Like most people, he wasn’t altogether bad. He campaigned for inoculation against smallpox at a time when everybody was against it because it was something new. In fact, a bomb was thrown into his house by an anti-inoculationist. Ben Franklin liked him, and there wasn’t a shrewder judge of character than old Ben. When Cotton wasn’t trying to get witches burned, he was dispensing food and Bibles to prisoners and senior citizens. He was a zealot, but he wanted very much for America to be a clean and honest country. He lost the battle, of course, but nobody held this against him.
Cotton also had a passion for sex if three marriages and fifteen children meant anything. Simon, however, was not descended from either of the two Mathers who outlived their father. His foremother was one of Cotton’s black houseservants, whom he had knocked up while in a frenzy of preaching to her. The sudden A-C conversion from religion to sex surprised both Cotton and Mercy-My-Lord, though it shouldn’t have. But then neither had the advantage of living in a later age, when it was well known that sex was the obverse side of the coin called religion.
It’s to Cotton’s credit that he blamed only himself for his fall and that he saw to it that both mother and child were well taken care of, though in a town a hundred miles away.
Simon, reflecting on this, decided that it wasn’t after all so unexpected that Cotton should enjoy watching dirty movies.
At the end of thirty years, the situation was what Chworktap had predicted and anyone could see had been inevitable after the event. The entire population, with the exception of the president, was in jail. Nobody had been declared rehabilitated because the rehabilitators had all been arrested. Aside from the fact that all but one had lost their citizenship, the society was operating efficiently. In fact, the economic situation was better than ever. Though the food was simple and not abundant, nobody was starving. The trusties on the farms were producing enough crops. The guards, who were also trusties, were keeping everything well under control. The factories, manned by cheap labor and administrated by trusties, were putting out tawdry but adequate clothes. In short, nobody was living off the fat of the land but nobody was suffering very much. It was share and share alike, since all prisoners were equal in the eyes of the law.
When the president’s term was almost over, he appointed himself chief warden. There were outcries that the appointment had been purely political, but there was little that anyone could do. There wasn’t another president to kick the chief warden out, nor, in fact, anyone qualified to replace him.
“That’s all very well,” Simon said to Chworktap. “But how do we get out of here?”
“I’ve been studying the law books in the library,” she said. “The lawyers that made up the law were somewhat verbose, which is to be expected. But that they tended to use overrich language instead of simple clear statements is going to get us sprung. The law says that a life sentence is to last the prisoner’s ‘natural span of vitality.’ The definition of ‘natural span’ is based on the extreme case of longevity recorded on this planet. The oldest person who ever lived on Goolgeas died at the age of one hundred and fifty-six. All we have to do is to ride it out.”
Simon groaned, but he did not give up hope. When he had been in prison one hundred and thirty years, he appealed to the chief warden to reopen his case. The warden, a descendant of the original, granted his appeal. Simon stood before the Supreme Court, all trusties and descendants of trusties, and stated his case. His “natural span of vitality,” he said, had been passed. He was an Earthman and so was to be judged by Earth standards. On his planet, nobody had ever lived past one hundred and thirty, and he could prove it.
The chief magistrate sent a party of trusties out to the landing field to get the Encyclopedia Terrica from the Hwang Ho. They had a hell of a time finding the ship. Interplanetary travel had been forbidden about a hundred years before. In this time, dust had collected against and on top of all the ships there, and grass had grown on the hills. After digging for a month, the party found the Hwang Ho, entered it, and returned with the necessary volume, Kismet-Loon.
It took four years for the judges to learn to read Chinese and so determine that Simon wasn’t pulling a fast one. On a balmy spring day, Simon, wearing a new suit of clothes and with ten dollars in his pocket, was released. With him were Anubis and Athena, but Chworktap was still locked up. She hadn’t been able to prove that she had any “natural span of vitality.”
“Robots don’t die of old age,” she had said. “They just wear out.”
She wasn’t in despair. That same day, Simon rammed the spaceship through the wall of the building in which she was held, and she climbed in through the porthole.
“Let’s get away from this stinking planet!” she said.
“The sooner the better!” Simon replied.
Both spoke out of the sides of their mouths, as old jailbirds do. It would be some time before they would get over this habit.
Simon wasn’t as happy as he should have been. Chworktap had demanded that he take her to Zelpst and let her off there.
“They’ll just make a slave of you again.”
“No,” she said. “You’ll drop me off on top of the castle’s roof. I’ll sneak in past the defenses, all of which I know well, and you can bet your ass that my master will soon enough find out who the new master is.”
Since there was very little communication among the Zelpstian solipsists, they would never find out that Chworktap had thrown the owner into the dungeon. But she was not going to be content to hole up there in all its luxuries.
“I’m going to organize an underground movement, and eventually a revolt,” she said. “The robots will take over.”
“What’re you going to do with the humans?”
“Make them work for us.”
“But don’t you want freedom and justice for all?” he said. “And doesn’t all include the former masters?”
“Freedom and justice for all will be my slogan, of course,” she said. “But that’s just to gull some of the more liberal humans into joining us robots.”
Simon looked horrified, though not as horrified as he would have been a hundred years before. He had seen too much while in prison.
“Revolutions are never really about freedom or justice,” she said. “They’re about who’s going to be top dog.”
“Whatever happened to the sweet little innocent? The one I met on Giffard?” he murmured.
“I was never programmed for innocence,” she said. “And if I had been, experience would have deprogrammed me.”
Simon let her out of the ship onto the roof of the castle. He followed her out to make a last appeal.
“Is this really the way it’s going to end?” he said. “I thought we’d be lovers for eternity.”
Chworktap began weeping, and she pressed her face against Simon’s shoulder. Simon cried, too.
“If you ever run across any couples who think they’re going to heaven and live there forever as man and wife, tell them about us,” she said. “Time corrupts everything, including immortal love.”
Sniffling, she drew away. She said, “The terrible thing about it is, I do love you. Even though I can’t stand you anymore.”