Mockingbird. Part 14

Mary Lou Last night I couldn't sleep. I had lain in bed an hour or more, thinking about the loneliness in the streets, about how no one seemed to talk to anyone. Paul had shown me a film once, called The Lost Chord. There was a long scene in it of what was called a "picnic," in which ten or twelve people bad sat at a big table out of doors eating things like corn on the cob and watermelon and talking to one another-just talking, all of them. I had not paid much attention at the time, sitting by Paul at his bed-and-desk in that gaudy room of his in the library bas.e.m.e.nt; but the scene had somehow stayed with me and would come into my mind from time to time. I had never seen anything like it in real life-a whole big group of people engaged in eating and talking together, their faces alive with the talk, sitting outdoors with a breeze blowing their s.h.i.+rts and blouses gently-the women with their hair softly blowing around their faces-and with good honest food in their hands, eating and talking to one another as though there were no better thing in life to do.

It was a silent movie, and I could not at the time read the words on the screen, so I had no idea what they were talking about. But it did not matter. Lying in bed last night, I ached to be a part of that conversation, to be sitting around that wooden table in that ancient black-and-white film, eating corn on the cob and talking to all those other people.

Finally I got out of bed and went into the living room, where Bob was sitting staring at the ceiling. He nodded to me as I seated myself in the chair by the window, but he said nothing.

I stretched myself in the chair and yawned. Then I said, "What happened to conversations? Why don't people talk anymore, Bob?"

He looked at me. "Yes," he said, as though he had been thinking about the same thing himself. "When I was newly made, back in Cleveland, there was more of it than now. At the automobile factories there were still a few humans working along with the robots, and they would get together-five or six at a time-and talk. I would see them doing it."

"What happened?" I said. "I've never seen groups of people talking. Maybe sometimes in twos-but then very seldom."

"I'm not sure," Bob said. "The perfecting of drugs had much to do with it. And the inwardness. I suppose Privacy rules reinforced it." He looked at me thoughtfully. Sometimes Bob was more human than any human I have known, except maybe Simon. "Privacy and Mandatory Politeness were invented by one of my fellow Make Nines. He felt it was what people really wanted, once they had the drugs to occupy themselves with. And it nearly put a stop to crime. People used to commit a lot of crimes. They would steal from one another and do violent things to one another's bodies."

"I know," I said, not even wanting to think about it. "I've seen television. . ."

He nodded. "When I was first awakened into life-if what I have may be called life-I was taught mathematics. That was done by a Make Seven named Thomas. I enjoyed talking with him. And I enjoy talking to you." He was looking out the window as he said this, into a moonless night.

"Yes," I said. "And I like talking to you. But what happened? Why did talking-and reading and writing-die out?"

He was silent for what seemed to be a long while. Then he ran his fingers through his hair and began to talk, softly. "When I was learning Industrial Management, I was shown films on all aspects of the Automobile Monopoly. I was being trained to be a major executive-which was what Make Nines were originally for-and I was shown everything from the film and tape and voice recording files of General Motors and Ford and Chrysler and Sikorsky. One of the films showed a big silver car going down an empty highway silently and smoothly, like an apparition-or a dream. It was an ancient gasoline-powered car, made before the Death of Oil and long before the Nuclear Battery Age."

"The Death of Oil?"

"Yes. When gasoline had become more expensive than whiskey, and most people stayed home. That was the Death of Oil. It happened in what was called the twenty-first century. Then there were the Energy Wars. And then Solange was made. He was the first of the Make Nines and strongly programmed-as I was not- to give mankind what it wanted to have. Solange invented the nuclear battery. Controlled fusion; safe, clean, and limitless. He learned to power his own body with it, and all the rest of us were built afterward for nuclear power. One battery lasts me for nine blues."

"Was Solange black?" I said.

"No. He was very white-with blue eyes."

I got up to make myself some coffee. "Why are you black?" I said.

He didn't answer until I was pouring the hot water onto the coffee powder. "I have never known why," he said. "I think I am the only black robot ever made."

I brought my coffee over and sat down again. "What about that film?" I said. "The one with the car."

"There was just one man in it," he said. "A man with a pastel blue sport s.h.i.+rt and gray polyester trousers. He had the windows rolled up and the stereo playing and the air conditioner and the cruise control on. His hands were white and soft and held the steering wheel lightly. And his face-oh, his face!-was as vacant as the moon."

I was unsure of what he was trying to say. "When I was a little girl and away from the dormitories for the first time, I would get very impatient and nervous and I wouldn't know what to do with myself. And Simon would say, *Just be quiet and let life happen to you,' and I would try to do that. Was that what the man in the car was doing?"

"No," Spofforth said. He stood up and stretched his arms out, just as a man would do. "On the contrary. No life was happening to him at all. He was supposed to have been *free'; but nothing was happening. No one knew his name, but one of the humans would call him Daniel Boone-the last frontiersman. There was a sound track with the film, with a deep, authoritarian, masculine voice saying, *Be free and alive and let your spirit soar with the Open Road!' And down the empty road he went, at seventy miles an hour, insulated from the outside air, insulated as far as possible even from the sounds of his own vehicle's moving down that empty road. The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and s.e.x better and brighter than in life."

Bob was pacing up and down the floor, barefoot. "Sit down, Bob," I said, and then, "How did all that get started? The cars- the controlled environment?"

He sat down, took a partly smoked joint from his shut pocket and lit it. "There was a lot, of money to be made from cars-from making them and selling them. And when television came it was one of the greatest sources of profit ever invented. And there was more than that; something very deep in humanity responded to the car, to the television set, to the drugs.

"When the drugs and the television were perfected by the computers that made and distributed them, the cars were no longer necessary. And since no one had devised a way of making cars safe in the hands of a human driver, it was decided to discontinue them."

"Who made that decision?" I said.

"I did. Solange and I. It was the last time I saw him. He threw himself off a building."

"Jesus," I said. And then, "When I was. a little girl there were no cars. But Simon could remember them. So that was when thought buses were invented?"

"No. Thought buses had been around since the twenty-second century. In fact there had been buses, driven by human drivers, in the twentieth. And trolley cars and trains. Most big cities in North America had what were called streetcars at the start of the twentieth century."

"What happened to them?"

"The automobile companies and the oil companies got rid of them. Bribes were paid to city managers to tear up the streetcar tracks, and advertis.e.m.e.nts were bought in newspapers to convince the public that it should be done. So more cars could be sold, and more oil would be made into gasoline, to be burned in the cars. So that corporations could grow, and so a few people could become incredibly rich, and have servants, and live in mansions. It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies-s.e.xual and economic and narcotic-upon the automobile. And the automobile prepared the way for the more profound-more inward- dependencies upon television and then robots and, finally, the ultimate and predictable conclusion to all of it: the perfection of the chemistry of mind. The drugs your fellow humans use are named after twentieth-century ones; but they are far more potent, far better at what they do, and they are all made and distributed-distributed everywhere there are human beings-by automatic equipment." He looked over at me from his armchair. "It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires-to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium."

I looked at him for a minute. "I don't take Valium," I said.

"I know," he said. "That's why I took you away from Paul. That and the baby you're going to have."

"I understand about the baby. You want to play house. But I didn't know the drugs-or the lack of them-had anything to do with it."

He shook his head at me, scoldingly. "It should be obvious," he said, "I wanted a woman I could talk to. And could fall in love with."

I stared at him. "Fall in love?" I said finally.

"Certainly. Why not?"

I started to answer that, but did not. Why couldn't he fall in love if he wanted to? "Did you?" I said.

He looked at me for a moment and then ground his joint out in an ashtray. "Yes, I did," he said. "Unfortunately."

Fall in love. The oddness of the phrase-the ancient phrase-occupied my attention for a moment there in the living room in the middle of the night. There was something about the words that struck me. And then I realized that I had never heard them spoken before; they were something from silent films and from books and not from the life that I knew. I had heard Simon say once, "Love is a swindle," and that was his only use of the word that I can recall. And "love" wasn't even a part of our vocabularies at the dormitories, where they taught us: "Quick s.e.x is best." But that was all. And here this robot with his sad and youthful face and his long, long history and his deep and gentle voice was telling me that he had let himself fall in love with me.

My coffee was getting cold. I sipped from it a moment and then said, "What do you mean by *love'?"

He did not reply for a long time. Then he said, "Flutterings in the stomach. And about the heart. Wis.h.i.+ng for your being happy. An obsession with you, with the way your chin tilts and your eyes at times stare. The way your hand holds that coffee cup. Hearing you snoring at night while I sit here."

I was shocked. They were words of a kind I had read at times and had ignored. I knew without thinking that they had something to do with s.e.x and with the families that had been a part of the ancient world; but they were never a part of my life. And how could they be a part of the "life" of this manufactured person, this elegant humanoid with its brown skin and kinky keratinoid hair? This false man, without a mother to gender him, without a p.e.n.i.s; unable to eat food or drink water-a battery-powered doll with soulful brown eyes. What was this business of love he was speaking of-some of the madness, the dementia that had haunted his manufacture and the whole making of that last Promethean strain of synthetic intelligences, that mad over-humanness of the doomed series of Make Nines?

And yet, looking at him, I could have kissed him. Could have embraced his broad, handsome back and pressed my mouth against his moist lips.

And then I found that-oh, my good lord Jesus Christ-I was crying. Tears were running down my face freely. I let my face fall wet into my open hands and sobbed the way I had sobbed as a child when I learned that I was alone in the world. It was like a great gust of warm wind blowing through me.

After crying I felt subdued, calm. I looked at Bob. His face was calm, restful, as I felt mine was. "Have you ever done this before?" I said. "Fallen in love?"

"Yes. When I was . . . when I was young. There were human women, back then, who were undrugged. I loved one of them. There was something in her face, sometimes. . . . But I never tried to live with a woman before. The way we are living now."

"Why me?" I said. "I was happy enough with Paul. We would have started a family. Why did you have to fall in love with me?"

He looked at me. "You're the last one," he said. "The last before I die. I wanted to recover my buried life. This erased part of my memory. I would like to know, before I die, what it was like to be the human being I have tried to be all my life." He looked away from me, out the window. "Besides, prison will be good for Paul. If he grows up enough he'll escape. Nothing works very well in the world anymore; most of the machines and most of the robots are breaking down. If he wants to get out of prison he will."

"Have you remembered anything?" I said. "Since we've been living together? Have you filled in any of the blank s.p.a.ces in your brain?"

He shook his head. "No, I haven't. Not a one."

I nodded. "Bob," I said. "You ought to memorize your life, the way I am doing. You ought to dictate your whole story into a recorder. I could write it down for you, and teach you how to read it."

He looked back toward me, and his face now seemed very old and sad. "I have no need to, Mary. I can't forget my life. I have no means of forgetting. That was left out."

"My G.o.d," I said. "That must be awful."

"Yes, it is," he said. "It is awful."

Once Bob said to me, "Do you miss Paul?"

I did not look up from my beer gla.s.s. "Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods."

"What was that?" Bob said.

"Something Paul used to say. When I think of him sometimes, I think of that."

"Say it again," Bob said. There was something urgent in his voice.

" *Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods'," I said.

"Woods," Bob said. And then "*Whose woods these are I think I know.' That's the line." He stood up and walked over toward me. "*Whose woods these are I think I know. His house . . .'"

So Bob finally got the word for his poem, after over a hundred years of wondering. I'm glad I was able to give him something.

Bentley The winter must have been coming to an end, for it was never as cold again after I left the toaster factory as it had been before. And I was never that sick again, even though I was still a bit weak when I left the unholy security of that place.

My progress northward became faster and the food I had taken from the factory, evil-tasting though it was, gave me strength. I continued to find clams and, later, mussels. And I frightened a sea gull on the beach away from a fish it had just caught; the stew it made lasted three days. Eventually my health returned better than it had ever been. I had become very firm and tough, and I could walk all day without fatigue, at a steady pace. I began to allow myself to think about Mary Lou and about the possibility of truly finding her. But I had a long way to go, I was certain; although I had no idea of just how far.

Then one afternoon I looked ahead of me and saw a road that wound its way across a field and down to the beach.

I ran up to it and saw that it was of ancient cracked asphalt, in places overgrown with weeds, with its surface old and faded and crumbled, but still walkable. I began to follow it, away from the beach.

I saw in the high weeds along the side of that decayed road something I had never seen before: a road sign. I had noticed them in films and read about them in books, but I had never seen one. It was of faded green and white Permoplastic, with its lettering almost obscured by dirt and vines; but when I pushed the vines away I could read it: MAUGRE.

CORPORATION LIMIT.

I looked at it for a long time. Something about the presence of this ancient thing, there in the weak sun of early spring, gave my body a sudden chill.

I picked up Biff in my arms and walked quickly down the road and around a bend.

And I saw spread out in front of me, half buried by trees and bushes, a cl.u.s.ter of Permoplastic houses-perhaps five hundred of them, filling a kind of shallow valley below me. The houses were set rather far from one another, with what once must have been parks and concrete streets between them. But there was no sign of human habitation. In what must have been the town's center were two large buildings and a huge white obelisk.

As I approached the town I began to push through rosebushes and honeysuckle, near-dead from winter, and I saw that the houses, perhaps once brightly colored, were all faded to a uniform bone white.

I walked into Maugre with trepidation. Even Biff seemed nervous, and squirmed in my arms and clawed at the straps that held my backpack. Where the town began was a haphazard trail through the underbrush between the houses; I began to follow it. I could not tell if the houses had porches, since the fronts of them were so overgrown; on only a few of them were doors visible through the bushes and weeds and honeysuckles.

I was heading toward the obelisk. It seemed to be the thing to do.

One house I pa.s.sed had fewer obstructions between me and its door and I set Biff down and pushed my way through the growth and came up to it, scratching myself several times on rosebushes as I did so. But I hardly noticed the scratches, the sensation of being in a dream or a hypnotic trance was so strong.

I was able, after some tearing of weeds, to get the front door open and, with a kind of awe, step inside. I was in a big living room with nothing in it. Absolutely nothing. The light was dim from the mold-covered and dusty plastic windows.

Opaque Permoplastic is the most tenacious-the most dead- material designed by man, and the entire room was merely a huge seamless hollow cube of it, all pink with rounded corners. There was no indication that anyone had ever lived there; but I knew that the nature of the material was such that the house could have been lived in for a hundred blues and have no signs-no scuff marks on the floor, handprints on the walls, smoke stains on the ceiling, no visible remnants of children playing or fighting or of where a favorite table had sat throughout the life of a family.

For some reason I shouted, "Is anybody home?" It was a phrase I had learned from films.

There was not even an echo. I thought sadly of those men in the film drinking from large gla.s.ses and laughing. Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods. I left. Biff was waiting for me, and I picked her up in my arms.

We headed for the obelisk. As we got closer the path became wider, easier to walk, and we came to the near-clearing of two big buildings and the obelisk more quickly than I had expected.

The obelisk was whiter than the bone white of all the buildings. It was about sixty feet wide at its base and rose about two hundred feet into the air, resembling the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument that I had seen in so many books and films and that was all that remained of the city of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

There was a gla.s.s double door, only partly overgrown by blue morning glories, at the base of it, and as I walked around I saw that each of the four faces of the structure had a huge door. And on the fourth side I saw, up high and in large, raised letters, these words: PERFECT SAFETY SHELTER AND MALL.

ALL LIFE IS SAFE BELOW THIS s.h.i.+ELD.

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE.

I read it over twice. Was the "s.h.i.+eld" the obelisk itself? Or was it within the doors?

I set Biff down and began trying the doors. The third one slid open with no effort.

Inside was a lobby, lit by the light through the gla.s.s doors. Two broad staircases, descending, were on either side of me. Another, narrower staircase went up. I hesitated only a minute and then began to go down the stairs on my left. After six or seven steps down, just as it was beginning to get dim, a soft light began to come from the yellow walls on either side of me, and on one wall were written these words: CONCUSSION BARRIER LEVEL.

And then, six or eight steps further down, other soft lights came on and I saw these words on the wall, which at this level was of a different color-gray: RADIATION BARRIER LEVEL.

And when I came to the bottom of the staircase I found myself in a huge, long, wide hallway with gla.s.s chandeliers of soft pink that came on gently at my approach and signs on each side of me that glowed: SAFE ZONE. MALL.

And then, astonis.h.i.+ngly, there began the sound of soft music, light and airy, of flutes and oboes; and, about fifty yards ahead of me, a great spray of water began to rise from a broad pool, and varicolored lights-blue and green and yellow-began to play over it and there came the sound of the water falling, the sound of the fountain.

I walked toward the fountain, marveling. Biff jumped from my arms and ran ahead of me and, without hesitating, perched herself on the edge of the pool, put her head down, and began to drink.

I came up slowly to her, bent down, cupped my hands with the cool, fresh water, raised it to my hot and dry face, and smelled it. It was clean and pure. I drank handfuls of it, and then washed my face in it.

The pool's sides were made of thousands of little squares of silver tiles, with white lines of mortar between them, and in the bottom of the pool, under the water, was a giant mosaic, in black and gray and white tiles, of a humpbacked whale with its back arched and its flukes spread.

The water of the fountain jetted up from between a group of three dolphins, curved and vertical, carved in black. I had seen something like it in a picture book called The Fountains of Rome. I stood back and stared at it, at the silver rim of the pool, the great picture of the whale, the dolphins, the great upward jet of water, feeling fine spray from the water on my face and body, hearing the music of flutes, and the hairs on my arms and the hairs on the back of my neck seemed to raise themselves and a fine tingle, almost painful, spread through my body.

It was like seeing the birds at the edge of the sea turning in flight, or a storm on the gray ocean, or the great ape Kong in his slow and graceful falling.

Beyond the fountain the great hallway ended at the top of a "T," with huge double doors going to the right and to the left. Over the doors to the left were the words: EMERGENCY QUARTERS.

CAPACITY 60,000.

and over the other door was simply: MALL.

This door opened automatically as I approached it and I found myself in another long, wide, tiled hallway. On either side of this were store entrances, far more of them than I had ever seen in my life. I have seen windows with merchandise displayed in them in New York and in the university where I live and teach; but I had never seen anything on a scale like this, and with such abundance.

The nearest store to me was called Sears; in its huge, curved windows was an array of merchandise that was almost beyond belief. More than half of it consisted of things I did not recognize. Some of them I was familiar with. But there were colored b.a.l.l.s and electronic devices and mysterious bright-colored things that could have been either weapons or toys, for all I knew.