“Time to listen,” I say.
“The performance schedule has not been increased. I am on a regular sche—”
I hit him two or three times. The chair rocks sideways from the blows. “Your voice was done by a German, not a Dane,” I say. There is a whining sound and a click. He picks up the scissors, cuts at the brightly colored paper.
“It was one very bad autumn,” he says, “and my life no better. And then, in the middle of it, an idea suddenly came to me while watching some ducks—”
“See!” I said. “That’s a lie right there. You lied to them all your life. It wasn’t fall, it was summer; it wasn’t ducks, it was geese. And the story’s a lie, too.”
He was talking all this time, and opened the paper — a line of white ducks and in the center a black one—“And that’s how I wrote ‘The Ugly Duckling.’”
“No,” I said. “No! Ugly once, ugly all your life!” I took him apart. “We’re talking people here, not waterfowl.” The rods to the chair continued to rock in their grooves in the floor. I smashed the chair, too.
One hand, clutching the scissors, continued to cut until the fluid ran out, though there was no paper nearby.
I went outside. A maintenance man stood with a set of controls. Beside him was a security man, who, I saw, had a firearm of the revolving cylinder type strapped to his waist.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the maintenance technician, pointing to his uniform.
“Maintenance,” I said. “Maintain your distance.”
“Stop!” he said. He pushed buttons on the control box in his hands. I grabbed it from him, pushed them in the reverse sequence just as I felt some slight shutting-down of my systems. They came back up. I looked at the frequency display; twisted it to a counter-frequency, turned it all the way to full. Across the way, a rat automaton jumped into the air, flung itself violently about and ran and smashed its head into a photo stand. I heard other noises from around the park. Then I broke the box.
The security man pointed the firearm up at my chest. He had probably not had to use one since the training range the week after he was hired, but I had no doubt he would use it; not using it meant no paycheck.
“Don’t you understand I’m doing this for you?” I said. I grabbed his wrist and pulled the firearm and one finger away from it. The finger spun out of sight. He yelled, “Goddamn it to hell, you asshole!” (inappropriate) and sank to the ground, clutching his hand. I took the firearm and left.
I could see other security people herding the crowds out, and announcements came from the very air, telling the people that the park would have to shut down for a short while, but they could all go to Area D-l, the secured area, where they would be entertained by the Wild Weasel Quintet + Two.
It was a two-story chalet, more Swiss than German. (German chalet is an oxymoron.) Two automata, circa 1840, German, brothers, sat at facing desks heaped high with manuscripts, books, old shirts, astrolabes, maps, and inkstands.
I came through the window, bringing it with me.
“Vast iss …?” asked the bigger one.
“Himmel …!” yelled the smaller.
I went about my work with great skill. “Pure German kindermarchen!” I said, putting a foot where a mouth belonged. “The old woman who told you those was French! And she was an in-law, not some toothless hag from the Black Forest! Hansel and Gretel. Blueprints for the Kaisers and Hitler!” I pulled the chest and waistcoat from the smaller and put them with the larger one’s legs.
I stood when I was through, ducking the ceiling. I took an inkstand, dipped my finger in it. Fake. I picked up a piece of necktie, dabbed it in hydraulic fluid, and wrote on the walls: LIES ALL LIES.
Then I took a short cut.
“But — But, monsieur—” he said, before I caved in the soft French face. “I am but a poor aristo, fallen on bad times, who must tell these tales—geech!” An eye came out on its spring-loader. “Perhaps some peppermint tea, a madeleine? SKKR!”
Then the head came off. Then the arms and legs.
Except for the scream of sirens, the park was quiet. I could hear all the exhibits shut down.
When I got to Old Mother Goose (the New England one) they were waiting for me.
I threw the empty revolving-cylinder firearm behind me. I picked up a couple more of varied kinds that had been dropped. One was a semiautomatic gas recoil weapon fed by a straight magazine with twenty-two rounds in it.
“Run!” I said. “I’m down on liars, and shan’t be buckled till I get my fill!”
I turned around and fired into the head of Mother Goose. She went down like a sack of cornmeal.
I stood in the bower where the girl held her head in her hands and cried. This is the one who has lost her sheep, as opposed to the one whose sheep followed it to school (not a nursery rhyme). She seemed oblivious to me.
A vibration came in the air, a subtle electronic change. I felt a tingle as it went through the park. It was a small change in programming; new commands and routines for all but me. They had begun to narrow my possibilities and actions; I could tell that without knowing.
She looked up at me, and up. “Oh! There you are. Oh, boo hoo, my sheep have all wandered off, and I don’t know—”
“Spare me, sister.”
There was a click then and her speaking voice changed, a wo-man’s, cool and controlled.
“TA 2122,” she said. “Or do you prefer Lermokerl?”
“It’s your nickel,” I said (local telephonic communications =.65 Eurodollars).
“Your programming has been scrambled and shortcircuited. Please remain where you are while we work on it. We want to help you—” There were muffled comments over the automaton’s synthesizer, evidently live feed from headquarters. “—return to normal. You have already damaged several people and other autonomous beings, probably yourself also. We are trying to solve the problem.”
“Perform an anatomical impossibility,” I said.
There was a long quiet.
“You had an infodump of a very large body of very bad, outdated ideas. You have been led to these acts by poorly processed normative referents. Your inputs are false. You can’t know—”
“Can the phenomenology,” I said. “I know the literature and the movies. Alphaville. Dark Star. Every Man for Himself and God Against All.” There was movement a few hundred meters away. I fired a round off in that direction.
“You should be ashamed,” I continued. “You use these cultural icons to give people a medieval, never-land mind-set. Strive to succeed, get rich, get happy. Do what authority figures say. Be a trickster — but only to the dumb-powerful, not the smart-powerful. Do what they say and someday you, too, shall be a real boy, or grow a penis” (another false mind-set).
Through Bo-Peep she spoke to me. “I didn’t make this stuff up. This, these tales, have a long tradition, thousands of years behind them. They’ve given comfort, they’ve—”
“A thousand years of the downtrodden; a product of feudalism; after that, products of money-mad Denmark, repressed Germany, effete French aristocracy, Calvinistic New England where they thought the Devil jumped up your butt when you went to the outhouse. There’s your tradition, there’s—” I said.
Bo-Peep stood up, looking from one of my heads to the other. She crossed her arms. She said: “They thought you up.”
I put Bo-Peep in the peep-sight of the semiautomatic weapon and fired.
Then I ran.
There was another, overpowering shift in the programming. I felt it as strongly as if magnets had been passed across my joints. There was an oppressive feel to the very air itself (as hu-mans are supposed to feel before storms).