Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns
Page 1
WHERE ROBOT MICE AND ROBOT MEN
RUN ROUND IN ROBOT TOWNS
Ray Bradbury
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977
Cover design by Mike Topping.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539956
Version: 2014–07–18
Dedication
Again for Marguerite/Maggie—because of thirty-two years
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Byzantium I Come Not From
What I Do Is Me—For That I Came
I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives
We March Back to Olympus
Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth
Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See!
I Have a Brother, Mostly Dead
Why Viking Lander, Why the Planet Mars?
We Have Our Arts so We Won’t Die of Truth
I Die, so Dies the World
My Love, She Weeps at Many Things
Death as a Conversation Piece
Remembrance II
J.C.—Summer '28
The Young Galileo Speaks
The Beast Atop the Building, the Tiger on the Stairs
Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me About Crying in the Shower?
Somewhere a Band Is Playing
The Nefertiti – Tut Express
Telephone Friends, in Far Places
Death for Dinner, Doom for Lunch
Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar
Lo, the Ghost of Our Least Favorite Uncle
That Son of Richard III
A Poem with a Note: All England Empty, the People Flown
The Syncopated Hunchbacked Man
If Man Is Dead, Then God Is Slain
Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral for the First Time
Their Names in Dust, Their Dates in Grass
Long Thoughts on Best-Sellers by Worst People
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue
* * *
They asked me where I’d choose to run, which favored? Ups? or Downs?
Where robot mice and men, I said, run round in robot towns.
But is that wise? for tin’s a fool and iron has no thought!
Computer mice can find me facts and teach me what I’m not.
But robot all inhuman is, all’s sin with cog and mesh.
Not if we teach the good stuff in, so it can teach our flesh.
There’s nothing wrong with metal-men that better dreams can’t chalk.
I’d find me robot-Plato’s cave if he lived on my block;
And though his eyes electric were, computerized his tongue,
Is that more wrong than Berlioz on LPs harped and sung?
So much electric fills our lives, some bad, some good, some ill.
But look! there Shaw and Shakespeare dance on Channel 7’s sill:
A gift of hearts and minds and eyes to see our dark/light face,
To weigh and balance halos/blights that half-destroy our race;
To midget make our rocket-ships, and squeeze grand Kong down small
Then Giants grow from Shavian seed to taunt, provoke us all.
As man himself a mixture is, rambunctious paradox,
So we must teach our mad machines: stand tall, pull up your socks!
Come run with me, wild children/men, half dires and dooms, half clowns.
Pace robot mice, race robot men, win-lose in robot towns.
Byzantium I Come Not From
* * *
Byzantium
I come not from
But from another time and place
Whose race is simple, tried and true;
As boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois,
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan. There I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
As any Yeats found to be true.
The house I lived in, hewn of gold
And on the highest market sold
Was dandelion-minted, made
By spendthrift bees in bee-loud glade.
And then of course our finest wine
Came forth from that same dandelion,
While dandelion was my hair
As bright as all the summer air;
I dipped in rainbarrels for my eyes
And cherries stained my lips, my cries,
My shouts of purest exaltation:
Byzantium? No. That Indian nation
Which made of Indian girls and boys
Spelled forth itself as Illinois.
Yet all the Indian bees did hum:
Byzantium.
Byzantium.
So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods’ bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade.
Pretending there beneath our sky
That it was Aphrodite’s thigh;
Pretending, too, that Zeus was ours
And Thor fell down in thundershowers.
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather a myth indeed
Did all of Plato supersede;
While Grandmama in rocking-chair
Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care,
Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright
To winter us on summer night.
And uncles gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
On Grecian porch on s
ummer nights.
Then went to bed there to repent
The evils of the innocent
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, through the nights and through the years
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun;
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantium.
What I Do Is Me—For That I Came
for Gerard Manley Hopkins
* * *
What I do is me—for that I came.
What I do is me!
For that I came into the world!
So said Gerard;
So said that gentle Manley Hopkins.
In his poetry and prose he saw the Fates that chose
Him in genetics, then set him free to find his way
Among the sly electric printings in his blood.
God thumbprints thee! he said.
Within your hour of birth
He touches hand to brow, He whorls and softly stamps
The ridges and the symbols of His soul above your eyes!
But in that selfsame hour, full born and shouting
Shocked pronouncements of one’s birth,
In mirrored gaze of midwife, mother, doctor
See that Thumbprint fade and fall away in flesh
So, lost, erased, you seek a lifetime’s days for it
And dig deep to find the sweet instructions there
Put by when God first circuited and printed thee to life:
“Go hence! do this! do that! do yet another thing!
This self is yours! Be it!”
And what is that?! you cry at hearthing breast,
Is there no rest? No, only journeying to be yourself.
And even as the Birthmark vanishes, in seashell ear
Now fading to a sigh, His last words send you in the world:
“Not mother, father, grandfather are you.
Be not another. Be the self I signed you in your blood.
I swarm your flesh with you. Seek that.
And, finding, be what no one else can be.
I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other’s Fate,
For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair
No country far enough to hide your loss.
I circumnavigate each cell in you
Your merest molecule is right and true.
Look there for destinies indelible and fine
And rare.
Ten thousand futures share your blood each instant;
Each drop of blood a cloned electric twin of you.
In merest wound on hand read replicas of what I planned and knew
Before your birth, then hid it in your heart.
No part of you that does not snug and hold and hide
The self that you will be if faith abide.
What you do is thee. For that I gave you birth.
Be that. So be the only you that’s truly you on Earth.”
Dear Hopkins. Gentle Manley. Rare Gerard. Fine name.
What we do is us. Because of you. For that we came.
I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives
* * *
Though Queen be gone, the drones come back to hives;
I am the residue of all my daughters’ lives.
I keep their old loves here, I am the friend
Of all the lost, the sad, discarded, gone, made end.
Their husbands are now mine, their lovers keep
In touch with me, they telephone to weep
On loves that, soon as lost, now are my kin.
Somehow the old sins, shunted off, wind up my sin.
I take those loves to lunch. I buy them wine;
Although these boys-grown-men were never mine.
What is this thing in me which, dumb, demands
The keeping up of face, outstretch of hands?
Why must I tend their graveyard with chill stones,
Why say hello to those young bags of bones?
Those scuttled marriages gone sour or dead
Whose ruin runs my blood and cramps my head—
Why should I dine this mortuary gang,
Why not pay out Time’s rope and let them hang?
Because, because, well now, again because—
Mayhap I drown in male’s dread menopause,
And tend to see my face in these I dine
To drink too much of sad lust’s mortal wine.
Oh, women often cry they were sore used
But these boy/men were much the same abused;
If men shunt off the fainter sex with guile
Why, women, daggerless, slay with a smile.
What do these lovers hope to gain from me?
An echo of her flesh now found at tea,
The sounding of her voice but dimly heard
Her beauty ricocheted and drowned, absurd
In maze of old genetics yet there kept,
Some wakening of love that now is slept?
An echo of her voice in some mere phrase,
A flicker of her glance in old beast’s gaze?
They come to find the lamb in lion’s paws,
But something in my laugh now gives them cause
To order more and more and deeply drink,
Though Lovely’s not my name, I clearly think.
Ah, well, to stand for her is not a shame,
And if the echo pleases them, what blame?
Years back I saw an old love’s sire one day,
And round about his smile I saw the fey
Sad, far, lost echoing of one mad year
Which ravened me to frenzies and wild fear.
So if a father’s teeth can cage a cat,
Why here behind my eyes, beneath my hat,
A girl before her time waits to commence—
Young men, I have no heart to cry: Go hence!
So stay awhile and hear her voice in me;
But, please, no tears, no funeral salt at tea!
We March Back to Olympus
* * *
Thrown out of Eden
Now we headlong humans
Sinners sinned against
Return.
Tossed from the central sun
We with our own concentric fires
Blaze and burn.
Once at the hub of wakening
And vast starwheel,
For centuries long-lost, and made to feel
Unwanted, orphaned, mindless,
Driven forth to grassless gardens,
Dead and desert sea,
We were shut out by comet grooms like Kepler
Galileo Galilei
Whose short-sight probing light-years
Upped and said:
The Hub’s not here!
So shot man through the head
And worse, each starblind prophet killed a part,
Snugged shut our souls,
Chopped short our reach,
Entombed our living heart.
But now we bastard sons of time
Pronounce ourselves anew
And strike fire-hammer blows
To change tomorrow’s clime, its meteor snows.
Our rocket selfhood grows
To give dull facts a shake, break data down
To climb the Empire State and thundercry the town;
But more! reach up and strike
And claim from Heaven
The Garden we were shunted from,
For now, space-driven
We fit, fix, force and fuse,
Re-hub the systems vast
Respoke starwheel
And at the spiraled core
Plant foot, full fire-shod
And thus saints feel
Or yeast like flesh of God.
We march back to Olympus,
Our plain-bread flesh burns gold!
; We clothe ourselves in flame
And trade new myths for old.
The Greek gods christen us
With ghosts of comet swords;
God smiles and names us thus:
“Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!”
Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth
* * *
It was a smother of Time, a crumbling of white;
The night gave way in hysterias trembling to cold,
Grown old and falling apart, let its white heart go
And slow and slow in a withering slide from the dark
The snow fell down and down with no lantern nor spark
Nor star nor moon to show its fracture and fall
Appalling in all its shivering shaken chill dusts
In soft clamors and tremors of panic it touched my sill
Like an old woman begging the storm to keep warm with mere crusts
And make do on my cat-couching hearth
Where a teakettle cinnamon puss kneels and folds
And beholds a soft inner contentment, a bumblebee simmer kept there
Like a hive on the hearth in a honeycomb color of cat
While nibbling the windows and gnawing raw rainspout toes
And flaking the rainbarrel frost there the smothering goes;
A funeral quell passes by in a pageant of lost
And cataracts windowpane eyes with a filming of frost
And sugars the dogs as they yellow-write sums in the snow—
Strange Orient alphabets sprinkled where smiling dogs go.
And the winter’s old bones fall apart in a shatter of white
And I bed with my bumblebee honeycomb cat for the night
And the sound of the snow grows in heart-murmur patterns yet dimmer
And the one thing I hear in deep sleep is the motor of cat:
What sound’s that?
Long-lost summer.
Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See!
* * *
Oh, pantry Deeps’ miscellany
Bestirs boy’s victual villainy,
Unwaters mouth of innocence,
Unshucks the soul of reticence;
For in the deeps of snowbin sweets
And hung-banana jungle treats
We wandered as a jump-squirrel boy
To amble, maunder, ponder, toy
With jellies, jams and other pelf
From apple-cherry-berry shelf,