Venus on the Half-Shell (15 page)

“It’s one of my talents.”

“Is everybody on Zelpst as talented as you?”

“Not everybody.”

“I’d sure like to go there.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said.

Simon took the banjo from her, but before he could ask her more, she said, “I’ll have supper in a minute.”

Simon smelled the food when she opened the radar oven, and he became ecstatic. He was getting fed up with chop suey and egg foo young and sour-sweet pork, and he was too soft-hearted to kill anything for a change of diet unless he’d been starving. And here came Chworktap with a big tray of hamburgers, french fries, milkshakes, ketchup, mustard, and dill pickles!

When he had stuffed his stomach and had lit up a big cigar, he asked her how she had performed this miracle.

“You told me what food you liked best. Don’t you remember my asking you how it was made?”

“I do.”

“I went out and shot one of those wild cows,” she said. “After I’d butchered it and put the extra in the freezer, I scouted around until I found some plants like potatoes. And I found others to make ketchup and mustard from. I found a plant like a cucumber and fixed it up. I have an extensive knowledge of chemistry, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” he said, shaking his head.

“I found chocolate in the pantry and instant milk. I mixed some chemicals with these to make ice cream and chocolate sauce.”

“Fabulous!” Simon said. “Is there anything else you can do?”

“Oh yes.”

She stood up and unzipped her gown, let it fall to the floor, and sat down on Simon’s lap. Her kiss was soft and hot with a tang of milkshake and ketchup. Simon didn’t have to ask her what it was she also did so well.

Later, when Simon had taken a shower and a doubleheader of rice wine, he said, “I hope you’re not pregnant, Chworktap. I don’t have any contraceptives, and I didn’t think to ask you if you had any.”

“I can’t get pregnant.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Do you want children? You can always adopt one, you know.”

“I don’t have any mother love.”

Simon was puzzled. He said, “How do you know that?”

“I wasn’t programmed for mother love. I’m a robot.”

10

Simon was shocked. He had detected nothing more than the usual amount of lubrication at such moments. There had been nothing of plastic or foam rubber or metal on or in her.

“You look pale, lover?”

“Why so pale?” he said. “I mean, you’re not making a statement of fact but a question. And you look rather pale yourself.”

“It just didn’t occur to me until a moment ago that you might not know,” she said. “As soon as I thought of that, then I had to tell you. I’m programmed to tell the truth. Just as real humans are programmed to tell lies,” she added after a second’s pause.

Would, or could, a robot be malicious or even sarcastic? Yes, if it was programmed to be so. But who would do this? Or why? Someone who wanted to make others uncomfortable or even furious and so had set up certain circuits in his/her robot for just this effect?

But a robot that was emotionally affected? So much so that she—he couldn’t think of Chworktap as an it—would turn pale or blush? Nonsense! But then, what did he know of robots like this? Earth science had not progressed to the point where it could build such a reasonable facsimile. It could, and had, clothed a metal-plastic-electromechanical with artificial protein. But the robot was so jerky in its movements, so transparently a construction, that it wouldn’t have fooled a child. Her planet, Zelpst, must be far advanced indeed.

Could he fall in love with a thing?

He sighed and thought, why not? He loved his banjo. Others, multitudes of others, had full-blown passions for cars, model airplanes, hi-fi’s, rare books, and bicycle seats.

But Chworktap was definitely a human being, and surely there was a difference between love for a woman and love for antique furniture.

“I’m basically a protein robot,” Chworktap said. “I’ve got some tiny circuit boards here and there along with some atomic energy units and capacitors. But mostly I’m flesh and blood, just like you. The difference is that you were made by accident and I was designed by a board of scientists. Like it or not, you had to take whatever genes—good or rotten—your parents passed on to you. My genes were carefully selected from a hundred models, and then they were put together in the laboratory. The artificial ovum and sperm were placed in a tube, the sperm then united with the ovum, and I spent my nine months in the tube.”

“Then we have at least that in common,” Simon said. “My mother, the selfish old bitch, didn’t want to bother carrying me around.”

“The human Zelpstians spend their first nine months in tubes, too,” she said. “The ova and sperms are mailed in by the adults, and the Population Control Bureau, which is run by robots, uses them to start a baby whenever an adult dies. At the same time, a hundred robot babies are started. These are raised as companions and servants for the human baby. They’re also socially programmed to admire and love their human master. And the only adults the human child sees are robots which act as surrogate parents.”

Zelpst was dedicated to furnishing all humans with all the comforts of its splendid technology. Even more important, every human was spared the pains and frustrations which Earthmen assumed were inevitable. The only things denied the human child were those which might endanger him. When a human reached puberty, he/she was given a castle in which he/she lived the rest of his/her life. The Zelpstian was surrounded by every material comfort and by a hundred robots. These looked and acted just like humans except they were unable to hurt the owner’s feelings. And they behaved exactly as the owner wanted them to behave. They were programmed to be the people the lord/lady of the castle wanted to associate with.

“My master, Zappo, liked brilliant witty conversation,” she said. “So we were all brilliant and witty. But he didn’t like us to top his wit. So every time we thought of a one-upman remark, it was routed to a deadend circuit board in us. The male robots were all impotent because Zappo didn’t want anybody except himself fucking the female robots. Every time they thought about getting a hard-on, the impulse would be rerouted through a circuit board and converted into an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. And every time we thought about punching Zappo, and believe me, we thought about it a lot, the impulse was also converted into shame and guilt. And a splitting headache.”

“Then you all had self-consciousness and free will?” Simon said. “Why didn’t the programmers just eliminate that in the robots?”

“Anything that has a brain complex enough to use language in a witty or creative manner has to have self-consciousness and free will,” Chworktap said. “There’s no getting away from it. Anything, even a machine composed solely of silicon and metal parts and electrical wires, anything that uses language like a human is human.”

“Good God!” Simon said. “You robots must’ve suffered terribly from frustration! Didn’t any of you ever break down?”

“Yes, but our bad thoughts were all rerouted back into our selves. This was done so that we wouldn’t harm our master. Every once in a while, a robot would commit suicide. When that happened, the master would just order another one. Sometimes, he got tired of a particular robot and would kill it. Zappo was a sadistic bastard, anyway.”

“I would have thought that anybody raised with nothing but love and kindness and admiration would grow up to be a kind and loving person.”

“It doesn’t always work out that way,” she said. “Humans are programmed by their genes. They’re also programmed to some extent by their environment. But it’s the genes that determine how they’re going to react to the environment.”

“I know,” Simon said. “Some people are born aggressive, and others are passive all their lives. A kid can be raised in a Catholic family, and his brothers and sisters will remain devout Catholics all their life. But he becomes a raving atheist or joins a Baptist church. Or a Jew forsakes the religion of his fathers but still gets sick at the thought of eating ham. Or a Moslem believes in the Koran one hundred percent, but he has to fight a secret craving for pork. The dietary genes control this.”

“Something like that,” Chworktap said. “Though it isn’t that simple. Anyway, no matter how carefully the Zelpst society was designed to prevent unhappiness and frustration for the humans, it wasn’t one hundred percent efficient. There’s always a flaw, you know. Zappo got unhappy because his robots didn’t love him for himself. He was always asking us, ‘Do you love me?’, and we’d always reply, ‘You’re the only one I love, revered master.’ And then he’d get red in the face and say, ‘You brainless machine, you can’t say anything else but! What I want to know is, if I took the reroute circuits out, would you still say you love me?’ And we’d say, ‘Sure thing, master.’ And he’d get even more angry, and he’d scream, ‘But do you
really
love me?’ And sometimes he’d beat us. And we’d take it, we weren’t programmed to resist, and he’d scream, ‘Why don’t you fight back!’

“Sometimes I felt sorry for him, but I couldn’t even tell him that. To feel sorry for him was to demean him, and any demeaning thought was routed to the devoicing circuit.

“Zappo knew that when he made love to me I enjoyed it. He did not want a masturbating machine, so he’d specified that all his robots, male or female, would respond fully. Whether we were being screwed by him, blowing him, or being buggered, we had intense orgasms. He knew that our cries of ecstasy weren’t faked. But there was no way for even the scientists to ensure that we would love him. And even if they could have made us automatically fall in love with him, Zappo wouldn’t have been satisfied. He wanted us to love him by our own free choice, to love him just because he was lovable. But he didn’t dare to have the inhibiting circuits removed, because then, if we’d said we didn’t love him, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it.

“So he was in a hell of a situation.”

“You all were,” Simon said.

“Yes. Zappo often said that everybody in the castle, including himself, was a robot. We’d been purposely made robots, but chance had made him one. His parents’ ovum and spermatozoon had determined his virtues and his vices. He did not have any more free will than we did.”

Simon picked up his banjo, tuned it, and then said, “Bruga put the whole philosophical question in a single poem. He called it
Aphrodite and the Philosophers.
I’ll sing it for you.”

The world we see, said Socrates,

Is only shadows, a crock, a tease.

Young Leibniz said we all are monads.

He lacked connection with his gonads.

Old Kant did run his life by clock.

Tick Tock! He lacked, alas, a cock.

Nor knew that his Imperative

Was horse’s laughter up a sleeve.

If Cleo’s nose had been too short?

If Papa Pharaoh’d named her Mort?

Would then have risen Caesar’s bone?

Or did it have a will its own?

It swelled, we know, at sight of Brutus.

He’d shove his horn up all to toot us.

Imperator, he’d screw the world.

The hole’s the thing, if boyed or girled.

Some say that love is Cupid’s arrow.

For this defense, call Clarence Darrow.

Envoi

Our Lady of Our Love’s Afflatus,

Unveil the All, and please don’t freight us

Sans paddle up the amorous creek,

Unknowing if by will or freak

Of circumstances our loves’ll mate us.

All flappers think they’ve picked their sheik

With perfect freedom in their choice.

In this have they as little voice

As chickens swallowed by a geek

“That’s just a list of question-beggers,” she said. “Bruga was like you, a man driven by his peculiar complex of genes to look for answers that didn’t exist.”

“Maybe,” Simon said. “So how do you explain how you, a nonfree-will robot, got away from your master?”

“It was an accident. Zappo struck me on the head with a vase during a fit of rage. The blow knocked me out, but when I woke up, I found that I was able to disobey him. The blow had knocked the master circuit out of commission. Of course, I didn’t let him know that. When I got the chance, I stole a spaceship. The Zelpstians quit space travel a long time ago, but there were still some ships gathering dust in museums nobody visited anymore. I wandered around for a while and then I came across this planet. There weren’t any human beings here, or so I thought. I was going to stay here forever. But I did get lonely. I’m glad you came along.”