Mockingbird (2 page)

By the time he was a year old Spofforth understood quantum mechanics, robotic engineering, and the history of state-owned corporations in North America—all taught to him by audio-visuals and by robot tutors—but he did not know how to read. Nor did he know anything about human sexuality, not consciously; although there were dim yearnings in what once would have been called his heart. Sometimes when he was alone and in darkness, his stomach would flutter for a moment disturbingly. He was beginning to know that in him somewhere was a buried life, a life of feelings. On the first warm evenings of his first June he began to be seriously disquieted by it. Walking from one dormitory building to another, late at night, he would hear the sounds of katydids in the trees in the warm Ohio evening and there would be a strange, uncomfortable pressure in his chest. He worked hard at the dormitories, doing much menial work for what was called “training”; but the work seldom really occupied his attention and melancholy had begun to fall on his spirit.

Some of the Make Four workers would break down occasionally; there never seemed to be enough repair equipment to keep up with minor malfunctions. A few old men were kept around to fill in when that happened. One of these was a derelict named Arthur, who usually smelled of synthetic gin and who never wore socks. He always spoke to Spofforth, in a partly friendly, partly mocking way, when they would pass each other in the dormitory hallways or on one of the gravel paths outside the buildings. Once, while Spofforth was emptying ashtrays in the cafeteria and Arthur was sweeping up, Arthur stopped working, leaned on his broom, and said, “Bob,” and Spofforth looked up from his work. “Bob,” Arthur said, “you’re a moody one. Didn’t know they
made
moody robots.”

Spofforth was unsure whether he was being teased or not. He continued carrying a stack of plastic ashtrays, filled with the morning’s array of marijuana butts, to the garbage can in the corner of the big room. The students had left a short time before for a televised lecture on yoga.

“Never saw a sad robot before,” Arthur said. “Is that because of those black ears?”

“I’m a Make Nine robot,” Spofforth said defensively. He was still very young, and conversations with humans could make him uneasy.

“Nine!” Arthur said. “That’s pretty high, isn’t it? Hell the Andy that runs this school is only a Seven.”

“Andy?” Spofforth said, holding the pile of ashtrays.

“Yeah, android. Andys is what we called you things—you guys —when I was a kid. Weren’t so many of you then. Weren’t so smart either.”

“Do you mind that? That I’m smart?”

“No,” Arthur said. “Shit no. People are so fucking dumb these days it makes you want to cry.” He looked away, and then gave a little push to his broom. “Smart is smart. I’m glad there’s some around somewhere.” He stopped sweeping and made a loose gesture around the big empty room as though the students were still there. “I wouldn’t want any of those dumb illiterates to be running the show when they get out of here.” His wrinkled face was rilled with contempt. “Hypnotized freaks. Jack-offs. They ought to put ’em in a coma and feed ’em pills.”

Spofforth said nothing. Something in him was drawn toward the old man—some tiny hint of kinship. But he had no feelings about the young humans who were being trained and acculturated in this place.

He had no conscious feelings about them, of the usually vacant-eyed, slow-moving, and silent groups of them, going quietly from class to class or sitting alone in the Privacy rooms smoking dope and watching abstract patterns on their wall-sized television sets and listening to mindless, hypnotic music from speakers. But in his mind there was almost always the image of one; the girl in the red coat. She had worn that ancient coat all winter and still wore it on spring nights. It was not the only thing different about her. There was sometimes a look on her face, flirtatious, narcissistic, vain, that was different from the rest of them. They were all told to develop themselves “individually” but they all looked the same and acted the same, with their quiet voices and their expressionless faces. She swung her hips when she walked, and sometimes she laughed, loudly, when everyone else was quiet, absorbed in herself. Her skin was as white as milk and her hair coal black.

Spofforth thought of her often. At times, seeing her on her way to a class, surrounded by others but alone, he wanted to walk over to her and touch her gently, just place his big hand on her shoulder and hold it there for a while, feeling the warmth of it. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was watching him from beneath lowered eyes, amused, laughing at him. But they never spoke.

“Hell,” Arthur was saying. “You robots’ll be running everything in another thirty years. People can’t do shit for themselves anymore.”

“I am being trained to run corporations,” Spofforth said.

Arthur looked at him sharply, and then he began to laugh. “By emptying ashtrays?” he said. “
Shit
!” He began sweeping again, pushing the big broom vigorously down the Permoplastic floor. “Didn’t know you could fool a goddamn robot. And a Make Nine at that.”

Spofforth stood there holding the ashtrays for a minute, looking at him.
No one is fooling me
, he thought.
I have my life to live
.

It was a June night about a week after the conversation with Arthur that Spofforth was walking by the Audio-Visual Building under the moonlight and heard a rustling noise from behind the dense bushes that grew untended by the building. There was the groan of a male voice, and then more rustling.

Spofforth stopped and listened. Something was moving, more quietly now. He turned, walked a few steps until he was standing up against a tall bush and then pushed it quietly aside. And when, suddenly, he saw what was happening on the other side, he froze and just stood there, staring.

On her back, behind the bush, lay the girl, with her dress pulled up beyond her navel. A pinkish, naked, chubby young man was kneeling astride her; Spofforth could see a cluster of brown moles on the pink skin between his shoulder blades. He could see the girl’s pubic hair under the man’s thigh—curly hair, jet black against her pure white legs and white buttocks, as black as the hair on her head, as black as the little collar of the red coat on which she lay.

She saw him, and her face went grim with disgust. She spoke to him, for the first and last time ever. “Get out of here, robot,” she said. “Fucking robot. Leave us alone.”

Spofforth, a hand clamped on bis cloned heart, turned and walked away. It was there he learned a thing he was to know for the rest of his long life; he did not really want to live. He had been cheated—horribly cheated—of a real, human life; something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him.

He saw the girl again a few times. She avoided his eyes completely. Not out of shame, he knew, since there was no shame for them in sex. “Quick sex is best” was what they were taught, and they believed it and practiced it.

He was relieved to be transferred from the dormitory to a more responsible job deciding the distribution patterns of synthetic dairy products, in Akron. From there he was moved to the production of small automobiles, presiding over the making of the last few thousand private cars ever to be driven by a once car-infatuated population. When that ended he became Director of the Corporation that manufactured thought buses, the sturdy eight-passenger vehicles made for an ever-dwindling human population. Then he became Director of Population Control, being transferred to New York for this, working in an office on top of a thirty-two-story building, watching over the aging computers that kept a daily census and adjusted human fertility rates accordingly. It was a tiresome job, presiding over equipment that was forever breaking down, trying to find ways of repairing computers that no human any longer knew how to repair and that no robots had been programmed to understand. Eventually he was given another job: Dean of Faculties at New York University. The computer that had served to direct that institution had ceased functioning; it became Spofforth’s job, as a Make Nine, to replace it and to make the mostly minor choices that running a university required.

There had been, he came to find out, a hundred Make Nines cloned, and animated with copies of the same original human mind. He was the last, and special adjustments were made in the synapses of his own particular metallic brain to prevent what had happened to the others of his series: they had been committing suicide. Some had fused their brains into black shapelessness with high-voltage welding equipment; some had swallowed corrosives. A few had gone completely insane before being destroyed by humans, freaking out madly, destructively, rampaging down city streets at midnight screaming obscenities. Using a real human brain as a model for a sophisticated robot had been an experiment. The experiment had been judged a failure, and no more were made. The factories still turned out moron robots, and a few Make Sevens and Make Eights, to take over from the humans more and more of the functions of government and education and medicine and law and planning and manufacturing; but all these had synthetic, nonhuman brains, without a flicker of emotion, of inwardness, of self-consciousness in them. They were merely machines—clever, human-looking, well-made machines—and they did what they were supposed to do.

Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.

The girl in the red coat grew old and fat and had sex with ten dozen men and had a few babies and drank too much beer and led a trivial, purposeless life and lost her beauty. And at the end of it she died and was buried and forgotten. And Spofforth went on, youthful, superbly healthy, beautiful, seeing her at seventeen long after she had forgotten, as a middle-aged woman, the sexy, flirtatious girl she had once been. He saw her and loved her and he wanted to die. And some heedless human engineer had even made that impossible for him.

The University Provost and the Dean of Studies were waiting for him when he returned from his June night alone.

The duller of the two was the provost. His name was Carpenter and he wore a brown Synlon suit and nearly worn-out sandals and his belly and flanks trembled visibly in the tight suit as he walked. He was standing near Spofforth’s big teakwood desk, smoking a joint, when the robot came in and walked briskly toward him. Carpenter stood nervously aside while Spofforth seated himself.

After a moment Spofforth looked at him—not just a bit to the right of him in the way that Mandatory Politeness required, but directly at him. “Good morning,” Spofforth said, in his strong, controlled voice. “Is something wrong?”

“Well . . .” Carpenter said, “I’m not sure.” He seemed disturbed by the question. “What do you think, Perry?”

Perry, the Dean of Studies, rubbed his nose with his forefinger. “Somebody called, Dean Spofforth. On the University Line. Called twice.”

“Oh?” Spofforth said. “What did he want?”

“He wants to talk to you,” Perry said. “About a job. A summer teaching. . .”

Spofforth looked at him. “Yes?”

Perry went on nervously, his eyes avoiding Spofforth’s. “What he wants to do is something that I couldn’t understand on the telephone. It’s a new thing—something he said he had discovered a yellow or two ago.” He looked around him until his gaze found that of the fat man in the brown suit. “What was it he said, Carpenter?”

“Reading?” Carpenter said.

“Yes,” Perry said. “
Reading
. He said he could do
reading
. Something about words. He wants to teach it.”

Spofforth sat up at the word. “Someone has learned to
read
?”

The men looked away, embarrassed at the surprise in Spofforth’s voice.

“Did you record the conversation?” Spofforth asked.

They looked at one another. Finally, Perry spoke. “We forgot,” he said.

Spofforth suppressed his annoyance. “Did he say he would call back?”

Perry looked relieved. “Yes, he did, Dean Spofforth. He said he would try to establish a connection with you.”

“All right,” Spofforth said. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” Perry said, fobbing his nose again. “The usual curriculum BB’s. Three suicides among the student body. And there are plans recorded somewhere for the closing down of the East Whig of Mental Hygiene; but none of the robots could find them.” Perry . seemed pleased to be able to report a failure among the staff robots. “None of the Make Sixes knew anything about them, sir.”

“That’s because
I
have them, Dean Perry,” Spofforth said. He opened his desk drawer and took out one of the little steel balls— the BB’s, they were called—that were used to make voice recordings. He held it out to Perry. “Play this into a Make Seven. He’ll know what to do about the Mental Hygiene classrooms.”

Perry, somewhat shamefaced, took the recording and left. Carpenter followed him out of the room. When they were gone Spofforth sat at his desk for a while, wondering about the news of the man who said he could read. He had heard of reading often enough when he was young, and knew that it had died out long before. He had seen books—very ancient things. There were still a few of them left undestroyed in the University Library.

Spofforth’s office was big, and very pleasant. He had decorated it himself, with prints of shore birds and with a carved oak sideboard he had taken from a demolished museum. On the sideboard was a row of small models of Robotic Engineering, roughly showing the history of anthropoid forms that had been used in the development of the art. The earliest, on the far left, was of a wheeled creature with a cylindrical body and four arms—very early, and somewhere between a servomechanism and an autonomous mechanical being. The model was made of Permoplastic and was about six inches tall. The robot had been, during its brief span of usefulness, called a Wheelie; none had been made for centuries.

To the right of the Wheelie was a more manlike shape, somewhat close to that of a contemporary moron robot. The statuettes became more detailed, more human, as they proceeded from left to right, until they concluded with a miniature of Spofforth himself—sleek, entirely human in appearance, poised on the balls of his feet and with his eyes, even in the model, seeming alive.