The Star Diaries (10 page)

Racking my brains in this manner, I walked along, until I noticed a portly robot seated on a bench and warming his old rivets in the sun. He had covered his head with a newspaper. On the first page I saw a poem that began with the words; “A degenereyt am I, fro Magnifica I hye”—what came next I don’t recall. Gradually we struck up a conversation. I introduced myself as a stranger from the neighboring town of Sadomasia. The old robot was exceedingly cordial. Almost at once he invited me to his home.

“Loo an wherfore sholdstow, worthy Sir, go knokkynge thee aboute tavernes in swiche wise and be obligen eek to biker with herbergeours and theyr sort? Pray coom with me. Vouchsaff the honour, my humble roof, hav the goodnesse, partake an gramercy. Blisse entereth, with your estemed persone, into my lowlysom abode.”

What could I do, I agreed of course, it even suited my purpose. My new host had his own house, on Third Street. He immediately showed me to my room.

“Fro the rode, hast douteles muchel dust yswalwed,” he said.

Again out came the oilcan, the silicone, and the rag. I knew already what he would say, robots being such uncomplicated creatures. And sure enough:

“Whanne ye arn a myte refresshened, pray take yow to the parloure,” said he, “and we shal pleyen som togedere pardee…”

He closed the door. I didn’t touch the oilcan or the silicone, but only examined the condition of my make-up in the mirror, blackened my teeth, and after some quarter of an hour decided to go downstairs, though I was not a little apprehensive about the prospect of this mysterious “playing,” when suddenly from the depths of the house a long and drawn-out rumbling reached my ears. This time however there was no escape. Down the steps I went, deafened by the racket, as though someone were hewing an iron stump to slivers. It came from the parlor. My host, stripped down to his iron torso, was with a curiously fashioned cleaver hacking away at a large doll that lay upon the table.

“Entre, goode my gest! Ye moote werken your hertes delyte upon yon carcase,” he said, leaving off his chopping when he saw me and pointing to another, somewhat smaller doll lying there on the floor. When I drew near, the thing sat up, opened its eyes, and began in a faint voice to say, over and over:

“Sire—I yam an innocent chylde—spare me—sire—I yam an innocent chylde—spare me.”

My host handed me an ax, similar to a halberd, but with a shorter shaft.

“Nowe then, noble gest, awey with care, awey with sorowe—hav to, and smyte smerte!”

“But I—I do no cure for children…” I feebly protested. He froze.

“No cure?” he repeated. “A pitee. Ye putten me in sore perplexitee, my frend. What shal you doon? I hav but litel oons—tis my wekenesse, ywis. Woldstow then trie a calf?”

And from out of the cupboard he brought a perfectly serviceable plastic calf, which, when squeezed, produced a timorous bleat. What could I do? Not wishing to unmask myself, I slashed away at the unfortunate puppet, tiring myself out completely in the process. Meanwhile my host had drawn and quartered both dolls, put aside his instrument, which he called his bone-buster, and asked if I were content. I assured him that I had not known such pleasure for quite some time.

And so began my cheerless life on Cercia. The next morning, after a breakfast that consisted of hot mineral oil, my host left for work, while his wife sawed at something furiously in the bedroom—a baby calf, I think, but couldn’t swear to it. Unable any longer to take the bleating, the screaming, the constant clamor, I went out and walked about the city. The way its inhabitants spent their time was fairly monotonous. Quartering, breaking on the wheel, burning, dissevering—at the center of town was an amusement park with pavilions, where one could buy the most ingenious instruments. After a few days of this I couldn’t even look at my own penknife, and only driven by hunger would I venture out beyond the city at dusk, to hide in the bushes and hurriedly cram down sardines and biscuits. Little wonder, that on such a diet I was always within a hair’s-breadth of the hiccups, which would have placed me in mortal danger. On the third day we went to the theater. They were putting on a play called “Carbazarius.” It was about a handsome young robot mercilessly persecuted by man—that is, by mucilids—who doused him with water, sprinkled sand in his oil, loosened his screws so that he kept falling down, etc. The audience clanged angrily. In the second act an emissary of the Computer appeared, the young robot was freed, and the third act dealt at length with the fate of man, which, as one might imagine, was not particularly pleasant.

Out of boredom I went poking through my host’s private library, but there was nothing of interest there: a few cheap reprints of the Marquis de Sade’s memoirs, beyond that nothing but pamphlets, items like
Howe to Recognys a Mucilid
, of which I memorized a couple of passages. “A mucilid,” the text began, “is veray softe, in consistency simular to a dumplynge… Its eyen are opake, watery, a trewe ymage of its soules abhomynacioun. The chekes are rubbry…” and so on, for nearly one hundred pages.

Saturday we were visited by the town notables—the master tinker of a tinsmith guild, a deputy municipal armorer, a senior guildsmech, two protocrats, one grand mason—unfortunately I was unable to figure out what sort of occupations these were, since the talk mainly was of art, the theater, and the wonderful all-functionality of Hys Inductivitee. The ladies gossiped a little. From them I learned that a certain Carpsidon, a notorious rake and scapegrace who in the upper circles led a life of reckless dissipation, had surrounded himself with a bevy of electrical bacchanettes, showering upon them the most expensive tubes and fuses imaginable. But my host did not seem particularly indignant when I mentioned this Carpsidon.

“Younge current muste hav its course,” he said good-humoredly. “Whanne he groweth rustee, and his resistoures begyn to fizzel, he shal clinke another tune…”

One female magnifican, who hardly ever dropped in on us, for some unknown reason took a shine to me and once, after downing Lord knows how many mugs of mineral oil, whispered:

“Thou art cute. Wilt have me? Let us hyen to my hous, ourselven ther for to up-hooken…”

I pretended that a sudden cathode discharge had made it impossible for me to hear her words.

My host and hostess generally got along well together, but once I was an involuntary witness to a quarrel; she shouted something about his going to scrap, to which he, the husband, made no reply.

We were also visited from time to time by a much sought-after master electrician who ran a clinic in the city; it was from him that I learned—for he did, though rarely, speak about his patients—that robots do on occasion go mad, and that the most serious of the persecution manias is the conviction that one is a man. Moreover—as I gathered from his words, though he never actually came out and said it—there had been a significant increase in the number of such cases of late.

I did not however relay these bits of information to Earth because, first, they seemed too trivial, and secondly, I wasn’t particularly eager to go marching back over the mountains to where I’d left my rocket, which held the transmitter. One fine morning, just as I was finishing my calf (my host supplied me with one each evening, convinced that nothing in the world could give me greater pleasure), the entire house reverberated to a violent banging at the gate. My fears, it turned out, were only too well justified. It was the police—that is, the halberdiers. They placed me under arrest and, without a single word, led me out to the street before the eyes of my petrified host and hostess. I was shackled, put into a van and driven off to prison, where a hostile crowd already stood at the entrance, hissing and booing. They locked me in a separate cell. When the door was slammed shut behind me, I sat on my metal mattress with a loud sigh. A sigh couldn’t hurt me now. For a while I tried to figure out just how many prisons it had been now, in which I’d sat in various regions of the Galaxy, but I kept losing count. Something was lying at the foot of the mattress. A pamphlet on the detection of mucilids—had it been put there maliciously, to mock me? I opened it without thinking. First I read about how the upper portion of the mucilid trunk moves in conjunction with the so-called phenomenon of breathing, and how one can determine whether the hand, extended in greeting, is
doughy,
and if from the facial opening there isn’t a
slight breeze.
When agitated—the passage concluded—the mucilid secretes a watery fluid, mainly through the forehead.

It was accurate enough. I was indeed secreting that watery fluid. On the face of it, cosmic exploration does seem a bit repetitious, viz. those abovementioned and perpetually recurring—as if they represented an unavoidable aspect of the enterprise—sojourns in jail, whether interstellar, planetary, or even nebular, but my situation had never been so dismal as now. Around noon a guard brought me a bowl of warmed-over mineral oil, in which there floated a few ball bearings. I asked for something more nourishing, inasmuch as I had already been unmasked, but he only clinked ironically and left without a word. I began to pound the door, demanding a lawyer. No one answered. Towards evening, when I had eaten the last crumb of a biscuit I’d discovered inside my armor, a key scraped in the lock and into the cell walked a squat automaton with a thick leather briefcase.

“Corsed be ye, mussilid!” he said, then added: “I am your defendour.”

“Do you always greet your clients in this manner?” I asked, taking a seat.

He also sat, clattering. He was hideous. The plates across his abdomen had worked completely loose.

“Mussilids, aye,” he said with conviction. “Tis only owt of a loyaltee to my professioun—nat to yow, ye shameles feend—that I exersyse my skills in your defens, creetur! Peraventure the punysshment that awaytethee kan be lightened to but a single desmantelynge.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I can’t be dismantled.”

“Ha!” he creaked. “That ys what you thynke! And nowe telle me what ye hav yhidde up your sleef, O yvel slyme!!”

“Your name?” I asked.

“Klaustron Fredrax,”

“Tell me, Klaustron Fredrax, what am I accused of?”

“Of mussiliditee,” he replied at once. “A capitall offence. And also: of the intent to werken tresoun upon us, of espiaillement on behaff of Gookum, of blasphemous conspiracye to liften a hond agayn Hiss Inductivitude—do that sufficeth, excressent muscilid? Confess you to thes crymes?”

“Are you really my lawyer?” I asked. “For you speak like a prosecutor or examining magistrate,”

“I am your defendour.”

“Good. I confess to none of the above crimes.”

“The sparkes they shal flye!” he roared.

Seeing the kind of defender they’d given me, I kept silent The next day I was brought out and interrogated. I admitted nothing, though the judge thundered even more terribly—if that was possible—than my lawyer of the day before. Now he would roar, now whisper, now burst into metallic laughter, and again calmly explain that sooner would he start to breathe than I escape magnifican justice.

At the next interrogation there was present some important dignitary, judging by the number of tubes that glowed inside him. Four more days went by. My biggest problem was food. I made do with the belt from my trousers, soaking it in the water they brought me once a day. The guard carried the pot at arm’s length, as if it were poison.

After a week the belt ran out, but fortunately I had on high laced boots of goatskin—their tongues were the very best thing I ate during my stay in the cell.

On the eighth day, at dawn, two guards ordered me to collect my things. I was placed inside a van and transported with an escort to the Iron Palace, the residence of the Computer. Up magnificent, rustproof stairs we went, through halls lined with cathode tubes, and I was ushered into an enormous, windowless room. The guards retired, leaving me alone. In the middle of the room was a black curtain that hung from ceiling to floor, its folds enclosing the center and arranged in the shape of a square.

“O wrecched mucilid!” boomed a voice, coming as if through pipes from an iron vault, “your final hour draws nigh. Speak, what is your pleasure: the flesh-shredder, the bone-buster, or the hydraulic punch?”

I was silent. The Computer clanged and rumbled, then cried:

“Hearken to me, mucilaginous monstrosity hitherward come at the behest of all gookumkind! Hearken to my mighty voice, thou puling coagulum, thou snivellous emulsion! In the magnificence of my illuminating currents I bestow upon thee mercy: if thou wilt join the ranks of my devoted minions, if thou with all thy heart and soul wouldst be a magnifican, I may possibly spare thee thy life.”

I said that this very thing had been my fondest dream for years. The Computer chuckled, pulsing with derision, and said:

“I know thou liest. But hear me, O maggot! Thou mayst continue thy glutinous existence only as an undercover magnifican-halberdier. Thy task will be all mucilids, spies, agents, traitors and such other viscous vermin as are sent from Gook—to unmask, expose, lay bare and brand with the white iron, for only through such loyal service canst thou hope to save thy sticky skin.”