Tik-Tok (3 page)

"Well uh sure we I guess—"

"Could we have one more of you both standing in front of it? Well more to the side, and could you both face each other, that's it, two patrons flanking—that's right, and now Tik-Tok if you could just hold a brush and stand here, a little closer to the camera? Look up—great. Great. I guess we can wrap it up now, whenever Mr Weatherfield is—?"

Bewildered Duane and flustered Barbie and yapping Tige all felt like strangers in their own house, while all the men and women with cameras, ladders, lights, clipboards and tape measures seemed very much at home. A national Sunday color magazine was about to discover me, however, and that was worth any amount of flustering. The electronic camera team had been flown in from Spain (where they were making a micro-record of the Prado), and the commentary was to be written by the distinguished author and critic (
Artful Living
, etc) Hornby Weatherfield.

Weatherfield seemed more at home than anyone. He was a huge, blue-jawed man with a broken nose and a wrestler's thick neck, a man easily mistaken for a grip if not for the fact that his ugly frame was wrapped in some kind of toga, and that he carried a clear-eyed tabby cat under one arm. He stood now lost in thought before the mural, his spatulate fingers stroking the cat convulsively.

He turned to the Studebakers. "Like to have a private word with the artist. Have you got a pool?"

"Of course," said Duane, still intimidated.

"Good, we can sit by the pool. I always like to conduct interviews by pools, as in the old movies, eh?"

"Movies?"

"Where detectives always interview gangsters, eh?"

So we settled in chairs by the pool. Weatherfield stared into the water as if looking for a water lily or a Hockney swimmer. "Where'd you get a corny name like Tik-Tok?"

"The Studebaker kids read Oz books a lot," I said. "Anyway all domestic robots have corny names. Rusty, Jingles, Mickey, One Volt, Nickleby—"

"I know, I know. Let's skip over to—"

"My past life? Well I first worked for a Southern family."

"Let's skip that too. I want to talk business, Tik-Tok. You've got talent. You could make a lot of money out of this."

"For my owners, you mean?"

He grinned. "Of course! Robots don't own property, they
are
property. It's unthinkable that any robot should find some way to get rich itself, eh? But to make money
for anybody
out of this, you need my help."

"The article you write, yeah I guess that could really—"

"And not just that. I know dealers, other critics, corporate art buyers—I swim in the art market water."

"Excuse me, there's a dead leaf in the pool." I took my time fishing it out. When I got back to my seat, Weatherfield was fuming. "Sorry, but I'm programmed for tidiness."

His hand almost strangled the cat. "You're also too smart for a healthy robot, is that part of your program too?"

I failed at a shrug. "Who knows?"

"Yes, well then, it was you who sent me the clipping."

"From the local paper, yes. 'Artist Robot Goes in for Home Decoration.' I thought it was worth more than that. And I don't want to spend my life cleaning this pool."

"Your
life
, very good. Okay then, you play ball with Uncle Hornby and you can
live
the kind of
life
you want. I want two paintings from you now, and two a year until I say Enough. Understand?"

I conducted him back inside, where the camera crew were packed, ready to go. Tige once more went mad at the sight of the cat. Hornby spoke to Duane and Barbie.

"A great talent there, a great talent. Encourage him."

"Oh we will," Barbie said. Duane didn't look so sure. Hornby's heavy hand clapped me on the shoulder. "This robot," he intoned, "can make you rich."

We all went to the door with him, as though saying goodbye to a friend. Down the street I saw old Mr Tucker being led from his house by two policemen.

C
ulpritwise, I'd selected old Mr Tucker because he was a natural fall guy. In Fairmont, where weirdness calls for punishment, Tucker was weird beyond redemption. He went to the supermarkets in carpet slippers. He never took any public exercise. He drove an old, not very clean car. He shouted at kids when they trampled his flowerbeds (which were full of weeds). More than once he'd been arrested for chalking equations on the sidewalk. He had a green beard.

I went to see him on the evening of the day Geraldine Singer died. He lay sweating out a fever on an untidy hideaway bed in his living room.

"Who is it? What is?" he kept muttering.

"Hello Mr Tucker, your screen door wasn't hooked," I said. "I brought you some giblets, sir."

"Gibbets? I . . . gibbets? Who is?"

"For soup. Help you fight that fever." I held out the plastic bag over him. "Here you go—oops! What a mess. I'll help you clean it up." Instead I sat down and watched him thrash around for a moment, distributing the blood and pieces of meat around the bed. "Gosh, you're pretty sick, Mr Tucker. Is it Darnaway's disease?"

He raised himself on one elbow and tried to focus his glassy eyes upon me. "Yes, yes you, you, yes, Darnaway, you know it?"

"I worked for an old soldier once myself, he had the same symptoms. Green beard, fits of equation-writing outdoors, fevers." I passed him the can of beer he was reaching for. "He fell off a water tower where he was painting m = m0 / (sqrt(1-(v/c)²)), I guess I know Darnaway's disease all right."

His head fell back. "Nobody else understands."

Why should they? I thought. Why should anyone remember the name of an obscure jungle disease contracted twenty years earlier, during an obscure jungle war? Especially since the war had been lost, and since the government was anxious not to pay out compensation for the disease.

"You're not the only one with troubles," I said. "Someone killed the Singer kid today. Killed her and cut her up. Did the police come to see you?"

"I don't know," he said, looking guilty. I told him how the girl was dressed, theorized for a moment about how fever could make a guy do terrible things without knowing it, and then said goodbye. He was already slipping back into delirium, unaware of his blood-spattered clothes and bed, the rubbery little heart lying on the pillow next to his ear, the little dark glasses being crushed under his elbow. That was how I meant the police to find him.

In fact the police fumbled it. They took a week to get around to talking to him, asked all the wrong questions and didn't listen to his answers. They went on running around in circles for some time, until I phoned in an anonymous tip. A fiasco avoided.

I became an expert on fiascos, or fiasci, early in my life, while working for the Culpeppers. Their family fortune was (I found out from a family history in their library) founded on a fiasco. Their great plantation, Tenoaks, their leisurely antebellum life among slave robots, their lavish entertaining at the manse, all had been paid for by a single fiasco, engineered by a single ancestor, Doddly Culpepper.

The Culpeppers had deep roots in the Old South, but roots unnourished by any money or intellect. In the nineteenth century they were horse dealers and thieves. In the twentieth they became used-car dealers and motorcycle daredevils, but somehow by the 1990s, Doddly Culpepper managed to turn up as a respected naval architect, designer and entrepreneur. It was he who invented
Leviathan
, America's first (and last) nuclear-powered land aircraft carrier.
Leviathan
was the most successful commercial defense project ever; it ended up costing every man, woman and child in the United States over twenty grand.

The idea of a land ship of that size may seem ridiculous now, but it was then the right project at the right time. Two big aircraft manufacturers were enthusiastic (carriers mean planes), so was a large nuclear ship-engine firm. The major ship-building and steel companies were behind it, as were several of the largest unions, then the senators and congressmen from every state where any subcontractors might fall.

The
USS Leviathan
would not be anything like an ordinary carrier. It would be a monster platform, some fifty miles across and equal in area to the state of Delaware. It would launch both missiles and planes of all types, and it would be capable of fast movement around the countryside.

In the first design,
Leviathan
was to run on wheels, thus promoting the interests of a large rubber company. But the number of tires required turned out to be 135 million, plus spares (a tire change would be needed every hundred yards). Unless a complete rubber factory were taken on board—one of the alternative suggestions—the entire ship would have to hover. Grumbling, the rubber company settled for a contract to provide the giant hovercraft skirt required.

Both houses of Congress shoved through the necessary legislation. There were objections that
Leviathan
would cost too much, would be a sitting duck, would devastate any land over which it happened to hover. But by now the Army wanted it as badly as any of the dozens of states, thousands of companies and millions of workers. The combined force of industrial, political, military and commercial arguments rolled the project over all opposition as one day
Leviathan
itself would crush down anything in its path. One junior Senator who continued to oppose it was sent on a fact finding mission to Antarctica while the bill was railroaded through.

From the start, there were problems called "teething troubles". The fans which were to lift the craft were at first too weak, then (redesigned) so powerful that they blew away the topsoil for miles around the craft, created dust storms and buried small towns in soildrifts. A computer company suggested expensive monitoring equipment to regulate each fan, but this never seemed to solve the topsoil problem. A chemical firm then went to work on a binding agent to hold the topsoil in place;
Leviathan
would spray the stuff out before moving. After months of experimentation with expensive agents, they found the best to be ordinary water. The
Leviathan
was now redesigned to accommodate huge water tanks holding whole lakefuls of water. Even so, it would never be able to stray more than fifty miles from a major water source (though thousand-mile flexible pipelines were considered).

Congress now began noticing how expensive
Leviathan
was getting. Costs had doubled every six months: five more years like the first two, and the entire US gross national product would be spent on the land boat. Of course the project had too much momentum to cancel, but unless there were visible results, trimming would begin. Doddly went before a Congressional committee to argue eloquently for his monster. He pointed to valuable spin-offs: the Department of Agriculture now knew much more about binding topsoils. But secretly he was worried, as his diary showed:

Now it's the damn engine mountings, they're okay for seagoing stresses but not for bumpy land in say Illinois, liable to drop the damn engine in Peoria. Platform stresses ditto—we'd be better off taking the damn thing to sea!

And so they did.
Leviathan
became a joint Army—Navy project, supposedly amphibious. On December 2, 1999, she slid into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, all ready for the millennium.

Privately, military people admitted that the thing was not landworthy, barely seaworthy, undefendable and useless in war. It carried a crew of 30,000, who were said to live in a luxurious below-decks city complete with supermarkets, drive-in movies, a baseball stadium and a park where people got mugged at night. In reality the crew had no time to enjoy such luxuries; they spent every waking moment cleaning, painting and patching leaks. Even so, the
Leviathan
shipped around a billion gallons of water per day. It puttered along the shores of the Americas for a year, never daring to come back on land nor put to sea. Finally it was quietly scrapped.

Doddly Culpepper bought a decrepit plantation with his new fortune. Probably he meant to retire quietly and graciously, but somehow he was overtaken by the family mania for motorcycles. He and a cousin finally set off on an ill-conceived expedition attempting to climb Everest on powerful bikes. They were caught up in the Sherpa Rebellion of '03 and killed.

Doddly's son Mansour was evidently an unassertive person who devoted his entire life to restoring Tenoaks to its ante-bellum glory. Everything he did was a contribution to this one dream, from raising racehorses to marrying Lavinia Warrender (of the Tennessee Warrenders). He died of a stroke, immediately after chastising one of the house servants for wearing livery with modern plastic buttons.

Five Culpeppers survived him, and these were my employers:

Lavinia, his widow, was an invalid, a martyr to bedsores and piles, who seemed to spend her days rereading
Gone with the Wind
and
The Foxes of Harrow
. She was continually plagued by difficult symptoms: At one stage she could eat nothing but bloater-paste sandwiches from England, cut into the shapes of quadratic equations. Later she developed an allergy to oxygen, which gave her many doctors some considerable difficulty. For a time they found it necessary to keep her in a deep-freeze filled with xenon. This was less trouble, however, than her spell of inverted hay-fever, an allergy to pollen-free air. That required rooms full of whirling clouds of house-dust and rose-pollen.

I later learned that Lavinia, despite her many unusual symptoms and the poverty of her reading matter, was an extraordinarily capable and intelligent manager of the family fortune. But at first, all I saw of her was a tired looking woman with violet shadows under her eyes. She would lie there complaining of her aches and sipping her special cocktails (in place of alcohol, they contained lead tetraethyl). An amazing woman, everyone said.

Berenice, her oldest daughter, divided her time between what she called her needlework (with morphine) and her hobby of killing insects. She caught and crushed flies on the verandah, swatted bees in the garden, stamped on cockroaches in the barn. She would hunt through the woods for dead logs to turn over, gleefully spraying their inhabitants with insecticide. In her room she kept both an ant farm and a termite farm, just to have more tiny creatures at hand to destroy. In the meadow she burned butterflies. Had she been denied all of these pleasures, I think Berenice would have cultivated lice in her long, lustrous black hair.