Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Khashdrahr stopped translating and frowned perplexedly. “Please, this average man, there is no equivalent in our language, I’m afraid.” “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.”

It was then that Paul began to suspect that Finnerty’s way of life wasn’t as irrational as it seemed; that it was, in fact, a studied and elaborate insult to the managers and engineers of Ilium, and to their immaculate wives.

Paul wondered about his own deep drives as he realized how much pleasure he was getting from recollections of Finnerty’s socially destructive, undisciplined antics. Paul indulged himself in the wistful sensation of feeling that he, Paul, might be content, if only—and let the thought stop there, as though he knew vaguely what lay beyond. He didn’t.

Paul supposed, gloomily, that beaters of systems had always been admired by the conventional.

“If you didn’t do anything to Charley, how come you were so sure he’d lose?” “Because my sympathy’s with any man up against a machine, especially a machine backing up a knucklehead

“If Checker Charley was out to make chumps out of men, he could damn well fix his own connections. Paul looks after his own circuits; let Charley do the same. Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.” He gathered up the bills from the table. “Good night.”

In short, Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.

“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.” Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded. “Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.”

“You keep giving the managers and engineers a bad time,” said Paul. “What about the scientists? It seems to me that—” “Outside the discussion,” said Lasher impatiently. “They simply add to knowledge. It isn’t knowledge that’s making trouble, but the uses it’s put to.”

“Well—I think it’s a grave mistake to put on public record everyone’s I.Q. I think the first thing the revolutionaries would want to do is knock off everybody with an I.Q. over 110, say. If I were on your side of the river, I’d have the I.Q. books closed and the bridges mined.”

“Maybe. Something like that. Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarkation. And I must say that the basic assumption of the present setup is a grade-A incitement to violence: the smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you’ll admit, pretty tough for the have-not’s to take. The criterion of brains is better than the one of money, but”—he held his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart—“about that much better.” “It’s about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get,” said Finnerty. “How’s somebody going to up his I.Q.?”

“I’m going to get myself a uniform, so I’ll know what I think and stand for.”

He had never been a reading man, but now he was developing an appetite for novels wherein the hero lived vigorously and out-of-doors, dealing directly with nature, dependent upon basic cunning and physical strength for survival—woodsmen, sailors, cattlemen…. He read of these heroes with a half-smile on his lips. He knew his enjoyment of them was in a measure childish, and he doubted that a life could ever be as clean, hearty, and satisfying as those in the books. Still and all, there was a basic truth underlying the tales, a primitive ideal to which he could aspire. He wanted to deal, not with society, but only with Earth as God had given it to man.

“He has a complete security package,” said Halyard. “His standard of living is constantly rising, and he and the country at large are protected from the old economic ups and downs by the orderly, predictable consumer habits the payroll machines give him.

“it’s the world, Wan—me and the world. I’m no good to anybody, not in this world. Nothing but a Reek and Wreck, and that’s all my kids’ll be, and a guy’s got to have kicks or he doesn’t want to live—and the only kicks left for a dumb bastard like me are the bad ones. I’m no good, Wan, no good!” “It’s me that’s no good to anybody,” said Wanda wearily. “Nobody needs me.

He tried again: “In order to get what we’ve got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them—the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.”

“The men from the boys—that’s what they used to say in the Army, Sergeant Elm Wheeler would. Memphis boy. ‘Here we go, boys,’ he’d say. ‘Here’s where we separate the men from the boys.’ And off we’d go for the next hill, and the medics’d follow and separate the dead from the wounded. And then Wheeler’d say, ‘Here we go, here’s where we separate the men from the boys.’ And that went on till we got separated from our battalion and Wheeler got his head separated from his shoulders.

There’s something about war that brings out greatness. I hate to say that, but it’s true. Of course, maybe that’s because you can get great so quick in a war. Just one damn fool thing for a couple of seconds, and you’re great. I could be the greatest barber in the world, and maybe I am, but I’d have to prove it with a lifetime of great haircutting, and then nobody’d notice. That’s just the way peacetime things are, you know?

“These kids in the Army now, that’s just a place to keep ’em off the streets and out of trouble, because there isn’t anything else to do with them. And the only chance they’ll ever get to be anybody is if there’s a war. That’s the only chance in the world they got of showing anybody they lived and died, and for something, by God.

“Used to be there was a lot of damn fool things a dumb bastard could do to be great, but the machines fixed that. You know, used to be you could go to sea on a big clipper ship or a fishing ship and be a big hero in a storm. Or maybe you could be a pioneer and go out west and lead the people and make trails and chase away Indians and all that. Or you could be a cowboy, or all kinds of dangerous things, and still be a dumb bastard. “Now the machines take all the dangerous jobs, and the dumb bastards just get tucked away in big bunches of prefabs that look like the end of a game of Monopoly, or in barracks, and there’s nothing for them to do but set there and kind of hope for a big fire where maybe they can run into a burning building in front of everybody and run out with a baby in their arms.

“Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.”

“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”