Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  To serve people? It sounded as though it might be true. “But what about the Detectors?”

  “The Detectors don’t detect anymore,” she said. “Look at me. They haven’t detected me. For stealing sandwiches. For sleeping in a Public Place. For leaving the Drop-out Reservation without Re-entry.”

  I said nothing, but the shock must have shown on my face.

  “The Detectors don’t detect anything,” she said. “Maybe they never did. They don’t have to. Everybody is so conditioned from childhood that nobody ever does anything.”

  “People burn themselves to death,” I said. “Often.”

  “And do the Detectors stop that?” she said. “Why don’t the Detectors know that people are thinking unbalanced, suicidal thoughts, and restrain them?”

  I could only nod. She had to be right, of course.

  I looked at the broken glass on the floor and then at the broken case with the plastic tree in it, now empty of movement. Then I looked at her, standing there in the House of Reptiles in the bright artificial light, calm, undrugged, and—I was afraid—totally out of her head.

  She was looking toward the python’s case. From one of the higher branches of the tree inside there was hanging some sort of fruit. Abruptly, she reached her arm inside the cage and stretched up toward the fruit, clearly intending to pick it.

  I stared at her. The branch was quite high, and she had to stand tiptoed and reach as far up as she could reach, just to catch the bottom of the fruit with her fingertips. With the strong light from the inside of the case coming through her dress her body was outlined clearly; it was beautiful.

  She plucked the fruit, and stood there poised like a dancer with it for a moment. Then she brought it down level with her breasts and, turning it over in her hand, looked at it. It was hard to tell what kind of fruit it was; it seemed to be some kind of mango. For a moment I thought she was going to try to eat it, even though I was certain it was plastic, but then she stretched her arm out and handed the thing to me. “This certainly can’t be eaten,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly calm, resigned.

  I took it from her. “Why did you pick it?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It seemed to be the thing to do.”

  I looked at her for a long time, saying nothing. Despite the age lines and the sleep lines in her face, and despite the uncombed look of her hair, she was very beautiful. And yet I felt no desire for her—only a kind of awe. And a slight sense of fear.

  Then I stuffed the plastic fruit into my pocket and said, “I’m going back to the library and take some sopors.”

  She turned away, looking back toward the empty case. “Okay,” she said. “Good night.”

  When I got back I put the fruit on top of Dictionary that sat on my bed-and-desk. Then I took three sopors. And slept until noon today.

  The fruit is still sitting there. I want it to mean something; but it doesn’t.

  DAY THIRTY-SEVEN

  Four days without pills. And only two joints a day—one after supper and one before going to bed. It is all very strange. I feel tense and, somehow, excited.

  I am often restless and must have taken to walking up and down in the halls outside my room in the library basement. The halls are endless, labyrinthine, mossy and gently damp. I pass doorways and, occasionally, open a door and look in, remembering when I found Dictionary, apprehensive, almost, that I may find something. I’m not certain that I want to find anything. I have had enough new things since I came to this place.

  But there is never anything in the rooms. Some have shelves in them, from floor to ceiling, but there is never anything on the shelves. I look around, then close the door and continue down the hall. The halls always smell musty.

  The doors of the rooms are of different colors, so that you may tell them apart. My room has a lavender door, to match the carpet inside.

  When I first moved in here, the feeling of walking about in this vast, empty building was frightening. But now I derive a kind of comfort from it.

  I no longer take naps, as I once did.

  DAY FORTY

  Forty days. It is all written out and on my desk in front of me, on seventy-two pages of art paper. All of it printed by me.

  It is the greatest achievement of my life. Yes, I have used that word: a great achievement. My learning to read was an achievement. Nobody knows that but me. Spofforth doesn’t know it. But then Spofforth is a robot; and a robot might just know anything. But robots can achieve nothing; they have been constructed to do what they do, and cannot change.

  I did seven films today, and hardly remember a word that I read into the machine. ,

  I cannot get her off my mind. I see her with the trees and ferns in their glass cases behind her, holding the plastic fruit out to me.

  DAY FORTY-ONE

  Most Burger Chefs are small Permoplastic buildings, but the one on Fifth Avenue is larger and made of stainless steel. It has red lamps on the tables in the shape of tulips and its Soul Muzak from the speaker walls is the music of balalaikas. There are big brass samovars at each end of the red serving counter and the waitresses —Make Four robots of a female clone—wear red bandannas on their heads.

  I was there this morning for a breakfast of synthetic scrambled eggs and hot tea. While I was waiting in line to be served, the man in front of me, a short man in a brown jump suit and with a face of blank serenity, was trying to get himself served an order of Golden Brown Fries for his breakfast. He had his credit card in his hand and I saw that it was orange, which meant that he was someone of importance.

  The robot waitress behind the counter told him that Golden Brown Fries were forbidden with breakfast. Abruptly his look of serenity vanished, and he said, “What do you mean? I’m not eating breakfast.”

  She stared stupidly down at the counter and said, “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef.” Then she looked over to the robot with identical features who was standing next to her. On both of them the eyebrows grew together right above the nose. “Only with the Super Shef. Isn’t that right, Marge?”

  I looked behind the counter and saw that there were stacks of fries sitting there in little plastic bags.

  Marge said, “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef.”

  The first robot looked back at the man, briefly, and then cast her eyes down again. “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef,” she said.

  The man looked furious. “All right,” he said. “Then give me a Super Shef with them.”

  “With the Golden Brown Fries?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but the Super Shef machine is not working properly today. We have Syn-eggs and monkey bacon, and Golden Brown Toast.”

  For a moment the man looked as though he would scream. But instead he reached into his breast pocket, took out a little silver pill holder, and swallowed three green sopors. After a moment his face became serene again and he ordered toast.

  DAY FORTY-TWO

  I have her here at the library! She is sleeping now, on the thick carpet in an empty room down the hall.

  Let me put down how it happened.

  I had resolved never to go back to the zoo. But yesterday I could not stop thinking about her. It was not sex, or that idea called “love” that so many of the films are about. The only way I can explain it to myself is to say that she was the most interesting person I had ever met.

  I think if I had not learned how to read I would not have been interested in her. Only frightened.

  Yesterday after lunch I took the bus out to the zoo. It was a Thursday, so it was raining. There was no one in the streets except for a few moron robots emptying garbage and trimming hedges and working in the parks and city gardens.

  She was not in the House of Reptiles when I got there. And I was stunned—frightened that she might have left and I would never see her again. I tried to sit down and wait for her, but I was so restless that I had to walk. First I looked at some of the reptiles.
The python cage had been repaired; but the python was not in it. Instead there were four or five diamond-backed rattlesnakes, shaking their rattles enthusiastically, with the same kind of zeal as the child with the ice-cream cone that I had seen outside.

  After a while I tired of looking at all those overbusy creatures and, seeing that the rain had stopped, I went outside.

  The child, or one of the others just like it, was out there on one of the paths. Since there were almost no people at the zoo on a rain day, the child must have decided to concentrate its attention on doing some kind of performance for me alone. It walked up to me and said, “Hi, there, mister. Isn’t it fun to watch all the animals?”

  I walked on by it, not answering. I could hear it tagging along behind me as I walked down a path toward a moated island that had zebras on it.

  “Boy!” the child said. “The zebras sure look lively today.”

  Something about that made me feel a thing I hadn’t allowed myself to feel since I was a child: anger. I spun and stared down at the chubby little freckle-faced creature, furious. “Bug off, robot,” I said.

  He did not look at me. “The zebras. . .” he said.

  “Bug off.”

  And then he turned and, abruptly, began to hop and skip away down another path.

  I felt fine about it. Even though I wasn’t completely sure he was a robot. Robots are supposed to be identified by their colored earlobes, but like everyone else, I had heard all my life rumors that that wasn’t always the case.

  I tried to pay attention to the zebras for a while. But I couldn’t keep my mind on them, because of all the various feelings I was experiencing: a kind of exultation from silencing that child—or whatever it was—and a whole group of mixed feelings about the woman, the most important of which was a dread that she might be gone. Or could she have been detected, after all?

  The zebras were none too animated; perhaps that meant they were real.

  After a while I began walking again and then I looked up the path ahead of me, toward a small gray fountain, and there she was in her red dress, walking toward me, carrying a bunch of yellow jonquils in her hand. I stopped walking, and for a moment it felt as though my heart had stopped beating.

  She walked up to me carrying the flowers and smiling. “Hello, there,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said. And then, “My name’s Paul.”

  “I’m Mary,” she said. “Mary Lou Borne.”

  “Where’ve you been? I went to the House of Reptiles.”

  “Walking. I went for a walk before lunch and I got caught in the rain.”

  And then I saw that her red dress and her hair were wet. “Oh,” I said. “I was afraid you were . . . gone.”

  “Detected?” She laughed. “Let’s go back to the snake house and have a sandwich.”

  “I’ve already had lunch,” I said, “and you should put on some dry clothes.”

  “I don’t have any dry clothes,” she said. “This dress is all I have.”

  I hesitated a moment before I spoke. And then I said it. I don’t know where it came from; but I said it. “Come back to Manhattan with me and I’ll buy a dress.”

  She seemed hardly surprised at all. “I’ll just get a sandwich . . .”

  I bought her a dress from a machine on Fifth Avenue—a yellov dress of a handsome, rough fabric called Synlon. By the time wi got there on the bus her hair had dried, and she looked stunning. She still had the flowers, and they matched the dress.

  I got that word “stunning” from a Theda Bara film. A nobleman and a servant were watching Miss Bara, in a black dress, carrying white flowers, come down a curved staircase. The servant said, as the words showed, “Pretty. Mighty pretty,” and the nobleman nodded slightly and said, “She is stunning.”

  We had not talked much on the bus. When I got her to my bedroom-office she sat on the black plastic sofa and looked around her. The room is large and colorfully furnished—lavender rug, bright floral prints on the steel walls, and gentle lighting—and I was really quite proud of it. I would have liked a window; but it was in a basement—a fifth sub-basement, in fact—and far too deep in the ground for that.

  “How do you like it?” I said.

  She got up and straightened a picture of some flowers. “It’s a little like a Chicago whorehouse,” she said. “But I like it.”

  I did not understand that. “What’s a Chicago whorehouse?” I said.

  She looked at me and smiled. “I don’t know. It’s something my father used to say.”

  “Your father?” I said. “You had a father?”

  “Sort of. When I ran away from the dormitory a very old man took care of me. Out in the desert. His name was Simon, and whenever he saw anything that was very bright—like a sunset—he would say, ‘Just like a Chicago whorehouse.’”

  She had been looking at the picture she had straightened. Then she turned her back on it and went to her seat on the sofa. “I could use a drink,” she said.

  “Liquor doesn’t make you sick?”

  “Not Syn-gin,” she said. “Not if I don’t drink much of it.”

  “All right,” I said. “I think I can get some.” I pressed the button on my desk for the servo robot and when he came, almost immediately, I told him to bring us two glasses of Syn-gin and ice.

  As he turned to leave she said, “Wait a minute, robot,” and then looked at me. “All right if I get something to eat? I’m awfully sick of the zoo’s sandwiches.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of it.” I was a bit put off by the way she seemed to be taking over, but I was pleased at the same time to be her host—especially since I had a great deal of unused credit on my NYU card. “The cafeteria machinery makes good monkey bacon and tomato sandwiches.”

  She frowned. “I never could eat monkey bacon,” she said. “My father used to think monkey food was disgusting. How about roast beef? But not a sandwich.”

  I turned to the robot. “Can you get a plate of sliced roast beef?”

  “Yeah,” the robot said. “Sure.”

  “Good,” I said, “and bring me some radishes and lettuce with my drink.”

  The robot left, and for a minute there was an awkward silence in the room. I was surprised at that, and actually a bit pleased in a way. Sometimes Mary Lou seemed to have no sensitivity at all.

  I broke the silence. “You ran away from the dormitory?”

  “Around puberty time. I’ve run away from a lot of places.” I had never even thought that anyone might think of running away from a dormitory. No, that wasn’t true. I remembered, as a child, hearing boys boast of how they were going to “run away,” because they had been treated unfairly by a robot-teacher or something. But no one had ever done it. Except Mary Lou, it seemed.

  “And you weren’t detected?”

  “At first I was sure I would be.” She leaned back on the couch, relaxing. “I was terribly scared. I had walked for half a day down an old road and then found an empty old town in the desert. But the Detectors never came.” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “That was when I began to realize that the Detectors didn’t really work. And that you didn’t have to obey robots.”

  I winced, remembering a thing that had happened to me in the dormitory, when a robot had put me in Coventry.

  “You know,” she said, “they teach you that robots are made to serve humans. But the way they say that word ‘serve’ it sounds like ‘control.’ My father—Simon—called it ‘politician talk.’”

  “Politician talk?”

  “Some special way of lying,” she said. “Simon was very old when I met him. He died only a couple of yellows after I moved in with him, and his teeth were all gone, and he could barely hear. He said a lot of things that he had learned from his father—or somebody—and that were very old.”

  “Was he trained in a dormitory?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought of asking him.”

  The robot came back, with our food and drinks.
She took her plate of roast beef in one hand, her drink of Syn-gin in the other, and made herself comfortable on the sofa. She took a deep sip of the gin, swallowed it with a small shudder, and then took a slice of the meat with her fingers and ate it in a very natural way that was new to me—I had never seen anyone eat with his fingers before.

  “You know,” she said, “Simon was probably the one who made a beef eater out of me. He used to rustle cattle from the big automatic ranches, or sometimes just hunt wild ones.”

  I had never heard of such a thing. “Does ‘rustle’ mean ‘steal’?” I said.

  She nodded. “I suppose so.” She took another slice of beef from the plate and then set the plate on the sofa beside her. She held the meat in her fingers and took another sip from the drink in her hand. “Don’t ask about the Detectors,” she said. “Because there weren’t any.” Then she finished her drink in one swallow. “Simon said that in his whole life he had never seen a Detector or heard of anyone being detected.”

  It was terribly shocking, but it sounded true. I was not young and I had never seen one or known anyone who had been detected. But then I had never known anyone, before, to even risk it.

  We stopped talking for a while then, and she concentrated on finishing the meat on her plate. I just watched her eat, still quietly astonished by her, by how interesting she was—and how physically attractive—and how I myself had got her to come here to stay with me.

  I wondered about sex, of course, but I felt that would not happen for a while. I hoped it wouldn’t, since I am shyer than most people about it, and though she was powerfully attractive—a fact that seemed more evident than ever to me after I had finished my gin—I was too apprehensive now for anything of that kind.

  Then after what seemed a long while, she said, “Let me see your recorder again,” and I said, “Certainly,” and went to my desk to get it. Next to the recorder was sitting the imitation fruit that she had picked from the python cage; she had not seemed to notice it since she had come to the room.