From Doc I also learned the importance of foreplay. Not that I was unacquainted with its benefits, but the first lovers I ever had were awkward teenage boys, and then a string of adult men mostly interested in themselves, and then there was Herbert, who believed lovemaking should take the same amount of time it takes to eat a boiled egg. I wondered if his speediness was specific to me, but his worldwide mistresses reported the same brisk efficiency. Doc, on the other hand, thought foreplay should take as long as a seven-course meal at a five-star restaurant. His long, supple fingers were more than sufficient but he also brought massage oil, soft feathers, and small appliances to the task. He was an inventor and tinkerer, remember, and thought the human body was a fine engine to tune.
I knew he loved me but wasn’t in love with me, as the saying goes. He loved circuits and designs, and making machines work better, and landing quad jumps in front of adoring crowds. Of us all, he was the most patient with Buck’s unpredictable temper tantrums. His theory was that Buck’s brain had been everso-slightly damaged in the manufacturing stage. Doc was also good at keeping secrets. I didn’t realize he was smitten with a secret love until the security staff caught her sneaking out his workshop window one cold winter morning. Dr. Skylar Anderson was the chief designer at New Human More Human, and my ex-husband’s latest wife.
“Skylar,” I said disapprovingly, arms folded over my chiffon bathrobe.
She straightened the lapels of her lab coat. A red bra strap poked out from under her blouse. “Kay.”
“Does Herbert know?”
She sniffed. “He’s been too busy whoring his way through the secretarial pool. I’ve already filed for divorce.”
This made her the enemy of my enemy, and thus an ally, so we had tea and pancakes and discussed lawyers. Later, at lunch, I asked Doc, “You and Skylar. You don’t think it’s very Oedipal?”
“Would you mind it something awful if I went to live with her, Katherine?”
“Would that make you happy?”
“I reckon so.”
“But where will you skate?”
“There’s a city rink near her house,” he said, cheerful and optimistic.
Their affair only lasted three weeks. Doc came back complaining that Skylar had only wanted him for his circuits, but I think it was the poor quality of the city rink that disappointed him most. We commiserated over the breakup on a faux bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire and then he went back to his workshop, happy as any sexy cowboy robot can be. Eventually he went to work for the UN Commission on Warming the Planet Back Up, at their headquarters atop Sicily. The Sicilian women adored him and the frozen Mediterranean was excellent for skating.
III.
Neill and Buck both came off the delivery truck wearing tight white T-shirts and leather vests, very similar in appearance: rugged, fair-haired, with chiseled chins and bright blue eyes. But there was always something comforting about Neill and dangerous about Buck. Maybe it was the way that Neill could stand at the center of a frozen pond and let the stillness of the piney woods seep into him, no need to show off or test the ice. Buck, though? From day one he had to spin as fast as he could, jump higher than anyone else, be the center of a private solar system around which the rest of us orbited in agitation or love or both.
It’s fair to say Neill was bisexual, but during threesomes he was usually more interested in Yuri or Dana than he was in me. When he and I were alone, he was determined to experiment with ropes, knots, and just about every position in the Wild West Guide to Sexual Positions. The Mosey, Saddlehorn, and Road Stake went well enough, but I had to replace the damaged headboard after we did the Appaloosa, and needed anti-inflammatories for a week after the Missouri Toothpick. Between rehearsals and marathon sex sessions, Neill read his way through most of my library. He would thump from one bookcase to the next with plastic guards on his skates, fascinated by the great philosophers and religious thinkers.
I wouldn’t have minded his choices so much if he didn’t entirely skip my row in the self-help section. That’s what I did before the Big Bad Ice: Dr. Katherine Campbell, best-selling psychologist. Maybe you’ve heard of my books? …I had a syndicated radio show. I appeared frequently on daytime television. My hair, makeup, wardrobe, and jewelry were impeccable, and my teeth brilliantly white. I was, in a word, insufferable.
In retrospect, Neill showed good sense by skipping my books. Herbert never read them, either. Like his creator, Neill also preferred ink on paper, and the way pages were sewn into spines.
“I prefer gravity,” he said, more than once. “Pixels have no weight.”
After Buck left us to build his secret laboratory up at Dodge Falls in New Hampshire, Neill volunteered to ski up the Connecticut River and talk some sense into him. The rest of us weren’t too keen on the idea. Bad enough to lose Buck to the crazy world outside, but risk another of us as well? Since the advent of the Big Freeze, snow bandits had taken to seizing any shipments of food or fuel that tried to make it overland. On the estate we had the aircar, the heated gardens, a security system, and a larder full enough for decades. Out in the valley, Neill would be on his own.
“What if you don’t come back?” asked Dana, number five in the sexy robot lineup. He was our cross-dressing robot: sexy cowboy on the ice, alluring cowgirl off it. He rested one manicured hand on Neill’s arm. “What if someone lassoes you and burns you for heat?”
Neill said, “I’ll ski by night and hide by day.”
Yuri took a sip from his beer bottle. None of the robots needed food or liquid, of course, but they’d been designed with storage tanks in their chest cavities to keep up social pretenses. “You think you’ve got a chance in hell of convincing Buck to come back?”
“I think it’s worth a try,” Neill said, square and honest. Of all the robot she was the one who most missed Herbert, or the ideal of Herbert; the absent father who had created them but then abandoned them with his death. Buck was a piece of Herbert that could not be lost as well.
Neill set off one winter sunset with the sun red behind the pine trees. To make it safely to Buck’s lair, he would have to climb over broken bridges and dams, avoid any local marauders, and keep himself safe from the dangers of the natural world. We received messages letting us know he’d successfully passed through Hartford and then Springfield. Then, somewhere near Turners Falls, he fell off the map. We heard nothing until Buck broke radio silence, popping up on the vid screen one night to inform us that agents of the U.S. federal government had captured Neill for nefarious experiments. They were holding him in an underground lab near Mount Sugarloaf.
“Experiment on him for what?” I asked, bewildered.
“Herbert personally designed him,” Buck said, his voice grim across the many miles. “New Human More Human is defunct. Skylar Anderson destroyed the last of the company records years ago. What’s left of the Defense Department thinks they can tear Neill apart and learn enough to build a whole new line of robots.”
We mounted a rescue attempt immediately. Cody, number six in the cowboy lineup, was a pilot whenever he wasn’t practicing his sit spins. With his aerial skills, my financial resources, and the true bravery of cowboys everywhere, we sped north. By the time we arrived, flames were shooting from the pristine countryside. The government lab was in ruins. Neill and Buck were safe in the woods, but Neill’s left arm was missing.
“They took it,” Neill said, holding his empty sleeve forlornly. I imagine he was thinking about sex again; it’s hard to perform the Four in Hand when you don’t have a hand to put in the appropriate orifice.
Yuri thumped him on the back. “We’ll build you another, partner.”