by John Sladek
‘Tell you a funny story,’ said Hannah. ‘See all these books?’
Allbright tore open one of the plastic-wrapped cubes and pulled one book out of it. ‘Die! Die! Your Lordship, catchy title there. What have you got, a zillion copies here?’
‘The last tenant this publisher, just walked off and left them,’ she said. ‘But we heard the whole story from the landlord. Seems they printed hundreds of thousands of these without noticing the last few pages were missing – where the name of the killer is revealed.’
‘Great! The ultimate mystery.’
‘That’s not all – you want some wine? There’s a glass by your foot there – that’s not the best part. They decided to cut their losses by announcing a prize for the first reader who came up with the correct answer. Only – so the landlord says – the guy that won it, it turned out he’d been on welfare for years – was feebleminded!’
‘Fair enough, you don’t have to be an Einstein –’
‘No but listen, the welfare people had him arrested for fraud and froze his prize money, and I guess they’re still fighting it out in court – and listen, the whole case –’ She was laughing so hard she could hardly pour the wine. ‘Listen the whole case hinges on the solution to this stupid mystery. His lawyers claim he got the right answer by accident, and the publishers – rather than lose the prize and get no publicity for it – they’re suing to get it back, claiming he got the wrong answer after all!’
‘Yeah, what does the author say?’
‘That’s just it, they kept stalling around about producing him, so I hear, and finally had to admit the author was a –’
‘A what? Sounded like you said a computer.’
‘I – I did. And the computer’s been erased or something, so nobody – nobody knows – ha ha ha, the ultimate mystery!’
Lyle worked on, putting the last touches as the light began to fail. The others lolled on unfinished mysteries, drinking wine and trading computer stories. Allbright, his shirt and shoes off, was beginning to mutter about the C-charged brain.
‘You know what? I think that head wants a drink. Hey head, you wanna drink?’ He stood up, lifted his sloshing glass, and stumbled towards the pedestal.
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Lyle had a terrible flash of premonition: wine pouring down the face, the indelible purple stain …
‘Good God! You didn’t have to hit him that hard,’ said Hannah in the semi-darkness. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Put on the lights.’ The head was unscathed. Its empty eye-sockets stared back at them across the floor where, amid signs of a struggle, Allbright lay face down, sprawled awkwardly as any body on any drawing-room hearth rug.
‘Damn you! Damn you!’ Hannah said, and it was not clear whether she was cursing Lyle Tate or his creation. She knelt, turned the body over, and removed her false teeth. ‘Not breaving,’ she said. ‘Get an ambulanf.’
‘I’ll have to go downstairs –’
‘Hurry!’
But when he returned, Allbright was sitting up, mumbling about the C-charged brain. ‘Addiction is just addiction …’ he said, and was still trying to say it right when the ambulance men had come and gone, cursing art and artists.
It was only then that Lyle noticed the head had been moved; lifted from its pedestal and put back wrong.
‘What the hell did you do? Hannah? Did you –?’
‘Don’t worry, the paint’s not smeared, I was careful. It was just that – you see I’m old, not enough breath in my body to revive him. I had to call – other sources for the kiss of life.’
‘That? You think that fibreglass shell with paint on it, could bring the dead to life?’
‘… not the Burroughs adding …’
‘Maybe it can’t,’ she said. ‘I just felt I had to try everything. Who knows, maybe just the smell of the paint shocked him – eh? Back into his body?’
‘Back into –! Jesus Christ Jane, next thing you’ll be levitating over in Dr Tarr’s fancy new lab, a fat grant from NASA to find out if birds read each others’ minds, how do you like that? Or is it psychic levitation now, NASA’s real interested there, bound to like the idea of mind-powered space flight. Trouble is most of the people in Tarr’s profession couldn’t work up the brain power to levitate birdshit in a hurricane.’
‘Look I know how you feel about, I know you don’t believe in psychic pow –’
‘Can’t afford to, I’m a painter. And what Tarr and his crowd want to do is put painters out of business, put damn near everybody out of business …’
‘I don’t see that at all.’ She sat down next to Allbright, who was pouring himself a drink and talking to it.
‘Well what’s the point of anybody going to a gallery to look at a Dürer? See, anybody can just be like this psychic Mathew Manning, whip out his own Dürer at home in a couple of hours, no previous training required. Or writing, why write a novel when you can be like this South American whatsisname, go in for automatic writing and knock out a novel in a week? Jesus it kind of makes a dumb joke out of everything anybody ever worked at, right? Take this Rosemary Brown, she’s even finished Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony … so what’s the point of anything?’
‘… funny dream …,’ said Allbright. The others stopped talking and looked at him. ‘Funniest damn dream … dreamed, you know what I dreamed?’
For different reasons, they were almost holding their breaths.
‘Dreamed this damn dummy was trying to kiss me …’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes?’
‘And then this other dummy was trying to bite me in the ass!’
‘My teeth!’ Hannah shrieked. ‘He rolled over on my –!’
All three of them were still giggling over it an hour later, when Sleep closed their eyes.
One liver-spotted hand passed the journal to another. ‘Fascinating article there by this J. Hannah. Proposing a robot culture in which –’
‘What do we know about this Hannah? Is he –?’
‘She. Jane Hannah, fifty-five-year-old anthropologist, teaching Comparative Literature at the U. of Minnetonka. Two years ago she was predictably hostile to Entities, voted against funding a
project I believe. But – bad luck there, seems her son died. She began to adopt a maternal-protective attitude towards Entities, fill in the blanks, usual hostility towards authority, organized behaviour …’
‘She saw robots as free spirits? Anarchists?’
‘Correct.’ Pipe-smoke curled and writhed through the conference room. ‘Class eight surveillance of course, but this article makes me wonder … class six, maybe?’
‘Are we interested in her contacts?’
‘Nothing significant so far, writers and artists, petty malcontents. But the article itself –’
‘Maybe we could check it with Leo?’
‘Leo, yes, so I thought. Let’s toddle over there now, I’ll summarize it for you on the way.’
The two old men made their way through the maze of corridors and security barriers of Building A, Orinoco Institute, emerging in the desert sun like lizards creeping out to bask.
‘Mmm, feel that sun!’
‘Mmm. What she’s done is tried to trace the origin of the idea of Entities – robots, that is – in Middle Europe. In Czechoslovakia especially. Evidently the home of Celts began there, the only “empire” without an emperor or a seat of government. She tries to link that with the Celtic religions, worship of the head, which they recognized as the centre of the intellect.’
‘I don’t see that as signif –’
‘She claims they tried to keep heads alive after death, and regenerate. Certainly true that they believed in reincarnation, at any rate.’
‘Ha! What will Leo make of that!’
‘Anyway she then goes on to point out all the Czech rebellions and revolutions, beginning as I recall with the Hussites, Taborites, brings in the Waldenses somewhere …’
‘Sounds cranky.’
‘Oh it is, it is. F
inds significance in the merest coincidences, fact that they met on Mount Tabor, almost robot backwards; fact that one of the Taborites was named Čapek, that he preached a bloodbath kill all sinners – very like the bloodbath initiated by robots in R.U.R., so was he an ancestor of Karel Čapek or what?’
‘Look, what’s the point of all this? Some nut pieces together a half-baked theory – do we really care?’
The other man stopped him, putting a weightless hand on his arm. ‘We have to care. Not what she says – but what people make of it. This is, this is just the worst scenario we examined.’
Lizard eyes blinked. The desert sun glared down at these two slight figures, creeping along one white concrete path from one white concrete building to another. But all around was dark grass, cooled by sprinklers. Ignoring rainbows, the two men walked on.
‘That’s not all, of course. She points out all the events that took place in Prague. The famous golem story, you know it? Rabbi Low of Prague, der Hohe Rabbi – you do know it? Okay then, how about the Infant of Prague? Seems to be the only Christian statue that isn’t a statue at all – it’s a jointed doll, with real clothes.’
‘Well well. Is there more?’
‘Much. She traces the revolution of 1618, successive occupations by Austro-Hungaria, Nazi Germany and Russia, the Czechs never quite knuckling under to their puppet governments (her phrase) as demonstrated in their literature, she cites Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an exploration of the old mind-body problem that so intrigued the Celts, Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik as a “cheerful robot” satire, Čapek’s R. U.R. of course; and even a very late item, a play written in 1968 by Vaclav Havel –’
‘The year of the Soviet tank invasion, wasn’t it?’
‘Exactly. And in this play the main character is a machine whose sole function, not so fast, you know I can’t walk fast since my op –’
‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’
‘Sole function is to investigate human character. Puzuk, I believe it’s called – ah! Good to be out of that sun!’
They entered the labyrinthine corridors of Building B, finally entering a dim, quiet room. The walls were lined with computer cabinets, and at the far end stood Leo’s ‘fish-tank’.
A young attendant in white rushed over to them.
‘Gendemen, I’m afraid this is a restric – oh, sorry, sir.’
‘’S all right,’ said the senior man. ‘You must be new here, eh? Heh heh, how do you like baby-sitting with Leo?’
The attendant hovered at his elbow as the three of them moved towards the tank. ‘Leo, sir?’
‘That.’ The senior man pointed to the floating brain. ‘That’s Leo Bunsky, at one time just about the best applications man in his field. Still is I guess – poor bastard. Oh, we’ve got some data here, like Leo to have a look at it.’
‘Yes sir, right away.’
The liver-spotted hands gave up the journal and then clasped. ‘Poor bastard thinks he’s still alive, you know? Still thinks he’s working on a robot project, Project Rubber Dick, something like that. Naturally we can’t disillusion him now, he might clam up on us.’
‘Yes sir well now I’ll just enter this data –’
‘Good man, Leo. Don’t know how we’d ever stop the propagation of Entities without him, gave us some of our most valuable scenarios. Kind of Devil’s advocate – Hello there Leo!’
The reptilian eyes, half-closed with amusement, stared down at the motionless brain. ‘Good man, old Leo.’
Pa leaned forward while Roderick adjusted his pillow. ‘Thanks. Now let’s see what this so-called newspaper has to say. Great thing about convalescence, you don’t feel so guilty wasting time like this – might even start watching TV if I listen to this:’
XMAS PLAGUE STRIKES 5 MORE KIDS
400 Cases – Health Dept Baffled
The mysterious ‘Christmas plague’ which has so far infected over 400 children across the State, causing two deaths, has struck again. Five new cases are reported in Newer, county seat of Stubbs County. State Health Department officials, while admitting the disease has no cause they can isolate, assure the public there is no cause for alarm. ‘The symptoms are somewhat similar to those of certain types of mercury poisoning,’ said a spokesman. ‘We can’t rule that out, but it doesn’t seem likely at this stage. There just isn’t any mercury pollution going on, that we know of. We’re sending our best investigative team to Stubbs County right away,’ he added. ‘Headed by a very capable man, Dr Sam Death.’
‘Be nice to have a new doctor in town,’ Pa said. ‘Welby never has time to see me – not that I really need a doctor. My body is as fit today as it was when I was a young – a young –’
‘Pa, speaking of bodies, could I ask you something?’
‘Fire away.’
Instead of firing away, Roderick began fidgeting with the quilt. It was a strange patchwork design, each patch being a little human figure with upraised arms. ‘Gee Pa, I don’t know where to begin.’
‘At the end, son. Either end.’
‘Yes Pa.’
‘And go on till you run out of it, then stop.’
‘Yes Pa.’
‘What is it, is it your new body you wanted to ask about?’
‘Yes Pa.’
‘Trouble getting used to it?’
‘No, heck – well I mean clothes itch a lot but no, it’s fine.’ Roderick traced a figure on the quilt. ‘Only, I mean, heck, well I mean, gee whiz, but heck, I mean gosh darn, I m –’
Pa reached out and slapped the stainless-steel face.
‘Thanks Pa, I needed that. Well maybe I didn’t need it, but – about my body, okay what I wondered was, is this it? Is this my body? All of it?’
The face was a crude blank, hardly more character in it than in a fencing mask. Pa said, ‘You worried about the head, is that it? But it’s like we told you, your Ma sculpted up a swell new head, and we got this painter working on it now, he should be shipping it to us any day now –’
‘Well no, Pa. I meant – well what about sex?’
Pa raised himself up on one elbow. ‘Sex? What in the world has sex got to do with your body?’
Roderick wasn’t entirely sure. ‘Well I mean, don’t I need an extra part or two? Or three?’
‘Son, you got all the parts they had in the factory.’
‘No but I meant like male parts. Or female parts.’
Pa scratched his head. ‘Pipe fittings, you mean? Electricals? Maybe you better spell this out for me, son.’
‘I mean for making babies, Pa.’
The old man sank back and laughed. ‘Babies! So that’s what’s worrying you! Well listen, I know I should of had a man-to-man talk with you some time back, only I just kept putting it off … But now listen. To have a baby, all you do is find a nice girl – or if you are a nice girl, a nice boy – takes one of each.’
‘Heck, I know that, Pa. I seen these pictures where –’
‘One of each. Then the two of you settle down together, next thing you know the babies start coming along, about one a year just like clockwork. Course you have to kiss a lot. That’s why we’re giving you a nice face, for kissing. But you don’t need no extra pipe fittings or electrical sockets – do you?’
‘I don’t know. Pa, how come you and Ma never had any kids of your own.’
‘Just plain unlucky, son.’ Pa rattled his newspaper. ‘Plain unlucky. You, uh, you don’t think there could be any other reason, do you?’
‘Yep.’ Roderick told him the story he’d pieced together from Chauncey and the other kids, from dirty pitchers, and from a glance into a book at Joradsen’s Drug, Tantric without Tears. All his sources, though disagreeing on details, seemed to tell more or less the same story.
Pa listened, looking astonished but remaining silent, until Roderick finished. ‘… well then I guess about nine months later the baby comes out of the same place the stuff went in.’
Pa laughed so hard he nearly fell out of bed. ‘Aw come on! That’s jus
t ridiculous – I mean them things are to pee with, everybody knows that! You expect me to believe that people go around peeing on each other to get babies inside that they can pee out – come on, now! That ain’t even common sense if people had to go through all that every time they wanted a baby, there wouldn’t be any people at all! Mary! Come up here listen to what this boy just told me – tell your Ma, son.’
Ma listened without laughing. ‘Huh! That’s what happens when you pick up stuff from other kids, cheap reproduction books and places like that. You should have come to Pa and me in the first place, we’d set you straight.’
‘But – but – but they talk about making it, screwing and making love –’
‘Making love,’ said Ma, ‘is just a question of matching up your souls.’
Pa finished coughing. ‘What she means, son, is your minds.’ He tapped his head. ‘Love, sex, whatever you want to call it, it all happens up here. And don’t let anybody ever tell you different.’
Ma smiled. ‘There! All cleared up? You know, I feel like – like really cooking something. See, all this talk about sex put me in mind of Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare, and that made me think of nutmeg graters, and that made me think of – of –’ Her gaze fell on the quilt. ‘Of gingerbread boys! For my invalid – though I suppose Duchamp would call him a vain lia?’
‘Roderick can give you a hand,’ said Pa. ‘Soon as I get him to try out this new cipher I’ve been working on.’ He dug down in the bedclothes and came up with a scrap of paper. ‘Here son, just you try cracking that one.’
ANN NÉE ANNA, NOD TO ANTS’ ADS (HE HAD TO AX 7).
CZAR INKS ODD IDS (OHMS) FOR NUT LADDER OF VHF STAR.
Roderick saw the answer at once, but pretended to puzzle over it. His thoughts kept straying to sex. It just had to be more than Ma and Pa thought. Only yesterday he’d been reading about Ramon Lull, the thirteenth-century Franciscan who’d invented a feeble kind of logic machine. Even Lull had pursued other things than truth. Lusting after a woman, he had written poems in praise of the imagined beauty of her breasts, and finally chased her on horseback into the cathedral. The woman then opened her bodice to reveal a breast partially eaten by cancer … but why had Lull imagined otherwise? There had to be more to the cipher of love than to any of Ramon Lull’s little cipher-wheel gadgets, or even to this substitution, in which A stood for B, B for C, … Was Lull converted because the breast disgusted him? Or because, God help him, it did not?