XV
Something pierces the sweetest solitude.
I got up, tickled him with the edge of my claw, joined them at the door. Closing it. “Stay, Davy.” This is one of the key words that the house “understands'; the central computer will transmit a pattern of signals to the implants in his brain and he will stretch out obediently on his mattress; when I say to the main computer “Sleep,” Davy will sleep. You have already seen what else happens. He’s a lovely limb of the house. The original germ-plasm was chimpanzee, I think, but none of the behavior is organically controlled any more. True, he does have his minimal actions which he pursues without me—he eats, eliminates, sleeps, and climbs in and out of his exercise box—but even these are caused by a standing computer pattern. And I take precedence, of course. It is theoretically possible that Davy has (tucked away in some nook of his cerebrum) consciousness of a kind that may never even touch his active life—is Davy a poet in his own peculiar way?—but I prefer to believe not. His consciousness—such as it is and I am willing to grant it for the sake of argument—is nothing but the permanent possibility of sensation, a mere intellectual abstraction, a nothing, a picturesque collocation of words. It is experientially quite empty, and above all, it is nothing that need concern you and me. Davy’s soul lies somewhere else; it’s an outside soul. Davy’s soul is Davy’s beauty; and Beauty is always empty, always on the outside. Isn’t it?
“Leucotomized,” I said (to the J’s). “Lobotomized. Kidnapped in childhood. Do you believe me?”
They did.
“Don’t,” I said. Jeannine doesn’t understand what we’re talking about; Joanna does and is appalled; Janet is thinking. I shooed them into the main room and told them who he was.
Alas! those who were shocked at my making love that way to a man are now shocked at my making love to a machine; you can’t win.
“Well?” said the Swedish Miss.
“Well,” said I, “this is what we want. We want bases on your worlds; we want raw materials if you’ve got them. We want places to recuperate and places to hide an army; we want places to store our machines. Above all, we want places to move from—bases that the other side doesn’t know about. Janet is obviously acting as an unofficial ambassador, so I can talk to her, that’s fine. You two might object that you are persons of no standing, but whom do you expect me to ask, your governments? Also, we need someone who can show us the local ropes. You’ll do fine for me. You are the authorities, as far as I’m concerned.
“Well?
“Is it yes or no?
“Do we do business?”
PART NINE
I
This is the Book of Joanna.
II
I was driving on a four-lane highway in North America with an acquaintance and his nine-year-old son.
“Beat ’im! Beat ’im!” cried the little boy excitedly as I passed another car in order to change lanes. I stayed in the right-hand lane for a while, admiring the buttercups by the side of the road, and then, in order to change lanes back, fell behind another car.
“Pass ’im! Pass ’im!” cried the distressed child, and then in anxious tears, “Why didn’t you
“There, there, old sport,” said his indulgent Daddy, “Joanna drives like a lady. When you’re grown up you’ll have a car of your own and you can pass everybody on the road.” He turned to me and complained:
“Joanna, you just don’t drive aggressively enough.”
In training.
III
There’s the burden of knowledge. There’s the burden of compassion. There’s seeing all too clearly what’s in their eyes as they seize your hands, crying cheerily, “You don’t really mind my saying that, do you? I knew you didn’t!” Men’s shaky egos have a terrible appeal to the mater dolorosa. At times I am seized by a hopeless, helpless longing for love and reconciliation, a dreadful yearning to be understood, a teary passion for exposing our weaknesses to each other. It seems intolerable that I should go through life thus estranged, keeping it all to my guilty self. So I try to explain in the softest, least accusing way I can, but oddly enough men don’t behave the way they do on the Late Late Show, I mean those great male stars in their infancy in the Jean Arthur or the Mae West movies: candid, clear-eyed, and fresh, with their unashamed delight in their women’s strength and their naive enjoyment of their own, beautiful men with beautiful faces and the joyfulness of innocents, John Smith or John Doe. These are the only men I will let into Whileaway. But we have fallen away from our ancestors’ softness and clarity of thought into corrupt and degenerate practices. When I speak now I am told loftily or kindly that I just don’t understand, that women are really happy that way, that women can better themselves if they want to but somehow they just don’t want to, that I’m joking, that I can’t possibly mean what I say, that I’m too intelligent to be put in the same class as “women,” that I’m different, that there is a profound spiritual difference between men and women of which I don’t appreciate the beauty, that I have a man’s brain, that I have a man’s mind, that I’m talking to a phonograph record. Women don’t take it that way. If you bring up the subject with them, they begin to tremble out of terror, embarrassment, and alarm; they smile a smile of hideous, smug embarrassment, a magical smile meant to wipe them off the face of the earth, to make them abject and invisible—oh no, no, no, no, don’t think I believe any of that, don’t think I need any of that! Consider:
You
Politics is baseball. Politics is football. Politics is X “winning” and Y “losing.” Men wrangle about politics in living rooms the way Opera Fan One shouts at Opera Fan Two about Victoria de los Angeles.
No squabble between the Republican League and the Democrat League will ever change
Still, you
Because of feminine incapacity.
One can go on.
