Roderick tried to look at him, but Pa’s face was in shadow. ‘You mean you were Isaac Asimov?’
‘Nope. And we weren’t Eando Binder, either. Nor anybody else who wrote “I, Robot”. Believe me, nobody ever heard of us, nobody even remembers the name of that pulp magazine.
‘Yes it was our story little Danny picked on, that twisted him some way — I don’t know, set him to dreaming or — well. You know the rest. Next time we heard from Danny he was grown up, he’d invented you, and he was in trouble.’
‘Is that how I came to stay here?’
‘Yep, another mistake. See, son, we hoped we could still change the world back, undo some of our damage, take back our terrible joke. Through you. If only we could make you learn how to be human…
‘So what we did, first we burned the old pulp magazines. Then we tried to teach you everything we knew about life. Like I said, a mistake.’
‘Pa, I don’t see it was such a mis—’
‘Because we knew nothing. Nothing at all. Few scraps of logic, a song, coupla half-assed ideas about art… a joke or two
Roderick felt compelled to protest again. ‘Pa, I think you and Ma haven’t done such a bad job. Heck, you only had a robot to begin with.’
‘A joke or two. Another mistake we made was money. Spent all we had and a whole lot we didn’t have yet. Then a whole lot we never would have. We cut a few corners — well hell, we stole. I stole. And when it began to look as if the law was catching up with us, with me, I had to die. Because if they finger-printed me, they’d find out who I was, and there we’d be, right back in the middle of that terrible joke again. You see? You see, son?’
Roderick scratched his head. ‘Sure okay, but what about the syphilis?’
‘Syphilis? Nobody said anything about—’
‘Right here in your cipher, Pa. “P WOOD IN SOUP (SYPH) SO NOW POSSUM NUMB MUMMY HYPNO-BOUND & SHUN MOB!!!’ I mean you can’t make it plainer than that, and later on there’s something about pox. too, that’s—’
‘Let me see that, where—?’ Pa snatched the paper and held it up to the light of SLUMBERTITE NEVER SLEEPS. ‘Pox that’s nothing, just the words of the song, you don’t want to pay no attention to that. It says Bow wow too, but that don’t mean I got fleas.’
‘Okay but—’
‘But this SYPH — well that is just your Ma’s bad spelling, the word is supposed to be SYLPH. Your Ma never could spell.’
‘Sylph? How can you be in the soup with a sylph?’
‘Not with, son. Like I said, your Ma never could spell, never should of been a writer. Sylph was a poor word for woman anyway.’
Roderick gasped. ‘The wedding picture, that’s what was wrong with it. Pa, you were the bride! Ma was the groom!’
‘Well it’s no reason to break into italics, son. Like I said, it all started off as a joke, just trading clothes now and then — son? You all right?’
Ben was packing up the papers.
‘No hurry, Benny, pour us another drink.’ Mr Kratt bit the end from a cheap cigar and settled back. ‘Goddamn trip was worth it, eh bub? Yes sir, Welby’s our boy. De’Ath better be our boy too, if he knows what’s good for him. Yes sir, a productive damn trip. We oughta lock this one up in a month or so, kick a few asses in our so-called lobby down in Lincoln, don’t see why we can’t be showing a profit this time next year on this little enterprise. You know bub, times like this makes me feel goddamn good.’
‘Yes sir.’ Ben was noticing, not for the first time, the large white square teeth of his employer. They always reminded him of a row of tombstones, and now…
‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’
‘I just… wish you wouldn’t grin like that sir, no offence, but—’
‘Grin if I goddamnit grin if I want to, hell we just made a killing here you want me to look sad about it?’
‘No sir but, just thinking of those kids, those dead—’
‘Death certificates, damn it didn’t I tell you not to worry? We’ll beat that, sure it’s a pain in the ass but we’ll beat that. Nothing’s gonna stop us, bub, because nothing can stop us, we’re on the move.’ He grinned again, lighting the cigar. ‘And sure I feel good. Hell, here I am fighting on the last frontier in the fucking world. And winning, sure I feel good.’
‘Winning.’
‘Because that’s what business is, bub, the last frontier. The last place where you can still take hold of the world and change it, make it — make it—’
‘Make it in your own image?’
‘Better, I was going to say. Make it what you want. See everyone else, the world is just something that happens to them, might as well be watching it on TV, right? But for me the world is something you — something you can get. Sure it’s risky. You gotta fight. You need guts and luck and, and imagination. But hell, isn’t it worth it? Just tell me that, isn’t it worth it?’
‘Yes sir.’ Ben found a TV set behind a panel and, after staring for a moment at his dark reflection in the screen, turned it on. It was going to be a long evening. Once Mr Kratt had a few drinks and started talking about the last frontier…
‘Why shouldn’t I feel good? Whole damn business is devoted to one thing, you know? One thing: giving people pleasure. Giving people pleasure. So why shouldn’t I get some pleasure too…?’
The TAPE button brought a canned promotion for the factory: ‘Our advanced integrated control system is continuously optimized by real-time goal-seeking—’ while rows of robot receptionists trundled along with their desks, ‘—routines implemented throughout a hierarchy of processors to attack such performance-characteristic problems as the utilization of modified control algorithms—’ each Roberta the Receptionist wearing more false hair than the automaton chess-playing Turk could have concealed beneath his ample turban. The Turk too had been seated behind a desk (when the Baron von Kempelen first exhibited him in Vienna, shortly before the American Revolution). And his desk had been a necessity, since it concealed that most perfect of chess-playing mechanisms (together with its lunch and piss-pot).
‘—including diagnostic programmes and multi-level alarms and interrupts, debugging and redistribution of modifications within each software sub-package—’
‘…because damnit, pleasure is our business, always meant to make that the group slogan, pleasure is our business. Greatest pleasure for the greatest number…’
Ben nodded agreement and changed channels, stabbing a button at random. Seemed to be something about the French Revolution, torches, billhooks and the laughter of toothless hags.
‘—on both a local and a global level, evaluating each task via sophisticated assessment procedures and providing next-level feedback from supervisory processors. Feasibility analysis, an integral part of each task, is similarly—’
Back to the mob scene, what was it, Tale of Two Cities? Probably get a shot of Madame DeFarge any minute now, knitting shrouds… funny thing was, the real revolution was going on all the time behind the scenes, the Jacquard loom with its punched cards weaving a new pattern, clicking away, a far far better thing it did than anyone had ever done… burial shrouds for human thought, maybe, but very good burial shrouds.
Or was it a different mob scene? The camera zoomed in on faces by torchlight, not at all the faces of Jacques One and Jacques Two and Madame DeFarge, but the faces of men with good teeth, men wearing sweatshirts and golf caps, windbreakers and glasses, baseball caps and twill, crewcuts and army fatigues…