Walter Tevis - Mockingbird

So I am the wife or mistress he would have had. And we play out some kind of game of domesticity, because Bob wants it that way.

I think he’s insane.

And how does he know his brain wasn’t copied from a bachelor’s? Or a woman’s?

He won’t listen to any of my objections. What he says is: “Do you really mind it, Mary?”

And I guess I don’t. I miss Paul. I think I loved Paul in some small way. But when I get right down to it I don’t really mind this life, this being the companion of a brown-skinned robot.

What the hell, I used to live at the zoo , for Christ’s sake. I’ll make out.

It’s still snowing outside the window. I’m going to finish this entry in my memory journal and then just sit for an hour and drink beer and watch the snow and wait for Bob to come home.

Sure, it would be nice to have Paul back. But, as Simon said, you can’t win them all. I’ll make out.

Bob has been telling me about his dream again, and as usual I can do little but smile politely at him when he talks and try to be sympathetic. He dreams of a white woman, but she is nothing like me. I am dark-haired and physically strong, with good, solid hips and thighs. She is blond and tall and thin. “Esthetic,” he says. And I am not that—although the word might well fit Paul. The woman in Bob’s dream is always standing by a pool of black water, and she wears a bathrobe. I don’t think I have ever worn a bathrobe in my life, and I am not inclined to stand by pools of anything for very long at a time.

I think what I’m trying to say is that he is in love with her and not with me. And, further, it is for the best.

I certainly don’t love Bob—hated him, in fact, when he took Paul away from me and had him sent to prison. Cried and hit him, a lot of times, after the initial shock. And one of the hardest things to get used to was that he really is a Detector—that, in fact, there really are Detectors after all. It didn’t bother me that he was a robot, or black; the main thing about the experience was in discovering that I could be detected . It took away a thing that had given me a great deal of strength all my life: the feeling that I wasn’t being fooled by this society-for-idiots I live in. It hurt some of the confidence that Simon had given me—Simon, the only person I’ve ever loved, or am ever likely to love.

Well. Paul was a dear, sweet man, and I worry for him. I have tried to make Bob have him released from whatever prison he was sent to, but Bob will not even discuss it with me. He merely says, “No one will hurt him,” and that’s all he will say. There were times, at first, when I felt like crying for Paul; I missed his sweetness and his naïveté, and the childish way he liked to buy me things. But I never really shed tears for him.

Bob, on the other hand, is a creature of consequence. He is, I know, very old—older than Simon would be if he were still living; yet that seems to be of no importance except that it gives him a world-weariness that is appealing. And his being a robot means nothing to me except a certain simplicity in our relationship because there can’t be any sex between us. That was a disappointment when I first discovered it; but I have become used to it.

It has been a half a year since Paul and I were separated and I have become comfortable living with Bob, if not altogether happy. It would be ridiculous to berate a robot for a lack of humanity and yet that is, after all, the problem. I do not mean that he lacks feelings—far from it. I must always remember to ask him to sit with me while I eat or his feelings will be hurt. When I am angry with him he looks genuinely baffled. Once when I was bored I taunted him with the name “Robot” and he became furious-frightening—and shouted at me, “I did not choose my incarnation.” No. He is like Paul in that I must always be alert to his sensitivities. I am the one who is cool about other people.

But Bob is not human, and I cannot forget that. I forgot it a few times during our first months together. It was after my anger with his taking Paul from me had subsided, during the second month; I tried to seduce him. We were sitting at the kitchen table silently, while I was finishing a plate of scrambled eggs and my third glass of beer and he was sitting next to me, his handsome head inclined toward me, watching me eat. He seemed touchingly shy. I had long since become accustomed to the fact that he did not eat and had totally forgotten the implications of that simple fact. Maybe it was the beer, but I found myself seeing for the first time how really good-looking he was, with his soft brown, youthful skin, his short and curly and shiny black hair, his brown eyes. And how strong and sensitive his face was! I had a sudden rush of feeling then, not so much sexual as motherly, and I reached out and placed my hand on his arm, just above the wrist. It was warm, like anybody’s arm.

He looked down toward the table top, and said nothing. We did not talk to one another very much back then anyway. He was wearing a short-sleeved beige Synlon shirt, and his brown—beautiful brown—arm was smooth, warm to my touch, and hairless. He was wearing khaki trousers. I set my glass down and slowly—as if in a dream—reached out my hand toward his thigh. And during the short moment it took, setting the glass down, pausing a moment in hesitation, and then reaching out to him while my other hand was still lightly gripping his arm, the whole thing had become specifically, excitingly sexual; I was suddenly aroused and was, for a moment, dizzy with it. I set my palm on the inside of his thigh.

We sat like that for what seemed a long time. I honestly did not know what to do next. My mind was totally without any calculation of the situation; the word “robot” did not for a moment enter it. Yet I did not go any further, as I might have with other… with other men .

Then he lifted his head and looked at me. His face was strange. Yet there seemed to be no expression at all on it. “What are you trying to do?” he said.

I just looked at him dumbly.

He inclined his head toward mine. “What in the hell are you trying to do?”

I said nothing.

Then he took my hand from his leg with his free hand. I took my hand from his arm. He stood up and began to take off his pants. I stared at him, not thinking of anything.

I had not even expected the point he was making. And when I saw, I was truly shocked. There was nothing between his legs. Only a simple crease in the smooth, brown flesh.

He was looking at me all this time. When he saw that his lower nakedness had registered with me he said, “I was made in a factory in Cleveland, Ohio, woman. I was not born. I am not a human being.”

I looked away and, a moment later, heard him putting his pants back on.

I took a thought bus to the zoo. A few days afterward I discovered that I was pregnant.

Instead of talking about his dream last night, Bob began talking about artificial intelligences.

Bob says his brain is not at all like the telepathic one of a thought bus. They receive instructions and drive themselves by what he calls an “intention signal receiver and route seeker.” He says neither he nor any of the other six or seven Detectors left in North America have any telepathic ability whatever. Telepathy would be too much of a burden for their “human model” intelligences.

Bob is a Make Nine robot. He says Make Nines, of which he may be the last one remaining, were of a very special “copied intelligence” type and the last series of robots ever made. They were designed to be industrial managers and senior executives; Bob himself ran the automobile monopoly until private cars ceased to exist. He tells me that not only were there private cars but there were machines, once, that flew through the air and carried people in them. It sounds impossible.