We, Robots
Page 151
No! Giant could feel himself coming apart, dense as the universe’s beginning, hollow as a perfect vacuum. Life is weak, he told himself, but it struggles against all winds. Life is weak, but it is also strong.
But is it strong enough for this?
“A little longer – only a little longer, then you can rest,” he told Holdfast, although he no longer knew if he was actually sending the thoughts or if she still existed to hear them. “You and the others followed a leader who flew always into darkness, and now you must follow him a little farther. Are you ready? It will take all that you have – and all that I have, too.”
And then he could no longer speak at all. The emptied hearts of his kind, the remnants of all they had felt and thought and consumed, filled him to bursting and beyond. He held on until he felt something begin to tear at the center of everything and the pent energies rushed out into the unknown. He felt them all going then, even Holdfast whirling past like a leaf blown from a branch, like a bird flying suddenly with the wind instead of against it.
Farewell, he thought as his thoughts were stripped away and sent spinning down into the vortex after her. Farwell, dear Holdfast…!
And then she was gone, and Giant felt himself finally beginning to disappear, pulled to pieces, the pieces sucked into the same stream of rushing, exploding transfiguration.
Birds, vanishing…
The road…
… Not long enough…
… Dreams wandering the desolate moors…
The energies seemed self-sustaining now, the process of seeding a new universe safely underway, but Giant would never know for certain, any more than little Bashō could have known where his dreams would wander, and to whom. Big Giant, little Bashō – they were one and the same now, rushing down into the endless dark together. Would things begin again, as Holdfast had wished? If so, it would happen somewhere else, somewhere that even Giant could not imagine. After all, he had been given only the one universe and one short lifetime in which to study it.
Giant found he did not care. He had lived. He had thought, and those thoughts had created everything and nothing. In the end, he had learned at least one truth. Perhaps now something else would come after him, seeking truths of its own. Or perhaps not.
All along this road, he realized, not a single soul – only autumn evening.
The universe’s last poem ended as Giant ended, spun into a mist of possibility at what might have been the end of all things, or another beginning.
(2013)
Translated by Sam Hamill
THE GOLEM
by Avram Davidson
The ever-elusive Avram Davidson, author of several notoriously half-told novels, was born in 1923 in Yonkers, New York. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1942. served as a medic in the newly-formed Israeli armed forces in 1948, then worked for a while as a shepherd. He added science fiction to his roster of crime and mystery fiction in the mid-1950s, and in 1962 assumed the editorship of Fantasy & Science Fiction. From the mid-1960s to the end of his life, Davidson did not publish a single regular novel. His short stories, on the other hand – especially those collected in Or All the Seas with Oysters (1962) and The Redward Edward Papers (1978) – consolidated his reputation as a significant, if frustratingly scattergun talent.
The grey-faced person came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with a codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.
Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the grey-faced person to her husband.
“You think maybe he’s got something the matter?” she asked. “He walks kind of funny, to me.”
“Walks like a golem,” Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.
The old woman was nettled.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think he walks like your cousin Mendel.”
The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipestem. The grey-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.
“Man comes in without a hello, goodbye, or howareyou, sits himself down, and right away he’s at home… The chair is comfortable?” she asked. “Would you like maybe a glass of tea?”
She turned to her husband.
“Say something, Gumbeiner!” she demanded. “What are you, made of wood?”
The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.
“Why should I say anything?” he asked the air. “Who am I? Nothing, that’s who.”
The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.
“When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.
“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”
“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.
“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”
“All mankind—” the stranger began.
“Shah! I’m talking to my husband… He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”
“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said complacently.
“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich, I suppose he came to California for his health.”
“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—”
Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.
“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”
“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.
“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”
“I am not a human being!”
“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?”
“On Wednesday, odder maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is his profession. My profession is to be a glazier—retired.”
“Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred,” the stranger said. “When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—”
“You said, you said already,” Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.
“In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia’s heart,” the old woman intoned, “you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?”
“Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—”
“Listen, how educated he talks,” Mr. Gumbeiner said admiringly. “Maybe he goes to the University here?”
“If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?” his wife suggested.
“Probably they’re in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?”
“Certainly he must be in the same class. H
ow many classes are there? Five in ganzen: Bud showed me on his program card.” She counted off on her fingers. “Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance… The American Dance—nu, Gumbeiner—”
“Contemporary Ceramics,” her husband said, relishing the syllables. “A fine boy, Bud. A pleasure to have him for a boarder.”
“After thirty years spent in these studies,” the stranger, who had continued to speak unnoticed, went on, “he turned from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In ten years’ time he had made the most titanic discovery in history: he made mankind, all mankind, superfluous; he made me.”
“What did Tillie write in her last letter?” asked the old man.
The old woman shrugged.
“What should she write? The same thing. Sidney was home from the Army, Naomi has a new boyfriend—”
“He made ME!”
“Listen, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” the old woman said, “maybe where you came from is different, but in this country you don’t interrupt people while they’re talking… Hey. Listen—what do you mean, he made you? What kind of talk is that?”
The stranger bared all his teeth again, exposing the too-pink gums.
“In his library, to which I had a more complete access after his sudden and as yet undiscovered death from entirely natural causes, I found a complete collection of stories about androids, from Shelley’s Frankenstein through Capek’s R.U.R. to Asimov’s—”
“Frankenstein?” said the old man with interest. “There used to be a Frankenstein who had the soda-wasser place on Halstead Street—a Litvack, nebbich.”
“What are you talking?” Mrs. Gumbeiner demanded. “His name was Frankenthal, and it wasn’t on Halstead, it was on Roosevelt.”
“—clearly shown that all mankind has an instinctive antipathy towards androids and there will be an inevitable struggle between them—”
“Of course, of course!” Old Mr. Gumbeiner clicked his teeth against his pipe. “I am always wrong, you are always right. How could you stand to be married to such a stupid person all this time?”
“I don’t know,” the old woman said. “Sometimes I wonder, myself. I think it must be his good looks.” She began to laugh. Old Mr. Gumbeiner blinked, then began to smile, then took his wife’s hand.
“Foolish old woman,” the stranger said. “Why do you laugh? Do you not know I have come to destroy you?”
“What?” old Mr. Gumbeiner shouted. “Close your mouth, you!” He darted from his chair and struck the stranger with the flat of his hand. The stranger’s head struck against the porch pillar and bounced back.
“When you talk to my wife, talk respectable, you hear?”
Old Mrs. Gumbeiner, cheeks very pink, pushed her husband back to his chair. Then she leaned forward and examined the stranger’s head. She clicked her tongue as she pulled aside a flap of grey, skinlike material.
“Gumbeiner, look! He’s all springs and wires inside!”
“I told you he was a golem, but no, you wouldn’t listen,” the old man said.
“You said he walked like a golem.”
“How could he walk like a golem unless he was one?”
“All right, all right… You broke him, so now fix him.”
“My grandfather, his light shines from Paradise, told me that when MoHaRal—Moreynu Ha-Rav Löw—his memory for a blessing, made the golem in Prague, three hundred? four hundred years ago? he wrote on his forehead the Holy Name.”
Smiling reminiscently, the old woman continued, “And the golem cut the rabbi’s wood and brought his water and guarded the ghetto.”
“And one time only he disobeyed the Rabbi Löw, and Rabbi Löw erased the Shem Ha-Mephorash from the golem‘s forehead and the golem fell down like a dead one. And they put him up in the attic of the shule, and he’s still there today if the Communisten haven’t sent him to Moscow… This is not just a story,” he said.
“Avadda not!” said the old woman.
“I myself have seen both the shule and the rabbi’s grave,” her husband said conclusively.
“But I think this must be a different kind of golem, Gumbeiner. See, on his forehead; nothing written.”
“What’s the matter, there’s a law I can’t write something there? Where is that lump of clay Bud brought us from his class?”
The old man washed his hands, adjusted his little black skull-cap, and slowly and carefully wrote four Hebrew letters on the grey forehead.
“Ezra the Scribe himself couldn’t do better,” the old woman said admiringly. “Nothing happens,” she observed, looking at the lifeless figure sprawled in the chair.
“Well, after all, am I Rabbi Löw?” her husband asked deprecatingly. “No,” he answered. He leaned over and examined the exposed mechanism. “This spring goes here… this wire comes with this one…” The figure moved. “But this one goes where? And this one?”
“Let be,” said his wife. The figure sat up slowly and rolled its eyes loosely.
“Listen, Reb Golem,” the old man said, wagging his finger. “Pay attention to what I say—you understand?”
“Understand…”
“If you want to stay here, you got to do like Mr. Gumbeiner says.”
“Do-like-Mr.-Gumbeiner-says…”
“That’s the way I like to hear a golem talk. Malka, give here the mirror from the pocketbook. Look, you see your face? You see the forehead, what’s written? If you don’t do like Mr. Gumbeiner says, he’ll wipe out what’s written and you’ll be no more alive.”
“No-more-alive…”
“That’s right. Now, listen. Under the porch you’ll find a lawnmower. Take it. And cut the lawn. Then come back. Go.”
“Go…” The figure shambled down the stairs. Presently the sound of the lawnmower whirred through the quiet air in the street just like the street where Jackie Cooper shed huge tears on Wallace Beery’s shirt and Chester Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressler.
“So what will you write to Tillie?” old Mr. Gumbeiner asked.
“What should I write?” old Mrs. Gumbeiner shrugged. “I’ll write that the weather is lovely out here and that we are both, Blessed be the Name, in good health.”
The old man nodded his head slowly, and they sat together on the front porch in the warm afternoon sun.
(1955)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NON-FICTION
Dustin A. Abnet, The American Robot: A Cultural History, 2020, University of Chicago Press
Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The automaton in the European imagination, 2011, Harvard University Press
Mateo Kries et al., Hello Robot: Design between human and machine, 2017, Vitra Design Museum
Stanisław Lem (trans. Joanna Zylinska), Summa Technologiae, [1964] 2014, University of Minnesota Press
Adrienne Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, machines and ancient dreams of technology, 2018, Princeton University Press
Chloe Wood (ed.), AI: More than Human, 2019, Barbican International Enterprises
Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A magical history of the quest for mechanical life, 2002, Faber
FICTION
David R. Bunch, Moderan, [1971] 2018, NYRB Classics
Samuel Butler, Erewhon, [1872] 2006, Penguin Classics; New Impression edition
Karel Capek (trans. Claudia Novack-Jones), R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), [1921] 2004, Penguin Classics
John Sladek, Tik-Tok, 1983, Corgi
Stanisław Lem (trans. Michael Kandel), The Cyberiad – fables for the cybernetic age, [1975] 2020, MIT Press
Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (trans. Robert Martin Adams), Tomorrow’s Eve, [1886] 2000, University of Illinois Press
Rachilde (trans. Melanie Hawthorne), Monsieur Venus, [1884] 2004, Modern Language Association
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, [1818] 2003, Penguin Classics
Yevgeny Zamyatin (trans. Clarence Brown), We, [1920–1] 1993, Penguin Classics
Projects of this sort are, more than usual, a team effort. Thanks go to everyone involved at Head of Zeus: Nicolas Cheetham, Christian Duck, Jennifer Edgecombe, Clare Gordon, Jade Gwilliam, Sabir Huseynbayli, Ben Prior, Rachel Thorne and Nikky Ward.
EXTENDED COPYRIGHT
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
Brian Aldiss: “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” published in Harper’s Bazaar, 1969, copyright © 1969 by Brian Aldiss. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of The Executors of the Estate of Brian Aldiss.
Juan Jose Arreola: “Baby H. P.,” 1913, translated by Andrea L. Bell from Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, copyright © 2003 by Wesleyan University Press. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used with permission.
Paolo Bacigalupi: “Mika Model” published in Slate, 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, Inc.
T.S. Bazelli: “The Peacemaker” published in Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! 2016. Reproduced by permission of Samantha B. Literary Agency.
Chris Beckett: “The Turing Test” published in Interzone, #183, October 2002. Reproduced by permission of John Jarrold Agency.
Helena Bell: “Robot” published in Clarkesworld Magazine, #72, September 2012. Reproduced with permission of the author.
Stephen Vincent Benét: “Nightmare Number Three,” copyright © 1935, renewed 1963 by Thomas C. Benet, Rachel B. Lewis, Stephanie B. Mahin. Used by permission of Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. Any copying or distribution of this text is expressly forbidden. All rights reserved.
Morris Bishop: “The Reading Machine” published in The New Yorker, March 1947. Reproduced by permission of Margaretta Jolly.
James Blish: “Solar Plexus” first published in Astonishing Stories, September 1941. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of James Blish and the Heather Chalcroft Literary Agency.