The Holy Machine Read Free Page A

occasion of the Territorial Purchase, which he himself negotiated in order to found our unique scientists’ state. After that was the Fellowship of Reason Tower and the gleaming headquarters of IBM, Sony, Esso, Krupp and a score of the other giant corporations that moved here with the refugees. Every ten metres there was a flagpole from which fluttered alternately the many flags of the extinct secular nations from which our people came, and the black-and-white flag of Illyria. Its emblem was a wide-open eye, in contrast to the closed eyes of blind faith which surrounded us on every side.
    I kept walking, refusing to tell myself where I was going.
    Outside the Senate House there was some kind of disturbance. A little group of Greek guestworkers were holding a demonstration. They were sitting down in the road holding up placards in poorly spelt English:
    ‘LET US PLEESE CELEBRAT EESTER AND CHRISTMAS.’
    ‘ALOW US OUR TRADITONS QUIETLY THANKYOU.’
    ‘LIVE AND LET US LIVE.’
    Around them a hostile crowd of Illyrians were shouting abuse while a dozen robot police, silent silver giants, were picking up the protestors two at a time and loading them into vans with as little fuss and as little acrimony as if they were tidying away discarded food cartons.
    ‘Throw them all out!’ suddenly screamed a thin little middle-aged woman just by me. (She reminded me of Ruth, though she had a British accent). ‘Christians! Jews! Muslims! Throw out all the treacherous little bigots!’
    Her eyes were bulging with hate and fear.
    ‘Or gas the lot of them even better,’ wheezed the stooped, trembling man who was with her.
    Who knows what ghosts were haunting them? The Oxford Burnings? The Science Park Massacre? While the Elect established their American theocracy, the British tried for a time to keep the Reaction at bay by shutting their dispossessed classes away, surrounded by high fences. But in the end, their dam too had burst.
    I turned away from all of this, down Darwin Drive, into the Night Quarter where the restaurants were and the theatres and the cinemas, and…
    But still I would not allow myself to know my destination.

4
    And then I was there, in the lobby, standing on the red carpet, smelling the sickly smell of scent and disinfectant, hearing the dreamy muzak.
    ‘Good evening, sir. Do you have an appointment?’
    The receptionist was a syntec in the likeness of a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman.
    My mouth was so dry I could barely form the words.
    ‘No… I…’
    ‘Would you like to choose from the menu – or from one of our special offers? Or would you like to go through to the lounge and make your own selection personally?’
    ‘I… the… lounge.’
    ‘That’s fine sir. You’ll see it’s just through the door there. Have a nice evening!’
    I glided like a sleepwalker across the corridor.
    There were thin women and fat women, black women and white women, barely pubescent girls and handsome motherly women of forty. Some of them were almost naked, others dressed as nurses, as teachers, as housewives, as schoolgirls… There were boys too, and muscly men in posing pouches… And even stranger things: boys with breasts, girls with penises, elfin creatures, impossibly slender and covered in smooth fur, with pointy cat-like ears and narrow cat-like eyes…
    They were waiting round the edge of a big dark-red room, some reclining on sofas, some perched on stools, others standing. If you looked in their direction, they would smile and try to catch your eye and start to move towards you. If you looked away they would stop.
    The music meandered on and on and on. Sometimes it seemed like saxophones, sometimes like an orchestra of violins from long ago and sometimes like girlish voices that repeated the same few words over and over: ‘Love me, baby, baby love me, baby, baby, my baby love…’
    Male sleepwalkers wandered round and round the room, blank-faced, avoiding one another’s eyes, round and round. From time to