Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "Swung to T, O.K.," said the engineer, tucking a metal clip just a little deeper into Paul's armpit.

  "Now, a half-truth," said the judge.

  "I am contented," said Paul.

  The spectators chuckled appreciatively.

  "Square in the middle," said the engineer.

  "Proceed with the examination," said the judge.

  "I will ask the good patriotic doctor the same question," said the prosecutor. "Doctor, your part in this plot to overthrow the--ah--machines: you say it was motivated solely by your desire to serve the American people?"

  "I think so."

  Again the telltale restlessness in the courtroom.

  "You think so, eh?" said the prosecutor. "Do you know where the needle pointed on that one, Doctor, patriot, latter-day Patrick Henry?"

  "No," said Paul uncomfortably.

  "Squarely between T and F, Doctor. Apparently you're not sure. Perhaps we can dissect this half-truth and remove from it a whole one--like removing a tumor."

  "Urn."

  "Could it be, Doctor, that this hate of what you describe as an injustice to humanity is in fact a hate or something a good bit less abstract?"

  "Maybe. I don't quite follow you."

  "I'm talking about your hate for someone, Doctor."

  "I don't know who you're talking about."

  "The needle says you do know, Doctor--that you do know your red-white-and-blue patriotism is really an expression of hate and resentment--hate and resentment for one of the greatest true patriots in American history, your father!"

  "Nonsense!"

  "The needle says you lie!" The prosecutor turned away from Paul in seeming disgust. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury and the television audience: I submit that this man before you is little more than a spiteful boy, to whom this great land of ours, this great economy of ours, this civilization of ours, has become a symbol of his father! A father whom, subconsciously, he would have liked to destroy!

  "A father, ladies and gentlemen of the jury and the television audience, to whom we are all in debt for our lives, for it was he, more than any other American, who mustered the forces of know-how, and brought civilization to victory!

  "Call it Oedipus complex, if you will. He's a grown man now, and I call it treason! Deny it, Doctor, deny it!

  "But this boy chose to resent, to hate this brilliant apparition on the pages of history, out of whose loins he had sprung. And now, as a man, he has transferred this hate to what might very well serve as a symbol for his father, your land, ladies and gentlemen of the jury and the television audience, and mine.

  "Deny it," he said again, his voice little more than a whisper.

  The cameras about-faced, and closed in on Paul like dogs closing in on a coon shot from a tree.

  "Apparently I can't deny it," said Paul. He looked down helplessly, wonderingly, at the wires monitoring every reflex God had given him with which to defend himself. A moment before, he had been a glib mouthpiece for a powerful, clever organization. Now, suddenly, he was all alone, dealing with a problem singularly his own.

  "If my father were a petshop proprietor," he said at last, "I suppose I would be a subconscious dog poisoner."

  The cameras dollied back and forth impatiently, panned across the spectators, glanced at the judge, and returned to Paul.

  "But, even if there weren't this unpleasant business between me and the memory of my father, I think I would believe in the arguments against the lawlessness of the machines. There are men who don't hate their fathers, so far as I know, who believe in the arguments. What the hate does, I think, is to make me not only believe, but want to do something about the system. Does the needle agree?"

  A number of spectators nodded.

  "Good. So far, so good. I suspect that all people are motivated by something pretty sordid, and I guess the clinical data bears me out on that. Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.

  "What the prosecutor has just done is to prove what everything about this world we've made for ourselves seems determined to prove, what the Ghost Shirt Society is determined to disprove: that I'm no good, you're no good, that we're no good because we're human."

  Paul gazed into the television camera lenses and imagined the millions now watching, now listening, and he wondered if he'd made sense to any of them. He tried to think of some vivid image that would bring his point home to them all. An image came to mind; he rejected it as indelicate, could find no other, and so blurted it out anyway.

  "The most beautiful peonies I ever saw," said Paul, "were grown in almost pure cat excrement. I--"

  Bagpipes and drums howled from the street below.

  "What's going on out there?" demanded the judge.

  "Parade, sir," said a guard, leaning out of the window.

  "What organization is it?" said the judge. "I'll have every last one of them hauled in for this outrage."

  "Dressed like Scotchmen, sir," said the guard, "with a couple fellas up front that look kind of like Injuns."

  "All right," said the judge irritably, "we'll stop the testimony until they're past."

  A brickbat shattered a courtroom window, showering the American flag to the judge's right with bits of glass.

  33

  THE STATE DEPARTMENT limousine, bound for New York City, crossed the Iroquois River at Ilium once more. In the back seat were Mr. Ewing J. Halyard, the Shah of Bratpuhr, spiritual leader of 6,000,000 members of the Kolhouri sect, and Khashdrahr Miasma, interpreter, and nephew of the Shah. The Shah and Khashdrahr, languishing with nostalgia for the temple bells, the splash of the fountain, and the cries of the houri selano in the palace courtyard, were going home.

  When the expedition had crossed this bridge before, at the beginning of their trip, Halyard and the Shah, each in the fashion of his own culture, had been equals in splendor, with Khashdrahr coming off a poor, self-effacing third. Now, the hierarchy of the travelers had shifted. Khashdrahr's function had been extended, so that he served not only as a language bridge between the Shah and Halyard, but as an intermediate social step between them as well.

  Wondering at the mechanics of being a human being, mechanics far beyond the poor leverage of free will, Mr. Halyard found himself representing the fact of no rank as plainly as Doctor Halyard had once represented a great deal of rank. Though he had told his charges nothing of the physical-education examination that could mean life or death to his career, they had sensed the collapse of his status the instant he'd been brought back from the Cornell gymnasium and revived.

  When Halyard had recovered, and changed from the ruined shorts and tennis shoes into street clothes, he had seen in the mirror, not a brilliantly fashionable cosmopolite, but an old, overdressed fool. Off had come the boutonniere, the contrasting waistcoat, the colored shirt. Accessory by accessory, garment by garment, he'd stripped away the symbols of the discredited diplomat. Now he was, spiritually and sartorially, whites, grays, and blacks.

  As though there were anything of Halyard left to crush, one more crushing blow had fallen. The State Department's personnel machines, automatically, with a respect for law and order never achieved by human beings, had started fraud proceedings against him, since he had never been entitled to his Ph.D., his classification numbers, or, more to the point, to his pay check.

  "I'm going to bat for you," his immediate superior had written, but it was, Halyard knew, an archaic incantation in a wilderness of metal, glass, plastic, and inert gas.

  "Khabu?" said the Shah, without looking at Halyard.

  "Where are we?" said Khashdrahr to Halyard, filling the social gap for form's sake, though the Bratpuhrian word, God knows, was familiar enough to Halyard by now.

  "Ilium. Remember? We crossed here before, going the other way."

  "Nakka Takaru tooie," said the Shah, nodding.

  "Eh?"

  "Where the Takaru spit in your face," said Khashdrahr.

 
"Oh--that." Halyard smiled. "I hope you don't take that home as your chief recollection of the United States. Perfectly ridiculous incident, isolated, irrational. It certainly isn't any indication of the temperament of the American people. That one neurotic would have to manifest his aggressions in front of you gentlemen. Believe me, you could travel this country for the next hundred years and never see another outburst like that."

  Halyard let none of his bitterness show. With a melancholy spitefulness he continued, for these last days of his career, to perform his job impeccably. "Forget about him," he said, "and remember all the other things you've seen, and try to imagine how your own nation might be transformed."

  The Shah made thoughtful clucking sounds.

  "At no expense whatsoever to you," said Halyard, "America will send engineers and managers, skilled in all fields, to study your resources, blueprint your modernization, get it started, test and classify your people, arrange credit, set up the machinery."

  The Shah shook his head wonderingly. "Prakka-fut takki sihn," he said at last, "souli, sakki EPICAC, siki Kanu pu?"

  "Shah says," said Khashdrahr, " 'Before we take this first step, please, would you ask EPICAC what people are for?' "

  The limousine came to a stop at the head of the bridge on the Homestead side, blocked this time, not by a Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps crew, but by a phalanx of Arabs. They were led, as though the significance of the banners and costumes weren't confusing enough, by two men wearing Indian shirts and war paint.

  "Dinko?" said the Shah.

  "Army?" said Khashdrahr.

  Halyard had his first good chuckle in many weeks. That anyone, even a foreigner, could look on this colorful tangle of banners, sashes, and toy weapons as an effective fighting force! "Just some people having a little fun dressing up."

  "Some of them have guns," said Khashdrahr.

  "Wood, cardboard, and paint," said Halyard. "All make-believe." He picked up the speaking tube and spoke to the driver: "See if you can't ease past them and down a side street, toward the courthouse. Things ought to be quieter down there."

  "Yessir," said the driver uneasily. "I don't know, though, sir. I don't like the way they're looking at us, and all that traffic on the other side looked like they were running away from something. Maybe we should turn around and--"

  "Nonsense. Lock the doors, lean on the horn, and go on through. Things have come to a pretty pass if this sort of monkey business has the right of way over official business."

  The bulletproof windows slithered to the top, the door locks clicked, and the limousine nosed diffidently into the apricot, green, and gold ranks of the Arabs.

  Jeweled dirks and scimitars stabbed and slashed at the limousine's armored sides. Above the howls of the Arabs came crashes of gunfire. Two great pimples appeared suddenly in the side of the car, inches from Halyard's head.

  Halyard, the Shah, and Khashdrahr threw themselves on the floor. The limousine plunged through the raging ranks, and down a side street.

  "Head for the courthouse!" cried Halyard to the driver from the floor, "then out Westinghouse Boulevard!"

  "The hell with you!" said the driver. "I'm bailing out right here. The whole town's going nuts!"

  "Stay at the wheel or I kill you!" said Khashdrahr savagely. He was shielding the Shah's sacred body with his own poor flesh, and he held the point of a golden dagger against the back of the driver's neck.

  Khashdrahr's next words were lost in an explosion nearby, followed by cheers and a hail of rubble on the limousine's top and hood.

  "Here's the courthouse!" said the driver.

  "Good. Turn left!" commanded Halyard.

  "My God!" cried the driver. "Look!"

  "What's the matter?" quavered Halyard, prone with Khashdrahr and the Shah. He could see only sky and building tops and passing skeins of smoke.

  "The Scotchmen," said the driver hollowly. "My God, here come the Scotchmen." The limousine stopped with a shriek of rubber.

  "All right, back up and--"

  "You got radar down there on the floor? Take a look out the back window, then tell me we should back up."

  Halyard raised his head cautiously above the window sill. The limousine was trapped by bagpipers ahead, and, behind, by a squad of gold-epauleted Royal Parmesans, who had sallied from an Automatic Market across the street from the courthouse.

  An explosion hurled the market's conveyers and clips of canned goods through the windows. An automagic cashier rolled into the street, still miraculously upright on its round pedestal. "Did you see our special in Brussels sprouts?" it said, tripped on its own wire, and crashed to the pavement by the limousine, spewing cash from a mortal wound.

  "It isn't us they're after!" called the driver. "Look!"

  The Royal Parmesans, the Scotchmen, and a handful of Indians had joined forces and were ramming the courthouse door with a felled telephone pole.

  The door burst into kindling, and the attackers were carried inside by the ram's momentum.

  A moment later they emerged with a man on their shoulders. In the midst of their frenzied acclamation, he was marionettelike. As though to perfect the impression, bits of wire dangled from his extremities.

  "To the Works!" cried the Indians.

  The host, bearing their hero aloft like another banner beside the Stars and Stripes, followed the Indians toward the bridge across the Iroqois, cheering, skirling, smashing, dynamiting, and beating drums.

  The limousine stayed where it had been trapped by the Royal Parmesans and Scotchmen for an hour, while the dull thunder of explosions walked about the city like the steps of drunken giants, and afternoon turned to twilight under a curtain of smoke. Each time escape seemed possible, and Halyard raised his head to investigate a lull, fresh contingents of vandals and looters sent him to the floor again.

  "All right," he said at last, "I think maybe we're all right now. Let's try to make it to the police station. We can get protection there until this thing plays itself out."

  The driver leaned on the steering wheel and stretched insolently. "You think you've been watching a football game or something? You think maybe everything's going to be just the way it was before?"

  "I don't know what's going on, and neither do you. Now, drive to the police station, do you understand?" said Halyard.

  "You think you can order me around, just because you've got a Ph.D. and I've got nothing but a B.S.?"

  "Do as he says," hissed Khashdrahr, placing the point of his knife in the back of the driver's neck again.

  The limousine moved down the littered, now-deserted streets toward the headquarters of Ilium's keepers of the peace.

  The street before the police station was snow-white, paved with bits of punctured pasteboard: the fifty-thousand-card deck with which the Ilium personnel and crime-prevention machines had played their tireless games--shuffling, dealing, off the bottom, off the top, out of the middle, palming, marking, reading, faster than the human eye could follow, controlling every card, and implacably protecting the interests of the house, always the house, any house.

  The doors of the building had been torn from their hinges, and within were rolling dunes of dumped files.

  Halyard opened his window a crack. "Hello, there," he called, and waited hopefully for a policeman to appear. "I say, hello!" He opened his door cautiously.

  Before he could close it again, two Indians with pistols jerked the door wide open.

  Khashdrahr lunged at them with his knife, and was knocked senseless. He fell on top of the quivering Shah.

  "I say," said Halyard, and was knocked cold, too.

  "To the Works!" ordered the Indians.

  When Halyard regained consciousness he found himself with his aching head on the limousine floor, halfway out of the open door.

  The car was parked in front of a saloon near the bridge. The front of the saloon had been sandbagged, and inside were men operating radios, moving pins on maps, oiling weapons, and watching the clock. By the head of th
e bridge itself were crude breastworks of sandbags and timbers, facing the pillboxes and turrets of the Ilium Works across the river. Men in every conceivable type of uniform wandered about the fortifications in a holiday spirit, coming and going as they pleased, on missions seemingly best known to themselves.

  The commandeering Indians and the driver were gone, while Khashdrahr and the Shah, bewildered and frightened, were being castigated by a tall, gaunt man who wore an Indian shirt but no war paint.

  "Goddammit!" said the tall man. "The Knights of Kandahar are supposed to be manning the roadblock on Griffin Boulevard. What the hell you doing here?"

  "We--" said Khashdrahr.

  "Haven't got time to listen to excuses. Get back to your organization on the double!"

  "But--"

  "Lubbock!" cried the tall man.

  "Yessir."

  "Give these men transportation to the Griffin Boulevard block, or put 'em under arrest for insubordination."

  "Yessir. Ammo truck's leaving now, sir." Lubbock hustled the Shah and Khashdrahr into the back of a truck, atop cases of handmade grenades.

  "Brouha batouli, nibo. Nibo!" cried the Shah piteously. "Nibo!"

  The truck meshed its gears and disappeared into the smoke.

  "I say," said Halyard thickly.

  "Finnerty!" cried a short, fat man in thick glasses from the door of the saloon. "The state police are trying to break through the Griffin Boulevard roadblock! Who've we got for reinforcements?"

  Finnerty's eyes widened, and he ran his hands through his hair. "Sent back two stragglers, and that's it. The VFW and the Knights of Pythias wandered off, and the Masons never did show up. Tell them we haven't got any reserves!"

  A geyser of flame and shattered masonry spouted from the Ilium Works across the river, and Halyard saw that where the Stars and Stripes had flown over the works manager's office, a white flag now snapped in the smoky wind.

  "For chrissake!" said Finnerty. "Get the Moose and Elks on the radio and tell them to quit it. They're supposed to occupy the Works, not atomize it."

  "Baker Dog Three," said Lasher into a microphone. "Baker Dog Three. Protect all equipment in the Works until decision can be made as to proper disposition. Can you hear me, Baker Dog Three?"

  The crowd by the saloon fell silent, to hear the reply of the Moose and Elks above the shushing noise of the loudspeaker.