“How do you like it?” I said.
She got up and straightened a picture of some flowers. “It’s a little like a Chicago whorehouse,” she said. “But I like it.”
I did not understand that. “What’s a Chicago whorehouse?” I said.
She looked at me and smiled. “I don’t know. It’s something my father used to say.”
“Your father?” I said. “You had a father?”
“Sort of. When I ran away from the dormitory a very old man took care of me. Out in the desert. His name was Simon, and whenever he saw anything that was very bright—like a sunset—he would say, ‘Just like a Chicago whorehouse.’”
She had been looking at the picture she had straightened. Then she turned her back on it and went to her seat on the sofa. “I could use a drink,” she said.
“Liquor doesn’t make you sick?”
“Not Syn-gin,” she said. “Not if I don’t drink much of it.”
“All right,” I said. “I think I can get some.” I pressed the button on my desk for the servo robot and when he came, almost immediately, I told him to bring us two glasses of Syn-gin and ice.
As he turned to leave she said, “Wait a minute, robot,” and then looked at me. “All right if I get something to eat? I’m awfully sick of the zoo’s sandwiches.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of it.” I was a bit put off by the way she seemed to be taking over, but I was pleased at the same time to be her host—especially since I had a great deal of unused credit on my NYU card. “The cafeteria machinery makes good monkey bacon and tomato sandwiches.”
She frowned. “I never could eat monkey bacon,” she said. “My father used to think monkey food was disgusting. How about roast beef? But not a sandwich.”
I turned to the robot. “Can you get a plate of sliced roast beef?”
“Yeah,” the robot said. “Sure.”
“Good,” I said, “and bring me some radishes and lettuce with my drink.”
The robot left, and for a minute there was an awkward silence in the room. I was surprised at that, and actually a bit pleased in a way. Sometimes Mary Lou seemed to have no sensitivity at all.
I broke the silence. “You ran away from the dormitory?”
“Around puberty time. I’ve run away from a lot of places.” I had never even thought that anyone might think of running away from a dormitory. No, that wasn’t true. I remembered, as a child, hearing boys boast of how they were going to “run away,” because they had been treated unfairly by a robot-teacher or something. But no one had ever done it. Except Mary Lou, it seemed.
“And you weren’t detected?”
“At first I was sure I would be.” She leaned back on the couch, relaxing. “I was terribly scared. I had walked for half a day down an old road and then found an empty old town in the desert. But the Detectors never came.” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “That was when I began to realize that the Detectors didn’t really work. And that you didn’t have to obey robots.”
I winced, remembering a thing that had happened to me in the dormitory, when a robot had put me in Coventry.
“You know,” she said, “they teach you that robots are made to serve humans. But the way they say that word ‘serve’ it sounds like ‘control.’ My father—Simon—called it ‘politician talk.’”
“Politician talk?”
“Some special way of lying,” she said. “Simon was very old when I met him. He died only a couple of yellows after I moved in with him, and his teeth were all gone, and he could barely hear. He said a lot of things that he had learned from his father—or somebody—and that were very old.”
“Was he trained in a dormitory?”
“I don’t know. I never thought of asking him.”
The robot came back, with our food and drinks. She took her plate of roast beef in one hand, her drink of Syn-gin in the other, and made herself comfortable on the sofa. She took a deep sip of the gin, swallowed it with a small shudder, and then took a slice of the meat with her fingers and ate it in a very natural way that was new to me—I had never seen anyone eat with his fingers before.
“You know,” she said, “Simon was probably the one who made a beef eater out of me. He used to rustle cattle from the big automatic ranches, or sometimes just hunt wild ones.”
I had never heard of such a thing. “Does ‘rustle’ mean ‘steal’?” I said.
She nodded. “I suppose so.” She took another slice of beef from the plate and then set the plate on the sofa beside her. She held the meat in her fingers and took another sip from the drink in her hand. “Don’t ask about the Detectors,” she said. “Because there weren’t any.” Then she finished her drink in one swallow. “Simon said that in his whole life he had never seen a Detector or heard of anyone being detected.”
It was terribly shocking, but it sounded true. I was not young and I had never seen one or known anyone who had been detected. But then I had never known anyone, before, to even risk it.
We stopped talking for a while then, and she concentrated on finishing the meat on her plate. I just watched her eat, still quietly astonished by her, by how interesting she was—and how physically attractive—and how I myself had got her to come here to stay with me.
I wondered about sex, of course, but I felt that would not happen for a while. I hoped it wouldn’t, since I am shyer than most people about it, and though she was powerfully attractive—a fact that seemed more evident than ever to me after I had finished my gin—I was too apprehensive now for anything of that kind.
Then after what seemed a long while, she said, “Let me see your recorder again,” and I said, “Certainly,” and went to my desk to get it. Next to the recorder was sitting the imitation fruit that she had picked from the python cage; she had not seemed to notice it since she had come to the room.
I left the fruit alone and took the recorder from my desk and gave it to her.
She remembered how to work it. “Do you mind,” she said, “if I record something?”
I told her to go ahead. Then I had the robot bring us each another Syn-gin and ice and I lay back in my bed and listened while she talked into the recorder.
It took me a moment before I realized what she was doing. She spoke in a kind of slow, hypnotized way and said the words without any apparent feeling. What she was doing, I realized eventually, was saying her “life” as she had “memorized” it—repeating the words as she had learned to repeat them by practice:
“I remember a chair by my bed. I remember a green dress that I wore to my classes. Everybody tried to dress differently from everybody else, to show our Individuality. But I think we all looked the same.
“I was very smart in my classes, but I hated them.
“I remember a girl named Sarah, with awful pimples on her face. She was the first to tell me about sex. She had done it already, while some other children watched. It sounded… wrong.
“There was desert all around the place where we all lived, and Gila monsters sometimes came into the dormitories to sleep. The robots would pick them up and carry them out. I felt sorry for the big, stupid lizards. In the House of Reptiles they do not have any Gila monsters, but I think they should have….”
And on it went. At first I was interested, but after a while I became very sleepy. It had been a long day. And I was not used to drinking like that.