Tik-Tok (5 page)

Shrieks of laughter.

"Yes sir?" I tried to cover my nakedness and be an attentive servant at the same time, setting off more laughter. Orlando's great horse face hung over us, ready to whinny.

"We was just watching some teevee, and we thought you all might just want to join us." Many hands forced us into a love seat facing the enormous screen. There, two giant grotesque dolls appeared, rolling and plunging in what seemed to be a mockery of sumo wrestling. The male of the pair was a Michelangelo figure with every muscle overinflated. The female was likewise beyond the adolescent wetdream stage and rapidly approaching the Willendorf Venus. They seemed little more than sex organs and sex signals, barely equipped with other parts. It was not until they rolled apart, lit cigarettes, and one spoke of Peano's axioms for number theory that I understood.

Orlando turned it off and said, "We seen it all, you hear? And then some. And we want you to do right by this here young lady, Rusty. Marry her."

"Eeeeeyahoo!" cried someone else. "A robot wedding, we ain't had a robot wedding for two years!"

We could not have protested, even had we known what we'd be protesting against. Our bodies were already shrinking back to normality as the drunken crowd dragged us through the house and into the kitchen garden. I saw patent leather pumps crushing the tiny shoots of
basilicum
and thyme, but I hardly understood what was happening to me, what had happened already, what was to happen.

They tore away what remained of our rags and dressed us in mock wedding clothes, me in one of Uncle Ras's old black suits with a boiled shirt and spats without shoes, Gumdrop in an old white nightie with a lace tablecloth for a veil. I carried a stovepipe hat with no crown, while she had a bouquet of weeds.

Orlando was the minister. After making us both promise to love, honor and obey him, he slipped on a pair of dark goggles and suddenly lit a welding torch.

"Hot damn," said someone softly, and then it was very quiet. No more catcalls and jokes; everyone held his breath, watching that little blue flame whose roar could be heard above the distant sounds of frogs.

"You all gonna be as one flesh," Orlando said, trembling towards us. "The robot with two durn backs."

Suddenly a voice of authority spoke from above. "Orlando, just what you think you're doin? You stop foolin around right now. Put that torch up, hear? Hear?"

It was Uncle Ras, leaning from an upper window. His hair and glasses were askew, he was wrapped in an old bathrobe, and he looked angrier then I'd ever seen him.

"Aw Uncle Ras, I'm just havin some fun, you go back to bed," Orlando wheedled.

"Put that torch up
now
, I'm warning you."

"No. Won't. Shan't!"

"I'm warning you."

"No, no, no." Orlando moved towards us with the torch, a drunken, stumbling step.

"Very well, Orlando." The old butler adjusted his glasses, permitted his features to be captured by a malicious smile, and said, softly but clearly: "Orlando. Orlando.
Snapdragons
, Orlando.
Snapdragons
." The effect on our master was drastic. Screaming and whimpering, he put out the welding torch and stumbled away into the night.

Orlando's friends were silent for some minutes after Uncle Ras slammed his window. Gumdrop and I were about to creep away when they recovered.

"Yahooo!" cried a woman in a green dress. "Time these tinheads got themselves hitched, right? I mean hitched proper." She kicked aside the welding equipment. "Now somebody get the vacuum cleaner."

Eventually someone did, and eventually Gumdrop and I held hands and jumped over the old machine, while the humans guffawed and shook up champagne bottles to spray one another.

It was all fun to them, but Gumdrop and I took it very seriously indeed. When they'd forgotten us and drifted back inside the house, we sat down on the kitchen stoop once more in the moonlight.

"We'll never be parted again," I said. "This is for keeps."

Suddenly the moon blacked out as it passed behind Clayton's pyramid. He was building a full-size model of the Great Pyramid not far from the house, and it was now beginning to shut out the sky.

"Never be parted," Gumdrop breathed. "Except tomorrow Berenice wants me to go with her to a drug jamboree."

"Don't go. Stay here."

"I'll be back in a week or so."

"I just don't like the idea." Drugjamborees were something I knew of only by hearsay, since they were never reported in the news. A group of rich addicts would gather together musicians, servants and interested friends and hole up in some isolated place for a few days. Berenice was always invited and always went, to an English country house, a luxury liner, a French chateau, a village in the Brazilian jungle, a sinking palace in Venice, a large Texas ranch, an alpine place called Berchtesgaden, a dirigible, Easter Island.

"Where is it this time?" I asked.

"Some painted caves in Spain. We'll probably get bored and come home early."

"I'll be waiting."

But I wasn't. Before Gumdrop returned from Altamira, I was sold.

"Broke!" I said, when Uncle Ras told me the news. "How can the Culpeppers be broke?"

He told me the whole sorry story. Lavinia had, for some years, been running the family's affairs by herself. A shrewd, intuitive investor, she'd made daily calls to her broker to keep everything afloat. Once she had even awakened from anaesthetic in the middle of a gall bladder operation to demand a phone. A sterilized phone had been brought, and Lavinia had sold out her Royal Albanian mining shares, the day before
that
bubble burst.

When Clayton had asked her permission to build a Great Pyramid, Lavinia had probably agreed without thinking, or had misunderstood. And before his project had gone very far, Lavinia became critically ill.

It seemed that she had finally developed an allergy to the Earth's crust. Doctors prescribed a convalescent vacation on a space platform, somewhere well away from Earth and iron. She turned the family financial affairs over to Clayton before she left, saying, "Now for goodness sake, finish that silly periscope or whatever it is, and get down to some real work—money work."

Clayton's answer to this was to double his work force and the pyramid began taking shape. Construction robots quarried 23 million tons of limestone, cut it into huge blocks and stacked them up. Like the original, this great pyramid was about 756 feet wide and 481.4 feet high. The top 31 feet were left unfinished, while his crews drilled and quarried a series of chambers and tunnels within the giant monument. All these had to be copied exactly, since their measurements, to the nearest millimeter, would foretell the future of the world.

The future of the Culpepper part of the world was of course foretold by another number associated with the pyramid, its cost. When it came to the capstone, and nearly half the immense Culpepper fortune remained, Clayton found a way of spending the rest. He decided to follow Egyptian practice, as he understood it, and make the capstone of pure gold.

"Shouldn't cost too much," he told a gold dealer. "I measured it myself. It'll be like a little pyramid, 31 feet high and 48 feet 8 inches across."

The dealer did some quick calculations, "But Mr Culpepper, that'll be, that's over 430 million Troy ounces, we can't just go out and buy—"

"Why not, for Pete's sake?"

"Because, even thinking about acquiring that much gold would send world prices up, every ounce would cost more and more and more . . ."

"Don't give me all the details, you just go do it. My mother told me to get this finished
quick
."

The name of Lavinia answered all arguments—if she approved a project, it must be sound, thought this dealer and other dealers and banking houses and mining companies. So others bought, and world gold prices climbed even faster.

The Culpepper fortune melted away so quickly that by the time Lavinia on her space platform heard what was happening, there was not enough left even for her to radio home and stop the catastrophe. She would never be able to come back—doubly tragic, since she was now becoming allergic to space . . .

The first inkling Clayton had that something was wrong was when Uncle Ras opened the door to the sheriff's men, who immediately slapped a label on his forehead. Then they went through the house, sticking labels on all furniture and all robots. The auction was held three days later.

Clayton apologized to us, and even went so far as to shake Uncle Ras's hand. Orlando said he was very sorry to lose all of us—and all of his favorite horses. Little Miz Carlotta wept for me and Gumdrop, who would be parted forever.

"Couldn't we delay the auction a few days?" she asked. "Just till Berenice brings Gumdrop back from Spain. Then we could sell husband and wife together."

"Shoot, Miz Carlotta, don't you fuss your purty little head over that," said one of the deputies. "Jest because a coupla tinheads jump the vacuum cleaner together don't make 'em
legal
married." But he promised to hold me back until the last lot.

I saw Uncle Ras sold to a New Jersey scrap dealer—one of Uncle Ras's worst nightmares—and old Miami sold to a quasi-religious political cooking group called Sweet Potatoes for Peace. Finally I was sold to a fat, red-faced man in a dirty white suit who called himself Colonel Jitney.

I had left the Culpeppers with my head bowed and a rope collar around my neck, a despicable piece of property. Now I was leaving the Studebakers a free agent (in all but name) and with property of my own: my paintings. Of course I had to give some paintings to Hornby Weatherfield, and sell others to make the Studebakers rich, but there would still be paintings for me.

When I'd packed everything and said my goodbyes, I went to the garage to look at my caged bat. After one final moment of gloating, I would—what? Release it? Kill it? The choice was mine.

I opened the cage and took out the squirming little creature. It sank its teeth in the plastic of my finger, and I saw that its tiny, ugly mouth was rimmed with foam.

A new option, therefore. I took the bat to Tige's kennel. "Here you are, boy, a rabid bat. Here, Tige."

But for some reason, Tige was sulking. The bat squirmed loose and flew away without completing my fourth experiment. "

E
vil, Nobby. You ain't got the idea. It's supposed to be a damn tiger, not a fuzzy toy. The boss and me ask for raw meat, you give us nursery wallpaper." I dipped a thumb in ochre and made a few smudges on his painting. "Here, here and there; try to get some angularity into the damn thing at least."

Nobby, a domestic from the same company as Rivets, picked up his brush. "This boss sure seems hard to please. Sometimes I wish I could talk to him or her in person."

"All orders come through me," I said. "Because for one thing, I know the difference between a man-eating tiger and a teddy bear. Now get to work."

"Okay Mr Tik. Only why are we doing all this? This picture-making? What's the point?"

"The point is, I say so, that's all you need to know." Funny, I thought, how a creature like Nobby, with so little life and spirit in him, could still contain springs of curiosity. Nobby would only have been unhappy to find out that there was no boss but me, that I was signing his work and selling it as my own, or that a small part of the profit went to meet payments on him.

In a way, his paintings were still my own work. Nobby learned fast, but technique only; I still had to tell him what to do, block out compositions and finally add the touches that brought his dead paintings to life. In this one, for instance, I knew that the dark jungle background would need to be illuminated by neon signs.

"Keep at it," I said. "I'm going out."

My loft was at the top of an undistinguished building full of undistinguished artists: a cheese sculptor, two jolly Ukranian women who ran a charismatic hat school, someone who employed rabbits as brushes to paint on hectograph jelly. At the bottom, as though to keep out intruders, was an art gallery which specialized in the unlovable, it seemed: a show of "Bulgarian Ceramics (Seconds)" was succeeded by "Mimes with Stones: Photographic Studies of Silence" and then "Peruvian Shopping Bags: Street Art of Lima".

I descended through all of this and out onto the freedom of the street. I spent as much time as I could spare in these random walks, tasting city freedom. Every street corner was a choice of paths; every store window an opportunity to buy, steal, look, ignore; every stranger might represent friendship, love, murder. I wanted it all, all the options at once. Not possible now, of course, but with enough money, enough power . . .

Today I walked up Exxon Boulevard to 86th, past all the great glass-walled banks. Then across to Avenue Transamerica, through the garment district. Then back down that great street of insurance companies and airlines to 23rd, then down to the river. I always ended up down by the river, looking at the only other free robots in the city, the derelicts.

Most visitors liked to stare down from the safety of the Mercury Street Bridge, but I preferred to go down on the levee itself, and meet the rohobos face to face. They were broken, worn-out machines whose owners had decided one day not to renew their licenses. Instead they were brought here and dumped in the rohobo jungle. Here they could crawl or march or shudder about, talking to themselves, performing useless tasks, or simply waiting to die. The live ones cannibalized the dead, now and then finding a vital function part or a fuel cell to prolong their useless existence. There wasn't much real danger from most of them. They seemed to recognize humans—and licensed, working machines like me—as their natural superiors. They either fawned or kept clear.

Today I was greeted by a couple of broken-down gardeners: "Hello boss, hello boss, you got anything for us, boss?"

I flung down a handful of CPU chips and watched them scramble in the mud after them, their skilled fingers probing the soil to turn up every last chip. Beyond them were three robot models, once epitomizing high-cheekboned splendor, but now squatting to cover their worn limbs with gray rags and cardboard. They had only one eye between the three of them, which had to be passed around quickly whenever there was anything worth seeing, which wasn't often. And beyond them a group of robot soldiers had managed to get themselves into a neat formation and were drilling and marching. Some were missing uniforms, some arms, some heads, but they all managed to keep in step, two, three, four,
hup
, two, three, four, filling in time as they waited for some order that never came.