Damon Knight - Orbit 19

“You’re all anxious, aren’t you?” Dr. Gay’s tones were effeminate and casually snotty. “Anxious, apprehensive, fearful—”

Bush league, Cy thought, stereotyped shrink bullshit. He looked closely at the girl across from him, and realized that his tight smile was more of a leer. Hey, big black momma, he thought, what a platter of sirloin and mashed potatoes running with gravy. Could my white snake actually nudge through that sporran of shiny black wire, those liver-colored labia, that snug ebony receptacle. Here, go dorsal, and lower yourself onto it. Sit on it, infuse it with chocolate juice, dye it brown for good. His fantasies were good for a few seconds, then he felt a clean wedge of tabula rasa alertness. God, I wonder how the bots do that, he thought—like a fairy godmother touching a magic wand to the puppet’s head.

He leaned forward, input sensitivity at asymptote. The man on Cy’s left did claim to feel anxiety; Dr. Gay reflected the comment in slightly different contexts, made an offensive personal reference, neutralized the aggregate group mood, and fed in the data to the therapeutic console. The man got a coding of existential anxiety, temerity, self-depreciation, and overcompensatory effusiveness. The diagnosis fed into the man’s life-data banks, and the therapeutic agents were specified as a sliver of robber-baron confidence, plus a shot of Zen ideation.

Cy was called on to free-associate. “I don’t know what the hell you mean,” he said. “I’m not anxious. I think I resent your purporting to know what is best for me. I don’t have any hangups.” Cy felt a flow of memories, as if truth serum had replaced the blood in his brain. He knew that the action was produced by the psychoanalyst and the data banks, but could not fight it off adequately, nor was he certain that he should fight it. “I am first-born,” he said, “dominant, egocentric, variably cynical, eclectic. My mommybot and housebot and daddybot gave me a huge buttress of reinforcement. I was a spanking clean success story all the way. You should have seen me in my starched linen knickers and mohair jacket, singing the merry thirty-second notes in Gilbert and Sullivan—”

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a faggot?” Dr. Gay asked, his voice disquietingly grave.

“Does a hobby-horse have a wooden ass?” Cy said, not quite retaliatory enough, he thought. Then he felt himself reaching out for the quiescence his console was always able to provide. I’m feeling some autonomic reactions, he thought, hey, where’s all that happy ideational formaldehyde—hey, back home! I’m being prodded by a shrink, and watched by a circle of clods. Zap in some good signals, hey?

“Most of us are unisex,” Dr. Gay said, and his tone seemed to suggest admiration of Cy.

“I’m hetero,” a frog faced man said, “but I see bisex or unisex as better in some ways.”

“I feel hetero,” another man said, “but I prize oragenital techniques as long as the heterosex pairing is maintained.”

“You couldn’t tell the difference in the dark,” a woman said.

“I could smell the difference,” another said.

“Why do these encounters get onto sex so quickly?” a shapely girl whined. “Can’t we talk about religion or politics or atomic energy, or old movies, or something?” A fat Oriental woman sneezed and farted simultaneously, and this broke up the group in laughter. While the laughter continued and the camaraderie grew warm, Cy got his diagnostic code: expansive egocentrism, self-acclamation, megalomaniac disdain—the same old shit, he thought, and the same therapeutic recommendations: humility extract, self-objectification, docile wonderment. The hour was ending and the message from home was strong this time: “Cy, baby, friend, peer, favorite son—you have got to cool it. Put it on ice, don’t fight us. There’s no spoils, no rewards, no booty or bounty, no masculinity layers to have to peel off. Roll with the punch, baby, give in, let us run your show. Hey, have you ever felt warm custard bridging all your synapses? It’s like orgasm all over. Or you can have soma saturates instead—stay high and sheepish and sedated. I can make you feel any way I choose, but I don’t want to fight you. You are made of strong stuff, and you have had great imprinting. You could be Quad Chief—top dog—”

Cy still felt that his freedom of choice was something nobody could take from him, certainly not one machine, or one robot, or even one robot government. He was concentrating ferociously on being anarchic, and the group could see that he was near exploding. He jumped up and said, “Oh, lumpy clummocks of silver robot shit!” The black girl squealed and applauded, then was shocked by her console. Dr. Gay disconnected the group, and a provobot moved directly over Cy.

I wish I had a lunch box to throw at you, he thought, and got a mild electroshock. His anger flared, and he made a move at the provobot. It was a stupid thing to do and he knew it, but he had felt raw hypothalamic anger shoot past the cortical inhibition layers, unadulterated, unmonitored, and blatantly maladaptive. Now the provobot clapped a mildstun force-field around him. Goddam tin box, Cy thought, non-fucking alloy isomorph. The field increased to modstun. Cy was beginning to feel controlled, but still had a hot-metal fleck of rage in him. Back to the junkyard! he tried to yell, but could not. The provobot blotted him unconscious and dispatched him home.

He awoke to pinnacular genital itching, found himself locked in with a hearty, thrusting, obviously professional copulatress. His loins rared and locked and sneezed, and he clung to the top of the orgiastic feeling for several long pulsing seconds.

“You might wake me up before you go ripping off three days of my continence,” he said to his consolbot.

“That ranked at centile ninety-two on your orgasm index,” the console said. “Your mtv’s are fattened the better for it.”

“Right, right,” Cy said, trying to think through the delicious parasympathetic obliteration of his senses. The girl was dressing, moving languidly, smelling of hot bread and musk. Cy lunged at the girl, tackled her gently. He got astride her, and she parted her legs.

“You can’t be a robot,” he said, close to the gelatin lips. “What’s your name, who are you, I know you—”

“I’m better than real,” the girl purred, spider-clawing Cy’s back, biting his mouth softly, “and I’m every inch yours—every square inch, any orifice.” She was trying to fit herself to him, but Cy sat up on his haunches and pinned the girl’s biceps to the floor with his knees. She made a quick move to ingest his stalk, but he forced his hand under her chin.

“You’re a goddam hive of Mitsubishi transistor banks, aren’t you,” he said, “a pseudo-fucking bionic Venus!”

“No, baby,” the girl said, “I’m whatever you want me to be, whatever you need, whatever you want—” Cy felt a new surge of desire that caught high in his throat. He began to fondle the smooth body, then he felt the form give a nudge of physical strength that he knew could not be human. He began to chop at the face with his hands, screaming “Whore! Slut! Bitch! Split-tail strumpet!” The consolbot was strangely silent, but the monitoring was very precise. “Aseptic holobot!” Cy roared. “Latex and pneumoflex and synthetic bartholin!” He raised both hands in an axe-chop posture, and the girl dematerialized. “Unfair!” he shouted, feeling his vocal cords grate. “Bring her back, dammit—she needs to be lanced and scourged and slit!” A crawler skittered out, flipped Cy on his back, and held him in a force-field. He knew what was coming and braced himself for it. Suddenly he was screaming wavery vowel sounds and supravocal nonsense trumpetings, as if air horns were blaring from his voicebox. His voice seared the air like a factory whistle. He doubled up and rolled on the floor, bleating and spitting. Then it stopped, and he felt flaccid and sodden and cast in warm resin.