The Holy Machine Read Free

America. I have denied the Lord. But I do repent brothers and sisters. Pray for my soul. Help me to bear the righteous wrath of God…’
    There are cheers. The crowd likes this display. But the preacher is frowning.
    ‘Methinks he doth protest too much, brothers and sisters, methinks he doth protest too much . This is false repentance , my friends, thrown to us as a sop, while in his heart this unbeliever, this sinner, still nurses the viper of sin and atheism!’
    Carp stares at him in terror, ‘No sir, I really do… I mean…’
    He is led away to where the tar smokes and bubbles in its black pots.
    And it is Ruth’s turn.
    A cold wind blows across the lake.
    Poor Ruth. Poor little Ruth. All alone up there, facing that dark sea of rage…
    She had managed at last to get to sleep. I tiptoed to my own room, and Charlie brought me my own knockout pills.
    How excited Ruth and I were all those years ago when we unpacked dear Charlie, all shiny and new from his box lined with polystyrene. How thrilled we were when we found out we could personalize all his store of friendly messages with our own names.
    ‘Goodnight,’ he said in his raspy electronic voice, ‘Goodnight George’.

3
    I took a different route home from work the next day, walking through the Commercial Centre, rather than taking the subway as I normally did to the District of Faraday where we lived. I told myself I needed the exercise.
    All along the seafront the crowds streamed, checking out the VR arcades with their garish holographic signs. Under the eye of robot police – two metres tall, with sad, silvery, immobile faces – the children of Illyria made their choices of the countless electronic worlds waiting to entertain them with surrogate adventure, surrogate violence, surrogate sex…
    Below the railings, the mild Adriatic sea sucked gently on the stones. I kept walking, steadily, quickly, careful not to ask myself where I was going.
    Ahead of me the Beacon of Illyria rose from the sea, Illyria’s cathedral of science, that huge silver tower like a gigantic chess-pawn that seemed to hover weightlessly above the water, though it was the tallest building in the world. People were going across the thin steel bridge that linked it to the land, heading for the delights within. Far up at its huge spherical head, there were four Ferris wheels, one for each point of the compass. They were much bigger than any fairground wheel, but they looked tiny up there. One was pulling in to unload, another was building up to full speed.
    I liked the Beacon. When he was alive my father sometimes used to take me there, on the monthly Saturdays when I spent the afternoon with him. It was a relief when we went because it was a genuine treat, a time when I could go home and tell Ruth quite truthfully that I’d had fun, wandering through the intricate maze in there that took you, each time by a different route, through the history of scientific knowledge. He even let me ride on one of those Ferris wheels, though it was understood between us that he would not ride with me. On other monthly visits, he left me to entertain myself and I had to lie to Ruth about what we’d done so as not to have to hear her say what a bad man my father was. He was a great scientist after all, the inventor of Discontinuous Motion no less, and really he had no time for children, least of all a child like me.
    (He died when I was ten, incidentally. It was an accident at work and his body was never found. He was working on new applications for Discontinuous Motion at the time, finding ways of punching holes through space to arrive at distant places, so perhaps his body is lying out there somewhere, on some planet orbiting some distant sun.)
    But now I turned away from the Beacon, away from the seafront, and along the grand Avenue of Science. I walked past the News Building with its gigantic screen, where President Ullman’s face, forty storeys high, was shown making his annual speech on the