Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "Hey, your headlamp's busted," said a man, peering through the doorway of the saloon.

  Paul passed him quickly, without getting a good look at him. "Thanks."

  Only when he'd overtaken Finnerty in the damp twilight of the inside did he turn for another look at the man--at his short, broad back. The man's neck was thick and red, and glinting behind his ears were the hooks of steel spectacles. It was the same man, Paul realized, the same man who had been sitting by Rudy Hertz--the man whose son had just turned eighteen. Paul remembered that he had promised this man, in the panic of the moment, to speak to Matheson, the placement director, about the son. Perhaps he hadn't recognized Paul. Paul slid into a booth with Finnerty, in the darkest corner of the room.

  The man turned and smiled, his eyes lost behind the milky, thick lenses of his glasses. "You're entirely welcome, Doctor Proteus," he called. "It isn't often that anyone can do a favor for anyone in your position."

  Paul pretended he hadn't heard, and turned his attention to Finnerty, who dug a spoon around and around and around in a sugar bowl. Some of the white grains spilled over, and Finnerty absently drew the mathematical symbol for infinity in them with the tip of his finger.

  "Funny what I expected from this reunion, what I guess everybody expects from affectionate reunions. I thought seeing you would somehow clear up all sorts of problems, get me thinking straight," said Finnerty. He had a candor about his few emotional attachments that Paul found disquieting. He used words to describe his feelings that Paul could never bring himself to use when speaking of a friend: love, affection, and other words generally consigned to young and inexperienced lovers. It wasn't homosexual; it was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second.

  "I guess I looked forward to some sort of rebirth too," said Paul.

  "But you find out quick enough that old friends are old friends, and nothing more--no wiser, no more help than anyone else. Well, what the hell, that doesn't mean I'm not damned pleased to see you again."

  "No booth service until eight," called the bartender.

  "I'll get them," said Finnerty. "What'll it be?"

  "Bourbon--plain water. Make it a weak one. Anita's expecting us in an hour."

  Finnerty came back with two strong highballs.

  "Is there any water in it?" said Paul.

  "There was enough water in it as it was." Finnerty swept the sugar from the table with his palm. "It's the loneliness," he said, as though picking up the thread of a conversation that had been interrupted. "It's the loneliness, the not belonging anywhere. I just about went crazy with loneliness here in the old days, and I figured things would be better in Washington, that I'd find a lot of people I admired and belonged with. Washington is worse, Paul--Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. And the women, Paul--the dull wives feeding on the power and glory of their husbands."

  "Oh, now listen, Ed," said Paul, smiling, "they're good-hearted people."

  "Who isn't? I'm not, I guess. Their superiority is what gets me, this damn hierarchy that measures men against machines. It's a pretty unimpressive kind of man that comes out on top."

  "Here come some more!" called the man with the thick glasses from the door. From far off came the sound of marching, and the thump of a bass drum. The noise came closer, a whistle blew, and a brass band exploded with music.

  Paul and Finnerty hurried to the door.

  "Who are they?" shouted Finnerty at the man in thick glasses.

  The man smiled. "Don't think they want anybody to know. Secret."

  At the head of the procession, surrounded by four trumpeters dressed as Arabs, was a florid, serious old man in a turban and pantaloons, carefully cradling in his arms an elephant tusk inscribed with mysterious symbols. Behind him came an enormous square banner, held aloft by a staggering giant, and steadied in the wind, maypole fashion, by a dozen Arabs tugging at colored ropes. The banner, which from a distance had given promise of explaining all, was embroidered with four lines of long-forgotten--or perhaps recently invented--script, and with four green owls against a field of apricot. After it came the band, which carried out the Arabian motif. There were owl-bearing pennants hung from the brasses, and the banner's message was repeated, in case anyone had missed it, on a cart-borne bass drum perhaps twelve feet in diameter.

  "Hooray," said the man in thick glasses mildly.

  "Why are you cheering?" said Finnerty.

  "Don't you think something's called for? Cheering Luke Lubbock mostly. He's the one with the tusk."

  "Doing a swell job," said Finnerty. "What's he represent?"

  "Secret. He couldn't be it any more, if he told."

  "Looks like he's about the most important thing."

  "Next to the tusk."

  The parade turned a corner, the whistle blew again, and the music stopped. Down the street, another whistle shrilled, and the whole business began again as a company of kilted bagpipers swung into view.

  "Parade competition down at the park," said the man with the glasses. "They'll be coming by for hours. Let's go in and have a drink."

  "On us?" said Finnerty.

  "Who else?"

  "Wait," said Paul, "this should be interesting."

  An automobile had just come from the north side of the river, and its driver honked irritably at the marchers, who blocked his way. The horn and the bagpipes squalled at one another until the last rank of marchers had turned down the side street. Paul recognized the driver too late to get out of sight. Shepherd looked at him with puzzlement and mild censure, waved vaguely, and drove on. Peering through the back window were the small eyes of Fred Berringer.

  Paul refused to attach any importance to the incident. He sat down in the booth with the short, heavy man, while Finnerty went after more drinks.

  "How's your son?" said Paul.

  "Son, Doctor? Oh, oh, of course--my son. You said you were going to talk to Matheson about him, didn't you? What did the good Matheson say?"

  "I haven't seen him yet. I've been meaning to, but the opportunity hasn't come up."

  The man nodded. "Matheson, Matheson--beneath that cold exterior, there beats a heart of ice. Well, it's just as well. There's no need to talk to him now. My boy's all set."

  "Oh, really? I'm glad to hear that."

  "Yes, he hanged himself this morning in the kitchen."

  "Lord!"

  "Yes, I told him what you said yesterday, and it was so discouraging that he just gave up. It's the best way. There are too many of us. Upps! You're spilling your drink!"

  "What's going on here?" said Finnerty.

  "I was just telling the Doctor here that my son couldn't find any good reason for being alive, so he quit it this morning--with an ironing cord."

  Paul covered his eyes. "Jesus, oh Jesus I'm sorry."

  The man looked up at Finnerty with a mixture of bewilderment and exasperation. "Now, hell, why'd I have to go and do that? Have a drink, Doctor, and pull yourself together. I haven't got a son, never had one." He shook Paul's arm. "Hear me? It's a lot of crap."

  "Then why don't I bust your stupid head open?" said Paul, half standing in the booth.

  "Because you're wedged in too tightly," said Finnerty, pushing him back down. He set the drinks before them.

  "Sorry," said the man to Paul. "I just wanted to see how one of those superbrains worked. What's your I.Q., Doctor?"

  "It's a matter of record. Why don't you go look it up?" It was a matter of record. Everyone's I.Q., as measured by the National Standard General Classification Test, was on public record--in Ilium, at the police station. "Go on," he said acidly, "experiment with me some more. I love it."

  "You picked a bad specimen if you're out to find out what the rest of them across the river are like," said Finnerty. "This guy's an odd one."

  "You're an engineer too."

  "Until I quit."


  The man looked surprised. "You know, this is really very illuminating, if you're not kidding me. There are malcontents, eh?"

  "Two that we know of," said Finnerty.

  "Well, you know, in a way I wish I hadn't met you two. It's much more convenient to think of the opposition as a nice homogeneous, dead-wrong mass. Now I've got to muddy my thinking with exceptions."

  "How have you got yourself typed," said Paul, "as an upstate Socrates?"

  "The name is Lasher, the Reverend James J. Lasher, R-127 and SS-55. Chaplain, Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps."

  "The first number's for Protestant minister. What's the second, that SS thing?" said Finnerty.

  "Social scientist," said Lasher. "The 55 designates an anthropologist with a master's degree."

  "And what does an anthropologist do these days?" said Paul.

  "Same thing a supernumerary minister does--becomes a public charge, a bore, or possibly a rum-dum, or a bureaucrat." He looked back and forth between Paul and Finnerty. "You, I know, Doctor Proteus. And you?"

  "Finnerty, Edward Francis Finnerty, Ph.D., one-time EC-002."

  "There's a collector's item--a double-o-two number!" said Lasher. "I've known several single-o men, but never a double-o. I guess you're the highest classification I ever had friendly words with. If the Pope set up shop in this country, he'd be only one notch up--in the R-numbers of course. He'd be an R-001. I heard somewhere that the number was being held for him, over the objections of Episcopal bishops who want R-001 themselves. Delicate business."

  "They could give him a negative number," said Paul.

  "That the Episcopalians would go along with. My glass is empty."

  "What was this business about the people across the river being the opposition?" said Paul. "You think they do the Devil's work, do you?"

  "That's pretty strong. I will say you've shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them. When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they're finding out--most of them--that what's left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway. My glass is empty."

  Lasher sighed. "What do you expect?" he said. "For generations they've been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men--and boom! it's all yanked out from under them. They can't participate, can't be useful any more. Their whole culture's been shot to hell. My glass is empty."

  "I just had it filled again," said Finnerty.

  "Oh, so you did." Lasher sipped thoughtfully. "These displaced people need something, and the clergy can't give it to them--or it's impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it's enough, and so does the Bible. The people say it isn't enough, and I suspect they're right."

  "If they were so fond of the old system, how come they were so cantankerous about their jobs when they had them?" said Paul.

  "Oh, this business we've got now--it's been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war. Maybe the actual jobs weren't being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was. Go to the library sometime and take a look at magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II. Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production--know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines. And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true. Even then, half the people or more didn't understand much about the machines they worked at or the things they were making. They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego. And then there was all this let's-not-shoot-Father-Christmas advertising."

  "How's that?" said Paul.

  "You know--those ads about the American system, meaning managers and engineers, that made America great. When you finished one, you'd think the managers and engineers had given America everything: forests, rivers, minerals, mountains, oil--the works.

  "Strange business," said Lasher. "This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon."

  "Well," said Paul, "you'll have to admit they did some pretty wonderful things during the war."

  "Of course!" said Lasher. "What they did for the war effort really was something like crusading; but"--he shrugged--"so was what everybody else did for the war effort. Everybody behaved wonderfully. Even I."

  "You keep giving the managers and engineers a bad time," said Paul. "What about the scientists? It seems to me that--"

  "Outside the discussion," said Lasher impatiently. "They simply add to knowledge. It isn't knowledge that's making trouble, but the uses it's put to."

  Finnerty shook his head admiringly. "So what's the answer right now?"

  "That is a frightening question," said Lasher, "and also my favorite rationalization for drinking. This is my last drink, incidentally; I don't like being drunk. I drink because I'm scared--just a little scared, so I don't have to drink much. Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it's sure to be a bloody business."

  "Messiah?"

  "Sooner or later someone's going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth--hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws. But sooner or later someone's going to keep out of their sight long enough to organize a following."

  Paul had been watching his expression closely, and decided that, far from being in horror of the impending uprising, Lasher was rather taken by the idea. "And then what?" said Paul. He picked up his glass and rattled the ice cubes against his teeth. He'd finished his second drink and wanted another.

  Lasher shrugged. "Oh, hell--prophecy's a thankless business, and history has a way of showing us what, in retrospect, are very logical solutions to awful messes."

  "Prophesy anyway," said Finnerty.

  "Well--I think it's a grave mistake to put on public record everyone's I.Q. I think the first thing the revolutionaries would want to do is knock off everybody with an I.Q. over 110, say. If I were on your side of the river, I'd have the I.Q. books closed and the bridges mined."

  "Then the 100's would go after the 110's, the 90's after the 100's, and so on," said Finnerty.

  "Maybe. Something like that. Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarkation. And I must say that the basic assumption of the present setup is a grade-A incitement to violence: the smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you'll admit, pretty tough for the have-not's to take. The criterion of brains is better than the one of money, but"--he held his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart--"about that much better."

  "It's about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get," said Finnerty. "How's somebody going to up his I.Q.?"

  "Exactly," said Lasher. "And it's built on more than just brain power--it's built on special kinds of brain power. Not only must a person be bright, he must be bright in certain approved, useful directions: basically, management or engineering."

  "Or marry someone who's bright," said Finnerty.

  "Sex can still batter down all sorts of social structures--you're right," Lasher agreed.

  "Big tits will get you in anywhere," said Finnerty.r />
  "Well, it's comforting to know that something hasn't changed in centuries, isn't it?" Lasher smiled.

  There was a mild commotion at the bar, and Lasher leaned out of the booth to see what was going on. "Hey," he called, "Luke Lubbock--come over here."

  Luke, the serious old man who had borne the elephant tusk at the head of the parade, came over from the bar, gulping his beer as he came, and looking nervously at the clock. He was perspiring and short of breath, like a man who'd been running. He had a large parcel wrapped in brown paper under his arm.

  Paul welcomed the opportunity to study Luke's magnificent costume more closely. Like a stage set, it was designed to impress at a distance. Nearness showed that the splendor was a fraud of cheap cloth, colored glass, and radiator paint. At his waist was a jeweled poniard, basically plywood, with an owl on its hilt. Counterfeit rubies as big as robin's eggs, mounted in golden sunbursts, were hung at random on the front of his lavender blouse. About the cuffs of his blouse and jade-green pantaloons were circlets of tiny bells, and--again--perched at the upturned tips of his golden slippers were a pair of miniature owls.

  "Luke, you look wonderful," said Lasher.

  Luke's eyes flashed agreement, but he was an important man, in too much of a hurry to respond to flattery. "It's too much, too much," he said. "Now I got to change so's I can march with the Parmesans. They're waiting up the street, and I got to change, and some damn fool's locked hisself in the can, so I got no place to change." He looked around quickly. "Would you let me do it in the booth, and kind of screen me?"

  "You bet," said Finnerty.

  They let Luke squirm into the shadows of the booth, and Paul found himself keeping a playful, leering lookout for women.

  Muttering, Luke started to disrobe. He dropped his belt and poniard on the table, where they struck with an impressive thump. The glittering heap grew and grew, until, from a distance, it might have looked good enough to be at the end of a rainbow.

  Paul relaxed his vigil for an instant to glance at Luke, and he was shocked at the transformation. The man was in his underwear now, ragged and drab, and none-too-clean. And Luke had somehow shrunk and saddened and was knobbed and scarred and scrawny. He was subdued now, talking not at all, and meeting no one's eyes. Almost desperately, hungrily, he ripped open the brown parcel and took from it a pale-blue uniform, encrusted with gold embroidery and piped in scarlet. He pulled on the trousers and black boots, and the jacket with its ponderous epaulets. Luke was growing again, getting his color back, and as he strapped on his saber he was talkative again--important and strong. He bundled up his other costume in the brown paper, left the parcel with the bartender, and rushed into the street, waving naked steel.