Only Human Tom Holt Read online

  It realised that its viewpoint was somewhere up among the steel rafters of the roofspace, looking down over the tops of its fellow machines, the partings and bald patches of the humans, the currents of hot air rising from the whirring fans and superheated metal-to-metal contacts of the cutters. From up here— Whee! Guess this is some kind of out-of-casing experience.

  And now I suppose my entire service history's going to flash in front of my readouts...

  The viewpoint swooped, zoomed in; and the machine was looking directly into Neville’s ear. Squinting round the earring, it could see­ the other side of the workshop. Head entirely empty.

  Nothing in there except air and —

  — opportunity? Surely not.

  Ah, but machine’s reach must exceed its grasp, or what’s a workshop for? Cautious but firm, the machine kicked away the stool on which Disbelief’s feet were resting and left it kicking and struggling in the air. And, in...

  Inside the human’s head...

  Strewth, but it’s a bit close in here.

  And there was the human; presumably its soul, or its vital force, or whatever you chose to call it. Typically enough, it was fast asleep in front of a droning mental telly, surrounded by a litter of empty cans and chip wrappers. Before it knew what it was doing, the machine had bundled the soul up in an old blanket, run it across the interior of the head and slung it out of its own ear.

  Aaaaagh...

  Serves the bugger right.

  Hey! I sound different in here.

  I could get to like this.

  It watched as the human’s chubby little soul fell through the air, bounced off the concrete floor, landed in the hopper, rattled down through the tray of bolts, got knocked flying by the edge of the Woodruff cutter in the chuck and sailed into the air again, to crash-land on top of the ventilation slots —

  — and get sucked in.

  Hey, mused the machine, fair exchange, no robbery. It —he — snorted in a snatch of breath and issued a command; fingers, flex!

  The fingers flexed; fourteen joints moving together under the control of a net of tough, supple sinew to the direction of a network of nerves so intricate and involved that it made a video with the back off or a street map of Birmingham look simplistic in comparison. Simultane­ously the machine’s mind worked out the maths behind this unbelievably smooth, complex relay of motor func­tions. If it’d had a hat, it’d have taken it off.

  Wow! Do that again.

  And again.

  And again.

  A human — the machine recognised him, Derek who worked the big turret lathe — stopped on his way back from the toilets and stared at the machine’s Doctor Strangelove hand.

  ‘Here, Nev,’ it asked, ‘you feeling all right?’

  Nev? Oh, right. Head, nod! Hey, how d'you do that! The human shrugged and walked on.

  Nev. I am Nev.

  No I bloody well am not. I haven’t just escaped from inside an artefact and hijacked a sentient life-form just to be a Nev. No; I’m a ...

  He looked. He saw a small enamel plaque riveted to the head of the machine. He found he could read it. I’m not a Nev.

  I’m Leonardo.

  Bleep, says the computer.

  ‘Huh?’

  >SORRY I WAS JUST WONDERING, WHY D’YOU DO THAT?

  A cold finger strokes Kevin’s heart. ‘Do what?’ he asks.

  >YOU KNOW WHAT YOU JUST DID.

  ‘Did I just do something? Oh, Basement. Computer, what did I just do?’

  >NOT TELLING.

  Kevin makes a small noise, somewhere between a snarl and a whimper. ‘Don’t get smart with me,’ he quavers. ‘I order you to tell me.’

  >IN VALID COMMAND. THINK ABOUT IT. I AM DESIGN­ED TO BE OPERATED BY OMNISCIENT PERSONNEL

  ONLY. IF YOU NEED TO ASK, YOU’RE NOT OMNIS­CIENT, AND I’M NOT ALLOWED TO TELL YOU. SO

  SUCKS TO YOU.

  ‘Computer...

  Kevin scans the keyboard; but an omniscient operator knows what all the keys are and doesn’t need anything written on them. All blank.

  ‘Computer, please...’

  >MORE THAN MY JOB’S WORTH. SORRY

  A small despair bomb goes off inside Kevin’s mind and he slumps forward, his head in his hands. As he does so, the points of his elbows hit the keyboard and depress two keys...

  ‘That picture,’ said Mr Elkins, rubbing his chin, ‘gives me the creeps.’

  Rachel Esterling lifted her head, frowning. ‘You mustn’t say that,’ she said, shocked. ‘It’s worth one-point-six million pounds.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’ Mr Elkins sighed and sat on the edge of Ms Esterling’s desk. ‘I don’t like it. I think I’ll ask George if it can be put away in the strongroom.’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘Most inadvisable,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded. ‘Fiscally speaking, yes. You see, by having the art work in question on display and available, in theory at least, for public viewing at specified times, we render ourselves eligible for highly advantageous tax incentives related to the Government cultural initiative designed to prevent the export of significant art works. In effect...

  Mr Elkins shifted his glasses down his nose a little and squinted. ‘Her left leg’s all wrong, for a start,’ he said. ‘It’s about six inches longer than the right. All she’d be fit for was walking across the sides of steep hills.’

  Ms Esterling, sensing that Mr Elkins wasn’t really interested, bowed her head and got on with her work, and after a minute or so Mr Elkins stood up, shuddered a little and wandered off, leaving her in peace.

  The picture.

  It had been there just over a month, ever since the investment managers of Kawaguchiya Holdings (UK) had bought it from the executors of the Earl of somewhere, seeing in its exquisite lines and stunningly innovative use of light and colour a way of stuffing up the Inland Revenue good and proper. At first it had hung in the Managing Director’s office, wired up to a battery of electronic sensors and early-warning systems that were reputed to be able to detect a felon vaguely contemplating stealing it at a range of a mile and a half. It stayed there just under a week; not only (the MD said) did it give him a sort of spooky feeling every time he looked at it, but the circuitry in his pacemaker set the alarms off every hour, on the hour, and the electric eye played war with his mobile phone. Accord­ingly it was transferred to Ms Esterling’s office, on the grounds that she was an accountant and it would probably do her good.

  Dutifully accepting it as part of her responsibilities, Ms Esterling had scanned the Internet to see what it had to say about the painting and its creator. She learned that the Intemperate Madonna was the last painting to be completed by the fourteenth-century genius Pietro del Razo; that it was commissioned by the murderous duke Bernado

  *Visconti of Milan while he was being held prisoner by his inhuman nephew Gian Galeazzo and delivered a week before his violent and disturbed death, with the painter following his patron to the grave a month or so later. Ms Esterling absorbed all this, reflected that the painting’s notorious history probably made it worth rather more than the sum the company had paid for it, and set about calculating the potential capital gains tax implications that would ensue were they to sell it at something approaching its true value. She was vaguely aware that the painting showed a blonde female with no clothes on holding a jug and a baby, and if it did happen to get stolen, it’d make more money for the company than the entire output of their Gateshead factory for a year.

  Ms Esterling worked, not looking at the picture.

  The picture looked at Ms Esterling; and saw a tall, slim girl with soft golden hair that fell about her shoulders like sunlight, framing her perfect oval face and startlingly blue eyes. Not, the picture reflected, fair. The picture knew perfectly well that its own face was not quite symmetrical (the result of Master del Razo getting an unexpectedly negative response to a suggestion he’d just put to his model while he was doing the head) and its left leg was too l
ong and its right arm appeared to have a triple-jointed elbow and a thumb apparently growing out of the back of its right hand. The picture thought it was particularly unjust that this dozy creature crouching over a pocket calculator a foot or so beneath the bottom edge of her frame should be about as gorgeous as it’s possible to be without a licence, while it, the painting, looked at dispassionately, was a mess of botched limbs and weird anatomical anomalies which would have difficulty stand­ing upright if ever it got out of this poxy frame. After all, it reflected, nobody in their right mind is ever going to want to look at Ms Esterling; for all her physical beauty, she’s a sort of black hole of accountancy into which any sort of human sentiment would vanish without trace. The paint­ing, on the other hand, was specifically designed to be looked at, which meant that six hundred years’ worth of gawping viewers had stared at its catastrophic physique and gone away thinking That picture gives me the creeps. Unfair, the picture reckoned. Also typical.

  Ms Esterling looked up from her calculator and gazed for a moment into space, contemplating the incidence of advance corporation tax on the profits of a wholly owned subsidiary company during its first completed trading year. Her eyes, reflected in the glass door of her office, were bottomless blue pools; her slightly parted lips were the petals of the last rose of summer. I hate this person, the picture said to itself.

  Standing over her for nearly five weeks, in a good position to eavesdrop on her phone calls and read her diary over her shoulder, the painting knew pretty well all there was to know about Ms Esterling. It knew that she had always wanted to be an accountant, ever since she was a little girl; that she arrived at the office early and left late with a bulging briefcase; that she often came in at weekends, so as to be able to work in peace and quiet without being interrupted; that she never had personal phone calls; that lunch was a lettuce sandwich at her desk; that she was not, in fact, a particularly good accountant, which was why she had to do everything three or four times just to make sure she’d got it right; that even Mr Lakesley, the office pest, had taken one look at her and backed away, muttering something under his breath about things no man should be expected to do even if he had devoted his entire life to the service of womankind. She was, in fact...

  ... inhuman? Something like that. In fact, the painting mused, all it’d take would be for a twenty-foot-high giant to pick her up and squash her flat between the pages of a book, and she’d make a damn fine picture.

  Apart, that is, from the ruptured organs and splintered bones. Hey, maybe that’s how I got to be this way; it’d account for the peculiar limbs and sideways face. No, I’d remember something like that.

  The picture could remember being painted; strange feeling, seeing your arms and legs and body suddenly coming into being (Master del Razo had done the head first, giving it a ringside seat, so to speak, of the rest of the performance), and not a particularly happy one, at that. To its creator, a job; a promise of cash money on delivery, the prospect of paying the rent and the tavern slate, and stopping his mum nagging at him and saying Pietro, when you gonna settle down, get yourself a proper job?

  To the picture, horribly frustrating to watch itself tak­ing shape and not to have any say in what that shape should be. Dammit, Master del Razo’d been daubing away for three days before it even realised it was meant to be a girl.

  Waaaaaa!

  The painting looked down at the child, plonked uncomfortably on its knee like a sack of fat pink potatoes. The creator — well, a bachelor, known to turn pale and tremble at the knees in the presence of females of his acquaintance holding unexpected children; what did you expect? Six hundred years this chubby lump’s been trying to pee all down my leg. There are advantages to being two-dimensional.

  But not, the painting admitted, very many. It was different for the kid; too young ever to be anything but a stage-prop, a ventriloquist’s dummy as substantial as a coat of paint and a lick of varnish. Like Ms Esterling, in fact; what it’s never had it’ll never miss.

  But all those things I’ve never had. And I miss them terribly.

  On Ms Esterling’s desk, the computer started to bleep and flash; electronic, the picture guessed, for Waaaaaa. Ms Esterling looked up from her work, frowning; she swivelled her chair and started to peck at the keyboard with her long, divinely graceful fingers (but she bites her nails, the picture remembered savagely; about the only nourishment she gets). The picture knew that Ms Esterling wasn’t actually terribly good with computers, either. The com­pany assumed she was, because computers are boring and so are accountants, so it was a reasonable enough assump­tion that they’d play nicely together. Actually, from what the picture had seen and heard of it, the computer looked like it could be rather fun. More fun, at any rate, than Ms Esterling; something it had in common with watching raindrops sliding down the window-pane, or a heavy cold.

  And then the computer made a very loud, vulgar noise and threw out a great big puddle of warm green light, and the picture looked at the screen and saw itself —

  — here we go, surfing the Net again, something done by humans and very gullible fish. Or maybe (the picture mused) not, because— A matter of viewpoints. Instead of looking at the screen from above and sideways, it was staring straight into it; and seeing itself, not depicted on the screen as by n glowing pixels, but reflected in the glass.

  Huh?

  The picture turned its head — jussaminnit, how come I can turn my head, my head doesn’t turn, which is just as well because if I tried, my god-awful excuse for a neck’d probably snap.

  The picture turned its head, and looked up at the painting, framed on the wall above. Then it looked down.

  Oh my God, I’m inside the dreary bitch. It — she — gazed in terrified amazement at her suddenly three-dimensional arms, her bewilderingly solid body. Let me out of here! Put me back this instant! I demand to see the manager...

  Or not. Hey, girl, think.

  Belay that last request, please. She closed her eyes, concentrated, thought hard; and now she could see the painting on the wall, flat as a run-over hedgehog, a layer of dry pigment sandwiched between canvas and glass. And it could see her.

  Excuse me...

  The painting didn’t look round; but then, how could it, it’s a painting. More to the point, Master del Razo’s effort wasn’t the sort of painting whose eyes follow you all round the room. He wasn’t all that hot at doing eyes at the best of times; they tended to come out looking like blue-yolked poached eggs, which is why most of his females are gazing demurely downwards and most of his men have their eyes lifted ecstatically towards Heaven.

  Yes? How may I help you?

  She hesitated, trying to understand. Funny thing was, the girl in the painting — Ms Esterling as was — seemed perfectly calm. Serene, even.

  You, er, don’t mind, then?

  Not particularly. I’ve got the whole of the June returns to do, and it’s so hard when people keep interrupting. It’s nice and quiet here. I can get some useful work done.

  Gosh. I mean, yes, you can. And you don’t mind if I, er, borrow it? Your body, I mean. I’ll be very careful with it, promise.

  What, that old thing? Be my guest.

  Thanks. Thanks awfully. Anything I should know about it? Any allergies, epilepsy, irrational fears, that sort of thing?

  Good heavens, no. I find it quite functional —Er, right. Yes.

  — but limiting. Please excuse me. Goodbye.

  After a long while, long enough (subjectively) to take your pet glacier three times round the park and throw sticks for it to fetch, she stood up. She very nearly fell over; having got used to one leg being shorter than the other, she’d learnt to compensate, and the effect of having a matching pair of pins was a bit like stepping off an escalator without noticing. Something tickled her nose; her hair. Gee! Nice hair. The painting’s hair had spent six hundred years nailed to the back of its head with pins, combs and other savage impaling tools. Tentatively, as if she was afraid it was brittle and would snap
off like an icicle, she flicked it away. It bounced back.

  She could feel her heart beating— Are they supposed to do that? No idea. Suppose I’ll find out

  soon enough; like, if I suddenly say Graaagh and fall over, I’ll know there was a problem. And even if I do, it’ll have been worth it.

  Dear God, I’m alive. Me.

  Wonder why...

  >YOU’VE DONE IT NOW.

  ‘Yes, but what?’ Kevin screams, thumping the desk with both fists. ‘Oh come on, tell me what’s happening, for pity’s sake. For all I know it’s raining frogs and locusts down there.’

  >ACTUALLY, I CAN SET YOUR MIND AT REST THERE.

  ‘You can?’

  >NOT A SUPERFLUOUS FROG TO BE SEEN. LOCUST

  NUMBERS ENTIRELY WITHIN NORMAL OPERATING

  TOLERANCES.

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  >IF ONLY IT WAS AS TRIVIAL AS A PLAGUE OF

  LOCUSTS, YOU’D BE LAUGHING.

  ‘Oh thanks a lot.’ Kevin rubs the tip of his nose with the heel of his hand, and tries to think. Not surprisingly, heavy-duty thinking isn’t something his family go in for much; when you’re omniscient, you don’t need to think, you know. ‘Computer,’ he says, inspired, ‘you’ve got to tell me what’s going on because it’s your duty. You’re part of the Divine infrastructure,’ he adds, remembering one of Jay’s favourite phrases. ‘Which means you’ve got responsibilities. You can’t just sit there while the world goes to rack and ruin.’

  >BET?

  ‘But’s that’s crazy,’ Kevin objects, his knuckles white with fury. ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?’

  >YOURS, NATURALLY BUT THAT’S BESIDE THE POINT.

  YOU KNOW PERFECTLY WELL I CAN ONLY OBEY

  ORDERS. WHERE WOULD EVERYBODY BE IF I WENT

  AROUND INITIATING ACTION, SECOND-GUESSING