Read Online Mockingbird by Walter Tevis - Free Book Online

never thought of asking him.”
    The robot came back, with our food and drinks. She took her plate of roast beef in one hand, her drink of Syn-gin in the other, and made herself comfortable on the sofa. She took a deep sip of the gin, swallowed it with a small shudder, and then took a slice of the meat with her fingers and ate it in a very natural way that was new to me—I had never seen anyone eat with his fingers before.
    “You know,” she said, “Simon was probably the one who made a beef eater out of me. He used to rustle cattle from the big automatic ranches, or sometimes just hunt wild ones.”
    I had never heard of such a thing. “Does ‘rustle’ mean ‘
steal’
?” I said.
    She nodded. “I suppose so.” She took another slice of beef from the plate and then set the plate on the sofa beside her. She held the meat in her fingers and took another sip from the drink in her hand. “Don’t ask about the Detectors,” she said. “Because there weren’t any.” Then she finished her drink in one swallow. “Simon said that in his whole life he had never seen a Detector or heard of anyone being detected.”
    It was terribly shocking, but it sounded true. I was not young and I had never seen one or known anyone who had been detected. But then I had never known anyone, before, to even risk it.
     
    We stopped talking for a while then, and she concentrated on finishing the meat on her plate. I just watched her eat, still quietly astonished by her, by how interesting she was—and how physically attractive—and how I myself had got her to come here to stay with me.
    I wondered about sex, of course, but I felt that would not happen for a while. I hoped it wouldn’t, since I am shyer than most people about it, and though she was powerfully attractive—a fact that seemed more evident than ever to me after I had finished my gin—I was too apprehensive now for anything of that kind.
    Then after what seemed a long while, she said, “Let me see your recorder again,” and I said, “Certainly,” and went to my desk to get it. Next to the recorder was sitting the imitation fruit that she had picked from the python cage; she had not seemed to notice it since she had come to the room.
    I left the fruit alone and took the recorder from my desk and gave it to her.
    She remembered how to work it. “Do you mind,” she said, “if I record something?”
    I told her to go ahead. Then I had the robot bring us each another Syn-gin and ice and I lay back in my bed and listened while she talked into the recorder.
    It took me a moment before I realized what she was doing. She spoke in a kind of slow, hypnotized way and said the words without any apparent feeling. What she was doing, I realized eventually, was saying her “life” as she had “memorized” it—repeating the words as she had learned to repeat them by practice:
    “I remember a chair by my bed. I remember a green dress that I wore to my classes. Everybody tried to dress differently from everybody else, to show our Individuality. But I think we all looked the same.
    “I was very smart in my classes, but I hated them.
    “I remember a girl named Sarah, with awful pimples on her face. She was the first to tell me about sex. She had done it already, while some other children watched. It sounded . . . wrong.
    “There was desert all around the place where we all lived, and Gila monsters sometimes came into the dormitories to sleep. The robots would pick them up and carry them out. I felt sorry for the big, stupid lizards. In the House of Reptiles they do not have any Gila monsters, but I think they should have. . . .”
    And on it went. At first I was interested, but after a while I became very sleepy. It had been a long day. And I was not used to drinking like that.
    Somewhere during her talking into the recorder I fell asleep.
    When I woke up this morning she was gone. At first I was alarmed to think she might have left. But I looked in the rooms along the hallway