Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

But his body was not—as he knew it would not be—his own. He had been designed by human beings; only a human being could make him die. Then he screamed aloud, throwing his arms out at his sides, bellowing in fury over the silent city. But he could not move forward.

Spofforth’s metal brain had been constructed and his body grown from living tissue at a time, long before, when engineering was in decline but the making of robots was a high art. That art too would soon decline and wither; Spofforth himself had been its highest achievement. He was the last of a series of a hundred robots designated Make Nine, the strongest and most intelligent creatures ever made by man. He was also the only one programmed to stay alive despite his own wishes.

Unwanted by the engineers who had made the recording, but unavoidable, were fragments of old dreams, yearnings, anxieties. There was no way to rid the tapes of these without damaging other functions.

It was, as the genetic engineers were fond of saying, an improvement upon the work of God. Since none of the engineers believed there was a God, however, their self-praise was unsound.

Spofforth thought of her often. At times, seeing her on her way to a class, surrounded by others but alone, he wanted to walk over to her and touch her gently, just place his big hand on her shoulder and hold it there for a while, feeling the warmth of it.

Spofforth, a hand clamped on his cloned heart, turned and walked away. It was there he learned a thing he was to know for the rest of his long life; he did not really want to live. He had been cheated—horribly cheated—of a real, human life; something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him.

He was the last, and special adjustments were made in the synapses of his own particular metallic brain to prevent what had happened to the others of his series: they had been committing suicide. Some had fused their brains into black shapelessness with high-voltage welding equipment; some had swallowed corrosives. A few had gone completely insane before being destroyed by humans, freaking out madly, destructively, rampaging down city streets at midnight screaming obscenities.

Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.

But even my footsteps seem terribly loud down here in the basement of the old library. Nobody ever comes here, and moss grows on the ancient stainless-steel walls.

‘Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,’ spoken by an old man to a young girl.

The films themselves are at times fascinating. I have already gone through more of them than I know how to count and more than those remain. All of them are black and white, and they have the kind of jerky motions of the huge ape in Kong Returns. Everything about them is strange, not just the way the characters move and react. There is the—how can I say this?—the sense of involvement to them, the sense that great waves of feelingfulness wash over them.

It is the hint of emotions that are wholly unknown to me—emotions that every member of the ancient audience of these films once felt, and that are now lost forever. It is sadness that I feel most often. Sadness. ‘Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.’ Sadness.

Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: ‘When in doubt, forget it.’

And when the word ‘baby’ appeared on the screen I suddenly realized that I had not seen a real baby for longer than can be known! Yellows, blues, reds: years beyond numberings, and I had not seen a baby. Where have the babies gone? And has anyone else asked this question? And then the voice in me that comes from my childhood training says, ‘Don’t ask—relax.’ But I can’t relax.

Nineteen. This is the highest number I can ever remember using. Nothing in my life has ever been worth this high a counting before.

I know, of course, not to try being a moral judge of anyone. And certainly not of people from another time. I know the life in the films is contrary to the dictum ‘Alone is best’; but that is not what bothers me. After all, I have spent days at a time with other people—have even seen the same students every day for weeks. It is not the Mistake of Proximity that bothers me about those ‘families.’ I think it may be a kind of shock that the people take such risks. They seem to feel so much for one another.

Two servos came out from the kitchen and stood near them—making sure, I suppose, that the fire didn’t spread. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. Finally, when the smell had become unbearable, I left the Burger Chef. But I stopped when I saw a man staring from outside through the window at the people in flames. I stood next to him for a moment. Then I said, ‘I don’t understand it.’ The man looked at me, blankly at first. And then he frowned with a look of distaste and shrugged his shoulders and closed his eyes. And I began to blush from embarrassment as I realized that I was crying. Crying. In public.

‘The Detectors don’t detect anything,’ she said. ‘Maybe they never did. They don’t have to. Everybody is so conditioned from childhood that nobody ever does anything.’ ‘People burn themselves to death,’ I said. ‘Often.’ ‘And do the Detectors stop that?’ she said. ‘Why don’t the Detectors know that people are thinking unbalanced, suicidal thoughts, and restrain them?’

I cannot get her off my mind. I see her with the trees and ferns in their glass cases behind her, holding the plastic fruit out to me.

I think if I had not learned how to read I would not have been interested in her. Only frightened.

So I’ve been wandering around the halls like Lady Macbeth opening doors. Most of the rooms were empty.’ ‘What’s Lady Macbeth?’ I said, trying to make conversation. ‘A person who walks around in pajamas,’ she said.

Without him, New York might have no longer functioned at all. He sometimes wondered how other cities stayed alive, with no Make Nines, and no really effective humans around; he remembered the piles of garbage in the streets of Cleveland, and how poorly everyone had been dressed in St Louis when he had served, briefly, as mayor of that city. And that had been almost a century before. No one in St Louis had had pockets for years, and everyone’s shirts had been too big, until Spofforth himself had repaired the sonic measuring equipment and removed a dead cat from the pocket machine of the city’s only clothing store.

But had he been able to produce more Make Nines he would have made certain they would come into the world without the ability to feel. And with the ability to die. With the gift of death.

She has lived with me nine days now, against all principles of Individualism and Privacy. I feel guilty at times, compromising my Interior Development by the whims of another person, but I don’t think about the immorality of that very often. In fact, these have been the happiest nine days of my life.

‘Reading is too intimate,’ Spofforth said. ‘It will put you too close to the feelings and the ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you.’

Finally the voice came back and said, ‘Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.’

When I was a little girl Simon talked to me about things like the water cycle and the precession of the equinoxes. He had an old piece of blackboard and chalk; I remember him drawing me a picture of the planet Saturn with its rings. When I asked him how he knew about such things he told me he had learned them from his father. His grandfather had, as a boy, looked at the night sky through a celestial telescope, way back in the days not long after what Simon called ‘the death of intellectual curiosity.’

But now it’s all robots. Robots and the pleasure principle. Everybody’s head is a cheap movie show.’

I suppose that dream has much to do with my living here in this three-room apartment with him. It was almost certainly the beginning of his desire to live and act like an ordinary human being of a long time ago, to try to live a life like the life of the dream’s original dreamer. So I am the wife or mistress he would have had. And we play out some kind of game of domesticity, because Bob wants it that way. I think he’s insane.

When I am angry with him he looks genuinely baffled. Once when I was bored I taunted him with the name ‘Robot’ and he became furious—frightening—and shouted at me, ‘I did not choose my incarnation.’ No. He is like Paul in that I must always be alert to his sensitivities. I am the one who is cool about other people.

He seemed to have drifted off the point. I had noticed him doing it before and had called it to his attention. ‘Just getting senile,’ he had said. ‘Robot brains wear out like anybody else’s.’

He told me once that he remembered part of a line of a poem from his brain’s erased memory. It went: ‘Whose “something” these are I think I know…’ But he could not remember what the ‘something’ was. A word like ‘tools’ or ‘dreams.’ Sometimes he would say it that way: ‘Whose dreams these are I think I know…?’ But it did not satisfy him.

Simon used to say to me when I was a little girl that things were all falling apart and good riddance. ‘The Age of Technology has rusted,’ he would say. Well, it’s gotten worse in the forty yellows since Simon died. Still, it’s not too bad here. I wash the windows and clean the floors myself, and there is plenty of food.

The face on the box was, Paul had told me, the face of Jesus Christ. It was used to sell a lot of things.

‘Why would I be pregnant if no one else is?’ I said. ‘Because you don’t use pills or marijuana. Most drugs for the past thirty years have contained a fertility-inhibiting agent. I checked some control tapes at the library after the subject came up between us the other day. There was a Directed Plan to cut back population for a year. A computer decision. But something went wrong with it, and the population was never turned back on again.’

Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics; but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said; I am human. I talk and I listen and I read. Why can no one read? What happened?

Bob seems to know almost everything; but he doesn’t know when or why people stopped reading. ‘Most people are too lazy,’ he said. ‘They only want distractions.’ Maybe he is right, but I don’t really feel that he is. In the basement of the apartment building we live in, a very old building that has been restored many times, is a crudely lettered phrase on the wall near the reactor: WRITING SUCKS. The wall is painted in an institutional green, and scratched into the paint are crude drawings of penises and women’s breasts and of couples engaged in oral sex or hitting one another, but those are the only words: WRITING SUCKS. There is no laziness in that statement, nor in the impulse to write it by scratching into tough paint with the point of a nail or a knife. What I think of when I read that harsh, declarative phrase is how much hatred there is in it.

I think the ocean means most to me on rain days, when the water and sky are gray. There is a sandy beach below the cliff; its tan color looks beautiful against the gray water. And the white birds in the gray sky! My heart beats noticeably when I even imagine it, here in my cell. And it is sad, like the horse with the hat on its head in the old film, like King Kong falling—so slowly, so softly, so far—and like the words that I now say aloud: ‘Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.’ Like remembering Mary Lou, cross-legged on the floor, her eyes on her book.

Something about that one word seemed to open up the older man. ‘I used to fix coffee for her,’ he said, ‘and we’d drink it in bed. Real coffee with real milk in it, and sometimes when I could find it a piece of fruit. An orange, maybe. She’d drink that coffee out of a gray mug and I’d just sit at the other end of the bed facing her and pretend to be thinking about my own coffee but what I was really doing was watching her. God, I could watch that woman.’ He shook his head.

And I fell down on my knees in the field and wept, dumbly, for Mary Lou and for the life that I had, for a time, lived, when my mind and my imagination were, so briefly, alive.

I am amazed to think of the number of people who must have screamed and died on battlefields in order to fulfill the ambitions of presidents and emperors. Or of the aggregation into the hands of some large groups of people, like the United States of America, great reserves of wealth and power, denied to most others. And yet, despite all this, there seemed to have been good and kind men and women. And many of them happy.

Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a ‘great man.’ I am not certain I like the idea of ‘great men’; it makes me uncomfortable. ‘Great men’ often have had very bloody plans for mankind.

For years he had felt that if he could find a woman like her and live with that woman he might find a key to the other life that the consciousness he bore had lived—the life of whoever had been copied to make his brain. And now he was doing it. But he had found no key.

My old programming would say, ‘When in doubt, forget it.’ But I had to quiet that voice, too. Because it was wrong. If I was to continue to live a life that was worth the trouble of living it, I had to leave.

For the first time in my entire life, I was a free man.

When literacy died, so had history.

I could have killed Biff and eaten her and used her skin for a hat; but I did not want to kill Biff. I was a changed person from what I had been trained to be; I no longer wished to be alone, private, or even self-reliant. I needed Biff. Self-reliance was not just a matter of drugs and silence.

It was the most horrible place I have slept in in my life, with that mindless parody of productivity going on constantly around me, and with the wretched waste of time and energy in the making and unmaking of battery-powered toasters. And those gray-uniformed sub-morons, parodies of humanity, shuffling around silently, with no real work to do. During the five days I stayed there I saw no robot except the inspector do anything at his job. And he only dropped toasters into a bin and every hour or so shouted, ‘Recycle time!’ And fed the others their two meals a day.

A few moments later, at the end of the line, the inspector robot flipped up the switch on that toaster and its element glowed red. He showed no surprise but merely flipped the switch back off and set the toaster in an empty carton, and then repeated his action. I watched him fill up a carton with twenty toasters ready for shipping. I had not the remotest idea how they would be shipped or where, but I felt pleased with what I had done.

‘Privacy and Mandatory Politeness were invented by one of my fellow Make Nines. He felt it was what people really wanted, once they had the drugs to occupy themselves with. And it nearly put a stop to crime. People used to commit a lot of crimes. They would steal from one another and do violent things to one another’s bodies.’