"For my next illusion," the magician said, "in front of your very eyes, I will…"
He stopped. They all heard the wail of a train whistle. Soon the train itself appeared, steam-operated, three cars long, laying track as it went.
"Sorry I can't complete the act," the magician said, stepping aboard the first car. "But that's how it goes. Something always turns up."
"Ticket," said the conductor.
The magician produced a ticket from his hat. Slowly, the train got under way. Ronsard called out, "How did you like the act?"
"It was great!" Mishkin said.
"That was nothing," said the magician. "Wait until you see the finale."
"When will that be?"
"It is happening now!"
"What's happening?" Mishkin called. "Who are you?"
But the train was too far away for him to hear Ronsard's reply if, indeed, he made any.
Mishkin and the robot watched until the train was out of sight. Then Mishkin said, "I've got a funny feeling about all this."
"Mirrors," the robot sneered. "Big talk and cheap stage effects."
They stood under a sky that reflected the earth that reflected the sky and discussed mirrors and stage effects.
20. Robot Follies
The robot had not always been of a suchness. Once he had known the splendour of youth. He, too, had drifted beneath laurel, under a willow-eyed sky. He, too, had wept at shadows, fought love, and conquered feeling. A child of Hephaestus, of the earth truly, he was the unwilling respondent of those programmatic outlooks which find identity only in similarity.
A robot may be defined as the sum of his relationships plus eighty-eight pounds of metal and plastics.
Robots desire soft things, the better to appreciate their own hardness. Robots of the Schenectady area worship a being they call White Leather Man. No Freud of the robots has come forth to explain this output.
When robots come they spurt hot grease, just like automobiles.
Robots mimic eating. There is a black robot who lives on 125th Street and drives a pink Cadillac. There are Jewish robots skilled in exegesis, whose parts drip chicken fat.
There are homosexual robots who dance and lust.
Once upon a time a young robot wandered far from his factory. Lost and alone, he moved through a deep forest…
How well our robot remembered! A sort of madness came over him. Opacity of desire seemed a response that one could live by. He saw Mishkin as imperfect yet lovable. This was programming; he knew he did not know how to escape it.
21. Ancestral Voices Prophesying Predictability Experimental Psychoses Produced by Experimental Psychotics
"Mishkin! Come in here! You have nothing to lose but your preconceptions!"
"Price of admission — your premise."
"Come, Mishkin lad, forget that dreary old business of the missing part. Let go of it and live a life at this moment."
"Hang up your logic over there."
"The only way out of the systems of repetition-compulsion is through novelty. Singularity instead of regularity. You must never predict your response. You must go through the world as if it were the world."
"Mishkin! You must not live as though your life were a preparation for living.
Preparation is an illusion. What you thought you were preparing for is what you are doing right now, which is preparing."
"Prince Mishkin, I beg you to wake up and realize who you are."
"You search for an object fixed in your memory like a rock in a shallow pond. Touching, perhaps, but not convincing. Do you think that you still must search? Right now, you may be solving future searches without even knowing it!"
"Here, Mishkin, is the egg you will be looking for!"
"I lost my beloved's shoe under distressing circumstances. But now Mishkin has found it."
"It's right over here, Mishkin — the Holy Grail!"
"Upon my word! He's found the lost city of Atlantis!"
"Shiver me timbers! He's discovered the Lost Dutchman mine!"
"Be damned if he hasn't stumbled across the Holy Sepulchre!"
"This attack upon your purpose is deadly dangerous, but not to be simplemindedly resisted. Some things that devour us enhance us. Sometimes we must stand still and let ourselves be eaten."
"Open the gates! Let Mishkin pass through!"
"I smell memory leakage. Someone around here is not paying attention."
"Mishkin has found the White Goddess!"
"And also the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; the secret cave where the sirens dwell; the tomb of Charlemagne; the Hall of Barbarossa; the Sibylline Books; the Philosopher's Stone — to name but a few."
22
Mishkin lived in a nice little house with a nice little wife, a nice little grape arbour.
Almost everything he had was nice and little. There were exceptions, of course: specifically, a nice big dog, and a not nice big chair, and a not nice little car. Still, almost everything else was as nice as you could get it and as little as you could hope for.
One day FUTUREFLASH!
At first glance he seemed an old man: his white hair, palsied walk, dribbly lower lip, faded eye, and blotched hand all argued that he was on the wrong side of seventy. What a surprise, then, to discover that his actual chronological age was a mere twenty-three.
"A single event did harrow me thus," quavered the oldster.
"It must have been exceptionally heavy," Mishkin remarked.
"It will be," the old man said. "You see, due to a faulty relay in the space-time continuum, I remembered an event that I will only experience in the future. The verb tenses get a little tricky, but I'm sure you know what I mean."
"I think so," Mishkin said. "But what is or was or will be this experience that you will have and that has already altered you so drastically?"
"Young man," said the old man, "I was there when Earth fought its last and greatest fight against the Black Hell Creatures from Far Arcturus."
"Tell me about it," Mishkin said.
"I was just about to," the old man said and made himself as comfortable as he could, considering the brittleness of his bones.
23. Earth versus the Black Hell Creatures from Far Arcturus
Captain John McRoy's Superdreadnaught-class XK-12X spaceship, on picket duty out beyond the Southern Ridge Belt Stars, was the first to pick up the signal that all Terra was soon to know and to dread. But this was at the beginning, and the first hint of anything wrong came when Radioman 2nd Class Rip Halliday came to the captain's cabin with a worried look on his homely, freckled face.
"Take a pew, Rip," the captain boomed. "Drink? Lee Pan Hao, our friendly Cantonese cook, has brewed up some high-energy cocoa that really does the trick. Or how about some tollhouse cookies made with real Martian chocolate?"
"No, thanks, Captain, nothing right now."
"Then slouch back in that easy chair and let's hear what's on your mind."
Rip Halliday slouched back but with a hint of respectful attentiveness. In that age, when a perfect classlessness was observed by all superiors, the utmost informality prevailed. The system worked because inferiors never presumed above their station and always maintained a perfect measure of respect.
"Well, sir, I was…"
"Please, Rip, no «sirs» in this cabin. Just call me John."
"Well, sir, John, I was doing a routine sweep of the 6B2 radio bands, but this time I was using a zero-beat random selector just to see how it worked. If you remember the Thalberg-Martin equations, sir, they postulate…"