Mockingbird (8 page)

I was holding the book open, trying to guess at what the word “chess” might mean, when Mary Lou spoke. “What is it exactly that you
do
with a book?”

“You read it.”

“Oh,” she said. And then, “What does ‘read’ mean?”

I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, “Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently.”

She stared at me for a long time. Then she took a book from the shelf, somewhat awkwardly, and opened it. She was finding it a strange and complicated thing to handle, as I had a yellow before. She looked at the pages, felt of them with her fingers, and then handed the book back to me, her face blank. “I don’t understand,” she said.

I started to explain it again. Then I said, “I can say aloud what I am reading. It’s what I do in my work—reading and then saying it aloud.”

She frowned. “I still don’t understand.” She looked at me and then at the books on the steel shelves, and then at the moldy carpet on the floor at her feet. “Your work is ... reading. Books?”

“No. I read something else. Something called silent films.” I took the book from her. “I’ll say aloud, if I can, what I read. Maybe that will make it understandable.”

She nodded and I opened to the middle and began. “Mostly preferred is five B to B four, followed by the Lasker Variation, for, while White may regain his pawn, he obtains no great attack. It will be seen that, after the ninth move of White, a well-known position is arrived at, and most authorities consider it all in favor of the White side.”

I thought I read it well, hardly stumbling over the unfamiliar words. I had no idea what it meant.

Mary Lou had moved next to me, pressing her body against mine, while I was reading. She was staring at the page. Then she looked into my face and said, “Were you saying things that you heard in your mind from just
looking
at that book?”

“That’s right,” I said.

Her face was uncomfortably close to mine. She seemed to have forgotten all the rules of Privacy—if she ever knew them. “And how long would it take to say aloud everything . . .” She squeezed my arm and I had to fight to keep from jumping and pulling away from her. Her eyes had become terribly intense, the way they sometimes disturbingly became. “To say aloud everything you hear in your mind from looking at all the sheets of paper in that book?”

I cleared my throat, and pulled slightly back from her. “A whole daytime, I think. When the book is easy and you don’t say it aloud you can do it faster.”

She took the book out of my hand and held it in front of her face, staring at it so intensely that I half expected her to start saying the words aloud by sheer force of concentration. But she did not. What she said was: “Jesus! There is that much . . . that much silent BB recording in this? That much . . . information?”

“Yes,” I said.

“My God,” she said, “we should do it with them all. What’s the word?”

“Read.”

“That’s it. We should
read
them all.”

She began to gather up an armful of books and I meekly did the same. We carried them down the hallways to my room.

I spent the rest of that morning reading to her from different books. But it was difficult for me to continue paying attention; I had almost no idea of what was being said. Several times we changed books, but it was still chess.

After several hours of this she interrupted to say, “Why are all books about chess?” and I said, “I have books at my home in Ohio that are about other things. About people and dogs and trees and things. Some of them tell stories.” And then, suddenly, I thought of something I should have thought of before and I said, “I can look the word ‘chess’ up in
Dictionary
.” I opened up the cabinet in my desk and took it out and began leafing through it until I found the words that began with “C.” I found it almost right away. “Chess: a board game between two players.” And there was a picture of two men seated at a table. On the table was one of those black-and-white arrangements with what my reading had taught me were called “pieces” sitting on it. “It’s some kind of a game,” I said. “Chess is a game.”

Mary Lou looked at the picture. “There are pictures of people in books?” she said. “Like on Simon’s walls?”

“Some books are full of pictures of people and things,” I said. “The easy books, like the ones I learned to read with, have big pictures on each page.”

She nodded. And then she looked at me intensely. “Would you teach me to read?” she said. “From those books with the big pictures in them?”

“I don’t have them here,” I said. “They’re in Ohio.”

Her face fell. “Do you only have books about . . . about chess?”

I shook my head. Then I said, “There might be more. Here in the library.”

“You mean books about people?”

“That’s right.”

Her face lit up again. “Let’s go look.”

“I’m tired.” I
was
tired, from all that reading and running around.

“Come
on
,” she said. “This is
important
.”

So I agreed to go search more rooms with her.

We must have spent over an hour going down hallways and opening doors. The rooms were all empty, although some of them had shelves along the walls. Once, Mary Lou asked me, “What are all these empty rooms
for
?” and I said, “Dean Spofforth told me the library is scheduled for demolition. I think that’s why the rooms are empty.” I supposed she knew that buildings all over New York had been scheduled for demolition long before we were born, but nothing happened to them.

“Yes,” she said, “half of the buildings at the zoo are that way, too. But what are all these rooms
for
?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Books?”

“That many books?”

“I don’t know.”

And then, at the end of a long, especially mossy hallway, where some of the overhead lights were dim, we came to a gray door that had a sign saying: STORAGE. We pushed the door open with some difficulty; it was a much heavier door than the others and it had some kind of seal around it. We got it open by pushing together and I was immediately surprised by two things. The air inside smelled strange—it smelled
old—
and there were steps going down. I had thought we were on the lowest floor of the library already. We took the steps, and I almost slipped and fell. They were heavily layered with some kind of slippery, yellowish dust. I caught myself just in time.

As we descended, the air smelled even stronger, older.

At the bottom of the stairs was a hallway. There were overhead lights, but they were very dim. The hallway was short, and at the end of it were two doors. One said: EQUIPMENT, and the other said: BOOKS, and below this, in smaller letters: TO BE RECYCLED. We pushed the door open. There was at first nothing but darkness and sweet-smelling air behind the door. Then, suddenly, lights flickered on and Mary Lou gasped. “Jesus Christ!” she said.

The room was huge and there were books everywhere.

You could not see any walls because of the shelves filled with books. And books were stacked up on their sides in the middle of the room, and in piles along the walls in front of the full shelves. They were of every color and size.

I stood there not knowing what to do or say. I was feeling something that was like what some of the films had made me feel— a sense that I was in the presence of great waves of feeling that had once been felt by people who were now dead and who understood things that I did not.

I knew that there had been books in the ancient world, of course, and that most of them were probably from that time before television, but I had no idea there were that many.

While I stood there, feeling what I have no name for, Mary Lou walked toward a pile of big, thin books that was not as high as the others. She reached up, the way I had seen her reach up for the inedible fruit in the python cage at the House of Reptiles, and took the top book down carefully. She held it awkwardly in both hands, and stared at its cover. Then very carefully she opened its pages. I could see that there were pictures. She stared at some of the pages for a long time. Then she said, “Flowers!” and closed the book and handed it to me. “Can you . . . say what you read on this?”

I took it from her and read the cover:
Wildflowers of North America
. I looked at her.

“Paul,” she said softly, “I want you to teach me how to read.”

Every afternoon at two o’clock Spofforth took a walk, for about an hour. Like his habitual whistling, which was the only manifestation of his to-him-unknown ability to play the piano, the habit of taking walks had been, willy-nilly, copied into his metal brain from the start. It was not a compulsion; he could override it when he wished to; but he usually did not. His work at the university was so slight, so trivial to him, that he could easily spare the time. And there was no one with the authority to tell him not to.

He would walk through the city of New York, his arms swinging, his tread light, his head erect, usually looking neither to the right nor to the left. Sometimes he would look in the windows of the small automatic stores that distributed food and clothing to anyone with a credit card, or stop to watch a crew of Make Twos emptying garbage, or working on the repair of ancient sewers. These matters concerned him; Spofforth knew far better than any human being did the importance of supplying food and clothing and removing waste. The ineptitudes and malfunctions that plagued the rest of this moribund city could not be allowed to stop those services. So Spofforth would walk through a different part of Manhattan every day and check to see if the food and clothing equipment were functioning and if the wastes were being removed. He was not a technician, but he was smart enough to repair ordinary breakdowns.

He generally did not look at the people he passed on the street. Many of them would stare at him—at his size, his physical vigor, his black earlobes—but he ignored them.

His walk this August day took him through midtown Manhattan, on the West Side. He walked through streets with small Permoplastic houses, centuries old, some of them with poorly tended flower gardens. Gardening, for some reason, was taught in the dormitories. Probably hundreds of years before, some Engineer-Planner with a liking for flowers had decided that flower gardening should be a part of the standard human experience; because of that one casual idea, generations of humanity had planted marigolds and zinnias and phlox and yellow roses without really ever knowing why.

Sometimes Spofforth would stop and minutely examine the equipment of a store, to see if its computers were working properly, keeping supplies at the proper level, its Make One unloaders ready and able to handle the morning’s trucks, its vending machines in good working order. He might go into a clothing store, slip his special Unlimited credit card into a slot, speak out loud into the Orderphone, saying, “I want a pair of gray trousers that will fit me tightly.” Then he would stand in one of the little booths, just barely being able to fit into it, let himself be measured by sound waves, and step out again to watch the machines that would select the fabric from huge overhead bolts, cut it, and stitch his trousers together before returning his credit card. If something went wrong—and it often did—with the way the zipper was put in or the pockets were made or whatever, he would either repair the machine himself or try to commandeer a technician robot by telephone to repair it. If the telephone was working.

Or he would enter a sewer main and look around him to see what was cracking or jammed or rusting, and do what he could to get that repaired. Without him, New York might have no longer functioned at all. He sometimes wondered how other cities stayed alive, with no Make Nines, and no really effective humans around; he remembered the piles of garbage in the streets of Cleveland, and how poorly everyone had been dressed in St. Louis when he had served, briefly, as mayor of that city. And that had been almost a century before. No one in St. Louis had had pockets for years, and everyone’s shirts had been too big, until Spofforth himself had repaired the sonic measuring equipment and removed a dead cat from the pocket machine of the city’s only clothing store. They were probably not yet naked and starving in St. Louis; but what would happen in twenty blues, when everyone was old and weak, and there were no young people around with sense enough to go out and find a Make Seven to help in an emergency? Had he been able to he would have replicated himself, putting another hundred Make Nines into the world to keep things running in Baltimore and Los Angeles and Philadelphia and New Orleans. Not because he cared that much for humanity, but because he hated to see machinery that worked poorly. He thought of himself as a machine sometimes, and he felt responsible.

But had he been able to produce more Make Nines he would have made certain they would come into the world without the ability to feel. And with the ability to die. With the gift of death.

On this hot August afternoon he did not stop anywhere until he came to a squat old building on Central Park West. He had a particular thing on his mind.

The building was one of the few in the city made of concrete, and it had columns in front of it and big, multi-paned windows and a dark, stained old wooden door. He opened the door, entered a dusty lobby with a glass chandelier hanging from a white ceiling, and walked up to a wooden counter with a scarred, gray plastic top.

Behind the counter a small man was hunched in an armchair, asleep.

Spofforth spoke to him sharply. “Are you the mayor of New York?”

The man opened his eyes sleepily. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I’m the mayor.”

“I want to talk to National Records,” Spofforth said, allowing irritation to show1 in his voice. “I want the population for western America.”