“Desdemor!” announced a loud voice. “Jewel of the western branch lines!” But it was only a big advertising screen, woken by the movement as Zen and Nova emerged from the station entrance. The buildings of the city soared high and slender and abandoned, and empty bridges spanned its calm canals. The screen flashed images of crowded beaches and laughing children across a deserted piazza, welcoming tourists who would never arrive. Overhead shots showed Desdemor to be an island, but Zen had guessed that already; he could not see the ocean yet, but he could hear the boom and rush of it, and smell it in the clean air.
He looked up. Big clouds were sweeping overhead. The greenish-golden light, which shone between them, was not sunlight. It came from the immense gas planet that filled half the sky.
“It must have been lovely here in the old days,” said Nova. “So full of people! Raven is the only one who comes here now.”
“But why?” Zen asked, following her across the piazza. His voice echoed from the glass walls of towering buildings. “Why come here, I mean? Raven must be rich. Rich people live in nice houses. They have friends, and families, and nice stuff. They don’t dance with Station Angels. They don’t live in ruined beach resorts with only wire dollies for company. No offence.”
“None taken,” said Nova.
They walked beside a canal, following it down to the beach. The tide was in. Spray burst high into the air and fell back slowly in the frail gravity. Storms had stripped the shutters from the little shops behind the promenade. Buckets and spades lay half-buried in the drifts of sand inside, like treasures in desert tombs. Far out at sea, where big waves broke over reefs the color of bone, Zen saw a skein of ungainly looking birds flying, black against the face of the gas giant.
“That planet is called Hammurabi,” said Nova. “Tristesse is one of its moons. And those birds aren’t birds, they’re sky-rays. Genetically engineered, based on the big manta rays that used to live in the oceans on Old Earth, you know?”
“Oh, right…” (Zen didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to let her see that.)
“They roost on the offshore reefs. People used to go out in boats, with special guns, to hunt them. And the ocean is called the Sea of Sadness—isn’t that pretty? Like something in a song.”
Another wave burst, towering over them, collapsing across the promenade like a drunken fountain. Zen stepped back, but Nova just stood there, raising her face to the falling spray.
“Is this all right for you?” he shouted, over the snore of the withdrawing wave. “All this water?”
She only laughed, shaking her wet hair. “Think it’ll short-circuit me? I’m not a toaster, Zen! I have skin. Look! It’s waterproof, and it covers me all over.”
“It’s not real skin,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It’s better. I’m a very advanced model.”
“Did Raven make you?” he asked.
“He started me, if that’s what you mean.”
“So that makes him, like… your father or something?”
She was silent for a while. They moved back, out of reach of the spray. She said, “It was in the storm season. In one of the old ballrooms at the hotel. He’s done it up as a workshop. A laboratory. One minute I wasn’t anything, and the next I was me. I was lying on a metal table and there was rain on the windows.
“He said I was an experiment. Which does nothing for a person’s self-esteem, I can tell you. He said he was trying to build a Motorik that thought it was a human being. Only it didn’t work, because I knew what I was at once. I lay there in the rain-light and watched menus opening in my brain. I could feel all my subroutines coming online. Raven just puttered about watching me, with the shadows of the rain on the windows running down his face, and the lightning flashing from his eyes. I saw an old movie once about a mad scientist, and he looked exactly like Raven did that day. Which makes me his monster, I suppose. That’s not very good for my self-esteem either.”
“Did Raven program you to be this way?”
“To be what way?”
“Well…”
“Nobody programmed me, Zen Starling. I program myself. Raven gave me passwords. He showed me how to open my own menus and rewrite my code.”
“Is that why you have freckles?”
“Yes! It took ages to get the pigmentation just right. Do you like them?”
“Not much.”
“Motorik are meant to look perfect,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Like dolls. That’s why stupid people call us ‘wire dollies,’ I suppose. But I don’t want to look perfect. It’s so boring. I’m working on giving myself some pimples next. I wish I could make myself fat. Why don’t you like the freckles?”
Zen felt embarrassed now. He wished he hadn’t called her a wire dolly. He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. He hadn’t even realized Motorik had feelings. He said, “They make you look like you’re trying to be human.”
“I am human,” she said. “I have a processor for a brain instead of a lump of meat, and my body is made of different substances, but I have feelings and dreams and things, like humans do.”
“What do you dream about?”
“That’s my business.”
*
They walked back toward the K-bahn. The station was on the ground floor of a building called the Terminal Hotel, a soaring glass wing whose thousand windows all reflected the storms and rings of Hammurabi. There seemed to be people in the lobby, but when Nova led him inside, Zen saw that they were just more Motorik. One came to meet the new arrivals, bowing. She was gendered female, with a long, wise face, a blue dress, silver hair in a neat chignon.
“Mr. Starling? I am Carlota, the manager. Mr. Raven told us to expect you.”
“Is this where he lives?” Zen asked.
“When he has nowhere better to be,” said Nova. “He got the old place up and running again, woke up all these wire dollies to keep it working.”
“Mr. Raven is a regular guest here at the Terminal,” said Carlota. (If she was offended at being called a wire dolly, she did not let it show.)
“You’d better keep an eye on Mr. Starling, Carlota,” said Nova. “He’s a thief. Count the spoons. Keep the safe locked.”
Carlota’s smile was patient and preprogrammed. “Come, sir,” she said. “I’ll show you to your room.”