Damon Knight: Orbit 17

“I . . . What!” I squawked, realization dawning. “You had no right! You filthy, lecherous, perverted thing!" I screamed, my voice growing shriller with each word.

“Let’s watch that anthropomorphism, if you please.” He leaned against a building and picked specks of dust from his chest.

I was so angry at him I was shaking. But I controlled myself as I repeated through my teeth, “You. Had. No. Right.”

And, “I had every right,” he snapped. “You know, you people really get me. You give a fellow psychic powers—and damn good ones, too, don’t get me wrong—and you put no restrictions on how he can use them—because he’s ‘only a machine’ after all— and then every time he uses them you start screaming about ‘privacy’ and ‘decency’ and ‘a man’s rights.’ Well, for Christ’s sake, what about my rights!” He had gotten quite loud; faces appeared at windowframes. He cried, “Ulp!” and jumped into the shadow with me. As well as I could judge from his bearing and from the silence he now assumed, he was genuinely embarrassed.

I regarded him coldly. “You might at least have asked permission, or something . . .”

“What, and have it ruined by your knowing there was a third party involved?”—this as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. “And besides, you’d only have said no.” A brief pause, in which I waited for him to go on. Then, “She is sorry that you left.” All the flippancy left his voice and bearing. “Do not be angry with me; I only do what I must. The force that drives your green body, gives it urgings and anger, impulse and imaginings—this force drives me also.”

Jiggory came up to us softly through the night, touched my arm, and smiled. The robot’s head pivoted toward him, and, “My name is Morundissimis,” he said. “I am psioid.”

Jiggory looked at him a moment, smiled again, and told him, “Take what you want.” He never noticed that his clothing was missing; or if he did, he did not care.

The Dane’s undervoice came to us from somewhere in the folds of the night, muttering of persistence, sounding relaxed and agitated and nonplussed all at once. Morundissimis said, “He would feel badly if I spied on his evening’s pleasures. I shall not.” When I started to protest that he had not afforded me this privilege, he merely said, “You know better than to mind. Soribus, though . ..” It seemed unlike him to want for words. “He thinks I am Melcanno. Please, introduce me to him. One grows so weary doing it one’s self all the time.”

Soribus, his voice percolating in his lungs and his face looking perplexed, stepped into our now badly crowded shadow and looked to me for explanation. “This is Morundissimis,” I said. “He is one of the psioids, and he has joined us.”

“Come to my rooms,” said Morundissimis, “and we will talk.”

We followed him through the streets of Starport, past old men and occasional cats, through shadows and under arches, accompanied by the sounds of bare feet and of ferric scraping. “How do you earn your living?” asked Soribus. “Are you a tramp?”

The robot’s head pivoted around to him. “I suppose that’s what most people would call me,” he said. “I live by playing poker with drunken old men. No,” he added, “it isn’t unlawful. I always identify myself; there’s no way of getting around that. But these men are intoxicated—enough so that they think they can outplay me anyway. Knowing what I am, knowing that I am aware of every card they hold and every thought they think, they still play poker with me.”

The Dane muttered something about “fools,” and the robot snapped, “No! No,” he went on in a milder, almost sentimental tone, “only human.”

He lived in a basement, three rooms spare and ill-furnished (what needs has a robot?): paintings, one on each wall (six in the sitting room), greens dominant; a golden sculpture, abstract, suggestive of birds, on a pedestal in a corner; tables in the centers of the two larger rooms; a huge stuffed pouf, of an uneasy brown shade, on which he perched; the walls were grey. The small room was a music room; from it came the sounds of low and mournful paranes, played on a lute.

Nine white cats moved liquidly through the rooms. As Morun-dissimis found his seat on the pouf, one of them leaped to his shoulder and sat there, imperious, staring at me. Three more of them found Jiggory, who’d crawled into a corner, and settled on and about him. (Having no pockets to carry them in, he had brought no pebbles.) Morundissimis pivoted his head at each of us in turn, thinking thoughts unguessable and, no doubt, positronic; and, by all that’s telepathic, the movements of the cat’s head matched his precisely, staring first at Soribus, who was examining a painting and talking of the primitive; then at me, staring back; and finally at Jiggory, who was stroking the fur of a cat and seemed delighted to find electricity in it.

“Tell me of yourselves,” the robot said. And before any of us could speak, he added, with his metallic tones mildly suggesting sadness, “No, no, I do not know ‘all about you.’ I am a telepath, not an empath: I can pick up the thoughts on the surface of your minds, but nothing deeper. I can know that someone is happy without understanding why. And of course,” he told us, “I can never really share in the happiness. I can derive a certain contentment from understanding what induced it. That is all.”

We all sat silent for a moment, and then he said, hesitantly, as if he were unaccustomed to talking of himself as he had been doing, “Please, now, give me .. . something to react to. Tell me of your dreams.”

As much as Soribus had shocked me when he had been first to act, Jiggory surprised me even more by speaking first. “Space! To be free in the great up-and-out!” he chimed. His three cats looked up at him, startled. “To be a trader—perhaps on the Taurus run. There is a song they sing on the Taurus run—a very old one, and I don’t know if the spacemen ever really sing it anymore. But I like it. It’s a bit flip and cynical, I guess, but it has in it all the things I feel about the tiredness of Earth and the beauty and aliveness of other parts of space.” He was quiet for a moment. Then, his voice forming an odd counterpoint to the music of the lute, he sang:

“You see, staying here for me means endless repetition, evermore conflict with Melcanno and his kind. Space ... space means to be free; to wear no clothes; to use my mind—and my emotions, for that matter—as I will.”

Jiggory had been talking quite rapidly. Now he looked up at us, to see if he had made a fool of himself. He decided from our silence that he had not, and he went on. “There may be more Forgotten Worlds to be found in the deeps of space. Oh, the things that I could learn from them! More than I ever could if I remain here behind.” He stopped, looked up at the robot as if in hope of having found, for the first time, someone who might understand. His voice turned low and whimsical and a bit sad. “And then there are the lost starships. I don’t guess I could find them; I don’t think anyone ever will, really. But if I could ... If I could know where they went and why they left us, long ago. What prospect could Earth offer me half as exciting as that?”

“In the deeps of space,” the Dane said suddenly, with a touch of whimsy in his voice. “In the heart of the Horsehead, obscured by dust and hydrogen, instinct with solitude, hangs the Abbey of Black St. Mark. There, unhampered by unwanted stimulus, there exists a colony of artists and philosophers; and it is there that I wish to go, to think and to write, to study, to ponder, to penetrate.”