Mockingbird

I do not know whether that is bad or good.

Yet I think it would be in many ways a good thing to be the father of a child, and to have Mary Lou be the mother. And I would like to live with her, and for us to be a family—despite the great risks to my Individuality.

What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?

DAY ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR

Today the Protein 4 plants were harvested. When we went out in the field to work there were two huge yellow machines already there, noisily moving down the rows like giant thought buses, throwing up clouds of dust and scooping up the ripened plants twenty or thirty at a time and feeding them into hoppers, where I supposed they would be pulverized, to be made into soybars and synthetic protein flakes.

We kept our distance from the field because of the smell, which was far worse even than usual, and watched the machines in silence for a while.

Finally someone spoke. It was Belasco, and he said grimly, “There goes another season’s work, boys.”

Nobody said anything else. Another season’s work. I looked around and behind me, looking at things closely for the first time in weeks. The trees on the hills beyond the prison buildings had all lost their leaves. The air was cold on my skin. I felt a tingling, thinking of the feeling of my skin, looking up at the pale blueness of the sky. At the edge of the hills a great crowd of birds were flying, wheeling, and turning in unison.

And I decided then that I must escape from this prison.

Spofforth

Her face was not pretty, but it held his frightened gaze as it always did. She stood on the wet mud at the edge of the pond, as tall as he, her white feet not even sinking into it, her face puzzled and her arms tense, shaking slightly beneath her long robe as she held the thing out to him. What it was he could never tell, no matter how hard he tried to see it across the four or five feet that separated them. He stared and stared at what she was holding out to him and then, sadly, defeated, looked down. The mud was over his own white ankles, and he could not move. Nor, he felt, could she. He looked up again at her, still holding out the thing that would not focus for his eyes, and he tried to speak to her, to ask her what she wanted to give him, but he could not speak. He became more frightened. And he awoke.

Deep, deep he had known it was a dream. He always seemed to know. And afterward, sitting on the edge of his narrow bed in the apartment, he thought of the woman in the dream, as he always did afterward, and then he thought of the girl with the black hair and the red coat. He had never, in his long, long life, dreamt of her; it was always the woman in the robe—his secondhand dream, taken by accident from a life he had not lived and knew almost nothing of.

He had seen a few real women who looked something like her. Mary Borne was one of these, with her bright, strong eyes and her solid way of standing, although she was much stronger-looking, much more poised than the woman in the dream.

For years he had felt that if he could find a woman like her and live with that woman he might find a key to the other life that the consciousness he bore had lived—the life of whoever had been copied to make his brain. And now he was doing it. But he had found no key.

The dream, which happened every eight or ten days, was always disturbing, and he never became entirely accustomed to the fright he felt during it; but he accepted it as a part of his life. Sometimes there were other dreams, with subject matter from his own memory. And there were others that used subject matter he did not recognize—some involving the catching of fish, and some a battered upright piano.

He got off the bed and walked heavily to the window and looked out at the early morning. Distant and clear in the pale dawn it stood, higher than anything else outside: the Empire State Building, the high grave marker for the city of New York.

Bentley

I had no trouble finding Belasco’s cell. I had watched him go there to get Biff for me, and I found it easily. When I pushed open the unlocked door and went in, Belasco was lying on his bunk, petting an orange cat. His TV was not on. There were three other cats asleep in a sort of pile in the corner. Photographs of naked women covered one wall, and on the others were pictures of trees and fields and of the ocean.

There was an armchair covered in pale green cloth, and a floor lamp—both of them gotten in some illegal way, I’m certain. Had Belasco known how to read he would have had a better place for it than I.

I did not sit down. I was too agitated.

When Belasco looked up at me he seemed surprised. “What you doing out of your cell, Bentley?” he said.

“They were open again.” I ignored Mandatory Politeness and looked directly at his face. “I wanted to see you.”

He sat up on his bed and gently dropped the cat to the floor. It stretched and then joined the others in the corner. “You look worried,” he said.

I kept looking at him. “I’m frightened. I have decided to escape.”

He looked at me, started to say something, and then didn’t. Finally he said, “How?”

“That big knife blade in the shoe factory. I think I can cut these off with it.” I held my bracelets out toward him.

He shook his head and whistled softly. “Jesus! What if you miss?”

“I have to leave this place. Do you want to go with me?”

He looked at me for a long while. Then he said, “No.” He pushed himself further upright in his bed. “Being on the outside doesn’t mean that much to me. Not anymore. And I wouldn’t have the guts to hold my hands under that knife.” He began fumbling in his shirt pocket for a marijuana cigarette. “Are you sure you have?”

I let my breath out with a sigh, and then sat in the armchair and stared for a while at the manacles on my wrists. They were a little looser than when they were new; I had become leaner and harder from the work in the fields. “I don’t know. I won’t know until I try.”

He lighted the joint and nodded. “If you do get out, what’ll you eat? This place is far from any civilization.”

“I can find clams along the beach. And maybe fields with things growing that I can eat….”

“Come on, Bentley. You can’t live that way. What if you don’t find any clams? And this is winter. You’d better wait till spring.”

I looked at him. What he said made sense. But I knew, too, that I could not wait until spring. “No,” I said. “I’ll leave tomorrow.”

He shook his head at me. “Okay. Okay.” Then he got out of the bed, leaned down, pulled back the bedcover, and reached under. He slid out a large cardboard box and opened it. Inside were packages of cookies and bread, and soybars, all wrapped in clear plastic. “Take what you can carry of this.”

“I don’t want to…”

“Take it,” he said. “I can get more.” And then, “You’ll need something to carry it with.” He thought for a moment and then went to the door of his cell and shouted, “Larsen! Come here!” and a moment later a short man whom I recognized from the Protein 4 fields came walking up. “Larsen,” Belasco said, “I