The Complete Roderick

‘Damn you! Damn you!’ Hannah said, and it was not clear whether she was cursing Lyle Tate or his creation. She knelt, turned the body over, and removed her false teeth. ‘Not breaving,’ she said. ‘Get an ambulanf.’

‘I’ll have to go downstairs—’

‘Hurry!’

But when he returned, Allbright was sitting up, mumbling about the C-charged brain. ‘Addiction is just addiction…’ he said, and was still trying to say it right when the ambulance men had come and gone, cursing art and artists.

It was only then that Lyle noticed the head had been moved; lifted from its pedestal and put back wrong.

‘What the hell did you do? Hannah? Did you—?’

‘Don’t worry, the paint’s not smeared, I was careful. It was just that — you see I’m old, not enough breath in my body to revive him. I had to call — other sources for the kiss of life.’

‘That? You think that fibreglass shell with paint on it, could bring the dead to life?’

‘…not the Burroughs adding…’

‘Maybe it can’t,’ she said. ‘I just felt I had to try everything. Who knows, maybe just the smell of the paint shocked him — eh? Back into his body?’

‘Back into –! Jesus Christ Jane, next thing you’ll be levitating over in Dr Tarr’s fancy new lab, a fat grant from NASA to find out if birds read each others’ minds, how do you like that? Or is it psychic levitation now, NASA’s real interested there, bound to like the idea of mind-powered space flight. Trouble is most of the people in Tarr’s profession couldn’t work up the brain power to levitate birdshit in a hurricane.’

‘Look I know how you feel about, I know you don’t believe in psychic pow—’

‘Can’t afford to, I’m a painter. And what Tarr and his crowd want to do is put painters out of business, put damn near everybody out of business…’

‘I don’t see that at all.’ She sat down next to Allbright, who was pouring himself a drink and talking to it.

‘Well what’s the point of anybody going to a gallery to look at a Durer? See, anybody can just be like this psychic Mathew Manning, whip out his own Durer at home in a couple of hours, no previous training required. Or writing, why write a novel when you can be like this South American whatsisname, go in for automatic writing and knock out a novel in a week? Jesus it kind of makes a dumb joke out of everything anybody ever worked at, right? Take this Rosemary Brown, she’s even finished Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony… so what’s the point of anything?’

‘…funny dream…,’ said Allbright. The others stopped talking and looked at him. ‘Funniest damn dream… dreamed, you know what I dreamed?’

For different reasons, they were almost holding their breaths.

‘Dreamed this damn dummy was trying to kiss me…’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes?’

‘And then this other dummy was trying to bite me in the ass!’

‘My teeth!’ Hannah shrieked. ‘He rolled over on my—!’

All three of them were still giggling over it an hour later, when Sleep closed their eyes.

One liver-spotted hand passed the journal to another. ‘Fascinating article there by this J. Hannah. Proposing a robot culture in which—’

‘What do we know about this Hannah? Is he—?’

‘She. Jane Hannah, fifty-five-year-old anthropologist, teaching Comparative Literature at the U. of Minnetonka. Two years ago she was predictably hostile to Entities, voted against funding a project I believe. But — bad luck there, seems her son died. She began to adopt a maternal-protective attitude towards Entities, fill in the blanks, usual hostility towards authority, organized behaviour…’

‘She saw robots as free spirits? Anarchists?’

‘Correct.’ Pipe-smoke curled and writhed through the conference room. ‘Class eight surveillance of course, but this article makes me wonder… class six, maybe?’

‘Are we interested in her contacts?’

‘Nothing significant so far, writers and artists, petty malcontents. But the article itself—’

‘Maybe we could check it with Leo?’

‘Leo, yes, so I thought. Let’s toddle over there now, I’ll summarize it for you on the way.’

The two old men made their way through the maze of corridors and security barriers of Building A, Orinoco Institute, emerging in the desert sun like lizards creeping out to bask.

‘Mmm, feel that sun!’

‘Mmm. What she’s done is tried to trace the origin of the idea of Entities — robots, that is — in Middle Europe. In Czechoslovakia especially. Evidently the home of Celts began there, the only “empire” without an emperor or a seat of government. She tries to link that with the Celtic religions, worship of the head, which they recognized as the centre of the intellect.’

‘I don’t see that as signif—’

‘She claims they tried to keep heads alive after death, and regenerate. Certainly true that they believed in reincarnation, at any rate.’

‘Ha! What will Leo make of that!’

‘Anyway she then goes on to point out all the Czech rebellions and revolutions, beginning as I recall with the Hussites, Taborites, brings in the Waldenses somewhere…’

‘Sounds cranky.’

‘Oh it is, it is. Finds significance in the merest coincidences, fact that they met on Mount Tabor, almost robot backwards; fact that one of the Taborites was named Capek, that he preached a bloodbath kill all sinners — very like the bloodbath initiated by robots in R.U.R., so was he an ancestor of Karel Capek or what?’

‘Look, what’s the point of all this? Some nut pieces together a half-baked theory — do we really care?’

The other man stopped him, putting a weightless hand on his arm. ‘We have to care. Not what she says — but what people make of it. This is, this is just the worst scenario we examined.’

Lizard eyes blinked. The desert sun glared down at these two slight figures, creeping along one white concrete path from one white concrete building to another. But all around was dark grass, cooled by sprinklers. Ignoring rainbows, the two men walked on.

‘That’s not all, of course. She points out all the events that took place in Prague. The famous golem story, you know it? Rabbi Low of Prague, der Hohe Rabbi — you do know it? Okay then, how about the Infant of Prague? Seems to be the only Christian statue that isn’t a statue at all — it’s a jointed doll, with real clothes.’

‘Well well. Is there more?’

‘Much. She traces the revolution of 1618, successive occupations by Austro-Hungaria, Nazi Germany and Russia, the Czechs never quite knuckling under to their puppet governments (her phrase) as demonstrated in their literature, she cites Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an exploration of the old mind-body problem that so intrigued the Celts, Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik as a “cheerful robot” satire, Capek’s R.U.R. of course; and even a very late item, a play written in 1968 by Vaclav Havel—’

‘The year of the Soviet tank invasion, wasn’t it?’

‘Exactly. And in this play the main character is a machine whose sole function, not so fast, you know I can’t walk fast since my op—’

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘Sole function is to investigate human character. Puzuk, I believe it’s called — ah! Good to be out of that sun!’

They entered the labyrinthine corridors of Building B, finally entering a dim, quiet room. The walls were lined