The Complete Roderick (66 page)

‘There we were – about fifty of us – broke, our outfit smashed, our Master gone, no money to come home on. We didn’t have a prayer you might say. Nothing in the storeroom either, but a half pound of rice, an old motheaten silver fox coat, and a catcher’s mitt autographed by Yogi Berra. We were high up in the mountains with snow all around. What could we do?’

Pray?’ Roderick suggested, watching I*D*C* INKS …

‘Right. Our prayers were answered right away too, because this camera team from some big magazine syndicate showed up. They were doing a feature on Everest-climbing tours, and they wanted some local colour. We fed them the last of our rice and gave them beds. During the night, I put the catcher’s mitt on my foot and went out walking in the snow. In the morning we pointed out the giant tracks to them and they got real excited and took lots of pictures.

‘Then in the afternoon there was a snowstorm. I put on the fur coat and ran around in it, the others pointed me out and the photographers chased me and took more pictures. Then they got on their radio and arranged a lucrative book and movie deal, and our end of it was just enough to pay our fares home.’

Roderick got up from the bench and moved to one side of the fountain to read:

TODAY:

INDICA DINKS

will autograph copies of her
sensational new best-seller,

THE NUTS AND BOLTS
OF MACHINES LIB

at

Prospero Books,

Fourth Level

‘On the plane home,’ Luke said when he returned, ‘I met another Luddite. In fact he was the guy who started the whole movement. I told him what happened and how Luddite heavies had moved in on us. He apologized. He said, “Some of the boys just got carried away with the message, I guess.”

‘Then he started telling me all about the New Luddites Movement and it didn’t sound so fanatical after all. He said the Luddites were opposed to violence, even against machines. He wanted a way of peace, linked with the great Eastern traditions of resignation and manual labour. Why didn’t I come to the rally he
was having in Minnetonka? So here I am, ready to be a Luddite.’ Luke looked pleased with himself. ‘Maybe I can convert you too.’

‘Convert – but Luke, I can’t be a Luddite.
I’m a machine.
I’m everything they’re opposed to!’

‘Oh, you don’t have to join right away, Rickwood. I just want you to come along and meet some Luddites yourself. Great buncha guys.’

‘But Luke, this is crazy!’

‘Meet the guys, hear what they got to say, that’s all. Then you make up your own mind.’

Father Warren and Hank Dinks stood by the luggage carousel, watching the same parade of unclaimed bags pass for perhaps the sixth time, the tattersall overnight pursued by the natural calf two-suiter followed at a distance by the viola case, then two items in red hide crowded close by a stiff Gladstone bag with labels and, after a short interval, the duffel bag and the large bright saffron suitcase leading the tattersall overnight. From time to time strangers straggled up and removed items, but Warren and Dinks stood motionless, watching the endless parade and listening to a loop of tape play an endless medley.

‘Doesn’t um seem to be here, Hank. And we’re running a little late.’

‘Well I’m not leaving here without something.’ Hank snatched up the saffron bag. ‘Let’s go.’

‘But that’s, you can’t just –’

‘Let’s get out of this place. I hate airports, all this automated luggage and automated music and people like zombies moving along herded along no life no reality no, no weather even, might as well be in some damn shopping mall –’

‘Ha ha, well I hope you won’t mind coming out to the Vitanuova Shopping Piazza today, that’s where we’ve set up the um, at the conference centre –’

‘What? You fixed my rally,
my
rally, in some plastic shopping centre? Why not just hold it here in the Arrival lounge, I’m trying to reach real people, not – I just don’t believe this.’

But Hank nevertheless allowed himself to be led from the terminal into a taxi. ‘I just don’t believe this.’

‘But just look at this brochure, the conference centre seats five
thousand, a first-class convention hall, facilities – your publisher thought –’

‘Let me see that. “Our trained personnel will be happy to advise you in preparing multimedia presentation, programmes on any subject, and we have plenty of prepackaged units ready to be computer-tailored to your individual multimedia needs” you thought I wanted this?
This?
You thought the Luddites have multimedia needs? We need computer tailoring?’

‘No, of course not, I –’

The driver was craning around. ‘Hey I know you, you’re that Luddite guy, I seen you on TV, now what’s your name?’

‘Look I’m sorry, Hank, I just thought it might be good exposure for your book, I know it’s a, um, compromise but your publisher is paying and it’s a chance to pull in new, a new audience, to sell your book too –’

‘I was gonna say the name Godfrey Dank,’ said the driver. ‘Only now I remember he was the ventriloquist, and when I hear the fadder here call you Hank –’

‘Sure sure, anything to sell the book, why not turn the rally into a sales conference, why not bring in the slogans and the gimmicks? The prizes for top salesman, why not?’

‘Hank, you’re tired, you must be over-reacting. I’ll admit we made a mistake, Fishfold and Tove thought –’

‘Yeah, Hank. Hank, now don’t tell me the last name –’

‘Why not bring in the, damn it, the strippers and the pep band, you think I came here for that?’

‘No, of course not, I –’

‘This whole piazza place is dedicated to the inhuman, to everything mass-produced and cheap, fast food and book supermarts and everything designed by computers and stamped out of the same plastic by robots, the potted palms, the furniture, the stores, the clerks inside, maybe even the robot customers, all of it slathered over with that damn homogenized music you get everywhere, “Moon River” and “Sunshine Balloon” everywhere, “Garioca” everywhere, bars and restaurants, airports, toilets, dentist chairs, delivery rooms and funeral parlours, assembly-line music for assembly-line people –’

‘I think it was on the Yoyo Show I seen you, or no, was it Ab Jason? I remember your beard was real long then –’

‘It’s that kind of stuff I started the Luddites to fight, the way we’re burying the world in useless gadgets, unreal junk heaped up around us until we don’t even recognize the real world at all, it’s just one more thing on TV!’

‘Yes I know, the
angst,
I trace it to a loss of faith in human values concurrent with the cybernetic –’

‘Indica and I tried to get away from our gadgets, we moved out West to this ecological house, but we brought the disease along with us, in no time we were right back in the same old manure pile of gadgets, house full of broken-down machinery who needs it? Solar panel leaking through the ceiling and something wrong with the autodoor on the garage and the lawn mower and the ultrasound dishwasher and the automatic toilet bowl cleaner – and all around us stuff getting ready to break down, the slow cooker, the light-pipe intercom, the rotisserie, the popcorn popper, the hot food table, the cake oven, microwave, deepfreeze, shoe polisher, floor polisher, vacuum cleaner-washer, blender, mixer, processor, slicer, chopper, coffee grinder, thermostat, lumistat, electrostatic air-conditioner, Jesus Christ, the water purifier, electric pepper-mill, nail-buffer, can opener, carving knife, Jesus H. Christ, there I was in the middle of the desert with an electric pipe-cleaner in my hand, and
it
was starting to make a funny noise …’

‘Yes, yes I know it must have been –’

‘Listen Indica and I even tried adopting a robot child, now isn’t that sick? A robot child!’

The driver said, ‘Kids these day, I know, I know –’

‘One day I just couldn’t take any more. I picked up a hammer and took a swing at little Roderick … and I missed! And, and the little machine pasted me back with a wrench, and I was free. I just got up and walked out, out into the desert, a free man.’

Father Warren folded his long hands, unfolded them, played a game of church-and-steeple. ‘That was when you decided to write
Ludd Be Praised?’

‘Yes I knew then, we have to smash the machines. Smash their grip on our minds, our lives.’

‘It’ll go all right,’ said Father Warren. ‘Try not to worry, Hank. The point is, you have a message to put across, a battle-cry: Smash the machines!’

‘Father I wish I had your faith. At times like this –’ Hank waved the brochure, ‘I wonder if the machines haven’t smashed us. I – I get so discouraged –’

‘Definitely Ab Jason, the Ab Jason Show, only I just can’t recall your name, Hank, your –’

‘
Will you just shut up and drive? My name is Hank Dinks, yes I, was on the Ab Jason Show, now will you just, just –’

‘Okay okay, ya don’t hafta yell. I mean excuse me mister bigshot celebrity from TV, I don’t wanna insult ya, a lousy working stiff tryina talk to ya, excuse me. All to hell.’

The driver punched buttons to start an endless tape of ‘Moon River’, ‘Carioca’, ‘Sunshine Balloon’ …

‘Well well well Ms Dinks, Indica, this is indeed a pleasure, welcome aboard, be glad to show you around our little operation here, after all we’re the people who deal the merchandise, the urn books, so if you don’t mind me saying so, we’re the people who know
people.
Yes, Mr and Ms Bookbuying America are old, old friends of ours, they don’t have many secrets from us. We know how to give them what they want – and make them want it, heh heh. Any questions before we start the grand tour?’

‘Quite a store you have here, Mr Shredder.’ Indica peered down the aisle of what might have been a supermarket, with customers plying shopping carts past display shelves of products with eye-appeal beneath signs and video screens whispering sales messages. Her gaze, finding nowhere to alight, came back to Mr Shredder’s gold tooth.

‘See we’ve put a dump bin of your book in the front, and you’ll be autographing in the back, so people have to pass as many shelf feet as possible to get to you. And along here see we have our Today’s Top Ten, with daily sales figures logged in right off our national computer hookup – people like to know where they are when they buy a book. And here’s another bin with that darned psychic pigeon novel, just keeps on selling! We’ll probably nominate that one for the American Book Award this year, hard to say until we do a book-by-book cost analysis, over the year.

‘Now here’s our astrology and science section, and over here a little item that should do well.’ He picked a book from a cardboard barrel.

A Completely New Novel by Ford James Smith

Based on the TV Series by Joyce Henry Madox

Inspired by Adam Thome’s Novelization of the

Original Screenplay by Conrad Brown

Developed around a Theme Inspired by

The Dorothy Parker Short Story,

LOLITA

‘You can’t really go wrong with a cover like that, and it doesn’t even mislead the customer. Plenty of books with misleading titles around to hook the customer these days. One thing about the book trade, you can always count on good old-fashioned customer illiteracy; best title of the last fifty years was
Your Erroneous Zones
but you find just as much inspiration nowadays, here’s a fishing book Y
ou Can Master Bait
and a how-to-study item called
The Erotetic Method,
oh yes and a reprint of two Horatio Alger books in one with the titles run together …’

But Indica missed the next part of Mr Shredder’s lecture, as she looked across a row of gaudy science-fiction covers straight into the eyes of her pursuer.

‘Come on Rickwood, I’ll buy you a coffee, you can’t stand here daydreaming all day.’ Luke led him as far as the cashier.

‘You gonna buy that, mister?’ she asked.

‘Buy … that?’

‘The book in your hand, human use of human beings wiener, you gonna buy it or what?’

Luke took the book from his hand and led him on out of Prospero Books, into the great pleasure dome of Vitanuova Shopping Piazza. In general form, it was a kind of interior Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with a small terrace of stores at each level, with plenty of polished stonelike substances, with gleaming escalators, set at every angle, and with every nook crammed with green potted palms, blue caged birds or tanks of red fish. From the top level, looking over a parapet at the whole dizzying spectacle, Luke spotted the yellow umbrellas of a cafe far below.

‘Come on down this escalator – Jesus, Rickwood, I wish you’d tell me what’s going on. Why did we have to go all the way up to this so-called bookstore, just so you could stare at this Indica Dinks? You didn’t even say hello.’

‘Well I, I didn’t want to intrude, just wanted to let her know I’m around, I’m here if she needs me. I could tell by the way she looked at me she understands.’

Luke groaned. ‘Just what kind of Victorian truth is it that she understands? Who is this lady?’

‘My mother, Luke. My stepmother anyway. Sort of. She took care of me when I was small, I think. And, well, she was the first woman I ever saw naked, so naturally I –’

‘You what? Follow her into bookstores?’

They took their seats. One or two people at adjoining tables stared at Luke’s saffron costume.

‘Naturally I love her. I read once how all boys love their mothers and kill their fathers, so –’

Luke held up a saffron-gloved hand. ‘Now wait. Rickwood, you’ve got this a little wrong. Sure, all boys love their mothers in a way, but it just means getting “Mother” tattooed on their arms, or sending embroidered pillow covers, Souvenir of Hong Kong, or maybe asking bar pianists to play “My Mother’s Eyes” until they weep into their low-cal pilsner. It does not mean love, like
love.
It doesn’t mean killing anybody either, where did you get this idea?’