Authors: Rachael Eyre
The call came that autumn. He’d had a tiring day with the fire service and could barely keep his eyes open. “Don’t he look terrible?” he heard one of the boys whisper. He hadn’t settled in his chair before the tube began to trill.
Swearing under his breath, he crossed the hall. He nearly dropped it when a voice murmured, “I’ve been a very bad daddy -”
“Ken, if this is a wind up -”
“Don’t be a wanker. Can you put somebody intelligent on?”
Luckily Gussy was coming down the stairs. “Kitty?”
“How did you guess?”
Alfred sat on the stairs and watched the clock. As the hour struck, the knights had their fracas. Gussy replaced the tube, looking as though she was going to be sick.
“We need to go to Lux Met. Ken’s been caught having sex with Guy.”
He wouldn’t go. It wasn’t his concern.
Everybody knew about the Deviance Act. It was drafted as early as 2100, when artificials were a hazy daydream. Backed up by a certain Theist text, where a city is scourged for “deviance” with clockwork angels, it declared sex with non human life forms to be an abomination, meriting the strictest punishment the law could devise. It wasn’t merely a crime against society, it was a crime against Lady Thea.
Alfred wasn’t religious. Nominally a Theist, services bored him. But his every instinct - call it his mind, soul or stomach - knew boning a robot was wrong. Especially that one. Now he understood all those late nights, Ken’s defensiveness. No wonder he’d sneered at his impotence. ‘Once you’ve had metal, there’s no going back...’ He tried to convince himself Ken was sick - he deserved pity, not rage - but an image of him and that
thing
flashed into his mind.
Then there was his interview with Eustace Lucy, a corporal in those days. He insisted he and Ken were lovers in the past tense, he’d never slept with a robot, but the nasty little stoat refused to drop it, breaking his right hand during interrogation. He smashed Lucy’s nose in retaliation and spent a night in the cells for assaulting an officer.
Two days later he was summoned to see Ken. He tried hiding the letter, but Gussy intercepted it. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Nothing that expressed his fury, grief and - though he hated his weakness - love.
Ken sat on the other side of a partition, head shaved. “They think I’m contagious,” he said. “Psychos get more respect.”
“Are you eating properly? You look thin.”
“Come off it, Alf. You didn’t come here to knit me nice woolly jumpers. Ask what you want to know.”
“Why did you do it? Did breaking the law turn you on?”
“Keep your voice down -” Ken hissed.
“Did it last longer? Did it give it to you better than I can?” Alfred shook his head. “Could.”
“I was lonely.”
“You had me.”
“When you’re globetrotting every month? I missed you so much, I couldn’t stand it.”
“You could’ve come too.”
Ken threw up his hands. “It wasn’t possible! Wanking’s okay for a quick fix, but I wanted intimacy.”
“You got that from a robot?”
“One time I was upset, he asked what the matter was. One thing led to another. I knew it was his programming, but I could talk to him.”
“You fell in love with it, didn’t you?”
Ken’s evasiveness said it all.
“I’m done here.”
“Alf -”
“There’s nothing you can say. I’ve been through hell. Just because you were too yellow to admit you preferred a bot to me.”
Ken shouted after him. It was no use. He would go to the court case, suffer the fall out, but they were through.
***
Alfred had expected a media circus but it was hushed up. Robotics was such a new, innocent science, a scandal could kill it. He suspected Gussy of blackmail but her cool face gave nothing away. Neither did Ken’s. He’d seen men far gone with disease who looked as he did: bright eyed, ascetic, voice a whisper.
Yes, he was Professor Kenneth Summerskill. No, he didn’t deny the charges. Yes, he’d been caught in a compromising position. Yes, he was Guy Love. Professor Summerskill was his handler. Yes, he did kiss him on that date, perform fellatio. Yes, they’d had intercourse –
Alfred must have dozed off. The next he knew Gussy was nudging him in the ribs. “They’re summing up,” she said.
Satisfied Professor Summerskill was suffering from sex mania, the jury felt a custodial sentence was inappropriate. They would treat his disorder and put him on a course of drugs. Guy was squelched in the courtyard outside. Gussy cried on Alfred’s shoulder.
Take that, you bastard!
he thought. He looked at Ken, flanked by guards. His thoughts seemed a world away from the head that nattered a full minute, then died.
“Poor Guy,” Gussy whispered. “He was only following orders.”
There was no time for pity. No time to watch the door clang shut behind Ken.
“C’mon, sis. Let’s go home.”
He spent the next nine months trying to forget. Luckily Jerry Etruscus made it easy. “We need a chap like you,” he said, whacking a crocbot with a mallet. “I sniff out danger, you find it. Killin and Ms Sparks have signed up already.”
His first assignment was to track down Jerry’s daughter, who had eloped with a waiter to Talos. He found her early on, not in the least ashamed. She said she wasn’t coming back.
He was taken on as an advisor to the Talos police force. He fell in with Dan Boolaky, now a lieutenant, and soon took up where they had left off. He realised what he’d never appreciated before: Boo loved him and wanted to make a go of it. Around this time he confessed he’d been born into the wrong body.
“That’s why you won’t stay, isn’t it?” Boo said. “You’re weirded out I’m a he-she.”
“I’m not ready for a serious relationship -”
“And you still love
him
. Despite everything.”
“Says whom?”
Boo smiled ruefully. “Honey, if your face was a book, it’d be
Charlie the Curious Cat
.”
The Mayor sent irate messages ordering him home. Alfred kissed Boo goodbye and gave him a thousand Q for the operation.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Boo said. Alfred knew it wasn’t a promise he could keep.
Alfred had always loved how Chimera lay in the lap of the Tessera hills. No matter how he travelled - vix, keli - he liked to walk the last few miles, savour his homecoming. Nanny and Tolmash were on the lawn, the butler holding wool with a long suffering expression.
“Alfie!” She flung her knitting into Tolmash’s lap. Alfred spun her round. “We weren’t expectin’ you for two days!”
“I got bored. How is everyone?”
Tolmash lowered his voice. “Lady A’s not in a good way -”
Gussy came down the front steps. “I thought it was you.”
Normally he would swing her as he had Nanny, but something prevented him. She looked so small and pale, her cheekbones jutting out. “Lucas left,” she said.
“Good riddance!”
“He’s taken the children. And -” she tried to make it sound inconsequential - “Ken’s here.”
“What?” He glared at Nanny and Tolmash.“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Where was he supposed to go?”
He stormed, he blackmailed, but Gussy was immovable. Ken didn’t have any family. He’d been blacklisted and couldn’t work.
“Come on, Alfie. No one else would have him -”
“With good reason!”
“Don’t you think you’re being childish?”
“This is
my
home and I don’t want him here!”
“If you saw him you’d change your mind -”
“I need time.”
Alfred went on a fact finding mission tailing a mole. Nothing came of it. Jerry deliberately assigned him low profile jobs. On the way home he took a shortcut through the plantation. A hunched figure was sitting on a bench, knitting.
“Hello, Alf.”
Running into Ken like this, he saw the damage ‘treatment’ had wrought. His hair, never plentiful, was a few sorry tufts around his ears. The ivory skin was puffy with broken veins, the fine eyes misted over. He’d lost half his teeth, had a stench of decay. In nine months he’d become an old man.
“What have they done to you?”
“Grisly, eh? Look like my own death mask.” The hand on his arm was like sandpaper. “While none’s so fair as my Alfred.”
Alfred’s eyes felt shamefully hot. “What’s with the knitting?”
“This stuff I’m taking gives me the shakes. Anything that helps motor dexterity is good. More often it makes a bloody mess.” The self deprecating smile was utterly alien. “How was your trip?”
It was as though the drug had waited for Alfred to return, then worked its way into Ken’s bloodstream. He was painfully thin but couldn’t keep food down. His breath smelled wretched, sores clustered on his lips. Any exertion exhausted him.
Ken only minded when he started to forget. It started with small things: where he’d put a book, the combination on his safe. Over time it spread. Whether he’d eaten. Remembering to wash. What date it was. “My mind’s the only thing I have left,” he said. “Once that’s gone I’m finished.”
Gussy appointed herself his carer. Alfred marvelled she could do it. She persevered, yet tears were always close to the surface. She’d spent the past year perfecting a new form of communication. Everyone’s brainwaves would be connected on one network, giving and receiving information. Ken helped her when he was lucid. After a few arguments they called it the Storm. They unveiled it one day in the middle of the drawing room. To Alfred’s untutored eye it looked like a mangle.
“Every home will have one,” she said. “The chip in the headset transforms your brainwaves into energy -”
“Someone can tap into my brain?” Alfred objected.
“It’s password protected.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Kitty, back me up - Ken! Not in here!”
He was wearing a dreamy, disconnected look, groping the front of his trousers.
“I don’t know how much more I can stand,” she whispered.
Ken wasn’t her only problem. Her divorce had come through, Lucas citing unreasonable behaviour. Now he haggled for sole custody. She didn’t feel safe seeing him alone.
Alfred blamed himself for what happened. He was out with Lewis one night, drinking to times past. It must have been twenty three hours when he wandered over the threshold.
Tolmash was at his side immediately. “M’lud, it’s -” He mopped his forehead. “You’d better see.”
He followed him to Gussy’s room. Nanny sat with her on the bed, holding her hand. She looked as though half the blood had drained from her body.
“What the hell’s going on?” Alfred demanded.
“Lucas came. They argued about the kids. He -”
Gussy sat up, wincing in pain. “I was going to have a baby.”
“I found her at the foot of the stairs,” Tolmash said. Alfred glanced at Nanny and she shook her head, her eyes gleaming with tears.
“I was going to name him after Dad,” Gussy said.
Rage lent Alfred wings. A plan had sprung into his head - once he’d gathered the kit, he leapt into his vix. He was too drunk to drive but didn’t care. He arrived at Bloom and Kidd’s an hour later. Uncle Bloom had died the previous year; now Lucas owned the practice.
Alfred still had a key left over from his apprenticeship. All these years later it fitted the lock. He moved through the sombre panelled rooms, the walls painted institutional green. They’d installed a lift since his time. It whispered through the building, up to the third floor. He slid the door open a crack and peered out.
Lucas was sitting in the room opposite, typing. When Gussy married him he’d had a mediocre handsomeness. Now his true character had wormed through: a double chin, greedy eyes, a permanent sneer.
Just as Alfred was getting cramp, Lucas started to lock up for the night. Whistling, he took the few steps from his office to the lift. An arm shot out and stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth. He breathed it in and slept.
Lucas woke half an hour later. He heard grasshoppers scraping, the blood freezing cry of a kestrel. He was on his back in a field, stars wheeling overhead.
“Hello, Lucas.” Alfred leant on a spade, his foot against a trunk. Five feet away was a freshly dug pit.
Lucas tried to sit. “Is this a joke?”
“When have we shared those, brother dear?”
“I’m not your brother.”
“A feeling I heartily reciprocate.” He brought the spade down across Lucas’s knees. “Ssh.”
“Don’t ssh me, you bastard.”
“Save your breath. No one can hear.” Alfred lit a cigarette. He took his time, smoking it to the dog end.
Lucas glared at him, the paraphernalia, the pit. He noticed a needle mark in his wrist. “What have you done to me?”
The smile faded. Alfred threw the dog end away. “What did you do to Gussy?”