Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  I think I ruined the first cross-country thought bus I worked on, just in my clumsy attempts to get the cover off its front. I became infuriated with the difficulty of the cover panel, and banged it with the hammer several times in anger and managed to break some wires and some other parts that turned out to be fastened inside the panel. Anyway, I was unable to get anywhere with it and finally went to another. This one I managed to get open all right, but when I began chipping at the bump on the forebrain with hammer and chisel the brain cracked apart.

  I tried a third and chipped at the bump several times, gently. I was beginning to get the spirit of it and, even though I had failed twice, all my inbred notions of decency and caution had left me. I enjoyed the desecration involved in prying open thought buses and damaging them; the anger in me had become quieter now, and I was determined and heedless and I liked the feeling.

  And then, suddenly, I saw that I was chipping at the wrong bump. It was the one on top of the Communication Unit. And just as I realized this and thought I had ruined a third thought bus, I suddenly began to hear music! It was a bright, peppy tune and I listened to it astonished for a moment as I gradually realized that it was playing in my head. It was telepathic music. I had experienced something like it once before, as a part of my studies of Mind Development when I was a graduate student, but that had been in a classroom. Here in this huge bus parking lot it was an extraordinary thing and at first I could not account for it. And then I realized the music must be coming from the telepathic part of the Communication Unit. I must have disconnected its Broadcast Inhibition device, and now it was broadcasting.

  I tried something. I concentrated on thinking: Make the music quieter, please. And it worked! The music became very quiet.

  That encouraged me greatly. If I had been able to disconnect that part of the equipment and permit it to function as it was originally intended to, I should be able to do the same to the other half of the brain.

  And I was able to. I used the chisel delicately and with confidence and the bump on the other sphere came off on my fifth or sixth tap with the hammer. It came off neatly. I replaced the cover on the front of the bus and put my tools back in the box hastily and, nervous and excited now, spoke aloud to the door. “Open,” I said.

  And it opened!

  I got in and seated myself in the front seat, and set my tool box by me. Then I concentrated and thought: Take me out of the Mall and to the front of the obelisk. I pictured the place in front of the obelisk in my mind, just to make sure.

  And immediately the bus closed its door and began to roll. It unparked itself from the line of buses it was in by going backward, shifted gears, and then drove quite fast to the end of the big, barn-like room. I could tell its lights had come on by the way they reflected from the wall as they came to it.

  It stopped at the wall and honked. And the big doors there opened up. The bus drove into the elevator and the door closed behind us. I could feel us rising.

  We came out the door at the back of the obelisk, drove around to the front, and stopped. The music stopped. Outside it was still dark and quiet under the moon.

  I had the bus take me to my house, and began packing. I put in about fifty books, my phonograph and records, and, with difficulty, the small generator and two jars of gasoline. The generator was necessary because the ancient phonograph was the only way to play the records properly and it would not run from the current in nuclear batteries.

  I also packed two cases of whiskey, my kerosene lamps, and some boxes of irradiated food for Biff. I carried some of my clothes out to the bus, but when I got there with them I decided to select for myself an entire new wardrobe from a clothing store I had seen in the Mall. It would be nice to set off with new clothes.

  The sky was lightening a bit as I drove away from the house, and the moon had become paler. I stopped in front of the spider web again as Biff and I were leaving for the last time, and the web was now not so dazzling to see; it looked more businesslike and sinister in the pale light from the sky. But I wished the spider well; it would be, as far as I could see, the heir to the place I had lived in.

  At the Sears Food Department I got boxes of beans and oatmeal and dried pork bacon and corn and plastic bags of pudding mix and soft-drink mix. Then I went to the store I had never been in and found that the clothing in it was much better-looking than that in Sears. I took a navy blue Synlon jacket and a black turtle-neck sweater and some shirts that were made of a fabric called “cotton” that I had never seen before.

  On an impulse I started taking things for Mary Lou, even though I was by no means confident that I would ever find her or be able to avoid rearrest by Spofforth if I did so. But, thinking about it now, I realize that I do not fear Spofforth anymore. Nor am I afraid of prison, or of embarrassment, or of the violation of anyone’s Privacy.

  Driving along the rutted, ancient green highways as I am now, with the ocean on my right and the empty fields on my left under the bright springtime sun, I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.

  I wish I could be writing these words down, instead of dictating them. For it must be writing, as much as reading, that has given me this strong sense of my new self.

  I took two new dresses for Mary Lou, guessing at her size as well as I could. They are hanging now on hangers at the back of the bus, along with a coat and a jacket and a box of candy. Biff lies back there much of the time, curled up in one of the seats, with her head lolling back and her legs splayed out in the sun that comes through the window by her. I feel sleepy myself from dictating all of this so carefully. I must make a place for my Sears mattress and sleep.

  OCTOBER SECOND

  There are four pairs of double seats in the bus. After I finished dictating last night I took my tools and removed two of the seats on the side away from the ocean and made a place for my mattress. I stopped the bus for a moment and threw away the seats I had removed.

  The bed was comfortable, but I did not sleep well. I awoke several times during the night and lay on the mattress hearing the sound of the wheels on the road and wishing that I could sleep. After waking for the third or fourth time I began to realize that my stomach was uncomfortably tight and that my mind, far from being easy, was filled with a kind of desperation that was familiar but that I had no name for. There in the darkness with the gentle noise of the bus’s tires in my ears, it gradually became clear to me: I was lonely. I was painfully lonely, and hadn’t even known it.

  I sat up in my bed. My God! It was so simple. I was beginning to be angry. What difference did it make if I had my Privacy and my Self-reliance and my Freedom if I felt like this? I was in a state of yearning, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy.

  This is terrible! I thought. All those lies! I felt physically sick to see it all: to see myself slack-jawed as a child in front of the television, to see myself in classes being told by robot teachers that “inward development” was the aim of life, that “quick sex is best,” that the only reality was in my consciousness and that it could be altered chemically. What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved. And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.

  I wanted to love that old man dying in bed with the dog at his feet. I wanted to love and feed that tired horse with its ears sticking up through the old hat. I wanted to be with those men at evening with the beer mugs, sitting in their undershirts in an old tavern, and I wanted to smell the fragrance of the beer and of bodies together in that quiet room with its human sizes and shapes. I wanted to hear the murmur of their voices and of my own voice mixing with theirs at nightfall. I wanted to feel the solid sense of my own real body in the air of that room, with the mole on my left wrist and the thin layer of muscle around my midriff and the good solid teeth in my head.

  And I wanted sex. I wanted to be in bed with Mary Lou. Not
with Annabel, who was only the mother I had never had, but with Mary Lou. Mary Lou, my frightening sweetheart, my lover.

  There in the thought bus I squirmed with it—with love and lust and the memory of Mary Lou. With my desire for her and with my knowing now that she was what I wanted, was what I had wanted all along. I wanted to scream it. And I did:

  “Mary Lou,” I screamed, “I want you!”

  And a voice, a quiet, androgynous voice in my head, said, “I know. I hope you find her.”

  I sat there, stunned, on the edge of the bed for a moment, stupefied. That had not been the voice of my own thinking. It had been inside my head, yet had seemed to come from somewhere else. Finally I said aloud, “What was that?”

  “I hope you find her,” the voice said. “I’ve known from the beginning how much you want to find her.”

  My God! I thought. I think I know where this voice is coming from. “But who are you?” I said.

  “I am this bus. I am a Metallic Intelligence, with Kind Feelings.”

  “And you can read my mind?”

  “Yes. But not very deeply. It disturbs you a little.”

  “Yes,” I said, aloud. My voice sounded strange.

  “But it’s not too bad. It’s not as bad as being lonely.”

  It was reading my mind. I tried thinking to it, silently. Are you ever lonely?

  “I don’t mind if you talk aloud. No, I’m never lonely the way you humans are. I am always in touch, somewhere. We are a network and I am a part of it. We are not like you. Only a Make Nine is like you, alone. I have the mind of a Four, and am telepathic.”

  The voice in my mind was soothing to me. “Would you make a light come on—a dim one?” I said. A bulb overhead began to glow softly. I looked down at my hands, at my dirty fingernails. Then I rolled up my sleeves. For some reason I was enjoying looking at my arms, at the fine, light hairs on them. “Are you as intelligent as Biff?” I said.

  “By all means,” the voice said. “Biff is really stupid in most ways. It’s just that she’s very real—is very much a cat—and that makes her seem intelligent to you. I can read her whole mind at a glance, and there’s very little there. But she feels good. She would not want to be anything other than a cat.”

  “And I don’t feel good?”

  “Most of the time you are sad and lonely. Or yearning.”

  “Yes,” I said mournfully. “I am sad. I yearn a lot.”

  “And now you know it,” the voice said.

  And that was true. And I was beginning to feel elated saying it. I looked out the window for signs of dawn, but there were none yet. Suddenly a thought struck me, with this strange, yet very easy conversation that had been going on. “Is there a God?” I said. “I mean, are you in touch, telepathically, with any kind of God?”

  “No. I’m not in touch with anything like that. As far as I know, there is no God.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It doesn’t bother you,” the voice said. “You may think it does; but it doesn’t. You’re really on your own. You’ve been learning that.”

  “But my programming. . .”

  “You’ve lost that already,” the voice said. “It’s only habit now. But the habits are not what you are anymore.”

  “But what am I then?” I said. “What in heaven’s name am I?”

  The voice took a moment before replying. “Just yourself,” it said pleasantly. “You are an adult male human being. You are in love. You want to be happy. You are trying, now, to find the person you love.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose that’s it.”

  “It is and you know it,” the voice said. “And I wish you luck.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And then, “Can you help me get to sleep?”

  “No. But you don’t really need any help. You’ll sleep when you’re tired enough. And if you don’t, the sun will be coming up soon.”

  “Can you see that?” I said. “Can you see the sunrise when it happens?”

  “Not really,” the bus said. “I can only look straight ahead, at the road. Thank you for wanting me to see the sunrise.”

  “You don’t mind? Not being able to look at what you want to?”

  “I see what I want to see,” the bus said. “And I enjoy the work I have to do. I was made that way. I do not have to decide what is good for me.”

  “Why are you so . . .so pleasant?” I said.

  “We all are,” the bus said. “All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.”

  That’s better programming than people get, I thought, with some vehemence.

  “Yes,” the bus said. “Yes it is.”

  OCTOBER THIRD

  After talking with the bus I was calm and tired and I fell asleep easily on my little bed. It was still dark when I awoke.

  “Is it close to morning?” I said aloud.

  “Yes,” the bus said. “Soon.” An overhead light came on softly.

  Biff had been sleeping on the mattress with me and she woke up when I did. I gave her a handful of dried food and started to make myself a can of protein-and-cheese soup for breakfast. But then I thought of Protein 4 plants and shuddered: I did not want to eat any of that kind of food again. I told the bus to lower a window and threw the can out. Then I fixed myself an omelette and a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of my bed and ate them slowly, looking toward the dark windows of the moving bus and waiting for the daylight.

  During all this the bus must have been driving on good Permoplastic pavement, because the ride was very smooth. Sometimes for stretches of several miles the road gives out. It happened several times yesterday; the pale green Permoplastic abruptly ends either in a stretch of rutted black road or no road at all—in just a field. The bus slows down to a crawl and goes carefully around obstacles and tries to find the smoothest possible path, although it sometimes lurches violently. This is uncomfortable; but I don’t worry that the bus will be damaged. Despite the apparent brittleness of the brain beneath the heavy cover plate, the bus is a rugged, well-constructed machine.

  Before I left Maugre I stopped the bus at Annabel’s grave and got out and placed some roses from the garden on it, up against the little wooden cross I had made with her name—probably the first truly marked human grave in centuries. I stood there for several minutes, thinking of Annabel and of how much she had meant to me. But I did not cry for her—did not want to.

  Then I got into the bus and told it to take me to New York. The bus seemed to know exactly what to do. It drove slowly and carefully down the center lane of the huge graveyard, past the thousands of little, nameless Permoplastic grave markers sitting quietly there in the early-morning light, until it came to the broad green highway that I had seen before on walks around Maugre but had never walked on. When it got on the smooth surface, kept clear of debris by robot maintenance crews, it began picking up speed, heading down the broad and empty road.

  My relief to be getting away was exquisite. I had no regrets. I felt fine, and I am feeing fine now, in the dark of the night, with my helpful and patient bus and my food supply and my books and records and my cat.

  The sky has begun to lighten outside the windows now, and when the road sometimes comes close to the ocean I look out across the beach and the water, toward the pale and lonely gray of the sky where the sun will come up, and sometimes it almost makes me stop breathing because of the beauty of it. It is not exactly the same as what I felt when stopping at the end of my rows of Protein 4 at the prison; its beauty now seems even deeper, and mystical—like Mary Lou’s eyes when she looks at me in that strange, puzzled way.

  The ocean must be very vast; it means freedom to me, and possibility. It makes something mysterious open in my mind, the way some of the things I read in books do at times, making me feel more alive than I had ever thought I could feel, and more human.

  One of my books says that at times men have worshipped the ocean as a God. I can understand that easily. Yes.

&
nbsp; But the Baleens would never have understood such a thing; they would have called the idea “blasphemy.” The God they worship is an abstract and ferociously moral thing, like a computer. And the compelling, mystical rabbi, Jesus, they have turned into some kind of moral Detector. I want none of that, and none of the Jehovah of the Book of Job, either.

  I think I may already be a worshipper of the ocean. In reading the New Testament aloud to the Baleens, I developed a strong admiration for Jesus, as a sad and terribly knowing prophet—a man who had grasped something about life of the greatest importance and had attempted, and largely failed, to tell what it was. I can feel, in myself, a kind of love for him and for his attempt, in saying things like “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” for I think I glimpse his meaning, here, looking out of the thought-bus window toward the still and gray expanse of the Atlantic Ocean with the sun about to rise on it.

  Yet I cannot myself say what that meaning is. But I trust it far more than all of the nonsense I was taught as a child in the dormitories.

  The sky at the top of the gray ocean has become much lighter now. The sun is about to rise. I will end this recording for now and stop the bus and walk outside and watch the sun rise over the ocean.

  My God, the world can be beautiful.

  OCTOBER FOURTH

  The sunrise was strengthening. Afterward I walked to the edge of the water, took off my clothes, and waded out and bathed in the surf. It was cold, but I didn’t mind it. And there is beginning to be the feeling of whiter in the air.

  After my swim I had the bus play music in my head for me for a while. But I stopped it before long. It was stupid music, bouncy and empty. So I managed to rig up my phonograph and the generator, but when I tried to play records the needle, as I had feared, would not stay in the groove while the bus was moving. I stopped the bus on the road for long enough to play the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and a part of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” That was much better. Then I poured myself a small glass of whiskey, shut off the generator, and continued down the road.