Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  Dorchin’s face went suddenly opaque. He seemed about to move; but the blonde girl he had called Janet slipped between him and the gun.

  “Please!” she begged Burckhardt. “You don’t understand. You mustn’t shoot!”

  “Get out of my way!”

  “But, Mr. Burckhardt—”

  She never finished. Dorchin, his face unreadable, headed for the door. Burckhardt had been pushed one degree too far. He swung the gun, bellowing. The girl called out sharply. He pulled the trigger. Closing on him with pity and pleading in her eyes, she came again between the gun and the man.

  Burckhardt aimed low instinctively, to cripple, not to kill. But his aim was not good.

  The pistol bullet caught her in the pit of the stomach.

  Dorchin was out and away, the door slamming behind him, his footsteps racing into the distance.

  Burckhardt hurled the gun across the room and jumped to the girl.

  Swanson was moaning. “That finishes us, Burckhardt. Oh, why did you do it? We could have got away. We could have gone to the police. We were practically out of here! We—”

  Burckhardt wasn’t listening. He was kneeling beside the girl. She lay flat on her back, arms helter-skelter. There was no blood, hardly any sign of the wound; but the position in which she lay was one that no living human being could have held.

  Yet she wasn’t dead.

  She wasn’t dead—and Burckhardt, frozen beside her, thought: She isn’t alive, either.

  There was no pulse, but there was a rhythmic ticking of the outstretched fingers of one hand.

  There was no sound of breathing, but there was a hissing, sizzling noise.

  The eyes were open and they were looking at Burckhardt. There was neither fear nor pain in them, only a pity deeper than the Pit.

  She said, through lips that writhed erratically, “Don’t worry, Mr. Burckhardt. I’m—all right.”

  Burckhardt rocked back on his haunches, staring. Where there should have been blood, there was a clean break of substance that was not flesh; and a curl of thin golden-copper wire.

  Burckhardt moistened his lips.

  “You’re a robot,” he said.

  The girl tried to nod. The twitching lips said, “I am. And so are you.”

  SWANSON, AFTER A single inarticulate sound, walked over to the desk and sat staring at the wall. Burckhardt rocked back and forth beside the shattered puppet on the floor. He had no words.

  The girl managed to say, “I’m—sorry all this happened.” The lovely lips twisted into a rictus sneer, frightening on that smooth young face, until she got them under control. “Sorry,” she said again. “The—nerve center was right about where the bullet hit. Makes it difficult to—control this body.”

  Burckhardt nodded automatically, accepting the apology. Robots. It was obvious, now that he knew it. In hindsight, it was inevitable. He thought of his mystic notions of hypnosis or Martians or something stranger still—idiotic, for the simple fact of created robots fitted the facts better and more economically.

  All the evidence had been before him. The automatized factory, with its transplanted minds—why not transplant a mind into a humanoid robot, give it its original owner’s features and form?

  Could it know that it was a robot?

  “All of us,” Burckhardt said, hardly aware that he spoke out loud. “My wife and my secretary and you and the neighbors. All of us the same.”

  “No.” The voice was stronger. “Not exactly the same, all of us. I chose it, you see. I—” This time the convulsed lips were not a random contortion of the nerves—“I was an ugly woman, Mr. Burckhardt, and nearly sixty years old. Life had passed me. And when Mr. Dorchin offered me the chance to live again as a beautiful girl, I jumped at the opportunity. Believe me, I jumped, in spite of its disadvantages. My flesh body is still alive—it is sleeping, while I am here. I could go back to it. But I never do.”

  “And the rest of us?”

  “Different, Mr. Burckhardt. I work here. I’m carrying out Mr. Dorchin’s orders, mapping the results of the advertising tests, watching you and the others live as he makes you live. I do it by choice, but you have no choice. Because, you see, you are dead.”

  “Dead?” cried Burckhardt; it was almost a scream.

  The blue eyes looked at him unwinkingly and he knew that it was no lie. He swallowed, marveling at the intricate mechanisms that let him swallow, and sweat, and eat.

  He said: “Oh. The explosion in my dream.”

  “It was no dream. You are right—the explosion. That was real and this plant was the cause of it. The storage tanks let go and what the blast didn’t get, the fumes killed a little later. But almost everyone died in the blast, twenty-one thousand persons. You died with them and that was Dorchin’s chance.”

  “The damned ghoul!” said Burckhardt.

  The twisted shoulders shrugged with an odd grace. “Why? You were gone. And you and all the others were what Dorchin wanted—a whole town, a perfect slice of America. It’s as easy to transfer a pattern from a dead brain as a living one. Easier—the dead can’t say no. Oh, it took work and money—the town was a wreck—but it was possible to rebuild it entirely, especially because it wasn’t necessary to have all the details exact.

  “There were the homes where even the brain had been utterly destroyed, and those are empty inside, and the cellars that needn’t be too perfect, and the streets that hardly matter. And anyway, it only has to last for one day. The same day—June 15th—over and over again; and if someone finds something a little wrong, somehow, the discovery won’t have time to snowball, wreck the validity of the tests, because all errors are canceled out at midnight.”

  The face tried to smile. “That’s the dream, Mr. Burckhardt, that day of June 15th, because you never really lived it. It’s a present from Mr. Dorchin, a dream that he gives you and then takes back at the end of the day, when he has all his figures on how many of you respond to what variation of which appeal, and the maintenance crews go down the tunnel to go through the whole city, washing out the new dream with their little electronic drains, and then the dream starts all over again. On June 15th.

  “Always June 15th, because June 14th is the last day any of you can remember alive. Sometimes the crews miss someone—as they missed you, because you were under your boat. But it doesn’t matter. The ones who are missed give themselves away if they show it—and if they don’t, it doesn’t affect the test. But they don’t drain us, the ones of us who work for Dorchin. We sleep when the power is turned off, just as you do. When we wake up, though, we remember.” The face contorted wildly. “If I could only forget!”

  Burckhardt said unbelievingly, “All this to sell merchandise! It must have cost millions!”

  The robot called April Horn said, “It did. But it has made millions for Dorchin, too. And that’s not the end of it. Once he finds the master words that make people act, do you suppose he will stop with that? Do you suppose—”

  The door opened, interrupting her. Burckhardt whirled. Belatedly remembering Dorchin’s flight, he raised the gun.

  “Don’t shoot,” ordered the voice calmly. It was not Dorchin; it was another robot, this one not disguised with the clever plastics and cosmetics, but shining plain. It said metallically, “Forget it, Burckhardt. You’re not accomplishing anything. Give me that gun before you do any more damage. Give it to me now.”

  Burckhardt bellowed angrily. The gleam on this robot torso was steel; Burckhardt was not at all sure that his bullets would pierce it, or do much harm if they did. He would have put it to the test—

  But from behind him came a whimpering, scurrying whirlwind: its name was Swanson, hysterical with fear. He catapulted into Burckhardt and sent him sprawling, the gun flying free.

  “Please!” begged Swanson incoherently, prostrate before the steel robot. “He would have shot you—please don’t hurt me! Let me work for you, like that girl. I’ll do anything, anything you tell me—”

  The robot voice said
, “We don’t need your help.” It took two precise steps and stood over the gun—and spurned it, left it lying on the floor.

  The wrecked blonde robot said, without emotion, “I doubt that I can hold out much longer, Mr. Dorchin.”

  “Disconnect if you have to,” replied the steel robot.

  Burckhardt blinked. “But you’re not Dorchin!”

  The steel robot turned deep eyes on him. “I am,” it said. “Not in the flesh—but this is the body I am using at the moment. I doubt that you can damage this one with the gun. The other robot body was more vulnerable. Now will you stop this nonsense? I don’t want to have to damage you; you’re too expensive for that. Will you just sit down and let the maintenance crews adjust you?”

  Swanson groveled. “You—you won’t punish us?”

  The steel robot had no expression, but its voice was almost surprised. “Punish you?” it repeated on a rising note. “How?”

  Swanson quivered as though the word had been a whip; but Burckhardt flared: “Adjust him, if he’ll let you—but not me! You’re going to have to do me a lot of damage, Dorchin. I don’t care what I cost or how much trouble it’s going to be to put me back together again. But I’m going out of that door! If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me. You won’t stop me any other way!”

  The steel robot took a half-step toward him, and Burckhardt involuntarily checked his stride. He stood poised and shaking, ready for death, ready for attack, ready for anything that might happen.

  Ready for anything except what did happen. For Dorchin’s steel body merely stepped aside, between Burckhardt and the gun, but leaving the door free.

  “Go ahead,” invited the steel robot. “Nobody’s stopping you.”

  OUTSIDE THE DOOR, Burckhardt brought up sharp. It was insane of Dorchin to let him go! Robot or flesh, victim or beneficiary, there was nothing to stop him from going to the FBI or whatever law he could find away from Dorchin’s sympathetic empire, and telling his story. Surely the corporations who paid Dorchin for test results had no notion of the ghoul’s technique he used; Dorchin would have to keep it from them, for the breath of publicity would put a stop to it. Walking out meant death, perhaps, but at that moment in his pseudo-life, death was no terror for Burckhardt.

  There was no one in the corridor. He found a window and stared out of it. There was Tylerton—an ersatz city, but looking so real and familiar that Burckhardt almost imagined the whole episode a dream. It was no dream, though. He was certain of that in his heart and equally certain that nothing in Tylerton could help him now.

  It had to be the other direction.

  It took him a quarter of an hour to find a way, but he found it—skulking through the corridors, dodging the suspicion of footsteps, knowing for certain that his hiding was in vain, for Dorchin was undoubtedly aware of every move he made. But no one stopped him, and he found another door.

  It was a simple enough door from the inside. But when he opened it and stepped out, it was like nothing he had ever seen.

  First there was light—brilliant, incredible, blinding light. Burckhardt blinked upward, unbelieving and afraid.

  He was standing on a ledge of smooth, finished metal. Not a dozen yards from his feet, the ledge dropped sharply away; he hardly dared approach the brink, but even from where he stood he could see no bottom to the chasm before him. And the gulf extended out of sight into the glare on either side of him.

  No wonder Dorchin could so easily give him his freedom! From the factory there was nowhere to go. But how incredible this fantastic gulf, how impossible the hundred white and blinding suns that hung above!

  A voice by his side said inquiringly, “Burckhardt?” And thunder rolled the name, mutteringly soft, back and forth in the abyss before him.

  Burckhardt wet his lips. “Y-yes?” he croaked.

  “This is Dorchin. Not a robot this time, but Dorchin in the flesh, talking to you on a hand mike. Now you have seen, Burckhardt. Now will you be reasonable and let the maintenance crews take over?”

  Burckhardt stood paralyzed. One of the moving mountains in the blinding glare came toward him.

  It towered hundreds of feet over his head; he stared up at its top, squinting helplessly into the light.

  It looked like—

  Impossible!

  The voice in the loudspeaker at the door said, “Burckhardt?” But he was unable to answer.

  A heavy rumbling sigh. “I see,” said the voice. “You finally understand. There’s no place to go. You know it now. I could have told you, but you might not have believed me, so it was better for you to see it yourself. And after all, Burckhardt, why would I reconstruct a city just the way it was before? I’m a businessman; I count costs. If a thing has to be full-scale, I build it that way. But there wasn’t any need to in this case.”

  From the mountain before him, Burckhardt helplessly saw a lesser cliff descend carefully toward him. It was long and dark, and at the end of it was whiteness, five-fingered whiteness . . .

  “Poor little Burckhardt,” crooned the loudspeaker, while the echoes rumbled through the enormous chasm that was only a workshop. “It must have been quite a shock for you to find out you were living in a town built on a table top.”

  IT WAS THE morning of June 15th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.

  It had been a monstrous and incomprehensible dream, of explosions and shadowy figures that were not men and terror beyond words.

  He shuddered and opened his eyes.

  Outside his bedroom window, a hugely amplified voice was howling.

  Burckhardt stumbled over to the window and stared outside. There was an out-of-season chill to the air, more like October than June; but the scene was normal enough—except for a sound-truck that squatted at curbside halfway down the block. Its speaker horns blared:

  “Are you a coward? Are you a fool? Are you going to let crooked politicians steal the country from you? NO! Are you going to put up with four more years of graft and crime? NO! Are you going to vote straight Federal Party all up and down the ballot? YES! You just bet you are!”

  Sometimes he screams, sometimes he wheedles, threatens, begs, cajoles . . . but his voice goes on and on through one June 15th after another.

  BRIAN W. ALDISS

  Who Can Replace a Man?

  Regarded by many as the literary successor to H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, and other writers of social science fiction, Brian Aldiss is considered one of the leading British writers of fantasy and science fiction in the twentieth century. His first published fiction appeared in the 1950s and he became affiliated with the New Wave movement of the 1960s through his stylistic experimentation and his mainstream approach to familiar science fiction themes. His first novel, Non-Stop, explores the scientific and philosophical aspects of life aboard a multigeneration spaceship. Report on Probability A uses postmodern narrative techniques to envision a landscape of stasis and entropy. Greybeard refracts the devastation of Earth by radiation and the inevitable extinction of the human race through the experiences of a character traveling along the Thames on a trip that symbolizes the arc of his life and the history of the race. Although the influence of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and other literary writers abound in Aldiss’s work, so does the impact of writers who shaped the course of fantasy and science fiction. His story “The Saliva Tree” is a highly regarded tribute to Wells. Frankenstein Unbound embellishes the cautionary spirit of Frankenstein in its account of a man from the future, where scientific irresponsibility has caused a rift in the space-time continuum, catapulted back to the nineteenth century, where he influences the development of Mary Shelley’s novel. Dracula Unbound works a similar imaginative variation on the theme of Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel. Among Aldiss’s most ambitious fiction is his thinking-man’s space opera, the Helliconia trilogy (comprising the novels Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, and Helliconia Winter), which sketches a blueprint for a planet where seasons last millennia and the ri
se and fall of specific civilizations is keyed to the changing environment. Aldiss’s best short fiction has been collected in Man in His Time and A Romance of the Equator, which draw from his early compilations No Time Like Tomorrow, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, But Who Can Replace a Man? and The Saliva Tree and Others. He has written a number of mainstream novels, notably the semiautobiographical trilogy formed by The Hand-Reared Boy, A Soldier Erect, and A Rude Awakening, as well as his autobiography, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s. He has also written, in collaboration with David Wingrove, The Trillion Year Spree, a revision of his seminal history of science fiction, The Billion Year Spree, and numerous collections of essays and reviews.

  MORNING FILTERED INTO the sky, lending it the grey tone of the ground below.

  The field-minder finished turning the topsoil of a three-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow it climbed onto the highway and looked back at its work. The work was good. Only the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by over-cropping. By rights, it ought now to lie fallow for a while, but the field-minder had other orders.

  It went slowly down the road, taking its time. It was intelligent enough to appreciate the neatness all about it. Nothing worried it, beyond a loose inspection plate above its nuclear pile which ought to be attended to. Thirty feet tall, it yielded no highlights to the dull air.

  No other machines passed on its way back to the Agricultural Station. The field-minder noted the fact without comment. In the station yard it saw several other machines that it recognised; most of them should have been out about their tasks now. Instead, some were inactive and some careered round the yard in a strange fashion, shouting or hooting.

  Steering carefully past them, the field-minder moved over to Warehouse Three and spoke to the seed-distributor, which stood idly outside.

  “I have a requirement for seed potatoes,” it said to the distributor, and with a quick internal motion punched out an order card specifying quantity, field number and several other details. It ejected the card and handed it to the distributor.