small for anybody but the chickens, whole thing smells of rotten eggs all the time. “I’ll fix it,” he says, and goes off to another damned pollution conference, Jesus! I could tell him a thing or two about pollution.’
‘Yeah,’ Bax said. After a moment’s thought, he added, ‘Yeah.’ He tipped his chair back further and reached a leg in her direction.
Indica stared into her earthenware cup, the one with her name and zodiac sign hand-painted on it, the one with the broken handle. ‘I mean, he got this house computer to make everything simpler, and it just made it worse, it never does anything but tell him how wrong he is, how wrong everything in the house is. And since we moved out here, anything goes wrong we have to take it twenty miles to town to get it fixed, there sits the ultrasonic dishwasher, it worked about a week.’
‘Complicated.’
‘Now he only wants to buy a car that runs on chicken-shit, that’s all, a bargain he figures and it only costs about twice as much as an Eldorado. See what I’m up against?’
Bax thought his foot was at that moment up against hers. He pressed, and something hummed and moved away from the contact.
‘Christ! Are you hurt?’ She helped him up.
‘No, I’m — but I guess the chair’s not too good.’ He handed her the splintered chair back, and she placed it in a corner, near a dismantled coffee grinder.
‘Hey, what is this thing under the table?’
Two glittering eyes peered up at him.
Indica shrugged. ‘That? Nothing. A kind of robot, I guess.’
‘A robot! Great!’ Bax stood clear of it.
‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t work either. Just some piece of junk a guy dumped on us. This creep poet Allbright, who never writes any poetry, just rips off stuff. Guess he ripped this off from some computer freak he knows…’
‘Yeah? What’s it, uh, supposed to do?’
‘Who knows? We’ve had it a month, so far all it does is watch TV and get in the way.’
Bax squatted down to look at it. ‘Watches TV?’
‘Sure. Hank’s creep friend said to treat it like a real kid. So Hank plunks it down in front of the TV every day and it just sits there by the hour. Never moves a muscle.’
Man and robot studied each other. ‘Not much to look at,’ said Bax, and it wasn’t: a squat instrument only two feet high with a large spherical head, a small, conical body, and a pair of tiny tank tracks on which it now edged back, further under the table. The spindly arms, resembling miniature dental drills, were folded against the chest, where Bax could read a word stencilled in black on battleship grey.
‘Roderick, eh? Here boy. Here, Roderick.’
The blue glass eyes stared. No sound came from the tiny grille set in the position of a mouth.
‘It doesn’t know a damned thing, not even its name,’ said Indica, and yawned.
Roderick saw a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots, knees bursting through faded jeans, a huge tattooed hand reaching out towards him. It all looked pretty dangerous, except that the hand had a wrist watch of the kind you could get at Vinnie’s Rock Bottom, for rock-bottom prices in comps, calcs, watches, cassettes, video, everything guaranteed personally by Vinnie, everything at low, lower, lowest, rock-bottom prices. At the other end of the arm was a man with hair under his nose, and milk on the hair.
Indica yawned. ‘Hank’s coming home in a couple of hours, so…’
They were gone. Milk, what was it for? Pour it on cereal and spoon it into your mouth. Once upon a time there was a lovely princess who bathed in milk, and they say that her complexion…
Roderick listened to their feet going upstairs. Bax was a big man with yellow hair the colour of cereal. Indica was a lovely princess who bathed in the big tub upstairs, it made a wonderful banging sound when she ran the water in. Water was like milk, it was milk with clear stuff added, clear as the shine that makes good furniture even better…
Something good was upstairs, Indica had whispered to Bax and led him up to see. Now there were stockinged feet moving around up there. Maybe they would tiptoe to the window and pull back the shade to see policemen all around the house. Grown-ups took off their shoes a lot, to watch TV, and if you have a foot-odour problem you need Footnote, spray or powder. Gee, no foot odour!
Bump, bump, bump. Just like water in the tub. Or like shots. Then they struggle for the gun, it goes off and there’s a body rolling down the stairs, bump, bump, bump, what have I done? Like chopping wood: I’d be beholden to you, ma’am, if you could see your way clear to givin’ a hungry man some wood to chop for his breakfast. Breakfast is the bestest when we all eat Honey-O.
Roderick hummed it to himself as he moved across the black-and-white squares of kitchen, the roses of the living-room, the creaky boards to the foot of the stairs:
The stairs were a problem. They were up and up, while Roderick was down here: he couldn’t see how to work it. TV people did stairs all the time. He saw them running down, falling down, rolling down, sitting still on a step and talking, waiting on the dark stairs with a gun and a hat, creeping up with shoes in hand, even vacuuming difficult stair carpets can be a breeze with Breeze-o-mat, because Breeze-o-mat makes housework a breeze!
Animal cries floated down to him, as the bumping continued. Jungle drums? Lord, the heat, the flies! Why don’t the beggars attack — what are they waiting for? I don’t know if I can stand much more of this, with the Brigadier away on trek for days at a time, leaving the two of us alone like this. My God, Marjorie, I’m only flesh and blood. I also, Nigel. The heat, the flies, gorillas hammering their chests, a Jap sniper in every tree, Joe, I can’t go on. Leave me here, I’ll hold them off, that’s an order soldier.
Roderick spun around to check the big green plant behind him. Behind it was another big green plant and then another Roderick and then shadows that might be anything: black men with spears, spotty things with teeth in their mouths, fat spiders, glittering snakes, a scorpion crooking its finger at him, shambling zombies coming after him. A guy had to protect himself, one chance in a million but it just might work, break through to the shore, the sunlit sand where he could hear the surf beating, beating…
‘Nothing,’ said Bax. He dropped Hank’s kimono on the floor and climbed back into bed. Indica noticed that he was getting a paunch.
‘How can it be nothing, we both heard it!’
‘I mean, just that little robot thing, you know? Knocked over your potted plant in the hall.’ He reached for her but she sat up, drawing the sheet around her shoulders.
Just great. I only spent two years growing that damned thing from an avocado stone, that’s all. Two years.’
‘Okay, but—’
‘Don’t. I’m not in the mood any more. I hate that sonofa-bitching robot, you know? Hank says it cost a million or so to build. For two cents I’d trash the damned thing.’
‘A million? Wow.’
‘Yeah, wow.’ She turned away from him, his bleached hair and faint face-lift scars. ‘That really grabs you doesn’t it, a price tag like that? That’s men all right, all you think about is gadgets and how much you can get them for. I see Hank reading an electronics catalogue, he gets the same look on his face, the same dumb look he gets over a sex magazine, how do you think that makes me feel?’
‘No, sure, but—’
