John Sladek: The Complete Roderick

‘Music of the spheres,’ said one of the old hands, lurching against the rail.

‘Careful! Maybe we’d all better go inside, boys and girls?’

And gradually they all lost interest and went back to the booze, all but Roderick. He stood leaning on the rail, noticing that the rain had stopped.

He saw no point in jumping. On the other hand, he saw no point in going back inside. Here was as good as anywhere. He looked down at the wet lozenges of the city. He looked up at the rolling clouds. There was nothing to steer by, nothing permanent.

He lifted up his arms, as though he were a Pharisee at prayer or else someone expecting a heavy burden to drop from the sky.

A dark shadow fell across Moxon’s office. He looked up to see a black disc inching up across his window, eclipsing it. ‘What the devil—?’ He pressed buttons and demanded an explanation.

‘It must be the dish antenna,’ Ann’s voice explained. ‘For the Moxon Music System. And corporate communications.’

‘As if I didn’t have too many lines of communication already.’

‘Your wife’s downstairs with the sculptor, Fough Braun. She wants to know if you’re coming down for lunch’

‘Tell her no, I… no, let me talk to her… Francine, look I’m sorry, I’ll have to grab a sandwich at my desk, Kratt left this place in a hell of a mess. He was, I don’t know, running everything like a one-man band, nothing delegated, nobody knows how to do anything… Fine, fine, look if you want a sculpture on the terrace down there, go ahead, only tell Jough to take it easy? We don’t want a big pile of wrecked cars embalmed in epoxy or anything like that… no of course I’m not, I’m just trying to remind you of the image we’re trying to… hang on, I’ve got… Swann?… Francine, I can’t talk now, you just, you just go ahead… Swann, you there? Listen, I’ve been going over the figures for this Autosaunas operation, I notice that before the medical lawsuits started hitting the fan we had a very healthy return on our investment there, I was just exploring the idea of, of when all the dust settles, of trying again… No, well, it’s just that sex with robots does seem like the logical, urn, extension of our leisure group activities, a natural follow-through on our… Yes, see what you can do, some kind of product warning, maybe safety checks, see what you can work out with Hare, he’s the product development man, you’ll be meeting him this afternoon at our… Ann, did you set up that meeting with Dr Hare? Okay yes, and… what choreographer? Oh him, Hatlo, no listen I can’t talk now but set up a meeting I want him to talk to our Personnel people about working out some Japanese-style calisthenics for the whole company, five minutes every morning… is Hare in yet? See if you can get him for me while I… Who? Hello, Dr D’Eath, what can I… He is? What kind of recovery time are we talking about there, six months, ten years?… Well yes, of course, in that case a nursing home would I agree be the best, and in fact we own a chain of clinics combined with pleasure ranches ourselves, Datajoy the name is, my secretary can make all the arrangements and you can transfer Mr Kratt right away… Andy, talk to the doctor will you? Ann, take a memo for the press office, “At his own request the former president and founder of the KUR family of companies, Mr — give him some first name — Kratt, is being transferred from the University Hospital to one of KUR’s own Datajoy clinic-ranches, where the accent is on health combined with pleasure. ‘Having devoted my whole life to giving pleasure to people,’ said the — make up some age — year-old tycoon, ‘I thought it was time to get a little pleasure myself — and where better than at a Datajoy pleasure ranch? Where else can you get all the benefits of a clinic without a clinical environment?’” And so on, just have them take the rest out of our Datajoy brochures. Oh and get me Swann again, I want to go over this problem with this lunatic church, The Church of Plastic Jesus, I want to… it is? Now? On what channel?’ He fumbled for buttons which brought a huge screen into view on the opposite wall, and filled it with a succession of living images: a cartoon germ, an armpit, a swimming pool filled with money. Moxon couldn’t help pausing briefly at the image of a man slumped over a table, apparently dead but still handcuffed to two policemen:

‘… don’t know what, but it looks like Culpa was eating, yes you can see it there now, the carton marked pizza-flavoured yoghurt fudge. Well I guess that’s it, folks, the doctor’s looking at it now. As you may know, the FDA has been trying to track down the last few remaining cartons of this product, after they discovered that one of the flavouring ingredients…’

He switched at last to a street scene. A woman with a microphone stood before a store window in the slummy end of town. She stood to one side of the name on the window:

‘Hi, good afternoon and welcome to Round ’n’ About. I’m Foy Grayson, and the reason I’m here at this very unusual church, is to attend a very unusual meeting. Believe it or not, folks, the bride and groom are both robots! Let’s go inside.’

The Reverend Luke Draeger and Sister Ida didn’t mind the TV station setting up this ‘robot wedding’ gimmick; they welcomed any chance to get their message across to anyone, before it was too late . It was Ida who had, when they’d first started their religion, had the idea of a message, to be delivered to the world before it was too late. If they weren’t going to do that, she’d said, what was the point of starting a store-front church at all? Luke it was who insisted on the ambiguous notice in the window: people might be welcome, but then again they might not. So far the effect had been to keep out everyone but the occasional bold drunk who was not welcome.

Aside from the TV crew, the human congregation was limited to Luke, and a kind young woman named Dora. Dora worked at the Meat Advice Bureau next door. Since no one in the neighbourhood ever sought any meat advice, she had time to drop in, listen to the sermons, help out with the singing, and put something in the collection.

Dora always had to sit at the back. All the other seats were permanently taken by the non-human congregation, nearly a hundred battered effigies:

First came a handful of store window mannequins, their hair and smiles identifying them as belonging to an earlier generation of dummies (during a previous Presidential administration). They were clothed now only in ragged coats and curtains of no use to people, but they sat in gracefully relaxed poses, and seemed to be enjoying themselves. Next to them were a few ‘robots’ built by children out of cardboard boxes and tinfoil, with noses made of burnt-out light bulbs and bottlecap eyes. Next came a plastic medical skeleton, only a few bones missing, and next, a shattered pinball machine. Its broken legs were arranged to look casually crossed, and its back plate lighted to show a grinning ballplayer. There were toy robots of battered metal or cracked plastic, run by clockwork or batteries to shoot sparks or mutter incoherent greetings. There was a ventriloquist’s dummy with a split wooden smile, a dental dummy with removable teeth, a tailor’s dummy and even a tackling dummy (legs only) made into a composite figure which also included a jack-in-the box. There were other composites, scarecrows and guys made up of stuffed clothes topped with various heads — pillows with printed faces, painted balloons, Hallowe’en masks of Frankenstein and Mickey Mouse, a plaster death-mask without its nose, an imitation marble bust, a lampshade depicting the face of a dead country singer. There were broken items from carnivals and arcades: a laughing mechanical clown, an automatic fortune-teller in a glass case, Brazos Billy the (retired) gunfighter, and I-Speak-Your-Weight. There were large plaster Kewpies, and waxwork replicas of a few mass murderers (from the days when mass murder was unusual).