Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

She did a great deal of work; but no one thanked her for it and most of it could have been done by a Make Three robot without the Baleens’ knowing the difference—all the cooking so lovingly and skillfully done, all the sweeping and dish-washing and pottery making, for years: And no one thanked her for it.

What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved, And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.

I developed a strong admiration for Jesus, as a sad and terribly knowing prophet—a man who had grasped something about life of the greatest importance and had attempted, and largely failed, to tell what it was.

Robots were something invented once out of a blind love for the technology that could allow them to be invented. They had been made and given to the world of men as the weapons that nearly destroyed the world had once been given, as a ‘necessity.’

It is only a marker, a mute testimony to the human ability to make things that are too big.