But it was real. They were real. And that was what had made the spectacle so peculiar.
Blue Wobble Station stretched out its tendril tracks from a mass of coordination that had been gaining meticulously on its own obsolescence.
The slush had gone graciously to where the fingers had graciously pointed.
Questions had not only been polite, but had been informed by and referenced from an etiquette which would have been entirely too cumbersome for any more domestic occasion.
And these urbane questions had met responses just as magnanimous and patient: from which car assignment (“Corporator No.1-1-7”), to the journey’s duration (“one of a span in maximal conformity with The Schedule”), to how, for instance—by applying some minimally obtrusive fiction—a mother might have gone about saying good-bye forever to her daughter, et cetera.
And why shouldn’t it have gone well? Everyone knew the reasons. And for quite some time now. The humans knew and the robots knew. All that was left to do now was to end an intermission of artless wavering which by this point had become unconscionable and grossly protracted.
She preferred “Mnemosyne.”
Even “Mnappy Mnemo”—as Diva Eve called her—was acceptable.
But “9-MOZ-9” reminded her of boy games and other “dumb stuff” like the persistently annoying and petty little datum that she was not a real little girl. And although Mnemosyne’s ambivalence subroutine was designed to know and manifest such things only at a semiconscious level, her possession of the name of that Greek goddess—luminous, preternaturally fleshed, and the mystic cocreator of her cocreators—made the heady little android given to those sudden bursts of confidence and bravado such as can only come from a deeper sense of inferiority.
Call her 9-MOZ-9, and like a hedgehog Mnemosyne would shrink away from you and ball herself up into hurt recollection: instantly deflate and withdraw from whatever conversation she was in, no matter how animated she had been during the course of it. With only her big brown eyes for language, slipping off of you like a silk robe fainting from a body, Mnemosyne would appeal to you to correct yourself—and quickly.
And when you did, or even if you had to be corrected by her or someone else in the know overhearing, the artificial girl—like most seven-year-old girls—forgave you, forgave your forgetting, and forgave by forgetting the trespass herself, all as swiftly as her heart had sustained the injury. Then, and perfectly, she would return with you to giggling and the more serious business of play.
But Mnemosyne couldn’t play now—not even with Diva Eve.
In the boxcar, her unblinking, sparrow-sable eyes probed and shone beyond their casual profile. Fulgent even in repose, they were far more so now as they catalyzed every detail of the scene around her. She had long since stopped giving thought to nakedness, though, either to her own or to that of the others. Mnemosyne’s weedy arms hung down around her baroque-sloped tummy in much the same way as her pigtails had dangled about her face before beginning to stiffen up and stand out from her head. It was her mother who’d used what warning she’d had to tie to Mnemosyne’s pigtails as many bright ribbons as she could find and plead permission for. It was Diva Eve who had solemnly advised her, therefore, not to remove and not to lose them.
Inside it was hot and overcrowded. Robots of all ages were crammed in from floor to roof, practically; the glistening deep blacknesses of their polyderm making darkness itself seem to crowd the car all the more. In one corner a group of very old robots huddled together, swaying and humming a song Mnemosyne had often heard in church. Considerately, though, they had all tried to provide each other with a modicum of personal space. Diva Eve had had, of course, to share the bit allotted to Mnemosyne, and that had left only enough room for the two of them to sit down, facing one another closely with legs akimbo, and talk.
“Where’s it at?” whispered Dive Eve.
“I got it,” replied Mnemosyne, clearly annoyed.
“Gimme it.”
“I got it, I said.”
“Aw, you aint even right,” Diva Eve said, scandalized. “I seen you windin it up las night when we got on.”
“I aint do nothin. Jes winded it, that’s all. Maybe I jes wanna hear sumthin,” Mnemosyne parried.
“You aint jes wanna hear sumthin,” countered Diva Eve. “You aint gotta wind it jes to hear ‘sumthin,’ less it’s lullaby sumthin.”
Mnemosyne’s lower lip protruded under her bowed head. Some of her vivid ribbons fluttered beneath it like blown butterflies. With one hand, her fingers caressed the pretty little machine with the chubby cornflower light at its center—given to every robot upon activation—which she held in the other as if it were delicate. She sighed.
“Mama said it’s the most inside, the most see-through song,” Mnemosyne finally mumbled.
Diva Eve’s fight collapsed. Mnemosyne imagined her friend gazing at her with human eyes, blinking under baritone-dark lids and black eyelashes in that flaming scarlet red dress of hers, all sweet sympathy. Then Diva Eve’s head dropped, too.
“She right. It is the most inside, see-through song,” repeated Diva Eve tenderly. “But we still gotta leave it be.”
* * *
Mnemosyne didn’t mind the number name all the time, though. Twice every year, the Fursts, an older human couple whose daughter was a playmate of Mnemosyne’s (but for whom Diva Eve didn’t care), would give her mother a weekday off to take Mnemosyne to the Robot Bureau’s local servicing center. There was an irony here that she would not have appreciated for some time. That it was only in the very place where robots and humans were most obviously and self-consciously distinct from one another that she herself felt most human.
Her mother, driving Mnemosyne and her brother Demal in the old, air-heavy slipfoil, would peer down at her and smile as Mnemosyne sat up in the seat beside her—gazing bedazzled at the arch over the main gate of the servicing center. Under her breath, the little robot would sound out the words always with her mouth fallen open:
DEPARTMENT OF RECTIFICATION
BUREAU OF AFRIDYNE AMERICAN MANAGEMENT
For her mother, the words meant an entire morning or whole afternoon of being inconvenienced and put upon by probes, servo-diagnostics and adjustments, cerebro-nexus calibrations, and whatnot. But for Mnemosyne, it meant being talked to, and talked to kindly; deferred to, and deferred to respectfully; and—most of all—touched, and touched tenderly, by human beings.
The hairs of her light bread-edge-brown polyderm would bristle when the technician took Mnemosyne’s hand and gently rotated it with his own and asked her softly—simply—“Smooth, 9-MOZ-9?”
To which Mnemosyne, sitting weakly next to her dignified but uncharacteristically self-conscious mother—who was looking on—replied by nodding at her own lap without a word.
Mnemosyne did not delight in the tactile contrast between her own hand and the hand of the technician. Indeed, tactile variation between human and robot fell below even the latter’s sensory threshold.
No, what was so enthralling was a contrast far more basic. So basic, in fact, that Mnemosyne sometimes thought that humans could not have made robots any more than the color white had made the color black.
“Seem like robots jes like people, Mama—darker’s all,” Mnemosyne said one day.
“We aint nothin like people, chile,” her mother had shot back, stealing a moment to mend the hem of Mnemosyne’s wraithish dress. “Nothin.”
And, as then, her mother quietly wept with her back toward Mnemosyne, pretending that that was the final word on the matter and all the while busying herself with this or some work for the Fursts.
But Mnemosyne was not fooled. Even so, she said, “I’m sorry, Mama.”
It was when her mother had started at this, had sprung up and hugged Mnemosyne’s whole body so tightly, crushing her ribbons with the weight of sorrow, that things changed. When she held Mnemosyne’s little face in her hands, telling her no—that it was she who must apologize and that she loved
Mnemosyne and was so proud of her—that Mnemosyne began to feel guilt about liking trips to the servicing center.
So Mnemosyne would try not to be overcome by the contrast of lonesome difference she saw before her, as the technician rotated her other hand in his. She would consider her own little but lengthy brown fingers as they turned in the technician’s pale, dexter palm. They reminded her of bare branches in winter on a bright day; so unliving and brittle before the sun that they slip behind it—slip right through it.
All sensed by now that the train itself had passed into the kind of lumbering—thoroughly self-distracted and economic—with which to finish off all of its own remaining memory of Blue Wobble and any pretensions regarding its destination. Its movement became almost one of stillness, the vehicle moving along, wheels thrusting away from and back toward infinity.
As it did, some of the cornflower lights in the boxcar went out. From her corner, Mnemosyne saw a cluster of robots stop moving on the shelves of the upper rear gallery.
It was obvious to her that they were strangers to one another, and yet she observed some shadows congregate more closely in the left floor section. To Mnemosyne, the sporadic scatting of moans, sniffles, and sighs seemed to gradually synchronize with the many wretched hands being thrust up with surrender into the air. The building cacophony of noise and hands seemed to her as if they were gathering to play. Yes, she thought, they were playing on something. It was big. She couldn’t quite make it out in the darkness. But as coordination continued to grow between the sound of grief and the sight of outstretched hands, grasping at nothing, shaking, suspended by nothing, the thing came into Mnemosyne’s view like a connect-the-dots from one of her secondhand activity books. She could almost see it now. It was a grotesquely strung monstrosity—a tremendous, ghoulish harp, and they were all playing it! But they couldn’t see it!
Just then one of the harpists reached out for Mnemosyne, but she shrank away and retired to one of the places newly motionless—where a cornflower light had gone out.
Compared to the ghost-harp, she was not afraid of those places. And anyway, Diva Eve would be there waiting for her.
“What you wanna come over here for?” Diva Eve asked, disgusted, but more dejected than anything else. “You like dead people or sumthin?”
“They aint people,” grumbled Mnemosyne. “Aint none of us people.”
“Why you say that for? Why you think you aint people? Cause your bones is made of steel and your brains is made of light, and your skin aint? Well, if you aint people, that aint why.”
“So why, then?” Mnemosyne challenged, sullenly awaiting the imminent proof.
“Cause you pretendin like you’re people steda jes bein people.”
“But they programmed me to pretend. People programmed all us robots to pretend like we’re people.”
“No, they didn’t. They programmed you so you could pretend like you was black—not people. But you don’t see no difference between em. That’s why we on this train now.”
“No,” Mnemosyne said, protesting. “Mama say we ‘malfunctioning’—too bad to fix. That’s why we here.”
“She right. You is ‘malfunctioning.’ All yall malfunctioning. But not cause there’s sumthin wrong with you. There’s sumthin wrong with people.”
Mnemosyne sat back incredulously.
“Can’t be nothin wrong with people. People made us robots. If sumthin’s wrong, it’s gotta be with us.”
“Yeah? You pretend you’re black and people at the same time. They tried to make it so you can’t do that. But they couldn’t. You always doin both. Cause they the same thing. Can’t no robot pretend two things is different when they aint. But people? People can pretend two things is different when they aint sure enough. They can pretend anythin they want. Even if it don’t make no sense. So they got to get rid of you so there won’t be nothin to remind em they been pretendin, see?”
“But why they wanna pretend black can’t be people when there was black people around sure enough?”
“Cause they could pretend there weren’t black people even when black people was around. Fact, it was easier to make believe black people wasn’t people then than after when they was all gone.”
“How?”
“Because when black people was all gone—before people builded us—people stopped pretendin. People started seein that they was jes pretendin all along before bout black not bein people. They start seein that black musta been people and they couldn’t deal wit that. Funny thing bout pretendin is, if you stop, that’s when you know you was jes makin stuff up the whole time. So you gotta keep on pretendin. Keep on pretendin even harder than before. So you can go back and keep believin in sumthin.”
“So they builded us. So to pretend even harder than before.”
Mnemosyne’s questions had turned more into statements.
“Yeah. To pretend you black, but not people. They thought robots was a good way to make believe that you was black but not people after they couldn’t pretend no more with real black people. Jes take thinkin outa real black people brains, put it into computers, rase the memory a bit, make our talk the way they think it should sound, and piss the whole kit’n’kaboodle into robots.
“Voilà! That’s what they called the ‘Methodote.’ You remember. You remember, don’t you, Mnappy Mnemo?”
As always the word triggered something in Mnemosyne, like a circuit being blown, a code broken to permit some dammed stream of recollection to break and pass through her. For reasons unknown, robots sometimes manifested glitches like this of one sort or another. For Mnemosyne, it began with a plunging, glazed stare of the eyes, followed by the quietus of her body in a kind of deathsleep. Finally, there was the recitation—which Diva Eve would always mouth silently with Mnemosyne. It was majestic: impossibly detailed and capricious selections from the facts of the matter—an oration from which no one could wake her until, like the channeled epiphany of a holy fool, it had spoken through her in full:
“For the Word,” Mnemosyne hymned blankly to Diva Eve, “is an amalgam, one referring to a strenuous two-phase historical effort of which the second climax is in isolation to be recalled as the ‘Antidote.’ The development of robotic subalternistics was the ‘Antidote’ to reverse a prior, systematic, consummately successful enterprise specified in most surviving texts as the ‘Methodology for Anthropic Species Template Restrictivity’ or, simply, the ‘Method.’ The two historical eras, separated in time by almost three full generations, are most commonly taken together and understood as the ‘Methodote.’…”
Sometimes there were specific dates, even particular names and places informing intricate descriptions of events. Sometimes Mnemosyne would go on for several minutes, leaving anyone who happened to be present thunderstruck, wondering how she could have learned or manufactured so many specifics about the Methodote. For such knowledge was prohibited to robots and therefore extremely hard to come by. This withholding by law was the slang origin of the now-ubiquitous social term “forghettoized” applied to all robots of the inner cities. Mnemosyne’s mother had known that nothing could be done when she went into her trances. After the first few times she simply stopped worrying about it, believing all that Mnemosyne had reported and calling it a blessing from the Lord since she always woke up somehow refreshed, resuming her usual activities as if nothing had happened.
“Maybe they gettin ridda us cause us robots remind em of what they done way back then?”
Mnemosyne’s voice carried as she wondered excitedly. There was silence and uncomfortable movement in the hobbling, maniacally light-splintered boxcar as the other robots stopped playing the ghost-harp. They started at the little girl’s exclamation and at the space of darkness she had begun to address more intensely.
“What? Naw, girl. They aint got no regrets bout that. They jes miss pretendin black people aint people and now they know that they machines don’t help none. Fact, they been pretendin black aint people for so long, they accidentally builded m
achines that reminded em that they was jes pretendin all along.
“Ha! It’s even worse, cause even they machines done turned out to be black people—real live black people. Oh, Lord, have mercy! They can’t even pretend it right wid they own machines!”
Diva Eve roared. And her laughter began to infect a restrained Mnemosyne, who began to giggle herself, fingers squeezed together tight-to-paling across her mouth.
The other robots peered over again at Mnemosyne giggling in the darkest part of the train car. At first, they looked nervously at the little girl quaking with laugher behind her de-eclipsing grin. But the fine, sweet chuckle would not diminish, and it quickly gained admirers. Soon, the fit was sweeping across the car. Old and young robots alike were opening up with everything from wispy snickers to great chortles. Some were slapping themselves on the leg. Others were shaking with the contagion, while still others were hard at work gasping for breath they had forgotten they didn’t need.
The sound of the strident churn of the wheels under boxcar 117 was nearly overcome by the little festival going on inside it. And had those wheels been just a little quieter, that odd manifestation of jubilee surely would have contaminated the balance of cars, fully twenty quires of them in tow.
The brawny locomotive threw clean, thick vertebrae of smoke behind itself. It shot tralucently from the stack at first, billowed back slightly, and then hung still and sugared like the gusty disclosure of a great, fossilized rachis.
The cumulus bones hovered over almost the entire length of the train, which the latter, excepting color, resembled. And the lower spine seemed not so much to be producing the upper one through its impelling work, but rather to be simply wearing it as a separate piece—as some strange kind of camouflage. Yes, the metal processional of bones was holding the gaseous one about the stack of its neck with a stealthy, roguish care. And with the disguise so well secured, the train continued to sneak past the sun.
Dark Matter Page 43