Mockingbird. Part 12

Gone With the Wind resembles some of the films I know. It is, I think, a made-up story. It is about some silly people in big houses, and about a war. I don't think I will ever finish it, since it is very long.

Many of the other books make no sense at all to me. Still, they seem to fit into some larger, only dimly clear, pattern.

What I like most is the strange sensation I get in the little hairs at the back of my neck when I read certain sentences. And, oddly enough, there are sentences that are often quite unclear to me, or that make me sad. I still remember this one from my days in New York: My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

I will stop writing now, and go back to reading. My life is very strange.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-NINE.

I read continuously, and take no sopors and smoke no marijuana. I read until I can stay awake no longer and fall in bed and lie there with my mind whirling and with faces and people and ideas from the past crowding and confusing me until, exhausted, I fall asleep.

And I am learning new words. Thirty or forty a day.

Long before robots and Privacy, mankind had a violent and astonishing history. I hardly know how to think or feel about some of the dead people I have read of, and of the great events. There is the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and the Great Flood of Fire and World War III and the Denver Incident. I was taught as a child that all things before the Second Age were violent and destructive because of a failure to respect individual rights; but it was never more specific than that. We had never developed a sense of history as such; all we knew, if we ever thought about it, was that there had been others before us and that we were better than they. But no one was ever encouraged tothink about anything outside of himself. "Don't ask; relax."

I am amazed to think of the number of people who must have screamed and died on battlefields in order to fulfill the ambitions of presidents and emperors. Or of the aggregation into the hands of some large groups of people, like the United States of America, great reserves of wealth and power, denied to most others.

And yet, despite all this, there seemed to have been good and kind men and women. And many of them happy.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-TWO.

The back part of Holy Bible is about Jesus Christ. Some sentences in it have been underlined by a former reader.

Jesus Christ died violently when he was still young, but before he died he said and did a great many striking things. He cured many sick people and talked strangely to many others. Some of the underlined sayings resemble what I was taught in my Piety cla.s.ses. "The kingdom of G.o.d is within you," for example, sounds much like our being taught to seek fulfillment only inwardly, through drugs and Privacy. But others of his sayings are quite different. "Ye must love one another" is one of these. Another one that is very strong is: "I am the way and the truth and the life." And another: "Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you rest."

If someone should come to me and say, "I am the way and the truth and the life," I would want with all my strength to believe him. I want those things: a way, the truth, and life.

As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of G.o.d, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With the Wind, or a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.

Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a "great man." I am not certain I like the idea of "great men"; it makes me uncomfortable. "Great men" often have had very b.l.o.o.d.y plans for mankind.

I think my writing is improving. I know more words, and the making of sentences comes more easily.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-SEVEN.

I have read all of my books, except for Gone With the Wind and The Art of the Dance, and I want more. Five nights ago the doors were unlocked again and Belasco and I went back to the abandoned building and searched it thoroughly, but we found no more books.

I must have more to read! When I think of all those books in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the library in New York I hunger to be back there.

In New York I saw some films that showed prison escapes. And in those prisons the guards were human and vigilant, while here ours are only moron robots.

But there are these metal bracelets that cannot be deactivated for more than a half day at a time. And how would I get to New York if I escaped?

In the Backpacking book there is a map of what is called the Eastern Seaboard; North and South Carolina are on this map, and so is New York. If I walked along the beach, keeping the ocean on my right, I would come to New York. But I have no idea how far it is.

Cooking Sh.o.r.e Dinners tells about finding clams and other things to eat on beaches. I could feed myself that way, if I escaped.

And I could copy this journal, in smaller writing, on the thin paper I found with the box of books and carry it with me in my pocket. But I could not carry all the books.

And there is no way to remove the bracelets. Unless there is something that would cut them.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-EIGHT.

In the shoe factory there is a very large machine that cuts the sheets of plastic that the shoes are made from. It has a shining blade of adamant steel that cuts through about twenty sheets of tough plastic at a single stroke. There is a robot guard by the machine, and no human worker is supposed to go near it. But I have noticed that at times the guard seems dormant; he may be a nearly senile robot that has been a.s.signed to the simple task of standing by a machine.

If, when I saw him looking dormant, I went to the machine and held my hands in exactly the right spot, the knife might be able to cut my bracelets.

If I made a mistake it would cut my hands off. Or it might not be able to cut through the metal and the blade would catch on it and twist my arms out of their sockets.

It is too frightening. I will stop thinking about it.

DAY ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY.

The Causes of Population Decline says this interesting thing about the number of people in the world: The reduction of the planet's inhabitants has been accounted for in a diverse and conflicting number of ways by contemporary demography. The most persuasive of these accounts usually suggest one or more of the following factors: 1. fears of overpopulation 2. the perfection of sterilization techniques 3. the disappearance of the family 4. the widespread concern with "inner" experiences 5. a loss of interest in children 6. a widespread desire to avoid responsibilities The book then a.n.a.lyzes each of these things.

But nowhere does it speak of a possibility that there might be no children at all. And that, I think, is the way the world has come to be. I do not think there are any more children.

After we all die, there may be no others.

I do not know whether that is bad or good.

Yet I think it would be in many ways a good thing to be the father of a child, and to have Mary Lou be the mother. And I would like to live with her, and for us to be a family-despite the great risks to my Individuality.

What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?

DAY ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR.

Today the Protein 4 plants were harvested. When we went out in the field to work there were two huge yellow machines already there, noisily moving down the rows like giant thought buses, throwing up clouds of dust and scooping up the ripened plants twenty or thirty at a time and feeding them into hoppers, where I supposed they would be pulverized, to be made into soybars and synthetic protein flakes.

We kept our distance from the field because of the smell, which was far worse even than usual, and watched the machines in silence for a while.

Finally someone spoke. It was Belasco, and he said grimly, "There goes another season's work, boys."

n.o.body said anything else. Another season's work. I looked around and behind me, looking at things closely for the first time in weeks. The trees on the hills beyond the prison buildings had all lost their leaves. The air was cold on my skin. I felt a tingling, thinking of the feeling of my skin, looking up at the pale blueness of the sky. At the edge of the hills a great crowd of birds were flying, wheeling, and turning in unison.

And I decided then that I must escape from this prison.

Spofforth Her face was not pretty, but it held his frightened gaze as it always did. She stood on the wet mud at the edge of the pond, as tall as he, her white feet not even sinking into it, her face puzzled and her arms tense, shaking slightly beneath her long robe as she held the thing out to him. What it was he could never tell, no matter how hard he tried to see it across the four or five feet that separated them. He stared and stared at what she was holding out to him and then, sadly, defeated, looked down. The mud was over his own white ankles, and he could not move. Nor, he felt, could she. He looked up again at her, still holding out the thing that would not focus for his eyes, and he tried to speak to her, to ask her what she wanted to give him, but he could not speak. He became more frightened. And he awoke.

Deep, deep he had known it was a dream. He always seemed to know. And afterward, sitting on the edge of his narrow bed in the apartment, he thought of the woman in the dream, as he always did afterward, and then he thought of the girl with the black hair and the red coat. He had never, in his long, long life, dreamt of her; it was always the woman in the robe-his secondhand dream, taken by accident from a life he had not lived and knew almost nothing of.

He had seen a few real women who looked something like her. Mary Borne was one of these, with her bright, strong eyes and her solid way of standing, although she was much stronger-looking, much more poised than the woman in the dream.

For years he had felt that if he could find a woman like her and live with that woman he might find a key to the other life that the consciousness he bore had lived-the life of whoever had been copied to make his brain. And now he was doing it. But he had found no key.

The dream, which happened every eight or ten days, was always disturbing, and he never became entirely accustomed to the fright he felt during it; but he accepted it as a part of his life. Sometimes there were other dreams, with subject matter from his own memory. And there were others that used subject matter he did not recognize-some involving the catching of fish, and some a battered upright piano.

He got off the bed and walked heavily to the window and looked out at the early morning. Distant and clear in the pale dawn it stood, higher than anything else outside: the Empire State Building, the high grave marker for the city of New York.

Bentley I had no trouble finding Belasco's cell. I had watched him go there to get Biff for me, and I found it easily. When I pushed open the unlocked door and went in, Belasco was lying on his bunk, petting an orange cat. His TV was not on. There were three other cats asleep in a sort of pile in the corner. Photographs of naked women covered one wall, and on the others were pictures of trees and fields and of the ocean.

There was an armchair covered in pale green cloth, and a floor lamp-both of them gotten in some illegal way, I'm certain. Had Belasco known how to read he would have had a better place for it than I.

I did not sit down. I was too agitated.

When Belasco looked up at me he seemed surprised. "What you doing out of your cell, Bentley?" he said.

"They were open again." I ignored Mandatory Politeness and looked directly at his face. "I wanted to see you."

He sat up on his bed and gently dropped the cat to the floor. It stretched and then joined the others in the corner. "You look worried," he said.

I kept looking at him. "I'm frightened. I have decided to escape."

He looked at me, started to say something, and then didn't. Finally he said, "How?"

"That big knife blade in the shoe factory. I think I can cut these off with it." I held my bracelets out toward him.

He shook his head and whistled softly. "Jesus! What if you miss?"

"I have to leave this place. Do you want to go with me?"

He looked at me for a long while. Then he said, "No." He pushed himself further upright in his bed. "Being on the outside doesn't mean that much to me. Not anymore. And I wouldn't have the guts to hold my hands under that knife." He began fumbling in his shirt pocket for a marijuana cigarette. "Are you sure you have?"

I let my breath out with a sigh, and then sat in the armchair and stared for a while at the manacles on my wrists. They were a little looser than when they were new; I had become leaner and harder from the work in the fields. "I don't know. I won't know until I try."

He lighted the joint and nodded. "If you do get out, what'll you eat? This place is far from any civilization."

"I can find clams along the beach. And maybe fields with things growing that I can eat. . . ."

"Come on, Bentley. You can't live that way. What if you don't find any clams? And this is winter. You'd better wait till spring."

I looked at him. What he said made sense. But I knew, too, that I could not wait until spring. "No," I said. "I'll leave tomorrow."

He shook his head at me. "Okay. Okay." Then he got out of the bed, leaned down, pulled back the bedcover, and reached under. He slid out a large cardboard box and opened it. Inside were packages of cookies and bread, and soybars, all wrapped in clear plastic. "Take what you can carry of this."

"I don't want to . . ."

"Take it," he said. "I can get more." And then, "You'll need something to carry it with." He thought for a moment and then went to the door of his cell and shouted, "La.r.s.en! Come here!" and a moment later a short man whom I recognized from the Protein 4 fields came walking up. "La.r.s.en," Belasco said, "I need a backpack."

La.r.s.en looked at him a minute. "That's a lot of work," he said. "A lot of st.i.tchin'. And you gotta get the canvas, and tubes for the frame. . ."

"You've already got one in your cell, the one you made out of a pair of pants. I saw it when we had that poker game, that time when all the robots were malfunctioning."

"h.e.l.l," La.r.s.en said. "I can't let you have that one. That's for my escape."

"Horses.h.i.t," Belasco said. "You ain't going nowhere. That poker game was three or four yellows ago. And how are you going to get your bracelets off? With your teeth?"

"I could use a file . . ."

"That's horses.h.i.t too," Belasco said. "They may run this prison dumb, but they ain't that dumb. There ain't no hand tools hard enough to cut them bracelets, and you know it."

"Then how are you getting out?"

"Not me. Bentley here." Belasco reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. "He's gonna try using the big knife in the shoe factory."

La.r.s.en stared at me. "That's a d.a.m.n fool thing to do."

"It's his business, La.r.s.en," Belasco said. "Can you let him have the backpack?"

La.r.s.en thought a moment. Then he said, "What do I get for it?"

"Two of my pictures from the wall. Any two you pick."

La.r.s.en looked at him narrowly. "And a cat?"

Belasco frowned. "s.h.i.t." Then, "Okay. The black one."

"The orange," La.r.s.en said.

Belasco shook his head wearily. "Get the backpack," he said.

And he got it, and Belasco filled it with food for me and showed me how I could carry Biff in it if I needed to.

Without sopors, I did not sleep that night. I did not want the aftereffects of sopors when I went to the shoe factory in the morning. I was tormented by thoughts of what I planned to do: not only to risk grave injury under the knife but to face a life of bare survival, in winter, with no knowledge of the places I would be traveling through and with no training for the difficulties except for one thin book about sh.o.r.e dinners. Nothing in my education- my stupid, life-hating education-had prepared me for what I was about to do.

A part of me kept saying that I should wait. Wait until spring, wait until they told me my sentence was over. Life in prison wasn't really any worse than life in a Thinker Dormitory, and if I learned to be like Belasco I could make an easy life for myself here. There really was almost no discipline, once you learned how to avoid being beaten by the guards, just by keeping an eye out for them. Obviously, once the device of the metal bracelets had been invented, everything about running a prison had gone slack, as with so much else. There was plenty of dope, and I was used to the food and the labor. And there was TV, and Biff, my cat...

But that was only part of me. There was another, deeper part that said, "You must leave this place." And I knew, knew even to my terror, that I had to listen to that voice.

My old programming would say, "When in doubt, forget it." But I had to quiet that voice, too. Because it was wrong. If I was to continue to live a life that was worth the trouble of living it, I had to leave.

Whenever I would see that huge knife in my imagination, or the cold and empty beaches, I would think of Mary Lou throwing the rock into the python's cage. It made the night alone in my cell bearable.

In the morning I wore the backpack to breakfast and ate my protein flakes and black bread while wearing it. None of the guards even seemed to notice.

When I finished my breakfast I looked up to see Belasco walking over toward my little table. We were not supposed to speak at meals, but he said, "Here, Bentley. Eat this on the way to the factory," and he handed me his chunk of bread-which was far larger than mine had been. A guard shouted, "Invasion of Privacy!" from across the room, but I ignored him.

"Thanks," I said. Then I held out my hand, as men did in films. "Goodbye, Belasco," I said.

He understood the gesture, and took my hand firmly, looking me in the face. "Goodbye, Bentley," he said. "I think you're doing the right thing."

I nodded, squeezed his hand hard, and then turned and walked away.

When I filed into the doorway with the rest of my shift the knife was already in operation. I stopped and let the others walk in past me and stared at it for a minute. It looked overwhelming to me and my stomach seemed to clamp tight inside me and my hands began to tremble, from just looking at it.

It was about the length of a man's leg, and broader. The metal was adamant steel, silvery gray, with a curved edge that was so sharp it hardly made any sound as it cleaved like a guillotine through twenty layers of thick polymeric shoe material. The material was fed to it on a conveyor belt, and held in position on a kind of anvil under the blade by a set of metal hands; they would hold a stack of material under the blade and the blade would drop from a height of five feet and shear noiselessly into the stack and then pull back up again. I could see light glitter on the edge of the blade when it was at its high point, and I thought of what would happen if it touched my wrists. And how could I be certain where to place them? And if I succeeded with one arm, I still would have to do the other. It was impossible. Standing there, I felt it wash over me like a wave: I'll bleed to death. The blood will let from my wrists like a fountain . . .

And then I said aloud, "So what? I have nothing to lose."