Kavan moved up to the nearest, his own eyes adjusting to the gloom.

The robot body that stood immediately before him was old. It wore iron panelling, red rust bubbling up among the faded remnants of what little paint had not flaked away from its body. It was a little shorter than Kavan, the curve of the arms and the legs not as graceful as his own. Everything about the body was a little straighter, a little squarer, a little less elegant.

He moved past this robot to the next one in the line. It looked older still. Shorter again, the panelling that covered its body was punctured by holes where the rust had eaten it away.

Kavan continued down the line. What was the purpose of this display? Had someone come to this land and collected specimens of local life to be exhibited here? Had the robots at the top of the world come to Shull, explored the land, made this exhibit, and then left? Why?

Down the line, past the robots, walking backwards through time. The bodies on display became smaller and more primitive the further he went. Realization dawned: This was a depiction of evolution on Shull laid out before him.

He moved even further back along the line, pleased by his deduction. Now the robots looked less like robots and more like animals. He passed four-legged crabs in thick iron shells. Something a little like a six-legged spider. Now the bodies had no legs: he saw a fish and something like a tiny whale, its metal body snub and rounded. And then there was nothing but the shells of organic life. He came to the end of the line and looked back along the exhibit.

Now he understood what he was looking at.

This building was testament, proof and warning all in one. There was no Book of Robots, there never had been. There was nothing but the evolution of robots.

But Kavan understood this: that if he wanted to rule the world, then the Book of Robots would be a useful tool. Particularly if he had a say in what went in the book. Just look at how the North Kingdom robots had fought, all because they had believed . . .