Mockingbird (12 page)

“I want you to summon a cleaning crew and have the judge cleaned. Immediately.” Then Spofforth looked at the bits of yellow dust and debris that were clinging to the clerk’s lap and said, “Have yourself cleaned up too.”

The clerk spoke respectfully. “The court servos and cleaning crew are no longer operable, your honor.”

“Why not?”

“Dead batteries and general malfunction, your honor.”

“Why haven’t they been repaired?”

“There have been no repair crews in Central Park for sixty yellows, your honor.”

“All right,” Spofforth said. “Then get cleaning materials yourself and clean the two of you up.”

“Yes, your honor.” The clerk turned and walked slowly out of the room. He limped badly, with one of his legs almost dragging behind him.

A few minutes later he returned with a pail of water and a sponge. He walked up to the judge and, dipping the sponge in water, began wiping off the judge’s face. Some of the yellow dust smeared, but most of it came off. Then he began cleaning the judge’s hands, slowly and awkwardly.

Spofforth appeared impatient. I did not know that there was such a thing as an impatient robot; but Spofforth was tapping a foot audibly. Then, abruptly, he strode to the seated judge, stooped, picked up the hem of the judge’s robe, and shook it vigorously. Dust flew everywhere. As it began to settle I saw that the spider web was gone.

Then Spofforth stood back and faced the judge. He told the clerk to stop and he stopped immediately, leaving a greenish stain on the judge’s left hand, still folded in his lap.

“Your services will not be needed for this hearing,” Spofforth told the clerk. “I will record the proceedings myself. While the hearing is in progress you may phone General Maintenance to send a City Cleaning and a City Repair robot immediately.”

The clerk looked at Spofforth stupidly. I think he was a Make Three—green lobes—and they are only a bit above moron robots. “The telephone doesn’t work,” he said.

“Then
walk
to General Maintenance. It’s about five blocks from here.”

“Walk?” the robot said.

“You clearly know how. Do you know where to go?”

“Yes, sir.” The clerk turned and began to limp toward the door. Spofforth said, “Wait,” and then, “Come here.”

The clerk turned around, came to him, and stood facing him. Spofforth bent down, took the clerk’s left leg in his hand, felt of it a moment, and then gave it an abrupt wrench. Something inside it made a heavy scraping sound. Spofforth stood up. “Now go,” he said.

And the clerk walked out of the court with his gait perfectly normal.

Spofforth turned and faced the judge again. The judge was cleaner now, but a bit streaked and rumpled.

“I call the court to session,” Spofforth said, just as our Civics class had taught us any citizen could do. They had never said anything about robots doing it, though. They had told us how important courts were for protecting our sacred rights to Privacy and Individuality, and how helpful a judge could be, but you somehow got the idea that it was a good idea to stay away from courts altogether.

The judge’s head came awake, although the rest of him remained motionless. “Who calls the court?” he said, in a deep, grave voice.

“I am a Make Nine robot,” Spofforth said quietly, “programmed for Detection and so empowered by the Government of North America.”

The rest of the judge woke up at that. He adjusted his robe, ran fingers through his grayish hair, then placed his chin in his hand and said, “The court is in session. What is the citizen robot’s request?”

Citizen robot? I had never heard that term before.

“A criminal case, Judge,” Spofforth said. “The defendant will give his name.” He turned to me. “Say your name, title, and place of residence.” And then, nodding toward the Truth Hole, “Be careful.”

I had almost forgotten about the Truth Hole. I avoided looking at it and said carefully, “My name is Paul Bentley. I am Professor of Mental Arts at Southeast Ohio University and my official residence is at Professor House on campus. Currently I live at the Arts Library of New York University, where I am temporarily employed by the Dean of Faculties.” I did not know whether I should say that Spofforth was the dean I worked for, but I did not.

“Very good, son,” the judge said. He looked at Spofforth. “What is the criminal charge?”

“There are three charges,” Spofforth said. “Cohabitation, Reading, and the Teaching of Reading.”

The judge looked at him blankly. “What is Reading?” he said.

Spofforth said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “You are a Make Seven, designed in the Fourth Age. Your Legal Program would not contain the charge. Consult your archives.”

“Yes,” the judge said. He flipped a switch on the arm of his huge chair and a voice somewhere said, “This is the Archives of Law for North America,” and the judge said, “Is there a civil crime called Reading? And is it a different crime to teach the first crime?”

The archives voice was a long time replying. I had never heard a computer take so long. Or maybe it was merely the way I felt. Finally the voice came back and said, “Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”

The judge switched off the computer. Then he said, “This is clearly a grave business, young man. And you are charged with Cohabitation also.” Then, to Spofforth, “With what has he cohabited? Man, woman, robot, or beast?”

“With a woman. They have lived together for seven weeks.”

The judge nodded and turned to me. “That is not as grave as the other, young man. But it is a serious risking of Individuality and Personhood and it has been known often to lead to far more serious behavior.”

“Yes, Judge,” I said. I started to say that I was sorry, but I realized just in time that I was not at all sorry—just frightened. I could have lost a finger.

“Is there anything else?” the judge asked Spofforth.

“No.”

The judge looked at me. “Take your hand from the Honesty Regulator and rise and face the court.”

I took my hand out of the Truth Hole and stood.

“How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” the judge said.

No longer having my hand in the box, I could have lied. But then I supposed my hand would be put back in if I said “not guilty” and we proceeded to have a trial. And, indeed, I have found out from another prisoner here that that is exactly the case. Almost everyone pleads guilty.

I looked at the judge and said, “Guilty.”

“The court commends your honesty,” the judge said. “You are sentenced to six years in the North American Penitentiary, at hard labor for the first two years.” The judge lowered his head slightly and looked at me sternly. “Come forward,” he said.

I walked up to his chair. He rose, slowly, and then reached out his arms. His large hands, one still with the green stain, grasped my shoulders. I felt something stinging my skin, like a drug in-jection. And I went unconscious.

I awoke in this prison.

That is all I can write today. My writing hand and arm ache from what I have already written. Besides, it is late and I must do physical work tomorrow.

My room—or “cell”—at the prison is not much bigger than a small thought bus, but it is comfortable and private. I have a bed, a chair, a lamp, and a TV wall with a small library of recordings. The only recording I have played so far is of a dance-and-exercise program, but I did not feel like dancing and took the BB out of the holder before the program was finished.

There are about fifty other prisoners in identical cells in the same building; we all leave for work together after breakfast. In the mornings I work in a prison shoe factory. I am one of fourteen inmate inspectors. The shoes are made, of course, by automatic equipment; my job is to examine one shoe out of each fourteen for flaws. A moron robot watches over us and I have been warned that if I do not pick up a shoe after the man on my left picks one up, each time, I will be punished. I have found that it is not really necessary to
look at
the shoe, so I do not. I merely pick up one out of each fourteen.

Since I am trained at Mental Arts it is easy for me to spend much of the shoe-inspection time in gentle hallucinating, but I am dismayed at times to find that there is one aspect of my hallucinations over which I have no control; images of Mary Lou will come, with shocking vividness, into my mind. I will be trying to amuse myself with hallucinated abstractions—colors and free-form shapes—when, without warning, I will see Mary Lou’s face, with that intense and puzzled stare. Or Mary Lou sitting cross-legged on the floor of my office with a book in her lap, reading.

When I was teaching, I used to make a little joke during my hallucinating-to-orgasm lecture. I would say to my classes, “This would be a good technique to learn in case you are ever sent to prison.” It never got much of a laugh, since I suppose you have to be well-educated in Classics—James Cagney films, for instance—to understand the prison reference. Anyway, that was a joke I used to make. But I do not now hallucinate to orgasm—even though I am expert at the technique. At night in my cell I masturbate—as I suppose the other prisoners do. I want to save my most intimate thoughts of Mary Lou for when I am alone at night.

We are given two joints and two sopors with our evening meal but I have been saving mine. After supper I can smell the sweet smell of marijuana in the big prison dormitory and hear the music of erotic TV coming from the other cells, and imagine the synthetic bliss on the faces of the other prisoners. Somehow the thought of that, writing it now, makes me shudder. I want Mary Lou here with me. I want to hear her voice. I want to laugh with her. I want her to comfort me.

A year ago I would not have known what I was feeling. But after all those films I know what it is: I am in love with Mary Lou.

It feels terrible. Being in love feels terrible.

I don’t know where this prison is. Somewhere by the ocean. I was brought here unconscious and woke to find myself being given a blue uniform by a robot. I could not sleep the first night, wanting her with me.

I want her. Nothing else is real.

In the afternoons I work in a field at the edge of the ocean. The field is vast, with about two miles of shoreline; it is full of a coarse synthetic plant called Protein 4. The plants are big ugly things, about the size and shape of a man’s head, purple-green in color and with a rancid smell. Even out in the sunny fields, the smell is sometimes almost overpowering. My job is feeding them individually with chemicals that are prescribed by a computer each day. I have a little squirt gun that is loaded with pellets by a computer terminal at the end of each long row, and I hold it to a little plastic mouth that is imbedded in the yellow soil at the base of each plant and squeeze a pellet in.

It is backbreaking to do, under the hot sun, keeping up the fast tempo that is created by the constant music in the field. Forty of us work there, with a five-minute break each hour. We all perspire constantly.

Ten moron robots could do this work. But we are being rehabilitated.

Or that is what the television we must watch during our after-lunch social time tells us. We are not allowed to talk during social time, so I do not know if the others feel as angry as I do, and as weary.

Two robots in brown uniforms watch over us while we work. They are short, heavy, and ugly, and whenever I look toward the one who has beaten me he seems to be staring at me, unblinking, with his android’s mouth hanging slightly open, as if he is about to drool.

My hand is still so tired and sore from squeezing the trigger on that pistol that I cannot write any more.

Mary Lou. I only hope that you are not as unhappy as I. And I hope that you think of me, from time to time.

Reading gets to be a bore sometimes, but every now and then I find out something that I enjoy knowing about. I’m sitting in an armchair by the window as I write this, holding a board in my lap to write on, and for a long time before starting I just sat and stared at the snow coming down. Big, heavy, clumped-together flakes falling straight down from the sky. Bob has told me to take it easy so I won’t get a backache from carrying around this stuck-out belly. So I watched the snow for a long time. And I began to think of something I’d read a few days ago about the water cycle, about how the whole elaborate business of evaporation and condensation and winds and air really works. I watched the snow coming down and thought about how those white clumps had recently been the surface water of the Atlantic Ocean, turned to vapor by the heat of the sun. I could visualize clouds moving together far above the water, and the water in them crystallizing into snowflakes, and those flakes falling and clumping and falling further until I could see them, outside this window in New York.

Something makes me feel very good about just
knowing
things like that.

When I was a little girl Simon talked to me about things like the water cycle and the precession of the equinoxes. He had an old piece of blackboard and chalk; I remember him drawing me a picture of the planet Saturn with its rings. When I asked him how he knew about such things he told me he had learned them from his father. His grandfather had, as a boy, looked at the night sky through a celestial telescope, way back in the days not long after what Simon called “the death of intellectual curiosity.”

Although he couldn’t read or write and had never been to school, Simon had some knowledge of the past. Not just of Chicago whorehouses but of the Roman Empire and of China and Greece and Persia. I can remember him in our little wooden shack, a marijuana cigarette hanging from his toothless mouth while he stood at the wood stove stirring rabbit stew or bean soup, and saying, “There used to be big men in the world, men of mind and power and imagination. There was St. Paul and Einstein and Shakespeare . . .” He had several lists of names from the past that he would rattle off grandly at such times, and they always gave me a sense of wonder to hear. “There was Julius Caesar and Tolstoy and Immanuel Kant. But now it’s all robots. Robots and the pleasure principle. Everybody’s head is a cheap movie show.”