Mockingbird Read Free

for themselves anymore.”
    “I am being trained to run corporations,” Spofforth said.
    Arthur looked at him sharply, and then he began to laugh. “By emptying ashtrays?” he said. “
Shit
!” He began sweeping again, pushing the big broom vigorously down the Permoplastic floor. “Didn’t know you could fool a goddamn robot. And a Make Nine at that.”
    Spofforth stood there holding the ashtrays for a minute, looking at him.
No one is fooling me
, he thought.
I have my life to live
.
     
    It was a June night about a week after the conversation with Arthur that Spofforth was walking by the Audio-Visual Building under the moonlight and heard a rustling noise from behind the dense bushes that grew untended by the building. There was the groan of a male voice, and then more rustling.
    Spofforth stopped and listened. Something was moving, more quietly now. He turned, walked a few steps until he was standing up against a tall bush and then pushed it quietly aside. And when, suddenly, he saw what was happening on the other side, he froze and just stood there, staring.
    On her back, behind the bush, lay the girl, with her dress pulled up beyond her navel. A pinkish, naked, chubby young man was kneeling astride her; Spofforth could see a cluster of brown moles on the pink skin between his shoulder blades. He could see the girl’s pubic hair under the man’s thigh—curly hair, jet black against her pure white legs and white buttocks, as black as the hair on her head, as black as the little collar of the red coat on which she lay.
    She saw him, and her face went grim with disgust. She spoke to him, for the first and last time ever. “Get out of here, robot,” she said. “Fucking robot. Leave us alone.”
    Spofforth, a hand clamped on bis cloned heart, turned and walked away. It was there he learned a thing he was to know for the rest of his long life; he did not really want to live. He had been cheated—horribly cheated—of a real, human life; something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him.
     
    He saw the girl again a few times. She avoided his eyes completely. Not out of shame, he knew, since there was no shame for them in sex. “Quick sex is best” was what they were taught, and they believed it and practiced it.
    He was relieved to be transferred from the dormitory to a more responsible job deciding the distribution patterns of synthetic dairy products, in Akron. From there he was moved to the production of small automobiles, presiding over the making of the last few thousand private cars ever to be driven by a once car-infatuated population. When that ended he became Director of the Corporation that manufactured thought buses, the sturdy eight-passenger vehicles made for an ever-dwindling human population. Then he became Director of Population Control, being transferred to New York for this, working in an office on top of a thirty-two-story building, watching over the aging computers that kept a daily census and adjusted human fertility rates accordingly. It was a tiresome job, presiding over equipment that was forever breaking down, trying to find ways of repairing computers that no human any longer knew how to repair and that no robots had been programmed to understand. Eventually he was given another job: Dean of Faculties at New York University. The computer that had served to direct that institution had ceased functioning; it became Spofforth’s job, as a Make Nine, to replace it and to make the mostly minor choices that running a university required.
    There had been, he came to find out, a hundred Make Nines cloned, and animated with copies of the same original human mind. He was the last, and special adjustments were made in the synapses of his own particular metallic brain to prevent what had happened to the others of his series: they had been committing suicide. Some had fused their brains into black shapelessness with high-voltage welding equipment; some had swallowed