The Complete Roderick (61 page)

‘Hushpuppy?’

‘We changed it from another name, a very downmarket name – anyway and T.S. Eliot liked cats. And we got all that info on the card, but then we can also play it.’

He shoved the card into a slot on the recorder TV. At once the tiny screen showed a cartoon Keats declaiming aloud:

Then I felt like some sky-watcher

When a new planet orbits into sight – zowie!

Or like brave Balboa when

‘What do you think of it?’ said Fleischman, turning it off. ‘Not bad, eh?’

‘It’s uh, fine. Really great, sir.’ Norm looked to the bar where a pretty girl was throwing back her head to release a theatrical laugh. He looked to the sofa where the mysteriously beautiful Mrs McBabbitt, in her customary black, still seemed to be waiting for someone. He looked to the piano where a few deliriously happy people had their heads together, trying to harmonize on a carol. Everybody in the room seemed to be having a terrific time. ‘Really terrific.’

Silently, Norm wished himself a Merry little Christmas.

The woman at the bar, Indica Dinks, was neither as girlish nor as pretty as she might seem from a distance, but she was a minor celebrity, being appreciated. That made her glow.

‘Semantics?’ She laughed again. ‘Mister Tarr, you don’t know the meaning of the word.’

The silver-haired man next to her nodded and smiled. ‘Very good. The name is Doctor Tarr, really. But my friends call me Jack.’

‘All right then, Jack, you may be an expert in your field – did you say it was market research?’

‘Market forecasting, really.’ Dr Tarr was a lot younger and handsomer than he might seem from a distance. He kept taking the unlit pipe from his mouth and pointing the stem at nothing. ‘But what I wanted to ask you was –’

‘Market whatever, you may be an expert in your field, but I too happen to know a little bit about human nature. Especially when it comes to machines.’

‘Yes, exactly. The interface –’

‘Face it,’ she continued, ‘machines are only human. They have feelings too.’

He paused, deciding not to laugh. ‘So you say in your book, Indica. But that’s just what I’m not clear about, where you say machines have feel –’

‘My book isn’t clear?
The Mechanical Eunuch
isn’t clear?’

‘Yes, yes, most of it and there’s quite a lot there I agree with, the magical bond between human and machine, yes. I was right with you there, where you describe a man trying to start his car on a cold morning, swearing at it, kicking it … I could almost imagine mechanical consciousness … But later when it gets down to whether a shoeshine machine feels degraded, I mean I just can’t quite … see?’

She patted his hand. ‘Of course not, okay. Don’t worry, maybe it takes a
bricoleur
to really dig –’

‘Yes, you’re probably right, only a man who lays bricks with his two hands knows the other side –’

‘Or a Zen person, maybe one who likes to fix motorcycles or at least lawnmowers. Because only a person like that can dig that machines aren’t just extensions of man any more. No, that’s all part of the old master-slave routine, the terrible power game we play with machines.
Machines are beings in their own right.
And if we don’t give them their freedom, one of these days they’ll be able to just
take
it.’

Dr Tarr nodded, and pointed his pipestem at nothing. ‘You’re right. I never saw it that way before. I guess my professional background does get in the way sometimes. Blinds me to certain possibilities.’

‘Your professional background?’

‘Parapsychology. I used to head a little department over at the University, before I decided to carve out a new career in market forecasting. And you know, I always took it for granted that psychic energy goes with consciousness, and with being human. Or at least with being a biological creature.’ The pipestem waggled. ‘You’ve opened up a very big can of questions, young lady. If machines can feel …’

A few moments later she was calling him ‘Jack’ often, and
emphasizing everything she said by touching his hand. She was telling him about her last husband.

‘Hank was okay really, but he kept getting wound tighter and tighter into ecology. I mean I tried to tell him whales aren’t the only fish in the sea, but – oh well. Now Hank’s trying to run this really seedy Luddite movement, talk about misguided. I mean you can’t turn the clock back to zero, that’s just a waste of time. He’ll learn, I hope. I still feel a lot of natural affection for Hank, you know? Like they say people do when they get an arm or leg cut off, they go around feeling this ghost limb for a long time. Kinda like that.’

She sighed, sipped her vegetable-juice cocktail. ‘And that’s natural and healthy, the ghost limb. But on the other hand take people with artificial limbs. They can get too attached to them, you know?’

‘The dance of life goes on,’ said Dr Tarr, his stem pointing nowhere in particular.

Father Warren sat on the South sofa, pretending to study the colour of his glass of sherry. Someone sat down beside him and asked what he did – and left before he could think of an answer.

The party was beginning to run down. Indica sat at the bar, talking to the woman whose sinus trouble was the trouble with Prague. The group at the piano were trying ‘Hello Dolly’. The remains of a buffet supper were being cleared away to the kitchen where Felix Culpa was examining an electric carving knife. Mrs Doody had found her husband upstairs asleep on the toilet – his pacemaker needed a new battery – and Mr Vitanuova helped her bring him down and pack him into the car.

Edd McFee, moving in finally to talk to General Fleischman, heard him say to Francine, ‘It’s like Whistler said, “If silicon was a gas, I’d be a – ”’

Someone glowered over a glass at Indica and said, ‘I knew her when she was plain old Indica Franklin, just another faculty wife who wanted to be a taco on local TV.’

Someone glowered over a glass at Mrs McBabbitt and said, ‘Well, silicon’s the basis of her life all right –’

Someone glowered over a glass at Father Warren and said, ‘There he goes, looking for another bandwagon. If Indica gave
him a kind word he’d drop this Luddite crap in five minutes … a
treen priest.’

Someone glowered at everyone and no one, while mumbling the words of a tired limerick: ‘… both concave and convex …’

A stranger arrived and, without removing his coat, hat or even the muffler that covered him up to his pale eyes, went straight into Moxon’s library. The room was dim, lit only by a desk lamp. Everett Moxon got up from the desk.

‘Ben? About time. Things are breaking up.’

‘Feel … like I’m breaking up myself …’ Franklin sat down and took off his fur hat. ‘I’m sick, Ev.’

‘There’s this flu thing going around, you’ll probably be okay in the morning. Now what have you brought me?’

Franklin threw a heavy envelope on the desk. ‘All there, the Taipin bids, the secret leasing arrangements for Kratcom International, the whole, whole … holus bolus. Jesus Christ, Ev, why didn’t you tell me
she
was gonna be here? I damn near walked in there and met her face to face, just in time I heard someone say, “Sinuses? They’re all in the head” and I slipped past. Scarf over my face like a damn burglar.’

Moxon was studying papers from the envelope. ‘This is good stuff, Ben.’ He looked up. ‘To tell you the truth, I clean forgot you used to be married to Indica. Seems like it must have happened in another ice age. Volume One and we’re in Volume Two. Anyway why can’t you two be pals now?’

‘Pals?’ Ben’s weak laugh set off a coughing fit. ‘Just the sound of her voice sets my teeth on edge, and what she says! Last time I saw her she talked about something being
water over the bridge;
I came close to hitting her, I – I know it sounds funny now but – are you listening?’

‘Sure. But maybe you just hate Indica because she’s hit the big time. Without you.’

Ben had taken off his coat; now he put it on again. ‘Yes, they all take it seriously, this Machines Liberation idea of hers. Without me? Well sure, she’s a self-made woman. I’m surrounded by self-made men and women, look at Kratt. God-damned world crawling with self-made people, self-made man myself, trouble is self-made people get made in their own image. Christ, it’s cold in here.’

‘Sweat’s pouring off you, how can you be cold? Ben, why don’t you go upstairs and lie down, I’ll call a doctor, okay?’

‘No but listen, Ev, you know what Kratt’s like.’

‘He treats his employees like toilet paper, I know that.’

Ben started to shiver. ‘It’s not that, not just that. I just can’t forget that time a few years ago when he poisoned all those kids just to break into the funfood market fast – funfood! Kids were dying of mercury poisoning! And you know what he did about it?’

‘Forget it, Ben, that was a long time ago.’

‘He bribed doctors to forge death certificates.’

Moxon slid the papers back in the envelope. ‘Sure, sure. But it’s Christmas now –’

‘Christmas! I think about Kratt, every Christmas, he fits right in there, Herod and the Holy Innocents. Herod and the

‘Let me call you a doctor.’

‘Makes you wonder – did Herod really want to kill Christ, or was he happy just killing any babies?’

‘Take it easy, Ben. Just wait right here, I’ll go get help and we’ll take you up to bed. Wait.’

Moxon found Francine in the kitchen. ‘Ben’s sick as a dog, we’ll have to put him in the spare room and call the doctor. He’s out of his head with fever right now. Still goes on about Kratt and that poisoned gingerbread business.’

She understood. ‘He still blames himself.’

‘Probably right to blame himself.’ Moxon lifted his small head and stared unseeing towards the two cooks who were arguing about a missing electric knife. ‘And for Indica’s walking out on him. The fact is, Ben’s always been a fuckup.’

He went back to the library with one of the waiters to find Ben shaking and weeping and sweating; sweat dripped from his chin to the desk blotter.

‘He was here, right here in the room!’

‘Who, Ben? Kratt?’

‘Roderick was right here!’ Ben pointed a shaking finger at the darkness. ‘My robot! My son, in whom I am well pleased!’

Moxon and Toy looked at one another; each took a shuddering arm. ‘Up we go now.’

‘He came into the room and stood right there. I saw him, he was wearing a ski sweater. Black, with little white figures on it.
Like little people, self-made men. He didn’t say anything but he knew who I was. He knew I was protecting him from Herod …’

On the second occasion when Roderick tried the library, Ben was gone but Allbright was there, examining books.

‘Oh it’s you. Getting to be like a reunion here, I saw your pal earlier. The guy that wears dark glasses. Felix.’

‘I … please I …’

‘You gonna puke? Try the wastebasket there.’

‘I need an outlet …’

Allbright dusted off a volume. ‘Who doesn’t? Here’s a rare little item. Life of Sir Charles M’Carthy. First edition, clothbound, slight foxing.’

‘Help.’ Roderick was on all fours behind the desk, fumbling with an electric cord that seemed to run from his navel. ‘Help … plug in.’

‘Hope this isn’t a suicide. Here.’ Allbright reached down and plugged the cord into the wall socket. He watched Roderick’s eyes go opaque, then close.

After a minute, Roderick sat upright in something like the lotus position. His navel was still plugged to 120V AC, his eyes still closed. ‘My batteries. I don’t usually let them run low like that.’

Allbright dropped Sir Charles M’Carthy into his battered briefcase and searched for more first editions. ‘Yeah, I feel like that sometimes. Only being a poet I can’t even kill myself. It would look too much like imitation of better poets.’

‘Suicide. I don’t see the point of it.’ A v-shaped smile in the shadow by the desk. ‘Why take a last step? Why not go on living – if only to see what happens next?’

Allbright’s laugh made him cough, then sneeze. ‘Life as a soap opera, eh? A never-ending series of episodes in
Dorinda’s Destiny?
Trouble is, life isn’t as real as TV, not any more. We’ve traded away our reality. We have no past, no future, no minds, no souls.’

‘I don’t understand, Mr Allbright.’

‘The past, that’s just Scarlett O’Hara in a taffeta-hung bed and Washington throwing a dollar across the Potomac – or the Delaware – all people remember is the dollar, all else is mist and plastic dinosaurs. The past is five minutes ago, it’s what happened before the last commercial.

‘The future now, that’s just space wars, white plastic rockets against black, Terra versus Ratstar. Names don’t matter, what matters is the violence. The future has to be galactic annihilation, 1984 for a million years, a spaceboot grinding an alien face forever. Nobody believes in the future anyway, except maybe a few crank science-fiction writers or maybe the people who want to freeze other people into peopie-sicles and store them – for a price. And imagine that, asking ice to pay for itself. Yet one more ingenious way to package and market the future.

‘So what’s left? The mind? Not even a ghost in a machine any more. Now the mind is just something you improve by reading condensed books and listening to distilled records, everybody now knows the mind has secret powers and you can write off to California to unlock, get rich through safe hypnosis in your spare time. The soul? That’s now just one more brand of saleable music, money seems to make everything more real, doesn’t it? Money is more alive than we are. No wonder kids have started calling themselves robots, they know what’s expected of them. It’s a robot world.’

‘A robot world?’

‘Sure, any decent machine can get in on the ground floor, work its way up, become President – one or two made it already. A robot has plenty of native advantages to start with: never wastes time, no personal problems, never picks nose in public. Winning combination there.’

Roderick opened his eyes. ‘What makes you think a robot would want to get ahead? Couldn’t it just enjoy being alive?’

‘Let me read you something, friend.’ Allbright took down a slim volume and read aloud:

‘“Jack keeps one hour. The policeman develops all pages. Some sister is offended. Jack’s nurse offended all reasons. A few fat pilots warded off more vegetables.” They call that computer poetry. Poetry? I wonder. Sounds like something Swift cooked up at the Academy of Lagodo, just keep flipping through the combinations and watching nothing much come up. Does this computer know it’s writing poetry, and not just figuring a payroll or firing off a missile?’