Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  Arthur looked at him sharply, and then he began to laugh. “By emptying ashtrays?” he said. “Shit!” He began sweeping again, pushing the big broom vigorously down the Permoplastic floor. “Didn’t know you could fool a goddamn robot. And a Make Nine at that.”

  Spofforth stood there holding the ashtrays for a minute, looking at him. No one is fooling me, he thought. I have my life to live.

  It was a June night about a week after the conversation with Arthur that Spofforth was walking by the Audio-Visual Building under the moonlight and heard a rustling noise from behind the dense bushes that grew untended by the building. There was the groan of a male voice, and then more rustling.

  Spofforth stopped and listened. Something was moving, more quietly now. He turned, walked a few steps until he was standing up against a tall bush and then pushed it quietly aside. And when, suddenly, he saw what was happening on the other side, he froze and just stood there, staring.

  On her back, behind the bush, lay the girl, with her dress pulled up beyond her navel. A pinkish, naked, chubby young man was kneeling astride her; Spofforth could see a cluster of brown moles on the pink skin between his shoulder blades. He could see the girl’s pubic hair under the man’s thigh—curly hair, jet black against her pure white legs and white buttocks, as black as the hair on her head, as black as the little collar of the red coat on which she lay.

  She saw him, and her face went grim with disgust. She spoke to him, for the first and last time ever. “Get out of here, robot,” she said. “Fucking robot. Leave us alone.”

  Spofforth, a hand clamped on bis cloned heart, turned and walked away. It was there he learned a thing he was to know for the rest of his long life; he did not really want to live. He had been cheated—horribly cheated—of a real, human life; something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him.

  He saw the girl again a few times. She avoided his eyes completely. Not out of shame, he knew, since there was no shame for them in sex. “Quick sex is best” was what they were taught, and they believed it and practiced it.

  He was relieved to be transferred from the dormitory to a more responsible job deciding the distribution patterns of synthetic dairy products, in Akron. From there he was moved to the production of small automobiles, presiding over the making of the last few thousand private cars ever to be driven by a once car-infatuated population. When that ended he became Director of the Corporation that manufactured thought buses, the sturdy eight-passenger vehicles made for an ever-dwindling human population. Then he became Director of Population Control, being transferred to New York for this, working in an office on top of a thirty-two-story building, watching over the aging computers that kept a daily census and adjusted human fertility rates accordingly. It was a tiresome job, presiding over equipment that was forever breaking down, trying to find ways of repairing computers that no human any longer knew how to repair and that no robots had been programmed to understand. Eventually he was given another job: Dean of Faculties at New York University. The computer that had served to direct that institution had ceased functioning; it became Spofforth’s job, as a Make Nine, to replace it and to make the mostly minor choices that running a university required.

  There had been, he came to find out, a hundred Make Nines cloned, and animated with copies of the same original human mind. He was the last, and special adjustments were made in the synapses of his own particular metallic brain to prevent what had happened to the others of his series: they had been committing suicide. Some had fused their brains into black shapelessness with high-voltage welding equipment; some had swallowed corrosives. A few had gone completely insane before being destroyed by humans, freaking out madly, destructively, rampaging down city streets at midnight screaming obscenities. Using a real human brain as a model for a sophisticated robot had been an experiment. The experiment had been judged a failure, and no more were made. The factories still turned out moron robots, and a few Make Sevens and Make Eights, to take over from the humans more and more of the functions of government and education and medicine and law and planning and manufacturing; but all these had synthetic, nonhuman brains, without a flicker of emotion, of inwardness, of self-consciousness in them. They were merely machines—clever, human-looking, well-made machines—and they did what they were supposed to do.

  Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.

  The girl in the red coat grew old and fat and had sex with ten dozen men and had a few babies and drank too much beer and led a trivial, purposeless life and lost her beauty. And at the end of it she died and was buried and forgotten. And Spofforth went on, youthful, superbly healthy, beautiful, seeing her at seventeen long after she had forgotten, as a middle-aged woman, the sexy, flirtatious girl she had once been. He saw her and loved her and he wanted to die. And some heedless human engineer had even made that impossible for him.

  The University Provost and the Dean of Studies were waiting for him when he returned from his June night alone.

  The duller of the two was the provost. His name was Carpenter and he wore a brown Synlon suit and nearly worn-out sandals and his belly and flanks trembled visibly in the tight suit as he walked. He was standing near Spofforth’s big teakwood desk, smoking a joint, when the robot came in and walked briskly toward him. Carpenter stood nervously aside while Spofforth seated himself.

  After a moment Spofforth looked at him—not just a bit to the right of him in the way that Mandatory Politeness required, but directly at him. “Good morning,” Spofforth said, in his strong, controlled voice. “Is something wrong?”

  “Well . . .” Carpenter said, “I’m not sure.” He seemed disturbed by the question. “What do you think, Perry?”

  Perry, the Dean of Studies, rubbed his nose with his forefinger. “Somebody called, Dean Spofforth. On the University Line. Called twice.”

  “Oh?” Spofforth said. “What did he want?”

  “He wants to talk to you,” Perry said. “About a job. A summer teaching. . .”

  Spofforth looked at him. “Yes?”

  Perry went on nervously, his eyes avoiding Spofforth’s. “What he wants to do is something that I couldn’t understand on the telephone. It’s a new thing—something he said he had discovered a yellow or two ago.” He looked around him until his gaze found that of the fat man in the brown suit. “What was it he said, Carpenter?”

  “Reading?” Carpenter said.

  “Yes,” Perry said. “Reading. He said he could do reading. Something about words. He wants to teach it.”

  Spofforth sat up at the word. “Someone has learned to read?”

  The men looked away, embarrassed at the surprise in Spofforth’s voice.

  “Did you record the conversation?” Spofforth asked.

  They looked at one another. Finally, Perry spoke. “We forgot,” he said.

  Spofforth suppressed his annoyance. “Did he say he would call back?”

  Perry looked relieved. “Yes, he did, Dean Spofforth. He said he would try to establish a connection with you.”

  “All right,” Spofforth said. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes,” Perry said, fobbing his nose again. “The usual curriculum BB’s. Three suicides among the student body. And there are plans recorded somewhere for the closing down of the East Whig of Mental Hygiene; but none of the robots could find them.” Perry . seemed pleased to be able to report a failure among the staff robots. “None of the Make Sixes knew anything about them, sir.”

  “That’s because I have them, Dean Perry,” Spofforth said. He opened his desk drawer and took out one of the little steel balls— the BB’s, they were called—that were used to make voice recordings. He held it out to Perry. “Play this into a Make Seven. He’ll know what to do about the Mental Hygiene classrooms.”

  Perry, somewhat shamefaced, took the recording and left. Carpenter followe
d him out of the room. When they were gone Spofforth sat at his desk for a while, wondering about the news of the man who said he could read. He had heard of reading often enough when he was young, and knew that it had died out long before. He had seen books—very ancient things. There were still a few of them left undestroyed in the University Library.

  Spofforth’s office was big, and very pleasant. He had decorated it himself, with prints of shore birds and with a carved oak sideboard he had taken from a demolished museum. On the sideboard was a row of small models of Robotic Engineering, roughly showing the history of anthropoid forms that had been used in the development of the art. The earliest, on the far left, was of a wheeled creature with a cylindrical body and four arms—very early, and somewhere between a servomechanism and an autonomous mechanical being. The model was made of Permoplastic and was about six inches tall. The robot had been, during its brief span of usefulness, called a Wheelie; none had been made for centuries.

  To the right of the Wheelie was a more manlike shape, somewhat close to that of a contemporary moron robot. The statuettes became more detailed, more human, as they proceeded from left to right, until they concluded with a miniature of Spofforth himself—sleek, entirely human in appearance, poised on the balls of his feet and with his eyes, even in the model, seeming alive.

  A red light began to blink on Spofforth’s desk. He pressed a button and said, “Spofforth here.”

  “My name is Bentley, Dean Spofforth,” the voice on the other end said. “Paul Bentley. I’m calling from Ohio.”

  “Are you the one who can read?” Spofforth said.

  “Yes,” the voice said. “I taught myself how. I can read.”

  The great ape sat wearily on the overturned side of a bus. The city was deserted.

  At the center of the screen a white vortex appeared and began to enlarge and whirl. When it stopped it had filled more than half the screen. It became clear that it was the front page of a newspaper, with a huge headline.

  Spofforth stopped the projector with the headline on the screen. “Read that,” he said.

  Bentley cleared his throat nervously. “Monster Ape Terrifies City,” he read.

  “Good,” Spofforth said. He started the projector again.

  The rest of the film had no written words on it. They watched it in silence, through the ape’s final destructive rampage, his pathetic failure to be able to express his love, on through to his death as he fell, as though floating, from the impossibly tall building to the wide and empty street below.

  Spofforth threw the switch that brought the lights back on in his office and made the bay window transparent again. The office was now no longer dark, no longer a projection room. Outside, amid the bright flowers of Washington Square, a circle of elderly graduate students sat on the unkempt grass in their denim robes. Their faces were vacant. The sun was high, distant, in the June sky. Spofforth looked at Bentley.

  “Dean Spofforth,” Bentley said, “will I be able to teach the course?”

  Spofforth watched him thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, “No. I’m sorry. But we should not teach reading at this university.”

  Bentley stood up awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I thought. . .”

  “Sit down, Professor Bentley,” Spofforth said. “I believe we can use this skill of yours, for the summer.”

  Bentley seated himself. He was clearly nervous; Spofforth knew that his own presence was overwhelming.

  Spofforth leaned back in his chair, stretched, and smiled at Bentley amiably. “Tell me,” he asked. “How did you learn to read?”

  The man blinked at him a moment. Then he said, “From cards. Reading cards. And four little books: First Reader, and Roberto and Consuela and Their Dog Biff, and . . .”

  “Where did you get such things?” Spofforth asked.

  “It was strange,” Bentley said. “The university has a collection of ancient porno films. I was trying to cull material for a course, when I came upon a sealed box of old film. With it were the four little books and the set of cards. When I played the film it was not porno at all. It showed a woman talking to children in a classroom. There was a black wall behind her and she would make marks on it that were white. For example, she would make what I later learned was the word ‘woman,’ and then the children would all say ‘woman’ together. She did the same for ‘teacher’ and ‘tree’ and ‘water’ and ‘sky.’ I remembered just having looked through the cards and seeing a picture of a woman. It had the same marks she had made under it. There were more pictures, more white marks on the black wall, more words spoken by the teacher and by the class.” Bentley blinked, remembering. “The teacher was wearing a blue dress and her hair was white. She seemed to smile all the time. . .”

  “And then you did what?” Spofforth said.

  “Yes.” Bentley shook his head, as if trying to shake away the memory. “I played the film again, and then again. I was fascinated by it, by something that was going on in it that I felt was . . . was . . .” He stopped, helpless for a word.

  “Important?” Spofforth asked.

  “Yes. Important.” Bentley looked at Spofforth’s eyes for a brief moment, against the rule of Mandatory Politeness. Then he looked away, toward the window, outside of which the stoned graduate students still sat silent, their heads nodding occasionally.

  “And then?” Spofforth said.

  “I played the film over, more times than I could count. Slowly I began to realize, as though I had known it all along but hadn’t known that I knew it, that the teacher and the class were looking at the marks and saying words that were represented by the marks. The marks were like pictures. Pictures of words. A person could look at them and say the words aloud. Later I was to learn that you could look at the marks and hear the words silently. The same words and words like them were in the books I had found.”

  “And you learned to understand other words?” Spofforth said. His voice was neutral, quiet.

  “Yes. That took a long time. I had to realize that the words were made of letters. Letters made sounds that were always the same. I spent days and days at it. I did not want to stop. There was a pleasure in finding the things that the books could say within my mind . . .“ He looked down at the floor. ”I did not stop until I knew every word in the four books. It was only later, when I found three more books, that I discovered that what I was doing was called ‘reading.’“ He became silent and then, after a few moments, looked shyly up toward Spofforth’s face.

  Spofforth stared at him for a long moment, and then nodded his head slightly. “I see,” he said. “Bentley, have you ever heard of silent films?”

  “Silent films?” Bentley said. “No.”

  Spofforth smiled slightly. “I don’t think many people have heard of them. They’re very ancient. A great many were found recently, during a demolition.”

  “Oh?” Bentley said politely, not understanding.

  “The thing about silent films, Professor Bentley,” Spofforth said slowly, “is that the speeches of the actors in them are not spoken but written.” He smiled again, gently. “To be understood, they must be read.”

  Bentley

  DAY ONE

  Spofforth suggested I do this. Talk into the recorder at nights, after work, and discuss what I had done during the day. He gave me extra BB’s just for this.

  The work is dreary at times; but it may have its rewards. I have been at it five days now; this is the first on which I have felt at ease enough with the little recording machine to begin talking about myself into it. And what is there to say about myself? I am not an interesting person.

  The films are brittle and must be handled with the greatest of care. When they break—as they frequently do—I must spend a careful time splicing them back together. I tried to get Dean SpoSorth to assign me a technician robot, perhaps a moron robot trained as a dentist or in some kind of precision work, but Spofforth merely said, “That would be too expensive.” And I’m certain he’s right. So I thr
ead the films into strange old machines called “projectors” and make certain they are adjusted properly and then I begin projecting them on a little screen on my bed-and-desk. The projector is always noisy. But even my footsteps seem terribly loud down here in the basement of the old library. Nobody ever comes here, and moss grows on the ancient stainless-steel walls.

  Then, when words appear in print on the screen I stop the projector and read them aloud into a recorder. Sometimes this only takes a moment, as with lines like “No!” or “The End,” where only the slightest hesitation is needed before pronouncing them. But at other times harder phrases and spellings occur, and then I must study for a long time before I am certain of the wording. One of my most difficult was on one of those black backgrounds on the screen after a highly emotional scene where a young woman had expressed worry. It read, in full: “If Dr. Carrothers does not arrive presently, Mother is certain to take leave of her senses.” You can imagine the trouble I had with that one! And another went: “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,” spoken by an old man to a young girl.

  The films themselves are at times fascinating. I have already gone through more of them than I know how to count and more than those remain. All of them are black and white, and they have the kind of jerky motions of the huge ape in Kong Returns. Everything about them is strange, not just the way the characters move and react. There is the—how can I say this?—the sense of involvement to them, the sense that great waves of feelingfulness wash over them. Yet to my understanding they are sometimes as blank and meaningless as the polished surface of a stone. Of course I do not know what a “mockingbird” is. Or what “Dr.” means. But it is more than that which disturbs me, more even than the strangeness, the sense of antiquity about the life that they convey. It is the hint of emotions that are wholly unknown to me—emotions that every member of the ancient audience of these films once felt, and that are now lost forever. It is sadness that I feel most often. Sadness. “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.” Sadness.