Mockingbird by Walter Tevis Page B

furnished—lavender rug, bright floral prints on the steel walls, and gentle lighting—and I was really quite proud of it. I would have liked a window; but it was in a basement—a fifth sub-basement, in fact—and far too deep in the ground for that.
    “How do you like it?” I said.
    She got up and straightened a picture of some flowers. “It’s a little like a Chicago whorehouse,” she said. “But I like it.”
    I did not understand that. “What’s a Chicago whorehouse?” I said.
    She looked at me and smiled. “I don’t know. It’s something my father used to say.”
    “Your
father
?” I said. “You had a father?”
    “Sort of. When I ran away from the dormitory a very old man took care of me. Out in the desert. His name was Simon, and whenever he saw anything that was very bright—like a sunset—he would say, ‘Just like a Chicago whorehouse.’”
    She had been looking at the picture she had straightened. Then she turned her back on it and went to her seat on the sofa. “I could use a drink,” she said.
    “Liquor doesn’t make you sick?”
    “Not Syn-gin,” she said. “Not if I don’t drink much of it.”
    “All right,” I said. “I think I can get some.” I pressed the button on my desk for the servo robot and when he came, almost immediately, I told him to bring us two glasses of Syn-gin and ice.
    As he turned to leave she said, “Wait a minute, robot,” and then looked at me. “All right if I get something to eat? I’m awfully sick of the zoo’s sandwiches.”
    “Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of it.” I was a bit put off by the way she seemed to be taking over, but I was pleased at the same time to be her host—especially since I had a great deal of unused credit on my NYU card. “The cafeteria machinery makes good monkey bacon and tomato sandwiches.”
    She frowned. “I never could eat monkey bacon,” she said. “My father used to think monkey food was disgusting. How about roast beef? But not a sandwich.”
    I turned to the robot. “Can you get a plate of sliced roast beef?”
    “Yeah,” the robot said. “Sure.”
    “Good,” I said, “and bring me some radishes and lettuce with my drink.”
    The robot left, and for a minute there was an awkward silence in the room. I was surprised at that, and actually a bit pleased in a way. Sometimes Mary Lou seemed to have no sensitivity at all.
    I broke the silence. “You ran away from the dormitory?”
    “Around puberty time. I’ve run away from a lot of places.” I had never even thought that anyone might
think
of running away from a dormitory. No, that wasn’t true. I remembered, as a child, hearing boys boast of how they were going to “run away,” because they had been treated unfairly by a robot-teacher or something. But no one had ever done it. Except Mary Lou, it seemed.
    “And you weren’t detected?”
    “At first I was sure I would be.” She leaned back on the couch, relaxing. “I was terribly scared. I had walked for half a day down an old road and then found an empty old town in the desert. But the Detectors never came.” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “That was when I began to realize that the Detectors didn’t really work. And that you didn’t have to obey robots.”
    I winced, remembering a thing that had happened to me in the dormitory, when a robot had put me in Coventry.
    “You know,” she said, “they teach you that robots are made to serve humans. But the way they say that word ‘serve’ it sounds like ‘control.’ My father—Simon—called it ‘politician talk.’”
    “Politician talk?”
    “Some special way of lying,” she said. “Simon was very old when I met him. He died only a couple of yellows after I moved in with him, and his teeth were all gone, and he could barely hear. He said a lot of things that he had learned from
his
father—or somebody—and that were very old.”
    “Was he trained in a dormitory?”
    “I don’t know. I