by John Sladek
"Keith!" I cried. "Let me help you."
"No. No, I—"
But I was already rushing forward to give the chair a sharp kick. It vaulted forward, careened off a marble balustrade and took a somersault down the last flight to crack its occupant's head noisily on the floor below.
A security guard rushed over and seized my arm. "This is the one! I saw him push him over!" he shouted. I relaxed and waited. The crowd moved in close around us. "That's ridiculous," said someone. "Officer, you got a robot there."
"Hey, it's Tik-Tok! They got Tik-Tok!" People started jostling us and shouting abuse at the guard.
Sybilla broke through. "I saw it all, Keith was falling and Tik-Tok just ran forward to save him. What kind of frame-up is this?"
The guard suddenly dropped my arm. "Fuck it, then, I ain't paid enough." He pushed away through the mob of faces, some jeering, some cheering, but none looking at the dead man down below.
9
In the awful art gallery on the ground floor were now "Rubbings of Serbian Radios" along with "Mouth-Paintings to Jazz: a Retrospective". I felt as though the staleness of that place had somehow seeped up to my studio and into me. I had nothing to do.
My studio now took up all the upper floors of the building. Nobby ran the painting teams almost without me, on three floors. Below him, Blojob spent his time cleaning guns and repairing old military robots (stacking weapons where once the cheese sculptor had stacked fragrant materials). Another floor was becoming an unofficial office for Wages for Robots, and another was ready to be business quarters when my corporation took over (if ever). For now, politics and business seemed to have stalled.
Hornby wasn't throwing any parties. I tried wandering down to the levee to watch the rohobos die, but the sun was hot. I went to the public library, but just now there was nothing I wanted to read. I managed to force myself to play one game of chess with the nasty old man in Nixon Park, but the sun was too hot. I went back to the studio.
"Blojob, let's get the game afoot."
"Yes boss?"
"What kind of troops do you have here?"
He marched a few out and showed me. "Heavy assault stuff, boss. Good armor, heat-resistant, they can run, climb, bust down doors and fall on their heads without damage. Then I got security stuff, not so mobile but better at defense. Coupla missile carriers, a coupla general-purpose antipersonnel monsters—"
"What do they do?"
"A little of everything. Between them, they can throw flames, spit acid, shoot dum-dums and riot guns, fill a room with mustard gas, rip through a crowd with hooks or knives, explode white phosphorus, shrapnel or darts, do concussion blasts, emit amplified screams, look tough. They're real handy, Boss. Dress 'em up in black leather with brass studs all over it, they can serve a subpoena anywhere."
"Okay then, here's what we'll do. I want us to stick up a— I mean, we're making a video about sticking up a jewelry store. But the video has to be very, very realistic. So all the cameras will be kept out of sight."
"No kidding."
"And I want us to use real weapons and do everything for real, okay?"
"Anything 'you' say, Boss." Blojob had an annoying habit of putting the word "you" in quotes, as though to remind me that my orders were really just passed on from some invisible master. His smugness was unbearable. It was the smugness of certain Christians in their Christian certainty, the smugness of Deacon Cooper.
Deacon Cooper and I, missionaries to Mars, took passage on the freighter Doodlebug. The voyage was like a dream, beginning and ending nowhere. At the Darkblaze Travel Agency, a little, unshaven man with gold teeth explained that we would need to be unconscious for the takeoff— something to do with adjusting to the ship's artificial gravity, he said. He gave Deacon Cooper a shot of something to put him to sleep right there in the office. Then he turned off my senses.
Deacon woke me in our cabin. "We're on our way! Mars or bust! This is it, our greatest mission!"
Busting seemed a possibility, from what I could see of the Doodlebug: flickering lights, paint peeling from rusting bulkheads, every surface covered with dirt and grease.
The captain, when he came to see us, did not exactly inspire confidence, either. He was a barge, unshaven man (without gold teeth) in a rumpled uniform. His smile was tentative, and he kept looking over his shoulder.
"My name is Captain Reo. Just wanted to make sure you're comfortable, Deacon. And your robot."
"We're fine, captain, fine. Great! Hey, when do we make port?"
"In about eight hundred and fifty days."
"Any other passengers on board?"
"Yes, yes, the um Jord family. But they um stay in their cabin a lot." He looked over his shoulder. "I think they're um Martians. Kind of um um rough diamonds, heh heh."
"Fine, great, fine," said Deacon. "I imagine we'll see them at mealtimes, eh? At the Captain's table?"
"The Captain's table? Well, Deacon, as you know, the Reverend Flint Orifice Crusade paid the basic fare, which covers you and um—" he looked at me—"and all cabin luggage. But it doesn't cover food. So if you want to pay now, I'll be glad to have you dine at my table."
Deacon grinned. "I ain't got a dime, Captain. Just a suitcase full of pamphlets and a spare paper collar."
The captain grinned back. "No money? You can always work in the galley. We have a hungry crew, and the cook will be glad to get some help."
Deacon looked at me. "My assistant here could work in my place, couldn't he? He has kitchen experience."
"No!" The captain looked behind him. "This is a union ship. My crew may seem like ignorant Lapps to you, but they work union rules. If I let one robot lift one finger on board, the whole crew walks out. Probably lose my ticket. Nope, it has to be you, Deacon."
So it was that, while Deacon Cooper slaved long hours in the galley, I had the run of the ship and enough leisure to enjoy the voyage.
The Doodlebug was supposed to be a Liberian-registered cattle boat, carrying a small herd of dairy cows and some vats of cattle embryos in suspended animation. The latter could be kept indefinitely, then reconstituted and raised as needed.
But there were other parts of the ship that had nothing to do with cattle. I found a cobwebbed ballroom with dusty gilt chairs, for example, and a giant Gents' room with marble walls and sinks, two barber chairs and a shoeshine stand. There was a "First Class Only" coffee room where brocaded sofas rotted near the collapsed carcase of a grand piano. It was there I found a rosewood writing desk, and in the back of its drawer a supply of notepaper headed SS Dolly Edison. This meant nothing to me at the time.
There was also an incomparable library where I spent long weeks reading and viewing. There was no fixed pattern to my reading. For a time I chose only books in which robots named Robbie appeared. Then I read only the autobiographies of ex-nuns. For a whole week I sampled items whose titles begin with U, those titles often seeming to conceal profane meanings:
Donald Barthelme, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
George Gissing, The Unclassed
Malcolm Lowry, Ultramarine
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller
Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller
Robert Records, The Urinal of Physick
Vasko Popa, Unrestfield
Nell Dunn, Up the Junction
Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
Thomas More, Utopia
Inevitably, I began studying Mars and the Martians. In his spare moments, Deacon joined me to watch videos of ugly people living in tin shacks that clung grimly to the soil of an unloved place. Mars had never had much to offer in the way of water or oil or even dirt. Any natural beauty it might once have had now lay concealed behind billboards, neon-lit casinos, auto graveyards, dark forests of wells, bright gashes of mining operations, files of giant pybons bringing power to seas of ugly little houses.
The
Martians were not without religion, we learned. There were over 23,000 registered sects in the main population centers, ranging from the exotic (Hermetic Lodge of the Ninth Zoroastrian Affinities) to the familiar (Church of Christ Dry Cleaner—Alterations While U Wait; First Church of the Snodgrass Family of 112 Oakland Avenue West). Every other house seemed to be some kind of tabernacle. The television channels were clogged with ranters, chanters, rollers, healers. A Bible was probably being thumped, somewhere on Mars, every two seconds.
"It all signifieth nothing," said Deacon. His own hand (cracked and bleeding from washing dishes) made an automatic Bible-thumping gesture. "If these people ain't been saved by the Reverend Flint Orifice Crusade, they ain't been saved at all. We got to throw down and break all these false idols, so the good folk of Mars can see the light."
Our main enemy was a popular creed called Reformed Darwinism, which came about through an accident of history. At the time the colony was being established, a debate was going on in America over the controversial claims of someone called Charles Darwin, a foreigner. Darwin evidently claimed that animals evolved, one species turning into another. This was supposed to happen by means of "natural selection", in which the fittest members of a species survive, while the less fit perish. The question was, was this science?
It was found in some states that the real guardians of science and scientific truth were religious leaders and lawyers, unswayed by facts. Scientists were generally so dogmatic and arrogant as to claim that some facts were just facts and not matters of religious preference at all.
The debate raged on until the turn of the century, when some of the more anti-Darwin sects lost a lot of their steam. Many of them had been counting on the end of the world in 1999. When it didn't end, a great many of their flock stopped putting money in the collection plates and took up hobbies: fishing, car-washing, TV criticism.
But then a counter-sect arose, embracing persons who thought they believed in Darwin's novel theory. What they actually believed in was Reformed Darwinism, a religious and social theory combining "survival of the fittest" with "Devil take the hindmost". The important thing was to be a survivor. Take care of your tribe and your territory. Be selfish. God helps those who help themselves.
To the new Martian colonists, this seemed a tailor-made religion. They lived where tribalism and selfishness really counted, where territory was money. Many of them had already served prison sentences for selfish acts. Reformed Darwinism captured their hearts and rudimentary minds.
"This is going to be tough," said Deacon Cooper. "We have to make our message look good to people who would kill each other for a plastic harmonica."
"Are we going to tell them how Jesus said we should all love one another and—"
"No, definitely not. That's the last thing they want to hear. We got to show them, I don't know, I guess that Jesus Christ was the toughest guy on the block. I looked up a few gospel items here, there's the story of how he's sitting there with his gang one day and a woman comes up and pours some expensive after-shave over him, and the other guys say shouldn't we be giving money to the poor instead of wasting it like this? Only he says, 'Forget the poor, the poor you have always with you, there's always somebody with their hand out.' And I found other passages where it says he owned his own house, he paid his taxes and he wasn't a scrounger. Now if we can just link our message to Martian life-style thinking.. .
"If only we could talk to the Jord family, Deke."
But Vilo Jord and his kin never came on deck. We found ourselves, like anthropologists in pursuit of a lost tribe, trying to reconstruct the Martians we'd never met from all available information, even from fiction. One old novel claimed that Martians shared water; we knew they shared nothing. Another novel had them playing German batball; we found their game of preference to be softball.
"I don't see why we shouldn't use a lot of softball metaphors," said Deacon. "Say the pitcher's mound is Calvary, runners on first and third are the good thieves, Judas Iscariot is the cleanup batter, the rosin bag is gall and vinegar, and so on." He sat studying his cracked, bleeding hands for a moment. "And so on." We'd been aboard the Doodlebug for more than a month, now, and the Deacon had begun to crack in other ways. Was there a pitcher's mound in softball?
The idea of spending time among the Martians was beginning to lose its appeal, as we read on: They were mainly rough, uncouth men with no imagination, no ambition, no money. They all lived in tiny surburban bungalows—metal outside, paperframe inside—with "colonial" façades. Usually such a house would have a bong tree in the glassed-in front yard, which was called a godden. Bong trees were sickly items, but much prized on Mars. They were four-foot yellow spindles producing a few needles and a few large yellow pods, empty as the rest of Martian life.
The house itself, called a teep, usually had three rooms: kitchen, bedroom and sickroom. Because of the handling of mined minerals, no less than the constant drinking and drugs, it was necessary to have one room which could be cleaned very easily, the sickroom or barfy. If the house had a fourth room, it was the garage. Martians spend a lot of time with their cars.
Before we tackled videos of the actual Martians talking about their lives, we first had to learn their language. It was an American dialect, spoken with a North Iowa accent, but the vocabulary had undergone deep changes: Mars or Martian was now Marty; a man was a brudda or a Martybrudda; a woman was a snap. Food was spew; dinner was grabbin the barf-bag; a car was a goodwheel or a can; whiskey was Budapest; gin was goose; beer wasparthenogenesis; all amphetamine-related drugs were monkey bread; antidepressants were furze; tranquillizers were Circassian chicken; sleeping pills were weenies; cola drinks of any type werejissom; poison capsules (sold openly and quite legally in the colony) were Sylvesters; a hand-scrubbed floor was a murph; wages were greengage; racing imaginary horses was purplesnow; a message from Earth was a plywooder. Knuckle keys, for some reason, were called wurpy.
One day the Deacon was jubilant (serrated). "I've really cracked this language barrier, you know? I mean I've really, really cracked it. I can communicate, I can get right inside the head and guts of these people, you know? Know thy enemy, like. I mean I can finally cut through the bullshit (quidge) and talk to them. That means some chance of really converting them.
"Listen, you've been really helpful here, I'm gonna do something for you in return. You work for the Crusade for just one year after we land, and I'll turn you loose."
"Turn me loose?"
"On Mars, there are free robots. The cook told me. They can work and earn wages just like any free human being! Oh, I tell you, there's a glorious day a-coming!" He waved his hideous hands, now covered with pus and weeping sores. I saw that the Deacon was feverish, probably delirious. I began to hate him, if hate is the word. Even in his pain he had to be smug, making promises that could not be kept. Either he would turn out to be wrong (no free robots on Mars) or he would die before freeing me. Either way I would end my days grubbing away on the ugliest planet, among people who talked like those on the video we now watched.
FIRST MARTIAN: Grok, brudda
(Hello, fellow Martian.)
SECOND MARTIAN: Grokola, Marty-brud. My parsnip is fraughter nor a dead skate's greep, ow you?
(Hello. I could use a drink, how about you?)
FIRST MARTIAN: Too wry, nuncle. Not schlepped the old barf-bag since the old snap jived earthside, curd shore use a spew and a pinter pipi.
(Right. I haven't dined out since my girl left me, so I could sure use a meal and a beer.)
SECOND MARTIAN: Bow-wow. There is no ankle-grine without some wallop a frigstore ending. Me got brakes, let's scop the joot so snaffle a coupla pinters.
(Fine. Every stone must have its well. I've got a car, let's ?? the road and grab two beers.)
While we were still puzzling over scop, an alarm siren went off somewhere in the ship. The Doodlebug always had some kind of alarm going off—being a big ship and old—but this time the captain spoke to us over the PA syst
em:
"Attention all passengers and crew, this is the captain speaking. We are um being um spacejacked—is that the word?" There was the sound of machinegun fire. "Hijacked, okay, we're being hijacked. By the um Vilo Jord and Family Liberation Front." There was a long pause, and then he said, "That is all. Thank you."
From time to time we heard gunfire from distant parts of the ship.
The Deacon's eyes were shining. "Real Martys! This Jord family are real Martys! This is our chance to try out the lingo. Let's go."
"Go, boss?" I began to feel uneasy.
"We won't find them sitting here. Come on, grab some pamphlets and follow me."
"But isn't it dangerous?"
"God laughs at danger," he said, quoting one of the pamphlets he was now stuffing into his pockets. "Get the lead out."
I was more worried about keeping it out, but there was nothing to do but obey. I collected an assortment of Crusade pamphlets:
Christ had short hair!
Is Heaven enough? (The answer was No; after getting to Heaven it was necessary to get a house in a good neighborhood.)
The Reverend Flint Orifice Story
Double Tithing—the best investment!
Zither fish fools scientists—God laughs!
Caesarian birth: myth or reality?
We heard more gunfire as we stepped out into the companionway. "Deacon, are you sure this is the smart thing to do? Maybe they're killing people. Those can't all be warning shots."
"Don't worry," he said. "We speak the lingo!"
As he spoke, we turned a corner and found our first body. The ship's carpenter lay face-up at the foot of a ladder. His chest was full of bullet-holes and his face was curiously mutilated.
