Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

This book is not a book about what is, but a book about what could be. The characters are modeled after persons as yet unborn, or, perhaps, at this writing, infants. It is mostly about managers and engineers. At this point in history, 1952 A.D., our lives and freedom depend largely upon the skill and imagination and courage of our managers and engineers, and I hope that God will help them to help us all stay alive and free. But this book is about another point in history, when there is no more war, and …

ILIUM, NEW YORK, is divided into three parts. In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live. If the bridge across the Iroquois were dynamited, few daily routines would be disturbed. Not many people on either side have reasons other than curiosity for crossing.

During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war—production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.

His father, Doctor George Proteus, was at the time of his death the nation’s first National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director, a position approached in importance only by the presidency of the United States.

Doctor Proteus?”

During the war, the managers and engineers had found that the bulk of secretarial work could be done—as could most lower-echelon jobs—more quickly and efficiently and cheaply by machines.

He was showing the cat an old battlefield at peace. Here, in the basin of the river bend, the Mohawks had overpowered the Algonquins, the Dutch the Mohawks, the British the Dutch, the Americans the British. Now, over bones and rotten palings and cannon balls and arrowheads, there lay a triangle of steel and masonry buildings, a half-mile on each side—the Illium Works.

But now this elite business, this assurance of superiority, this sense of rightness about the hierarchy topped by managers and engineers—this was instilled in all college graduates, and there were no bones about it.

Objectively, Paul tried to tell himself, things really were better than ever. For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors—mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder. Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day.

In each face was a defiant promise of physical strength, and at the same time, there was the attitude of a secret order, above and apart from society by virtue of participating in important and moving rites the laity could only guess about—and guess wrong.

And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon—Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned,

Now, by switching in lathes on a master panel and feeding them signals from the tape, Paul could make the essence of Rudy Hertz produce one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand of the shafts.

The flash of a welder went off inches from her eyes, and the sweeper gobbled her up and hurled her squalling and scratching into its galvanized tin belly.

She dropped to the asphalt—dead and smoking, but outside.

“It seemed very fresh to me—I mean that part where you say how the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated.”

“To the people who were going to be replaced by machines, maybe. A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking.

“How gay can a party get?”

“Not slaves,” said Halyard, chuckling patronizingly. “Citizens, employed by government. They have same rights as other citizens—free speech, freedom of worship, the right to vote. Before the war, they worked in the Ilium Works, controlling machines, but now machines control themselves much better.”

“Less waste, much better products, cheaper products with automatic control.” “Aha!” “And any man who cannot support himself by doing a job better than a machine is employed by the government, either in the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps.”

“He says, ‘Where does the money come from to pay them?’ ” said Khashdrahr.

“Oh. From taxes on the machines, and taxes on personal incomes. Then the Army and the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps people put their money back into the system for more products for better living.”

In New York City, for instance, there were many skills difficult or uneconomical to mechanize, and the advances hadn’t liberated as high a percentage of people from production.

Khashdrahr blushed, and translated uneasily, apologetically. “Shah says, ‘Communism.’ ” “No Kuppo!” said Halyard vehemently. “The government does not own the machines. They simply tax that part of industry’s income that once went into labor, and redistribute it. Industry is privately owned and managed, and co-ordinated—to prevent the waste of competition—by

by a committee of leaders from private industry, not politicians. By eliminating human error through machinery, and needless competition through organization, we’ve raised the standard of living of the average man immensely.”

“You know,” said Halyard, “the ordinary man, like, well, anybody—those men working back on the bridge, the man in that old car we passed. The little man, not brilliant but a good-hearted, plain, ordinary, everyday kind of person.” Khashdrahr translated. “Aha,” said the Shah, nodding, “Takaru.”

“What did he say?” “Takaru,” said Khashdrahr. “Slave.” “No Takaru,” said Halyard, speaking directly to the Shah. “Ci-ti-zen.” “Ahhhhh,” said the Shah. “Ci-ti-zen.” He grinned happily. “Takaru—citizen. Citizen—Takaru.” “No Takaru!” said Halyard.

Khashdrahr shrugged. “In the Shah’s land are only the Elite and the Takaru.” Halyard’s ulcer gave him a twinge, the ulcer that had grown in size and authority over the years of his career as an interpreter of America to provinci...

“Thanks! It’s about time!” said Halyard as the limousine eased past the man. “You’re welcome, Doc,” said the man, and he spat in Halyard’s face.

DOCTOR PAUL PROTEUS,

These were members of the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, in their own estimate the “Reeks and Wrecks.”

Similar councils had been formed for the transportation, raw materials, food, and communications industries, and over them all had been Paul’s father. The system had so cut waste and duplication that it was preserved after the war, and was, in fact, often cited as one of the few concrete benefits of the war.

Ilium was a training ground, where fresh graduates were sent to get the feel of industry and then moved on to bigger things.

He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn’t have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality.

Private First Class Hacketts was in the middle of the First Squad of the Second Platoon of B Company of the First Battalion of the 427th Regiment of the 107th Infantry Division of the Ninth Corps of the Twelfth Army,

Hacketts did not bow back because he wasn’t supposed to and he wasn’t going to do a goddamn thing he wasn’t supposed to do and he had only twenty-three more years to go on his hitch and then he was through with the Army and the hell with it, and in twenty-three years if some sonofa-bitching colonel or lieutenant or general came up to him and said, “Salute me,” or “Pick up that butt,” or “Shine your shoes,” or something like that he’d say, “Kiss my ass, sonny,” and whip out the old discharge and spit in his eye and walk away laughing like crazy because his twenty-five years was up and all he had to do was hang around with the old gang in Hooker’s in Evansville and wait for the old pension check and to hell with you buddy because I don’t have to take no crap from nobody no more because I’m through and—

And Hacketts wondered where the hell he’d go in the next twenty-three years and thought it’d be a relief to get the hell out of the States for a while and go occupy someplace else and maybe be somebody in some of those countries instead of a bum with no money looking for an easy lay and not getting it in his own country

LYING ABED AFTER the stout-hearted men’s evening at the Kroner’s, Doctor Paul Proteus, son of a successful man, himself rich with prospects of being richer, counted his material blessings.