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The following evening Noel was still resting
when he heard a scuffle and angry voices in the next room. Despite his fatigue,
he got up to see what was happening. It was Xavier and George.
"What's it got to do with you?" George was shouting. "It's
up to her."
"I can't take any more, that is what it has got to do with me,"
exploded Xavier and grabbed George by his jacket lapels. He pushed George
across the room and slammed him against the wall. They took no notice of
Noel. Holding George against the wall Xavier pushed him up off the ground
so that their eyes were level. Xavier hissed at him:
"All these years I thought you were my friend. You know damn well how
I and Prunella live. We are like man and wife. And you have the nerve to
come here..."
"Oh so you still think that you are in every respect like a man, do
you?" choked George bitterly. "Well you've gone too far now. For
God's sake Prunella wanted me and that is that."
"You wouldn't dare treat me like this if I weren't a droid!" Xavier
was practically incoherent.
"Don't be so bloody stupid!" shouted George back at him. There
was silence for a moment.
"How could I be so wrong about you," said Xavier coldly. "You
were the one back then that showed me the way." Xavier's voice rose.
"It was you who said we were basically the same.."
"Basically..." George tried to interrupt him but Xavier increased
the pressure on his body with a jerk.
"You were the one to say that we all had souls, all just the same."
Xavier's voice rose to a harsh metallic scream: "And now you bloody
treat me worse than you would an animal! You treat me like any unfeeling
bloody machine!"
Yelling the last word with great bitterness he banged George against the
wall and let him fall in a heap. Xavier stepped back from him.
"If it weren't for all those years you helped me, I would have killed
you now," said Xavier, waving at him with clenched fists.
Slowly and painfully George rose. He was shaking. Xavier glared at him.
George's usual hang-dog expression was eclipsed by an anger Noel had never
seen in his face before. George coughed and in silence walked unsteadily
to the door. Turning, he put one hand against the jamb to steady himself.
"You think you are so bloody human. Well you can't begin to imagine
what you have yet to learn about it." George shook his head, stared
at Xavier and said:
"Like feeling for another's needs."
They stared at each other in silence for a few moments, then:
"You bastard," George muttered and turned to leave.
"Don't leave," said Noel. George shook his head.
"No Noel, I've outstayed my welcome. I'll be seeing you."
George disappeared down the stairs.
Later that evening Prunella returned home.
"Where's George?" she asked.
There was silence. Eventually Xavier said:
"I threw him out."
"You had no right!" shouted Prunella. Xavier looked down at the
ground.
"Oh for God's sake!" she shouted at him, grabbed the nearest object,
which happened to be a bottle, and flung it at him. It missed and smashed
against the wall. Xavier did not move. Noel watched as the tall human waved
her arms in the air and kicked a chair. She moved with a grace even in her
anger. She flopped into a dilapidated armchair facing Xavier and flung her
long black hair out of her eyes. Xavier gave her a sideways glance and looked
away again.
"Oh damn. Oh shit, shit, shit," she said.
Noel had to hide a smile.
"I suppose its the best thing," she said after a while, curling
up her lips, screwing up her nose, and looking at the ceiling.
"Hey?" she asked, lifting a dainty foot out of her boot and extending
it to Xavier. He took the toe and rested it on his hip. He scowled and suddenly
pushed her foot away again. He grunted:
"Shit."
"Don't you dare!" she cried, springing over to him and looking
down at him angrily, staring him in the face.
"I'm the one who's got a reason to be angry!"
Xavier said nothing.
"Xavier, can't we talk about this?"
He looked away.
"You just retreat into your shell," she said, "and then pretend
after a while that things are back to normal. Why can't we deal with it
now?"
Xavier turned and stared at her, his face set.
"Its no good," she said. "I can't talk to you when you look
at me like that."
Prunella stomped into the kitchen and noisily made herself some food: nothing
more was said about the matter.
As they returned to the business of preparing their expedition Noel tried
to ignore his tiredness. To start with he was all right, but as he was lifting
a crate of ammunition into one of the trucks he collapsed and passed out.
Xavier came straight to his side. Picking him up gently like a child, he
carried Noel to his room where he then stayed for nearly a week. Prunella
came as often as she could and sat and talked with him. Xavier also came
at times. Both Xavier and Prunella could see the weight of prophecy that
pulled down Noel's spirit. His eyes showed a blankness and lethargy that
accompanied the burden of his visions; he had witnessed the destruction
of life on a colossal scale. For Noel it was not part of history, to be
gradually forgotten, but part of their intimate future. Bit by bit he told
them how he saw the forthcoming events and the last days of the Continent,
and their possible escape. To Noel there was no possibility of averting
the disaster, but to Prunella and to a lesser extent Xavier, Noel's visions
told them how important the Fusodrome was. They still believed that their
efforts to consolidate its defences could save its destruction.
Xavier's feelings for Prunella had changed; he seemed to oscillate between
his old self and a more reserved state. Noel could see that he was fighting
with himself over the events.
"I know that she loves me," Xavier told Noel in his little room
one dark evening. "But I am beginning to hate my creators in a new
way now. I can meet any man on any ground ... except one. I cannot reproduce.
My physical body has the possibility of immortality yet I can never create
flesh from my flesh. I can never fulfil Prunella's life in the way that
she can mine."
Xavier confided his feelings to Noel in a simple and apparently calm fashion,
but Noel could sense the depth of the bitterness that was growing in him.
Xavier had told him once that to be a man you had to be able to take the
life of a man. Xavier's deep instinct to be like his creators had long ago
taken him down that path.
"It's not true," said Noel. "You can fulfil Prunella in exactly
the same way that she fulfils you. I see that the love between you is always
growing. It is a living thing that, that," Noel fumbled for words,
shaking his head. He looked anxious and earnest; Xavier just stared into
through the window into the distance. Noel could feel Xavier's mind setting
hard. He would not listen to Noel.
A few weeks later, when Noel was well again, he learned a little more about
Xavier's past. They were returning from a bar late in the night when they
heard shouts:
"He's heading down a side street."
"Cut him off at the corner."
"I'll shoot him to bloody pieces!"
From a small alley-way a tall figure hobbled out into the main street, turned
towards them and collapsed. Xavier pushed Prunella into the arms of a droid
for safe-keeping and ran towards where the alley-way joined the main street,
along with another droid. Noel and Steven pulled the body of the collapsed
droid under an arch.
"Oh my God," said Prunella, "he's got an arm missing."
Two men emerged from the alley way. As they did so Xavier kicked the weapon
out of the hands of the first one, and disarmed the second one with a short
powerful punch. He held one with his arm behind his back against a wall.
Another droid held the second man.
"Look at them. Mugsies, both." This was Xavier's term for the
henchmen and hired thugs of the crooked business men of the Quarter. Xavier
twisted the man's arm higher. The man hissed in pain.
"I just want you to understand one simple thing. Very simple idea.
Do you think you can cope?"
Xavier twisted his arm more. His victim exhaled suddenly, and nodded.
"Right," Xavier nodded as well.
"Tell your boss, whoever he, she, or it is, that that one," Xavier
pointed to the crippled droid with Noel and Prunella. "Belongs to us
now. This is a message from Xavier."
With that, he pushed the man forward and kicked him back into the alley-way.
He treated the other cowering figure in the same fashion, and turned to
examine the fugitive. The crippled droid had risen to his feet and stood
shakily looking at Xavier. The newcomer was even taller than Xavier, but
one could not imagine a greater contrast in manner. Xavier stared at him.
The shoulder above the missing arm was twitching uncontrollably, and his
back was twisted. His face was gashed on the left and his eyes were vacant
and roved from Xavier to the alleyway where the two men had disappeared
and back again. Around the eyes were dark marks as from charring. The number
forty was branded on his neck.
"He used to call me Shorty," he mumbled indistinctly.
The droid started to make strange harsh croakings. With a shock Noel realised
that he was trying to cry. The droid began to collapse. Xavier slipped under
him as he fell forward, and slung him over his shoulder.
"Shit," said Xavier, shaking his head and looking angry. "What
a state."
Xavier carried him home and brought in a droid medic from the tenement facing
them. The medic, a local woman, made some improvements in his general condition,
and stopped the shoulder twitching. She told them they would have to wait
a few days for her to find a spare right arm. In the morning they tried
to find out what had happened to the injured droid. Despite his improved
condition Shorty seemed listless and unable to say much.
"They just killed him," he said a few times, until they understood
and repeated it back to him. Once they had understood this much he ventured
nothing more. For days he just lay in his cot, unwilling or unable to emerge
from his lethargy. Even after a new arm was fitted and the damage to his
face repaired he remained the same.
"He is terribly upset over something," said Prunella.
Noel became quite depressed to see a droid in such a state.
"He is not drugged, is he?" Noel asked Xavier.
"No," said Xavier scowling. "They are quite different then.
And it fades after a few days. This one is the worst I've seen."
"You mean that you've seen others like him?"
"Yeah. You've never seen the League take a group of droids, and what
they do to them. They like to dismember them, strip them, give them high
voltage bursts, oh you can't imagine it. The lucky ones they kill within
a few days. Sometimes they play with a droid for months. This is the kind
of effect it has on them. But I've never seen one take so long to come round.
He hasn't even registered that he's not with the League any more, or that
he's got a new arm."
Xavier kicked the table in anger and was silent for a while.
"I've never told you about my first contact with them. I was coming
like you into the Poets Quarter, only I wasn't so well prepared or so lucky.
A roving band of the bastards caught me. They took me out of the City into
the countryside. I didn't resist. It was dark when we got there and they
were holding a torch-lit procession. They stripped me down and tied me to
the front of a truck; men and women threw stones and muck at me and jeered
because I was sexless. Then one of them took some poor kid and pulled his
pants down and held him high above his head, and yelled about the true future
of the Continent, a future without the droids. They shouted and cheered.
Later they threw me into a cellar, and kept me for some months before I
finally escaped and hid in the hills."
Xavier shook his head.
"It changed me. I almost succumbed to the kind of lethargy that Shorty
is in. Its the conflict of new data with old programming."
Xavier smiled as he remembered.
"Funnily enough a grizzly bear helped me to pull through. I was just
lying out in the open when he came snarling up at me and tried to bite my
leg. I got such a scare that I lashed out and hit him on the nose. He got
really mad then and came for me. I suppose as it was just a bear and not
a man I had no conflict about defending myself. All my strength returned.
By some piece of luck we were in the ruins of an old pumping station, and
I found a piece of iron piping and killed the poor beast with it. It was
a turning point for me though: I swore then that if the next assailant were
man, beast, or droid he would get the same treatment regardless."
Noel nodded.
Xavier paused for a while.
"While I was their captive, I was frequently brought to the ADL Leader,
who decided that I should be lectured about the mission of the League, almost
as if he was wanting to justify himself, to get a droid to understand them.
I must have listened to him in such a way that he was drawn further into
this ridiculous position, and I learned a lot from him. He was a big red-faced
man, courteous in a way, but terribly impatient and full of his own importance,
and the importance of the ADL 'mission'. He was very kind to his wife and
children, and treated his generals and captains, as he called them, in a
fatherly way, but it only took a small mistake, or even a few minutes lateness
for an appointment, and he would fly into a rage with them, and have them
punished. He had brought his children up to hate droids. His oldest boy
had a gun and would practice shooting at targets with droids with bright
red eyes painted on them. This boy would come to where I was tied up and
point his gun at me, holding it for minutes at a time without saying anything.
I would try and talk to him, but he would not respond; he just looked at
me with an absence of feeling, that I could sense would grow into hatred
as he became a man. I had the sense that the boy, and all the people around
the Leader, had been programmed."
Xavier uttered the last word almost delicately.
"After a while I realised that the Leader was basically a stupid man,
with no real qualities of leadership, but that his blind repetition of a
few simple ideas found a huge audience."
Xavier grinned as he remembered something.
"I'll give you an example of how dumb he could be: he was not a very
fit man - he liked his comforts too much - but in the weeks coming up to
one of his rallies he had decided that he would spend the night before the
parade with his favourite horse in the stables. This was meant to symbolise
his bond with the old traditions, and he told everyone about it. When it
came to it he only lasted a few hours in the uncomfortable, cramped and
smelly conditions, and in the middle of the night crept back to his flat.
He was in a terrible temper for the whole of the rally, and no one dared
mention it again."
They all laughed at this.
"He genuinely believed that he could show me the logic of his arguments.
He would put an arm on my shoulder and say:
"'My friend, you must understand: the human population is diminishing
because we are loosing our vitality,'" Xavier was imitating the clipped
vowels of the Leader: "'You androids have taken the dignity of labour
from us and so we are losing the will and desire to breed. Can't you see
this simple fact? Eventually there will be more droids than people, and
this ridiculous constitution would ensure them a majority vote. We would
be finished, so we must act now.'"
"But a lot of people believe that," said Noel. "You can't
convince them that there are far more people than droids, and that we aren't
going to go on for ever anyway."
There was an awkward pause as the difficult subject of android longevity
was brought up.
"And we all want to see the dignity of labour restored to the humans,
don't we?" someone added, and they burst into laughter again, the humans
amongst them included.
A few days later a human friend called round, a man in his sixties, one
of the oldest inhabitants of the outlawed Quarter. He was curious about
Shorty, so they took him in to see him. At first the droid was as lethargic
as usual. After a while however he started to stare at the old man.
"You aren't dead then?" he cried, half choking.
The old man looked round at Xavier and shrugged.
"They seem to have killed someone very important to him. He must have
been your kind of age," said Xavier.
Shorty sat up and looked closely at the old man. Suddenly he started to
make the same strangled crying noises that he had when they had found him.
This time he seemed to break down completely; Noel had never heard anything
so dreadful. After a while Shorty collapsed back on his cot and went to
sleep. He seemed to improve after this event though, and over the next few
days he told them a bit of his story. He never once smiled though and seemed
unable to bring himself back to normal life. Apparently he had been in one
of the A.D. League's camps for nearly a year, and had suffered continuously.
They had removed his arm inch by inch over the year. Finally, for no particular
reason, they had turned him loose. He had wandered into the Quarter, where
a kindly old man had taken him in.
"Did the old man give you the name Shorty?" asked Noel.
"Yes."
"Because of your height or because you were number forty?"
"Neither." The droid paused for a long time. "It was because
of the short-circuit in my shoulder."
"Oh I am sorry," said Noel in confusion.
"God damn them," muttered Xavier.
"The old man needed me," said Shorty pathetically after a while.
"He didn't mind the twitch in my shoulder. He couldn't afford to have
me repaired. I was his only friend."
Shorty started to cry again. After a while he continued:
"Then some robbers came and ransacked his flat. I hid under the stairs.
The old man came home and they murdered him. I rushed out and fell on his
body. They just laughed and dragged me off. I knew that they were going
to take me back again so I ran away."
After telling his story in fits and starts he became withdrawn again. One
morning he was missing. They searched for a long time, but there was no
trace of him. Noel felt very sad about him.
In the Capital, not far from the Quarter, Zebulun hung over his apartment,
delighting again in his bird-like freedom, then tensing suddenly as he saw
his wife leave and get into her car. He followed her progress through the
thinning evening traffic, keeping high in the night sky and observing her
through his binoculars as an almost invisible blob defined by head- and
tail-lights. As it became clear that her route was taking her to the City's
Quarter, Zebulun frowned and the hawkish look of delight in his movements
was replaced by a steely glare of disapproval. Althea left her car in a
small lot, and crossed into the Quarter on foot, where she was met by another
car. Zebulun followed his wife and her lover until they came to a small
park with a fountain and got out to stroll together. He stiffened and gasped
a small 'no' as he finally brought his wife's lover into view, this was
surely not possible: his Althea, for all that he despised and looked down
on her, could not be capable of this.
Zebulun forgot the caution he had sworn himself to in this jaunt, forgot
that he was already risking the wrath of the Elders for an unauthorised
flight, and swooped down towards the couple, not even considering the risk
of being seen. As he flew closer he was confirmed in his first ghastly suspicion:
his wife's lover was an android. A blind rage seized him, and from the tip
of his fore-finger he unleashed an electric bolt at the droid which killed
him instantly. Swooping down to hover next to the screaming Althea, he seized
her and flew upwards, suddenly conscious of the public display of his powers.
Struggling with his wife he realised with relief that there was no one in
the almost unlit park: he had not been seen. Althea suddenly froze in his
powerful arms as she recognised him in the zeesuit. It came home to her,
the horror of her situation, now a great height above the park, and at the
mercy of the man she had always in her heart felt fear for.
"Zeb, Zeb, please don't hurt me," she said in a tiny voice, staring
terrified and uncomprehending into his eyes.
As the shock of his rash actions wore off, Zebulun put to one side his anxieties
of discovery and began to savour the moment. His loathing of her had finally
found a reason to boil over: she had committed the unforgivable crime of
going with an android. For a long time he just stared at her, exulting in
her terror, and then almost imperceptibly began to loosen his grip on her.
As she felt this she screamed "No!" and clung to him desperately,
unable to take her eyes off his face. Her legs dropped away, and she hung
from his back, her arms hurting with the strain. He looked down at her upturned
face, and with a contemptuous sneer placed his hand over it and pushed.
He watched her fall, screaming his name, until the faint thud came of her
impact on the old concrete fountain. Checking with his binoculars, he saw
her lifeless body lying on the lip of the fountain's bowl, stared at it
for a while, and then flew home.
Zebulun went to work as usual for the next few days, finding that his empty
home brought him alternately the sense of freedom that he had been longing
for, and a strange and unwelcome sense of loss. On the fourth day he contacted
the police to say that his wife had gone missing, and after a routine search
of the flat and examination of the entryvid disks he heard nothing more
until the police managed to correlate his report with the dead body in the
park in the City's Quarter. After another couple of days her car was found,
and the police pieced together her rendezvous with the droid, his battering
to death of her on the fountain, and finally the spectacular electrical
breakdown of the android. The police officers spelling out their version
of the events to Zebulun could barely hide their puritanical glee with which
they viewed the very nasty but totally appropriate end of the affair between
Zebulun's wife and an android. Their sympathy towards the stricken husband
was matched only by their certainty that their own wives were safe from
such perverted and dangerous adventures.
"Did any of you see...," Zebulun paused, lowering his voice: "her
body?"
"Well..."
The policemen looked at each other. One spoke finally:
"We don't, as you probably know, have any jurisdiction in the Quarter,
but we were told that she had died from head wounds consistent with being
battered against the fountain..."
"Look we're real sorry," he finished up, "we can't deal with
the reverts in the Quarter."
"Yeah, filthy reverts," grunted one of the other policemen.
"We know what to do with them here though, I can tell you," said
the first, tapping his nightstick on his thigh.
The others muttered their agreement.
Zebulun thanked them for their concern, offered them all refreshments which
were duly refused, and saw them out.
Zebulun now had the freedom at home that he needed to cope with the rapid
developments of the Last Phase, and ordered his life into an even stricter
discipline in preparation for the coming events. Any occasional feelings
of loss or loneliness were fiercely suppressed. A few weeks later Dan Amalek
turned up with a new zeesuit to replace the existing one, saying that some
final corrections had been made to the design that would ensure that they
could carry out their grand plan. Zebulun was inwardly nervous of his superior
Brother, but to his delight there was no mention of his wife's death, no
suspicion of his involvement. Instead Dan brought him the long awaited instructions
on his next mission: he was to help defend the Fusodrome from the ADL in
case the Government made a mess of it. Zebulun was to be in charge of a
zeemen unit: Dan gave him the means of contacting them, and spoke of the
orders for mobilisation which would soon arrive.
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