by John Sladek
‘No.’ Francine sneaked a look at her watch.
‘He did. And he flunked out on chemistry. He said. “If silicon was a gas, I’d be a major general.”’
Nearby the piano thundered and a ragged chorus took up ‘Frosty the Snowman’ as a waiter passed bearing a frothy pink cocktail which he conveyed down the room to the dumpy woman in purple, who was speaking to an astrologer.
‘No kidding? The same day as Monet, well there you are! Talent is talent. You know I was just talking to some young smartass kept trying to tell me Rodin’s works were like cheap Jap movies, how do you like that? I mean, Gate of Hell, how can you compare that to a cheap –’
She paused to sip the drink. ‘That’s better, Toy. That’s the ticket. Now just keep ’em coming.’
Allbright heaved himself to his feet nearby and, smiling at everyone with bleeding gums, made his way along the room, pausing to collect a drink, to lend a cigarette to Mrs Doody, and to confront Felix Culpa.
‘Hello again!’
‘What?’
‘I said hello again. I met you before didn’t I? Aren’t you some kind of – pet-food market research was it?’
‘Mistake,’ said Felix Culpa hoarsely, keeping a glass in front of his face. ‘I’m in satellite leasing, on the educational side. We network to school systems, linking them on a broad spectrum of, of achievement-based multifaceted synergies, excuse me.’ He almost knocked over Judi Mazzini in his hurry to escape.
‘I’ve scared him off. Funny.’
‘Maybe if you took a bath now and then, people would find you nicer to be near,’ said Judi Mazzini. ‘We were just talking about The Machine Dances. Know it?’
‘I ought to, I wrote it.’
‘Oh come on, Allbright.’
‘I did. Ghosted it for a guy named Rogers, that’s why it’s the only book of his anybody reads. Rest of his stuff is so loaded with sociological jargon it moves along like the shoes of Boris Karloff. Matter of fact he writes a little like your friend here talks.’
‘Felix? I think he only talks that way when he’s nervous.’ She looked at Allbright. ‘You’re disgusting, why don’t you ask Francine if you can take a bath here, maybe borrow some clothes from Everett?’
He swayed a little, looking into his glass and trying to frame an answer, while behind him someone complained about sinus trouble in Prague.
‘What were you saying about my book, then?’
‘I said it wasn’t very well thought out. I mean, it’s kind of easy to just make a list of all the ballets with mechanical people or dolls or puppets in them, from Coppélia to Petrushka –’
‘Satie’s Jack-in-the-Box and Bartok’s The Wooden Prince –’
Yes and The Nutcracker, but isn’t it all kind of easy? Why does it have to be significant that people wrote “robot” ballets? The fact is, they were just interested in setting up problems in movement, Coppélia was just –’
‘They started to think of people in terms of machine movements, that’s the whole point. Once you reduce a man to a gesture, you can set up assembly lines, that’s the whole point! People reduced to therbligs, goddamnit, that is the – !’
‘Shh! Okay, okay.’
‘And the Rockettes are an assembly line, assembling a gesture, a pure gesture.’
Harry Hatlo, though forgotten, stood by, still holding his toupee in place. ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘My own work is more like pure therapy I guess, I choreograph routines to work over postural and coordination problems; right now I am working with some young people who as kids some time ago got brain damaged from mercury poisoning, it leaves you with a little parasthesia, some weakness and tremors. So what we been trying …’
His monotone was lost in the general surge of voices arguing over stale politics, declaring faith in a rising stock market, seeking reassurance about a cancer cure, or wondering whether Frosty really had a very shiny nose.
‘Indica!’
She turned, preparing a smile for a friend, to find the masklike face of a stranger. No one. No one important, but these eyes … something about the eyes made her uneasy.
‘Do I know you?’
‘Don’t you?’
She dropped the smile. ‘No. No, I don’t know you.’ The eyes held her for a moment before she managed to turn away – hadn’t she seen these eyes before? Where, not in this false face with its v-shaped smile. Not in this, not in any face. The eyes she was beginning to recall had no face to them.
‘I’ll give you a hint. I used to follow you.’
‘You still here?’ She spoke without looking at him, frightened now, feeling the chill gaze on her neck. Following her. That was it, the nightmare came back to her so suddenly and clearly that she almost staggered; covered by banging her glass on the bar.
‘Like another drink here,’ she said. ‘And please tell this gentleman to –’
But he was gone. Only the revived nightmare remained. She was sitting in the kitchen talking to her mother on the phone when she looked under the pine table and saw the eyes glittering, something ready to pounce … Then she was up and running through a dead woods, some trees charred by lightning, and behind her the faint clank of tank treads, the beast that could not be killed, the eyes that would not close, endless, endless pursuit …
General Fleischman said to Norm, ‘Poetry, I got nothing against poetry, it’s poets I can’t stand. Like that creep over there in the storm-coat, never had a bath or a shave in his life. Afraid it’d spoil his poetry if he got clean once. I don’t mind telling you, when Moxon asked me to invest money from my bank in poetry, I laughed out loud. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Uh, right, sir.’
‘But this turns out to be real educational and kinda synergistic, so I think it might just develop into a nice little media package. See Moxon is going to market these Home Art Kits, each one is like a little complete art package with music, visuals, prose poetry what-have-you, all wrapped up together – here, let me show you.’
He produced a pocket recorder TV. ‘Course on this bitty screen everything gets diminutified, but here. This card is, see, Number Fifteen of the Nutshell Poets Series, John Keats. Like it says here how he liked birds and all. Animals are a plus in this line, kids like to hear how Shelley liked birds too, how Elizabeth Browning liked her dog Hushpuppy –’
‘Hushpuppy?’
‘We changed it from another name, a very downmarket name – anyway and T.S. Eliot liked cats. And we got all that info on the card, but then we can also play it.’
He shoved the card into a slot on the recorder TV. At once the tiny screen showed a cartoon Keats declaiming aloud:
Then I felt like some sky-watcher
When a new planet orbits into sight – zowie!
Or like brave Balboa when
‘What do you think of it?’ said Fleischman, turning it off. ‘Not bad, eh?’
‘It’s uh, fine. Really great, sir.’ Norm looked to the bar where a pretty girl was throwing back her head to release a theatrical laugh. He looked to the sofa where the mysteriously beautiful Mrs McBabbitt, in her customary black, still seemed to be waiting for someone. He looked to the piano where a few deliriously happy people had their heads together, trying to harmonize on a carol. Everybody in the room seemed to be having a terrific time. ‘Really terrific.’
Silently, Norm wished himself a Merry little Christmas.
The woman at the bar, Indica Dinks, was neither as girlish nor as pretty as she might seem from a distance, but she was a minor celebrity, being appreciated. That made her glow.
‘Semantics?’ She laughed again. ‘Mister Tarr, you don’t know the meaning of the word.’
The silver-haired man next to her nodded and smiled. ‘Very good. The name is Doctor Tarr, really. But my friends call me Jack.’
‘All right then, Jack, you may be an expert in your field – did you say it was market research?’
‘Market forecasting, really.’ Dr Tarr was a lot younger and handsomer than he might seem f
rom a distance. He kept taking the unlit pipe from his mouth and pointing the stem at nothing. ‘But what I wanted to ask you was –’
‘Market whatever, you may be an expert in your field, but I too happen to know a little bit about human nature. Especially when it comes to machines.’
‘Yes, exactly. The interface –’
‘Face it,’ she continued, ‘machines are only human. They have feelings too.’
He paused, deciding not to laugh. ‘So you say in your book, Indica. But that’s just what I’m not clear about, where you say machines have feel –’
‘My book isn’t clear? The Mechanical Eunuch isn’t clear?’
‘Yes, yes, most of it and there’s quite a lot there I agree with, the magical bond between human and machine, yes. I was right with you there, where you describe a man trying to start his car on a cold morning, swearing at it, kicking it … I could almost imagine mechanical consciousness … But later when it gets down to whether a shoeshine machine feels degraded, I mean I just can’t quite … see?’
She patted his hand. ‘Of course not, okay. Don’t worry, maybe it takes a bricoleur to really dig –’
‘Yes, you’re probably right, only a man who lays bricks with his two hands knows the other side –’
‘Or a Zen person, maybe one who likes to fix motorcycles or at least lawnmowers. Because only a person like that can dig that machines aren’t just extensions of man any more. No, that’s all part of the old master-slave routine, the terrible power game we play with machines. Machines are beings in their own right. And if we don’t give them their freedom, one of these days they’ll be able to just take it.’
Dr Tarr nodded, and pointed his pipestem at nothing. ‘You’re right. I never saw it that way before. I guess my professional background does get in the way sometimes. Blinds me to certain possibilities.’
‘Your professional background?’
‘Parapsychology. I used to head a little department over at the University, before I decided to carve out a new career in market forecasting. And you know, I always took it for granted that psychic energy goes with consciousness, and with being human. Or at least with being a biological creature.’ The pipestem waggled. ‘You’ve opened up a very big can of questions, young lady. If machines can feel …’
A few moments later she was calling him ‘Jack’ often, and emphasizing everything she said by touching his hand. She was telling him about her last husband.
‘Hank was okay really, but he kept getting wound tighter and tighter into ecology. I mean I tried to tell him whales aren’t the only fish in the sea, but – oh well. Now Hank’s trying to run this really seedy Luddite movement, talk about misguided. I mean you can’t turn the clock back to zero, that’s just a waste of time. He’ll learn, I hope. I still feel a lot of natural affection for Hank, you know? Like they say people do when they get an arm or leg cut off, they go around feeling this ghost limb for a long time. Kinda like that.’
She sighed, sipped her vegetable-juice cocktail. ‘And that’s natural and healthy, the ghost limb. But on the other hand take people with artificial limbs. They can get too attached to them, you know?’
‘The dance of life goes on,’ said Dr Tarr, his stem pointing nowhere in particular.
Father Warren sat on the South sofa, pretending to study the colour of his glass of sherry. Someone sat down beside him and asked what he did – and left before he could think of an answer.
The party was beginning to run down. Indica sat at the bar, talking to the woman whose sinus trouble was the trouble with Prague. The group at the piano were trying ‘Hello Dolly’. The remains of a buffet supper were being cleared away to the kitchen where Felix Culpa was examining an electric carving knife. Mrs Doody had found her husband upstairs asleep on the toilet – his pacemaker needed a new battery – and Mr Vitanuova helped her bring him down and pack him into the car.
Edd McFee, moving in finally to talk to General Fleischman, heard him say to Francine, ‘It’s like Whistler said, “If silicon was a gas, I’d be a – ”’
Someone glowered over a glass at Indica and said, ‘I knew her when she was plain old Indica Franklin, just another faculty wife who wanted to be a taco on local TV.’
Someone glowered over a glass at Mrs McBabbitt and said, ‘Well, silicon’s the basis of her life all right –’
Someone glowered over a glass at Father Warren and said, ‘There he goes, looking for another bandwagon. If Indica gave him a kind word he’d drop this Luddite crap in five minutes … a treen priest.’
Someone glowered at everyone and no one, while mumbling the words of a tired limerick: ‘… both concave and convex …’
A stranger arrived and, without removing his coat, hat or even the muffler that covered him up to his pale eyes, went straight into Moxon’s library. The room was dim, lit only by a desk lamp. Everett Moxon got up from the desk.
‘Ben? About time. Things are breaking up.’
‘Feel … like I’m breaking up myself …’ Franklin sat down and took off his fur hat. ‘I’m sick, Ev.’
‘There’s this flu thing going around, you’ll probably be okay in the morning. Now what have you brought me?’
Franklin threw a heavy envelope on the desk. ‘All there, the Taipin bids, the secret leasing arrangements for Kratcom International, the whole, whole … holus bolus. Jesus Christ, Ev, why didn’t you tell me she was gonna be here? I damn near walked in there and met her face to face, just in time I heard someone say, “Sinuses? They’re all in the head” and I slipped past. Scarf over my face like a damn burglar.’
Moxon was studying papers from the envelope. ‘This is good stuff, Ben.’ He looked up. ‘To tell you the truth, I clean forgot you used to be married to Indica. Seems like it must have happened in another ice age. Volume One and we’re in Volume Two. Anyway why can’t you two be pals now?’
‘Pals?’ Ben’s weak laugh set off a coughing fit. ‘Just the sound of her voice sets my teeth on edge, and what she says! Last time I saw her she talked about something being water over the bridge; I came close to hitting her, I – I know it sounds funny now but – are you listening?’
‘Sure. But maybe you just hate Indica because she’s hit the big time. Without you.’
Ben had taken off his coat; now he put it on again. ‘Yes, they all take it seriously, this Machines Liberation idea of hers. Without me? Well sure, she’s a self-made woman. I’m surrounded by self-made men and women, look at Kratt. God-damned world crawling with self-made people, self-made man myself, trouble is self-made people get made in their own image. Christ, it’s cold in here.’
‘Sweat’s pouring off you, how can you be cold? Ben, why don’t you go upstairs and lie down, I’ll call a doctor, okay?’
‘No but listen, Ev, you know what Kratt’s like.’
‘He treats his employees like toilet paper, I know that.’
Ben started to shiver. ‘It’s not that, not just that. I just can’t forget that time a few years ago when he poisoned all those kids just to break into the funfood market fast – funfood! Kids were dying of mercury poisoning! And you know what he did about it?’
‘Forget it, Ben, that was a long time ago.’
‘He bribed doctors to forge death certificates.’
Moxon slid the papers back in the envelope. ‘Sure, sure. But it’s Christmas now –’
‘Christmas! I think about Kratt, every Christmas, he fits right in there, Herod and the Holy Innocents. Herod and the
‘Let me call you a doctor.’
‘Makes you wonder – did Herod really want to kill Christ, or was he happy just killing any babies?’
‘Take it easy, Ben. Just wait right here, I’ll go get help and we’ll take you up to bed. Wait.’
Moxon found Francine in the kitchen. ‘Ben’s sick as a dog, we’ll have to put him in the spare room and call the doctor. He’s out of his head with fever right now. Still goes on about Kratt and that poisoned gingerbread business.’
She understood. ‘He still blames himself.’
‘Probably right to blame himself.’ Moxon lifted his small head and stared unseeing towards the two cooks who were arguing about a missing electric knife. ‘And for Indica’s walking out on him. The fact is, Ben’s always been a fuckup.’
He went back to the library with one of the waiters to find Ben shaking and weeping and sweating; sweat dripped from his chin to the desk blotter.
‘He was here, right here in the room!’
‘Who, Ben? Kratt?’
‘Roderick was right here!’ Ben pointed a shaking finger at the darkness. ‘My robot! My son, in whom I am well pleased!’
Moxon and Toy looked at one another; each took a shuddering arm. ‘Up we go now.’
‘He came into the room and stood right there. I saw him, he was wearing a ski sweater. Black, with little white figures on it. Like little people, self-made men. He didn’t say anything but he knew who I was. He knew I was protecting him from Herod …’
On the second occasion when Roderick tried the library, Ben was gone but Allbright was there, examining books.
‘Oh it’s you. Getting to be like a reunion here, I saw your pal earlier. The guy that wears dark glasses. Felix.’
‘I … please I …’
‘You gonna puke? Try the wastebasket there.’
‘I need an outlet …’
Allbright dusted off a volume. ‘Who doesn’t? Here’s a rare little item. Life of Sir Charles M’Carthy. First edition, clothbound, slight foxing.’
‘Help.’ Roderick was on all fours behind the desk, fumbling with an electric cord that seemed to run from his navel. ‘Help … plug in.’
‘Hope this isn’t a suicide. Here.’ Allbright reached down and plugged the cord into the wall socket. He watched Roderick’s eyes go opaque, then close.
After a minute, Roderick sat upright in something like the lotus position. His navel was still plugged to 120V AC, his eyes still closed. ‘My batteries. I don’t usually let them run low like that.’
Allbright dropped Sir Charles M’Carthy into his battered briefcase and searched for more first editions. ‘Yeah, I feel like that sometimes. Only being a poet I can’t even kill myself. It would look too much like imitation of better poets.’
