The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  Nursie stopped just inside, and Baby knew she was scanning for Rob 6. Maybe she was even talking to him in the silent way they had that Baby could never hear. A long time ago he had felt for the first time the fierce frustration of not hearing. Even though the discovery of it had come gradually, the understanding came all at once. It was as if he “knew” they were doing it long before he “realized” it. That day a feeling like the one he had now had washed over him in a hot flush. They’re hard and hurt-proof, and I’m soft’ they’re strong with long changeable arms, and I’m weak and only one shape’ and now they talk together and I can’t hear it. My Nursie talks silently to that Rob 6.

  That day of realization he had gone down to the high buildings where the statue was, tall to the third window of one of them, and he had climbed all the way to the top of the white head for the fist time. He scraped his thumb on the way up. He remembered the blood smearing the fleshy part of his hand, and the drops making three red lines down his arm.

  At the top he had shouted, “I wish to be Rob 6.” He sat right on the big head with a foot on each ear, drunk with height. “I don’t want to be Baby anymore. I must be more than I am. Please, please, please, and please. Baby said please.”

  He had looked at the hot summer sun had shouted, “I say please twice to the sun in the sky,” and then he turned towards Central, “and four times to Central.” He liked the sun best, but he knew Central was more powerful. He smeared the blood from his hand across the white statue head and shut his eyes tight. I am getting hard and strong, he thought. I have one eye here in the center and it flickers red. He could feel his two eyes merging slowly to just above his nose. My arms are interchangeable, and if I jump I will land on rubber feet and my knees will spring, one section up into the other, and I won’t be hurt. I am Rob number one thousand and twenty-six. I am changed.

  And he had jumped then.

  It took Nursie almost a whole day to find him. “You naughty boy. You naughty, naughty boy, to go so far from home.” She carried him back gently and called the Rob-Doc, and Baby had lain in bed a long time after that. She had been happy with him for being a good boy all that time, but he had cried each night with pain and frustration, and he had wondered, since he couldn’t be Rob 6, when he would be at least a man, whatever that was. Nursie always just said, sometime.

  And now he would try to hurt her as he had hurt then, inside, and as he hurt now with an unknown need.

  She started off, after the few seconds’ wait at the door, pulling Baby along after her. Her broad caterpillar read easily mounted the stone steps behind the huge carefully rustic fireplace. She crossed, in rubbery silence, the metal-tiled hallway while Baby pad-padded behind her, leaving dirty damp outlines of his feet on the spotless floor. They crossed the kitchen by the center ramp and entered the door to the brain center of house 74.

  The room was large and filled with wires and pipes and conveyer belts, but the main control unit was small. The thing that ran everything in the house including this maze of crisscrossing wires and pipes, was bread-box size. Rob 6 stood before it, propped back on his third leg, the one he used for balance when walking and as a prop when standing still. He wore his mechanic hands and had plugged himself into one side of the control unit by a long flexible thumb.

  “There is something wrong,” Rob 6 said, “but it is not here. Control is fine.”

  “Baby says there is no milk,” Nursie said, “but I heard the milk robs come this morning. Baby is fooling Nursie again. He fools and fools. And, Rob 6, Baby is getting so big. Such a big boy. Too big for Nursie. Or do I need to be fixed too? Will you check, Robby 6?”

  “You are thirty-eight years old. You should have been replaced.”

  “We make do with what we have. Yes we do.” She chanted it as if she were reciting a nursery rhyme. “But now, Robby 6, is there milk in the dairy box for Baby?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all. There is always milk in the dairy box at seven twenty-three.”

  “Things are not going right and they are getting worse. There is something wrong with 74 now, but Control is fine. Library did not send a tape with motor repair information. I dialed and none came. And I asked and Central did not answer.”

  “That’s too bad, too bad,” Nursie chanted, and then she said, “But if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” and, “Things will be better tomorrow.”

  “Not without human beings.”

  “They’ll come back. Mommy and Daddy will come back later.”

  “Nurse 16, you helped to bury them yourself after the enemy seeded the sickness.”

  “Why Rob 6! And in front of Baby too! He understands things now, you know.”

  Baby squatted down, flat-footed, on the metal-grilled floor of the control room. Rob 6 and Nursie never used chairs and neither did he since he’d outgrown his highchair. “He’s only said it a thousand times already,” he muttered, sullen faced, carefully not looking at them.

  It wasn’t going to happen now either, not ever. No matter what he said or did, Nursie would be the same. She would never know anything she didn’t already know now. Her eye looks at me, but she doesn’t really see me at all, he thought. If I were gone or even stopped like some of the robots, she would say only, “He’s coming back later,” like she says over and over about Mommy and Daddy and Jeannie. She sees my shape, but not me. I am a nothing thing to her, but she is less than that even.

  “Baby was inside Nursie then,” Nursie said. “That was a long time ago and you were just a little scallywag.”

  “You’re just a nothing,” Baby said.

  “Hush, dear. That’s not very polite. You know, I kept you inside me a whole extra year like your Mommy and Daddy said and when you came out you were just as safe as can be, and now you’re growing up to be a little gentleman just like Mommy and Daddy wanted you to be.”

  Baby breathed out loudly and hunched lower over his knees. She will not change and she will never see me. “You’re both just nothings,” he said, “and there is no Central and no Please at all.”

  “What a thing to say,” Nursie said.

  “Ask, then—ask Central and Library. Ask them why there is no milk anymore.”

  Rob 6 and Nursie stood silent. They’re asking, Baby thought, feeling an unbearable irritation. Rob 6, even, is asking Central and he knows it doesn’t answer.

  “Central doesn’t answer,” Rob 6 said.

  Suddenly Baby found it difficult to breathe. Squatting over his knees was too cramping and he stood up. “Central never answers anymore.” His voice sounded different to him, low and tense. “Yesterday and yesterday and yesterday before that, a long time before even, it didn’t answer, but you keep asking and asking.”

  “It is right to ask Central first,” Rob 6 said.

  “Of course it is,” Nursie said. “You know that, yes you do. Always ask Central first. It will tell you what to do next.”

  He began to tremble and he felt a hot knot swell in his stomach. Part of him seemed to stand apart and ask, what’s wrong lately? Rob 6 and Nursie are not so different than they used to be.

  He remembered a time when they had seemed enough in every way, observant enough, intelligent enough, loving enough, but that was a long time ago, and he had changed somehow and he was changing even more. Now he was full of unreasonable, uncontrollable angry feelings.

  He kept his eyes carefully off Nursie. He felt he would burst if he looked at her empty, wide eye. “Rob 6,” he spoke slowly, “Central will never answer… never answer anymore. What are you going to do about it?”

  Rob 6 stood silent. Is he asking again, Baby wondered? Is he asking Central what will he do now that Central is out?

  Suddenly it was too much. The swelling hot knot inside him burst and he was shouting. “This is the end of it. I will not listen to any one of you anymore. You don’t understand anything. You have no eyes and no ears that are anymore good than stopped ones.”


  “Let’s not have a tantrum now,” Nursie said, interrupting him. “Why Baby needs his nap. My goodness, no wonder. It’s way past the time.” She reached out to him.

  Fighting wouldn’t do any good. He could never hurt her, never dent her, in her mind nor in her body. He was still nothing to her even when he fought, but now he fought. He bit at the soft arms and kicked at her treads, bruising his feet, and he began to laugh an odd, sobbing laugh. The fighting was silly and the laughter shook him so that it was only weak fighting anyway. “You can’t even see me. You never have. Never, never.”

  She was carrying him slowly, but easily, up the wide low stairway, and she was talking, gently soothing. “You must learn to be a good boy, and not fight. You know, there’s an enemy, a barbarous enemy, far away, and we, the robots, protect the city for all the peace-losing peoples of the world, for this city is more than just a place for people to live and work. It stands for a way of life. It is a haven of civilized living and we must keep it safe.”

  He’d heard all this before.

  Tall wide-leaved plants, rooted at the foot of the stairs, brushed at them as they rose. Baby tore off a whole branch with one violent sweep of his arm.

  “No, no,” Nursie said. “Mustn’t touch.” This made Baby laugh louder and more, though he didn’t know why, and the laughing hurt his stomach, but he couldn’t stop.

  They crossed the balcony, Nursie swaying a little with Baby’s tossing weight. The door of the nursery slid open as it always did instantly for Nursie, but never for anyone else., not even Baby, though it would have opened for Mommy and Daddy.

  They were there, in his bright special room, circular, windowed top to bottom, with a blue ceiling where stars winked on and off. A room specially planned by a loving mother and father for a son named Christopher John.

  Nursie put him gently into his bed and shut the gate. “You’ll feel much better after your nap,” she said. “Then you’ll be my good boy again and we’ll play in the sandpile at the park if you like.”

  Baby doubled up with painful laughter. Why was everything so funny now?

  She left and the gay red door slid shut after her, shut to stay, until she came back.

  The bed was youth-size. Baby lay, knees drawn up. Laughing and holding his stomach. Gradually the laughter stopped and it was like after crying, leaving him empty and looking at his starred ceiling.

  Later he put his feel tight against the bottom of the bed and braced his hands at the top. “This is not even my bed,” he said out loud. “It’s too small.” And he pushed until the wood panel broke and his feet came through and he lay out straight. “I’m me,” he said. “They can’t see me, but I am me, and quite big.”

  He got up and stepped over the side of the bed. He went to the section of the wall with movable panels. He had broken the levers long before, on that moonlight night of the first escape when he was half the size he was now. House had not registered it even then so no one came to fix it. He slid the glass panel to the side, letting the hot outside air come in. He grinned again, pulling his lips back from his teeth, a dog grin, or wolf.

  He stepped out on the thin wire frame that held the patio roof. “Please,” he said, but there was a downturning of his voice, half mockery, yet not quite sure. He ran out on the frame, tightrope style, sure-footed, jumped at the end and landed rolling in the grass beyond the gray-and-orange circle of the patio. There was no one in sight.

  “Good Please?” He loped across the back, leaped the dried-up stony bed where the imitation stream used to run, pumped in a rambling circle about the back yard. He climbed the carefully random rocks at the far end and jumped a retaining wall to the footwalk below.

  The sub-belt entrance, a stone lean-to at the corner park, was a 200-yard sprint. Baby ran down the slow-moving ramp into the bright white-tiled tunnel and at the bottom stepped easily from the slower belts to the fastest. But even there he kept running along the moving aisle past the line of seats.

  This was not a time for sitting. Now he was going farther and faster than ever before, and never coming back. He went at an easy run, hands low, relaxed, head tipped back. He looked ahead down the long bright tunnel, empty and bare as far as he could see—but then everywhere he had ever looked had been empty and bare except for occasional robots.

  He ran until, even in this cool place, the sweat dripped down from under his arms. He felt the dampness between his shoulder blades and on his upper lip and he smelled himself, a sticky, unrobot smell, bitter and sweet. After a while he tired and sprawled, knees spread wide, in one of the hard molded chairs at the side.

  A long time has passed, he knew. Usually he was impatient with the sub-belt. He had never been able to stay underground more than about an hour without coming up to take a look, but this time he had the patience to stay. The running had eased the turmoil but something still smoldered inside him and now he had a new kind of patience.

  He lay back, eyes half shut, not moving, hypnotized by the long white way before him and the humming movement. Hours were nothing to him now.

  It was hunger, finally, that woke him to reality again, but still he didn’t go up outside. He began a series of belt-changings, branching off at random but staying on the fast lanes. His stomach growled and he knew that even leaving the belts was no insurance of a meal. He would have to hunt and sneak and hide from overseers or wild dogs. But if this was to be forever, a change for keeps, it had to be far and devious, and so he stayed.

  Much later he took the slower lanes to the slowest and then to a rising ramp.

  He came out on a wide-walled footwalk. The summer sun was low and red, and Baby stood, watching it. He could almost see it move past the tree tops. He whispered nothing, but he felt the feeling he used to feel when he said Please and it was important, the same feeling when Rob 6 asked Central and Central used to answer and was always right.

  He stared at the sun, thinking, this will be the place, Sun. Here I will be me and robots will not tell me what to do and I won’t belong to any house or any overseer.

  He walked across the grassy tree-lined footwalk to the smooth gray wall. It was half again as tall as he was and had not the slightest hand hold. Baby bent his knees low, jumped from a stand, and grasped the top with both hands. He swung his left foot up, curled the toes over the top and then pulled himself up. Resting on elbows and one knee, he looked down into the garden, a richer, larger garden than he had ever seen before. He felt an exhilarating excitement for this looked like something really new and different.

  He rolled gently over the wall and landed on hands and knees in the grass. He stood up and walked boldly down the neatly kept path that led away from the wall. He didn’t hide or watch for overseers. Whatever would happen, he felt, would be different here in this different place, and he went eagerly forward to meet whatever would come.

  He passed rows of thick hedges, then a group of tall, pungent-smelling pine trees. He rounded a bank of white-flowered bushes and there, before him, surrounded by cut hedges like the walls of a room, was a fountain and a statue.

  The pool was edged with natural-looking rocks and on the largest rock in the center was a figure of stone about his own size.

  Baby laughed out loud then, splashed through the clear cold water and climbed up the slippery rock to stand just below the figure. He had seen others, oddly shaped like this, in parks and downtown sections sometimes: the rounded body, looking strangely lumpy top and bottom, with a thin waist in the center. He knew the names that went with this shape were woman, girl and lady.

  This figure held the head of a serpent. The long snake body crossed the waist just under one of the pointed chest-lumps. The snake’s mouth was wide, and inside there was the tiny pipe where the water of the fountain came flowing.

  Baby stooped and drank from the serpent’s mouth, and then looked up and it seemed as if the statue’s bent head and half-closed eyes looked at him with a steady gaze, and there was something there that was not like a robot. Something that mad
e him sad.

  He reached up and ran his fingers down the soft curve of the cheek, He touched the nose and then his own nose. This is a little baby too, he thought, smaller than I am. He went round to the back. He laughed because the hair hung down so far from the head. He ran his hand from under the arm, inward to the waist and down over the hips and he laughed again because his own shape was right and this shape was a joke.

  Then he remembered how hot it was and how cool the water below felt on his legs. It was a shallow pool. The water came only just above his knees, but he climbed down and lay full length in it, splashing and blowing and putting his head in all the way.

  He sat up, wiping the water from his face with the palms of his hands, and there, in the path before him, it seemed as if the statue had come to life, colored a rosy tan. It was all there, but different from the stone: damply curling tan-brown hair, the darker etched eyebrows, tan-brown eyes, lips lightly red and also the tips of the two round shapes at the chest.

  Soft, it was, but it stood like the statue, and he, half rising on one knee, stood like a statue too. He stared a long time, not moving, afraid almost to breathe even, and the other stared back. Then he stood up slowly, so slowly, as if a strange made dog or wild cat was before him. The only sound was the water dripping from his body, but that lasted only a few moments and again they stood and stared. Then Baby moved again, stepping slowly forward this time. He was not afraid. This creature was smaller than he was and looked so vulnerable.

  The creature took a step back then, and Baby took a faster step forward. Then the thing turned and ran, but Baby caught it easily in two leaps and they fell together, one warm soft body against another. This contact shocked them. They drew apart quickly, stilled again like statues, and they stared silently. Then slowly Baby touched a finger to the creature’s chest. The wonder of the feel made him draw his hand away again, but slowly this time. “Soft,” he said in a whisper, “Soft and warm,” and then he touched his own chest. “I too.”