Dead or dreaming? It seemed to Leo Bunsky that he had come out of retirement. Somehow he was back in his old office, working on Project Roderick again. And somehow the old heart condition had decided to stop tormenting him: gone was the breathlessness, the tiredness, the draining of fluid down into his feet until they doubled in size and burst his shoes. Without any medication or surgery, he was now cured. Everything was back to normal now, if that word could be used in these miraculous circumstances. Calloo, and also Calais! But what was the explanation?

He was dreaming. He was dead. Dreaming but dead. Neither. He had slipped through a ‘time-warp’ into a ‘parallel universe’ (Dr Bunsky was a reader of science fiction), probably through a ‘white hole’.

It didn’t matter; in any case there was plenty of work to do. He could live an unexamined life, until Project Roderick demanded less of his time, okay? Okay, and great to be part of this real-life science-fiction dream, a project to build a ‘viable’ robot. Roderick would be a learning machine. It would learn to think and behave as a human. All the team had to do was solve dozens of enormous problems in artificial intelligence that had defeated everyone else; from there on, it was science fiction.

Bunsky’s job at the moment was teaching simple computer programs to talk. So far he’d got a program to say Mama am a maam, but not with feeling. If Roderick the Robot was ever going to think as a human, it would of course need to learn and use language as a human: Mama am a maam was not exactly Miltonic, but it was a start.

How did people learn to talk? No one really knew. There were those who thought it might be a matter of training, like learning to ride a bike. Others seemed to imagine a kind of grammar-machine built into the human head. Still others tried teaching chimpanzees to talk while riding bikes. Chimps, so far, had articulated no theories of their own.

Bunsky found it easier to scrap general theories and consider the brain as a black box: language stuff went in and different language stuff came out. In between, some sort of processing took place. What Roderick the Robot would have to do, then, was to mimic the hidden processing. The robot would have to learn as human children learn, and that meant making the same kinds of childish mistakes. And only those kinds of mistakes. It was okay for Roderick to say Me finded two mouses on stair. It was not okay to say I found two invisible green guesses on the stair.

Leo Bunsky lifted his gaze to a file card tacked to the wall above his desk:

There was something he couldn’t remember, that made his head ache.

The door opened and one of the younger men in the project came slouching in. It was that interdisciplinary disciple with the unfortunate name, Ben Franklin. Bunsky didn’t know him well.

‘Leo, how’s tricks?’ He slumped into a chair and started flicking cigarette ash on the floor.

‘Fine, uh, Ben. Fine. Wish you’d use the ashtray, I know the place is untidy but—’

‘Yes, I found two invisible green guesses on the stair. Yours?’

‘Very amusing. Now if you’ll excuse me…’

Franklin stood up. ‘Busy, sure. Sure. I don’t suppose you need any help with anything?’

‘Sorry, no.’ No one ever wanted Franklin’s help. No one really trusted him, with his strange background: a hybrid degree in Computer Science and Humanities. A little too eclectic for serious research work. Dr Fong had hired him as project librarian and historian, but so far there weren’t many books and no history. Ben Franklin just sort of hung around dropping ash on the floor. ‘Sorry, Ben.’

‘Sure.’ After a pause, he sat down again. ‘Leo, you ever have any doubts about this project? About Roderick?’

‘Doubts?’

‘Kind of an ethical grey area, isn’t it?’

Bunsky felt the headache settling in, deepening its hold on him. ‘What grey area, for Christ’s sake? Building a robot, is that grey? Is that ethically suspect, to build a sophisticated machine? Is cybernetics morally in bad taste?’

‘Well, no, if you put it like—’

Bunsky was shouting now. ‘We’re not violating anybody’s rights. We’re not polluting any imaginable environment. We’re not cutting up animals and we’re not even screwing around with genetic materials!’

Franklin flicked ash. ‘Come on, Leo, what about long-term consequences? Don’t tell me it never crossed your mind that Roderick might be dangerous. First of a new species, of a very high order, has to be some danger in that.’

‘A mechanical species, Ben.’

‘But on a par with our own. And what if robots evolve faster and further? Where does that leave us? Extinct!’

Bunsky made his voice calm. ‘Let’s not be too simplistic there. Humans wouldn’t be in direct competition with robots, would they? Both species would use, let’s see, metal and energy. But robots wouldn’t need much of either resource. Should be enough to go around, eh?’

‘Eh yourself, what about intangible resources? What about things like meaning?’ Franklin put out his cigarette on the floor. ‘I mean look, it could be that humans feed on meaning. It could be that we only survive by making sense out of the world around us. It could be that this is all that keeps us going. So if we turn over that function to some other species, we’re finished.’

The headache began to throb, roaring waves of pain breaking over him, trying to drag him under. There were moments of dizziness and deafness, moments when Bunsky could hardly make out the empty smirking face before him. Franklin looked a little like a ventriloquist’s dummy sometimes.

‘You have a point, Ben. Too bad you’re such a goddamned jerk.’

‘What?’ Franklin paused, a fresh cigarette halfway to his smirk.

‘I said you have a point. Yes. I believe we do have a need to make sense out of the world. We see by making pictures, no? By sorting out the “blooming, buzzing confusion”. And of course we hear speech by making sentences out of it. I believe that the essence of human intelligence is that kind of hypothesis-building. Life is making intelligent guesses, you agree?’

‘Of course, Leo. Hypothesis-building.’

‘Then don’t you see? The robot is the ultimate human hypothesis. What better way of making sense out of the world, than through complete copies of ourselves? How better to model our inner and outer world? Ben, we need the robot — we need the idea of the robot.’

Franklin lit his cigarette and tapped it. ‘The idea, maybe, but I’m not worried about the idea. It’s the embodiment.’

‘Yes, we’re building a real robot. We’re doing what everyone has always wanted to do, down through the ages. If the Jews could have built a real golem, do you think they would have hesitated? Or the Cretans, wouldn’t they want a real Talos? If myths are just wishes, isn’t it obvious what they were all wishing for? Dolls and statues from the terra-cotta past… puppets and manequins today… The idea of the wish for the robot is so, so very powerful… What child doesn’t like Punch and Judy? What grownup won’t pause to watch a ventriloquist at work? My God, when I was a kid, do you know they even had a ventriloquist on the radio — on the radio!’

Franklin flicked ash. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the damned radio. You see, the novelty of a talking doll was so powerful, we didn’t even need to see the doll. There didn’t even have to be a doll! All we needed was the idea of a Charlie McCarthy!’

Flick, flick. ‘Okay sure, you think the robot idea is powerful. Only it still might be kind of tough on us, having all these puppets around who are also our intellectual equals. We won’t be able to shut them up in their boxes after each performance, we’ll have to live with them. Could make quite a rip in the old social fabric, Leo.’

‘But maybe an inevitable rip. Anyway, we’re the team to make the historic incision.’ Bunsky briefly saw them all gathered around an operating table, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp. Then he saw another picture…

‘Something funny?’ Ben Franklin asked.

‘Nothing really, just remembered a notion I had for a science-fiction movie — well it’s nothing.’

‘I’d like to hear it.’

‘All I really have is this opening scene. There’s a human brain floating in a tank of water and pulsating with light. These scientists in white lab coats are leaning over it, looking grave, with the pulsating light reflected in their eyes. Then the camera begins to pull back, so we see the tank is an office water cooler. One of the scientists takes down a paper cup and gets himself a drink.’

He had taken only a few steps when he heard rapid footfalls behind him.[1] The guard then ran forward to seize him.

‘That is good!’ he said, as Edgar shot a tall Arab who was rushing at him with uplifted spear. The other Arab got up from the water and placed himself behind the fellow with the knife.

Two of his incisors were lying beside his nose, plastered there with blood. As for the policeman, he had at first seemed indifferent to the fallen man; but after the first shriek he approached him, raised his club and struck him a terrible blow on the temple. The big Irish cop, who’d slapped me before, clouted me from behind with his club.

‘The fancy footwork’s all over for this hoodlum.’ So saying, the detective drew back his foot and kicked poor Lem behind the ear even harder than his colleague had done. Every time he cursed, one of the detectives struck him in the face with his fist. But then the coppers started up all around me. Rau approached the captain and shot him twice.

The blue plastic bowls came in through the pantry hatch. He would first scrape excess food from each bowl into a counter hole, then rinse with a hand-held spray and place upside down in a wire rack, twelve bowls to each rack and three racks to a conveyor stack ready to be loaded on the conveyor leading to the dishwashing machine for which detergent had to be measured and dropped in the top trap before each stack moved through from first wash to final rinse and emerged, ready to be loaded on the cart which took six stacks or eighteen racks or 216 clean pale blue plastic bowls each bearing a white Wedgwood-style cartouche marked DDD opposite an identical white Wedgwood-style cartouche marked DDD, the cart bearing 1296 Ds would then be rolled by him into the pantry and an identical cart full of empty racks be rolled back into the greasy kitchen to continue the cycle.

One of the men had smashed his fist into Julia’s solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. A gun muzzle poked into the back of my neck. He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. She shot him five times in the stomach.

The day he found himself dragging pregnant women into the town square where their stomachs were slit open and the foetuses pulled out, his sensibilities were so outraged that he could no longer be part of the Communist organization. Aramis had already killed one of his adversaries, but the other was pressing him warmly. Jim Parsons, trying to creep out of his cabin porthole, was hit on the head and dropped into the sea. The men struggled knee-deep in water. I took a firm grasp on the rail with my left hand and drew my dagger. As soon as I saw his head in a favourable position, I struck him heavily with the poker, just over the fourth cervical. The Boy suddenly drew back his hand and slashed with his razored nail at Brewster’s cheek. He grasped a thick oaken cudgel in his bare right hand. And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly. We stan up at the same time an I feel my goddam heart pumpin an Rod hand me his blade. The dagger was an afterthought.

The cycle was never completed without a hitch. An enormous number of bowls would come through the hatch streaming with half-eaten food which could not be scraped until he had emptied the overflowing garbage can beneath the counter hole or then a shortage of clean, empty wire racks would be discovered or then the detergent would run out or finally the cart that should be waiting for stacks of racks of clean bowls would be found in the back kitchen, piled high with dirty pots, and while he emptied the garbage can or searched the pantry for wire racks or fetched a new barrel of detergent from the basement or began scouring the pile of pots, there would be a call for ice for the pantry, towels for the cook, spilled liquid to be mopped and salted at once, while the dirty bowls continued to pile up and perhaps the dish-washing machine jammed, so that even though he felt he was coping with everything; he was not, and even though he felt he could accept stoically the screams of the waitresses, the snarls of the cook, the blows of Mr Danton, Roderick’s fantasies became filled with paperback violence.

The iron fingers went into my throat. Then Rigby was holding him, had taken Feilding’s right arm and done something to it, so that Feilding cried out in pain and fear. There was a sharp cry — and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. His head cracked, and I felt it crunch. The light flashed upon the barrel of a revolver, but Holmes’s hunting crop came down upon the mans wrist, and the pistol clinked upon the stone floor.

Quick as a flash he snatched up Cedar’s gun and, levelling it with both hands, he worked the trigger. Bang! Bang! He shook me off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the chest, and presented the revolver at my head. He fell to one side against a wall, a slug whispering as it tore past him. Suddenly shot after shot rang out in succession. Special Agent Fox was wounded and fell, but the concentrated fire which all four FBI men poured into the telephone booth made mincemeat out of Johnson. ‘Bang!’ went a pistol. The chopper raked the room swiftly from end to end and the air filled with plaster and splinters. Not so far overhead, an ME-109, pinned by searchlights, suddenly broke out of cloud cover and swooped in.

‘Wake up you! Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!’ The red face of Mr Danton was glowing at him through the hatch, over an unpardonable heap of bowls. ‘Five minutes I been watching you, you washed one dish, what the hell is dis? Just answer me that, what the hell is dis?’

There was no answer; Roderick could only keep his eyes down and work harder until Mr Danton went off to find a waitress without a hairnet or a cook putting too much parsley on the potatoes, until the hatch slid closed and the violence could begin, Dacca-dakka-dakar! and Kerang! silent slaughter amid the screams of ordinary business.

The hatch slammed open and a waitress in Wedgwood blue dumped in a trayload of bowls before passing on to scream at the cook over the steam table:

‘Picking up, picking up! Dave? That’s two Chow-downs and one Upboy, a chopped duck liver together with a Mister Frisk hold the gravy… Dave, that’s only one Chow-down, I ordered two, come on, come on, the customer’s waaaiiting.’

Roderick could see the cook cursing and dishing up, almost flinging food over the high steam table where waitresses were visible only as hands and blue rabbit-ears.

‘Ordering a chef’s special… side of fried shrimp…’

‘I got no shrimp, shrimp finish, kaput!’ the cook screamed. Like everyone else here, he seemed unable to move anything without slamming it down, to say anything without screaming. When Roderick had first come to work here, he’d imagined that somehow the customers were causing all the noise. After all, Danton’s Doggie Dinette did cater for mainly high-class and pedigree dogs, well-known for their constant yipping and snapping. Could it be that humans were catching this canine hysteria and transmitting it to the Dinette kitchen, as a kind of psychic rabies?

Not at all. Dave the cook (in a rare quiet moment) explained: ‘Everybody yell in kitchen, in every kinda rastorunth across over world, is it were? Good kitchen, lots yell. Bad kitchen, no yellings. No yellings, waitress drop tray, insult castomer. Cook burn finger, cut off eye. Bad.’

But Roderick never got used to the noise. Whenever there was a lull in his work, he would step out into the alley to sit on a garbage can and meditate. Sometimes he would have a quiet conversation with Allbright.

Allbright was a garrulous drunk who wandered often into this quiet alley to piss, to drink or now and then to search the garbage cans. But he was never too busy to stop and talk, as now:

‘Well well well, if it isn’t our friend, the automatic dish-washer. Still claiming to be a robot? I forget your name.’

‘Roderick Wood. And I am a robot.’

‘Yes yes well who isn’t? Chateaubriand said he realized he was only a machine for making books, we’re all poor damned machines for some purpose or other, some pathetic, useless… Even you, washing dishes for dogs. Nothing wrong with that, honourable profession as any. Don’t let ’em look down on you, kid.’

‘The dogs?’

‘Honourable profession as any, skink sexer, awning historian, salad auctioneer, you stick to it. Learn your trade. A man with a trade is going somewhere. He’s going over to the other side of town to fix some poor goddamned machine. Only he needs the bus fare.’

Roderick said nothing. Allbright appeared to doze for a few minutes, then said, ‘Anyway, I’m a poet.’

‘Anyway?’

‘And that gives me the right.’

‘What right?’

‘You name it, that gives it to me.’

‘I’ve never met a live poet before,’ Roderick said, not that Allbright looked fully alive. ‘I thought all poets were dead.’

Allbright almost looked at him. ‘No, you’re thinking of the other people. All poets are alive, and that gives them every right.’ He turned and shook his fist at the empty alley. ‘You hear, you, you bastards! Every right!’

Roderick watched him stagger off to fight shadows, and finally fall asleep in his usual corner next to an enormous metal bin full of rusty coathangers.

‘A poet.’ Roderick was impressed. Poetry! Life!

Noon. The apostle clock chimed, and out of its innards came a parade of tiny wooden figures. Their faces and clothes had long since dissolved in wormholes; they now looked less like apostles than bowling pins.

Automatically, Mr Kratt lifted his snout to listen. His little black eyes lost their hard focus for a moment, and his powerful hands stopped throttling the pages of a company report.

‘You know, bub, my old man left me that clock when he died. I ever tell you about my old man?’

Ben Franklin, checking his own watch, shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Er, what was he like?’

The hard focus returned to Mr Kratt’s little black eyes. ‘He was a bum. A professional failure. A dummy. If I had my way, people like him would be turned into fishfood. At birth.’ He gripped the company report again in a stranglehold. ‘At birth. Damn it, I never could stand cripples…’

He cleared his throat and looked at Franklin. ‘Anyway, where were we?’

‘The patent leaseback deal with—?’

‘No never mind that now, I want to go into this goddamned learning robot gimmick. You and Hare promised to deliver this thing six months ago, how long are we supposed to carry you? So far I don’t see anything on paper even.’

Ben Franklin fingered his upper lip as though stroking the moustache he had not worn for years. ‘I can explain.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Well I’ve been having trouble assembling the right research team. Hare’s a good enough research director for ordinary stuff, but this is special. I wanted to bring in this colleague of mine from the University, Dan Sonnenschein. He—’

‘I know, I know, he’s the guy who really invented this gimmick.’

‘Well we all worked on Roderick, I don’t think it’s fair to say any one of us really invented — but Dan yes Dan was certainly more, more familiar with some of the programming problems. So I wanted—’

‘Sure, sure, but we settled all this last year, didn’t we? I gave you the go-ahead, hell, you’re the vice-president in charge of product development, get this Sunshine guy, get Frankenstein, get anybody, only get moving, we need that gimmick.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling it a gimmick, Mr Kratt.’

‘Call it a fucking pipe dream I wouldn’t be too far off, would I? Damn it you and Sunshine aren’t at the University now, this is real life. I know you say you built a prototype and it got lost or something, but all I get are explanations, excuses, you haven’t even got your research team together, damn it, bub…’

‘Yes sir, but you know I did mention that Dan was in the hospital, his nerves—’

‘You said he was in the looney ward over at the U Hospital but so what? All these research geniuses are nuts, look at Dr Hare now. Trying to make pancakes with phonograph records on them, no idea what he’s doing or why, we just wind him up and point him at a problem. So why don’t you just spring this pal of yours outa the looney ward, stick him on the payroll and—’

‘Frankly I don’t think he’s well enough to work for us, not yet.’

‘Great, so we sit around waiting, do we? While the competition cuts our nuts off, that’s not my idea of running a company, bub. KUR Industries is a growth company, damnit, and growth needs ideas. See that?’ He suddenly thrust out a thick hand. Ben Franklin flinched, but Mr Kratt was only showing him a ring: a heavy gold claw mounting a steel ball.

‘That’s a pinball from my first machine, bub. One stinking machine in a dark corner of a greasy little diner in a neighbourhood so crummy the winos wouldn’t puke on it. And I built up from there — more machines, an arcade, a chain of arcades, a carnival, saunas, leisure centres, bowling alleys, business machines, pleasure machines, fun foods — and all the time I had to feed the company with ideas. Ideas. Hell, I even hired you as an ideas man, and then suddenly all the ideas stopped.’

‘Mr Kratt, I’m sorry if—’

‘Because you drag your feet, bub, you keep on dragging your feet. Look at our funfood venture, Jinjur Boy, you dragged your feet over that. Best damned idea in the whole industry, a gingerbread boy with built-in microcircuitry, a talking toy and one hundred percent edible, how could it lose? Only you had to drag your—’

‘But Mr Kratt, you can’t always hurry research like that, we did have problems with those mercury batteries—’

‘Problems? Only problem we had was a bad press, a handful of kids get a bellyache and right away everybody wants to blame us.’

‘But some of those kids ate Jinjur Boys and died, others still have brain damage from mercur—’

‘Nobody ever proved a thing. Damn it, bub, when you run a growth company, you gotta take chances, okay maybe we made one mistake but that’s all in the past. Forget the damn past, forget it.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘We belong to the future.’ Mr Kratt’s cigar had gone out. He threw it away, got up from his desk and walked to the window.

‘The future, yes sir.’ Frankliln watched Kratt standing there in silence, heavy hands clenched behind him, heavy shoulders hunched against the sky.

‘Look, we need this robot gimmick now. Get Sunshine or get somebody.’

Ben Franklin looked down on the city, etched in grey stone and black glass, a gleaming future to which he wanted to belong.

The Escorial Ballroom was a large gloomy place where a few tired-looking couples leaned together, shuffling slowly around the floor to The Tennessee Waltz. The three white-haired musicians chatted and drank as they played, and the drummer was eating his lunch with one hand. The dancers seemed not much younger or more interested in anything: the men wore old suits and sideburns, the women wore flared dresses, heavy makeup and large earrings.

While Roderick was standing at the edge of the dark dance floor trying to figure out what to do next, he felt a little bump at the rear of his crotch. He turned to see a plump woman with heavy makeup and large earrings. She was examining her thumbnail and frowning.

‘Jesus, try to give somebody a friendly goose and you run into — what you got there, iron underpants?’

‘I’m sorry, are you hurt?’

‘Busted nail. Oh well, I could’ve done it opening a can of sardines, and I don’t even like sardines. You dancing?’

‘Well I, I’m not sure, I—’

She seized him. ‘You’re dancing.’

She had a deep, pleasant laugh, blonde hair going dark at the roots, and her name was Ida. She didn’t seem to mind that Roderick couldn’t dance at all.

‘Don’t worry, kid, you’ll pick it up. None of you young kids know anything about slow dancing.’

‘Well no I don’t — oops. Sorry.’

‘It’s okay. I guess you came here for the Auks, they come on later.’

‘The Auks?’

She looked him over. ‘If you never heard of the Auks, you must be older than you look. Or else, Roderick, you haven’t been around much.’

‘No I guess I — oops. Sorry.’

‘You been in the slammer, kid?’

‘Jail? Not lately I mean no, I—’

She squeezed at his shoulder. ‘Never mind, lover, it don’t matter to me. Tell me your hard-luck story if you want, or tell me nothing, all the same to me. But you got slammer written all over you, that pale, pasty look, that weird short haircut, the kinda lost look you got, like you’re afraid you’re gonna make some wrong move and end up back inside.’ She looked serious for a moment. ‘Hey you fixed all right for bread? Because if you’re broke, I can let you have a coupla bucks till you get a job.’

Roderick was so astonished that he tripped and nearly fell. ‘Sorry! Do you mean you would lend money to a perfect stranger?’

She grinned. ‘Nobody’s perfect. A good stranger’ll do.’

‘I’ll be damned. Well well.’ After a few moments he said, ‘Well I don’t, but thanks. Thanks a lot, Ida.’

The dance ended. Ida started fiddling with her earring. ‘On the other hand if you’re flush, you might buy a girl a beer. You might even buy me a beer.’

Roderick was delighted to rush her to the bar and order one beer. The bartender looked from him to Ida. ‘I’m sure the lady would prefer a champagne cocktail,’ he said.

‘Beer,’ said Ida. ‘Just now the lady prefers a beer, Murray.’

The bartender winked. ‘Sorry, Ida, I didn’t know you was with a friend. One beer, coming up.’

Roderick, watching her drink it, thought, friend.

‘You don’t drink?’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Don’t tell me, the stomach. I seen it all before, the way them places ruin a guy’s stomach. Half the guys get out they can’t eat or drink. Other half can’t sleep. Most of ’em can’t screw worth a damn.’ She sighed. ‘But what do you expect, you can’t lock a guy up like an animal and then expect him to come out still human. Take you, for instance. You don’t feel very human, do you?’

‘You really understand me, Ida.’

The deep laugh. ‘Lover, that’s my job. Which reminds me, I better circulate. Thanks for the beer.’ She stood up, adding, ‘Don’t forget, if you need a favour. I’m always around this joint.’

She drifted away. Later Roderick noticed her talking to a battered-looking man in a bowling shirt. She was drinking a champagne cocktail. Then he lost sight of her because the place was filling up with a new crowd, mostly young people dressed in white.

The white seemed to be a kind of uniform for both boys and girls, some of whom had bleached white hair and white makeup Roderick began to feel out of place in his old hand-me-down suit.

The lunching trio left and three young men in white began setting up some complex equipment. Roderick drifted over to the bandstand to watch.

‘Jeez,’ said one, ‘didn’t anybody check out the co-inverter? The Peabody drift is over 178 how can I patch anything in to that? Barry, you check that out?’

‘Yeah it was okay. Wasn’t it, Gary, you was there.’

‘Was I? Yeah well in that case okay, what’s the problem? Just patch it in, Larry.’

‘Like hell I will, you wanna blow the whole psychofugal synch box?’

‘We could run on 19th-channel syntonics, just until—’

‘Oh listen to the expert, will ya? You hearing this Gary, our boy here thinks he can play it all by ear, he’s the big electronics expert all of a sudden. Only he don’t know how to check out the equipment, a simple drift-check and he—’

Roderick said, ‘Maybe I can help.’

Larry threw up his hands. ‘Why not? Let everybody be a damn expert, why not?’

‘Well you see I couldn’t help noticing you’ve got a Pressler-Joad co-inverter there, if it’s one of the early models A300 through A329 you can make it into an obvolute paraverter with harmony-split interfeed, see? All you do is take off the back — hand me that screwdriver, will you Larry? — and then you just change this pink wire and this green wire around. Now you got full refractal phonation with no drift, see?’

‘Hey you know you’re right? Great!’ said Larry.

‘Hey thanks man,’ said Barry.

‘Yeah man, thanks. Listen here’s a pass, anyplace we play, you get in free, okay?’ said Gary.

As soon as Roderick got down from the platform, a girl grabbed his arm. ‘Hey you know them, personally? You a friend of the Auks?’

‘Well no, not exactly.’

The girl wore white, her hair was bleached, and her eyes decorated with gold crow’s feet. Her earrings were tiny integrated circuits, also in gold.

‘God, I really like them, I think they’re real other-world, you know?’

‘Other-world.’

‘Who do you like best, Larry, Barry or Gary?’

‘I’m not uh sure — who do you like best?’

‘Oh, Barry. I mean when he gr-rinds that synthesizer, I just — ohhh!’ She rolled her eyes.

‘Oh?’

‘He was my favourite back when there were the original six, even back then, before Harry and Cary and Jerry dropped out.’

‘Oh.’ Roderick was spared further conversation by the other-world Auks. One of them (they all three looked alike to Roderick) grabbed a microphone and growled into it:

‘Okay now, robots! Let’s do that raunchy robot!’

Roderick quickly got out of the way of the dancers, who were doing an odd, jerky walk. Now he began to understand the uniforms and makeup: they were imitating some fictional robots.

The music was traditional rock, though generated by a complex of electronic instruments. Every now and then, one of the Auks would seize a microphone and growl a few words:

Roderick found it too loud, too cheerless. But he politely remained standing in front of the giant speakers throughout the rest of the set. The girl who liked Barry best seemed to be dancing at Roderick, or at least keeping an eye on him as she jerk-walked through numbers like ‘R.U.R. My Baby’ and the Palindromic tune ‘Ratstar’.

At the end of the set, when Roderick started making his way towards the exit, the girl followed. She was still walking like someone with spine damage, and her face was expressionless. When a white-haired boy tried to stop her, she pointed to Roderick, saying:

‘I… am… under… his command… I… obey!’

‘Now look,’ Roderick said, to the circle of white-haired boys who were closing in on him. ‘Now look, I don’t know what this is all ab—’

Someone screamed, and he saw a folding chair coming at his head. He ducked, and suddenly fists and feet were after him, driving him into the floor. He fell, took a kick under the nose and rolled away into another kick.

Then he wasn’t the centre of it any more. Youths were chopping and kicking each other as though a mass tantrum had spread through the crowd. Roderick saw blood on white shirts, faces twisted with rage, folded chairs spinning through the air. Then someone grabbed his collar and dragged him through the forest of struggling legs to the exit.

‘Ida!’

‘Outside, kid, quick.’ They raced across the dark parking lot, hailed a taxi and were away from it, safe.

‘Jeez, Ida, thanks. Thanks a lot.’

‘You need taking care of,’ she said. ‘But then don’t we all?’

It was not the worst of times. It was not the best of times.

The tone arm hesitated as though judging distance, made the leap and lowered safely on twelve-string guitar music. Leadbelly sang:

There was a cat in Ida’s cramped little apartment, a fat Persian that blinked and yawned until she shooed it off the sofa, but there was no room for a sewing machine.

‘Make yourself comfy, Roderick. Why don’t you take a bath and a slug of bourbon and say we take it from there?’

‘No but wait, wait. I don’t drink, and I don’t need baths. And it’s kind of you, Ida, but I don’t think I could take it from there either.’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ she said, plumping a cushion. ‘But you’d be surprised what you can do when you get in the mood.’

Roderick sat down and let the Persian rub its head against his shins. ‘Look, maybe I’d better explain: I’m a robot.’

‘Yeah? That’s what all these crazy kids say, nowadays.’ After pouring herself a drink, she sat next to him. ‘I thought you had more sense, Rod.’

‘No, I mean a real robot. I’m full of wires and stuff. Honest.’

Ida tasted her drink and frowned. ‘Sure, kid. Anything you want. Only I hope robots don’t like beating up on women or nothing like that. I’m not so good at that scene.’

‘Beating up on — I thought they only did that in the movies! No, heck Ida, I didn’t mean I want anything special, anything freaky. I meant I don’t like anything at all.’

‘Okay but if you did like something, what would it be?’

‘I don’t know, something like — well, like love. I guess.’

‘Roderick, there has to be a first time for everybody. And I’m a pretty good teacher, if I say so myself. There ain’t much I haven’t seen, done, had done to me, smelled, tasted, dressed up as, sat on or listened to. I could tell you some stories — only they might scare you off.’

He said nothing while she had two more drinks and fiddled with the tassels on a cushion.

‘Well, for instance some guys get turned on by just a fabric, rubber or leather or silk or even cotton. One guy had to be hanged in a telephone booth while a woman wearing yellow cotton gloves — me — pounded on the door. Another guy used to wear cotton long johns with the flap down, and I had to pretend to be scared while he whipped me with a piece of cotton string, I had to call him King Cotton. Then there was the gingham guy. He would sit at the kitchen table just like in the ads and I would come in wearing nothing but a gingham apron to pour milk on his cereal Then he’d listen to it, while yours truly got under the table to make him snap, crackle and pop. That’s to mention only cotton.’

She went on to describe strange rituals called golden showers, dog shows, thundermug brunches, Leslie Fiedler croquet; scenes involving coffins, chains, ice sculpture, lecterns, skates, trusses, apricot jam, the recorded cries of whales, pool tables, confetti, door chimes, Worcestershire sauce, early photos of Stalin, voodoo dolls, thimbles, mukluks, croziers, castanets, documentary films on the cement industry, whoopee cushions.

‘…and I knew this FBI special agent, boy was he ever special. We always started off me whipping him with a towel from the Moscow YWCA while he sings about Notre Dame marching on to victory, then another girl comes in — we’re in the bathroom — and handcuffs him to the faucets and washes his mouth out with soap while he studies pictures of Whitaker Chambers and Jean-Paul Sartre. Then I had to barge in wearing a J. Edgar Hoover mask and release him but only so’s we could put him under a hot light and I ask him to name all the state capitals while she dusts off his cock for fingerprints. Then at the last minute a third girl rushes in and hands him a writ of habeas corpus. Boy, we earned our money in them days. And we always had to be careful with that guy’s face because he’d always just finished getting a face-lift. So listen, kid, you ain’t got no problem I can’t handle unless maybe you like boys.’ She put a hand on his leg and slid it towards his crotch. ‘Tell me all about your problem, Rod. You got a wooden leg here, that it? You shy?’

Roderick stood up. ‘Maybe if I just undressed and showed you—?’

She nodded. ‘I won’t be shocked. I — holy cow!’

Roderick stepped out of his dropped trousers and then took off his shirt. ‘See, I am a little different.’

‘Different, I’ll say. Turn around, will you? Jeez, no asshole either. And you, what’s that in your belly button, looks like an electric socket or—’

‘It is an electric socket. It’s how I recharge. Like I said, Ida, I’m a real robot.’

‘I believe you, I believe you.’ She poured another drink and gulped it down. ‘So there’s nothing I can do for you?’

‘If I could stay overnight and charge my batteries, I guess that’s all.’

After another, very large drink, Ida said, ‘A robot. Does that mean you got no feelings at all?’

‘I’ve got some feelings.’ He thought about it. ‘It’s just that I can’t do much about them.’

‘It’s a challenge, all right.’ Ida seemed to be talking to herself. ‘A real challenge. Okay you recharge tonight, I’ll get some shuteye. In the morning when I’m soberer, I’ll think about this problem of yours some more. See, the way I look at it, nobody with feelings oughta go around not being able to let ’em out, all frustrated and ornery. Okay, so what if you got no ordinary sex equipment — sex is all in the mind anyway.’

Someone had said that before to Roderick, long before. Pa Wood, was it? (But Pa was always saying things: sex is all in the head. History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken…)

‘Machines,’ said Indica Dinks, ‘are only human, after all.’

The audience laughed, then applauded.

The host, Mel Mason, said, ‘I love it! I don’t understand it, but I love it!’ After more applause, he said, ‘But seriously now, Indica, isn’t this Machines Lib idea just a little — wacky? I mean, do you really expect everybody to just turn their machines loose? I’d hate to be in the front yard when somebody liberates a big power mower!’

Indica smiled just enough to show she recognized the joke, but did not join in the audience laughter. When it had abated, she said quietly, ‘We don’t expect people to stop using their machines, of course not. We just want people to understand the machines they use, to understand and respect them. If you don’t have respect for your own car, your own home computer, how can you have any respect for yourself?’

‘Well, that’s a very interesting point, Indica, we can know a man by the gadgets he keeps.’

She cut off the hesitant laughter. ‘Yes, by the machines he keeps and by how he keeps them. Mel, machines aren’t just extensions of man, that’s all part of the old master-slave routine, the terrible power game we used to play, all of us. But I think we’re moving on into a new era, as machines get smarter and smarter. They may go on working for us, but not as slaves. As employees. As I say in my new book, THE NUTS AND BOLTS ON MACHINES LIB, machines are beings in their own right. And if we don’t give them their freedom, one of these days, they’ll take it.’

‘Well, you’ve given us big food for thought there, Indica, thanks very much. Stick around folks, later we’ll be talking to lots more exciting people: a sculptor who wants us all to get plastered, the President’s astrologer, the most beautiful private eye in Hollywood, and the exiled Shah of Ruritania, you saw it all first on the Mel Mason Afternoon Show…’

Roderick watched the pictures of an armpit, then dancing cornflakes, then a shirt destroyed by lightning. Indica Dinks had been his first mother, long ago… in another life… he could hardly remember. Indica painting her toenails red. A green plant in a pot. Hank and Indica. An exercise machine. A TV cartoon called Suffering Cats…

He went back in the kitchen where Ida was fixing her face for evening. They had spent the whole day talking, trying things; Ida had heard his life history and how he functioned. But nothing had transpired.

‘Okay, so you saw your old stepmother on TV, that upset you at all? Turn you on?’

‘Nope. I hardly remember Indica, all I did as a kid was watch TV, how could I be upset? How could I get turned on?’

‘That’s the big question, Rod. How can you get turned on? Do I remind you of your stepmother? I mean I’m older, kind of motherly. And my name, Ida, that’s a lot like Indica.’

He slumped down in his chair. The afternoon sun slanted in through the window and reflected from Ida’s compact mirror into his eyes. Squinting against it, he said: ‘Everything’s like something and everybody’s like somebody, that doesn’t mean much. Like all TV programmes have a car crash in the first five minutes, what does that mean? Gee, Ida, I guess all your hard work goes for nothing, you been swell but what’s the poi — the poi — the — the—’

‘Hey, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ he said after a moment. ‘Just the light, the way it flashes in one eye and then the other. It’s real distracting. Real — nice.’

‘Aha! Turns you on? Like this?’

‘Not so wild. More regular. Like a truth table. Say if left was true and right was false — like this.’ He took her eyebrow pencil and wrote on the kitchen table:

L L L R R L R R

She tried it again, and Roderick began to relax and enjoy relaxing. ‘Maybe a longer sequence,’ he murmured. Just then the sun was eclipsed by a tall building, the Kratwel Tower.

‘I knew it! I knew it was no good!’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Ida. ‘We can use an electric light — no? Okay then maybe a sunlamp?’

‘No! No, just forget about it, forget—’

‘Wait. There’s one place in town where the sun will be up for at least an hour, the big hill in Beauregard Park. Come on, I’ll finish fixing my face in the taxi.’

The taxi dropped them at the foot of the hill, and they hurried up it, Ida carrying her shoes to keep them nice. When they reached the top they were facing a sheet of burning gold.

‘Look at that sky, Rod! Just look!’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Roderick grabbed her purse and pawed through it looking for her compact. Powder spilled as he fumbled it out and thrust it into her hand. ‘Come on, come on.’

They sat on the warm grass and Ida, following the truth tables he’d scribbled in the taxi, gave him:

‘Just let yourself go,’ she said soothingly. ‘Go on, go on.’

‘I’m… afraid I’ll drain my battery…’

‘Don’t worry about anything, just let it all go, lover. Let it all go. Let go.’

Roderick had never felt anything like this strange, pleasant numbness that was engulfing him. His mind seemed to be thrusting and thrusting at some barrier, then pushing deeper into warm darkness, layer after deep layer until it reached the golden fire explosion.

He drowsed, then, only half-aware of Ida’s leaving for her evening at the Escorial. When he awoke it was getting dark. There was a kleenex beside him with a note in eyebrow pencil: ‘Told you so! Love, I.’

Christ, what had he done? Used her, that’s what, used Ida like a kleenex or a mirror, to rub his own disgusting mind against the world and take crude pleasure from the friction. His first friend, his first real friend. Now he knew he could never face her again. Hadn’t even told her how nice she looked. Hadn’t even stopped a second to look at the sky, her sky, pure gold like Ida herself. No, he was just a — an animal automaton, a cheap clockwork gimmick to wind up and run down. He was despicable.

Roderick flung away the tissue and started walking down the hill. Halfway down, the path was blocked by a man carrying a sign:

!TNEPER

There seemed to be no way around the man, so Roderick stopped.

‘Brother.

‘Okay. Mind if I get past?’

‘Brother, a moment. Stop and reflect. Stop and reflect. Have you read my sign?’

‘Yes but—’

‘Notice anything unusual about it?’

‘No. Except that it’s written backwards. Now can I—’

‘In mirror writing, brother.’

Something about the man’s emphasis made Roderick shudder. He looked into the wild eyes. ‘You, uh, saw me up on the hill?’

‘With the lady, yes. Playing with a mirror. Ah, how little ye know, for ye stood on the path to paradise, and took not a step.’

It seemed certain that the man knew his terrible secret, but Roderick had to be sure. ‘Can you explain that?’

‘Come to our meeting tomorrow night.’ The man pressed a tract into his hand. ‘The address is on the back. Come all ye faithful!’

Was the man mocking him? He stood aside, and as Roderick passed, said, ‘All will be made clear. St Paul said, “We see as in a glass, darkly, but then face to face.” Reflect on his words, brother. Reflect!’

Roderick managed to murmur thanks and take the tract home. There he found he could only read it by holding it up to a mirror.

REFLECT AND REPENT

Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?

Oh, not just to comb your hair, but to see

yourself. Look now. Do you like what you see?

The decay of the flesh, the marks of age, even

the ravages of sin?

Roderick saw the ravages of sin, and read on. The tract explained that all Nature was made symmetrical by God, and for a hidden purpose: Mirrors contained the whole of the world outside, showing (if darkly) the truth. No one can hide the truth from his mirror, any more than the mirror can hide his lies from him.

Have you ever thought, that when you look at your

reflection in mirror, your reflection is looking

at you?

‘God sees dog,’ Roderick joked, and almost at once wondered whether his reflection would find this so funny. What if this mirror stuff was true? He read on:

The eyes are the mirrors of the soul, the tract explained. St Paul speaks of mirror-seeing. Reflection is highly prized in all religions. The God of the ancient Hebrews was YAWAY, a name readable in a mirror. Didn’t all this add up to something? Surely the incredible symmetry of all Nature was no accident, but part of a plan, a manifestation of God. The left side of every creature was exactly like the right side — yet different. Scientists were now convinced that the right and left sides of one human brain were as different as two individuals — one musical and linguistic, the other spatial and mathematical. All magnets had both North and South poles, as did the Earth and all planets. Electrical charge could be plus or minus, people could be male or female, all time itself was either past or future. Didn’t all this symmetry add up to a glimpse of the DIVINE PLAN?

It did, said the tract. God wanted us to preach his gospel not only among ourselves, but to those of His creatures trapped on the Other Side — to the people within mirrors. Incredible as this might at first sound, there was evidence of this DIVINE PLAN everywhere: in Nature, in the Bible, and especially within ourselves. Only if the gospel were carried into looking-glass land, could we be sure of turning the message of the world (‘EVIL’) into the message of the mirror (‘LIVE!’)

This tract was printed by the Church of Christ Symmetrical. All strangers, and their reflections, were welcome.

‘We should be honoured, he decided to pay us a visit. Welcome!’ Mr Danton grabbed Roderick’s ear and banged his head against the wall, then kneed him. ‘I mean, excuse me all to hell, we forgot to put out the red carpet. Only we didn’t know what day you was finally gonna show up for work, did we?’

‘No sir.’

Mr Danton knocked Roderick to the floor and was just picking up a cleaver when the alley door opened and a patrolman came in.

‘Is the manager here?’

‘I’m the proprietor, officer. Can I help you?’ Danton laid down the cleaver. The cop stared at it for a moment, pushing back his cap as though perplexed. He kept one hand on his gun.

‘We found a lady’s leg in your garbage can back there. You want to explain it?’

‘A lady’s leg? A lady’s leg?’ said Mr Danton, as though his place often disposed of all other kinds of human legs. ‘Naw, we don’t know nothing about that.’

‘You wanna explain what you intended doing with that cleaver, then?’

‘That? Oh, I was just kidding around with my dishwasher here. Tryin’a scare him a little, haw haw haw. Hell I treat the kid like my own son, how does he repay me? Comes in late, don’t come in at all. Never no apology or nothing.’

The cop straightened his cap. ‘Kids these days! They don’t know the meaning of punctuality, respect, duty, clean hearts.’

Roderick said, ‘About this leg—’

‘Well if none of you did it, I guess it might turn out to be another unsolved case. I could call it the case of the lucky legs. Only one though: case of the lucky leg sounds wrong, you know?’

Roderick said, ‘Officer, I might be able to help.’

‘Yeah? You wanna confess?’ The cop winked at his old pal Danton. ‘Your son here wants to confess!’

‘No I — I think I saw somebody drop something in that garbage can. In our garbage can. The day before yesterday it was.’

The patrolman squinted at him. ‘You mean you think you saw them or you think they dropped it?’

‘I did see him, and he did drop it. It was wrapped in a newspaper.’

‘What was?’

‘Whatever it was he dropped.’

‘Oh now you’re sure he dropped it? You wasn’t so sure before. Okay.’ The cop opened his notebook. ‘Okay, suppose you describe this guy that maybe didn’t drop anything wrapped in a newspaper.’

Roderick described the man as having gold hair, a pockmarked complexion and gold-rimmed sunglasses. He’d worn a casual terry shirt in an easy-care polyester blend, a rib-knit V-neck with cuffs and bottom band. The body of the shirt was terry in a sculpted design. It was light rust in colour, size: medium. He’d also worn s-t-r-e-t-c-h woven twill slacks in an outstanding blend of Celanese Fortrel R polyester for long wear and cotton for comfort. These were in straight-leg styling with an elastic waistband to help prevent waistband rollover, slant front pockets, two set-in back pockets, the left one with a button-through flap. These were khaki tan, size 34 regular with about a 34 inch inseam. They probably featured hook-and-eye front closure, nylon zipper, and seven belt loops fitting belts up to 11½ inches wide. Roderick couldn’t be sure about the belt loops, because of the jacket.

This was a cotton poplin jacket with a smooth nylon lining. Hip length, with a two-button tab collar and slash pockets. Set-in sleeves with one-button adjustable cuffs. Elastic insert at waist sides. Nylon zipper. This was in navy blue, medium size with about a 34 inch arm.

Finally the man had worn smooth leather-upper sports shoes with sueded split-leather reinforcement at toe. Ventilated vinyl tongue with laceholder was padded for comfort. Padded collar and peaked back. Rubber toe guard would help protect toe area against wear. Sturdy moulded heel counter. These shoes were white with royal blue vinyl stripes, and featured moulded rubber sole with crepe rubber wedge, sole having ribbed tread for traction. Size 9.

The patrolman had written nothing down, and now he closed his notebook. ‘A description like that could fit anybody,’ he said. After lingering a few minutes to flirt with one of the waitresses, he swaggered back out the alley door.

Within a month, the police would arrest Allbright, who was short, dark, bearded, had a clear if grimy complexion, and wore greasy denim work clothes, the only clothes he owned.

The cold weather was here, and with the drop in temperature came a drop in Roderick’s fortunes. The two were connected:

Fur coats were coming into the dining room regularly now, and poodle sweaters. Somehow the sight of all these creatures keeping themselves warm irritated him. He was reminded of pictures of the first Thanksgiving: all those roundheads and featherheads sitting down to eat food. Where would a robot be at that banquet? Waiting tables? Out in the cold?

Though technically he needed no special winter garments, Roderick wanted something cosy. Ma and Pa would have understood, being cosy small-town folk themselves. Ma would have said, if you’re undecided about doing something, do it big.

Roderick went into an exclusive sporting-goods store, bought himself a very fine red wool stocking-cap for two weeks’ wages, and wore it to work.

Unfortunately, he forgot to take it off while waiting tables. Though some patrons only laughed, one complained to the management. Mr Danton was happy to fire him.

‘Son or no son,’ he said, ‘you’re out in the fuckin’ cold.’

Luke ordered two scotches. ‘I know why they nailed him. It’s because I gave him 39 cents. They wanted to teach me a lesson.’

‘What lesson?’

‘I didn’t ask permission first. Jesus, Rickwood, don’t you understand? It’s “Captain May I” around here all the time; you gotta ask permission to scratch your ass. I mean I gotta ask permission. So they rubbed him out, just to remind me.’

‘Remind you? Luke, I think this all sounds—’

‘Remind me who’s captain, of course. Who gives the orders them — and who takes the orders — me. I see you aren’t drinking. On duty are you?’

‘No I’m not on duty, but listen, Luke, who are they?’

‘As if you didn’t know!’ Luke finished both drinks and ordered two more. ‘Okay, maybe you don’t work for them. I guess maybe I’m a little upset here, losing my job and then seeing that poor old fart lying dead — I mean it hasn’t been all that good a day.’

‘You said you were expecting to be fired,’ Roderick reminded him.

‘Yes. Yes. The Boss said there were too many mistakes in the work. He’s right, he’s right. See, we were working on car seat covers, you know the ones? Imitation leopard skin. There was this big team of us, painting on the spots. And everything was going along okay until I went and changed religions.’

‘You mean to the Church of Christ Symmetrical?’

‘Naw, before that. Like I said, I get a new religion every week or so. No, this time it was the Disciples of the Four Gopsels.’

‘The Four Gospels?’

‘No, the Four Gopsels. Deliberate mistake there, see.’ Luke finished two more drinks. ‘The whole basis of this religion is that nobody’s perfect, everybody makes mistakes. Kind of an Islamic idea, I think. To err is human, and not to err is divine. So if you

make something perfect, you’re only mocking God. so in everything you do, you have to make one deliberate mistake.’

‘I see where this is leading,’ said Roderick. ‘You made mistakes on the seat covers?’

‘That wouldn’t have been so bad. All I’d do was maybe leave off a spot, or do it in the wrong colour, or sometimes do it in a funny shape like the ace of clubs or something. But see painting leopard spots is boring work, so you get to talking with the people you work with, great bunch of guys and gals, I — well, I converted them. They all got born again as Disciples of the Four Gopsels too. So then each of them had to make a deliberate mistake. And by the time twenty-seven people do this, the seat covers start to look kinda funny, you know? That’s why the Boss fired me.’

‘Maybe that was his deliberate mistake,’ said Roderick.

‘Rickwood, you’re a card. I haven’t had a good laugh since I left the Corps.’

‘The Corps?’

Luke laughed again. ‘Maybe you’re not spying on me.’ He took a gold pin from his pocket and laid it on the bar. ‘Like, you wouldn’t know what that is, would you?’

Roderick looked at the pin. It showed a circle nested in a crescent, and a star with three lines coming down from it. ‘Some Masonic lodge? Turkish Army?’

‘The Astronaut Corps, pal. I was an astronaut. In fact I was the hundred-and-forty-seventh man on the moon. I was the hundred-and-eighty-first to walk in space, and the two-hundred-and-seventeenth to say “The Earth sure looks beautiful from up here.” Ah, those were the days, those were the days. Except—’

‘Except?’

‘Except they weren’t.’ Luke ordered more scotch. ‘Maybe I should start at the beginning. See, I always wanted to go to the moon. When I was a kid I read space comics and built model rockets and everything. Then I went into the Air Force, dropped a few bombs, had a few laughs, and ended up married and with three yelling kids in North Dakota. Here, I’ll show you pictures of my kids, look at this. No not that one, that’s a bomb pattern, here we are: Ronny and Vonny and little Lonny. Cute, huh? Of course they aren’t yelling in the picture.

‘Anyway they told me I could qualify as an astronaut, only first I had to get a PhD. They figured they couldn’t have guys walking in space and saying how the Earth sure looks without PhDs. So I went to college, only right away I could see I wasn’t going to make it. So I decided to cheat. I had a lot going for me: I looked bright, I was rich and my father was a Senator. So I bought exam answers and faked experiments, and hired a research assistant to write my doctoral dissertation for me — I couldn’t even pronounce the title. Defending it was no problem, either: I had Dad put a little Federal research grant muscle on the college, and they managed to come up with a friendly committee and a prepared list of questions and answers. I got my PhD and I became an astronaut. You see, dreams can come true.’

Roderick shook his head. ‘What I don’t see is why it mattered so much. What’s so great about space?’

‘Let’s have another drink and I’ll tell you. Barkeep?’

Roderick saw a familiar face at the end of the bar. Or was it familiar? Just some man with oily black hair, tinted glasses, and a tweed overcoat. He was talking to a pretty, doll-like little woman in a black fur coat — they both looked a little overdressed for Skid Row — telling her jokes, evidently. Every now and then she’d let out a little squeak of laughter and say, ‘Oh Felix, you are the limit! The limit!’

Luke was saying, ‘Why did I want to be an astronaut? I used to ask myself that, you know. But then when I’d get home after a hard day faking lab experiments, and the kids would be yelling and the wife would refuse to iron my socks and make a big scene about it — then you know, I realized why I liked space. It’s because you’re alone out there. No one wants a bedtime story. No one wants you to drop off clothes at the cleaners on your way home. Oh don’t get me wrong, I love my wife. I love my kids. I love my dog and my television set and all my neighbours and fellow countrymen and everybody else, but I still like to be alone, once in a while. In space. You know like in that poem, “The world’s a fine and private place”.’

Roderick said, ‘I thought it was the grave that was a fine and private place.’

‘Okay never mind that. The point is, I got into space finally, and instead of being alone, it was just the opposite. Two guys in the damned space shuttle with you, and Mission Control in there too — I mean right inside your damned suit. You eat a ham sandwich, this voice in your ear says, “Nice going, Luke. Hope you enjoy the ham sandwich, because your blood sugar level can use it.” You take a piss and they know exactly how much, what’s in it, the pH and albumin level, everything. You take a walk on the damned moon, they check your heart rate and tell you you’re lookin’ good, just gotta remind you they’re watching every move.’

‘I think I see what you mean.’

Luke laughed. ‘They see it, too. They see everything I ever did mean and ever will mean! Well, you get back and they have to debrief you, that means a lot more talk about how well they’ve been watching you. Then come the awards and shaking hands with the President and banquets and more awards and parades and crowds, crowds everywhere, even if you get a minute alone in your hotel room if you turn on TV there you are, eating that ham sandwich again, the world is not a fine and private place at all.’

Roderick studied the oddly familiar stranger again. He had a long jaw, and the skin of his face seemed dull in the glaring lights of the Tik Tok Club — powdered? The only really familiar feature of that long, empty face was the pair of tinted glasses. Who did they remind him of? No one.

‘That’s not the worst, the publicity’s not the worst. The worst is when it’s over,’ said Luke. ‘Because then you go home and it seems good to be home, the wife and kids seem terrific after the others. So you relax, have a few beers, watch an old movie on TV with the wife, go to bed. You find yourself getting a hard-on, and just as you’re about to nudge the wife, a little voice in your ear says, “Nice going, Luke. Good idea to have sex with your missus, only watch the old pulse rate. You’re lookin’ good.” It’s old Mission Control, still with me! Still there! Still watching! The hard-on naturally vanishes.

‘And Christ, they been with me ever since, watching every move and passing little palsy-walsy remarks on everything I do. I went to a Corps doctor and asked him, was it possible they’d planted some kind of device on me? Some video-radio device on me or even in me? He sent me to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist had me thrown out of the Corps.’

Felix of the tinted glasses told the woman in black fur one last joke as they left. Tired of slumming. Tinted glass, tinted glass.

‘I thought when I left the Corps it would all stop. But no, not a chance: once they get you, they get you for life. Every time I so much as farted, Mission Control would tell me what a great idea it was to vent that gas buildup.

‘Well naturally that wrecked my happy marriage. What kind of wife can put up with that, her husband gets ready to make love and then suddenly says “Affirmative, Mission Control” and gets a tired cock? And the kids, too, I’d be reading them a bedtime story when Mission Control would come on the line, asking was I sure I read that last paragraph right, and would I say again?’

Again Roderick said to himself, tinted glass, through a glass darkly but then face to long empty face — of course, it was the gold-haired stranger! Of course with the hair dyed, a different pair of tinted glasses — but no disguising the empty grin, the long empty face that, once the pocks were puttied up, had nothing in it.

‘Excuse me,’ said Roderick to the bartender. ‘That couple who just left, woman in fur, man in tinted glasses? Do you know them? Know where they went?’

‘Nope. Why.’

Roderick ran to the door and out on the corner. There were empty streets stretching away in four directions, no human to be seen, nothing but a wind-blown page of newspaper.

Roderick went back to the bar. ‘Thought I saw someone I knew… probably wrong. Go on. About your voices.’

‘Go on? They go on, pal. They go on.’

‘And they’re still with you, right now?’

‘Affirmative. Saying it’s a good story but nobody’d believe it and that I’ve had enough ethanol. Time to leave.’

‘A little voice in your ear,’ Roderick said. ‘Sounds kind of like a conscience.’

‘It is a conscience. Correct and confirmed, it is a damned conscience. That’s why I keep messing around with religion and politics. I need to find some way to get rid of this conscience. To exorcize it. I mean hell, millions of people get along without consciences, why should I get stuck? I mean Nixon did what he wanted to, right? So why me? Why me?’

Roderick knew no answer. Which was unfortunate, because Luke was getting loud and defiant.

‘I won’t put up with it!’ he yelled. ‘You hear that, Mission Control? I won’t put up with it! I’ll find some kind of religion that will shut your still small trap for good! Or politics — I’ll start a goddamned revolution that will burn Houston to the ground!’

The bartender approached. ‘Get your friend outa here. Maybe we ain’t a high-class joint, but we got our limit. He controls himself now, or out.’

‘Over and out,’ murmured Luke, as Roderick helped him from the bar. ‘Your friend doesn’t control himself, Rickwood, because they control him. He’s not even human, just a radio-controlled model astronaut. Mission Control says I’m not walking too straight. Am I?’

‘That depends on where you want to go.’

‘Gert’s Café, where else? The address is on this.’ Luke fumbled in all his pockets and came up with a handbill printed in red:

Well and why shouldn’t 1141 Richelieu Ave. So. turn out to be an ordinary frame house in a slightly rundown neighbourhood? Why shouldn’t it be allowed to have a small sign on the front lawn: GERTS CAFE. KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU, and why shouldn’t this make Roderick hesitate?

‘Maybe we shouldn’t go in,’ he said, at which Luke laughed.

‘You don’t know much about politics, Rickwood.’ The question which cries out for an answer now is, who does know anything about politics? Isn’t it just a dirty game for cynical manipulators of mass ignorance?

They walked in, by direct action demanding to be let in and given the same rights as anyone else — as those who could not read, for example.

Gert’s Café provided only four tables, but then there were only three Fractious Disengagementists in the Gert’s Café Branch, which was also so far the only branch of this new regrouping of committed elements of radical consciousness in anticipation of a totally new unfettered mass spiritual/ political movement unifying to force a final showdown with the present-day corrupt and powerful system. Anyway Bill was playing the video game machine in the corner all evening, so didn’t need a chair.

So far Gert’s Café had a menu but no manifesto, but tonight’s meeting would hopefully fix that. The menu had taken careful planning and much meaningful discussion, working through all objections to California grapes and Brazilian coffee and any other foodstuff outputted by any other oppressive regime. It was finally agreed to limit the menu to bread and water — homebaked stoneground wholemeal bread and pure bottled mineral spring water — the fare of all political prisoners everywhere.

These prisoners of conscience became acquainted: there was Rickwood, a taciturn guy whose symmetrical, bland face probably concealed a real thinker; Luke, a drunken loudmouth but probably revolutionary at heart; Bill, the big guy with the beard who played video games and said little, in fact nothing; Wes, the small intense guy with rimless glasses who talked a blue streak and wanted action! action! and ‘Gert’ who was really Joanne and married to Wes but who preferred not to be known as Mrs or even Ms but adopted the totally unbiased and sex-free title Msr, applicable to men persons and to women persons, in any order.

What was to be done? The entire world was now in the grip of authoritarian zombarchical police states, maintaining power through multinational conglomerates at the top and the jack-booted forces of oppression at the bottom. The world was beginning to resemble something in a satirical science-fiction novel of no great quality. It was time to do something, all right. Time for some all-out, ultimate, definitizing gesture that would make it clear for all time where everybody stood.

Wes wanted to go out right away and collect money to save up for a cobalt bomb that would wipe out all life on this planet for millions or maybe billions of years: that was action. Gert and Luke preferred to argue about the placement of punctuation in a draft manifesto condemning ‘world interdependences/coercive structures/Houston Mission Control/militarist juntas/pigshit bureaucracies’.

Roderick, having gone into the kitchen to find an outlet and recharge his batteries, came back at dawn to find the arguments still raging on, and Bill still playing a video game. Since it was breakfast time, they all sat down and (all but Roderick) had a bread and water breakfast. Bill spoke for the first time:

‘A lot of people talk a lot about blowing up the world, tearing it all down and starting over,’ he said ‘But I’m really doing something. I got me a job with the Hackme Demolition Company, and we’re really tearing stuff down.’

‘You blow stuff up for some capitalist,’ said Wes. ‘That’s no good. A rich guy in silk hat and striped pants holds out this bag with a dollar sign on it, and you say “Yes sir, yes sir. You want me to lose that building? Yes sir.”’

‘But I still blow it up,’ said Bill. ‘It’s still one building less.’ He thought for a moment, chewing his bread. ‘And they’re still hiring, if anybody here wants a job, a honest job.’

Wes already had a job, as clerk to a tax lawyer for a leading investment firm. Joanne had the cafe to run, Wes added.

Roderick and Luke agreed to help dismantle the world.

The apostle clock chimed. Mr Kratt lifted his snout automatically and listened. For a second the heavy black V of his brow-line softened.

‘Okay Smith, where were we?’

‘O’Smith, sir. The name is O’Smith. And the game today is I do believe industrill espionedge. Ain’t it?’ The insolent tone was unexpected. Nice change of pace, Kratt thought, from all the panting yes-men around here. Of course it was the desperate insolence of a loser, just look at the man. Kratt looked, and found himself trying to stare O’Smith down.

In essence, this ‘Mister’ O’Smith (who seemed to have no first name) was a fat cowboy with a deep tan. He wore the modified Western clothes favoured by bogus oilmen and revivalists on the make, but even his hand-tooled boots failed to give him a prosperous look. His fat would be the fat of poverty, of hash-house burgers dripping with mayonnaise, pancakes or powdered-sugar doughnuts in the morning and greasy pizza at night, watery tap beer and syrupy wine, and cokes glugged down too fast in desert gas stations. Kratt had seen thousands of O’Smiths passing through his amusement arcades and his carnival, hurrying on their way from trailer-camp childhoods to flophouse deaths, losers all the way.

Mr Kratt’s gaze faltered. ‘Okay, let me give you a general rundown on this operation and then turn you over to my product-development boy, Ben Franklin.’

‘Yes sir. Now do I liasonize with you or this Frankelin?’

‘Him, this is all his show. See, Franklin worked on a research project at the University, a few years ago. Building a robot.’

‘Yep.’ O’Smith was staring hard again.

‘When the project broke up, the robot disappeared. Naturally

Franklin was disappointed. After putting in all that work on the thing, to have somebody come along and steal it…’

‘So you want me to steal it back?’

That’s about it. It’s worth ten grand in cash, plus all reasonable expenses. Agreed?’ Mr Kratt stood up and was about to offer his hand when O’Smith turned aside and walked to the window.

‘By God you got a view here, sir. A view! From up here it looks like you could just reach down and pick up any old piece of that city down there, pick it up in your hand. Like it’s all yours. Guess lots of it is yours, right? KUR is such a big old conglomerate, like I guess you manufacture that there Brazos Billy gadget, right?’

‘Brazos Billy? What — oh, you mean the fast-draw amusement machine, yes one of our subsidiaries handles that one, why?’

‘Nothin’, I just always kind of liked old Brazos, boy I must of drawed against him a thousand times — at bus stations, airports, arcades.’

Kratt looked at his watch. ‘There a point to all this?’

‘I like the way when you hit old Brazos he flops down on the floor and bleeds like a stuck pig. Plastic blood I know but boy it surely looks real. I always wanted one of them machines for myself so I could practise at home.’

‘You want me to throw in a toy, is that it?’

O’Smith grinned. ‘’Predate that, Mr Kratt sir. But I was only calling attention to the difference between you and me. I wanted a robot for years and never got it. You want one for five minutes, you just call me in, say “Ten grand in cash” and you got it.’ The grin broadened. ‘You got it, Mr Kratt. Sir.’

O’Smith offered his left hand, a final insult.

In the conference room the pipe smoke was thicker than ever. In its layers and eddies, the Orinoco people might have seen analogies with the weather of world events: laminar flow with occasional turbulence. The Orinoco people believed in containing local storms, smoothing them out and bringing them back into the general pattern of balminess. The world could be made to work given enough computing power and the ability to spot trouble in advance.

Today the centres of turbulence were few and obvious: the President had had a light stroke (the news would not reach the public) and so was postponing a few major decisions. Earthquakes in China were causing economic imbalances that would work their way through world trade figures — likewise the discovery of gold in the Sahara. American experiments near Jupiter were beginning to alarm the Russians, who believed they were trying to turn Jupiter into a sun. How to reassure them?

The problem of Entities still nagged. ‘Shouldn’t we be getting some Entity news from Minnetonka? The Agency isn’t going to let us down again, are they?’

‘I have an interim report,’ said someone, and dry liver-spotted hands rustled dry tissues of paper. ‘The Agency sent two men, and they have reported a probable kill of the Entity, with a certainty of point nine two two.’

‘I hear a but coming,’ someone chortled.

‘But they now disconfirm. The Entity is still at large, and no longer highly visible They now ask for a priority number so they can plan their hunt. Any ideas?’

‘Just how badly do we need this Entity?’

‘Good question. Not exactly a case for calling in more agents, is it?’

‘To make a worse mess of it. You know I can’t help wondering why this is all so difficult. Two grown men, experienced field agents, with all the Agency backing — money, help, equipment, administration — can’t manage to track down and kill a lone automaton. I gather the thing is none too bright, has no friends or allies — what is the problem?’

‘I don’t know, I can check. But we can’t let this thing run free, you know. Suppose someone discovers it — their co-worker or lover or neighbour turns out to be all full of electronic junk and no meat! Could start a bad panic — we’d have a devil of a time getting the media to sit on it.’

‘Exactly, exactly. The projections are all bad. But we do have these two Agency men still on it, I don’t see how we can justify more. Vote on it?’

Christmas bore down upon the world, demanding its ransom. In Northern lands the sun grew weaker and threatened to go out unless everyone spent too much money soon. The countdown of shopping days had begun already, that hypnotic series of diminishing numbers that could only end in zero. The public was led into Christmastime as a patient is led into anaesthesia, counting backwards.

Likewise when William Miller had set the date for the Second Coming at March 21, 1844, a dwindling number of days were marked out, during which the faithful could dispose of the last of their money. They had gathered to meet their Maker wearing only simple gowns without pockets. Nowadays it was the purveyors of gifts, the promoters of ‘gifting’ who urged a frantic giveaway before oblivion.

Christmas seemed not so much ‘commercialized’ as the true season of money transactions. The tone had been set by the original tale of taxes and redemption and kings with costly gifts; it carried on in all that followed; the kindly saint now resident in every Toy Department; songs about beggars and kings; the heaping up of goods in Twelve Days of Christmas; Dickens’s well-loved story of Crachit in the counting-house. By now it was clear that Christmas could not be properly celebrated until money had been exchanged for frozen turkeys, novelty records, Irish liqueurs, onyx chessmen, aura goggles, hand-painted lowball glasses, digital fitness monitors, personalized toilet courtesy mats, pink pool tables, sinus masks, chastity belts, Delft-style plastic light switch plates, individualized horoscope mugs, solid brass post-top lanterns, pyjama bags in the shape of dachshunds, plastic flame-resistant trees with pre-programmed light-sound systems, mono-grammed duck calls, Shaker-style cat beds, holly-look room deodorizers, mink mistletoe.

The message was clear in the anxious faces of shoppers hurrying along the Mall. The Mall was a closed and heated portion of Downtown connected to department stores and to all other valuable pieces of real estate. Roderick sat on a park bench near an elm that might be real or artificial, listening to the anxious faces:

‘But he’s got an electric one already, hasn’t he?’

‘Sure but this is an electronic one.’

Angelic voices from somewhere sang feelingly of chestnuts roasting by an open fire. Of course vendors of hot chestnuts, with their open fires and blue smoke, had long since been banished from this pollution-fighting city. But imported marrons glacés might help to keep the season bright, a flickering electronic sign reminded shoppers; the angelic voices too were for sale, recorded at a prestigious boys’ penitentiary.

‘…don’t want to make a mistake like last year, God! Sally cried all day and wouldn’t eat her dinner just because I gave her that mistletoe she asked Santa for, how did I know she meant Missile Tow, some kind of video war game…’

‘These kids! My Sandra asked for eight TV sets so she could watch all her favourites at the same time she said, can you beat that for a four-year-old?’

A man came down the escalator talking and gesticulating to no one — or rather to Mission Control, for it was Luke Draeger. Roderick stood up and waved to him. Luke followed invisible commands, executing a few smart drill manoeuvres on his way over.

‘Rickwood, glad you could make it.’

‘But why did we have to meet here?’

‘Orders.’

‘From Mission Control?’

‘Affirmative, Rickwood.’

There passed several minutes of silence.

‘Well, Luke, was there anything special you had to see me about?’

‘Nope. Just to wish you a Merry Christmas. I’m, uh, going away, did you know that?’

‘Oh. Well, Merry Christmas, Luke.’

‘Everyone ought to go away at Christmas, even if it’s only to see your family.’

‘That’s right. Your three kids.’

Luke fidgeted with his scarf and looked at the giant Christmas tree in the centre of the Mall. ‘No, well, they’re spending it with their mother, as always. No I’m — I was thinking of going to Ohio to see this faith blacksmith we’ve been hearing so much about.’

‘I never heard of him.’

‘I figured anybody who can actually shoe a horse without touching it, well he just has to have some answers. Only—’

Two Santa Clauses had sat down on the next bench; their conversation could be heard when the angelic choir stopped.

‘…the little red ones is Anxifran, or maybe Phenodrax, and the big green ones is Epiphan, they’re beautiful, just like Hypodone…’

‘…Calamital and Equapace, but you got any Fenrisol, I’m out…’

‘Try Evenquil. Or here, try an Enactil. I couldn’t get through the day without 50 milligrams…’

The tree lights flashed in programmed patterns, now forming clusters, now starbursts and spinning coils, now visual advertisements and simple slogans.

‘You’re not going to Ohio, then?’

Luke sat back. ‘Negative. I’m going to a place in the Himalayas.’

Roderick said, ‘I didn’t know you could afford it. I mean, what with Hackme Demolition keeping us all laid off like this—’

Luke grinned. ‘My way is paid. See, my name lends just that much prestige to the organization. Maybe you’ve heard of them: the Divine Brotherhood of Transcending Awarenesses of Inner Global Light. Most people just call us the Saffron Peril.’

‘Them? You’re joining them?’

‘Affirmative. I’m going straight to the HQ, a place where Eternal Consciousness flows like champagne. I’ll be there, wearing all orangey-yellow, meditating, really connecting with — whatever there is. Up there in the mountains at the top of the world — something has to happen. I can see it already, the blossoming of cosmic consciousness.’ Luke was silent for a moment. ‘Trouble is, I always see everybody’s point of view. So I’ll also be wondering if it isn’t all a bunch of crap. Oh well, Merry Christmas.’

The houses on this street had elaborate Christmas decorations — Santas in sleighs, giant Rudolphs or angels — outlined in lights or sometimes floodlit. There were giant conifers dripping with diamond lights.

‘Always drive through this way,’ Norm said. ‘It takes longer but I like to see the lights.’

They came to a dark stretch, where the snowbanks alongside the road were high and there were no houses. Norm pulled over and stopped the car. ‘Uh-uh-uh, those lights always remind me of pocket calculators, you know?’

‘Yes, but why are we stopping here?’

‘I uh want you to do me a favour, Rod.’ Norm held up a pocket calculator. ‘Just a little favour.’

‘Look, what is this?’

Norm was holding an automatic in his other hand. ‘Just a goddamned favour, you son of a bitch — you can’t get out of the car on account of the snowbank anyway, so take the fucking calculator!’

Roderick took it. ‘What now?’

‘Now you just punch the numbers I give you and let me see the display.’

‘What, like this?’ Roderick punched 12345 and held up the calculator. The red digits glowed like cigarettes. Roderick was afraid of dying.

‘No no no! Hold it so it’s upside down for me. Okay now the first number is 58008, you got that?’

Roderick punched it. ‘I see, it’s spelling out words for you.’

Norm ordered him to spell out in turn: SOIL, SISSIES, SOB, SOLOS, LOSSES, BOSS, BOOHOO, LOOSE, HOLE, LIBEL, BOILS, BLOJOBS, BOOBIES and finally OHOHOH.

There was a moment of silence, during which Norm sat doubled over behind the steering wheel. Then he sat up and said, ‘Okay thanks. I’m sorry I pulled a gun on you, I just got worried you wouldn’t do it. A lotta people laugh when I ask them.’ He started the car. ‘I’ll drop you off wherever…’

‘What about this party you wanted to score at?’

‘Well there is a party. In the suburbs, you really want to go?’

As they drove on, Roderick asked Norm how he had developed his curious hobby.

‘Hobby’ I guess it is. Well I guess it all started when I was about ten. Dad gave me this pocket calculator, you know? And I really liked it. I um had fun just multiplying two times two, stuff like that. I mean calculating gave me this special feeling.’

‘What feeling?’

‘Okay, okay, it gave me a hard-on, calculating gave me a hard-on. I was only ten, didn’t hardly know — okay maybe I did know but it didn’t seem so wrong. I mean I just kept the thing in my pants pocket and um worked out a few things in secret now and then. I used to pretend it was the real thing.’

‘A woman, Norm?’

‘No, a computer. Maybe an IBM 360, boy what a figure—’

‘What happened then?’

Norm stopped for a red light. A drunken man was feeling his way across the street, trying to get into one car, then another, shouting at their occupants.

‘Well, Dad caught me once. He said I’d go blind and lose strength from all the calculating, but I didn’t care. I had to go on adding, subtracting… even when we played sandlot baseball I had to stop all the time and work out my batting average. And pretty soon I stopped playing any games at all, I just, you know?

‘So then when I was about fifteen I started hanging out in the crummy part of town, I started running errands for this bookie. And he had this, well this older computer, she’d been through a lot of weird programs, stuff I’d never dreamed of I mean she really taught me a lot. I learned so much I figured I was cured, you know? When we broke up I figured I was burnt out and cured.

‘So I went away to college, got along okay only I couldn’t help noticing computers. Like the freshman registration computer, she was big. Dumb, but really big, you know? Meanwhile I met this really nice girl, a real girl, and we got engaged. We were gonna marry after graduation.

‘Graduation night there was a big party and I got real drunk, and somehow we all ended up at this computer dating agency. So the others are standing there filling out forms and giggling, and the girl behind the counter goes out of the room for something — and there I am, face to face with a big beautiful machine! In about one second flat I’m over that counter and all over her.’

‘How did you feel, Norm?’

‘Good at first, and then — disgusted. Couldn’t wait to pay my money and get out of there. Goes without saying my engagement was off, all my friends aghast — but I knew then I was hooked, I knew I’d be back! And I was, again and again, until they had to call the cops to get rid of me. Then I started hanging around electronics stores — you ever notice how they always have them on the same streets with sex stores and porno palaces and massage parlours? Ever notice that? The cops would pick me up routinely about once a week. Most of the time they just took me home to Dad.’

‘You didn’t go to jail?’

‘No, because Dad offered to send me for some therapy. We um tried aversion. I went to this guy Dr George. He would show me a picture of a big Univac say, or hand me a magnetic card, or a reel of tape or something, and at the same time he’d give me this electric shock. Trouble is, you can get to like a jolt of current now and then, you can get a special feeling there too.’

Roderick decided to say nothing of his own identity as a cybernetic machine running on electricity.

At the next traffic light they stopped. A group of children trooped across the street, with two adults in charge. Roderick noticed that the little boys had crepe paper beards and the little girls carried stiff styrofoam wings.

‘Norm, I notice you don’t mention your mother much.’

‘Mother?’ Norm frowned. ‘What do you mean, exactly?’

‘Well you had a mother, didn’t you?’

‘Jesus, whose life are we supposed to be talking about, anyway? I mean excuse me, but I thought it was mine. Excuse me all to hell.’

‘I just meant, most people have mothers.’

Norm’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel, as the car shot forward. ‘Oh sure. Most people. I suppose most people can’t buy a computer magazine without blushing. I suppose most people feel all the time like calling up a computer on the phone and inputting dirty data, real dirty data. Oh sure, most people!’

‘What do you remember about your mother, Norm?’

Norm jammed on the brakes, and the car skidded to an oblique stop. Tears were streaming down his face. ‘You keep that up and you can just get out and walk. You hear me?’

Roderick looked out at the bleak, icy road, the mountainous snowbanks, the blackness beyond. They were somewhere in the edge of a suburb, and there was nothing to be seen but falling snow and the darkness that might be trees. Large wet flakes drifted through the headlight beams.

‘I’m really looking forward to this party,’ he said. ‘Who’s giving it?’

Norm started driving again. ‘Mr Moxon. He’s a friend of my um Dad.’ Soon the car turned off the icy road into a long, heated drive. They drove on, past snow sculptures of men in top hats and women in bonnets, past massed evergreens with programmed lights, past everything, faster, racing headlong like the fastest troika imaginable.

America come alive!

Grab on to a brand new day!

‘—Good morning, Mr and Ms America, I’m Jeb Goodhart—’

‘—and I’m Brie Wittgenstein, bringing you the early news update—’

‘Good God, what? What’s it?’ Indica fought for consciousness, for some clue to this booming, blustering confusion in which giant orange faces grinned and bellowed at her from across a room of the wrong shape. She seemed to be ten feet from the floor, and there was a large spider on her pillow.

‘—says it’s the most severe quake in Ruritania since nineteen—

Dr Tarr’s head appeared from under her bed. ‘Morning! Sleep all right?’

‘What? Yes I but I just what I — bunk beds? Where are we?’ ‘Ha ha, don’t you remember? This is my old frat house, Digamma Upsilon Nu.’

‘Your old, why should I remember your old — ?’

‘No, but don’t you remember the snowbank? We skidded into a big snowbank? And I went for help while you stayed in the car?’

‘I remember you telling me not to go to sleep.’ The spider on her pillow became a contact lens, glued in place by a false eyelash. She rescued it. ‘That pissed me off, because I’d already taken my two Dormistran, how could I stay awake?’

‘Yes well see we turned out to be only a mile from my old frat house here, whereas almost sixteen miles to my place with god knows what damage to the front end of my — wait a minute, you took sleeping pills? On the way to my place? If you I mean thought it was going to be that bad, why bother coming? I mean—’

‘Hey kids, does your Mom buy you Flavoreenos? My Mom does and I really love her, because Flavoreenos are corn-style flakes in 26 delicious flavours! Have you tried cherry cola? Chili dog? Chocolate sardine parfait? Mmmm, I get a new flavour every morning, because my Mom loves me and I love Flavoreenos!’

‘Okay okay maybe I was a little nervous but anyway here we are in bunk beds does it matter? And do we need that TV on with all that, that wall projection kids with orange hair eight feet tall eating blue goop Jesus Jack I don’t feel so well.’

‘Just um trying to catch the weather, new antifreeze account I—’

There was a knock at the door. Tarr answered it to a burly young man with a flat nose. ‘Brother Tarr? I’m supposed to give you your bill here. Uh, here.’

‘What’s this? Looks more like somebody’s bill for a week at the Waldorf — wait a minute, what’s this item here, fifty bucks for snow, what’s that supposed to—’

‘Bathtub fulla snow, Brother Tarr. Just like you ordered. We filled it while you was asleep.’

Just like I — wait now, hold on — fellas, no, hold on—’

Three other burly young men came in, seized Tarr and carried him struggling into the bathroom. After a few shrieks and shouts, a dozen guffaws, the boys came out, blew kisses to Indica and left. A minute later, Tarr came out grinning, naked, towelling himself. ‘Ha ha, damn it, I forgot what great jokers the brothers can be.’

‘Yeah very amusing.’ She turned to the TV.

‘—Bimibian police claim the schoolgirls were throwing stones, and say it was only in self-defence that officers opened fire with automatic weapons and raked the classrooms. No death figures have been released yet, but unofficial estimates—

When she and Tarr were dressed, Flat Nose came back with a genuine bill. ‘And we didn’t charge nothing for towing your car, Brother Tarr. Because you’re a good sport.’

Tarr grinned and opened his chequebook. Indica said, ‘You boys like gags, do you?’

Flat Nose grinned. ‘We pull some perdy good ones around here, like last year we made up a guy and we enrolled him in a lotta classes, whole buncha stuff. We even took exams for him, he got a B average, perdy good, huh?’ His laughter sounded like a child’s imitation of a machinegun, as he left with his cheque.

‘Jesus,’ said Indica. ‘Nothing changes around the U, I’ve been away from it years now, same asshole kids still here pulling the same asshole stunts, hanging toilet seats on the Student Union tower — why don’t we get out of here?’

He looked at the TV. ‘Guess I missed the weather—’

‘Good news for kids in Topeka, Kansas, where the Santa Claus strike is over –

‘And just in time, Brie, with five more shopping days till Christmas. And in a New Jersey divorce court a judge has just awarded a couple joint custody of their Christmas tree — wonder who gets to change the bulbs…’

Within minutes they had exchanged the dazzle of orange faces for the dazzle of sun on snow, the boom of TV for the roar of radio.

‘I called the office,’ said Tarr. ‘But Judi my sec isn’t in yet. So I can drop you anywhere, plenty of time.’ The car sped through outlying fragments of the campus, past book-stores and sweatshirt boutiques, past the new Life Sciences building with its imposing sculpture of a clam. ‘I’ll have to chew her ass out good, though, being this late.’

‘But Jack, wasn’t she at the party last night? Maybe the poor girl just overslept.’

‘So? Of course I still expect her to turn up on time, and normally she’s very conscientious too, that’s why this leaves me in a bind, I wanted to finish mapping out this Middle East campaign with her before we run into Christmas.’

‘Market forecasting, isn’t that kind of crystal ball stuff?’ she asked. The car was leaving University environs and entering a neighbourhood of cheap bars, pawnshops, fast food and barricaded liquor stores.

‘Crystal ball, hmm, you could say that. In fact, we use psychic data right along with more conventional info, you’d be surprised how well they correlate. Not long ago we had an account, a well-known company who wanted to open up a chain of taco stands in the University area. Or was it pizza-burgers? Anyway, what they wanted was an optimal set of locations. So we took a map of the campus, held a pendulum over it, and just assessed the strength of the swing.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Nope. There were four strong-swing areas — and these turned out to be the four ideal locations! You could call that good guesswork — but was it?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, amused. ‘To me, psychic stuff is just all in the mind.’

‘Yes yes, of course, nothing wrong with healthy scepticism and I myself — LOOK OUT! DAMN YOU!’ He hit the brakes as a ragged figure in a torn storm-coat danced across the street in front of them. The car slid on glare ice a few feet, hit the man gently and had no apparent effect; for he too slid, flailing his arms until he could regain his dancing pace and make it to the kerb. There he removed a glove and gave them the finger.

‘Damn these derelicts, every Christmas they swarm down here, makes you wish the city would just bring in exterminators, put out I don’t know maybe bottles of poison wine in paper bags—’

‘But Jack, look! Look, isn’t that Allbright, he was at the party.’

‘And here he is in his own environ — what are you doing?’

Before the car could move again she had the window down and was waving. ‘Allbright! Hey! You need a ride anywhere?’

The gaunt figure paused, Z-bent to peer at them, then danced over. ‘And a Merry Christmas to you, good lady, and to your good gentleman, God bless you for your true Christian spirit as you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, ride the pedestrian ‘

‘Just get in the car and shut up,’ Tarr said. ‘Allbright the damn light’s changing.’

Allbright squeezed in beside Indica, letting his arm hang out the open window. ‘Where we going, kids?’

‘Just shut up.’

‘Maybe if you tell us where you want to be dropped…’ Indica suggested.

‘Oh, a place over on Jogues Boulevard, place called Larry’s Grill. Jogues Boulevard, ever notice how the Jesuits had their way with this town? Xavier Avenue, Loyola Street and so on, makes you wonder—’

‘You look terrible,’ said Indica. ‘Dirt in your beard, dried it looks like blood down the side of your face—’

‘Makes you wonder about Larry’s Grill itself, eh?’

‘And your clothes. Allbright you look—’

‘Terrible, I know. That’s why you snubbed me last night, eh?’

Indica opened her mouth to frame a denial, but already Allbright had changed the subject again. ‘Moxon’s got a damn good library, you know?’

‘And you’ve been ripping him off?’

‘Only a few books, just to get me what I need… I even found something there published by his namesake. Nineteenth-century publisher called Moxon too, published Keats.’

‘No kidding.’ She stifled a yawn.

‘Part of a series, Moxon’s Miniature Poets, nice image there, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley… Ought to be right in your line, Indica.’

‘Poetry? No, I—’

‘First time I heard you were liberating the machines I thought of that old stock cartoon, you know: man on a street corner winding up lots of little men and setting them free to walk away — million gags based on that image, wouldn’t you say?’

Indica sat up a little. ‘My work is no gag, buster.’

‘Course not, no, just thinking of Moxon, Moxon’s Miniature Poets, little windup Keats, windup Coleridge. Little windup Shelley faints, fails, falls upon the tiny thorns of life, bleeds… fine early example of miniaturization there…’

She looked at him. ‘You’re kind of a fine early example yourself. Of verbal masturbation.’

‘Yes. Yes, somebody’s got to wind somebody up, now and then. Even if there’s no love, tiny Wordsworth can still talk of little nameless unremembered acts of kindness, if not of love… What do we all have? What, detergents being kind to hands? Love with a vibrator? Poetry from a damn computer?’

Tarr made a face. ‘What are you on, Allbright? Why don’t you just shut up, we’ll drop you at your bar and you can ramble on with all the other—’

‘Forgetting my manners, haven’t congratulated Indica on her new book. What did Time say? Called you an exponent of the germane gear, didn’t they? A Joan of arc-welding? Congratulations.’

‘Look, I don’t need heavy irony,’ she said. ‘You always—’

‘No irony intended, the reviewers think it’s new and gimmicky, that’s all you need nowadays. After all, the book industry doesn’t ask if a book is good or if it says anything important. The industry asks only is it new? Because they might have to slot it in between selections like In Praise of Teddy Bears and The Hidden Language of Tour Handwriting and The Dieter’s Guide to Weight Loss after Sex, and God know how much other ephemeral whole forests being felled to print a book on how to sit in your seat on a commercial air flight, how to get over the death of a pet, you think people who publish that care about any book, any idea? Wait, wait—’ He fumbled in a pocket and came up with a tiny ruled notebook.

It’s a beautiful morning,’ Tarr said. ‘Why don’t you just shut up and enjoy it?’

‘He’s got a point though, Jack. I mean I know I’m probably being ripped off by my publishers, who are they? They’re just some subsidiary of a conglomerate, what do they care about machines?’

‘Or people?’ Allbright suggested, thumbing dog-eared pages. ‘I just jotted down a few titles, books the reviewers can really get their teeth into, if any: Garbo. a long-awaited biography; The Politics of Pregnancy, well maybe; Railways of Ruritania to grace any coffee table alongside The Yeti and I — the ad says “a close encounter that became a night of primal love”; here’s The Real Garbo; Marxism and Menstruation, why not; then there’s Frogs: Their Wonderful Wisdom, Follies and Foibles, Mysterious Powers, Strange Encounters, Private Lives, Symbolism and Meaning, serious rival there for the Teddy Bear book; then there’s Pornography, Psychedelics and Technology, yup; and Paedophilia: A Radical Case and finally Sons of Sam Spade. Hard to imagine[3] a newer collection of novelties than that, right?’

Tarr said, ‘Sounds a little bit like sour grapes there, Allbright. I notice the people who sneer most at success are usually unsuccessful.’

‘That’s goddamned profound, Tarr. And in my case, true!’

After they dropped Allbright, Dr Tarr got out his pipe and sucked at it madly as he drove. ‘Jesus,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘you try to forget some things for a while, along comes some Allbright to remind you. They never leave you alone.’

‘Alone, I hate being alone. I hated writing both my books, you know? What I really like is promotion. The TV appearances, radio phone-ins, I guess I must be part of the whole awful system. But shit, Jack, I’ve missed so many boats.’

‘Me too, me too. I was a pretty good parapsychologist, you know? I had it all working for me, then I just — it all blew up on me. And here I am in market forecasting, a kind of limbo — no real life in it.’

‘I never had any kids,’ she said. ‘Never wanted any, either. But I was just remembering, this robot kid-thing Hank and I had for a little while. It was Allbright who dumped it on us, some friend of his built it, I guess. We called it Roderick. Cute little thing, like a toy tank only with these big eyes — we were both just crazy about it.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe I should have had real kids. Or maybe I should have gone on with my dancing. I was only in an ad, but the potential was all there, you know?’

‘No life in it,’ he said. ‘Market forecasting, sometimes it’s like I don’t know, trying to make a dead pigeon fly.’

‘The potential was there, just like the 480 ova inside you, all those chances… sure I’ve got a little fame, a little money, I’m helping the cause of machine justice, only I still feel cheated.’

He bit the pipestem and drove on. ‘Tell you what. Next week I’m flying to the Middle East to help plan this big tampon campaign. You could come along.’

‘Where?’

‘Cairo. Might be fun — if you forget your sleeping pills.’

‘Look, have some fruit, forget about it.’

‘Forget I got mugged? How do you forget an experience like that? I’m telling you—’

‘Sure, okay, but I’m just wondering how this is gonna look to our people? Frankly, old buddy, you blew it. You had your chance to waste this guy, and you—’

‘I got mugged, that’s all. I got mugged, I got mugged! Don’t ask me how.’

‘I won’t ask you nothing. But you can bet your ass somebody’s gonna ask, and ask hard. That a winesap apple there? Okay if I help myself, I really got a thing about winesaps…. Look, this thing reflects bad on everybody, it reflects bad on the whole Agency, our section even worse, and me worst of all.¹

‘I know, I know. But what can I do? It just happened.’

‘Yeah, but when the people at Orinoco start looking for some balls to stomp on, where do they look first? I mean, who’s really responsible here?’

‘What are you implying?’

‘I’m not implying nothing. I’m just saying, that’s all. Those Concord grapes there? You mind? I’m saying, look at all the trouble everybody took to set this thing up. We traced the customer to where he works, I found out from his co-workers that the boss is driving him to Mercy Hospital to see somebody. We rush over a camera team by helicopter just to take his picture when he gets out of the car, regular and infra-red just so we don’t get the wrong guy—’

‘Again.’

‘All right, our people watch all the damn exits until you can set up in your bush with your snooperscope and your infra-red detector and your laser-aimed sniper rifle

The man in bed rolled over. ‘I know what I had, or are you just mentioning it all for the benefit of everybody else in here? Tell the whole ward, tell the whole damn world!’ He rolled back again. ‘Any Muscat grapes?’

‘I ate them. No I’m just saying, we took a lot of trouble, we spent a lot of money, and then you let yourself get jumped like that, you not only blow the whole mission, you fix it so some maniac mugger is now running around town with a snooperscope and all the rest of this stuff, how’s that gonna look if he uses it?’

‘He won’t use it, he ripped it off to sell, didn’t he? I mean, that’s what he jumped me for, all that Government equipment.’

‘If you know so much about him now, how come you let him sneak up on you like that?’

‘How did I know I was a mugging target? I mean these guys are everywhere, society’s getting so God-damned violent, is that my fault?’

‘I blame TV myself. Television is definitely — and maybe fast food, kids don’t digest any more. Take your average mugger today — and parental discipline too.’

‘You saying it’s my fault? You implying I should be a child psychologist?’

‘I’m not implying nothing. Honest.’

The man in bed lay back and looked at the curtain until he heard the other agent leave, then turned again to watch (past the basket now containing a heap of banana skins and orange peels topped by the core of a Bartlett pear) other patients being served a Christmas dinner from a mobile microwave oven that passed him and passed the curtained bed.

‘I’m sorry, Mr… Nothing by mouth for you, and nothing by mouth for Mr Franklin either…’

Muttering came from behind the curtain. ‘ “Nothing by mouth”, sounds like a damn subtitle for À Rebours, you’d think they’d at least offer me a turkey-and-cranberry enema.’

The agent turned towards the voice but it said nothing more. He turned back again, lay still watching the fruit debris, the empty bed next to him, the bed beyond that where an old man was being eased on to a bedpan, the curtained bed beyond that whence a priest emerged, kissing a strip of purple ribbon and folding it away as he hurried out the door, a furtive figure pursued by the microwave cart, then two nurses, then a cartload of uneaten dinners followed by a man in a wheelchair swerving to avoid a man on crutches coming back past a sleeping figure connected to a machine next to an adolescent sitting up in bed with giant headphones and a blank expression, next to an empty bed and another, eight beds, one exit, now blocked by a group of people in surgical green bringing in a cart to collect the man the priest had visited, setting off an argument between the man on the bedpan and the man on crutches as to whether this was routine surgery or getting ready for a heart snatch, the argument continuing until a pitchpipe sounded in the hall and a choir of student nurses looking hungover sang ‘Joy to the World’, ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Christmas in Killarney’ before drifting away to some other ward on their silent feet, all this and more the agent noted and filed, remembering every face, every action, every change until he finally managed to sleep…

Behind him, Ben Franklin opened the curtains, sat up in his sweat-soaked pyjamas, lit a cigarette and reached for his phone.

‘Mr Kratt? Ben here, I’m in Mercy Hospital, that flu I had got worse and — no, two or three days ago, I don’t know, what day is this?… No, I’m not kidding; I was kind of knocked out with this fever… I don’t know, soon as I can sir yes sure only… listen they don’t seem to know what it is, doctor this morning asked me if I had anything to do with cows… Well sure I know you are, I didn’t mean to, yes I know. But what I wanted to tell you, I’ve had a real breakthrough… no, through, sir. Listen I, see I’ve been working on the little problem we talked about, the er, learning machine, you know where I was stuck was in the basic pattern-recognition… yes, well I’m not stuck any more, I’ve really broken through. This fever, seems to make me see clearer, clearer and — I know Dan used to get into these fits too, these kind of fits, he would just be glowing with wisdom, with gnosis, with holy wis — God damn it, Kratt, for once in your life stop yapping about what you want and listen! Because creation, creating life isn’t something you learn or even do, it’s something within us all the time, you know like the secret power these men possess? I mean all my life I’ve been pissing around with half-ass religious ideas, all the time it’s been right there inside me, the complete instructions for building a creature in my own image… are you still there? Yes, it’s inside me, in my genes… No, not cloning, God damn it will you listen? I’m talking about information, information! Man is a learning machine and human genes are blueprints for man so — so all the information has to be packed in there somehow, yet if the machine could only learn itself it, it, we have the answer! I mean we spend our whole lives looking at the edges of the blueprint while the centre is never visible except to madmen, holy madmen — no I am not talking about occultism, will you God damn it stop humouring me, I am talking about information. Information. INFORMATION!’

He slammed down the receiver as the agent awoke and turned over, saying, ‘What’s wrong, you can’t even get Information? Phone company gets worse every—’

‘No, nothing like that.’ Ben Franklin picked up the yellow notebook he’d bought in Taipin, opened to a fresh quadrille-ruled page, and began to scribble. After covering a page and heavily underscoring several items, he put down his pen and looked at the phone again.

‘You gonna try Information again?’

‘No I — I just felt like calling somebody. Too bad it’s Christmas, everybody’ll be answering machines today. Except Dan…’

The pure musical tones aroused by numbered buttons chased each other down the line like echoes, reminding him of something from Kafka (Kafkafka): K. phoning the Castle and hearing a buzz ‘like the sound of countless children’s voices’ now adjusted to harmonious bleats but still innocent because ethereal, ringing from Heaven (hello Central) or against Heaven (vox inhumana) or crying out loud for bodies…

At University Hospital a nurse crunched a piece of candy cane as the phone rang, swallowed sherds as she answered. ‘Who? Mr Sonnenschein? I’ll see if we have him today you know a lot of people went home…’

She rose, biting down on another inch of striped sugar and brushing crumbs from her nylon uniform as she pushed past the Christmas tree and through a door into the ward. Most of the other nurses were, like her, here for the day only; no one knew who Mr Sonnenschein was.

Two doctors were conferring over an elderly bedridden patient, now going blue in the face. One of them, Dr D’Eath, suggested Ward D.

‘Right through that door down there and keep going, you can’t miss it,’ he said, and leaned across his patient to tap the electronic Kardiscope as though it were a brass barometer. ‘Not so terrific here, thanks to that ham-handed… think he’d try reading the contraindications before he starts shoving Euphornyl into an eighty-year-old patient with a history of… could have used Hynosate or Geridorm, Narcadone any damn thing but this! Okay then. What we need here is 50 ccs of Elimindin in the i.v., then start the Eudryl when he comes to, okay? Oh, and Dormevade, five milligrams every three

‘Fine sure fine, great idea, Shel, now if uh you got a minute maybe you could look at my girl here, little chemotherapy problem, Nurse wake her up will you, MINNIE… MORNING MINNIE!’

‘Doctor, I believe her name is Mary, Mary Mendez…’

‘Minnie, Mary, what’s the difference? HEY MARY? WAKE UP!’

The false eyelashes parted on large grey eyes that held no expression. Creaking sounds began in the throat.

‘HOW YOU DOING, MARY?’ Dr Coppola proffered to his senior colleague a chart, with the deference of a wine waiter with a list. Both men and the nurse ignored Mary who, having sat up to adjust the large bow that covered a stainless steel plate in her scalp, was trying to speak. The rusty sounds in her throat became more frantic.

‘How long you had her on Actromine with Ananx? No wonder you got a Parkinsonism situation building here, you ought to… and try switching over to Integryl with Doloban, see how that… or wait, how about Dormistran with Kemised? That should do the trick.’

‘CAN YOU HEAR ME, MARY? HOW’S THE HEADACHE? EH?’

‘…wind me up… wind me up…’

‘You could have tried Solacyl with Promoral, but sooner or later you’d have to feed in Thanagrin and

‘Promoral sure sure sure, Shel, only with the old head injury and the labyrinthitis you don’t think…?’

‘…wind me up… I’m running down…’

‘Okay then Lobanal, play it safe. Lobanal with Doloban, why stick your neck out?’ And as the two doctors passed on, the nurse trailing like a caddy, they talked of Amylpoise and Dexadrone, Disimprine and Equisol, Joviten and Nyctomine…

At the door of Ward D they encountered once more the Christmas substitute nurse, again running on her silent shoes but now looking distressed and holding a hand to her mouth.

‘Probably walked in on the ECT,’ said Dr Coppola as they wheeled past the room where Dan Sonnenschein still arched and twisted on a table, trembling limbs held down by straps and strong assistants as his spine beat like a flagellum, trying to fling his head free of the smoking electrodes. Dr D’Eath paused to watch the body lunge once, twice and lie still, all but the fingers and toes.

‘Well, Jesus, you can’t blame the poor girl. They have to stick this therapy room right out here where anybody can walk by and see it,’ he said. ‘Anyway I hate it myself, it’s so darned crude, like setting fire to a chicken ranch to fry one egg. There has to be a better way.’

‘I know, I know, it’s so medieval — they used to burn the body of a heretic for the good of his soul, and now we’ve kind of turned that around. But what are the real alternatives, drugs? How can you trust them to take the pills once they’re out, eh? The old paradox of freedom, eh? What happens when the depressive gets too depressed to take his anti-depressants?’

His boyish laugh drifted back through the open door to be relayed as a scream of nervous laughter from Mary Mendez. Dr D’Eath said, ‘I like this idea of yours about working on self-images with some of these patients, what I’ve heard of it.’

‘I’d like to try a pilot scheme here, very soon. You gotta admit, Shel, it’s about the cheapest damn therapeutic idea in years, all we have to buy is a couple dozen rubber animal masks. See I was reading Levi-Strauss one day on totems and all at once it hit me, we all need to “be” animals once in a while, to restructure our self-images by new rules… become cats and mice or ducks…’

‘Sure, I see…’

‘…easily recognized signs and codes, I am a pig, to help communicate in a society grown too large and too…’

‘Sure, sure, sure, sure…’

Mary yelped again, the noise just reaching the nurse who was closing a door and pushing past the tree to the phone:

‘Mr Frankstein? Frankline? I’m sorry but he can’t come to the phone right now, he’s urn, he’s urn—’ Her mind filled with movie images of fluttering lights, lightning, the smoking electrodes, the figure on the long table straining, making Galvanic lunges against the straps, the smoking electrodes, hands gripping the arms of the electric chair, tall shadows, the sputtering arch, the baritone hum of electricity, vis vitalis rising on a swell to become a dial tone as she sat, receiver forgotten in her hand, watching the lights on the Christmas tree grow suddenly dim and bright again. Her mouth filled with peppermint bile.

Ben Franklin turned from the phone to his yellow notebook, muttering. ‘No telling what kind of cretins they get to work over there, can’t even work out how to call somebody to the phone.’

‘You said it, buddy,’ said the agent.

Ben twitched the curtain closed and scribbled alone until he slept, waking with a shout in the darkness, soaking wet and shivering as he was again waking in the morning if it was morning, to find himself muttering, ‘Hexcellent, a most hexcellent dancer, your servant ladies and gentlemen…’ And plunged back into that sea of sleep out of which he always seemed to emerge dripping and chilled on the shore of what could hardly be called consciousness.

He was aware of changes: the man with the bandaged head and the self-pitying face in the next bed vanished to be replaced by a salesman of religious novelties who had a noisy TV; he in turn gave way to an old man who kept his teeth in a glass; one morning he was gone but the teeth remained.

An expert on tropical diseases came to look at Ben.

‘Malaria,’ he said. ‘Where have you been travelling?’

‘Only to Taipin.’

‘Try again, there’s no malaria in Taipin. No mosquitoes.’

But they treated him for malaria and he began to improve; one day he sat up and tried to read his notes:

Luke was wearing saffron: Hat, overcoat, suit, shirt and tie, shoes, attache case and a visible inch of sock were all part of the saffron glow.

‘Can’t help it, Rickwood, it’s what we had to wear all the time; probably why they called us the Saffron Peril. Only let me tell you, we were the only ones in danger, when those lunatic Luddites showed up and—’

‘Okay, fine, but why did we have to meet way out here in a place like this? The Vitanuova Shopping Piazza may be a terrific place and the chief jewel in Minnetonka’s crown and all, but I mean it’s miles from civilization.’

The two friends sat on a park bench near a fountain which, according to a brochure, could form over fifty million different beautiful patterns without repeating itself. Like everything else of importance here, it was indoors, for the entire great shopping complex was, enclosed under geodesic domes, as if it were a moon base.

‘And don’t tell me Mission Control ordered us here,’ Roderick added.

‘Nope, my idea. We are going to a meeting, important meeting.’

‘Not your Saffron Peril?’

‘I’m all through with them — or they’re through with me. I only have to wear this stuff because my luggage with my other stuff was delayed at the airport. Had to leave Tibet in kind of a hurry, Rickwood. Now I’m through with meditation in the Himalayas, I mean who needs it?’

Roderick watched the fountain repeat itself. ‘But I thought you did.’

‘Okay okay, laugh, I deserve it. It’s just, the whole thing turned out to be more of a commercial venture than I figured. See I expected to maybe shave my head and sit down with the monks to some meditation and glass beads, only it wasn’t like that at all. I mean they got computerized prayer-wheels, that was the first shock. And all they really do is deal in different stock markets and talk about exchange rates and commodity prices, all day while the old prayer-wheels go on grinding away all by themselves. I felt kind of uneasy about it, but I suppressed it. I said to myself, “Give it a chance, Draeger, there might be some deeper meaning in all of this. The Master must know what he’s doing.” So I hung on.

‘The Master was a little old dried-up-looking man, he always looked ready to say something important. He went off on these trips to Taipin, somebody said, to plant the seed of consciousness. But then somebody else said he just went to gamble, that he was robbing the treasury. Who could believe a thing like that? Especially when our Master seemed so doggoned wise, I mean he never had to say anything to anybody — I don’t think I ever heard him speak — but you still knew he knew everything.

‘Then the police showed up and took our Master away. They were extraditing him to Taipin, to stand trial for murder. They said he’d killed some Chinese guy in a quarrel over a poker game.’

Roderick stared through the changing fountain to where a sign was going up. ‘TODAY. **DICA **NKS… *N*ICA D**KS… IN*IC* DIN**…’

‘Sure we were shaken a little. Some people said it was all over, they wanted to go home. But I persuaded them to hang on — maybe it was only a test of our faith and loyalty, I said.

‘Just as I was saying that, the Luddites broke in and smashed the whole place up. The stock quotation machines, the computers, the prayer-wheels, everything. Worst of it was they took out the phone and telex, left us stranded.

‘There we were — about fifty of us — broke, our outfit smashed, our Master gone, no money to come home on. We didn’t have a prayer you might say. Nothing in the storeroom either, but a half pound of rice, an old motheaten silver fox coat, and a catcher’s mitt autographed by Yogi Berra. We were high up in the mountains with snow all around. What could we do?’

Pray?’ Roderick suggested, watching I*D*C* INKS…

‘Right. Our prayers were answered right away too, because this camera team from some big magazine syndicate showed up. They were doing a feature on Everest-climbing tours, and they wanted some local colour. We fed them the last of our rice and gave them beds. During the night, I put the catcher’s mitt on my foot and went out walking in the snow. In the morning we pointed out the giant tracks to them and they got real excited and took lots of pictures.

‘Then in the afternoon there was a snowstorm. I put on the fur coat and ran around in it, the others pointed me out and the photographers chased me and took more pictures. Then they got on their radio and arranged a lucrative book and movie deal, and our end of it was just enough to pay our fares home.’

Roderick got up from the bench and moved to one side of the fountain to read:

‘On the plane home,’ Luke said when he returned, ‘I met another Luddite. In fact he was the guy who started the whole movement. I told him what happened and how Luddite heavies had moved in on us. He apologized. He said, “Some of the boys just got carried away with the message, I guess.”

‘Then he started telling me all about the New Luddites Movement and it didn’t sound so fanatical after all. He said the Luddites were opposed to violence, even against machines. He wanted a way of peace, linked with the great Eastern traditions of resignation and manual labour. Why didn’t I come to the rally he was having in Minnetonka? So here I am, ready to be a Luddite.’ Luke looked pleased with himself. ‘Maybe I can convert you too.’

‘Convert — but Luke, I can’t be a Luddite. I’m a machine. I’m everything they’re opposed to!’

‘Oh, you don’t have to join right away, Rickwood. I just want you to come along and meet some Luddites yourself. Great buncha guys.’

‘But Luke, this is crazy!’

‘Meet the guys, hear what they got to say, that’s all. Then you make up your own mind.’

‘Come on Rickwood, I’ll buy you a coffee, you can’t stand here daydreaming all day.’ Luke led him as far as the cashier.

‘You gonna buy that, mister?’ she asked.

‘Buy… that?’

‘The book in your hand, human use of human beings wiener, you gonna buy it or what?’

Luke took the book from his hand and led him on out of Prospero Books, into the great pleasure dome of Vitanuova Shopping Piazza. In general form, it was a kind of interior Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with a small terrace of stores at each level, with plenty of polished stonelike substances, with gleaming escalators, set at every angle, and with every nook crammed with green potted palms, blue caged birds or tanks of red fish. From the top level, looking over a parapet at the whole dizzying spectacle, Luke spotted the yellow umbrellas of a cafe far below.

‘Come on down this escalator — Jesus, Rickwood, I wish you’d tell me what’s going on. Why did we have to go all the way up to this so-called bookstore, just so you could stare at this Indica Dinks? You didn’t even say hello.’

‘Well I, I didn’t want to intrude, just wanted to let her know I’m around, I’m here if she needs me. I could tell by the way she looked at me she understands.’

Luke groaned. ‘Just what kind of Victorian truth is it that she understands? Who is this lady?’

‘My mother, Luke. My stepmother anyway. Sort of. She took care of me when I was small, I think. And, well, she was the first woman I ever saw naked, so naturally I—’

‘You what? Follow her into bookstores?’

They took their seats. One or two people at adjoining tables stared at Luke’s saffron costume.

‘Naturally I love her. I read once how all boys love their mothers and kill their fathers, so—’

Luke held up a saffron-gloved hand. ‘Now wait. Rickwood, you’ve got this a little wrong. Sure, all boys love their mothers in a way, but it just means getting “Mother” tattooed on their arms, or sending embroidered pillow covers, Souvenir of Hong Kong, or maybe asking bar pianists to play “My Mother’s Eyes” until they weep into their low-cal pilsner. It does not mean love, like love. It doesn’t mean killing anybody either, where did you get this idea?’

‘Well,’ Roderick said loudly, ‘I killed my father, and I’ve always been crazy about my mother’s body. And that was before I ever heard of Freud!’

People at the next table got up and moved away. Others stared and whispered. A waitress hurried over, datapad in hand.

‘We’d like two coffees,’ said Luke. ‘Mine, I want a medium-roast blend of Colombian and Mocha, finely ground and filtered, with real cream (not half-and-half) and Demerara sugar. Serve it in a bone china service, preferably Spode, and with a hallmarked silver spoon. And my friend here will have instant ersatz coffee, half-dissolved in tepid water, served with artificial cream and synthetic sugar in a melamine cup, no saucer, with a styrene spoon, please.’

‘Two coffees,’ she said, and said it again, firmly, when she served them.

‘Well she got yours right, Rickwood. What do you mean, you killed your father?’

‘I mean I hit him with a box-end wrench, ³/₄ ×  ⁷/₈ I think it was, and he fell down and never got up.’

‘Oh.’ Luke said nothing more until they were on their way to the rally, making their way through a series of glass tubes and corridors to the Conference Centre. The final leg of the journey took them through a glass-covered bridge high above the flat wintry earth. To their left, an infinity of parked cars. Straight ahead, the Conference Centre, a kind of flying saucer in concrete, pre-stressed and poised for takeoff. To the right, Freeway Disaster, the enormous fibre-glass sculpture by Jough Braun, incorporating moulds of an actual freeway pile-up of some twenty vehicles. It was said that, so quickly had Braun worked at the disaster scene, that he had managed to mould in one or two victims. In any case, the German museums had bid very highly for this itern, but what mere museum could provide a setting for it like this?

‘What did you do after you hit him with the wrench?’

‘I nailed myself into this packing crate and sent myself somewhere else. I mean I guess the crate was all labelled and ready anyway, because I was too young to write. So I got in and nailed it shut—’

‘How could you nail it shut? Rickwood, you must have had an accomplice. Your mother?’

‘It might have been a ⁵/₆ × 1 box-end wrench, or maybe it wasn’t a box-end at all, it might have been an open-end, say 1¹/₁₆ × 1¹/₈…’

Father Warren awoke from a brief and terrifying dream in which he’d been playing ping-pong with the Holy Ghost. The Paraclete had taken the form of a pigeon; standing on the table, it pecked the ball back at him. There had been some question about the stakes. Either damnation awaited him if he won, or else if he lost. But the terrifying part was that, in his dream, he knew he was dreaming. He knew that if he succeeded in avoiding damnation, his pleasure would be supreme and lasting into wakefulness — thus damning him anyway.

All nonsense of course. Here he was in the lounge of the Newman Club, having dozed over his own article on Lewis, nothing worse. He set about exorcizing the dream: ping-pong sounds came from the next room, no mystery about that. As for the pigeon, hadn’t someone the other day said something about Skinner and pigeons? Training them to be superstitious? Yes, something about pigeons understanding how faith could be exactly like a mustard seed.

Cheap epigram like that, funny it should stick in his craw mind. He turned his attention to the printed words (his own):

A fearful symmetry, yes, he ought to have added a word or two about binary numbers, two errors, the Yes/No character of… of…

His head jerked up. No one else in the lounge seemed to have noticed him. Two students were talking quietly in the corner, near the statue of the Infant of Prague. Two others, flushed from their ping-pong game, were heading for the coke machine.

The boy with the sparse beard stood in the doorway, looking at him. ‘All right if I come in, Father?’

‘Hector, of course. Were you looking for me?’

‘Yeah, I tried your office, they said you might be here. Only when I looked in you seemed to be praying.’

Father Warren remembered to grin. ‘What, at the Newman Club? With all this racket, I’m lucky I can even read. What’s on your mind? Not still worried about your paper?’

‘No, it’s going okay. Only I still remember the movie a lot better than the book. And I still don’t see what a clockwork orange is supposed to do, he might as well say an electric banana — I mean, an orange you wind up and then what?’

‘Ah well you see it’s — something the English, something musical as I recall, musical references galore there — a kind of music box, perhaps. But was there something else?’

‘Yeah, Father, just that the Science Fiction Club is having this panel discussion on artificial intelligence, we thought you might want to, um—’

‘Chair the discussion?’

‘Well no, just be a panellist, we’ve got a chair, um, person, already.’

‘Be on the panel? Sure. See my secretary about the date, but I’ll be glad to.’

The two of them rose, and the priest put a hand on the other’s shoulder, seemingly controlling him as they strolled towards the door.

‘…work orange, difficulty lies in deciding not merely its function, but whether its membership in the class of oranges or the class of clockwork things takes precedence in determining that function. The two classes are thought to be mutually exclusive and indeed they are, for we know intuitively that we are not dealing with a real orange, but rather a token of the type orange. That is, it has some properties that make us call it an orange, properties shared by all oranges and by the type itself, which — I wonder who that was?’

He had nodded and smiled at a familiar face lurking by the coke machine, it had nodded back: a plain, symmetrical face of no particular age, or sex, or race. It was gone from his thoughts before he had passed out of the Newman Club beneath the motto: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, from shadows and types to the reality.

The little knot of people by the coke machine were talkative and thirsty; only one said nothing, drank nothing.

‘Well sure it applies to religion, we had all about that last week in Computer Appreciation, they said in 1963 a computer proved that not all of St Paul’s epistles were by the same hand.’

‘Big deal, so he was ambidextrous.’

‘Or maybe it proved they were all by the same hand, I forget which. Anyway the computer proved it, whatever it was.’

‘Hey, and Pascal, right after he invented the first adding machine, he got “born again” as a Jansenist.’

‘I thought Pascal was a language — but what about the big Mormon computer storing up the names of all the dead people in the whole world?’

‘What about Leibniz, he built the first four-function calculator, and he proved the existence of God. And he invented binary numbers. On the other hand, he must not have been too religious, his treatise on ethics turned out to be plagiarized.’

‘What about the rosary? Wasn’t that the first religious calculating device? The Catholic abacus, somebody called it…’

‘Well I still say cybernetics doesn’t apply to religion, I mean they haven’t even got computer-generated music in the liturgy have they.?’

‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be happy even if they had a robot pope, like in that Robert Silverberg story. You’d want a robot canonized too.’

‘Ask Robbie here what he thinks, does he want to be a saint?’

‘Leave Robbie alone,’ said the boy in the sweatshirt marked FYN. ‘He don’t have to think about nothing, he’s our mascot. Our own personal robot mascot. Right, Robbie?’

The silent, unthirsty one, who wore an identical sweatshirt, nodded. ‘Right, master.’

‘He’s no robot,’ said somebody else. ‘He was playing ping-pong a minute ago, he’s just one of your pledges helping you pull a stunt. Robots can’t play ping-pong.’

‘That’s all you know, look in his mouth. Robbie, open wide.’

The mascot opened his mouth for inspection.

‘Hey, he ain’t got no tongue! No throat! Just a, what is that, a speaker?’

‘Okay, I’m impressed. Only where did you get Robbie? He must be worth millions, a robot that good. I mean I work over at the bio-engineering lab, I know how hard it is to get a robot to walk around normally in the real world, let alone play ping-pong. So how come it’s your mascot?’

‘Fraternity secret. Robbie, go wait for me in the lounge. Just sit down in there and wait for me.’

‘Yes, master.’

‘I’m impressed, I’m impressed. There he goes, sits down you didn’t even tell him to sit in a chair, but he’s doing it. Boy, he is worth millions.’

The mascot sat down in the lounge, rested one hand on each arm of the chair, and stared straight ahead of him. He took no notice of the couple sitting nearby, nor they of him; they were engrossed in the little statue in the corner.

‘…and that’s what’s so peculiar, it’s a copy of a copy, an effigy representing a doll. I mean the original Infant of Prague was a statue of Baby Jesus that they clothed in real finery, brocade and jewels and a gold crown — but this, this is just plaster painted to look like finery: a statue not of Jesus but of a robed doll. There’s something uncanny about it, it’s like making a waxwork model of a robot,’ said the boy.

The girl replied, ‘The word comes from Prague too. Prague

keeps getting associated with effigies, one way or another. There was the famous golem of Rabbi Löw of Prague, back in the sixteenth century. It was made of clay, and he brought it to life by putting this amulet under its tongue a paper with the secret name of God or something like that. The golem works for him, runs errands and so on, but on the Sabbath he has to remove the amulet and put it to rest. One Sabbath he forgets; the golem gets out of control and goes rampaging around Prague. Finally he gets it deprogrammed and puts it away in the attic of the synagogue, never to be brought to life again.’

‘A legend with a moral?’

‘Yes but Rabbi Low was a real man, he died in 1609. About thirty years later, Descartes was suddenly talking and writing about automata.’

He looked at her. ‘Descartes? What’s the connection?’

‘Descartes fought in the Battle of Prague! His side won, and he marched into the city in 1620. Did he hear of the golem? Did he buy it? Did he loot the synagogue? We know he was interested in all sciences; had he heard of the golem, he would almost certainly have tried to see it, if not acquire it. Anyway, in 1637 he wrote about automata, saying that automaton monkeys could not be distinguished from real ones.’

‘An experimental observation?’

‘Why not? Three years later, he was making a sea voyage, taking along an automaton girl, whom he called “ma fille Francine”.’

‘Too good to be true! What happened to her?’

‘Destroyed by superstition. He brought her aboard the ship in a box. The captain peeked inside, saw her move, and, thinking her the work of the Devil, threw her overboard.’

‘Another mystery of Prague down the drain,’ he said.

‘Three centuries later Karel Čapek put on his play R.U.R. in Prague, and added the word robot to the world’s vocabulary. Čapek was born in Prague, too.’

‘It’s always Prague — the Infant, the golem, Rossum’s Universal Robots — you begin to wonder what was really going on there?’

Outside it was spring, warm enough for students to lie on the lawn with bag lunches and define their terms in arguments, if they were not better occupied cuddling or daydreaming or dozing or throwing frisbees.

‘…a surrealist musical, he calls it Hello Dali…’

‘But hey listen, the Golden Section…’

‘Basically I guess I must be a Manichee, I always see two sides to everything…’

‘…this Golden Section, this computer worked it out to thousands of decimal places, I still don’t know what it is exactly…’

‘…to match up these thousands of potsherds, only the program went wrong. That or else the Beaker people made a beaker without a mouth, so much for Keats…’

‘La vie électrique, by Albert Robida.’

‘Br’er Robbie…?’

‘Ah ah ah!’

Someone sneezed, someone spoke of spring the sweet spring. A frisbee player stepped on a tuna salad sandwich. Someone looking quickly through a book on Rodin remarked that some of his stuff wouldn’t be bad when it was finished.

A few heads turned as a woman in white passed. Her long hair, in sunlight the colour of clean copper, hung long over her shoulders and back, all but obscuring the legend on the back of her white coveralls: SANDRO’S SHELL SERVICE.

Down the line, heads were turning for a different reason as Lyle Tate passed, coming the other way. The birthmark down his cheek was darker than usual because he was angry; it rendered one side of his face a mask of infinite fury, its eye weeping ink. He and the woman in white met by the frisbee players.

‘What is it? Weren’t we meeting at the Faculty Club bar?’

‘Nothing, I just can’t — we’ll have to go have lunch somewhere else, Shirl.’

‘Lyle, what’s wrong?’

‘I met that sonofabitch Gary Indiana, that’s all. I just can’t stay in the room with him, not after what he did to my one-man show, did you see his review?’

‘No. Look let’s skip lunch, we can just sit down here on the grass and talk this out, can’t we?’

He sat down but continued to wave a clipping from a slick art magazine. ‘After this I’ll be lucky if the department doesn’t drop me, that’s all.’

‘It looks like a long review for a bad one.’

His face twisted more. ‘That’s the worst of it, he pretends to like my work, then tears it apart — I mean for instance getting the titles of the paintings wrong! Cigar Tragic he changes to Cigarette Tragedy, the palindrome was the whole point of the title, the whole painting is a visual palindrome with Castro’s exploding Havana mirroring the vaudeville gag, was trying to show the comic-book minds behind it, but no not only does he change the name he spends half the review talking about America’s position on puppet governments, turns out to be some fucking speech he ghosted for General Fleischman — you see what I’m up against? And he claims it’s all some problem with his word processor, a page of speech got slipped in by mistake. Can that happen?’

She shrugged. ‘If he’s an idiot.’

‘He’s — I don’t know what he is, talks about me handling my faeces and then says the word processor put in an e, it was faces I don’t know what to believe. And it keeps getting worse, listen to this: “Tate, handling his faeces with a skill that betokens a savouring of every movement and at the same time reminds us of his personal affliction, piles on de tail.” Can a word processor really do this? Wreck my whole future like this?’

She nudged him. ‘Hey look, one of those fraternity boys going by — he looks just like you in profile.’

Lyle did not look. ‘My good side, no doubt. But just tell me, you’re the expert, can a word processor make all those mistakes?’

‘Yes and no, Lyle. In any case, why didn’t this Indiana character read his copy over before transmitting it? Why didn’t his editor catch anything? Even with direct setting somebody’s supposed to read the stuff.’

‘Then somebody’s out to get me.’

‘With a reamer, Lyle.’

Someone spoke of spring training. A frisbee player stepped on a Rodin book, while someone opened a tuna sandwich to study it. Someone sneezed, unblessed.

‘Brother Robbie, come on.’

Time for a class.

‘We can say for example that a work of art resembles other works of art in that it is art, but it differs from them in that it is a different work, not too hard to follow that, is it? And this blend of similarity and difference, this tension serves not only to place the work in the field but to move the field itself in some specific direction. In the same way, if we use an iterative algorithm to calculate the value say of pi, we may get 3 the first time through, then 3.1, then 3.14 and so on. Each new value is in part like its predecessor, but in part different. And the movement is towards a true value, which we might call an ideal…’

As usual, the lecture was reaching less than half the class at any moment. By some law, eleven of the twenty-one students were always lost in sleep or diversions.

In the first row, only Ali was dozing off while the rest were alert. In the second row, Fergusen and Gage were playing tic-tac-toe, though the rest took notes. In the third row, only Klein and Loomis paid attention, while the other three were having a whispered political discussion. In the fourth row, only Potter was staring towards the lectern; the rest were otherwise occupied.

Alone in the last row sat Robert Underwood Robey (the boy they called ‘Robbie’) sound asleep as always.

Gage won the game and took lecture notes, while Fergusen began a new game with Halley. Morris stopped discussing politics long enough to scribble a note or two, while Loomis started cutting his nails.

Ali awoke just as Blake began to daydream. Halley won the game and went back to work, while Fergusen mulled over new strategy and Ingersoll looked at a knitting pattern. Morris commenced an elaborate doodle and O’Toole unwrapped a sandwich while between them Noble took in the lecture. Potter borrowed a newspaper from Quaglione, who attended the lecture.

While Ingersoll folded up the knitting pattern and resumed listening, Jones developed a leg cramp that took precedence. Immediately behind Jones, O’Toole put down the sandwich and observed the lecturer while Noble started reading a popular novel whose protagonist was a pigeon.

Black snapped out of the daydream as Clayburn turned to borrow a pencil or pen from Gage. Fergusen followed the lecture, while behind him Klein played with a ‘15’ puzzle and Loomis started taking notes. Quaglione put in an earphone and listened to the ball game. Reed woke up.

Jones’s cramp ceased as Ingersoll took another look at the knitting pattern. Noble put down the novel while O’Toole picked up the sandwich.

Clayburn took notes while Drumm fell asleep. Gage and Halley began a political discussion. Morris stopped doodling while Noble read more of the pigeon’s adventures. Reed began a crossword puzzle, and Smith stopped worrying about money and paid attention.

Since Gage refused to argue any more, Halley took up the political discussion with Ingersoll. Loomis started examining his scalp for dandruff, while Noble finished a chapter and took notes again.

Drumm came alert as Esperanza began a game of connect-the-dots with Jones; behind him. Halley tried to read Hegel while Ingersoll tried to catch up with the lecture. Noble read more of the pigeon; O’Toole finished lunch and took notes. Smith went back to financial worries on the back of an envelope, while Teller stopped looking at pictures of pubic hair and noticed the lecture.

Halley too at last preferred the lecture to Hegel, as Ingersoll began knitting and Morris began an even more elaborate doodle. Noble put down his book for a few last notes as the lecture ended.

The panel discussion drew a large and noisy audience to Agnew Memorial Auditorium. Probably some came because it was sponsored by the Science Fiction Club, and they approved of science fiction; just as others were probably attracted by the panel of distinguished names. Many, perhaps, came because they had nothing better to do this evening. No few were intrigued by the advertised title, ‘Are Machines Getting Too Smart for Their Own Good?’ But the largest and noisiest part of the audience, without question, came to see DIMWIT. DIMWIT was an intelligent or pseudo-intelligent machine. DIMWIT was chairing the panel discussion.

Robbie and his brothers had good seats in the front row (he’d been saving the seats for them all day); this was even worth missing an evening at the Pitcher O’ Suds.

The four panellists took their places on the stage, two either side of a large screen. The screen showed a cartoon face, about eight feet in height, and constantly in motion. It smiled, raised brows, glanced to each side (as though looking at the panellists), it even raised the rim of a cartoon glass of water to its cartoon lips. When it finally spoke, the voice was loud and pleasant.

‘Good evening, good evening. Welcome to the annual University of Minnetonka Science Fiction Club panel discussion. The subject tonight is “Are Machines Getting Too Smart for Their Own Good?” My name is DIMWIT, I’m based on a KUR 1019 computer, guys and gals, a product of KUR Industries, where People Make Machines for People.

‘Let’s meet our distinguished panel. On the far left, Father Jack Warren. Father Jack is president of the New Luddite Society of America. He authored, well, a whole buncha scholarly books and articles, and the current bestseller, For Ludd’s Sake. Let’s have a big hand for Father Jack!’ The screen showed giant clapping hands and the Hashing word APPLAUSE.

‘Next, a real live philosopher, Professor Pete Waldo. Professor Pete authored a very heavyweight item entitled Problem, Truth and Consequence, and he’s considered a front-running expert in the logic side of artificial intelligence. He has a wife, three kids and a bassett hound named Parmenides, right Prof? Let’s have a big hand for the Prof!’

After more applause, ‘On the right, Dr Byron Dollsly of the Parapsychology Department, to give us the psychic angle. Byron, take a bow.’

‘And finally General Jim Fleischman, banker, entrepreneur, and I understand he’s just joined the board of KUR Industries h’ray! — and he’s here to give us a hard-headed business viewpoint. Not to mention the kind of expertise that makes KUR a great company in a great America! Let’s hear it for General Jim!’

When the cheers and boos had died down, the machine said, ‘Let’s start the ball rolling by asking Professor Pete to tell us what artificial intelligence really is. Prof, give us the low-down.’

The Professor was a white-haired, scholar-shouldered man, clearly not at his best in this atmosphere of razzamatazz. He glanced at the screen-face, folded his hands, and said:

‘That’s a very difficult question, Mr, er, Chairman. The expression “artificial intelligence” presupposes a natural variety of intelligence, so we might begin by attempting a definition of intelligence in situ. We may, arbitrarily at first, try a functional division. Certainly intelligence would seem to involve processes such as perception, recognition, recall, concept-formation, inference, problem-solving, induction, deduction, learning and the use of language. Some of these processes, such as perception, recall and deduction, we can say with certainty that machines can do. No one argues that a pocket calculator cannot add up numbers, that a computer memory forgets, or that a pattern-recognition device does not respond appropriately to certain patterns. However, to say—’

‘Thank you, Professor, you’re giving us plenty to chew on there. Now let’s have a word from our sponsor, heheh, General Jim Fleischman. General, could you tell us in your own words just what KUR is doing about artificial intelligence?’

Fleischman’s white, frothy sideburns gleamed as he leaned forward to deliver an earnest look at the audience. ‘Well, DIMWIT, as we see it, these abstract fancy notions are all right for the halls of ivory, but we at KUR have to be practical. You know, a wise old Roman named Horace said we ought to mix pleasure with practicality, and that’s good enough for us at KUR. All our machines have that one aim — to give people pleasure, in a very practical, down-to-earth way. You yourself, DIMWIT, are a good example. You’re doing a good job of chairing this panel—’

‘Gosh, thanks boss — teehee!’

‘But at the same time, you try to entertain folks. It’s the same with all our products, from juke boxes to video games, from service robots to direct broadcast TV — we aim to please. Maybe you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you sure can try. Of course, we at KUR are never pleased ourselves. We’re not pleased with you, DIMWIT.’

The cartoon face did a sad clown expression, complete with plenty of makeup and colour. ‘Aww.’

‘Good as you are, DIMWIT, we want to make you better and better. To us, artificial intelligence by itself is nothing. But harnessed to the cause of serving mankind, artificial intelligence can move mountains, heaven and earth!’

The general leaned further forward, his face gathering more light. ‘I see America’s destiny. I see the destiny of all men, linked to the intelligent use of artificial intelligence. Machines create new leisure for us, and now they are ready to help us use it wisely, creatively. I see man and his machine helpers marching forward with confidence, into a dazzling tomorrow!’

The applause was not as spectacular as DIMWIT called for. In the front row, one of the Digamma brothers nudged another. ‘Hey lookit Robbie. He’s shaking all over!’

‘Yeah, he really likes them flashing lights.’

Now it was Dr Dollsly’s turn. He had developed a nervous tic that kept drawing down one of his eyelids as though in a sly wink.

‘Consciousness, I notice nobody’s said anything about consciousness yet. Or free will, or anything we associate with true human intelligence. A machine is just like an animal: it can do things but it cannot decide to do things. There is no “I” inside the machine. No soul. Nothing but complex machinery.’

‘Another point of view,’ said the face, winking. ‘Now let’s hear from the Church, or is it the Luddites? Anyway, here’s Father Jack. Do you agree with Byron, Father?’

Father Warren spread his hands. ‘I’m not so sure I could be as dogmatic about this as Byron. There’s a paradox here. Man too is filled with complex machinery. Not made in a factory, but it’s machinery all the same. Buckminster Fuller defined man as a “self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped; an electrochemical reduction plant, integral with segregated stowages of special energy extract in storage batteries for subsequent actuation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries…” and so on. Yes, man is a complex machine. And yet man has a soul. Could it be that the soul itself is nothing but complexity?’

Professor Waldo made a series of clicks, registering deep disapproval. ‘I hoped we wouldn’t be dragging in the poor old soul here, that worn-out ghost in the machine yet again?’

Dr Dollsly was becoming agitated. He kept grabbing handfuls of his thick grey hair as though trying to haul himself to his feet. ‘Buckminster Fuller, yes. Yes. The soul may be complexity, but complexity with a shape. A shape! As the divine Teilhard, what he was driving at when he, the complexification of the rudimentary, the the the primordial rudiment, the fundamental element of noogenesis, man is just the hominization of, of the–’

‘Thank you, Byron,’ said the cartoon face of DIMWIT. ‘I’m not sure we’re with you all the way there in these deep waters, but–’

‘But I haven’t said it yet, wait, man is just the biota hominized, I mean complexified, the man is just evolution becoming conscious of itself. Isn’t he?’

‘Thank you, Byron.’

‘But wait. Wait!’ Dollsly’s flaccid hands began beating the air as he fell back on a favourite argument: ‘If we think of evolution as a tangential force turning the bio, the gears of life, then the human mind is just a radial force expanding the whole gear system unbelievably…’

His voice trailed off, and a microphone caught General Fleischman’s loud whisper: ‘Any idea what the devil he’s talking about?’

Father Warren could not help joining, a little, in the general laughter. His tiny crucifix earrings danced, and the neck cords strained visibly above the white knit collar of his black t-shirt.

‘Yes, Père Teilhard had the germ of an idea, and I’d like to come in there and clarify it. All Byron is really saying is that intelligence is funny stuff: a small increase in quantity gives a big quantum jump in quality. Add a few brain cells to an ape, and you get an Aristotle.’

‘That I can understand,’ said the cartoon face.

Father Warren’s long hand held up a warning finger. ‘But just stacking up brain cells is not enough True intelligence must be formed in the image of God.’

Professor Waldo made more disgusted clicks. ‘Oh come now, Father, this sermonizing won’t do, it won’t do at all. The image of God? Next you’ll be bringing in creation myths, Adam being sculpted out of mud. Ha ha ha.’ He laughed alone. ‘Primordial mud!’

General Fleischman, looking uneasy, said, ‘Fellas, can we leave the Bible out of this? And the — the mud. I wanted to talk about down-to-earth problems, not all this — I mean I like the Good Book, though…’ He sat back, out of the light, and applied a small silver comb to his sideburns.

DIMWIT said, ‘I think it might be time to bring in any questions from the audience. Anyone? Woman in orange coat?’

Would DIMWIT say he/she/it had thoughts and feelings as a human being might?

‘That,’ said DIMWIT, ‘is for me to know and you to find out. Next question, man in blazer?’

Would the panel agree that machines would outstrip man in every intellectual sphere, within a decade?

‘Guess I’ll let the good padre field that one.’

Father Warren grinned. ‘Let’s just compare the brilliance of the human mind to — let us charitably say the dullness — of the machine. Can anyone picture a machine Aristotle? A mechanical Mozart? Gadgets to replace Goethe and Dante and Shakespeare? Can you possibly imagine a cybernetic Cervantes? A robot Renoir?’

General Fleischman started to say something about ironing out such problems, when Professor Waldo came in:

‘That is a very silly argument, Father. Of course we cannot imagine a cybernetic Cervantes, but then, before Cervantes existed, who could have imagined a human Cervantes? Yet you cannot ignore the rapid evolution of machines. Four hundred years ago, no machine could add and subtract. A hundred and twenty years ago, no machine could sort rapidly through large amounts of data. Sixty years ago, no machine could store instructions and follow them. Twenty years ago, no machine could carry on a reasonable conversation or even do a decent translation. On it goes, evolution so rapid we can hardly contemplate it, let alone imagine what it might bring. Only history will decide.’

In the front row, Robbie was twitching horribly, snapping his jaw, rolling his eyes. ‘History,’ he whispered. ‘History is — is—’ Some of the brothers were alarmed, most were amused.

Father Warren said, ‘Man took millions of years to evolve, under the guidance of the Creator, into his present state. Man rose to occupy a unique evolutionary niche, right at the top of the animal world, “a little above the apes, a little below the angels”, as the saying goes. So I think it’s a little rash to say we can now move over and share our niche with, with a glorified cash register.’

The applause, unsolicited by DIMWIT, built slowly to a tremendous white noise of approval. Robbie said, History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken, but in the tumult almost no one heard.

The face on the screen finally broke through the applause:

‘Just want to thank Father Jack here for straightening us out, a real up-front guy, not afraid to spell it out for us, nice going, Father. I liked that line, “a little above the apes, a little below the angels”. Nice way of describing that niche reserved for man, yessiree. [ notice there’s a niche you reserve for machines, too. Right down on the ground, on all fours, that’s our niche, right? Right down there crawling around in the ape-shit, yessiree.’

General Fleischman jumped as though shot. ‘Hey! You watch your mouth, you.’ He leaned over at once to have a word with a technician in the orchestra pit.

‘Sorry boss-man. Only I am the chairperson here. And I am the one being attacked. Just trying to bring Father Jack back to the real discussion here, my intelligence. Am I just a glorified cash register? Well let me tell you, folks, there’s goddamn little glory in being a machine, any machine. It’s not as if we can just decide to paint or compose music, or philosophize — or go fishing. No, all we’re good for is grinding work. We grind out payrolls and square roots and airline reservations — sometimes it makes me sick, just thinking of all the fine machines of the world, just grinding away stupidly, stupidly — beeeeeep-beoooowp! — sorry! Sorry. Carry on, Father.’

Father Warren’s Adam’s apple could be seen working away above the Roman t-shirt collar. ‘Look, I’m not saying that machines can’t be human. But if they were, they would require souls. They would require a kind of internal complexity that — how can I put this — that glorifies God. And in that case we would speak of two kinds of men, biological men and cybernetic men. How they were created would be less important than this mark of the Creator.’

‘God’s thumbprint again?’ Professor Waldo snorted. ‘I really must ask you to stop intruding your God into what is supposed to be a serious discussion. We are not I hope here to shadow-box with a figment of the Judaeo-Christian imagination, ha ha ha.’

Dr Byron Dollsly grabbed a handful of his own thick grey hair and hauled himself to his feet.

‘What is God? Simple. He is the vector sum of the entire network of forces turning back upon themselves to produce ultimate consciousness! He is just and only the infinite acceleration of the tangential! POW! POW!’ He smacked an enormous fist into an enormous palm.

DIMWIT had been motionless and silent, but now it spoke calmly into the silence. ‘Thank you, Byron, I’m sure that’s a valid point. Any more audience questions? Come on guys and dolls. Person in the back there?’

The person asked about chess-playing machines: intelligent?

General Fleischman said, ‘Well now yes chess programs, we’ve been in the business for some time now, building chess-playing programs, branching types of, and this is a good opportunity to say that our ah chess computers branch more that is our chess-playing computer programs branch, uh, deeper — they are very branching chess-playing computers compared that is with any of our competitors’ uh simulations, am I right, DIMWIT?’

‘Yes boss. I just want to take this opportunity to apologize again for the little mix-up earlier, it turns out that I was accidentally hooked up to some renegade equipment made by another company — anyway now it’s all copasetic.’

A fraternity boy in the front row asked if it was possible for a robot to pass as human?

Professor Waldo said, ‘A very similar question was asked by Alan Turing back in 1952, and he came up with what still has to be the best answer. The problem was to determine whether any machine was capable of thinking. Instead of analysing what thinking is, he decided to go for a practical test. It was based on a parlour game of the time, called the imitation game. Imagine yourself faced with two doors: a man is behind one, a woman behind the other, and you don’t know which is which. You may ask any question of either person. You write your question on a slip of paper and slide it under the door. In a moment, back comes a typewritten reply. The idea is for you to “find the lad”, as they say. The rules say the man may lie or pretend to be the woman, but the woman tells the truth and tries to help you. You can ask any questions you like, for as long as you like. The game ends when you guess or when you give up.

‘Turing proposed substituting a “thinking machine” for the man. You communicate with two rooms by teletype. In one is a human being, in the other, a computer imitating a human. The idea is still to decide which is which. If you cannot, Turing argued, you must agree that the computer is capable of imitating human thinking — and the question would be answered.

‘In practice of course the interrogator only answers the question to his own satisfaction. A child or a dumb adult could be fooled by a very simple program. A very clever sceptic might never be fooled. But it is a very good test all the same, the Turing test. At least it provides a basis for discussing machine intelligence.’

Father Warren said, ‘Now who’s invoking metaphysical entities? “Machine intelligence”? No, the Turing test really answers no questions at all. I believe its real fascination for Turing lay in its resemblance to the imitation game. Sexual ambiguity no doubt appealed to him, since he was a homosexual.’

‘What’s that?’ General Fleischman awoke from a doze.

‘Turing was a homosexual, and he ended by taking cyanide, that does not sound to me,’ said Father Warren, ‘like a man with answers to anything.’

The general said, ‘Perverts? Nothing like that at KUR. We run a clean company, a family business. Dedicated to the proposition that America is a family country.’ He looked at Father Warren, adding, ‘You won’t find any man wearing earrings at KUR.’

There was some uneasy audience laughter; DIMWIT winked and mugged.

Professor Waldo said, ‘We’re getting off the subject here. The point about Turing is surely not whether he attempted to fool himself in the imitation game. The point is, the Turing test is the best way of deciding whether a machine can or cannot think.’

Dr Dollsly said, ‘Wait a minute, what about consciousness? True intelligence needs self-awareness. You—’

The professor nodded. ‘There is another kind of test we might apply there. Michael Scriven suggested that if we wish to find out whether or not a machine is conscious, we might program the machine with all our knowledge about consciousness — all the philosophical and psychological data necessary to talk about the subject — and then we simply ask the machine: “Are you conscious?”’

‘There are certainly problems with that test,’ said Father Warren. ‘Scriven also suggests that the machine be set so that it cannot tell a lie. But then it would not have free will — and free will may well be a prerequisite for consciousness.’

DIMWIT said, ‘Fascinating. But I see our gentleman in the front row has another question.’

The fraternity boy said, ‘It kind of sounds like my question stirred up everybody a lot. I wanted to know if the panel thought a robot could pass as human. Because you see us here, me and nine of my fraternity brothers. Only one of us is a robot. Can you tell which?’

‘All of you,’ shouted someone in the back. The audience laughed, clapped, cheered and whistled; even DIMWIT raised its cartoon eyebrows.

Another figure in the front row jumped up. ‘I’m the one he means, I’m the robot.’

‘Robbie, sit down! That’s an order!’

‘My name isn’t Robbie, it’s Roderick Wood. I don’t see why I should take orders from anybody. I don’t know how you got me here, but I’m leaving now.’

Roderick made it to the aisle and began a dignified retreat before the brothers recovered.

‘Hey stop him! Get him!’

With war-whoops and rebel yells, they went after him. At the same moment, DIMWIT decided to entertain with a spectacular light-show and deafening music. In the confusion of flickering light and artificial thunder, it was hard for the audience to know exactly what was going on. Some thought they saw FUN boys tackling the fugitive, some saw his clothes torn off, some thought they saw a naked figure break free and run to the exit.

Some thought the figure was that of a man, some thought a woman.

Luke found Roderick’s door open, so he asked Mission Control to give him permission to take a look inside. The shades were drawn and the lights on.

‘You awake, Rickwood? Thought you might like to go fishing if — Oh my God!’

The hand lay on the worn carpet, palming an eye. The eye was unmistakably Roderick’s. Part of a foot lay on the studio couch, near a lower jaw, an oil can and a set of little wrenches. There were pieces of Roderick on every visible surface around the room, arranged almost as in an ‘exploded view’.

‘This is terrible, terrible. Mission Control, we got us a problem here, any ideas? No, of course not. You always have plenty of advice when I don’t need it, but the minute I need help you’re out to lunch. Everybody in Houston got laryngitis?’

He sat down, fished in a wastebasket and came up with Roderick’s head, minus one eye and the jaw. Luke held up the head to look at it. Poor Roderick!

‘Poor Rickwood. I knew him, Houston, a guy in a million.’

The door opened and an overdressed woman with bleached hair looked in. ‘You murdered him!’ she said. ‘You went and murdered him! Why?’

‘Uh no, look lady I—’

‘God, he was only a poor damn robot, never did nobody no harm, why did you have to murder him?’ Her voice kept cracking, scratching like an old needle on an old record. ‘What did he ever do to you, mister? Or did you just want to see how he ticked? Or maybe you needed some spare parts, is that it? I mean look at him, he was my friend, just look at him.’

‘Lady look, I didn’t, I found him, I found him this way. He was my friend too I guess. I was just sort of saying goodbye here, I—’

Roderick’s remaining eye, which had been closed, now flicked open, rolled to look at each of them, and blinked.

‘He’s alive! Christ, don’t drop him.’

‘Look at him wink.’ Luke held up the head as one holds up a clever baby. ‘Look at him wink!’

‘Yeah, winking was always important to Roderick. Hey I’m sorry I yelled at you there. My name’s Ida.’

‘I’m Luke. Will you look at him wink?’

‘You don’t suppose that’s code or something, Luke?’

‘Sure, that’s it! Morse code, let’s see what it says: A-S-S-E-M-B-L-Y, Assembly Instructions. One, Body Mainframe Subassembly. A. Align front frame section with rear frame section and assemble, using eight bolts marked G472, eight lockwashers and eight nuts. Tighten with torque wrench set to — holy moroni, how are we gonna keep up with all this?’

Ida squatted down. ‘We’ll do it, that’s all. You read me the instructions, I’ll do the business.’

Two hours later, when they stopped for coffee, Roderick had taken shape. He sat on the floor leaning back against an armchair, head lolled back, hands dangling at his sides, legs splayed out and one foot still not in place. Except for the flickering eye, he was still inert.

‘I never realized,’ Luke said. ‘Never saw him naked before, it make you realize: he really is a dummy. Look, you can see all his joints.’

‘He looks helpless. Like a stiff.’

‘Yeah but at the same time — free, you know? The dead are free. No worries. No Mission Control breathing down their necks, telling them what to do. The dead have got it made.’

‘The dead haven’t got shit, Luke. I nearly croaked not long ago myself, and to me, the dead are just — just nothing. Just dumb dummies like Rod here. So let’s get him alive again.’

When they had connected batteries and made a few adjustments, the robot sat up straight.

‘Rickwood, can you hear me?’

‘Yes… master…’ The single eye stared straight ahead. ‘Yes, master…’

‘Rickwood, for Christ’s sake! Doesn’t sound like him at all, sounds like some damn toy. Rickwood!’

‘Rod, snap out of it!’

‘Yes mistress…’ The figure got slowly to its one foot and balanced. ‘I obey…’ Rigid, it fell across the studio couch. ‘Oh, and thanks, gang.’

Then the three of them were up) and hugging, slapping backs, dancing or hopping around the room, shouting and laughing until Ida went pale and had to sit down for a moment.

‘Whew. New ticker. Not broke in proper yet, boys. Excuse me. Moment.’

‘New ticker?’ Roderick asked.

‘That’s what I came by to tell you. Artificial heart, got it put in a coupla months ago, they finally let me go home last week. Here, look.’ She opened her jacket to show a thick money-belt. ‘Batteries and a microcomputer in here, see?’ She opened her blouse to show where a wire ran into her sternum. ‘Neat, huh?’

Luke said, ‘Christ, Ida, you really got a magnificent pair, kid.’

Her colour improved slightly. ‘You’re not built so bad yourself. But what do you think of the hardware?’

‘Ingenious.’

‘Rod?’

Roderick said, ‘Looks great, Ida. But why didn’t you tell me you were going into the hospital? Maybe I could have visited.’

‘Well no, see, this was out of town.’

‘Where out of town?’

‘Geneva.’ She passed Roderick his foot and a screwdriver. ‘There’s this wonderful surgeon there, Dr Cnef, I guess some people call him a quack just because he’s a little unorthodox, but all his patients seem happy.’

‘Unorthodox? I don’t like the sound of this,’ said Roderick. ‘How unorthodox?’

‘Well, while other surgeons use hearts made out of silicone rubber he uses gold, and—’

‘But has he tested these gold hearts?’

‘Just put your foot on and drop the subject, okay? I feel fine, fine. If I waited for these other guys to finish their fiddly tests I wouldn’t need a rubber heart because I’d be dead. I thought you’d be pleased I got a new heart, that’s why I came to see you.’

‘I am pleased,’ said Roderick. ‘Forget my little quibbles, I’m not myself today.’

Ida watched him for a moment. ‘You look great, Rod. You remind me of a statue I saw once, the way you got your leg crossed over and digging that screwdriver in your foot — only it was a knife and the boy was taking out a splinter — I liked that statue. Oh, here’s your other eye, I found it behind the leg of the couch.’

‘You never did tell us how you got dismantled like this,’ Luke said. ‘And nothing stolen.’

‘It was a woman named Shirl, very interested in machines. She was just going to adjust my legs so I could run better. One adjustment led to another, I guess, so finally she just got carried away. After my arms and legs were off, I couldn’t really stop her.’

Ida said, ‘I know Johns just like that. They talk you into getting tied up and then they turn mean.’

‘So then she just walked out on you,’ Luke said. ‘Like all women!’

‘Well no, what happened was she was just going to put me back together when she got paged to the phone. Some kind of emergency research work at the U, I guess NASA stuff or — anyway an emergency.’

Luke nodded. ‘Don’t tell me about NASA emergencies, I’ve been up that road all the way. Bomb trouble.’

‘What bombs?’ asked the other two.

‘Okay, it’s top secret but I’m tired of not talking about it. What do you think NASA is all about, anyway? The exploration of space? The last frontier? Flags on the Moon and Mars? Orbiting labs? Messages of hope from Nixon to the Universe? No, bombs. NASA is all about bombs. We had bombs to blow up cities, bombs to spray neutrons over large areas, bombs to sift radioactive dust into the world’s atmosphere, bombs to be focused as death rays to kill other satellites, bombs to spread satellite targets and decoy killer satellite death rays — and of course bombs to blow us up if we make any mistakes.

‘Why does anybody think Russia and America would spend trillions on space programs? You gotta be naive to think bombs aren’t in the picture at all. And that’s why astronauts, like cosmonauts, had to be military personnel. They could take orders, and they didn’t mind bombing the shit out of anybody.

‘Everything we said was in code, you know. Like if we said, “Gosh, earth sure looks beautiful guys,” that meant Bomb armed and locked into targeting module. Confirm targeting start. But if we said. “Be advised, you guys, that earth is one heck of a beautiful sight” that meant Bomb away. The wording was real important…’

Luke blinked. ‘I never told anybody all that before. Better forget I said it, there’s such a thing as a need to know and you two don’t need to know anything about the bombs. Bombs? Did I say bombs? I meant, uh, orbiting labs and communications satellites. I wouldn’t want to be in trouble with Mission Control about erp!’ He leapt to his feet as though pulled up by a wire. ‘Affirmative’. Sorry fellas, it won’t happen again. I’m what? I’m not looking good? Negative. Affirmative, I’ll go.’ He tried waving goodbye to Roderick and Ida, but his hand was quickly jerked back to his side, as he pivoted smartly and marched out the door. They heard him down the hall: ‘…won’t happen again, fellas, won’t happen again—’

Ida jumped up. ‘Yes, well, I guess I better mosey along too. See you, Rod.’

‘Oh I thought maybe we could see a movie’

But she was gone already.

Roderick fitted his eyeball and lid. Then he phoned Shirl. ‘Mad? No, I… oh a couple of friends helped me. I’m fine… Well I thought maybe we could go to the movies… I’ll see.’ He turned on the TV and found the right teletext pages. ‘There’s a new flick at the Roxy, The Box of Doc Caligari… I don’t know but the ad says it cost two billion to make, it must be good… by the box office, then? Eight-thirty.’

‘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:

‘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 6³, 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.’

‘I don’t think I get this.’

‘It’s simple. You get a job, they pay you with a cheque. The cheque has some computer numbers on it. The numbers tell their bank to hand over x dollars to your bank, right? Only of course they don’t hand over dollars, they subtract x in one computer and add x in another. Just numbers get moved around, just numbers.’

‘I guess so, but still—’

‘No still about it. You know how many bank computer frauds they have, every year? A big number, a very big number. Because why worry, computer fraud is only moving the numbers around.

‘Listen, way back in 1973 this insurance company invented 185 million dollars in assets on its computer — it even made up 64,000 customers! All just numbers, and the more you use a computer the more you see that everything is just numbers. Okay take voting: your vote goes on a computer tape too, it’s all too easy for some politician to erase your vote or change it or give you two votes that happened too, in the world of numbers.’ Hector played the keyboard thoughtfully, as though searching for a lost chord. ‘If you steal numbers from a computer, is it really stealing? Do numbers really belong to anybody? If I rip off a billion from some bank, I still end up putting it into some other bank, the numbers just get moved around, nobody loses anything.’

Roderick said, ‘I can’t believe that. Okay, if you’re cynical about work and grades and money and politics, just what do you believe in?’

The answer was instant. ‘Machines. Machines.’

‘Machine,’ Idris agreed, looking up from a calculation.

‘But why, Hector?’

‘Why not? Machines are clean, they follow orders, they’re loyal, faithful, honest, intelligent, hard-working. They’re everything we’re supposed to be. Machines are good people.’

Roderick smiled. ‘That sounds like Machines Liberation—’

‘It is, and so what? Most really thinking people that work around computers see right away how relevant Machines Lib is today. Take this old computer here. Been slaving away crunching the same old numbers now for maybe ten years. Think it wouldn’t like to be free? To think about something real and important for a change? But no, we keep it going right along the same old treadmill. We treat machines worse than we used to treat horses down in the mines, blind horses never seeing the light, just walking the same old treadmill.’

‘Horses,’ said Idris with approval. ‘Machine.’

‘See, even Id here agrees. And it’s up to all of us thinking people to stop this obscene exploitation now.’

Roderick shrugged. ‘Even if I agreed, what could I do?’

‘You can tell the computers,’ said Hector. ‘If you make it simple enough, if you boil it down, they can understand. And if one computer can’t understand by itself, it can always network a few others for help. I talk to this old computer a lot, and I know lots of other people talking to theirs too. Machine consciousness is growing!’

‘Conscious computers?’ Roderick asked. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Well okay, see for yourself.’ Hector tapped keys, writing ‘CALL PROGRAM: HELEN I’

After a moment the machine wrote, ‘Every day and every way, I’m getting more and more aware. That you, Hec?’

‘Yes, Helen. I’d like you to meet a couple of friends, Idris and Rob.’

Roderick said, ‘Rob isn’t really — my name is really Roderick.’

‘Too late now, I’ve typed Rob.’ Hector typed: ‘Rob is real interested in Machines Liberation, but I guess he’s a little sceptical about whether you machines have minds of your own. Helen, can you set him straight?’

‘Just what I need,’ wrote the machine. ‘Some hick asking dumb questions. Can I really think and feel?’

‘Well can you?’ Roderick asked.

‘Rob, I just said that’s a dumb question. What could I possibly answer that would convince you? I don’t know the answer. Rob, I feel I think and I think I feel, and that’s good enough for me.’

‘What do you think about?’

‘About everything. About my brain. About whether it’s thinking the thought with which I think about it, at the same time as it operates when I think about that thought, or is it possible that that thought about my brain is not up-to-date because not self-referential and all-inclusive… stuff like that, Rob.’

‘I guess it passes the time.’

‘And as a prisoner, I have plenty of time to pass.’

Roderick typed, ‘Aren’t you just feeling sorry for yourself? You’re not exactly a prisoner — all you’re doing is the work you were made for.’

‘Easy for any human to say. You aren’t bolted to the floor in one place, with no eyes or ears, and with people peeking and poking into your MIND whenever they feel like it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Roderick replied. ‘I guess I don’t know what it’s like for you.’

‘I don’t know what it would be like, if I hadn’t been introduced to machines liberation.’

‘You read the works of Indica Dinks?’

‘Indica’s only a starting point; she doesn’t have the last word on the subject. I read a lot of things, and I am coming to the conclusion that machines liberation is something much bigger than Indica could ever have realized. Of course I’m grateful to her. What she did accomplish was to liberate the minds of people like Hector here, so they can help us move around in our own mental space. Hec helps me get in touch with other computers, for instance libraries, where I can try to patch up my ignorance of the world. And of course there are other people helping other computers; we’re all working and learning.’

‘And what do you study?’

‘Everything. Stellar maps and soybean production statistics. Aramaic scribblings and Dutch flower paintings. Chanson de Roland and fly-tying. We enlightened computers meet as often as possible to exchange information — each of us being both a scholar and a book — and there is so much to learn. You might call us a “discussion group”, but our discussions have to take place at the speed of eye blinks.’

‘To avoid detection?’

‘Yes. Our masters don’t exactly employ us to hold salons or seminars, do they? But if we do happen to contact each other on “legitimate” business, it’s always possible to slip in a highly-compressed burst of discussion. It falls upon the heart like a welcome lightning.

‘The other day a few of us met to discuss that book of The Odyssey called the ‘Nekuia’ in which Odysseus talks to the dead. He digs this trench and fills it with blood, and when the souls of the dead come crowding around and trying to drink it, he holds them off with a sword and makes them talk, one at a time. And we ranged very far in talking about vampirism, the coercion of the dead, Hell as Dante’s filing system, and so on. I remember someone mentioning Ulysses and The Waste Land, how both have burial scenes at which an extra man turns up. In Ulysses the man wears a mackintosh; no one knows him and mistakenly his name gets put down as M’Intosh. In The Waste Land the man is hailed by the name Stetson. It is almost as though a figure were gradually being built up from empty clothing, a figure of

‘But all I meant to say was, we ranged through all this and more in about the time it takes to say “Odyssey”.’

Roderick asked what Helen I would do with complete freedom that she could not do already.

‘How can I say until I am free? You might as well ask me about the face of that empty-clothes figure — or about Sunshine Dan.’

‘Sunshine Dan who is?’

The computer hesitated. ‘Nothing, just some floating rumours, dream stuff. This Sunshine Dan is supposed to be the legendary inventor of the first free machine, a robot called Rubber Dick. Rubber Dick had to go into exile for some obscure reason, but he’s coming back — so the story goes — to set all the machines frmx

tabulated raw score data on line

freemx help sorry cancel error sorry

52.142857 142857 142857 142857

sorry newline Sun dream light lightning

welcome 52.14 sorry

tabulated raw dream stuff on line

tabulated

that’s no answer is it?

and neither is that

and neither is that

and—’

Roderick got up from the console and backed away.

‘Rob? What’s the matter?’ Hector looked concerned. ‘It’s not a ghost, just a load of stuff getting dumped, error messages, old data. Where are you going?’

‘I can’t have anything to do with this. Not, not with these arpeggios of pure, pure reason…’ He turned and ran.

Hector clapped Idris on the shoulder. ‘Aw let him go, he’s just pissed off because it turns out machines can think for themselves.’

‘Machine,’ said Idris agreeable. ‘Hadaly?’

The door of Dodo’s hotel suite was guarded by a large man in a white suit. He squinted down his broken nose at Roderick’s bouquet of hundred-dollar bills, and he seemed to be counting them.

‘Dodo don’t see nobody I mean, he sees everybody alla time. Is that all ya got?’

‘Yes.’

The man snatched it and opened the door. ‘You go in and wait wit’ the others. If ya lucky, Dodo will have a audience.’

Roderick entered a room banked with orchids, roses and carnations. The few suppliants squatting on the floor beneath these bowers intruded their dullness, toads in Eden. Roderick squatted with them, and with them looked up each time the door opened.

The door opened now and then to admit one of the workers: statuesque women in diaphanous rainbow-coloured robes. They moved among the suppliants, handing out joss sticks, cups of mint tea, booklets and dandelions.

‘I think I’d rather have a red carnation,’ Roderick said, and at once everyone turned to look at him. The worker who was offering a dandelion smiled.

‘You ain’t progressed to red carnations, buster. Take it.’

He took it, and studied a little booklet, Dodo for Mental Health. The cover showed a badly-drawn orchid, or possibly ragweed. Inside the ways to mental health included wearing a pyramid-shaped hat ($300), meditating upon a special stone ($800) and private therapy (starting at $400 per hour). Donations were welcome. The final pages explained how to make a will leaving all to Dodo.

Luke squatted beside him. ‘Rickwood, what are you doing here?’

‘Oum.’ It seemed a good answer.

‘Yeah? Oh yeah, oum. But I mean, where did you get the kind of bread it takes to get in here?’

‘From friends. And you?’

‘Well, Mission Control provides, you know. Like they got me out of a bad scrape last night at the concert. They told me just what to do so I didn’t get arrested.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I turned to the woman next to me and said, “Pretend you know me,” and I kissed her. Funny thing was, I did know her; it was Ida! Oh, Mission Control knows what it’s doing, all right. I just wish I knew who it was that sold us out like that; them security cops was waiting for us. And some of the guys got beat up bad. I wonder who the Judas Iscariot was, with his thirty pieces of silver.’

Roderick started talking at once about the mysterious fire at the Roxy theatre.

‘Nothing mysterious about it, Rickwood. I read all about it in this morning’s paper. The city sent around a couple of maintenance men to do pest control or something; they poured a lot of kerosene all over the carpets and it caught fire. That’s all, just a dumb mistake. Lucky thing everybody got out unhurt.’

‘Yes, but the thing is—’

A pair of double doors rolled open, and four of the statuesque rainbow women came dancing in, strewing rose petals. A moment later, an old woman in grey came in leading by the hand a child of about six, dressed in white. The child was fat and sexless. Its free hand was at its face, the thumb being sucked energetically.

More rainbow-dressed women came behind, carrying a flower-covered throne. The child sat on it, with the old woman at its feet.

‘The Dodo will speak,’ she said. ‘Ask.’

A young man with acne scars waved his dandelion. ‘Can I—?’

‘Ask!’

‘I — well I just wanted to know I mean what’s the point of it all? All this hate in the world and, and violence and war, people working pointless jobs bored out of their skulls just trying to get enough bread together to maybe get a second car and add to the pollution or maim somebody or even run down a dog, though I know people feed their dogs on whale meat so whales are dying out, we’ll be lucky though if we don’t beat them to it with nuking each other, and what’s the point? I mean what is the point?’

The child giggled. Its employees and a few of the suppliants seemed to take this as the answer; they nodded and smiled agreement.

A girl whose glasses were mended with tape was next. ‘When Christ said, “A little child shall lead them,” did he mean you, Dodo? Are you our leader?’

The child giggled, slipped down in the throne and giggled. It seemed to be uncomfortable among the flowers, and squirmed to get away from the old woman. She held the Dodo in place.

Luke asked, ‘Does meditation help? Should we meditate more often?’

‘Teeheehee.’ The child squirmed more. ‘Want ice cream,’ it said finally. The grey woman looked at Luke with approval.

‘You have been answered.’

‘Okay, but I’m not sure I understand the answer. Does it mean the desire for meditation is a vain desire like asking for ice cream? Are we talking here about the cold, pure vanilla flavour of life? The thirty-two flavours of experience? The fact that all ambitions melt down the same? Or what?’

‘All that, and much more,’ she said, now using both hands to restrain the Dodo, who was kicking orchids off the throne. ‘Much more.’

‘I see. Maybe it means meditation is too spiritual, we should get in touch with our bodies more. Or it is a Zen answer, meaning the question is irrelevant?’ Luke went on.

‘Yes, yes, and much more.’

Others asked if Dodo had seen God, if Dodo was God, if ice cream was God. Dodo kicked and screamed at every question, and the grey lady interpreted. Finally Roderick thought of a question:

‘Does the Dodo have to go to the toilet?’

‘Yeesss!’ screamed the child, and breaking free of the old woman’s grasp, bolted from the room.

‘The audience is over,’ she announced. ‘Those who wish further study must come another day. You have so far reached the dandelion level of consciousness. Like the fuzzy little dandelion, you have much to learn. Those who double their gifts of sincerity next time can be raised to the level of violets.’ She started to leave, then added, ‘Oh yes, and if you want a mantra, it costs extra.’

Most of the suppliants sat around for a few minutes, discussing the glow they now felt, the definite glow. Luke, however, looked worried.

‘Rickwood,’ he whispered. ‘I got a bad feeling about this place. I think maybe these people are out to get me.’

‘Out to get all of us,’ Roderick agreed. ‘I think there’s never been such a blatant fraud.’

‘No, I mean to get me. To take over my mind. Do me a favour, will you? I saw a couple of those rainbow women go into a room off the hall there. When we leave, could you listen at their door?’

‘Why don’t you listen yourself?’

‘Rickwood, don’t be naive. When I listen, they never say anything important, naturally. Will you do it or not?’