by John Sladek
None of them, he guessed. All just burning globs of goop, so many light-years away. And when people died, they went the same place as the mark of a wren in last year’s snow.
Pa finished his cough. ‘Okay, home! Home, to hang up our socks!’
Christmas was all in the head, Pa said (the heart, Ma corrected). So really this home-made tree was just as good as any real one, wasn’t it?
Roderick looked at it and saw tall evergreens, cut down in the mountains by singing lumberjacks, hauled to town on horse-drawn sledges with bells all over them. It was set up in a house where there were wreaths on the doors and red candles in the windows, to guide visitors who would arrive any minute in their top hats and bonnets, laughing all the way to the bank, through the banks of snow and loaded down with presents (and of course cards showing all of this), Bob Cratchit goose puddings, black servants beaming at them over silver trays of eggnogs, giant dolls and electric trains that Father would play with when not admiring his new pipe and shotgun, but not half as much as Mother admired her new automatic kitchen machinery or her genuine diamonds lasting a lifetime or her personal transit car, just right for shopping (for turkey and trimmings, gifting ideas or magazines showing all of this including cards on the mantel (showing all …)) or for getting the kids Back to School, so much easier and fun to learn with a homework computer, just coming out of that big box under the glittering tree. The tree …
At the same time, Roderick saw it was only the bottom of a cardboard box with a green triangle drawn on it and a light bulb stuck through a hole. The bulb wasn’t really connected to anything, but then it was burned out anyway. And anyway, they had to keep the power-bill down this month. And all the other bills, like food. Ma and Pa would be imagining their Christmas dinner too, and probably their presents.
All the same, they hung up three stockings on the back of three dining-room chairs. And in the morning there was stuff in them!
In Pa’s stocking there was a beautiful hand-painted certificate awarding him the Nobel Prize for Inventions. And a drop of water.
In Ma’s stocking there was a wonderful little machine to help her make up titles for her sculptures: two cardboard wheels with words on them (Forest Sneeze, Shoelace Metonymy; etc). And a drop of water.
The drops of water had been snowflakes when Roderick put them in the stockings. Ma and Pa said they could see that they’d been pretty terrific snowflakes, too.
In Roderick’s stocking was a foot.
‘Don’t look so puzzled, son.’ Pa went out to his workshop and brought in the rest of the present: a complete, full-sized adult body in pink plastic, with a gleaming stainless steel head.
‘Oh,’ said Roderick, trying to sound pleased. ‘Clothes.’
XVIII
‘Frankly, Father, I expected something like this. You would give him those Protestant books to read …’
‘Kierkegaard? But Sister, it’s just, just a book about faith, the blind leap into darkn –’
‘All the same, Father. All the same.’ Sister Filomena held out the essay by two fingers, avoiding contamination. ‘No doubt you’ll be wanting a word with him about this.’
‘Well of course I’ll speak to the boy if …’
‘Boy! Lord have mercy on us, he can’t even get his knees under the desk. He’s head and shoulders over all the other children. Yes and all the girls have been – well, looking at him. He’s just not natural.’
‘Maybe we should graduate him or something … but you know, I keep feeling I’m almost getting through to him. Oh, sinful pride maybe, but I, it’s just that I’ve never had the opportunity before to bring into the faith a ro – a person like him.’
Sister Filomena hmp’d and went away, leaving the essay on his desk. He began to read:
The Story of Abraham and Isaac as a Flowchart
And so it went, through all the scenarios where Abraham, believing or doubting the voice, killed Isaac, was killed by Isaac, killed himself, killed someone else, killed an animal; where the altar (badly built) collapsed, killing them both or one of them; where a voice told him to look in a near-by thicket for his real victim (which turned out to be a ram, another son, a mirror); where he ignores the second voice and kills Isaac, and one intriguing version where, having raised the knife to strike,
Hard to blame the Springtime and glands for stuff like this. Especially when Father Warren could not yet be certain the boy had any glands.
But the girls do have glands, he reminded himself. There was a warning to be taken from the Asimov story ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ all right, in which a woman and a robot –
He diverted his thoughts from the subject a split-second before they became pleasurable. Well robots, then: it always came back to robots. Under his guidance the boy would read everything they could dig up, fact and fiction, about robots, androids, automata, golems, homunculi, teraphim, steam men, clockwork dancers, wooden dolls, simulacra, manikins, audioanimatrons, tachy-pomps, usaforms, sensters, mechanical chess-players, bionic men, cyborgs, marionettes that come to life, electrified monsters that murder children, chemical creations that turn against their masters, a living brain floating in a fish-tank, a malevolent computer seeking to dominate the world. If he wanted robots he’d get them: singers, housekeepers, factory hands, potato diggers, novelists, boxers, judges, surgeons, policemen, detectives, actors, carpenters, assassins, botanists, diplomats (priests?) … even scapegoats … a thousand stories twanging the same old string, that’s the way to get him off the subject, that’s the way to do it …
Roderick shifted a little in his chair. This new body with the clothes and all wasn’t so terrific all the time. If it wasn’t that Pa had worked so hard on it and made himself sick and all, Roderick would like to try putting on his old body again. Boy, he could almost feel his old treads, biting into the soil only last summer but it felt like a lifetime ago, he remembered one day when he’d stopped to rest and looked around and there were his own marks cutting right across the yard, the place where he’d dodged to miss a dandelion, the place where he’d put on speed to squash this dog-turd, he could see it all now, every detail: a stick with the skin off it, a bumble-bee hesitating by the dandelion, nothing lost. Nothing ever lost.
Except his old body. That was out at Cliff’s junkyard with all the dead cars and rusty washing-machines. The first warm day he’d walked out and looked at it, thinking That was me, was it? Or was it? Looking into the empty eye-holes until Cliff hobbled out of his trailer to say Get lost, beat it.
‘Stop fidgeting.’
‘Yes, Father.’ He stared out of the window at an apple tree, just now looking like a still picture of a snowstorm. Father Warren sitting there waiting for him to say something, heck all he could think of was how things wear out, break down and get thrown away – people too. Pa going out in that snowstorm just to get him a lousy arm or something …
‘Well, Roderick? Do you agree with me when I say, “Man is made to serve only God, but the robot is made to serve only man”?’
‘At mass you serve God up on a plate, does that mea –’
‘DON’T try to be facetious. Either you agree or you don’t, that’s logic.’
‘It sure is, Father, only …’
‘Only what? Only what?’ The hands made an agitated gesture, and Roderick noticed that one wore a small bandaid.
‘Only didn’t they used to say the same thing about women, how they were made to serve men as men sewed God?’
‘Think we’re getting off the subject here –
‘No but I mean heck they don’t say it much any more. See, Father, I just wanted to know if this saying is true or just … just a saying. Like maybe in a few years we could have Robots’ Liberation or anyway robots could say “Why should we do all the work, running around waiting on people?” And maybe this saying won’t seem so true, Father?’
The priest sighed. ‘Look, this is very simple. Women have free will. Robots don’t – by definition. So there’s no –’
‘Yeah but anyway, Father, you said Made to Serve, does that mean a robot’s real purpose like, or just what the guy who made it thinks? Because there’s a difference, see, Pa says. Pa says there was this guy No Bell invented dynamite and he thought it would stop wars, that’s what he made it for only the real purpose –’
‘Off the subject again, Roderick. What’s all this about Women’s Lib and dynamite, Roderick? Try. Try to be logical.’
‘Yeah, Father, but robots, heck, who knows why they’re made, why we’re made, could be anything. Could be even the people that make them don’t know why, maybe they’re lonely. Maybe they just get tired of being boss over everything, maybe they just want to be – extinck.’
‘What? What are you –?’
‘And the only way is to make up somebody better, to take over? Huh, Father?’
Dr Jane Hannah picked up peanuts one at a time, whispered to each one and popped it into her mouth.
Lyle Tate put down his brush. ‘Jesus I wish you’d stop that! How can I work with that … it’s like having somebody saying a rosary all the time, I can’t … Jesus can’t you talk or something?’
‘What about? You and your head?’
‘Someone mention me?’ Allbright called from the far end of the loft.
‘Jesus!’ said Lyle, putting down his brush again. ‘What are you doing here? Look Allbright I haven’t got any money, I –’
‘Take it easy, I’m okay. Look.’ And when he came close enough for the cold North light to reach his face and clothes, they saw that he’d changed. The beard and hair were trimmed, the face unexpectedly clean, the lapels of his new suit bore expensive stitching. Even Dr Hannah sat up and stared.
‘What happened,’ she said, ‘to the winter garment of repentance? And where the hell have you been this last month?’
‘Selling a poem,’ he said, tweaking the knees of his trousers as he sat down. ‘In a way.’
‘Selling a poem my ass.’ Lyle turned away and went back to work on the head.
‘That too. Well you know how I was, just after ex-mas? Thought I’d hit bottom there – you know, when I put my head in the ov –’
‘You phoney son of a bitch, suppose you didn’t know it was a fridge, every move calculated, every –’
‘Yeah okay I’m a sonofabitch, fine. Only how was I supposed to know goddamn Rogers and his ultra-modern kitchen, okay don’t believe me. But I tell you, I first I tried to get into his freezer, you know? Thought I’d just go to suleep as they say, only it was all full of pork, legs of –’
‘So what happened?’ Hannah asked. ‘Hospital?’
‘Yup, and what do you know, they cured me. All these goddamn lugubrious head-shrinkers got busy and – shrank my head! Now I’m a hell of a nice little guy, no more bad habits.’
‘That’s a relief,’ said Lyle. ‘If it’s true.’ He began mixing a blue, dabbing it on his wrist.
‘See it all came to me one day, as they say. You know how I used to go around quoting Burroughs, how the C-charged brain was like a pinball machine … what are you doing? Looks like, what is that woad you got there? Old Hannah converted you to some –’
‘He’s trying to match his veins,’ she said. ‘What about your Edgar Burroughs machine?’
‘Eh? Not Edgar, Bill. As in billing machine. See, his grandfather was it, invented the adding – anyway listen, it all came to me, junkies are just machines. Garbage in, garbage out, that’s what they say in the trade. Junk in, junk out.’
Lyle paused again. ‘You know, I think I liked you better when were – better before.’
Allbright unexpectedly laughed. The others exchanged a look.
‘No but listen, junkies really are machines. So I wrote a little poem about it. Now listen to this last line: “Addiction is only addition. Plus C”’
Hannah looked embarrassed. Lyle fought back a sudden impulse to be tactful. ‘Jesus, Allbright, that’s terrible.’
‘Yeah, ain’t it?’ Allbright laughed again. ‘See I’m cured of poetry, too. Cured of, of Allbright. They hooked me up to the old machine in there and gave me the pure juice, everything in, everything … hell I walked around for a few days feeling like Volta, in the comics remember? My right hand attracts – bzzzzt. My left h –’
‘O God,’ said Hannah, turning away. Lyle continued working, while he tried to find something to say. He wheeled the head around to compare the vein on the opposite temple, for symmetry.
Allbright too seemed at a loss for words. He turned to Hannah, grinning. ‘Edgar Rice Burroughs, for Christ’s sake. Bet you haven’t read him either.’
The old woman blinked at the peanut her hand had raised automatically, and put it down. ‘The, er, The Adding Machine?’ she said. ‘I saw that performed back in –’
‘That’s Elmer Rice, for Christ’s sake. You’re supposed to be teaching Comparative Lit., compared to what for Christ’s sake? You never read any English or American stuff in your life, did you? Come on, did you?’
‘You haven’t told us where the money came from,’ she said.
‘Oh that. Well. While I was in the nut hatchery I met this old pal of mine, knew him back in high school, seen him around campus a few times, but here he was, a fellow nut. This guy used to be a computer freak, coupla wires got crossed somewhere and here he was, playing Chinese checkers with himself. With one goddamn marble.’
Lyle had stopped painting. The North light fell on his port-wine birthmark.
‘Anyway he wasn’t so crazy, you know? He told me all about a neat little trick you can play on these bank terminals –’
‘Memory banks?’ Hannah asked. ‘I’m afraid I don’t …’
‘No real banks. With these terminals all over town like goddamn mailboxes, you just stick in your magnetic card and out comes money. Only he told me how to do it without a card. You just call up the computer on the phone, see, and –’
Lyle finished wiping his hands and threw the rag on the floor. His birthmark grew brighter. ‘You call that selling a poem? Jesus, Allbright, you make me sick with your –’
‘No look, wait. I work for that money. I had to get this job, see, with this data processing company. To find out the secret phone number.’
‘That, that’s worse –’
‘Only they change it every month so I gotta keep my job, just till I get enough –’
‘Enough!’ Lyle jammed his hands in his pockets and walked away to the window. He moved stiffly, as though the hands were working hidden stilts. ‘Enough! Did they take that away from you too? Your honesty? Did they, did they, make you switch brains with some fucking junior executive, some, in some fucking musical toilet comp – Jesus, you don’t even look like Allbright any more.’
Allbright grinned at Hannah. ‘That’s what I like about Lyle. He can get pissed off over nothing. Wonderful set of moral standards he’s got, he figures if you keep your fingernails dirty enough you have to be honest, never mind that you boost books at parties and rip off all your friends, lie to everybody, lie to yourself, somehow it all becomes honest if you can just manage to come up with a case of crabs or scurvy, better still kwashiorkor and beri-beri with maybe a touch of impetigo –’
‘Why don’t you just piss off, Allbright?’ Hannah glared at him, her eyes like black olives startling in her pale, almost albino face. ‘Lyle’s trying to work on something here, something fine. Something even you would have to call “honest”. And all you’re doing is trying to goad him, spoil it for him.’
‘I’m not. “Honest” I’m not. All I want is to get him to admit that he puts a price-tag on honesty just like everybody else, only his price is zero. Am I right, Lyle?’
‘No point in arguing with you, you just –’
‘Am I right though? Anything is honest to you as long as you don’t make money on it, a profit of zero makes it honest, right?’ He stood up, drawing back the curtain of his jacket to plant a fist on one hip, and pointed at the painted head. ‘That, for instance. Bet you worked out your fee so it
just covers your materials, right?’
Lyle mumbled something about a commission for a friend. But Allbright seemed to have forgotten the argument completely, as he found himself confronted with this strangely familiar face, so –
‘Uncanny,’ he said. ‘Uncanny, like the face of John Q. Public but – different. Transfigured. Almost see light coming out of it, that transparent skin … and the symmetry …’
Lyle nodded. ‘Just about finished. If I could just get you and Hannah to sit down and entertain each other …’
‘Yeah sure but what’s this movable jaw – you can’t be making a head for some damn ventriloquist’s dummy or – I mean this would scare the shit out of any audience –’
‘For a robot,’ Hannah said, patting the seat next to her. Allbright noticed that the seat, indeed all the seats and tables in the place, were nothing but stacked cubes formed of identical paperback books. ‘And don’t say there’s no such thing, there is now. Just look at it.’
He sat beside her. ‘The symmetry … and no age, no sex, you can’t even be sure of the race …’
‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’ She handed him a batch of dusty drawings. ‘Take a look at his working sketches, see how he got there?’
‘What’s this, warts all over it?’
‘Rivets,’ said Lyle, examining a needle-sized brush. ‘See, first I figured he ought to look robotic. So I tried a lot of crap, faces from Metropolis, Egyptian masks even. Hannah finally convinced me he ought to be – well – inhumanly human.’
‘I’ll be damned.’
‘I didn’t convince him of anything he didn’t know already,’ Hannah said. ‘All I said, in so many words, was that we need tribal deities, lesser gods to – to fill the empty spaces between the people. You understand?’
Allbright nodded. ‘I guess that’s it. What would pass, nowadays, for a tribal deity. Not important, just a, as you said, a household god. A – a pet stranger?’ He tore his gaze away from it. ‘Look I’m sorry about, uh, some of the things I said earlier. To both of you. It’s just that I –’
