Tik-Tok (8 page)

Julep was no longer Julep, just as a crushed eggshell is no longer an egg. There were a few scraps of plastic hide still visible in the mess, and rags of clothing, but the rest was nothing but broken machinery: twisted steel frames, torn hanks of wiring, silent motors. A pool of hydraulic fluid spread slowly across the crazy paving. A false eyelash floated on it like a delicate water insect. I began to wish I were somewhere else.

"One down," he said cheerfully. "Four to go!" A line of black drool ran down his chin.

He started in at once on the tall short-order cook, whose name was Hatrack.

"Ouch! I wish you wouldn't do that, master. If you have to, okay, but—Ouch! I wish we could talk this over, master. Why don't I fix you a nice cup of java and a stack of buckwheat cakes and—Ouch!" After a while, Hatrack stopped saying ouch and dissolved into a second junkpile. One of his realistically bloodshot eyes glared up at the sky. A little old woman, the Judge's wife, tottered out from the house with a glass of milk and a plate of cookies. "Now you just sit down and have some refreshment, dear, before you do another thing. You're not as young as you used to be, one of these days you'll just faint and fall over in it, as we used to say."

Meekly, the Judge sat down at a little white wrought-iron table and had his milk and cookies. His wife spoke, apparently to us. "He doesn't take care of himself, you know. Still thinks he's young. Most men his age have a nap in the afternoon, but not him. No, he has to go swinging a crowbar and smashing up robots."

"Why does he do it, ma'am?" I asked.

"Because he enjoys it, of course, It's his hobby, his little hobby. Keeps him busy and happy, and he's very good about clearing up the mess afterwards. A man has to have a hobby, doesn't he?"

"Okey-dokey," said the Judge. He stood up, belched, and reached for his crowbar. His wife got out of the way quickly. In no time, there were two more little junkpiles.

"Sir," I said in desperation, "maybe you'd like to give me a sporting chance?"

"What kind of sporting chance?"

"A little head start, a couple of yards. And you could just chase me around the garden a few laps."

"What would be the point? I'm going to demolish you anyway." He raised the crowbar.

"Oh well, if you're feeling too
old
and
tired
—"

"Tired? I'll show you who's tired, ready get set, go!"

Our peculiar little race began. I hoped there was an outside chance that he might fall dead of a heart attack or something, or at least get too tired to kill me. Instead, I found the old boy to be a strong, sure runner, while my batteries began to drain. I heard his flapping footsteps coming closer and closer, and then, just before the crowbar ended my consciousness, I heard him say, "
You're it
."

Since Teddy Roosevelt was one of Cord's heroes, I posed him next to a stuffed bear. Normally such a portrait would take me about an hour, but I had to pretend to have difficulty in capturing the signs of leadership which I pretended to find in his undistinguished face. It was in fact a face untroubled by any ideas or emotions, the face of a golfer. I knew this meant that he would soon be a general, and I was right. At our third sitting, I had to remove the gold arrows from his portrayed uniform and replace them with silver rosettes.

"Congratulations, general."

"It means a move to Washington," he sighed. "But what the hell, a town's only as good as the people in it."

"Or out of it," I said, pretending to understand. I never understood his garbled maxims, if that's what they were, but I knew how to seem to reply to them.

"You got it, Tik-Tok, you got it. Intellectually, you're right on my wave beam, you know that? Not many human types are, it's funny I can get through to a robot. Guess it shows, there are robots vastly smarter than the massive herd of people. Too bad you can't come along to Washington, you're good for bouncing ideas off of. In fact—" He scribbled something on a card. "In fact, if you ever feel like a little vacation from your owners and all this art stuff, give me a buzz at the Pentagon and I'll commandeer you."

"Can that be done?"

"In the interests of National Security, anything can be done. I'm working at the top echelons, the top echelons. Liaising real close with the President on this."

"No kidding?"

"The president has got his eye on yours truly, that's the frank truth of it, Tik-Tok. And you know how it is, when the President jumps. . . ." Cord made a grandiloquent, sweeping gesture with one arm and managed to rap his knuckles on the bear's teeth. I showed him to the bathroom to staunch the bleeding under cold water. Then, bandaids decorated with stars and stripes.

Up to that time, I'd never thought about politics.

The papers were full of stories about families of the air crash victims. I picked up a cheap home printer and knocked out a few letters like this:

Dear Mrs Smith:

So your husband and two kids died in that plane crash. Isn't it too bad. I bet you're all broke up, spending all that insurance money! Let's face it, the whole neighborhood knows how you and your hubby really got along. All I want to know is, who planted the bomb? Was it you, or the guy you been playing around with? Or did hubby find out the kids weren't his, and decide to finally get away from you?

If there was any justice, the government would have you hanged and burned alive and fed to stray dogs. I may run you over myself some night—be careful crossing the street! As for your three surviving kids, I wouldn't count on them growing up if I was you, ha ha. Killing's too good for them too, but I wouldn't mind hurting them real bad. Are you afraid of poisonous snakes? Be careful opening any packages for the rest of your miserable life!

—A Well-Wisher

H
ard by the lake shore east of our city lay the campus of the University of Kiowa. Almost every building had been arranged to turn its back on the busy city and face the lake, to gather in a fair share of tranquillity. Now this choice was turning out to be a bad one. The lake was dead and putrefying, while the city—now that offices were vanishing—no longer seemed a threatening prospect. From here, the city's glittering towers now seemed monuments to a new heroic age, ruled by gods of light and metal and summer winds.

The University buildings no doubt glittered from a distance too, but close-up, the place seemed like a hostile camp under siege. Helmeted security guards were everywhere, some patrolling with large dogs, some with pumas. All were carrying sidearms, clusters of blackout gas grenades, and back packs large enough to hold riot guns. There was no sign of trouble, though students crossing the campus seemed to travel in larger crowds than necessary, as if convoying one another to classes.

Popper Hall was a conventional glass office building, from outside, whose academic function had been indicated by adding a sketch of a Greek temple facade, sketched in neon tubing. This was blue, indicating I suppose seriousness. Like all universities, Kiowa wanted to be taken seriously, but not too seriously. It craved the respect of intellectuals, but it wanted to become a part of "society", too, an adjunct to the supermarket and the hamburger drive-in.

Inside the door, to the right, there was a small plaque with a quotation from Karl Popper: A rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence. He is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation and threats, or even by persuasive propaganda.

—
Conjectures and Refutations

Facing it, to the left, was an enormous billboard advertising motor oil. It showed a lush garden overgrown with poppies and mushrooms and orchids and ferns, and featuring also a lush nude. She lay prone, smiling and burying her face in a cluster of the same small flowers with which her hair was twined. The sun, or some glow from the sky, raised airbrushed highlights on her back and exaggerated buttocks. An oilcan in the sky was pouring oil over her legs and buttocks, and much had been made of the effects of light on this viscous, slightly fluorescent yellow-green liquid. A direct association of motor oil with sex, profane acts, nature's wonderland, mystical meanings—even the ambiguities of motor-oil "dirtiness"—not bad. I could use a few painters like that in my stable, I thought, as I passed on up a white double staircase and through heavily guarded corridors to the seminar.

It was held in a tidy, colorless little conference room. Dr Riley sat at the far end of the table, apparently sleeping. Seven students lounged in their chairs, some pretending to read, others openly staring at me.

"Take a pew, Tik-Tok, and meet the gang," said Riley. "Nancy, Keith, Sybilla, Dean, Fent, Deedee, and Purina."

There were nods from some, surly looks from others. The seminar began without further formality. Nancy delivered a paper on "Robots, Mental States and Aesthetic Theory":

"It was Richard Wollheim who first proposed one kind of relationship between what an artist does and the artist's mental state. He said: 'If someone can recognize in something that he's made a reflection of an inner state, it is often the case that he would not have been aware of this state except through the object or objects that he makes. And one explanation of this can be that the mental state or condition, though in one sense remaining unchanged, has acquired or developed a structure, a degree of inner articulation that it previously lacked.'

"If I may paraphrase what I think is this process, I would guess that it is somewhat like map-making. Each of an artist's works explores and charts a territory adjacent to others, or at least connected to others, that have gone before or will come later. The territory may be there before the map, but it is so hazily known as to have no useful existence.

"Suppose for example a painter produces two similar paintings—Rembrandt's self-portraits, say, or the naked and clothed Maja, or two views of Fujiyama. The two works together define a certain territory—perhaps the aesthetic space between them—which the painter now may understand is his to work within. Perhaps the first painting established his claim on this
terra incognita
and the second then goes on to push out the boundaries or merely goes over the details and improves the sharpness of the original map.

"There are several kinds of assumptions we could make about the inner landscape thus being externalized, or externally represented. We could assume that the painting is in some way entirely planned and modelled or painted within the inner landscape first, and that the painter simply transfers his plan to canvas. Or we could assume that everything happens during the execution of the real objective painting—the inner painting goes on at the same time. Or we could assume a kind of two-way traffic between the inner state and the outer painting, so that both reach finally some stability or stasis, at which point the painter decides his painting is finished.

"It can also be argued that what obtains for two paintings by one painter could obtain for two paintings by two painters, provided that they share enough common ground in their belief-states or ways of relating their work to the world. Hence
schools
or
movements
might be considered to be founded on partially shared inner landscapes.

"Until recently, however, all such assumptions about the relationship between the objective work and the subjective mental state have had little chance of testing. Now, the appearance of a robot who (or which) seems to paint in the same way humans paint, offers some fascinating possibilities. Unlike the human, the robot's mental state ought to be accessible to outsiders—at least in principle. In principle, then, it should be possible to probe that state in such a way as to be able to compare it, stage by stage, with the work that is actually being painted."

I saw that all the others were awaiting my reaction. What I felt, though I wasn't showing it, was some anxiety. I decided to expel it in a joke.

"Probing, you say? I hope nobody's actually going to plunge a screwdriver into
my
head!" Moderate laughter.

Nancy, a pretty, chubby girl, showed a dimple. "Not at all. I was only proposing a thought experiment, not an experiment on your thoughts."

"Anyway, imagine philosophers being that practical," said Keith, a thin boy in a wheelchair. "Never heard of any philosophers settling anything by simply picking up a screwdriver."

Riley asked for more questions, either of Nancy or me. A morose, pimply boy named Dean spoke first.

"Um, aren't we kind of moving too fast here? I mean um, Nancy's assuming the robot produces art before she finds out um what producing art is. I mean um couldn't it be just um a human activity? So that the canon of what is acceptable art has to be stuff that is the product of the human um imagination? Because in that case it's begging a question."

Nancy shrugged. "I guess in part the canon of what is acceptable has to be what critics accept, and they accept robot art. This doesn't mean you're wrong, Dean, though, because maybe robots are blessed with what we call human imagination. So ask Tik-Tok."

I threw up my hands. "This is all kind of fast-moving for me. I don't know whether to call my work art or not, but I feel there's a certain—what can I call it? Human element?—a certain human element in it. At least I hope there is. Because, though I know I never can be really human, I like to aim for humanity."
With a great big nova bomb
, I thought. "I guess we robots can't help but aspire to a condition of near-humanity, can we?"

This kind of speech, which in most circles makes people feel warm and friendly or even turned-on, seemed here to have little effect. One or two faces—the girl with pigtails, Sybilla—even registered disgust. Time to change direction. "After all," I added quickly, "you folks have almost made it."

A gasp from Deedee, but delighted grins from several others. Sybilla said, "Almost is right. The one thing that's holding back humanity from becoming human now is the fact that we still want to keep slaves."