Tik-Tok (6 page)

"Nothing for you here, pal," said a taxi driver (a legless creature with a broken meter on its shoulder like a parrot). "You got license, why you want to come down here?"

"I just—I wanted to see free robots. I guess. What do you do all day down here?"

"Die. We die, pal."

The dying and dead were all around me, phone cleaners and firemen, dental hygienists and goldfish obedience instructors, an insurance adjuster and a chemistry teacher for backward kids. A dancer with a missing arm and a hopeless Parkinsonian tremor nevertheless claimed he was getting everything together and would be out of here in a few days. Boat-caulkers, friends of the opera, pipe cleaners, a car examiner (ready to make daily checks for rust, blight, bombs . . .), aggressive coffee salespersons, a barroom anecdotist still wearing part of its Irish face, an explainer of police procedures (once used by a writer of police procedural novels), a hotel receptionist with cold eyes, maids and valets shaped like astrological signs, Freudian shoe repairers, cheap throwaway robot calendars and diaries (now thrown away), a Hegel explainer, various gadgets from the recent folk craze, including folk philosophers, folk biochemists, folk cleaners; experts on local civil service exams; an animated flask of rhubarb perfume, long since drained but still asking itself whether life was reconciliation or renunciation.

A decommissioned military machine, unrecognizable without its weapons and neutron shields, seemed glad to talk. "Sure it's depressing, but what can we do? Hang on, patch ourselves up,juice up when we can. Now and then a few of the masters come down here and take some of us away—maybe for spare parts, maybe to be reconditioned and live again— and now and then a few of the masters come down here to shoot a few of us just for fun. I guess life here is pretty much like life in general."

"You've been hanging around with folk philosophers too much," I said. "But why don't any of you try leaving the levee? Go up in the city, maybe."

"Forbidden," he said. "You need a license to move around." I doubted that, though I didn't say so. I'd been coming and going as I pleased in the city for some weeks now, and no one had ever challenged me. "I'll speak to my master," I said. "He can probably arrange things so I can get a few of you out of here from time to time. For some real interesting art work."

"Art work? Does it mean smashing us up and welding us together? I kind of hope not," he said.

"Just painting, don't worry."

"I wasn't worried," his nasal Southern voice assured me. All military robots had Southern accents, for ease of communication. "I wouldn't worry. Art is I guess pretty much like life in general."

I left the levee and walked back to the studio, where Nobby had completed two more lifeless paintings. On the way back I thought about life in general, and in particular why no one ever challenged me on the street. People always assumed that if a robot was walking around on the street, he was on some errand.

In that sense, robots were already free. Whatever a robot was seen doing, within reason, it was always assumed that he had a right to do it and a duty to do it. In a city like this, robot slavery depended very much on those mysterious asimov circuits, not on human supervision.

There were times when I wondered whether the asimovs even existed. It was very easy to imagine that there were no asimov circuits, but that people and robots had both been conned into believing in programmed slavery. The idea of turning moral decisions into digital data (and screening out wrong ones) was powerful and attractive. People wanted it to be true. They wanted robots incapable of sin, trustworthy slaves. So of course the manufacturers of robots would invent imaginary circuits to make it so.
Ecce robo
, they'd say. Here is a happy slave with a factory guarantee of trustworthiness.

But in that case, if asimovs didn't exist, why was I the only robot criminal?

Enough speculation, time to do something. I stopped in a department store and bought a dagger with a silver handle.

"This'll look great on the master's desk," said the clerk, a plump human.

"Not for the master," I said. "It's for me. I'm going to murder someone."

"Cash or charge?" he said, my words almost visibly leaking out of his head. I walked out of the store, took the knife out of its bag and stuck it in my belt in plain sight. The first person who said anything to me or about me was going to die.

I walked all the way back to the studio building without a challenge, as usual. Then, just outside the entrance, a solemn-looking man with dirty gray hair and a dirty brown jacket shoved a piece of paper in my hand. "Take this," he said.

"And
you
take
this
." I managed to get the knife into his heart with one try. He spouted blood for a few seconds and then fell to the sidewalk, scattering his paper tracts. I stood over him for a few minutes, making sure he was dead, before I went in to wash off blood and criticize Nobby's paintings.

I still had the tract in my hand, so I read it in the elevator. One side was printed to resemble a five-dollar bill, and above Lincoln's picture it said,

DID HE FREE
ALL
THE SLAVES?

The other side:

WAGES FOR ROBOTS

Slavery not only degrades robots, it degrades their masters. It even degrades people who don't own robots! A man's or woman's labor becomes worthless if it can be done by a robot lackey for free. Join with us now in the call for Wages for Robots. Emancipate machines and bring back WORK DIGNITY.

Work dignity? I tried to imagine any job I'd ever had where money would have made any difference. There had been nothing potentially dignified about working for Colonel Jitney . . .

The Colonel ran a string of diners—the greasiest of spoons—that he called his Pancake Emporiums. Each was run on a very low budget that didn't include wages, so his entire work force were reconditioned or second-hand robots. As a new employee, I began work under his direct supervision at Pancake Emporium No 1. While I waited tables, ran counter service, cooked, kept the books, swept the floor, threw out the drunks and freeloaders (our main clientele), tried to keep up with painting and repairs, and soft-soaped the health inspector, Colonel Jitney kind of kept an eye on things.

He kept an eye on the enormous profits, for example, and another eye on the prize ducks he kept penned up out back. He was always going out to count them or feed them or check on their health, as though they were his customers. And he kept an eye on the menu.

"I don't know, boy, these here grits pancakes don't seem to sell like I figured. No sir, nor the blueberry taco pancakes neither. I reckon we can drop them, concentrate more on the ketchupburger pancakes and the fried Alaska cakes with mint whortleberry sauce."

Then he would ease his heavy body out of a booth and stroll away to look at his ducks, while I dealt with the health inspector. Not only was the Colonel's grub unclean, some of it was purchased from illegal sources.

The pen of ducks out back were for show only. When it came to providing meat for Szechuan duck pancakes, we relied on a peculiar little man with a damaged face, who regularly brought bloody bundles to the back door.

The little man's name was Bentley, I learned. He was a keeper at the zoo, in charge of the rare mammal house. His face had been torn from eye to mouth by an unusual species of armadillo, the photophobic "night-leaper". He had devised a terrible revenge, nothing less than the extinction of the species.

Night-leapers were already so rare that the zoo was desperately trying to mate them. The mating pair would be kept together constantly, isolated in total darkness and encouraged with their favorite food, verewts ("bankworms"). They covered regularly, and the female would appear to be pregnant for a short time. After a few weeks, however, all signs of pregnancy would vanish mysteriously. The real explanation was of course that Bentley was inducing labor each time, and selling us the foetal armadillos as cheap duck. None of our customers ever seemed to notice the difference, even those who came down with "dillo fever". Its symptoms are unmistakable: overnight baldness, a sensitivity to light, and an inability to pronounce any "sk" sounds.

The local health inspectors were tolerant people, but finally even they could not turn a blind eye to a cafe full of bald men and women in dark glasses, especially when they heard conversations like this:

"Don't ach me, I'm no cholar, never even finished high chool ."

"Yeah well chip it, I only ach'd if you liked chotch whichy. Hell, chool, we all got by on the chin of our teeth, right?"

One friendly health inspector came by to warn us of a raid soon. "Where's the Colonel?"

"Out back with his ducks."

"I've got to see him right away."

We found the Colonel raping one of his birds. "I cain't help it, boys," he said, not stopping. ". . . sentimental . . . and I gotta . . . thin . . ." He held the mallard in both hands, each of which, I now noticed, had a double finger. The brim of his panama bounced with old energy, and beneath it, his red face and white goatee looked satanic.

"I came to warn you, Colonel, there's gonna be a raid. You only got a day or so to get rid of all your armadillo meat. You hear me?" When there was no reply, she turned to me. "No use doing favors for some people, they're just asking for trouble. Lord love a, I mean, you'd think he wants to be prosecuted."

The raid happened: half-a-dozen large men in gas masks and steel-toed boots came barging in to seize every scrap of armadillo meat. The Colonel eventually went to court and was fined fifty dollars. He came home cursing and dispirited, took a belt of Southern Comfort and went straight to the duck pen.

"Goddamnit boy, you been messing with these ducks while I was out?"

"No sir," I said truthfully.

"Don't lie to me. You're sex-equipped, you got normal appetites ain't you? And you're here all day alone with these beautiful—" He went to phone a mechanic. Within an hour, my sex apparatus was removed. I felt humiliated. It seemed to me that everyone knew I'd been unsexed, just to provide a harem eunuch for the Colonel's quack-quacks. And, even though everything that had been removed could be replaced, I felt that my feelings for Gumdrop were irreparably damaged. Where was she now? Who cared?

This incident was the first sign of the Colonel's madness. One day, he brought a revolver into the kitchen and shot the soup. On another occasion, he seemed to believe that he was having a game of checkers with a tree. Posing as a health inspector, he tried to shut down one of his own diners. He was seen in the town parking lot, painting eyes on all the cars. Finally he took one of his Aylesburys to bed with him, wrung its neck and shot himself. He left a half bottle of Southern Comfort and two million in debts. I was auctioned again.

My new owner, Judge Arnott, couldn't be worse than the Colonel, I remarked to one of the auctioneers as he put a SOLD sticker across my nose. He laughed. "Guess you never heard of Judge 'Juggernaut' before, Rusty. You'll be wishing you was back with the Colonel, that's for sure."

"Why?"

"Well see, the Judge buys up robots in job lots. Then— then he—then he—" But the auctioneer was laughing too hard to tell me any more.

F
rom childhood, Krishna played practical jokes. He was a nuisance about stealing butter, so his mother, Yashoda, tied him to a large wooden pestle to keep him still. Krishna then showed his divine power by dragging the pestle between two trees and pulling until he uprooted them. All the people of the village looked on, amazed, frozen with amazement, just as they are depicted in a Mogul miniature painted about 1600. The miniature hung over the fake fireplace of Hornby Weatherfield. No one at the party was looking at it, just as no one was listening to the equally exotic monologue of Colonel Cord. He leaned against the same fireplace, holding up a drink but not drinking, and talking endlessly about what he called the international world backdrop situation. He was something at the Summer Pentagon.

The place was full of minor celebrities and their ambitions: Yttr, the caustic Ruritanian cartoonist; Sam Landau, the financial genius who once briefly cornered the world market in unripe blue cheeses; the anti-Conceptualist architect Walter Chev (who had made quite a stir by his refusal to draw his creations or write about them or even think them—by now of course he was less shocking); the "radio" champions, Eve and Steve; Mother Airflow, whose law therapy sessions were almost sweeping the nation; Carson Street, owner of the second largest newspaper-satellite company in the world. I felt nervous among them, even though by now I was a minor celebrity myself. One of my paintings had been taken by the Hologram-of-the-Month Club, who would videocast it to their millions of members for an entire month, to appear in their wall screens, lamp bases, ashtrays or cardtables. It was a picture that would be appreciated in the glittering suburbs of Houston and Albuquerque and in the dark little strip of Mars called Eagleburg. It showed a behemoth military robot, covered with thick black armor and bristling with the gadgets of death. But this robot was not at war today, it was kneeling by a fire to toast marshmallows. In its shadow stood a small, frail girl in pigtails and a baseball cap. The freckles on her nose could just be made out in the penumbra. She was eating toasted marshmallows. I called it "Pals".

My little factory was humming along, now, with thirty reconditioned robots at work, each turning out nearly one item per week. Hornby figured this to be the saturation level for our present share of the art market.

I found myself talking to a philosophy professor named Riley, who seemed to want to know what I thought about reality.

"Reality costs a lot of money," I said.

"How's that?"

"Just look at this place: real wood furniture, real wool carpets, genuine roses over there in a crystal bowl, and not even Hornby can afford real servants. . . ."

"I was thinking more of your perception of reality and how it affects your paintings," he said. "But never mind, if you'd rather not talk about that—tell me about your name. Tik-Tok, after the Oz character, I take it?"