Mockingbird

We sat like that for what seemed a long time. I honestly did not know what to do next. My mind was totally without any calculation of the situation; the word “robot” did not for a moment enter it. Yet I did not go any further, as I might have with other… with other men.

Then he lifted his head and looked at me. His face was strange. Yet there seemed to be no expression at all on it. “What are you trying to do?” he said.

I just looked at him dumbly.

He inclined his head toward mine. “What in the hell are you trying to do?”

I said nothing.

Then he took my hand from his leg with his free hand. I took my hand from his arm. He stood up and began to take off his pants. I stared at him, not thinking of anything.

I had not even expected the point he was making. And when I saw, I was truly shocked. There was nothing between his legs. Only a simple crease in the smooth, brown flesh.

He was looking at me all this time. When he saw that his lower nakedness had registered with me he said, “I was made in a factory in Cleveland, Ohio, woman. I was not born. I am not a human being.”

I looked away and, a moment later, heard him putting his pants back on.

I took a thought bus to the zoo. A few days afterward I discovered that I was pregnant.

FOUR

Instead of talking about his dream last night, Bob began talking about artificial intelligences.

Bob says his brain is not at all like the telepathic one of a thought bus. They receive instructions and drive themselves by what he calls an “intention signal receiver and route seeker.” He says neither he nor any of the other six or seven Detectors left in North America have any telepathic ability whatever. Telepathy would be too much of a burden for their “human model” intelligences.

Bob is a Make Nine robot. He says Make Nines, of which he may be the last one remaining, were of a very special “copied intelligence” type and the last series of robots ever made. They were designed to be industrial managers and senior executives; Bob himself ran the automobile monopoly until private cars ceased to exist. He tells me that not only were there private cars but there were machines, once, that flew through the air and carried people in them. It sounds impossible.

My way of getting used to being with Bob, after he insisted that we live together, was to ask him questions about the way things worked. He seemed to enjoy answering them.

I asked him why it was that thought buses weren’t driven by robots.

“The real idea,” he said, “was to make the ultimate machine. It was the same kind of idea that had led to me—to my kind of robot.”

“What’s ultimate about a thought bus?” I said. They seemed to me such ordinary things, always around, with their comfortable seats and with never more than three or four passengers. Sturdy, gray, four-wheeled aluminum vehicles and one of the few mechanical things that always worked and that did not require a credit card to use.

Bob was sitting in a dusty Plexiglas armchair in the kitchen of our apartment; I was boiling synthetic eggs at the nuclear stove, on the one burner that worked. Over the stove a portion of the wall covering had fallen away years before to reveal copies of a green-jacketed book that had been nailed there by some long-gone former tenants, for insulation,

“Well, they always work, for one thing,” he said grimly. “They don’t need spare parts. The brain of a thought bus is so good at finding wear and stress points in the machinery, and making critical adjustments to distribute the wear and tear, that it just wasn’t necessary to make any.” He was looking out the window, at snow falling. “My body works the same way,” he said. “I don’t need spare parts either.” He became silent.

He seemed to have drifted off the point. I had noticed him doing it before and had called it to his attention. “Just getting senile,” he had said. “Robot brains wear out like anybody else’s.” But apparently, thought-bus brains did not wear out.

I think Bob is too obsessed by that dream of his, and by his attempt to “resurrect his lost self”—the attempt that led him to send Paul away and take me as his wife. Bob wants to find out whose brain he has and to recover its memories. I think it’s impossible. I think he knows it’s impossible. The brain he has is an erased copy of a very intelligent person’s brain. Erased completely, except for a few old dreams.

I’ve told him he should let it go. “When in doubt, forget it,” as Paul says. But he says it’s the only thing that keeps him sane—that interests him. In their first ten blues Make Nines had burned out their own circuits with household current and transformers, had smashed their brains in heavy plant equipment, or had merely freaked out and begun to drool like idiots, or had become erratic, screaming lunatics—had drowned themselves in rivers and buried themselves alive in agricultural fields. No more robots were made after the Make Nine series. Never.

Bob has a way, when he is thinking, of running his fingers through his black, kinky hair, over and over again. It is a very human gesture. I certainly have never seen another robot do it. And sometimes he whistles.

He told me once that he remembered part of a line of a poem from his brain’s erased memory. It went: “Whose ‘something’ these are I think I know…” But he could not remember what the “something” was. A word like “tools” or “dreams.” Sometimes he would say it that way:

“Whose dreams these are I think I know…” But it did not satisfy him.

I asked him once why he thought he was any different from the other Make Nines, when he told me that as far as he knew none of the others had shared these “memories.” What he said was: “I’m the only black one.” And that was all.

When he drifted off like that on that snowy afternoon in our kitchen, I brought him back by asking, “Is self- maintenance the only ‘ultimate’ thing about a thought bus?”

“No,” he said, and ran his fingers through his hair. “No.” But instead of going on right away he said, “Get me a marijuana cigarette, will you, Mary?” He always calls me “Mary” instead of Mary Lou.

“Okay,” I said. “But how can dope work on a robot?”

“Just get it,” he said.

I got a joint from a package in my bedroom. They were a mild brand, called Nevada Grass, that were delivered with the Pro-milk and synthetic eggs twice a week to the people in the apartment complex where we live. The people who have, as most of us do, the use of the yellow credit card. I say “people” because Bob is the only robot who lives here. He commutes to work by thought bus and is gone six hours a day. Most of that time I read books, or ancient magazines on microfilm. Bob brings me books from work almost every day. He gets them from some archives building that is even older than the one I lived in with Paul. He brought me a microfilm projector after I asked him once if there were other things to read besides books. Bob can be very helpful—although, come to think of it, I believe all robots were originally programmed that way: to help people.

I am certainly wandering in this account, in this continuation of my plan to memorize my life. Maybe I’m getting senile—like Bob.

No, I’m not senile. I’m just excited to be memorizing my life again. Before I started this I was merely bored—as bored as I had been after Simon died in New Mexico, as bored and freaky as I was getting at the Bronx Zoo before Paul first showed up, looking so childlike and simple, and appealing…

I’d better quit thinking about Paul.

I brought Bob his joint and he lit it and inhaled deeply. Then, trying to be friendly, he said, “Don’t you ever smoke? Or take pills?”

“No,” I said. “They make me sick, physically. And I don’t like the idea of them anyway. I like being wide awake.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “I envy you.”

“Why envy me?” I said. “I’m human and subject to diseases, and aging, and broken bones…”

He ignored that. “I was programmed to be wide awake and fully aware twenty-three hours a day. It has only