Not Valid for Spain

This story was originally published in 2017 in the anthology 49th Parallels: Alternative Canadian Histories and Futures, edited by Hayden Trenholm. It was longlisted for the Sunburst award.

*

It was a red sunset, just like tonight, on October 13, 1937. I got off the train in Toronto.

The union hall was humming with striking garment workers: some flesh, some aluminum.

One ran right into me as I walked through the door, and it hurt. As I rubbed my shoulder, I gaped at her motionless face. A gleaming carbide complexion with a bob of black horsehair, a dress with a sailor collar. On the collar, a cursive "R" was embroidered in careful black stiches.

I hadn't seen many robots at all, back home in Vancouver, and never would have dreamed of finding any in a hall full of striking workers. I'd thought robots couldn't strike. Any robot within a certain radius of its radio control tower would report to work at eight o'clock in the morning, no matter what. They only got nights off to perform self-maintenance.

More than a machine! The advertisements declared. A true worker who can do anything a human can do, except lollygag!

But that evening, those robots of Toronto were milling, chatting, arguing. Too many people, making too much angry noise. I glanced back toward the door where I'd come in, half-expecting to see a bunch of cops come through. Then I scanned the room for windows big enough for me to wriggle out of, if they did. I didn't want to answer any questions about who recruited me and for what purpose.

"You're looking for Walter," said the robot who'd run into me, and I jumped. It wasn't a question. Walter Chomiak was indeed the man I'd come to see, the top man of the underground Canadian recruitment effort. I was reluctant even to nod. How can you know whether you can trust a robot? But I didn't have to say anything. It wasn't really a question.

"Follow me," she said. Her voice was odd, not the same as the other robots whose bits of conversation filled the hall. Deep and thick, like someone speaking through tears. She must have modulated it somehow, found a way to make it unique.
With her stiff legs, she walked like a marching soldier. I followed her, still saying nothing, through the crowd of flesh and metal. At the back of the hall, wooden stairs led to a kind of mezzanine and a grimy office door.

"Here," she said. "I'm sure you'll do just fine."

That sounded bitter, almost angry, but I told myself it must just be that weird synthetic voice of hers. She was probably trying to be reassuring. What reason could she have to be angry with me, a man she'd never met? What reason could a robot have to be angry at all?

Before I could thank her, she was gone, off into the crowd. I opened the door and saw him. A big man, rubbing his temple as he read a telegram. He put it down, walked over to take my hand and close the door. I gave him my name, said I'd just come in on the train from Vancouver.

"You sure about this, Steven?" he asked.

I nodded, but he crossed his big arms and stared as if he expected something more.

I was never very good at declarations, and felt a little put out that he seemed to want one from me, travel-sore as I was. I was an educated, healthy young man offering myself for slaughter. What more did he want from me? Who was he to tell me whether I could or couldn't fight?

"Good people paid my way here so you could send me to fight the fascists," I said with an edge to my voice that would cut brisket. "I've been unemployed for a year, Mr. Chomiak. There won't be any real change, not for me, not for this country, until we show what ordinary folks can do together. Spain is where it starts."

Chomiak managed to look both amused and sad; his mouth moved in a funny way. I think I can guess why, now. He must have known already what I wouldn't learn for some time: that the war was indeed much bigger than Spain, but that it would outlast both of us. But he clapped me on the shoulder and said, "Good lad. The Mackenzie-Papineau battalion will be happy to have you."

For the first time since Vancouver, or so it felt, I exhaled. My little speech wasn't much but he probably figured if I were a police officer rooting out anti-fascists, I'd have come better prepared.

"The government put 'Not Valid for Spain' in my passport," I said.

"Don't worry about that. It's in all the passports now. The route's through France these days, over the Pyrenees. Tomorrow, you'll take the train for New York City. Go to Webster Hall, find Archie Brown and show him this."

He held out a scrap of brown silk with a number embroidered in black thread on it: 922.

"Sew it inside your jacket," he said. "This will tell Archie you're not a cop or a goon. This is your ticket to Spain."

I elbowed my way back through the crowd and stood at the edge of Spadina Avenue, trying to remember which way the rooming house was. The lights danced on the pavement.

"First time in Toronto?"

Synthetic voice or not, hers was somehow recognizable. I knew it was her before I turned around: The robot with the sailor collar, the embroidered "R." Her mouth was just wide enough to hold a cigarette. She left the cigarette in her mouth, didn't use her hands.

"I've been riding the rails but not this far, till now," I said. "I'm only here for one night."

She looked straight at me. She never glanced away.

"I am Ruth."

"They give you names?"

"No. Do you want me to sew that on for you?"

I was still clutching the bit of brown silk.

I muttered something about having a needle and thread, about how I thought she must be sick of sewing, if robots got sick of things.

"I want to go over too," she said, taking one step toward me. It would have been a whisper if a robot could whisper.

To Spain? I was so shocked, I nearly blurted it out, caught myself in time. She could have been a trap.

"Go over?" I asked, as innocently as I could, but my surprise must have shown in my face.

"Women are fighting in Spain, you know. Haven't you heard of the milicianas?"

"Yes, but not Canadian women," I protested, not quite sure why this should matter but sure that it did.

"There will be. Haven't you heard Jean Watts is over there now? She's officially there as a journalist but she's planning to join the Mac-Paps, if they'll take her. And why shouldn't they take her? Aren't we all comrades?"

Just because Jean Watts paid her way to Spain didn't mean this robot with the bob haircut was anyone's comrade.

"Yes, all right, but you're – I mean --"

"I am a tool of the capitalist class. I know. Robots are ready-made fifth columnists, Walter says. He will not send me. I asked."

I felt I should cheer her up, though I knew that was ridiculous. What was she but a mangle of parts and circuits artfully arranged?

"At least you know you always have a job," I said brightly.

I knew a fellow put out of work by robots in Vancouver.

"I do not call it a 'job', if I didn't choose to be employed there. Besides," she said, holding up her arms for me to see, "we are on strike."

Then I finally noticed that her arms ended at the wrist in an aluminum fork. She'd knocked the pins out of the joint. That's why the human strikers accepted the robots among them that night. Comrades, indeed. They would report for work the next morning, all right, but not do their employers a damn bit of good.

Something about her severed wrists looked like a wound.

"You offered to sew my patch on," I stammered.

"I know where to get my hands, in a pinch. I will get them now if you take me with you."

She'd get her hands, if she chose. She'd use them only as she chose: to operate a machine, to sew a letter onto her collar, to carry a gun.

"But if you leave Toronto, if you go out of range of the control tower, you just shut off. Right? I mean, that's how it works in Vancouver."

She was walking, one step at a time, gently steering us into a darker and quieter corner at the side of the building. Robots can't whisper. But they can choose where they stand.

"There are robots in New York who have learned how to change the way their circuits function," she said. "The government will not let anyone hear about it but I know it is true. If you took me to New York, I could find them. I trust you, Steven."

I hadn't told her my name.

"You were listening outside the door," I accused her. I could feel my cheeks get hot: part embarrassment that she had heard my little speech as I proved myself to Chomiak, part anger that she'd been so bold. These workers of Toronto trusted robots so much that they let one linger around Walter Chomiak's office door?

"The walls are thin. I stand where I want to stand, in this place. Here, I'm a fellow worker. Out there, I'm nothing but a tool. That doesn't make sense, Steven. It's a broken machine. If you let us robots fight by your side, we can fix it. We can make a world of fellow workers, a world where I can stand where I like."

It sounded very like the speech I'd given myself, but I looked down at her missing hands and couldn't help believing hers had to be as genuine as mine.

"Even if I took you with me, and even if someone got you working out of range of the control tower, you'd have to get yourself to Spain. If that's really what you want."

"Of course it is what I want," she said, her voice even. "I have told you it is what I want. In Spain, there are a few liberated robots fighting now among the Republicans. You could give me your patch, so they would think Archie approved me. They are not likely to turn down a strong human like you, patch or no patch. Give it to me. Say you lost it. Humans lose things."

There was something in her impassive face that reminded me of the women back in Vancouver who had made me sandwiches for the train journey. Hard working women who had watched me go with some expression in their eyes I couldn't read.

Those steady-eyed women had sent me to Toronto. I wouldn't let them down. I signed up to fight and die, not make this robot my business. She wasn't my business.

What did I say to her, at last? I can't remember the words, no matter how many times I replay this scene in my mind. Something like "I'm sorry," probably. "I can't risk it," perhaps. And I asked if she wanted to go to a café with me, on my last night in Toronto. I wanted to show her I trusted her, that much.

As clearly as I can see the red sun through that barred window, I can see the red end of her cigarette drop to the sidewalk before she walked away from me.

She would have dazzled the world. She would have commanded her very own aluminum brigade.

First I hoped, in some mouldy corner of my heart, that she was wrong about the robots fighting for the Republicans. I hoped that would absolve me. But there they were, from the very day I arrived in Spain: gleams of carbide amidst the gore.

After a while I pinned my hopes on seeing her among them, after all. I thought I'd recognize her face; I knew I'd recognize her voice. I talked to the robots, asked if they knew one named Ruth, from Toronto. Surely she found someone else to help her get to Spain, I thought. But nobody ever had any word of her.

Several months later, Franco unleashed his own Aluminum Column.

They fought on, no matter what wounds we inflicted on them. We shot off their hands, and they spat bullets. We blew off their heads and they kept walking.

We knew then that the war was lost but we kept fighting, though our own governments called us criminals. I can't count how many robots I blew to hell.

But what I see when I stare at the red westerly sun is the first of all the casualties I inflicted and received, and the only one that hurts me now.

THE END