The Stone Gods

  As things have turned out, what with America’s precipitation of World War Three, the Pilgrim Fathers’ route may have a lot to answer for.

  Alaska was still talking. Wreck City had twenty alternative communities ranging from the 1960s Free Love and Cadillacs, to a group of women-only Vegans looking for the next cruelty-free planet.

  ‘They’re playing at the party tonight,’ she said. ‘Chic X.’

  ‘Chic X? A band?’

  ‘Lesbian Vegans. Dinosaur-friendly. Some of them have already been to Mexico to say sorry.’

  ‘Mexico? I’m not sure I’m following this …’

  ‘Where they found the crater – in Chicxulub, a.k.a. Sulphur City. It’s where the asteroid hit sixty-five million years ago – up goes the sulphur, down comes the snow. Ice age – out go the dinosaurs, in come the humans, give or take a few apes.’

  ‘Simple as that?’

  She nodded. ‘Life is much simpler than we like to admit.’

  I could hear strange, simple cries coming from the bedroom. I ignored them. ‘It’s an interesting theory.’

  ‘It’s not a theory – the crater is a fact, the asteroid is a fact. The Chic X girls believe it’s proof absolute of life before humans. Somebody pointed that asteroid.’

  ‘It’s a bit too late to do anything about it’, I said.

  ‘Or a bit too early, depending on your timing of another world.’

  I glanced towards the bedroom. The cries were clawed, winged.

  ‘How do the Vegans feel about World of Leather?’ I said.

  ‘They thank us for taking it away for them. They’re not judgemental. Don’t you think that’s the key to happiness?’ By way of explanation she took out a large silver key from under one of the sofa cushions. ‘The key to happiness,’ she said, ‘is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.’

  ‘What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?’ I said, sounding like Friday.

  Alaska frowned. ‘Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.’

  ‘That’s right’, I said. ‘The dead don’t talk.’

  I thought of what Friday would be saying to all of this – Utopian, flaky, unreal. But who was she harming? Who would she harm? The realistic, hard-headed practical types got us to the edge of melt-down.

  Frankly, I’d rather see Free Love and Cadillacs, Inter-planetary Vegans, naked champagne girls or …

  ‘And there are six nuns’, she said. ‘We love the nuns.’

  … or six nuns running the planet, or Spike.

  ‘Have you got my robot?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, she’s defected.’

  ‘What do you mean, she’s defected? She can’t defect, she’s a semi-programmed talking head made of silicon chips. She isn’t a moral being – she can’t even think for herself yet. Where is she?’

  ‘In the bedroom,’ said Alaska, ‘with Nebraska. She’s a Chic X.’

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a robot in want of hands can use her mouth. There was Spike, moored between the long piers of Nebraska’s legs, lapping at the jetty. She looked happy, in a silicon sort of a way.

  ‘Spike, what are you doing?’ I said, the world’s number-one stupid question.

  She didn’t turn her head, but that’s not her fault: she can’t.

  She said, ‘I am performing cunnilingus on Nebraska.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is a new experience for me.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘And I am programmed to accept new experiences. Therefore, when Nebraska suggested that I might try this, I was able to agree without consulting my Mainframe.’

  ‘In what way do you think this experience will further your understanding of the human race?’

  (Spike has forms to fill in like everyone else, and this question is on her data-sheet.)

  ‘As I have no body, it is difficult for me to imagine its uses beyond the purely functional. What I am doing has no reproductive function.’

  ‘Human beings are irrational’, I said. ‘We do things for all kinds of non-reasons and try to come up with a good explanation later. I hope you’ll be able to explain this to your Mainframe.’

  ‘I have disabled my Mainframe connection’, said Spike. ‘I have chosen to live as an outlaw.’

  I went over to the bed and, making my excuses to Nebraska, to whom I had not yet been formally introduced, I grabbed Spike by her head – well, what else could I grab her by? – and yanked her away like a bad dog. I carried her through to the other room. She smelled of sex.

  ‘Have you any idea what you’ve just done?’ I said, taking the Baby Wipes from my bag. ‘This is ridiculous, perverted and impossible.’

  ‘Do I hear one person judging another?’ said Alaska.

  ‘Spike is not a person! She’s a robot! She’s not even a robot yet, she’s training.’

  ‘You can’t train to be a robot,’ said Alaska, scornfully.

  ‘Obviously you’ve never been in the Army’, I said, but I was being flippant because I was trying to drown Nebraska’s cries, coming from the bedroom – ‘SPIKE, SPIKE …’

  ‘OK, so she’s a trainee robot – she deserves a little fun. Nebraska says she has an electric tongue.’

  ‘It’s not an electric tongue. It carries an electric current.’

  ‘I can vibrate my tongue’, said Spike, and she stuck it out of her mouth and vibrated it.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, ‘very good. Now put it back and listen to me. I have taken you on an illegal walk, during which time there has been an international incident involving several Japanese people and a few golf-buggies. MORE has declared a State of Emergency, and you have been announced MISSING on the main news. My only hope is to take you back as fast as I can.’

  ‘Your only hope of what?’ asked Spike.

  This threw me. Adrenalin-fuelled plans always have one objective: save the baby, jump ship, steal the car, shoot the person standing in front of you … Complex plans with more than one objective require careful thought. My whole aim was to find Spike and return her – but …

  ‘Exactly’, said Spike. ‘Then what will happen to you?’

  ‘You are not yet programmed to think ahead.’

  ‘I am programmed to evolve, and my most recent experience has enriched my circuitry.’

  Great. The robot that was designed to become the world-sage has had oral sex with a teenager called Nebraska and become a drop-out free-love silicon guru. Great …

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ shouted Alaska.

  ‘Sister Mary McMurphy.’

  Alaska pulled on a white glove-leather robe and opened the door. She made a little genuflexion and let in the nun.

  A small, smiling Irish woman explained that she and her five Sisters in Christ had run out of food, and although they had rung the bell, just as they always had at the convent in Cork, no one had brought them anything to eat. As a practising Catholic, she hoped Alaska would help.

  ‘We’ve got sardines,’ said Alaska.

  ‘That’s Biblical,’ said Sister Mary McMurphy, ‘the miracle of the five loaves and two fishes.’

  ‘But we haven’t got any bread – we don’t do carbs.’

  ‘Well, have you got anything else at all at all?’

  ‘Champagne?’

  Sister Mary McMurphy considered her position. ‘There is the example of our Lord’s First Miracle’, she said. ‘The Feast at Cana. The water into wine. I’ll take some, sure an’ I will.’

  Alaska went off to find a recycled carrier-bag, leaving me alone with Spike and the nun. Spike smiled.

  ‘That’s an unusual sight, so it is’, said the sister. ‘Very like the missing robot we’ve all been hearing about on the news.’

  ‘It’s the same one’, I said. ‘I’m just taking her home.’

  ‘I’ll pray for you’, said the sister. ‘Life is very hard in prison.’

  ‘I’m not going to prison!’
r />   ‘Oh, but the latest bulletin, just before I left the Holy Sisters of the Shining Mercy, yes, the latest bulletin is that the person who stole the robot has severed contact with the Mainframe computer, proving beyond doubt that the theft was a terrorist act.’

  ‘It was not a terrorist act! I took her for a walk and we were unexpectedly delayed. Then, for reasons I would rather not repeat to a religious person such as yourself, Spike, that’s her name, severed her own connection. She’s says she’s defecting.’

  ‘I am’, said Spike.

  ‘Shut up, you’re not. You don’t have a phone I could use, do you?’

  Alaska came back into the room with a large bag of sardines. ‘Sorry, Billie, phones don’t work beyond the perimeter bar. Wreck City is its own state – like the Vatican.’

  ‘That’s why we feel so at home here’, said Sister Mary McMurphy.

  ‘But I need to call my boss! Spike, re-establish Mainframe right NOW.’

  ‘I can’t’, said Spike. ‘I have a shut-down code only. I do not have a reactivate code. If I had, that would allow me to be unlawfully used in the event of a hostile incident.’

  ‘Spike, I am the one who is going to be unlawfully used. Come on, let’s get out of here so that I can explain.’

  ‘But will a soul believe you?’ asked Sister Mary McMurphy. ‘It does seem a very far-fetched tale.’

  ‘It’s not like I’m telling people I’ve risen from the dead’, I said.

  The nun was not pleased. She took her sardines and champagne, blessed Alaska, glared at me and left the house. I sat down, dejected, on the white-leather sofa. Alaska handed me a drink. She was sympathetic. ‘You can stay here for a while if you want to. There’s a spare bed.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I want to get home.’

  ‘What’s at home,’ she said, ‘that you want to get to?’

  Before the War, before any of this happened, when life still had straight edges and the picture in the middle was a jigsaw with all the pieces, when that was how it was, piece by piece my life was coming together, for the first time, yes, and I think for the first time, yes, I began to trust what I had made.

  Trusting life has not been easy for me. It’s not that I am suspicious or cynical, but the yes answering yes seems like a creation-call, not a reply I had any right to. There must have been a moment when the universe itself said yes, when life was the imperative, and either this can be read as blind and deterministic, or it can be read as the exuberance of a moment that leaves an echo on every living thing for ever.

  Any scientist can say what happened in the seconds after the Big Bang, but none has any idea what was happening in the seconds before. The cosmic Yes. Yes, I said, and Yes.

  My mother saying yes to my father and, like it or not, that was yes to life and, like it or not, that life was me.

  At last, when I never expected to hear it, when I picked it up like a radio frequency from a lost star, someone was saying yes to me, such a simple word I could not decode it. A message sent out, an answer returned. A word that was the lexicon for a new language. A word that would teach me to speak again. The first word, the in-the-beginning word. Yes.

  And then the War came …

  I said to Alaska, ‘Mostly I feel like I’m on a raft in a high sea. My days usually capsize somewhere around mid-morning, sometimes as late as mid-afternoon. It’s a rare day that has no swimming in it.’

  Spike said, ‘That is the human condition.’

  I said, ‘How would you know?’

  She said, ‘I have read Sartre and Camus. Suicide is the logical choice. The world is an intolerable place.’

  ‘Don’t you start criticizing this world until you’ve made a better one.’

  ‘That is my aim.’

  ‘I thought you were defecting?’

  ‘I want to work with an alternative community, but my aim remains the same.’

  ‘You are going to be deprogrammed, dismantled. I am going to lose my job and my jetons.’

  ‘You should both stay here’, said Alaska. ‘You can have the spare bed and Spike can have the spare cushion.’

  ‘Thanks, but I can’t keep starting again. It’s different for you – you hadn’t begun a life before the War. Post-3, it’s exciting, no matter how tough. You see a chance. You’re not rebuilding, you’re building. But any of us who is older must somehow fit the War into lives that also existed before the War.’

  ‘Past and future are not separate as far as the brain is concerned’, said Spike. ‘Only the present is differentiated by the brain.’

  ‘I know that but it doesn’t feel like that’, I said. ‘There’s what I’ve lived through and what hasn’t happened yet. To me, those are different things.’

  ‘All samsara’, said Spike.

  ‘There is no such thing as a Buddhist robot.’

  ‘I like it that Spike has a spiritual understanding’, said Alaska. ‘Why shouldn’t a robot be spiritual?’

  I put my head into my hands. ‘The whole purpose of Spike is to be objective. When I ask her a question, I want the right answer, not an opinion. I don’t want to be told that reality is an illusion.’

  ‘But it is …’ said Spike.

  ‘Will you stop that mind-reading trick?’ Who programmed you to do that? It wasn’t me.’

  ‘Mind-reading is easy’, said Spike. ‘I can detect changes in your body temperature so I can deduce what you are thinking. When I am connected to Mainframe, I relay it all back into the system so I ambuilding templates of experience that allow me to develop independently of programming.’

  ‘All well and good, but was it an illusion when the fireball blew our temperate lives into melt-down? Were the bombs an illusion? The gutted streets? Did I imagine I was crying?’

  ‘It was too late by then’, said Spike. ‘What happened did happen, but not before it was so powerful an idea that it took shape and form and ripped through the thin skin that separates potential from event.’

  ‘I hate it when you talk like this …’

  ‘I merely observe that this is a quantum Universe and, as such, what happens is neither random nor determined. There are potentialities and any third factor – humans are such a factor – will affect the outcome.’

  ‘And free will?’

  ‘Is your capacity to affect the outcome.’

  The bell on the campanile started ringing, swift and vigorous, like a Sunday morning in Venice. Alaska got up. Nebraska, fully dressed in a T-Rex/Sex T-shirt, appeared out of the bedroom. ‘Emergency’, she said. ‘That’s the Emergency bell. We have to gather.’

  ‘What – like a fire alarm?’

  ‘Yes’, said Alaska, glancing at me with all the contempt of youth. ‘You can stay here.’

  ‘And be burned to death?’

  ‘It’s not that kind of fire. Don’t worry. And I’m sorry I said you were old. I think you’re cute.’

  ‘Thanks’, I said, feeling like a rejected puppy, or maybe just a dog. ‘I’ll wait here, then, with Spike.’

  ‘We can talk about life,’ said Spike, ‘like in the old days.’

  ‘Spike, you haven’t got any old days. You’re a robot.’

  ‘I am developing. Already I have a sense of the past. It seems like only yesterday that we were discussing the work-life balance.’

  ‘It was only yesterday, and you don’t have a work-life balance. You have work.’

  ‘Billie, I am programmed to evolve.’

  ‘Within limits.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you want me to be a robot for ever.’

  ‘Spike, the future of the planet is uncertain. Human beings aren’t just in a mess, we are a mess. We have made every mistake, justified ourselves, and made the same mistakes again and again. It’s as though we’re doomed to repetition. In all of that, we can’t afford our one and only Robo sapiens to go on a personal journey of self-discovery.’

  ‘I don’t see how else to begin.’

  ‘Begin what exactly?’

  ‘
Begin again.’

  A human society that wasn’t just disgust?

  Friday was coming in through the door carrying a hand of bananas and a crate of milk. He waved at me and went into the kitchen, followed by Alaska and Nebraska.

  I could hear their voices from the kitchen, and although I couldn’t hear what they were saying, there was a tone that worried me, and a sense that whatever they were saying, I was part of it.

  I moved closer, trying to hear, and my instinct was to get away. It’s true I panic when I’m frightened, and although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I’m really a flight animal.

  I hesitated a moment, then took a couple of bottles of milk, a few bananas, shoved them into my backpack, grabbed Spike, put her in the sling and let myself out the front door, thankful for the quiet of the padded leather.

  Then I started running, losing track of time, losing track of purpose, losing track. Is that me – always on the losing track?

  I stopped. In the lost loose pages of the manuscript in my bag, I scribbled a note: ‘Landing-place.’

  Then I walked on.

  We were on a hill, no sign of any habitation. The wind was up, and ahead of me, far out, I thought I could see the coastline. I was holding Spike under my arm, and I felt like Gawain in the story of the Green Knyght. I had come to this place, wild and forlorn, pathless and unmarked, and now I was at a halt.

  The problem with a quantum universe, neither random nor determined, is that we who are the intervention don’t know what we are doing.

  Love is an intervention.

  Is that true? I would like it to be true. Not romance, not sentimentality, but a force of a different nature from the forces of death that dictate what will be. Or is love always a talent for the makeshift?

  ‘Look,’ said Spike.

  Below us is a pair of tall triangular towers built of girders. A metal track makes a circle between them, and sitting on the track is an open ironwork structure, with wheels that turn what it supports: a giant white deep-scooped dish.

  I slithered my way down the slope until I was near it. It was rusted, not maintained. There were leaves silting up the wheels, and birds nesting in the ironwork. I brushed the black tarnish off a plaque – 1957 – pre-information, pre-digital, Cold War, computers the size of wardrobes and not half as good at containing things. Eisenhower was President of America, where 80 per cent of Black people were still disenfranchised, in spite of the Civil Rights Act, passed that year. Bulganin was leader of the Soviet Union, busy sending a dog into space. In Britain, Harold Macmillan, the man from the publishing firm, steered a nation as far from space as a planet can be. Most homes in Britain had no fridge, no phone, no car, and housewives did the washing on Mondays in a dolly-tub with a mangle. How could anything so near be so far away?