“So I can die. But look how suicidal mankind is.”
“Only because you’ve destroyed its future. You’ve drugged it and fed it lies and withered its ovaries and now you want to bury it. And I thought you were some kind of a God.”
“I’m only what I was constructed to be. I’m equipment, Mary.”
I could not take my eyes off him, and try as I might, I could not make his physical beauty ugly in my mind. He was beautiful to see, and his sadness was itself like a drug to me. He stood there with his chest bare and paint-spattered, and something deep in me yearned toward him. He was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and my wonder and my anger seemed to make that beauty glow around his heavy, relaxed-looking body, his sexless body, his incredibly old and incredibly youthful body.
I shook my head, trying to shake the powerful feeling off. “You were constructed to help us. Not to help us die.”
“Dying may be what you really want,” he said. “Many of you choose it. Others would if they were brave enough.”
I stared at him. “God damn it,” I said. “I don’t choose it. I want to live and to raise my baby. I like living fine.”
“You can’t raise that baby, Mary,” he said. “I can’t stand to live for another seventy years, awake for twenty-three hours a day.”
“Can’t you just turn yourself off?” I said. “Or swim out into the Atlantic?”
“No,” he said. “My body won’t obey my mind.” He began to paint. “Let me tell you. Every spring for over a century I have walked up Fifth Avenue to the Empire State Building, gone to the top, and tried to jump. It is, I suppose, the ritual that my life centers on. And I cannot jump. My legs will not take me to the edge. I stand, two or three feet from the edge, throughout the night, and nothing happens.”
I could see him up there, like that ape in the movie. And I would be the girl. And then, suddenly, I thought of something. But first I said, “How did you stop babies from being born?”
“The equipment is automatic,” he said. “It gets an input from Census to let it know whether to increase or decrease pregnancies, and it controls the equipment that distributes sopors. If pregnancies are up it is supposed to increase the amount of birth-control sopors. If pregnancies are down the sopors are only sopors.”
I sat there listening to this as though I were hearing a child’s lecture on Privacy. I was learning about the death of my species and it seemed to mean nothing to me. Bob was standing there with a paintbrush in his hand and telling me why no children had been born for thirty years and I felt nothing. There had never been children in my world. Only those obscene little white-shirted robots at the zoo. I had never seen anyone in my life who was younger than I. If my child did not live, humanity would die with my generation, with Paul and with me.
I looked at him. He turned, bent, dipped his brush in paint, and turned back to the wall above my bookcases.
“About the time you were born,” he said, “a resistor failed on the input amplifier. The machinery began getting signals that said population was too high. It still gets them and is still trying to cut population down, by distributing sopors that stop ovulation, even after it had sterilized almost your entire generation, in the dormitories. If you had stayed there one more yellow your ovaries would be gone.” He finished off the upper corner with paint. The wall looked clean, shiny.
“Could you have fixed that resistor?” I said.
He came down the ladder silently, holding the brush at his side. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never tried.”
And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, of what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself . everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it.
“My God, Bob,” I said. “My God.” Suddenly I hated him, hated his coolness, his strength, his sadness. “You goddamned monster,” I said. “Devil. Devil. You’re letting us die that way. And you’re the one who is suicidal.”
He stopped painting and turned to look at me again. “That’s right,” he said.
I took a breath. “And if you wanted to, could you stop those birth-control sopors from being made in this country?”
“Yes. In the whole world.”
“Could you just stop sopors? All of them?”
“Yes.”
I took another long breath. Then I said softly, “About the Empire State Building.“ I looked downtown, toward it. ”I could push you off.“
I looked back toward him. He was staring at me.
“After my baby is born,” I said, “and when I’m well again and know how to take care of it, I could push you off.”
Bentley
OCTOBER FIRST
I am on my way to New York, dictating this as I go, into an ancient Sears cassette recorder.
I have a calendar, also from Sears, and I have decided to call this day October first, and to number days in months, as my books do. October was once an important month of the Fall of the Year. I have made it that again.
I could not sleep on the night of the day I finished my account of the time at Maugre. Once I had decided that I would not write about repairing and furnishing the old redwood house by the sea and that I had told all that needed to be told, I became excited. I could leave whenever I chose to.
I wandered around the empty and overgrown streets of Maugre that night and then went to the obelisk and down to the level under Sears where the library and the thought-bus garage and the room filled with coffins were. I remembered that I had seen nothing in the garage but local buses, and one of the Baleens had told me that none of the buses in the garage worked anyway—and that they would not even open their doors. But I went and walked among them, up and down the long dark rows.
And I made a discovery. Near one wall there were five buses that looked exactly like the others except that on their fronts was written CROSS-COUNTRY. I stared at that for a long time, shocked. Had I been a Baleen I would have believed that the Lord had saved those buses for me until the evening of my departure. How had I missed them before?
But when I stood by the side of each of them and commanded its door to open, both mentally and aloud, nothing happened. I tried to force the doors with my fingers, but they were solidly tight, unyielding. I kicked at the side of one of them in despair.
And then, angry and frustrated, I thought of something. I thought of Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide.
Audel’s Guide is a small book, not much bigger than a large soybar. At the back of it there are thirty blank pages with the word “Notes” at the top of each. I had used those pages at the prison to copy down some of the poems I liked best. Most of them were from the book by T. S. Eliot, which was not itself very large, but too large to carry conveniently on the long trip.
I had never read the whole Guide, since it was technical and dull and since I had no intention of ever maintaining or repairing robots; but I did, suddenly, there in the great thought-bus garage, remember seeing a chapter toward the end of the book called “The New Robots-without-Bodies: Thought Buses,” with several pages of writing and diagrams.
I went back to my house quickly. The book was on the table by my big double bed, where I had left it the last time I had read “Ash Wednesday”—a sad and religious poem that seemed able to take away some of the ugly feelings I had about the Baleens’ religion.