Mockingbird

carton, and then repeated his action.

I watched him fill up a carton with twenty toasters ready for shipping. I had not the remotest idea how they would be shipped or where, but I felt pleased with what I had done.

Then I put on my backpack, picked up Biff, and left.

Mary Lou

Last night I couldn’t sleep. I had lain in bed an hour or more, thinking about the loneliness in the streets, about how no one seemed to talk to anyone. Paul had shown me a film once, called The Lost Chord. There was a long scene in it of what was called a “picnic,” in which ten or twelve people bad sat at a big table out of doors eating things like corn on the cob and watermelon and talking to one another—just talking, all of them. I had not paid much attention at the time, sitting by Paul at his bed-and-desk in that gaudy room of his in the library basement; but the scene had somehow stayed with me and would come into my mind from time to time. I had never seen anything like it in real life—a whole big group of people engaged in eating and talking together, their faces alive with the talk, sitting outdoors with a breeze blowing their shirts and blouses gently—the women with their hair softly blowing around their faces—and with good honest food in their hands, eating and talking to one another as though there were no better thing in life to do.

It was a silent movie, and I could not at the time read the words on the screen, so I had no idea what they were talking about. But it did not matter. Lying in bed last night, I ached to be a part of that conversation, to be sitting around that wooden table in that ancient black-and-white film, eating corn on the cob and talking to all those other people.

Finally I got out of bed and went into the living room, where Bob was sitting staring at the ceiling. He nodded to me as I seated myself in the chair by the window, but he said nothing.

I stretched myself in the chair and yawned. Then I said, “What happened to conversations? Why don’t people talk anymore, Bob?”

He looked at me. “Yes,” he said, as though he had been thinking about the same thing himself. “When I was newly made, back in Cleveland, there was more of it than now. At the automobile factories there were still a few humans working along with the robots, and they would get together—five or six at a time—and talk. I would see them doing it.”

“What happened?” I said. “I’ve never seen groups of people talking. Maybe sometimes in twos—but then very seldom.”

“I’m not sure,” Bob said. “The perfecting of drugs had much to do with it. And the inwardness. I suppose Privacy rules reinforced it.” He looked at me thoughtfully. Sometimes Bob was more human than any human I have known, except maybe Simon. “Privacy and Mandatory Politeness were invented by one of my fellow Make Nines. He felt it was what people really wanted, once they had the drugs to occupy themselves with. And it nearly put a stop to crime. People used to commit a lot of crimes. They would steal from one another and do violent things to one another’s bodies.”

“I know,” I said, not even wanting to think about it. “I’ve seen television…”

He nodded. “When I was first awakened into life—if what I have may be called life—I was taught mathematics. That was done by a Make Seven named Thomas. I enjoyed talking with him. And I enjoy talking to you.” He was looking out the window as he said this, into a moonless night.

“Yes,” I said. “And I like talking to you. But what happened? Why did talking—and reading and writing—die out?”

He was silent for what seemed to be a long while. Then he ran his fingers through his hair and began to talk, softly. “When I was learning Industrial Management, I was shown films on all aspects of the Automobile Monopoly. I was being trained to be a major executive—which was what Make Nines were originally for—and I was shown everything from the film and tape and voice recording files of General Motors and Ford and Chrysler and Sikorsky. One of the films showed a big silver car going down an empty highway silently and smoothly, like an apparition—or a dream. It was an ancient gasoline-powered car, made before the Death of Oil and long before the Nuclear Battery Age.”

“The Death of Oil?”

“Yes. When gasoline had become more expensive than whiskey, and most people stayed home. That was the Death of Oil. It happened in what was called the twenty-first century. Then there were the Energy Wars. And then Solange was made. He was the first of the Make Nines and strongly programmed—as I was not— to give mankind what it wanted to have. Solange invented the nuclear battery. Controlled fusion; safe, clean, and limitless. He learned to power his own body with it, and all the rest of us were built afterward for nuclear power. One battery lasts me for nine blues.“

“Was Solange black?” I said.

“No. He was very white—with blue eyes.”

I got up to make myself some coffee. “Why are you black?” I said.

He didn’t answer until I was pouring the hot water onto the coffee powder. “I have never known why,” he said. “I think I am the only black robot ever made.”

I brought my coffee over and sat down again. “What about that film?” I said. “The one with the car.”

“There was just one man in it,” he said. “A man with a pastel blue sport shirt and gray polyester trousers. He had the windows rolled up and the stereo playing and the air conditioner and the cruise control on. His hands were white and soft and held the steering wheel lightly. And his face—oh, his face!—was as vacant as the moon.”

I was unsure of what he was trying to say. “When I was a little girl and away from the dormitories for the first time, I would get very impatient and nervous and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. And Simon would say, ‘Just be quiet and let life happen to you,’ and I would try to do that. Was that what the man in the car was doing?”

“No,” Spofforth said. He stood up and stretched his arms out, just as a man would do. “On the contrary. No life was happening to him at all. He was supposed to have been ‘free’; but nothing was happening. No one knew his name, but one of the humans would call him Daniel Boone—the last frontiersman. There was a sound track with the film, with a deep, authoritarian, masculine voice saying, ‘Be free and alive and let your spirit soar with the Open Road!’ And down the empty road he went, at seventy miles an hour, insulated from the outside air, insulated as far as possible even from the sounds of his own vehicle’s moving down that empty road. The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and sex better and brighter than in life.”

Bob was pacing up and down the floor, barefoot. “Sit down, Bob,” I said, and then, “How did all that get started? The cars— the controlled environment?”

He sat down, took a partly smoked joint from his shut pocket and lit it. “There was a lot, of money to be made from cars—from making them and selling them. And when television came it was one of the greatest sources of profit ever invented. And there was more than that; something very deep in humanity responded to the car, to the television set, to the drugs.

“When the drugs and the television were perfected by the computers that made and distributed them, the cars were no longer necessary. And since no one had devised a way of making cars safe in the hands of a human driver, it was decided to discontinue them.”

“Who made that decision?” I said.

“I did. Solange and I. It was the last time I saw him. He threw himself off a building.”

“Jesus,” I said. And then, “When I was. a little girl there were no cars. But Simon could remember them. So that was when thought buses were invented?”

“No. Thought buses had been around since the twenty-second century. In fact there had been buses, driven by human drivers, in the twentieth. And trolley cars and trains. Most big cities in North America had what were called streetcars at the start of the twentieth century.”

“What happened to them?”

“The automobile companies and the oil companies got rid of them. Bribes were paid to city managers to tear