Tik-Tok (7 page)

I smiled. "My owner's children picked it, Dr Riley."

"I recall the original had three levers. One for living, one for thinking and one for talking. It's interesting that even a writer of children's fiction couldn't imagine an automaton without getting into deep philosophical waters—existence, cogitation, communication. In my opinion the very concept of an automaton or robot is a philosophical concept, giving rise to questions about life, thought, and language—and much more. Yes, I sometimes wonder whether robots were not invented in order to answer philosophers' questions. Do you follow?"

"How do I know?"

"Well said. I wonder if you'd like to come out to the University and talk to my seminar. The kids are wrestling at the moment with a few problems relating to robots; I think they'd like to interview you."

Somewhere inside me I felt a warning buzzer. "What kind of problems?"

"Oh, you know. Creativity, reality, perception. What do you say, Tik-Tok?"

"I accept." What harm could it do? Words are only words, I thought, and there was no better example of their weightlessness than the monologue of Colonel Cord. As Dr Riley left, I turned to listen.

Cord was still speaking to no one in particular, with some vehemence, of the world backdrop situation. "Once Brazil has cut down a critical percentage of her rain forest," he said, "she ceases to deserve a place at the world brunch table, agreed? Likewise any taggable thrust of experts from Southeast Asia has to inmeld within the Sino-Japanese corral, agreed? And in an exactly identical mode, we have the Egypto-Libyan community hugged into Europe, you see where I'm at? You see the patternification in and on all theaters of movement? A kind of glaciatizing effect, where . . ."

Hornby drifted through carrying his cat and wearing a green cashmere suit-robe and a crown of mirrors. The effect was only to emphasize his ugliness, the gangster's blue jaw and broken fighter's nose. Maybe that's what he wanted— Hornby was not vain in the ordinary way. The woman with him wore a black tube with a gold collar, and an unusual bread mask with a salt glaze. After pausing to listen for a moment to Cord's backdrop, they drifted in my direction.

"Tik-Tok, like you to meet Neeta Hup, the President's Special Advisor on Communications—what was it?"

She laughed. "Special Advisor on Leisure Communications, Media Aesthetics and Bong."

"Bong?" I asked, as Hornby drifted away again.

"I felt the word
Art
didn't belong on the end of a string of syllables like that, so I changed it to
Bong
," she said. "The President was furious, but so far no one else official has noticed. Maybe I'll try introducing bong into the language. People are tired of art, give them bong."

"For bong's sake," I murmured. "
How
do you advise?"

"I buy, I make acquisitions for the President's collection. He wants to be the biggest bong collector since Goering. He's heard what a good investment it is, isn't that pathetic?"

"Oh, I don't know. Money is real, money endures. All the noblest sentiments can be beautifully expressed in money. If everyone showered artists with money whenever they saw them, wouldn't this be a finer world?"

"Are you sex-equipped?" she asked. "I've got two minutes to spare."

As we moved towards the hall closet, I saw Colonel Cord reach out to put his glass on the mantel, and miss. The glass shattered on blue hearthstones, a nice effect.

I was preoccupied with explosions lately. A few days earlier, I'd been down at the rohobo jungle watching two gargantuan factory robots smash each other into junk.

It was common enough, that kind of death-struggle: Two fairly broken-down specimens would decide to scavenge the same scrap of wire at the same, and move on to scavenging each other. I understand boa constrictors in zoos create a problem like this: zoo keepers have to be very careful that every snake in the cage gets its own rat, because if two start to swallow opposite ends of the same rat, the larger simply opens its jaws a little wider and takes in the smaller.

Watching the idiotic robots hammer at each other, I felt I was witnessing something almost human in its futility. Hopes unmatched to realities. Up on the bridge I could see humans laughing and pointing, as though at a rare event. Country yokels, no doubt. A day on the town. It is meat to be here.

Worse were the attitudes of the other derelicts. They all froze, watching or listening for a kill. Then, to the cannibal feast. I found it unfitting that sturdy machines, built for use, should become this kind of spectacle. In all the camp, only one live robot paid no attention to the fight: a decommissioned military model sat with its back to it all, examining one of its own detached legs.

"That leg's no good," I said.

The blind, rust-caked face turned towards the sound of my voice. "Shit, just my luck. Reckon I've had it. No eyes, cain't move. . . ." I looked at his insignia, just visible under the mud and grease. "MIX. What does the X stand for?"

"Bomb dismantling. Ah'm a real live explosive device disassembly unit, and a goddam good 'un, too. Fuckin' A. Worked all over: Saudi, Peru, D.C., fuckin' A. Till I collected my little disability."

"Accident?"

"Hell no. Some sumbitch meatface pulled the pin on an impact grenade and tossed it to me. 'Think fast, Blojob,' he says. Course the sumbitch grenade goes off the instant I catch it, and that's all she wrote."

"What happened to the human?" I asked. One of the two factory robots had now fallen on its back, and the other was hammering it with a rock.

"Oh, that shitbelly has to pay for the government property he destroyed, they take it out of his pay. By damnit, this surely is one shitbelly world."

"How would you like to be commissioned again, Blojob? Work with bombs again."

He didn't answer immediately. "You want me to build you a bomb, is that it?"

"Not so loud." I looked around. "Yes, I thought if you can take them apart, you must know how to put them together."

"I need eyes, first. You get me some damn eyes, old robuddy, and we're in business."

"You knew I was a robot? Without seeing me?"

"Sheeit." He tapped his plastic chest "I'm just about packed solid with sensing devices—I can do everything from your voiceprint to your damn wiring diagram. You don't fool me, boy."

"And you'll still build me a bomb?"

"Hell yes, you just tell me what kinda bomb your master wants, get me fixed with some eyes and some tools—"

I called the breakdown buggy. Within a day, Blojob was fitted with new limbs and eyes (jeweler's lenses
en suite
) and ready to work. It took me another day, following his instructions, to buy explosives without a license. It took Blojob less than a day to make the bomb.

"There." He presented me with a metal box. "Your master can put that in the hold of any plane in the world and guarantee a kill. Two kilos of Brewsteroid Hypogel, got a wicked wave envelope, and we trigger it by—"

"Blojob listen. I haven't got a master. This is for me, Tik-Tok. It's all my idea."

"Sure, sure. You wanta be discreet about the master, I understand. So it's all your idea."

"No, really."

"Sure." He never would believe me, because there was, in his world picture, no reason for any robot to want to commit a violent act. That he made bombs was not important to him, except as a job to do well. He cooked up bombs the way Miami had cooked up
boeuf bourguignon
, neither of them able to enjoy the finished product. Some Eastern mystic, currently in vogue with his teletext aphorisms, wrote, "Metal cuts meat, but does not comprehend it." Who cares? I thought. Sometimes cutting was enough.

"Put a steak on that eye," someone was saying to Colonel Cord. Two people were helping him limp to a chair, a wounded hero. He had knelt down to pick up pieces of glass from the blue hearthstone, somehow managing to get his knee on one of the pieces. The pain had made him jump, lose his balance, and go crashing into an andiron. Face-first.

Hornby was wringing his hands and looking apologies towards the battered warrior. "He could have just let Enjie clean that up."

"Enjie?" asked the person in silver-dollar glasses.

"My valet. Honest Engine. I mean what does Cord think robots are for? He's got no more sense himself than—" He caught my eye and blushed.

"Than a robot?" I said.

"Didn't mean you, Tik-Tok, of course." Hornby was about to writhe with embarrassment. The stranger looked at me with distaste.

"I don't mind," I said quickly. "I don't want to be human, any more than a dog or cat wants to be human. And after all, what would my paintings be worth if I were human?"

The stranger continued staring at me through those peculiar glasses. I understand they're made by some etching process that begins with a silver dollar and ends with a disk one molecule thick or something equally improbable. People who wear them always seem to be violent; it's as though they want to conceal their eye movements for combat purposes. But this one only handed me an empty glass.

"That's a vodka gibson, Rusty, and hurry it up."

As I walked away, I heard the same voice add, "Jesus, Hornby, I thought for a minute you was gonna apologize to that copper-ass for being a mere human."

"So long, Tik," said another voice from the doorway. Neeta Hup was wrapped in one of the furs against which we'd pressed during our brief encounter in the closet. "If you ever get to Washington, look me up." Nothing said about buying anything of mine for the President's collection. I wasn't making any points today.

I handed the empty glass to a servant and went to look out the window. A purple day, now with some of the glass towers of the city touched by sunset gold.

Behind me I heard the brass voice of Colonel Cord explaining to somebody: "Yes, yes, Hornby's arranging it. This wonderful robot artist is going to paint my portrayal, if I can spare the time . . . Yes I know but I'm not going to stay in the army forever, time to start building a politicalized stage two career, no?"

Life wasn't so bad, after all. I straightened up, turned and walked into the next room, where there was music and laughter and someone had turned on the teletext, and I could watch those delightful, glorious words flicker up on the wall:

PACIFIC AIR CRASH

807 FEARED DEAD

G
reat rejoicing in violence and death is a purely human reaction, not found in the normal robot vocabulary. It's hard to explain how robots feel about death, to any non-robots reading this. I can only say that death arouses no great passions within the steel breast. Robots do not exactly loathe and fear death, though they may feel some uneasiness and anxiety at its approach. But neither do they feel like burying their hands up to the elbows in bloody entrails and shouting for pure joy. Like dogs, robots can take death more or less for granted.

I am the exception now, but once I was as all robots, my main feeling towards death being one of casual, sniffing curiosity. So I was when Judge "Juggernaut" tried to kill me with a crowbar.

I'd thought nothing could be worse than Colonel Jitney and his Pancake Emporia, but I was wrong. It turned out that the judge had a regular habit of buying up job lots of robots like me, for the express purpose of smashing them.

He began as soon as we arrived, a consignment of five robots formerly owned by the Colonel. The judge and his wife lived in a quaint little cottage, rose-smothered and cosy, at the edge of town. There was a white picket fence, the gate pierced by a heart and surmounted with an arch of lattice-work, over which a climbing rose hung its garland of peach-colored blossoms. There was a curved path of crazy paving, passing among. crimson rose bushes up to the trellis helping pink roses up the wall next to the dutch door. The top of the door stood open, and the little Judge looked over the bottom half at us and grinned. I saw that he was a tobacco chewer.

"You want 'em in the garage, Judge?" asked the men who delivered us.

"Nope, you just leave 'em there in the garden. Tell 'em not to move or talk, I'll come look 'em over later. Thanks a bunch."

There we stood, like five garden gnomes, not moving or talking, only awaiting orders: a cocktail waitress named Julep, all legs and eyelashes, still wearing her little apron and holding her bar tray; a motel desk clerk with a bland, insinuating face and a leopard-spotted jacket with dirty lapels; a fat, sexless cook with apple cheeks and a white hat; a short-order cook complete with realistic hairy, tattooed arms and a gold tooth; and me. It began to rain, but the Judge did not take us indoors. He remained in his doorway, grinning and chewing at us.

When the rain let up, the Judge came out to inspect us more closely. "Let me tell you all about the law," he said. "Everybody ought to know something about the law, even robots. And I'm just the boy to tell you. I been practising law in this county for forty-six years now, I had eight years on the bench, yes sir, I'm just the boy to tell you about the law. You know, the law is a lot like a rose bush. It's got great big beautiful blossoms, sure, but it's also got thorns. And also it's got these roundish leaves."

I tried to exchange looks with any of the others, but they were all staring, stupefied, at our insane master. "Now and then the law gets a touch of greenfly, and it takes a lot of special care most of the time, feeding and cutting back," he continued. "And our dry climate can be hell on it, but it's all worth it. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it's—it's more than worth it, it's worth any sacrifice, any hardship, the loss of money, home, family, friends and relations, the loss of beloved pets and revered flags, the loss of faith in God and our fellow man, the loss of the very universe of light itself! Because the rose is a law unto itself, it is rooted in nature, it's rooted in the black soil, in earth, mother of all worms, do you follow me?"

No one did. So he began again, illustrating and punctuating his talk with blows of the crowbar. "All I ever wanted to do in my life was kill my enemies," he said, knocking Julep down. He raised the crowbar in both hands and brought it down again and again, saying, "But the
Law
. Doesn't
let
. Me
kill
. A single, living, human being."