Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  I watched him for quite a while in silence. Then I said, “Do you know anything about childbirth?”

  He went on painting, not looking at me. “No. Nothing except that it’s painful. And that any Make Seven can abort a pregnancy.”

  “Any Make Seven?”

  He stopped painting and turned toward me, looking down. There was a white spot on his cheek. His head seemed to be touching the high ceiling. “Make Sevens were designed at a time when there were too many pregnancies. Someone had the idea to program them for abortions—for abortions right up through the ninth month. All you do is ask one.”

  That phrase, “through the ninth month,” shook me for a second. He had said it casually, but I didn’t like hearing it. And then I laughed, thinking of a Make Seven abortionist. Make Sevens are usually in charge of businesses or dormitories or stores. I could see myself walking up to one of them behind its desk and saying, “I want an abortion,” and having it whip out a little scalpel from a desk drawer. . . except that wasn’t funny.

  I stopped laughing. “Could you find me a book about having babies?” I held my hands cupped over my belly, protectively. “So I’ll have some idea what to expect?”

  Surprisingly, he didn’t answer me. He stared at me for a while. Then for a moment he whistled, softly. He seemed to be deep in thought. At such times I am amazed at Bob’s humanness. When he is alone with me like that his face can show more feeling than even Paul’s or Simon’s and his voice is sometimes so deep and so sad that it almost makes me cry. So queer that this robot should be the repository of so much love and melancholy—powerful feelings that mankind has rid itself of.

  Finally he spoke and shocked me with his words. “I don’t want you to have the baby, Mary,” he said.

  Instinctively I pulled my hands tighter against my belly. “What are you talking about, Bob?”

  “I want you to abort the baby. There’s a Make Seven in my building that can do it.”

  I must have stared at him in disbelief and fury. I remember standing up and taking a few steps toward him. All that was in my head were words I had learned from Simon years before and I said them: “Fuck you, Bob. Fuck you.”

  He looked at me steadily. “Mary,” he said, “if that child lives it will eventually be the only person alive on earth. And I will have to go on living as long as it does.”

  “To hell with that,” I said. “Besides, it’s too late. I can get other women off their pills and get them fertile. I can have other babies myself.” The thought of all that wearied me suddenly, and I sat down again. “And as for you, why shouldn’t you go on living? You can be a father to my children. Isn’t that what you wanted when you took me away from Paul?”

  “No,” he said. “That wasn’t it.” He looked away from me, holding his paintbrush, out the window toward the tree and the empty avenue. “I just wanted to live with you the way the man whose dreams I have might have lived, hundreds of years ago. I thought it might allow me to recover the past that lies around the edges of my mind and memory, might give me ease.”

  “And has it?”

  He looked back at me, thoughtfully. “No, it hasn’t. Nothing has changed in me. Except for loving you.”

  His unhappiness gripped me; it was like a living thing in the room—an inaudible crying, a yearning. “What about the baby?” I said. “If you had a baby to be a father to . . .”

  He shook his head wearily. “No. This whole arrangement has been folly. Like having Bentley read those films for me so that I could touch the past a little more through him. Allowing him to impregnate you before I took him from you. It has all been stupid —the kind of thing that emotions do when you yield to them.” Then he came down from the ladder, walked over toward me, and set his large hand gently on my shoulders. “All I want, Mary, is to die.”

  I looked up at his sad, brown face with the broad forehead wrinkled and the eyes soft. “If my baby is born . . .”

  “I am programmed to live for as long as there are human beings to serve. I can’t die until there are no more of you left. You . . .” And suddenly, surprisingly, his voice seemed to explode. “You Homo sapiens, with your television and your drugs.”

  His anger frightened me for a moment and I stayed silent. Then I said, “I’m Homo sapiens, Bob. And I’m not like that. And you are nearly human. Or more than human.”

  He turned away from me, taking his hand away from my shoulder. “I am human,” he said. “Except for birth and death.” He walked back to his ladder. “And I am sick of life. I never wanted it.”

  I stared at him. “That’s the name of the game. I didn’t ask to be born either.”

  “You can die,” he said. He began to climb the ladder again.

  Suddenly a horrible thought came to me. “When we all die off . . . when this generation is all dead, then you can kill yourself?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

  “You don’t even know?” I said, my voice rising.

  “No,” he said. “But if there are no human beings to be served . . .”

  “Jesus Christ!” I said. “Are you the reason no babies are being born?”

  He looked at me. “Yes,” he said. “I used to run Population Control. I understand the equipment.”

  “Jesus Christ! You fed the world with birth control because you felt suicidal. You’re erasing mankind. . .”

  “So I can die. But look how suicidal mankind is.”

  “Only because you’ve destroyed its future. You’ve drugged it and fed it lies and withered its ovaries and now you want to bury it. And I thought you were some kind of a God.”

  “I’m only what I was constructed to be. I’m equipment, Mary.”

  I could not take my eyes off him, and try as I might, I could not make his physical beauty ugly in my mind. He was beautiful to see, and his sadness was itself like a drug to me. He stood there with his chest bare and paint-spattered, and something deep in me yearned toward him. He was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and my wonder and my anger seemed to make that beauty glow around his heavy, relaxed-looking body, his sexless body, his incredibly old and incredibly youthful body.

  I shook my head, trying to shake the powerful feeling off. “You were constructed to help us. Not to help us die.”

  “Dying may be what you really want,” he said. “Many of you choose it. Others would if they were brave enough.”

  I stared at him. “God damn it,” I said. “I don’t choose it. I want to live and to raise my baby. I like living fine.”

  “You can’t raise that baby, Mary,” he said. “I can’t stand to live for another seventy years, awake for twenty-three hours a day.”

  “Can’t you just turn yourself off?” I said. “Or swim out into the Atlantic?”

  “No,” he said. “My body won’t obey my mind.” He began to paint. “Let me tell you. Every spring for over a century I have walked up Fifth Avenue to the Empire State Building, gone to the top, and tried to jump. It is, I suppose, the ritual that my life centers on. And I cannot jump. My legs will not take me to the edge. I stand, two or three feet from the edge, throughout the night, and nothing happens.”

  I could see him up there, like that ape in the movie. And I would be the girl. And then, suddenly, I thought of something. But first I said, “How did you stop babies from being born?”

  “The equipment is automatic,” he said. “It gets an input from Census to let it know whether to increase or decrease pregnancies, and it controls the equipment that distributes sopors. If pregnancies are up it is supposed to increase the amount of birth-control sopors. If pregnancies are down the sopors are only sopors.”

  I sat there listening to this as though I were hearing a child’s lecture on Privacy. I was learning about the death of my species and it seemed to mean nothing to me. Bob was standing there with a paintbrush in his hand and telling me why no children had been born for thirty years and I felt nothing. There had never been children in my world. Only those obscene little white-shi
rted robots at the zoo. I had never seen anyone in my life who was younger than I. If my child did not live, humanity would die with my generation, with Paul and with me.

  I looked at him. He turned, bent, dipped his brush in paint, and turned back to the wall above my bookcases.

  “About the time you were born,” he said, “a resistor failed on the input amplifier. The machinery began getting signals that said population was too high. It still gets them and is still trying to cut population down, by distributing sopors that stop ovulation, even after it had sterilized almost your entire generation, in the dormitories. If you had stayed there one more yellow your ovaries would be gone.” He finished off the upper corner with paint. The wall looked clean, shiny.

  “Could you have fixed that resistor?” I said.

  He came down the ladder silently, holding the brush at his side. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never tried.”

  And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, of what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself . everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it.

  “My God, Bob,” I said. “My God.” Suddenly I hated him, hated his coolness, his strength, his sadness. “You goddamned monster,” I said. “Devil. Devil. You’re letting us die that way. And you’re the one who is suicidal.”

  He stopped painting and turned to look at me again. “That’s right,” he said.

  I took a breath. “And if you wanted to, could you stop those birth-control sopors from being made in this country?”

  “Yes. In the whole world.”

  “Could you just stop sopors? All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  I took another long breath. Then I said softly, “About the Empire State Building.“ I looked downtown, toward it. ”I could push you off.“

  I looked back toward him. He was staring at me.

  “After my baby is born,” I said, “and when I’m well again and know how to take care of it, I could push you off.”

  Bentley

  OCTOBER FIRST

  I am on my way to New York, dictating this as I go, into an ancient Sears cassette recorder.

  I have a calendar, also from Sears, and I have decided to call this day October first, and to number days in months, as my books do. October was once an important month of the Fall of the Year. I have made it that again.

  I could not sleep on the night of the day I finished my account of the time at Maugre. Once I had decided that I would not write about repairing and furnishing the old redwood house by the sea and that I had told all that needed to be told, I became excited. I could leave whenever I chose to.

  I wandered around the empty and overgrown streets of Maugre that night and then went to the obelisk and down to the level under Sears where the library and the thought-bus garage and the room filled with coffins were. I remembered that I had seen nothing in the garage but local buses, and one of the Baleens had told me that none of the buses in the garage worked anyway—and that they would not even open their doors. But I went and walked among them, up and down the long dark rows.

  And I made a discovery. Near one wall there were five buses that looked exactly like the others except that on their fronts was written CROSS-COUNTRY. I stared at that for a long time, shocked. Had I been a Baleen I would have believed that the Lord had saved those buses for me until the evening of my departure. How had I missed them before?

  But when I stood by the side of each of them and commanded its door to open, both mentally and aloud, nothing happened. I tried to force the doors with my fingers, but they were solidly tight, unyielding. I kicked at the side of one of them in despair.

  And then, angry and frustrated, I thought of something. I thought of Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide.

  Audel’s Guide is a small book, not much bigger than a large soybar. At the back of it there are thirty blank pages with the word “Notes” at the top of each. I had used those pages at the prison to copy down some of the poems I liked best. Most of them were from the book by T. S. Eliot, which was not itself very large, but too large to carry conveniently on the long trip.

  I had never read the whole Guide, since it was technical and dull and since I had no intention of ever maintaining or repairing robots; but I did, suddenly, there in the great thought-bus garage, remember seeing a chapter toward the end of the book called “The New Robots-without-Bodies: Thought Buses,” with several pages of writing and diagrams.

  I went back to my house quickly. The book was on the table by my big double bed, where I had left it the last time I had read “Ash Wednesday”—a sad and religious poem that seemed able to take away some of the ugly feelings I had about the Baleens’ religion.

  I found the thought-bus part of the book; it was just as I had remembered it. It had a heading of exactly the kind I wanted: “Thought-Bus Deactivation.” But when I began to read it my heart sank.

  This is what it said:

  Thought buses are activated and deactivated by a computer code that, by Edict of the Directors, cannot be reprinted here. Deactivation is a necessity in order to control movement within cities when needed. The deactivation circuits are in the “forebrain” of the route-seeking Intelligence Unit, between the headlights. See diagram.

  I studied the diagram of a thought-bus forebrain without any real hope. The portion labeled “Deactivation Circuits” was a kind of solid bump on top of the lacy sphere of the brain itself. Actually there were two “brains,” both spherical; one was the “route seeker” that drove the bus and told it where to go; the other was the ”Communication Unit,“ which was telepathic, and had a bump on it much like the Deactivation Circuit bump on the other brain. It was labeled ”Broadcast Inhibition,“ with no further explanation.

  I was reading over this diagram and the accompanying text in dejection when a thought began to form. I could try removing the bump, together with the Deactivation Circuits!

  It was an unusual thought, and everything in my training went against it: to willfully alter and possibly destroy Sensitive Government Property! Even Mary Lou, with all her indifference to authority, had never broken into the sandwich machine at the zoo. Still, she had thrown that rock into the python cage and pulled out the robot python. And further, nothing had happened. She had told the robot guard to bug off, and he had. And there were no robots around Maugre for me to be afraid of.

  Afraid of? I was not, really, afraid of anything. It was only my old, almost forgotten sense of decency that trembled at the idea of taking a chisel and a hammer to the brain of a thought bus. It was a part of my insane upbringing—an upbringing that was supposed to liberate my mind for full “growth” and “self-awareness” and “self-reliance” and that had been nothing but a swindle and a cheat. My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered, drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.

  I sat there with Audel’s Guide in my lap, getting ready to go attack a thought-bus brain with a hammer, my mind racing at this absurd time of all times with the realization that all my notions of decency were something programmed into my mind and my behavior by computers and by robots who themselves had been programmed by some long-dead social engineers or tyrants or fools. I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds. They would have thought of
themselves as grave, serious, concerned men—the words “caring” and “compassionate” would have been frequently on their lips. They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix, with white hair at the temples and rolled-up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens, a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent, a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson—the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement—as all their powers of technology and “compassion” could devise.

  It was strange; I could not stop my mind from thinking all this except by getting off the bed, clutching my Audel’s Guide, and leaving the house. My heart now was pounding and I was willing to destroy all of their delicate brains if necessary.

  Outside, the moon had come out. It was full, a disk of bright silver. I saw a large, dramatic spider web on my back porch that must have been made while I was in the house with my mind in turmoil; the spider was just finishing the outer circle of it. The moon illuminated the strands of the big taut web so that it seemed to be made of pure light. It was dazzling, geometric and mysterious, and it calmed me just to stop and look at it, at the elaboration and power of life that could make such a design.

  The spider completed its work while I watched, and then picked its stilted way to the center of the web, took a position, and sat there waiting. I watched for a moment more and then headed toward the obelisk, itself silver in the light from the moon.

  The Guide had given me an idea of what I might need, and I found a tool box in Sears and filled it with pliers and screwdrivers and chisels and a ball-peen hammer. I had become fairly accustomed to the use of tools while repairing my house, although I was still a bit awkward with them. Normally people never did such things; tools were something used by moron robots.