Mockingbird. Part 8

"A criminal case, Judge," Spofforth said. "The defendant will give his name." He turned to me. "Say your name, t.i.tle, and place of residence." And then, nodding toward the Truth Hole, "Be careful."

I had almost forgotten about the Truth Hole. I avoided looking at it and said carefully, "My name is Paul Bentley. I am Professor of Mental Arts at Southeast Ohio University and my official residence is at Professor House on campus. Currently I live at the Arts Library of New York University, where I am temporarily employed by the Dean of Faculties." I did not know whether I should say that Spofforth was the dean I worked for, but I did not.

"Very good, son," the judge said. He looked at Spofforth. "What is the criminal charge?"

"There are three charges," Spofforth said. "Cohabitation, Reading, and the Teaching of Reading."

The judge looked at him blankly. "What is Reading?" he said.

Spofforth said nothing for a moment. Then he said, "You are a Make Seven, designed in the Fourth Age. Your Legal Program would not contain the charge. Consult your archives."

"Yes," the judge said. He flipped a switch on the arm of his huge chair and a voice somewhere said, "This is the Archives of Law for North America," and the judge said, "Is there a civil crime called Reading? And is it a different crime to teach the first crime?"

The archives voice was a long time replying. I had never heard a computer take so long. Or maybe it was merely the way I felt. Finally the voice came back and said, "Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Const.i.tutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count."

The judge switched off the computer. Then he said, "This is clearly a grave business, young man. And you are charged with Cohabitation also." Then, to Spofforth, "With what has he cohabited? Man, woman, robot, or beast?"

"With a woman. They have lived together for seven weeks."

The judge nodded and turned to me. "That is not as grave as the other, young man. But it is a serious risking of Individuality and Personhood and it has been known often to lead to far more serious behavior."

"Yes, Judge," I said. I started to say that I was sorry, but I realized just in time that I was not at all sorry-just frightened. I could have lost a finger.

"Is there anything else?" the judge asked Spofforth.

"No."

The judge looked at me. "Take your hand from the Honesty Regulator and rise and face the court."

I took my hand out of the Truth Hole and stood.

"How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?" the judge said.

No longer having my hand in the box, I could have lied. But then I supposed my hand would be put back in if I said "not guilty" and we proceeded to have a trial. And, indeed, I have found out from another prisoner here that that is exactly the case. Almost everyone pleads guilty.

I looked at the judge and said, "Guilty."

"The court commends your honesty," the judge said. "You are sentenced to six years in the North American Penitentiary, at hard labor for the first two years." The judge lowered his head slightly and looked at me sternly. "Come forward," he said.

I walked up to his chair. He rose, slowly, and then reached out his arms. His large hands, one still with the green stain, grasped my shoulders. I felt something stinging my skin, like a drug in-jection. And I went unconscious.

I awoke in this prison.

That is all I can write today. My writing hand and arm ache from what I have already written. Besides, it is late and I must do physical work tomorrow.

DAY NINETY.

My room-or "cell"-at the prison is not much bigger than a small thought bus, but it is comfortable and private. I have a bed, a chair, a lamp, and a TV wall with a small library of recordings. The only recording I have played so far is of a dance-and-exercise program, but I did not feel like dancing and took the BB out of the holder before the program was finished.

There are about fifty other prisoners in identical cells in the same building; we all leave for work together after breakfast. In the mornings I work in a prison shoe factory. I am one of fourteen inmate inspectors. The shoes are made, of course, by automatic equipment; my job is to examine one shoe out of each fourteen for flaws. A moron robot watches over us and I have been warned that if I do not pick up a shoe after the man on my left picks one up, each time, I will be punished. I have found that it is not really necessary to look at the shoe, so I do not. I merely pick up one out of each fourteen.

Since I am trained at Mental Arts it is easy for me to spend much of the shoe-inspection time in gentle hallucinating, but I am dismayed at times to find that there is one aspect of my hallucinations over which I have no control; images of Mary Lou will come, with shocking vividness, into my mind. I will be trying to amuse myself with hallucinated abstractions-colors and free-form shapes-when, without warning, I will see Mary Lou's face, with that intense and puzzled stare. Or Mary Lou sitting cross-legged on the floor of my office with a book in her lap, reading.

When I was teaching, I used to make a little joke during my hallucinating-to-o.r.g.a.s.m lecture. I would say to my cla.s.ses, "This would be a good technique to learn in case you are ever sent to prison." It never got much of a laugh, since I suppose you have to be well-educated in Cla.s.sics-James Cagney films, for instance-to understand the prison reference. Anyway, that was a joke I used to make. But I do not now hallucinate to o.r.g.a.s.m-even though I am expert at the technique. At night in my cell I m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e-as I suppose the other prisoners do. I want to save my most intimate thoughts of Mary Lou for when I am alone at night.

We are given two joints and two sopors with our evening meal but I have been saving mine. After supper I can smell the sweet smell of marijuana in the big prison dormitory and hear the music of erotic TV coming from the other cells, and imagine the synthetic bliss on the faces of the other prisoners. Somehow the thought of that, writing it now, makes me shudder. I want Mary Lou here with me. I want to hear her voice. I want to laugh with her. I want her to comfort me.

A year ago I would not have known what I was feeling. But after all those films I know what it is: I am in love with Mary Lou.

It feels terrible. Being in love feels terrible.

I don't know where this prison is. Somewhere by the ocean. I was brought here unconscious and woke to find myself being given a blue uniform by a robot. I could not sleep the first night, wanting her with me.

I want her. Nothing else is real.

DAY NINETY-ONE.

In the afternoons I work in a field at the edge of the ocean. The field is vast, with about two miles of sh.o.r.eline; it is full of a coa.r.s.e synthetic plant called Protein 4. The plants are big ugly things, about the size and shape of a man's head, purple-green in color and with a rancid smell. Even out in the sunny fields, the smell is sometimes almost overpowering. My job is feeding them individually with chemicals that are prescribed by a computer each day. I have a little squirt gun that is loaded with pellets by a computer terminal at the end of each long row, and I hold it to a little plastic mouth that is imbedded in the yellow soil at the base of each plant and squeeze a pellet in.

It is backbreaking to do, under the hot sun, keeping up the fast tempo that is created by the constant music in the field. Forty of us work there, with a five-minute break each hour. We all perspire constantly.

Ten moron robots could do this work. But we are being rehabilitated.

Or that is what the television we must watch during our after-lunch social time tells us. We are not allowed to talk during social time, so I do not know if the others feel as angry as I do, and as weary.

Two robots in brown uniforms watch over us while we work. They are short, heavy, and ugly, and whenever I look toward the one who has beaten me he seems to be staring at me, unblinking, with his android's mouth hanging slightly open, as if he is about to drool.

My hand is still so tired and sore from squeezing the trigger on that pistol that I cannot write any more.

Mary Lou. I only hope that you are not as unhappy as I. And I hope that you think of me, from time to time.

Mary Lou

ONE.

Reading gets to be a bore sometimes, but every now and then I find out something that I enjoy knowing about. I'm sitting in an armchair by the window as I write this, holding a board in my lap to write on, and for a long time before starting I just sat and stared at the snow coming down. Big, heavy, clumped-together flakes falling straight down from the sky. Bob has told me to take it easy so I won't get a backache from carrying around this stuck-out belly. So I watched the snow for a long time. And I began to think of something I'd read a few days ago about the water cycle, about how the whole elaborate business of evaporation and condensation and winds and air really works. I watched the snow coming down and thought about how those white clumps had recently been the surface water of the Atlantic Ocean, turned to vapor by the heat of the sun. I could visualize clouds moving together far above the water, and the water in them crystallizing into snowflakes, and those flakes falling and clumping and falling further until I could see them, outside this window in New York.

Something makes me feel very good about just knowing things like that.

When I was a little girl Simon talked to me about things like the water cycle and the precession of the equinoxes. He had an old piece of blackboard and chalk; I remember him drawing me a picture of the planet Saturn with its rings. When I asked him how he knew about such things he told me he had learned them from his father. His grandfather had, as a boy, looked at the night sky through a celestial telescope, way back in the days not long after what Simon called "the death of intellectual curiosity."

Although he couldn't read or write and had never been to school, Simon had some knowledge of the past. Not just of Chicago wh.o.r.ehouses but of the Roman Empire and of China and Greece and Persia. I can remember him in our little wooden shack, a marijuana cigarette hanging from his toothless mouth while he stood at the wood stove stirring rabbit stew or bean soup, and saying, "There used to be big men in the world, men of mind and power and imagination. There was St. Paul and Einstein and Shakespeare . . ." He had several lists of names from the past that he would rattle off grandly at such times, and they always gave me a sense of wonder to hear. "There was Julius Caesar and Tolstoy and Immanuel Kant. But now it's all robots. Robots and the pleasure principle. Everybody's head is a cheap movie show."

Jesus. I miss Simon, almost as much as I miss Paul. I wish he were here in New York with me, during the hours in the morning when Bob is at work at the university. While I was writing the first part of this journal, this memorizing of my life, when Paul and I were living together, I wanted Simon to be able to answer questions for me about the days when I first showed up at his place in the desert. About how I looked as a girl, and whether I was pretty and smart and whether I really learned things as fast as he said I did. Now I wish I had him for his sense of humor, and his wildness. He was an old, old man; but he was far wilder and far funnier than either of the two I have lived with since.

Paul was pathetically serious. It's comical just to remember how his face looked when I threw the rock at the gla.s.s on the python cage, or how gravely he went about teaching me how to read. And he used to read over the first parts of this journal, when we were living at the library, and purse his lips, and frown-even at the parts I thought were funny.

Bob is hardly better. It would be silly to expect a robot to have a sense of humor, but it is still hard to take his gravity and his sensitivity. Especially when he tells me about that dream he keeps having and that he has had all of his long life. At first I was interested, but I eventually became bored with it.

I suppose that dream has much to do with my living here in this three-room apartment with him. It was almost certainly the beginning of his desire to live and act like an ordinary human being of a long time ago, to try to live a life like the life of the dream's original dreamer.

So I am the wife or mistress he would have had. And we play out some kind of game of domesticity, because Bob wants it that way.

I think he's insane.

And how does he know his brain wasn't copied from a bachelor's? Or a woman's?

He won't listen to any of my objections. What he says is: "Do you really mind it, Mary?"

And I guess I don't. I miss Paul. I think I loved Paul in some small way. But when I get right down to it I don't really mind this life, this being the companion of a brown-skinned robot.

What the h.e.l.l, I used to live at the zoo, for Christ's sake. I'll make out.

It's still snowing outside the window. I'm going to finish this entry in my memory journal and then just sit for an hour and drink beer and watch the snow and wait for Bob to come home.

Sure, it would be nice to have Paul back. But, as Simon said, you can't win them all. I'll make out.

TWO.

Bob has been telling me about his dream again, and as usual I can do little but smile politely at him when he talks and try to be sympathetic. He dreams of a white woman, but she is nothing like me. I am dark-haired and physically strong, with good, solid hips and thighs. She is blond and tall and thin. "Esthetic," he says. And I am not that-although the word might well fit Paul. The woman in Bob's dream is always standing by a pool of black water, and she wears a bathrobe. I don't think I have ever worn a bathrobe in my life, and I am not inclined to stand by pools of anything for very long at a time.

I think what I'm trying to say is that he is in love with her and not with me. And, further, it is for the best.

I certainly don't love Bob-hated him, in fact, when he took Paul away from me and had him sent to prison. Cried and hit him, a lot of times, after the initial shock. And one of the hardest things to get used to was that he really is a Detector-that, in fact, there really are Detectors after all. It didn't bother me that he was a robot, or black; the main thing about the experience was in discovering that I could be detected. It took away a thing that had given me a great deal of strength all my life: the feeling that I wasn't being fooled by this society-for-idiots I live in. It hurt some of the confidence that Simon had given me-Simon, the only person I've ever loved, or am ever likely to love.

Well. Paul was a dear, sweet man, and I worry for him. I have tried to make Bob have him released from whatever prison he was sent to, but Bob will not even discuss it with me. He merely says, "No one will hurt him," and that's all he will say. There were times, at first, when I felt like crying for Paul; I missed his sweetness and his naivete, and the childish way he liked to buy me things. But I never really shed tears for him.

Bob, on the other hand, is a creature of consequence. He is, I know, very old-older than Simon would be if he were still living; yet that seems to be of no importance except that it gives him a world-weariness that is appealing. And his being a robot means nothing to me except a certain simplicity in our relations.h.i.+p because there can't be any s.e.x between us. That was a disappointment when I first discovered it; but I have become used to it.

THREE.

It has been a half a year since Paul and I were separated and I have become comfortable living with Bob, if not altogether happy. It would be ridiculous to berate a robot for a lack of humanity and yet that is, after all, the problem. I do not mean that he lacks feelings-far from it. I must always remember to ask him to sit with me while I eat or his feelings will be hurt. When I am angry with him he looks genuinely baffled. Once when I was bored I taunted him with the name "Robot" and he became furious-frightening-and shouted at me, "I did not choose my incarnation." No. He is like Paul in that I must always be alert to his sensitivities. I am the one who is cool about other people.

But Bob is not human, and I cannot forget that. I forgot it a few times during our first months together. It was after my anger with his taking Paul from me had subsided, during the second month; I tried to seduce him. We were sitting at the kitchen table silently, while I was finis.h.i.+ng a plate of scrambled eggs and my third gla.s.s of beer and he was sitting next to me, his handsome head inclined toward me, watching me eat. He seemed touchingly shy. I had long since become accustomed to the fact that he did not eat and had totally forgotten the implications of that simple fact. Maybe it was the beer, but I found myself seeing for the first time how really good-looking he was, with his soft brown, youthful skin, his short and curly and s.h.i.+ny black hair, his brown eyes. And how strong and sensitive his face was! I had a sudden rush of feeling then, not so much s.e.xual as motherly, and I reached out and placed my hand on his arm, just above the wrist. It was warm, like anybody's arm.

He looked down toward the table top, and said nothing. We did not talk to one another very much back then anyway. He was wearing a short-sleeved beige Synlon s.h.i.+rt, and his brown-beautiful brown-arm was smooth, warm to my touch, and hairless. He was wearing khaki trousers. I set my gla.s.s down and slowly-as if in a dream-reached out my hand toward his thigh. And during the short moment it took, setting the gla.s.s down, pausing a moment in hesitation, and then reaching out to him while my other hand was still lightly gripping his arm, the whole thing had become specifically, excitingly s.e.xual; I was suddenly aroused and was, for a moment, dizzy with it. I set my palm on the inside of his thigh.

We sat like that for what seemed a long time. I honestly did not know what to do next. My mind was totally without any calculation of the situation; the word "robot" did not for a moment enter it. Yet I did not go any further, as I might have with other . . . with other men.

Then he lifted his head and looked at me. His face was strange. Yet there seemed to be no expression at all on it. "What are you trying to do?" he said.

I just looked at him dumbly.

He inclined his head toward mine. "What in the h.e.l.l are you trying to do?"

I said nothing.

Then he took my hand from his leg with his free hand. I took my hand from his arm. He stood up and began to take off his pants. I stared at him, not thinking of anything.

I had not even expected the point he was making. And when I saw, I was truly shocked. There was nothing between his legs. Only a simple crease in the smooth, brown flesh.

He was looking at me all this time. When he saw that his lower nakedness had registered with me he said, "I was made in a factory in Cleveland, Ohio, woman. I was not born. I am not a human being."

I looked away and, a moment later, heard him putting his pants back on.

I took a thought bus to the zoo. A few days afterward I discovered that I was pregnant.

FOUR.

Instead of talking about his dream last night, Bob began talking about artificial intelligences.

Bob says his brain is not at all like the telepathic one of a thought bus. They receive instructions and drive themselves by what he calls an "intention signal receiver and route seeker." He says neither he nor any of the other six or seven Detectors left in North America have any telepathic ability whatever. Telepathy would be too much of a burden for their "human model" intelligences.

Bob is a Make Nine robot. He says Make Nines, of which he may be the last one remaining, were of a very special "copied intelligence" type and the last series of robots ever made. They were designed to be industrial managers and senior executives; Bob himself ran the automobile monopoly until private cars ceased to exist. He tells me that not only were there private cars but there were machines, once, that flew through the air and carried people in them. It sounds impossible.

My way of getting used to being with Bob, after he insisted that we live together, was to ask him questions about the way things worked. He seemed to enjoy answering them.

I asked him why it was that thought buses weren't driven by robots.

"The real idea," he said, "was to make the ultimate machine. It was the same kind of idea that had led to me-to my kind of robot."

"What's ultimate about a thought bus?" I said. They seemed to me such ordinary things, always around, with their comfortable seats and with never more than three or four pa.s.sengers. St.u.r.dy, gray, four-wheeled aluminum vehicles and one of the few mechanical things that always worked and that did not require a credit card to use.

Bob was sitting in a dusty Plexiglas armchair in the kitchen of our apartment; I was boiling synthetic eggs at the nuclear stove, on the one burner that worked. Over the stove a portion of the wall covering had fallen away years before to reveal copies of a green-jacketed book that had been nailed there by some long-gone former tenants, for insulation, "Well, they always work, for one thing," he said grimly. "They don't need spare parts. The brain of a thought bus is so good at finding wear and stress points in the machinery, and making critical adjustments to distribute the wear and tear, that it just wasn't necessary to make any." He was looking out the window, at snow falling. "My body works the same way," he said. "I don't need spare parts either." He became silent.