Connoisseur's SF

by Tom Boardman

  “Made in U.S.A.,” he said with satisfaction. “It’s all right then.”

  In contrast to his previous cautious, decorous manner, lie tore the blouse out of her waistband and ripped it off. Alison’s knees sagged as someone behind her began to fumble with her brassiere.

  “No, no!” Hewitt exclaimed in mock horror, “Mustn’t do that until she says you can. Even androids have rights. Or at least, if they haven’t, we should be polite and pretend they have. Android, say we can do whatever we like with you—”

  “No!” cried Alison.

  “That’s too bad. Shift your grip a bit, Butch.”

  The rough hands went up around her ribs, rasping her soft skin.

  Alison struggled and twisted wildly.

  “Keep still,” said Hewitt. He spoke very quietly, but there was savage joy in his face. Slowly and carefully, he loosened Alison’s belt and eased her skirt and the white trunks under it down to the pit of her stomach. Then he took out a heavy clasp knife, opened it and set the point neatly in the centre of her belly. Alison drew in her stomach; the knife point followed, indenting the flesh.

  “Say we can do whatever we like with you, android.”

  The knife pricked deeper. A tiny drop of crimson came from under it and ran slowly down to Alison’s skirt. Her nerve broke.

  “You can do whatever you like with me!” she screamed.

  Her brassiere came loose and fluttered to the ground. Hewitt’s knife cut her belt and her skirt began to slip over her hips. Butch’s hands went down to her waist again, biting into it cruelly. From behind, a hand tentatively touched her breast and another clutched her shoulder. One at a time, her feet were raised and the shoes taken off them and thrown in the bushes.

  But someone else had heard Alison’s scream. Long after she had thought no one would come, someone did.

  “Hell,” said Hewitt as one of his companions shouted and pointed, “something always spoils everything. Beat it, boys.”

  They were gone, Alison clutched her skirt and looked behind her thankfully. A man and a woman were only a few yards from her. The woman was young and heavy with child. Humans, both of them. She opened her mouth to thank them, to explain, to weep.

  But they were looking at her as if she were a crushed beetle of some kind.

  “Android, of course,” said the man disgustedly. “Dirty little beast.”

  “Hardly more than child,” the woman said, “and already at this.”

  “I think I’ll give her a good hiding,” the man went on. “Won’t do any good, I suppose, but…”

  Alison burst into tears and darted among the hushes. She didn’t wait to see whether the man started after her. Branches and thorns tore her skin. Her skirt dropped and tripped her. She flew headlong, flinched away from a thorny bush, slammed hard into a tree-trunk, and waited on the ground, sick and breathless, for the man to beat her.

  Her legs and arms and shoulders were covered with long scratches and a wiry branch had lashed her ribs like a whip, leaving a long weal. But that didn’t matter. A twisted root was digging into her side—that, too, didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Why had no one told her she was an inferior being? Somehow she had known; she had always known. But no one had ever shown her before.

  She realized afterward why the man and the woman, who must have seen or guessed what had really happened, had spoken as they did. They had, or were going to have, children. They hated all androids. Androids were unnecessary, their enemies, and the enemies of their children.

  But at the time she merely waited helpless, incapable of thought. The man would come and beat her, Susan and Roger would turn her away again, and she would never know happiness again.

  13

  “My parents never knew about that,” said Alison. “I hid in the bushes until it was dark, and then went straight home. I climbed into my bedroom from the outhouse and pretended later I’d been there for hours.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Roderick asked.

  Alison shrugged. “It was a small incident that concerned me alone. I knew, once I’d had time to think, that my adopted parents would be upset and angry, but not at me. I thought I’d better keep it to myself. I wasn’t hurt and none of it matters when you look back on it, does it?”

  “How about the man who was going to give you a good hiding?”

  “I never saw him again. It was two years later when I got my first punishment.”

  “Just a minute,” said Roderick. “You said that even then you knew you were an inferior being—you had always known, but this was the first time anyone showed you. How had you known? Who or what had told you? When? Where?”

  Alison tried. They could see her try. But she had to say: “I don’t know.”

  “All right,” said Roderick, as if it weren’t important. “What was this that happened two years later?”

  “Perhaps I am giving too much significance to these incidents,” Alison remarked apologetically. “Certainly they happened. But when I say ‘two years passed,’ perhaps I’m not making it clear that in those two years hardly anything happened, hardly anything was said or done, to remind me I was an android and not a human being.

  “When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I suddenly developed a talent for tennis. I had played since I was quite young, but just as front-rank players run in and out of form, I improved quite unexpectedly, I joined a new club. I was picked for an important match. I was in singles, mixed and women’s doubles. I did well, but that’s not the point.

  “After the match, my doubles partner told me I was wanted in the locker room. There was something strange about the way she told me, but I couldn’t place it. I wondered if I’d broken some rule, failed to check with someone, played in the wrong match, or forgotten to bow three times to the east—you know what these clubs are like.”

  “No, we don’t,” said Judge Collier. “We know nothing remember? Tell us.”

  Unexpectedly, he got an approving nod from the unpredictable Roderick.

  14

  Alison smiled uncertainly as she followed Veronica. She wasn’t nervous or sensitive as a rule; she seldom felt apprehension. She was curious, naturally, and even wilder possibilities suggested themselves. Had she been mistaken for someone else? Had someone stolen something and they thought she’d done it? Had someone inspected her racket and found it was an inch too wide?

  The whole team was waiting in the locker room. It looked serious, especially when she saw their expressions. It still didn’t occur to her that the fact that she was an android could have anything to do with it. Only once in her life had there been any real indication that in some way androids were inferior beings.

  But that was what it was. Bob Walton, the captain of the team, said gravely that their opponents, well beaten, had accused them of recruiting star androids to help them.

  Alison laughed. “That’s a new one. I’ve heard some peculiar excuses. Made them myself, too—the light was bad, the umpire was crazy, I had a stone in my shoe, people were moving about, the net was too high. But never ‘You fielded androids against us.’ Androids are just ordinary people—good and bad tennis players. The open singles champion is an android, but the number one woman is human. You know that as well as I do. Might as well complain because you’re beaten by tall people, or short people, or people with long arms.”

  Everyone had relaxed.

  “Sorry, Alison,” said Walton. “It’s just that none of us knew you weren’t an android.”

  Alison frowned. “What’s all this? I’m an android, sure. I didn’t say so only because nobody asked me.”

  “We took it for granted,” said Walton stiffly, “that you would know… as, of course, you did. There are no androids competing in the Athenian League. We try to keep one group, at least, clean.”

  He looked at the other two men in the team and inclined Ins head. Without a word they left the room, all three of them.

  Alison, left with the other three girls, one of whom she had kept out of the t
eam, looked exasperated.

  “This is nonsense,” she said. “If you like to run an all-human league, that’s all right as far as I’m concerned, but you should put up notices to avoid misunderstanding. I didn’t know you were—”

  “Whether you knew or not is beside the point,” said Veronica coldly—the same Veronica who had laughed and talked and won a match with Alison only a few minutes before. “We’re going to make sure you never forget.”

  They closed in on her. It was to be a fight, apparently, Alison didn’t mind. She jabbed Veronica in the ribs and sent her gasping across the room. She expected them to tear her clothes, thinking it would be conventional in dealing with android girls. But it was quite different from the scene in the bushes. This was clean and sporting. The men had left, very properly, and instead of half a dozen youths with a knife against a terrified child, it was only three girls to one.

  Alison fought hard, but fair. She guessed that, if she didn’t fight clean, it would be ammunition for the android-haters. To do them justice, the other girls were clean, too. They didn’t mind hurting her, but they didn’t go for her face, use their nails or yank her hair.

  Alison gave a good account of herself, but other things being equal, three will always overcome one. She was turned on her face on the floor. One of the girls sat on her legs and one on her shoulders while the third beat the seat of her shorts with a firmly swung racket.

  It was no joke. Alison wouldn’t have made a sound if it had been far worse, but when they let her go, she was feeling sorry for herself. They left her alone in the room.

  She picked herself up and dusted herself off. The floor was clean and the mirror in one corner showed that she looked all right. In fact, she looked considerably better than the three girls who had beaten her.

  Still angry, she was able to grin philosophically at the thought that she could beat them all in a beauty contest and at tennis. She could tell herself, if she liked, that they were jealous of her. It was probably at least partly true.

  Her feelings were hurt, but there was no other damage. She could even see their point of view.

  15

  “What was their point of view?” asked Roderick.

  “Well, they were human and they were snobs. They’d even have admitted they were snobs, if you put the question the right way. It was a private club—”

  “And it was quite reasonable,” suggested Roderick softly, “that they should exclude androids, who are inferior beings.”

  “No, not quite that,” Alison protested, laughing. “I don’t really believe…”

  She stopped.

  “Just sometimes?” Roderick persisted. “Or just one part of you, while the other knows quite well an android is as good as a human?”

  Alison shivered suddenly. “You know, I have a curious feeling, as if I were being trapped into something.”

  “That’s how people always feel,” said Roderick, “just before they decide they needn’t be terrified any more of spiders or whatever it was they feared.”

  The court was very quiet. There was something about Roderick’s professional competence and Alison’s determination to cooperate that made any kind of interruption out of the question.

  “There’s very little more I can say about this,” said Alison. “I took a job, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. It was with ah advertising agency. They knew I was an android. They paid me exactly what they paid anyone else. When I did well, they gave me a rise.

  “But then I noticed something—I never got any credit for anything. When I had an idea, somehow it was always possible to give the credit to someone else. Soon there was a very curious situation. I held a very junior position, I had little or no standing, but I did responsible work and I was paid well for it.

  “I went to another agency and It was quite different. Again, they knew I was an android, but no one seemed remotely interested. When I did well, I was promoted. When I did badly on any job, my chief swore at me and called me a fool and an incompetent and an empty-headed glamour girl and a lot of things I’d rather not repeat here.

  “But it never seemed to occur to him to call me a dirty android. I don’t think he was an android himself, either.

  “I joined a dramatic society, but again I chose the wrong club. They didn’t mind at all that I was an android. They didn’t keep me in small parts. But it was perfectly natural that the three human girls in the cast shouldn’t want to use the same dressing-room as another android girl in the show and I did. When we were at small places, she and I had to change in the wings.

  “There were scores of other little incidents of the same kind. They multiplied as I grew older—not because differentiation was getting worse, but because I was moving in higher society. In places where it’s held against you that you didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, naturally it’s a disadvantage if you’re an android, besides.

  “Then a law was passed and it was no longer necessary to admit being an android. I don’t know what the Athenian Tennis League did about that. I’d come to Everton then and hardly anyone knew I was an android. And the plain fact, despite everything I’ve said, is that hardly anyone cared. There are so many androids, so many humans. You may And yourself the only android in a group—or the only human.

  “Then I met Roderick.”

  “There,” said Roderick, “I think we can stop.” He turned to the judge. “I’m withdrawing my suit, of course. I think I made that clear quite a while ago.”

  He gave Alison his arm, “Come on, sweetheart, let’s go.”

  The roar burst out again, it must have been both one of the noisiest and one of the quietest trials on record. The judge, dignity forgotten, was standing up, hopping from one foot to the other in impatience and vexation.

  “You can’t go like that!” he shrieked, “We haven’t finished… we don’t know ,.”

  “I’ve gone as far as I can here,” said Roderick. He hesitated as the roar grew. “AH right,” he went on, raising his voice, “But you don’t explain people to themselves. Any little quirks that make them do funny things, or not do normal things, you get them gradually to explain to you, and to themselves.”

  He searched in his pockets and pulled out a key ring. “Go and wait in the car, honey,” he said, and told Alison where it was. She went, dazed.

  “I’ll have to keep the papers from her for a day or two,” Roderick went on, almost to himself. “After that, it won’t matter.” He turned his attention to the court, “All right, then, listen. If I’m right, I’ve found something that’s been under everyone’s nose for two hundred years and has never been seen before. I don’t say I found it in five minutes. I’ve been working it out for the last twenty-four hours, with the help of quite a few records of android patients.

  “Will you listen?” he yelled as the excited chatter increased. “I don’t want to tell you this. I want to go home with Alison. You’ve seen her. Wouldn’t you want to?”

  The court gradually settled.

  “Let’s consider human sterility for a moment,” said Roderick. “As you might imagine, some of it’s medical and some psychological. As a psychologist, I’ve cured people of so-called barrenness—and when I did, of course, it wasn’t sterility at all, but a neurosis. These people didn’t and don’t have children because owing to some unconscious conclusion they’ve reached, they don’t want them, feel they shouldn’t have them, or are certain they can’t have them.

  “But that’s only some. Others come to me and, in consultation with a specialist in that line, I find there’s nothing psychological about it whatever.

  “I have an idea, now, that all androids are psychologically sterile. Sterility has eaten into the cycle of human reproduction but how should it touch the androids? If one android can reproduce, they all can. Unless they, like these humans I’ve cured, have reached unconscious conclusions to the effect that androids can’t or shouldn’t or mustn’t have children.

  “And we know they nearly all have.”

 
; His voice suddenly dropped, and when Roderick spoke quietly, he was emphasizing points and people listened. There was no murmuring now.

  “I think if you were to run a survey and find who now is continuing to deny—passionately, honestly, sincerely—that androids can reproduce, you’d find the most passionate, honest, and sincere are androids. If you looked into the past, I think you’d find the same thing. Wasn’t it significant that it had to be a human doctor who declared publicly that androids weren’t sterile?

  “Into every android is built the psychological axiom that an android must be inferior to a human to survive. That’s the answer. Androids don’t come to me to be cured of this because they don’t want to be cured of it. They know it’s essential to them. With the more aware part of their brains, they may know exactly the opposite, but that doesn’t count when it comes to things like this.

  “And long ago, without knowing it, androids picked on this. Androids could not be a menace if they couldn’t reproduce. Androids would be duly inferior if they couldn’t reproduce. Androids would be allowed to exist if they couldn’t reproduce. Androids could compete with humans in other things if they couldn’t reproduce.”

  He knew he was right as he looked around the court. For once, almost at a glance, it was possible to tell humans from androids. Half the people in court were interested, bored, amused, indifferent, thoughtful—the humans. The other half were angry, frightened, ashamed, apathetic, resentful, wildly excited or in tears… for Roderick was tearing at the very foundation of their world.

  “I have real hopes for Alison,” he remarked mildly, “because she brought in Dr Smith. See what that means? Not one android in a thousand could have done it. She must love me a lot… but that’s none of your business.”

  He went the way Alison had gone. No one tried to stop him this time. At the door, he paused.