The Complete Roderick (74 page)

Roderick felt less sincere at once, but the aphorism was sparking off others; soon Barry and Gary were grinning and shouting at each other:

‘Darkness is just ignorant light.’

‘Peace is war carried on by other means.’

‘Every day is another.’

‘Man is the piece of universe that worries about all the rest.’

‘Stop looking for happiness until you find it.’

‘Dodo is finding out man was never kicked out of Paradise at all.’

‘Yeah, Dodo is instant everything.’

‘Dodo means just
do –
but twice.’

‘Dodo says, do fish know which way the wind blows?’

‘Dodo says, make today a wonderful yesterday,’ said Gary finally, and wrote out an address on a page torn from an electronic test manual. ‘Here you go. But listen, one thing: You have to prove your sincerity with Dodo. Take him like a bouquet of hundred-dollar bills. Anything like that.’

‘A bouquet of money?’

‘Dodo says money has its price.’

‘Fine,’ said Roderick. ‘Only I don’t have even
one
hundred-dollar bill. I’ve never seen one.’

‘You must not be very sincere, then,’ Gary said. He went to a snare drum mounted upside down at the back of the stage, reached into it and came up with a handful of hundred-dollar bills. ‘Take these, it’s okay. Yours to keep or give to Dodo. Your choice.’

Barry said, ‘All money belongs to Dodo.’

People were running around on the big stage now, moving lights, checking the Auks’s makeup, clearing spare cables. Someone led Roderick to the wings; a second later the Auks started playing and the curtain rose.

They naturally opened with the gospel-based song that first made them famous, ‘Rivets’:

There’s an android calling me

Calling me, oh calling, calling me

Cross the river

The deep river

Of Australia.

She is plastic, she is steel

But she really can really can feel

All my love

Cross the river

Of Australia.

A hammer clattered on the stage; there were dark figures struggling in the orchestra pit; another hammer spun through the air and dented a cabinet. Then it was all over: gangs of security police came from every exit and from the stage. The tiny mob of Luddites were disarmed and marched away within two minutes of their attack.

Roderick went outside to find out if Luke was still in one piece. He couldn’t see the astronaut among the men with bleeding heads being herded into a paddy wagon.

A security cop was talking to a city cop. ‘We could of used a little backup from you guys, you know? What if these guys had got nasty? Where’s all your guys?’

‘Ain’t you heard? Over watching the big fire, at the Roxy.’

‘The Roxy? Anybody killed?’

‘Naw, they had a full house too, three hundred easy, on account of this big-budget movie. But they all got out I guess the movie was so boring half of them were ready to leave anyway. Nobody even hurt.’

Roderick slunk away like a criminal. On the way home he stopped on a bridge to throw his hat in the river.

‘Please sit down. This won’t take a second.’

The man behind the desk had gleaming silver hair, gold glasses, a healthy tan, a Harris tweed jacket with soft white shirt and quiet knitted tie. He was writing something with a gold pencil on cream laid paper, resting it on a blotter decorated with a sky motif, pale blue with soft white cumulus. The blotter protected the gold-embossed leather top of his desk, which was of some handsome dark wood in some pleasantly vague antique style, with a brass handle or two. It stood in the deep pile of an Aubusson carpet.

The room was so arranged as to carry the eye slowly from one rich, pleasing and innocuous object to another – the paintings by Cuyp and Miro, the geode paperweight, the brass barometer.

The man finally stopped writing. ‘Now then, suppose we start with your name.’

‘Roderick Wood.’

‘Fine. Mind if I call you Roderick? Okay then, Roderick, what seems to be the problem?’

‘Everything, doctor. Everything.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well like last night I was supposed to go to the movies with this girl, at the Roxy. Only she stood me up. And if she hadn’t we and three hundred other people would have burned up in the big fire.’

‘How do you feel about being stood up, Roderick?’

‘Terrible, but – I don’t know. I don’t even know if I can feel. I’m not even real, I’m a robot.’

‘Why do you say that you’re a robot?’

‘Because I am.’

‘You believe you’re a robot?’

‘I am synthetic. Ersatz. Substitute. Artificial. Not genuine. Unnatural. Not born of woman. False. Fake. Counterfeit. Sham.
A simulacrum. Not bona fide. A simulation. An echo, mirror image, shadow, caricature, copy. Pretend. Make-believe. A dummy, an imitation, a guy, an effigy, a likeness, a duplicate.’

‘So you believe you’re not genuine?’

‘Robots seldom are, doctor. And I am certainly a robot. Or if you prefer, an automaton, android, golem, homunculus, steam man, clockwork man, mannequin, doll, marionette, wooden-head, tin man, lay figure, scarecrow, wind-up toy,
robot.’

The doctor picked up his gold pencil, put it down again, and leaned back. ‘All right, but suppose you were not a robot?’

‘But I am.’

‘Tell me a little about your childhood.’

‘What is there to tell? I was a normal healthy robot child, lusted after my mother and killed my father. But through it all, I had no sense of purpose. I still don’t have one.’

‘And you want a sense of purpose?’ When Roderick did not answer, the psychiatrist tapped his gold pencil on the sky blotter for a moment. Then: ‘Do you dream much?’

‘I had a dream last night. I dreamed I was walking down the street naked, with strangers staring. A man playing a tuba came up to me and asked for some rice for his mother. Someone with no face was giving a speech, saying that suffering and death are nothing but zebras eating doughnuts. Suddenly I was frightened; I hid under the stairs until the teacher called us all to our desks and made us draw trees. Then all the furniture started to move and then I was being chased through the snow by a sewing machine. The dentist was trying to stick my feet to a giant can-opener, the fire chief’s teeth were on the floor, don’t ask me why. I was on the doorstep of a strange house, my mother came to the door saying: “This house, with all its luxurious rooms tastefully furnished with elegant appointments (either casual colourful room coordinates with a casual contemporary look, or traditional antiqued items with the accent on classic styling) designed for a graceful, decorator-look life-style is really four nuns eating popcorn on an escalator.” In the next room they were showing a movie of my entire life. I saw a penny on the floor, and when I picked it up I saw another, and when I picked it up I saw another, and when …’

‘Yes, go on.’

‘Then I woke up.’

The psychiatrist looked at his watch. ‘Well I see our time is up. Like to go into this dream with you more in detail next week, Roderick. Okay?’

Roderick was out in the waiting room again when he realized the psychiatrist probably thought the robot talk was all part of a delusion. Why hadn’t he proved he was a robot? Why hadn’t he, say, opened up his chest panel to show his innards? Was he afraid of shocking the doctor? Afraid of seeing the kindly, impartial face suddenly jerk into a mask of fear?

He went back in. ‘Doctor, there’s one thing I ought to tell you –’

‘Please sit down. This won’t take a second.’

The doctor was writing again with his gold pencil on cream laid paper. When he had finished, he turned to Roderick with no recognition. ‘Now then, suppose we start with your name.’

‘You don’t know me?’

‘Do you think I should know you?’

‘Since I just left the room not five minutes ago, yes.’

‘I see.’ After a slight pause, the doctor said, ‘Roderick Wood, this is not your appointment. I must ask you to leave.’

On impulse, Roderick got up and walked around behind the desk. The doctor sat back and looked at him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Just looking.’ Below the hem of the doctor’s rich Harris tweed jacket there were no legs, no chair legs or human legs. There was only a steel pedestal as for a counter-stool, and a thick coaxial cable plugged into the floor. In the middle of the doctor’s back was a small plate:

CAUTION:

Do not remove this plate while psychiatrist
is connected to live power.

KUR INDUSTRIES

‘A robot. You’re a robot.’

The doctor turned to face him. ‘Does that upset you?’

‘It disgusts me.’

‘Next time we must talk about that disgust you feel.’

*

‘We might, for example, mean that Mary Lamb has given birth to a child, a “little Lamb”.’ The lecturer tossed chalk from hand to hand, but gave no other sign of his irritation at seeing a student come creeping in late.
‘Or,
Mary ate a small portion of lamb.
Or,
Mary owned a small lambskin coat. What did Mary have for dinner? Mary had a little lamb. What fur did she own? Mary had a little lamb.’

Roderick took his seat between Idris and Hector. Idris seemed to speak no English, and it was not clear why he was taking a course in Linguistics for Engineers; he spent most of his time at lectures fiddling with a gold-plated pocket calculator. Hector was no more attentive; he spent the time reading dog-eared paperbacks with titles like
Affected Empire
and
Slaves of Momerath,
or feeling his sparse beard for new growth.

‘Or,’
said the lecturer, ‘a tiny twig of Mary’s family tree belonged to the illustrious-Lamb family. In her genetic makeup, Mary had a little Lamb.’

‘The final’s gonna be a bitch,’ Hector whispered. ‘Guess I’ll just have to cut it.’

Roderick replied, ‘Wait a minute. I want to get this down, this is important. I think.’

‘Not if you cut the exam. I can do it without flunking out.’

‘Or,
Mary behaved lambishly. In her personality, Mary had a little lamb.’

‘It can’t be done. Cut the final?’

‘I got a job on the Registration computer,’ Hector said. ‘It’s real easy to get through to the Grades computer and make changes.’ Idris found the Golden Section to be 1.6, roughly. ‘I don’t believe you,’ Roderick whispered. ‘They must have it all checked some way.’

‘Hah. You come around with me after class, I’ll show you.’

‘
Or,
Mary had a slight acquaintance only with the works of Charles Lamb.
Or,
Mary enjoyed a sexual union with a small sheep. Before the sniggering gets out of control, let me add that Mary may well be a sheep herself; the impropriety you were about to savour evaporates.
And
while we are considering Mary a sheep, we may as well consider the obvious case in which Mary lambed; the ewe Mary had a little lamb.’

Idris found the Golden Section to be nearly
1.62,
as the bell rang. Roderick invited him along to see the computer, and he seemed interested.

‘Computer? Very yes!’

‘Idris is keenly interested in numbers,’ Roderick said. ‘You two should probably try to crack the language barrier, you seem to have a lot in common. Why only the other day Idris found a Pythagorean triangle with sides all made of 3s and 6s in some way, let’s see, one side was
6
³
,
one side was 630 and the third side –’

‘Number-crunching,’ said Hector, in the tone of a vegetarian observing a tartare steak on someone’s plate. He led them to Room 1729, Administration building, a large white room fitted with large white cabinets. In the aisles between cabinets, people were plying to and fro with carts loaded with reels of tape. The chums were impressed.

‘Here we are, fellas,’ Hector said with some pride. ‘A real old-time computer nerve centre. Or I could say an old real-time one, hahaha, come on, let me show you my neat console.’ ‘Like an electric organ,’ Roderick said.

Hector sat down and flexed his fingers. ‘People often say that. I just say yes, but this organ plays arpeggios of pure reason, symphonies of Boolean logic, fugues of algebraic wonder.’

‘That’s very good.’

‘I got it from
Slave Lords of Ixathungg,
a real neat book. Oh, but I was gonna show you how to get good grades without working. Now first we gotta connect into the Grades computer, so I use the Dean’s password, which is –’

‘How do you know the Dean’s password?’ ‘Well I just wrote a little piece of program for
this
computer, that says whenever it contacts any
other
computer, it digs out a list of all passwords and users. Then it puts them into a special file only I can get into.’

‘But why can’t somebody else just –?’

‘Anyway, the Dean’s password is LOVELACE, so here goes. See you ask for any subject, you get the whole grade list, all the numerical grades and also all the stastistical stuff, the big numbers they all care about. Stuff like the mean and the standard devaluation and all. Now if you want to change your score, you
can’t just add to it, because that would mess up the big numbers. So all you do is, you trade with somebody who’s got a higher score.’

Roderick said, ‘Wait a minute. If you’re failing, you can’t switch with somebody getting straight As; they’d complain.’

‘No, look, you rank all the scores. Then you just move everybody else down one notch, while you get the straight As. Like this, I got a 48 now, but I want a 92. So the guy that has 92 gets 91, he’s still happy, the guy with 91 now has 90 or 89, and so on, down to the guy that has 49, he now gets my 48. Everybody comes out about the same, only
I
get an A.’

Idris pointed out to them a number that was the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

Roderick said, ‘But it can’t be right to just take a grade you haven’t earned. I mean that’s stealing. Or even if it isn’t, a grade like that isn’t worth anything.’

Hector played an arpeggio. New numbers appeared on the screen, serried ranks rolling past as in review. ‘What’s any grade worth, man? Ask Id here, what’s any
number
worth? If you graduate and get a job they pay you in a dollar that’s worth maybe a nickle, but that doesn’t matter, dollars and nickles are just numbers too, 100 or 5, just numbers.’