Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  I’ve told him he should let it go. “When in doubt, forget it,” as Paul says. But he says it’s the only thing that keeps him sane—that interests him. In their first ten blues Make Nines had burned out their own circuits with household current and transformers, had smashed their brains in heavy plant equipment, or had merely freaked out and begun to drool like idiots, or had become erratic, screaming lunatics—had drowned themselves in rivers and buried themselves alive in agricultural fields. No more robots were made after the Make Nine series. Never.

  Bob has a way, when he is thinking, of running his fingers through his black, kinky hair, over and over again. It is a very human gesture. I certainly have never seen another robot do it. And sometimes he whistles.

  He told me once that he remembered part of a line of a poem from his brain’s erased memory. It went: “Whose ‘something’ these are I think I know . . .” But he could not remember what the “something” was. A word like “tools” or “dreams.” Sometimes he would say it that way:

  “Whose dreams these are I think I know . . .” But it did not satisfy him.

  I asked him once why he thought he was any different from the other Make Nines, when he told me that as far as he knew none of the others had shared these “memories.” What he said was: “I’m the only black one.” And that was all.

  When he drifted off like that on that snowy afternoon in our kitchen, I brought him back by asking, “Is self-maintenance the only ‘ultimate’ thing about a thought bus?”

  “No,” he said, and ran his fingers through his hair. “No.” But instead of going on right away he said, “Get me a marijuana cigarette, will you, Mary?” He always calls me “Mary” instead of Mary Lou.

  “Okay,” I said. “But how can dope work on a robot?”

  “Just get it,” he said.

  I got a joint from a package in my bedroom. They were a mild brand, called Nevada Grass, that were delivered with the Pro-milk and synthetic eggs twice a week to the people in the apartment complex where we live. The people who have, as most of us do, the use of the yellow credit card. I say “people” because Bob is the only robot who lives here. He commutes to work by thought bus and is gone six hours a day. Most of that time I read books, or ancient magazines on microfilm. Bob brings me books from work almost every day. He gets them from some archives building that is even older than the one I lived in with Paul. He brought me a microfilm projector after I asked him once if there were other things to read besides books. Bob can be very helpful—although, come to think of it, I believe all robots were originally programmed that way: to help people.

  I am certainly wandering in this account, in this continuation of my plan to memorize my life. Maybe I’m getting senile—like Bob.

  No, I’m not senile. I’m just excited to be memorizing my life again. Before I started this I was merely bored—as bored as I had been after Simon died in New Mexico, as bored and freaky as I was getting at the Bronx Zoo before Paul first showed up, looking so childlike and simple, and appealing. . .

  I’d better quit thinking about Paul.

  I brought Bob his joint and he lit it and inhaled deeply. Then, trying to be friendly, he said, “Don’t you ever smoke? Or take pills?”

  “No,” I said. “They make me sick, physically. And I don’t like the idea of them anyway. I like being wide awake.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “I envy you.”

  “Why envy me?” I said. “I’m human and subject to diseases, and aging, and broken bones . . .”

  He ignored that. “I was programmed to be wide awake and fully aware twenty-three hours a day. It has only been in the last few years, since I’ve begun to allow myself to concentrate on thinking about my dreams, about my former personality and its erased feelings and memories, that I’ve learned to ... to relax my mind and let it wander.” He took another puff from the joint. “I never liked being wide awake. I certainly don’t like it now.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “I doubt if that marijuana could affect a metal brain. Why don’t you try programming yourself for a high? Can’t you alter some circuits somewhere and make yourself euphoric, or drunk?”

  “I tried it. Back in Dearborn. And later, when I was first assigned by Government to this nonsense of being a university dean. The second time I tried harder than the first because I was furious at the pretense of learning that the university was committed to— the learning of nothing by students who come here to learn nothing except some kind of inwardness. But I didn’t get high. I got hung-over.”

  He stood up from his chair and walked over to the window and watched the snow for a while. I took my eggs off the fire and began to peel them.

  Then he spoke again. “Maybe it was the buried memory of a classical education in my brain that made me feel so furious. Or maybe it was just that I had been really trained to do my job. I know and understand engineering. Not one of my students knows any of the laws of thermodynamics or vector analysis or solid geometry or statistical analysis. I know all these disciplines and more. They are not on magnetic memories built into my brain, either. I learned them by playing library tapes over and over again, studying along with every other Make Nine robot, in Cleveland. And I learned to be a Detector . . .” He shook his head, and turned away from the window to face me. “But that doesn’t matter anymore, either. Your father was right. There aren’t many working Detectors anymore. There is no need for them. When the children stopped being born. . .”

  “The children?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. Then he sat down again. “Let me tell you about thought buses.”

  “But what about children?” I said. “Paul told me once . . .”

  He looked at me strangely. “Mary,” he said, “I don’t know why children aren’t being born. It’s something to do with the population control equipment.”

  “If no one gets born,” I said, “there won’t be any more people on the earth.”

  He was silent for a minute. Then he looked at me. “Do you care?” he said. “Do you really care?”

  I looked back at him. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I did care.

  FIVE

  We moved into this apartment a week after Paul was sent away and over the months I have grown to like it fairly well. Bob has tried to get repair and maintenance robots in to fix the peeling walls and put on new wallpaper and repair the burners on the stove and reupholster the couch, but so far he has had no luck. He is probably the highest-ranking power in New York; at least I don’t know of any creature with more authority. But he can’t get much done. Simon used to say to me when I was a little girl that things were all falling apart and good riddance. “The Age of Technology has rusted,” he would say. Well, it’s gotten worse in the forty yellows since Simon died. Still, it’s not too bad here. I wash the windows and clean the floors myself, and there is plenty of food.

  I have learned to enjoy drinking beer during my pregnancy and Bob knows a place where there is an inexhaustible supply that comes from an automated brewery. Every third or fourth can turns out to be rancid, but it’s easy enough to pour those down the toilet. The sink drain is too stopped up.

  The other day Bob brought me a hand-painted ancient picture from the archives to hang over a big ugly spot on the living-room wall. There was a little brass plaque on the frame, and I could read it: “Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” It is very good-looking. I can see it when I look up from the table where I am writing this. There is a body of water in the picture— an ocean or a large lake—and sticking up out of the water is a leg. I don’t understand it; but I like the stillness of the rest of the scene. Except for that leg, which is splashing in the water. I might try to get some blue paint someday and paint over it.

  Bob has a way of picking up on a conversation days after I thought we had finished with it. I suppose it has to do with the way his mind stores information. He says he is incapable of forgetting anything. But if that is true why was it necessary for
him to labor at learning things during his early training?

  This morning while I was eating breakfast and he was sitting with me he started talking about thought buses again. I suppose he had been thinking about it while I was asleep. Sometimes it seems spooky to me when I get out of bed in the morning and find him sitting in the living room with his hands folded under his chin or pacing around in the kitchen. I offered, once, to teach him to read so that he would have something to do all night, but he just said, “I know too much already, Mary.” I didn’t pursue it.

  I was eating a bowl of synthetic protein flakes and not liking the taste of them much when Bob said, appropos of nothing, “A thought bus brain isn’t really awake all the time. Just receptive. It might not be too bad to have a brain like that. Just receptiveness and a limited sense of purpose.”

  “I’ve met people like that,” I said, chewing the tough flakes. I didn’t look at him; I was still, rather sleepily, staring at the bright identification picture on the side of the cereal box. It showed a face that everyone presumably trusted—but whose name almost no one knew—a face smiling over a big bowl of what were clearly synthetic protein flakes. The picture of the cereal was, of course, necessary to let people know what was in the box, but I had been wondering about the meaning of the man’s picture. One thing I have to say about Paul is that he gets you wondering about things like that. He has more curiosity about the meanings of things and how they make you feel than anyone I have ever known. I must have picked up some of it from him.

  The face on the box was, Paul had told me, the face of Jesus Christ. It was used to sell a lot of things. “Vestigial reverence” was the term Paul read somewhere that was supposed to be the idea, probably a hundred or more blues ago, when such things were all planned out.

  “All the brain of a bus does,” Bob was saying, “is read the mind of a passenger who has a destination thought out, and then work out a way to drive him there without any accidents. And to fit his destination in with those of the other passengers. It probably isn’t a bad life.”

  I looked up at him. “If you like rolling around on wheels,” I said.

  “The first models of thought buses that were made at the Ford works were two-way telepaths. They would broadcast music or pleasant thoughts into the heads of their passengers. Some of the night runs would send out erotic thoughts.”

  “Why don’t they do that anymore? The equipment broke down?”

  “No,” he said. “As I told you, thought buses are different from the rest of the junk. They don’t break down. What happened was that nobody would get off the buses.”

  I nodded. Then I said, “I might have.”

  “But you’re different,” he said. “You’re the only unprogrammed woman in North America. And certainly the only pregnant one.”

  “Why would I be pregnant if no one else is?” I said.

  “Because you don’t use pills or marijuana. Most drugs for the past thirty years have contained a fertility-inhibiting agent. I checked some control tapes at the library after the subject came up between us the other day. There was a Directed Plan to cut back population for a year. A computer decision. But something went wrong with it, and the population was never turned back on again.”

  That was a shocker. I just sat there for a moment, thinking about it. Another equipment malfunction, or another burned-out computer, and no more babies. Ever.

  “Could you do anything about it? Fix it, I mean?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m not programmed for repair.”

  “Oh, come on, Bob,” I said, suddenly irritated. “I bet you could paint these walls and fix the sink if you really wanted to.”

  He said nothing.

  I was feeling strange, annoyed. Something about our conversation about the lack of children in the world—a thing I had never noticed until Paul had pointed it out to me—was bothering me.

  I looked at him hard—with that look that Paul calls mystical and says he loves me for. “Are robots able to lie?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  SIX

  Yesterday afternoon Bob came home early from the university. I’m seven months pregnant now, and I loaf around the apartment a lot, just letting the time pass by and watching the snow falling. Sometimes I read a little, and sometimes I just sit. Yesterday when Bob came in I was bored and restless and I told him, “If I had a decent coat I’d take a walk.”

  He looked at me strangely a moment. Then he said, “I’ll get you a coat,” and he turned around and walked out the door.

  It must have been two hours before he got back. By that time I was even more bored, and impatient with him for taking so long.

  He had a package with him and held it a minute, standing in front of me, before he gave it to me. There was something odd about his face. He looked very serious and—how can I say this?—vulnerable. Yes, big as he is, and powerful, he looked vulnerable to me, like a child, as he handed me the box.

  I opened it. In it was a bright red coat with a black velvet collar. I took it out and tried it on. It was certainly red. And I didn’t much like the collar. But it sure was warm.

  “Where did you get this?” I said. “And what took you so long?”

  “I searched the inventories of five warehouses,” he said, staring at me, “before I found it.”

  I raised my eyebrows but said nothing. The coat fit pretty well as long as I didn’t try to button it over my belly. “How do you like it?” I said, turning around in front of him.

  He said nothing, but stared at me thoughtfully for a long moment. Then he said, “It’s all right. It might look better if you had black hair.”

  That was an odd thing for him to say. And he had never given any sign before that he ever noticed how I looked. “Should I have the color changed?” I said. My hair is brown. Just plain brown, with no particular character to it. Where I have it is in the figure. And the eyes. I like my eyes.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want you to dye your hair.” There was something sad about the way he said it. And then he said another strange thing: “Would you like to take a walk with me?”

  I looked up at him, not letting myself blink for a moment. Then I said, “Sure.”

  And when we were out on the street he took my hand. Surprised hell out of me. He began to whistle. We walked like that for about an hour on the nearly empty streets in the snow and through Washington Square, where only a few zonked old ladies sat smoking their joints in silence. Bob was careful to walk slowly so that I could keep up with him—he really is enormous—but he said nothing the whole time. He would stop whistling every now and then and look down at me, as if he were studying my face; but he did not say a word.

  It was strange. Yet I felt somehow pleased with it. I felt there was something important to him about the red coat and the walking and the holding of my hand, and I didn’t really feel it necessary to know exactly what it was. If he had wanted me to know he would have told me. Somehow I felt needed by him, and for a while very important. It was a good feeling. I wish he had put his arm around me.

  Sometimes the thought that I will soon be a mother frightens me and makes me feel alone. I’ve never talked to Bob about this, would not know how to talk to him; he seems so absorbed in bis own longings.

  I have read a book about having babies and taking care of them. But I have no idea of what it will feel like to be a mother. I have never seen one.

  SEVEN

  Here in New York, when walking by myself through the snow I watch the faces. They are not always bland, not always empty, not stupid. Some are frowning in concentration, as if difficult thought were trying to burst out in speech. I see middle-aged men with lean bodies and gray hair and bright clothing, their eyes glazed, lost in thought. Suicides by immolation abound in this city. Are the men thinking of death? I never ask them. One doesn’t.

  Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long
ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics; but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said: I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.

  Why can no one read? What happened?

  I have a copy of the last book ever published by Random House, once a place of business that caused books to be printed and sold by the millions. The book is called Heavy Rape; it was published in 2189. On the flyleaf is a statement that begins: “With this novel, fifth in a series, Random House closes its editorial doors. The abolition of reading programs in the schools during the past twenty years has helped bring this about. It is with regret . . .” And so on.

  Bob seems to know almost everything; but he doesn’t know when or why people stopped reading. “Most people are too lazy,” he said. “They only want distractions.”

  Maybe he is right, but I don’t really feel that he is. In the basement of the apartment building we live in, a very old building that has been restored many times, is a crudely lettered phrase on the wall near the reactor: WRITING SUCKS. The wall is painted in an institutional green, and scratched into the paint are crude drawings of penises and women’s breasts and of couples engaged in oral sex or hitting one another, but those are the only words: WRITING SUCKS. There is no laziness in that statement, nor in the impulse to write it by scratching into tough paint with the point of a nail or a knife. What I think of when I read that harsh, declarative phrase is how much hatred there is in it.