I Sing the Body Electric!

will send myself to the showers and rust quietly.»

There was a titter of laughter. Agatha was hiding in the hall.

Grandma finished serving everyone and then sat at the other side of the table facing Father and pretended to eat. I never found out, I never asked, I never wanted to know, what she did with the food. She was a sorcerer. It simply vanished.

And in the vanishing, Father made comment:

«This food. I've had it before. In a small French restaurant over near Les Deux Magots in Paris, twenty, oh, twenty-five years ago!» His eyes brimmed with tears, suddenly.

«How do you do it?» he asked, at last, putting down the cutlery, and looking across the table at this remarkable creature, this device, this what? woman ?

Grandma took his regard, and ours, and held them simply in her now empty hands, as gifts, and just as gently replied:

«I am given things which I then give to you. I don't know that I give, but the giving goes on. You ask what I am? Why, a machine. But even in that answer we know, don't we, more than a machine. I am all the people who thought of me and planned me and built me and set me running. So I am people. I am all the things they wanted to be and perhaps could not be, so they built a great child, a wondrous toy to represent those things.»

«Strange,» said Father. «When I was growing up, there was a huge outcry at machines. Machines were bad, evil, they might dehumanize—»

«Some machines do. It's all in the way they are built. It's all in the way they are used. A bear trap is a simple machine that catches and holds and tears. A rifle is a machine that wounds and kills. Well, I am no bear trap. I am no rifle. I am a grandmother machine, which means more than a machine.»

«How can you be more than what you seem?»

«No man is as big as his own idea. It follows, then, that any machine that embodies an idea is larger than the man that made it. And what's so wrong with that?»

«I got lost back there about a mile,» said Timothy. «Come again?»

«Oh, dear,» said Grandma. «How I do hate philosophical discussions and excursions into esthetics. Let me put it this way. Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer. Only at noon can a man fit his own shoes, his own best suit, for a few brief minutes. But now we're in a new age where we can think up a Big Idea and run it around in a machine. That makes the machine- more than a machine, doesn't it?»

«So far so good,» said Tim. «I guess.»

«Well, isn't a motion-picture camera and projector more than a machine? It's a thing that dreams, isn't it? Sometimes fine happy dreams, sometimes nightmares. But to call it a machine and dismiss it is ridiculous.»

«I see that !» said Tim, and laughed at seeing. «You must have been invented then,» said Father, «by someone who loved machines and hated people who said all machines were bad or evil.» «Exactly,» said Grandma. «Guido Fantoccini, that was his real name, grew up among machines. And he couldn't stand the cliches any more.» «Cliches?»

«Those lies, yes, that people tell and pretend they are truths absolute. Man will never fly. That was a cliche truth for a thousand thousand years which turned out to be a lie only a few years ago. The earth is flat, you'll fall off the rim, dragons will dine on you; the great lie told as fact, and Columbus plowed it under. Well, now, how many times have you heard how inhuman machines are, in your life? How many bright fine people have you heard spouting the same tired truths which are in reality lies; all machines destroy, all machines are cold, thoughtless, awful.

«There's a seed of truth there. But only a seed. Guido Fantoccini knew that. And knowing it, like most men of his kind, made him mad. And he could have stayed mad and gone mad forever, but instead did what he had to do; he began to invent machines to give the lie to the ancient lying truth.

«He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out.»

Grandma circled the table, refilling our glasses with clear cold mineral spring water from the tappet in her left forefinger. «Meanwhile, you must use other compensating machines. Machines that throw shadows on the earth that beckon you to run out and fit that wondrous casting-forth. Machines that trim your soul in silhouette like a vast pair of beautiful shears, snipping away the rude brambles, the dire horns and hooves to leave a finer profile. And for that you need examples.»

«Examples?» I asked.

«Other people who behave well, and you imitate them. And if you act well enough long enough all the hair drops off and you're no longer a wicked ape.»

Grandma sat again.

«So, for thousands of years, you humans have needed kings, priests, philosophers, fine examples to look up to and say, 'They are good, I wish I could be like them. They set the grand good style.' But, being human, the finest priests, the tenderest philosophers make mistakes, fall from grace, and mankind is disillusioned and adopts indifferent skepticism or, worse, motionless cynicism and the good world grinds to a halt while evil moves on with huge strides.»

«And you, why, you never make mistakes, you're perfect, you're better than anyone ever !» It was a voice from the hall between kitchen and dining room where Agatha, we all knew, stood

against the wall listening and now burst forth.

Grandma didn't even turn in the direction of the voice, but went on calmly addressing her remarks to the family at the table.

«Not perfect, no, for what is perfection? But this I do know: being mechanical, I cannot sin, cannot be bribed, cannot be greedy or jealous or mean or small. I do not relish power for power's sake. Speed does not pull me to madness. Sex does not run me rampant through the world. I have time and more than time to collect the information I need around and about an ideal to keep it clean and whole and intact. Name the value you wish, tell me the Ideal you want and I can see and collect and remember the good that: will benefit you all. Tell me how you would like to be:

kind, loving, considerate, well-balanced, humane… and let me run ahead on the path to explore those ways to be just that. In the darkness ahead, turn me as a lamp in all directions. I can guide your feet.»

«So,» said Father, putting the napkin to his mouth, «on the days when all of us are busy making lies—»

«I'll tell the truth.» «On the days when we hate—»

«I'll go on giving love, which means attention, which means knowing all about you, all, all, all about you, and you knowing that I know but that most of it I will never tell to anyone, it will stay a warm secret between us, so you will never fear my complete knowledge.»

And here Grandma was busy clearing the table, circling, taking the plates, studying each face as she passed, touching Timothy's cheek, my shoulder with her free hand flowing along, her voice a quiet river of certainty bedded in our needful house and lives.

«But,» said Father, stopping her, looking her right in the face. He gathered his breath. His face shadowed. At last he let it out. «All this talk of love and attention and stuff. Good God, woman, you, you're not in there!»

He gestured to her head, her face, her eyes, the hidden sensory cells behind the eyes, the miniaturized storage vaults and minimal keeps.

«You're not in there!» Grandmother waited one, two, three silent beats. Then she replied: «No. But you are. You and Thomas and Timothy and Agatha.

«Everything you ever say, everything you ever do, I'll keep, put away, treasure. I shall be all the things a family forgets it is, but senses, half-remembers. Better than the old family albums you used to leaf through, saying