I am certainly wandering in this account, in this continuation of my plan to memorize my life. Maybe I’m getting senile—like Bob.
No, I’m not senile. I’m just excited to be memorizing my life again. Before I started this I was merely bored—as bored as I had been after Simon died in New Mexico, as bored and freaky as I was getting at the Bronx Zoo before Paul first showed up, looking so childlike and simple, and appealing…
I’d better quit thinking about Paul.
I brought Bob his joint and he lit it and inhaled deeply. Then, trying to be friendly, he said, “Don’t you ever smoke? Or take pills?”
“No,” I said. “They make me sick, physically. And I don’t like the idea of them anyway. I like being wide awake.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “I envy you.”
“Why envy me?” I said. “I’m human and subject to diseases, and aging, and broken bones…”
He ignored that. “I was programmed to be wide awake and fully aware twenty-three hours a day. It has only been in the last few years, since I’ve begun to allow myself to concentrate on thinking about my dreams, about my former personality and its erased feelings and memories, that I’ve learned to… to relax my mind and let it wander.” He took another puff from the joint. “I never liked being wide awake. I certainly don’t like it now.”
I thought about that for a minute. “I doubt if that marijuana could affect a metal brain. Why don’t you try programming yourself for a high? Can’t you alter some circuits somewhere and make yourself euphoric, or drunk?”
“I tried it. Back in Dearborn. And later, when I was first assigned by Government to this nonsense of being a university dean. The second time I tried harder than the first because I was furious at the pretense of learning that the university was committed to— the learning of nothing by students who come here to learn nothing except some kind of inwardness. But I didn’t get high. I got hung-over.”
He stood up from his chair and walked over to the window and watched the snow for a while. I took my eggs off the fire and began to peel them.
Then he spoke again. “Maybe it was the buried memory of a classical education in my brain that made me feel so furious. Or maybe it was just that I had been really trained to do my job. I know and understand engineering. Not one of my students knows any of the laws of thermodynamics or vector analysis or solid geometry or statistical analysis. I know all these disciplines and more. They are not on magnetic memories built into my brain, either. I learned them by playing library tapes over and over again, studying along with every other Make Nine robot, in Cleveland. And I learned to be a Detector…” He shook his head, and turned away from the window to face me. “But that doesn’t matter anymore, either. Your father was right. There aren’t many working Detectors anymore. There is no need for them. When the children stopped being born…”
“The children?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. Then he sat down again. “Let me tell you about thought buses.”
“But what about children?” I said. “Paul told me once…”
He looked at me strangely. “Mary,” he said, “I don’t know why children aren’t being born. It’s something to do with the population control equipment.”
“If no one gets born,” I said, “there won’t be any more people on the earth.”
He was silent for a minute. Then he looked at me. “Do you care?” he said. “Do you really care?”
I looked back at him. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I did care.
FIVE
We moved into this apartment a week after Paul was sent away and over the months I have grown to like it fairly well. Bob has tried to get repair and maintenance robots in to fix the peeling walls and put on new wallpaper and repair the burners on the stove and reupholster the couch, but so far he has had no luck. He is probably the highest-ranking power in New York; at least I don’t know of any creature with more authority. But he can’t get much done. Simon used to say to me when I was a little girl that things were all falling apart and good riddance. “The Age of Technology has rusted,” he would say. Well, it’s gotten worse in the forty yellows since Simon died. Still, it’s not too bad here. I wash the windows and clean the floors myself, and there is plenty of food.
I have learned to enjoy drinking beer during my pregnancy and Bob knows a place where there is an inexhaustible supply that comes from an automated brewery. Every third or fourth can turns out to be rancid, but it’s easy enough to pour those down the toilet. The sink drain is too stopped up.
The other day Bob brought me a hand-painted ancient picture from the archives to hang over a big ugly spot on the living-room wall. There was a little brass plaque on the frame, and I could read it: “Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” It is very good-looking. I can see it when I look up from the table where I am writing this. There is a body of water in the picture— an ocean or a large lake—and sticking up out of the water is a leg. I don’t understand it; but I like the stillness of the rest of the scene. Except for that leg, which is splashing in the water. I might try to get some blue paint someday and paint over it.
Bob has a way of picking up on a conversation days after I thought we had finished with it. I suppose it has to do with the way his mind stores information. He says he is incapable of forgetting anything. But if that is true why was it necessary for him to labor at learning things during his early training?
This morning while I was eating breakfast and he was sitting with me he started talking about thought buses again. I suppose he had been thinking about it while I was asleep. Sometimes it seems spooky to me when I get out of bed in the morning and find him sitting in the living room with his hands folded under his chin or pacing around in the kitchen. I offered, once, to teach him to read so that he would have something to do all night, but he just said, “I know too much already, Mary.” I didn’t pursue it.
I was eating a bowl of synthetic protein flakes and not liking the taste of them much when Bob said, appropos of nothing, “A thought bus brain isn’t really awake all the time. Just receptive. It might not be too bad to have a brain like that. Just receptiveness and a limited sense of purpose.”
“I’ve met people like that,” I said, chewing the tough flakes. I didn’t look at him; I was still, rather sleepily, staring at the bright identification picture on the side of the cereal box. It showed a face that everyone presumably trusted—but whose name almost no one knew—a face smiling over a big bowl of what were clearly synthetic protein flakes. The picture of the cereal was, of course, necessary to let people know what was in the box, but I had been wondering about the meaning of the man’s picture. One thing I have to say about Paul is that he gets you wondering about things like that. He has more curiosity about the meanings of things and how they make you feel than anyone I have ever known. I must have picked up some of it from him.
The face on the box was, Paul had told me, the face of Jesus Christ. It was used to sell a lot of things. “Vestigial reverence” was the term Paul read somewhere that was supposed to be the idea, probably a hundred or more blues ago, when such things were all planned out.