Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

‘Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.’

A year ago I would not have known what I was feeling. But after all those films I know what it is: I am in love with Mary Lou. It feels terrible. Being in love feels terrible.

Robots and the pleasure principle. Everybody’s head is a cheap movie show.’

When my child comes he will have no playmates. He will be alone in a world of old and tired people who have lost the gift for living.

I wanted, for a moment, to say something kind to him, to thank him for making my own sadness more bearable, or, even to put my arm around his frail-looking old shoulders. But I did none of these. I do not know how to do such things. I wish I knew how; I sincerely wish it. But I do not.

think it is near to wintertime, because the air outside is cold. But the field around the plants is heated somehow, and the sun continues to shine. The ground is warm beneath my feet as I fertilize the obscene plants, and yet the air is cold on my body. And the stupid music never stops, never malfunctions, and the robots stare and stare. It is like a dream.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

I will stop writing now, and go back to reading. My life is very strange.

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.

If someone should come to me and say, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life,’ I would want with all my strength to believe him. I want those things: a way, the truth, and life.

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.

What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?

Nothing in my education – my stupid, life-hating education – had prepared me for what I was about to do.

When literacy died, so had history.

And here this robot with his sad and youthful face and his long, long history and his deep and gentle voice was telling me that he had let himself fall in love with

“Whose woods these are I think I know.”

And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, of what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it.

my mind racing at this absurd time of all times with the realization that all my notions of decency were something programmed into my mind and my behavior by computers and by robots who themselves had been programmed by some long-dead social engineers or tyrants or fools.

I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way.

Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.

The ocean must be very vast; it means freedom to me, and possibility. It makes something mysterious open in my mind, the way some of the things I read in books do at times, making me feel more alive than I had ever thought I could feel, and more human.

Robots were something invented once out of a blind love for the technology that could allow them to be invented.

And oh, continues to fall. Finally then, with his face serene, blown coldly by the furious upward wind, his chest naked and exposed, his powerful legs straight out, toes down, khaki trousers flapping above the backs of his legs, his metallic brain joyful in its rush toward what it has so long ached for, Robert Spofforth, mankind’s most beautiful toy, bellows into the Manhattan dawn and with mighty arms outspread takes Fifth Avenue into his shuddering embrace.