“It’s okay,” Jake said. “I’m not that hungry. I’ll get something from my own unit a little later.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, stoutly refusing to be offended. “If you change your mind, you know where we are.”

  When Doreen closed the door behind her, Jake felt a perverse urge to lock it, but he wasn’t even sure that the door had a locking function, and if it had, he didn’t know how to operate it. There was so much to learn, and so little time to learn it. His room was no more than four meters square, and yet there was so much to be done within its boundaries and barriers that even an eternal youth like Sam couldn’t be expected to exhaust its possibilities in the space of a single lifetime.

  For a man like me, Jake thought, it’s just a cell on Death Row. No use making myself too much at home. He opened a cupboard and took out one of his old paperback books—a book printed before he’d been born—and sat down on the bed to read. He gave up before he reached the third page, wondering what on earth he was trying to prove. I’ll be chipping flints next, he thought.

  Outside the window, a brontosaurus whose enormous body was half-submerged in swamp water was patiently and methodically chewing its way through the lush foliage of a huge gymnosperm. Jake tried to catch its eye, but he couldn’t. He could look out easily enough, but there was no way the brontosaurus could have looked in, even if it had been real.

  Jake didn’t warn Sam and Doreen that he’d bought the tamarin, so they were somewhat disconcerted when it ar-rived at the door. He hadn’t consciously planned to lay down a challenge to their insistence that he could treat their home as his own, but he was interested to see their reactions nevertheless.

  “It’s okay,” he assured them. “It’s engineered for maxi-mum tidiness and programmed for social responsibility. It won’t make any dirty messes, and it won’t press any buttons it isn’t supposed to.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Sam said, although he evidently did feel uneasy on both scores. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. Why do you think you need it?

  I wouldn’t have thought cute and fluffy was quite your style.”

  “It’s just a sophisticated biochip that does the talking,” Doreen chimed in. “It’s exactly like talking to a conversational program on the net. It’s not really an animal— just an organic robot.”

  “It won’t give you any trouble,” Jake insisted, dog-gedly. “It’ll live in my room. It won’t bother you at all.”

  This turned out not to be entirely true. The pet’s programming had to be open-ended to allow it to adapt to its owner’s conversational habits, and it did tend to wander if Jake wasn’t paying attention. If it wasn’t authentically curious, it gave a very good impression, and its restless fingers did occasionally push buttons that would have been better unpushed. It caused no disasters, but it did produce a measure of exasperating inconvenience.

  Perhaps it was all Sam’s fault for making too much of an effort in the first couple of weeks; he only had to speak to the creature a few times to be included in its rapidly evolving response-system as an honorary co-owner, and thus to be pestered whenever he was available for pester-ing and Jake was otherwise occupied. Even though Doreen never said much more to the creature than “Go away!” she too was awarded a special place in its scheme of things, and its constant craven apologies to her quickly became as much of an annoyance as jeers and insults would have been.

  Jake could not have liked the creature half as much had it not been so subtly and insistently wayward.

  In the early days of their relationship, the tamarin’s conversation left much to be desired. It had a memory chip which carried a potential vocabulary far larger than Jake’s, but it was programmed to limit its competence to match his, so he had to spend time telling it elaborate stories using as many words as he could squeeze in. For a time, this educative process was enjoyable. It injected new purpose into such activities as looking out of the window and watching the TV news, because Jake was able—indeed, required—to deliver a running commen-tary on everything that could be seen, so that the tamarin could be familiarized with his descriptive powers and his attitudes. After a while, however, the whole thing began to seem like a chore, and the increasingly prolific contributions made by the pet came to seem like mockingly convoluted echoes of his own thought processes.

  “The trouble with you, little monkey,” Jake said to the tamarin, as they looked out of the window on to a busy street in the market quarter of some tropical city, watching the crowds go by, “is that you’re too good to be true.

  You’re the whole goddam world in a nutshell: bland, obliging, and fundamentally mechanical.”

  “The trouble with you, Jake,” the tamarin replied, airily, “is that you don’t know what you want from me. You change your mind from one day to the next, or one minute to the next! I could have had a nice kid for an owner, you know—a lovely little girl, full of hope and excitement and curiosity. You think this is an easy ride for me? Believe me, it isn’t.”

  “There you go again,” Jake said. “I call you bland, you immediately start compensating. Too goddam obliging.”

  On the other side of the window, a young street-arab made an obscene gesture. He was looking straight at Jake and the monkey, but Jake knew that it was just a perfor-mance—something he probably did in front of every spy-eye he passed, on the off chance that someone might be watching. Jake wished that there was some way that the kid could have known for sure that he was there, so that the gesture could have been personal instead of merely ritual.

  “Why did he do that?” the tamarin asked, almost as if it had read Jake’s secret wish. “It’s not as if he can see us.”

  “That program of yours is too clever by half,” Jake complained. “It’s better at reading people than people are. Heaven help us if your kind ever get the all clear to run for office! On the other hand, you’ll probably run the world a lot better than we do, at least until you master the Machiavellian arts of greed and corruption. He did that because he’s saying up yours! to the entire First World— because he knows that the things we have today, he’ll have tomorrow. He knows that his time is coming, and that he’ll have all the time he needs to get what he wants. The treatment’s too easy and too cheap, you see. It can’t be hoarded or controlled. It’s spreading like an epidemic, and the only people who can’t benefit from it are the people who are already old, already damaged. He knows that he won’t always be on the outside being looked at from within, no matter how many rich folks hereabouts are screaming blue murder about population problems and social utility.”

  ‘There are a lot of old people out there,” the tamarin observed, scanning the street scene with his little, dark eyes. “A lot of old people. And a lot of people so very nearly old that they can’t wait long.”

  “That’s right,” Jake said. “But they’re going about their business in a quiet and orderly way, because they don’t dare to do otherwise. All their fear and resentment is held in check, because this is one cause it wouldn’t make sense to risk death for. They all believe that their time is com-ing, if only they’ll be patient, and they’re right. All except the ones who’ve already missed out.”

  “I’ll die too,” the tamarin. said. “Artificial flesh is designed to be mortal.”

  “I know,” Jake said. “I read the specs.”

  “Is that why you bought me? Because I’m in the same boat as you, and Sam and Doreen aren’t? Is that why you needed me?”

  “I wish I knew,” Jake said, tiredly. “I wish I knew.”

  The tamarin was designed for indoor life; it didn’t need space or exercise.

  Even so, Jake began to take it out for “walks.” It clung to his shoulder, ducking low to get under the wide brim of his hat; when he talked to it out of the corner of his mouth, its replies were discreetly murmur-ous. He took it to places where there were trees, so that he could watch it playing in the branches. It was quite an athlete. Sometimes, he wished it would take the oppor-tunity to make a dash for freedom, but it never did. It had its inbuilt limitations.

  On occasion, when the sun was at full blast in a cloud-less sky and the temperature was over a hundred in the shade, the tamarin complained that it would rather stay home, but Jake was never quite sure whether it was protesting on its own behalf or being protective of him.

  “The species on which you’re modeled used to live way down south,” he told it, on one occasion. “I never could understand why natural selection handed out fur coats to tropical monkeys, but it can’t have been an accident. By rights, you ought to like the hot weather.”

  “The species on which you‘re modeled evolved on the plains of equatorial Africa,” the tamarin pointed out, “but that didn’t stop you from inventing air-conditioning.”

  “The monkey’s right,” Sam told him, as he stepped out the door.

  “Neither of you is fitted by nature for wandering around under the noonday sun. It’s not as if you were mad dogs or Englishmen!”

  “I wear a hat,” Jake retorted, pausing in order to make an argument of it. “Anyway, I’m not primed for skin can-cer. My weak spot is the heart. You know that. Congenital weakness emphasized by wear and tear. That’s the way I’ll be going.”

  “I wish you ‘d talk some sense into him,” Sam said to the tamarin. “He never listens to me.”

  “He always listens,” the tamarin riposted, loyally. “He just doesn’t take any notice. He’s old enough to make up his own mind.”

  “He sounds more like you than you do,” Sam said, wearily—to Jake, not the monkey.

  “Better buy one for Doreen,” Jake suggested. “Pretty soon it’d have everything she’s got and good looks too.” But that was uncalled-for, and they both knew it. He cleared out without further delay.

  He didn’t enjoy the outing. Sam and the monkey were right, as usual; it was far too hot outdoors for anything that moved. Even the trees seemed to be wilting under the sun’s relentless assault. The tamarin put on its usual acrobatic display, with all possible zest, but it wasn’t re-ally having fun. It was only pretending. Everything it did—everything it was or might become—was mere pre-tense.

  On the way back to the house, they passed thirty-three beggars—four more than the previous record count—but they weren’t menaced in any way whatsoever. There was nothing in the dark and silent eyes that watched them go by but reproach … and perhaps, in the younger ones, a little pity.

  “So much for trying to make the migrants stay home by promising to give full-aid priority to long-established populations,” Jake said. “They don’t believe us anymore. Time was when the word of our politicians was our bond.”

  “Would that be Lincoln you’re thinking of, or George Washington?” the tamarin inquired.

  “Saint Thomas More,” Jake answered.

  “He wasn’t an American.”

  “In spirit he was.”

  “In spirit,” the tamarin told him, “so are they. For that matter, so am I.”

  “I was myself, once,” Jake was quick to add, always desirous of claiming the last word. “But that was a long time ago.” The tamarin politely conceded the game. It always did, but Jake never felt that he’d won. Time after time after time, come blazing heat or pouring rain, he claimed the last line—but he never felt that he’d proved anything.

  They’d been walking for a long time, but it wasn’t until they got to the head of the sliproad leading up to the highway that the tamarin finally asked him, wearily, where they were going this time!

  “I don’t know,” Jake replied, truthfully. “I thought we might hitch a ride someplace. Anyplace would do.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?” the tamarin asked.

  “No,” Jake said. “If it was wise. I wouldn’t want to do it.”

  “I can understand that,” the tamarin assured him, “but isn’t it just a little too haphazard? You might count it a bonus that Sam won’t like it, but he really will be worried if you go missing and turn up three days later in New York or Vancouver.”

  “Nobody drives from Brownsville to Vancouver,” was all Jake said in reply. “We’ll be lucky to get as far as Corpus Christi.” He had already noted that at least nine out of every ten vehicles that passed them were on automatic, and that the few manual drivers tended to stare at his outstretched thumb as if he were out of his mind.

  “There’s nothing out there, Jake,” the monkey said, very softly, as it plucked at the lobe of his ear with its tiny hand. “You know that. We’ve looked at the whole goddam world through your window, and a thousand places more. We know there’s no rainbow’s end, don’t we?”

  “That kind of window is just a wall with delusions of grandeur,” Jake said, knowing that he was repeating himself. “You can look, but you can’t touch. The road is real. It goes to someplace real.”

  “What is it you want to touch, Jake?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll know when I see it, maybe I won’t. Either way, I don’t want to sit around the rest of my life just watching. Just for once, I want to go somewhere. Just for once, I want to be somewhere. Anywhere.

  Nowhere. You can go home if you want to. You can spill the beans to Sam if you want to.”

  That was unfair, not least because it was untrue. The tamarin couldn’t go home, unless he gave it a definite order properly confirmed—but Jake wasn’t about to compromise the perversity of his mood by being fair.

  The car that finally skidded to a halt thirty meters beyond them was just about the oldest model Jake had seen all day. So was the driver, who must have been seventy-five if he were a day. The driver didn’t ask Jake where he was headed; as soon as the door was closed, he put his foot right down and roared off.

  The car’s dashboard was an absolute mess, with circuit boards exposed here, there, and everywhere. The top of the windshield, where all the virtual displays should have been, was quite blank.

  “I guess you like tinkering,” Jake said. “My name’s Jake, by the way.”

  “Never ride in a car that can be hijacked by remote control,” the other advised him. “I’m Conor O’Callaghan. That’s Irish. Family goes right back to the great potato famine. Much better class of immigrant in those days. Not like now. Country’s going to hell.”

  The vehicle jagged from lane to lane in the same stac-cato style as his speech, out to the fastest track and then halfway in again. Most of the traffic on the highway consisted of disciplined convoys of robotrucks, which Conor seemed to take a profound delight in disrupting. A forlorn red light was blinking in the center of the steering column like a stranded bottle-top.

  “I believe that’s a police warning, Mr. O’Callaghan,” the tamarin remarked. It was the first time the creature had ever displayed knowledge that Jake didn’t have, and it was that rather than the red light itself that belatedly alerted Jake to the fact that all was not well.

  “That monkey of yours a fink?” the driver asked. “If it is, I’d be obliged if it’d get the hell out before the sirens start screeching.”

  “This is a stolen car?” Jake said, wonderingly.

  “Well hell, a man wouldn’t want to do all that to his own car, would he?” the driver said, presumably meaning the exposed circuit boards and the various kinds of sabotage that had doubtless been worked upon them.

  “Don’t worry—she might be old, but she’s got all the safety features. I don’t think I could kill us if I were to throw her off a bridge. Course, that thing on your shoulder ain’t belted in, so it might bounce around a bit when we cut to the chase.”

  In the distance, Jake heard the wailing of sirens. They seemed to be getting closer with remarkable rapidity.

  “They’re fast,” Conor conceded, as if he’d caught the thought crossing Jake’s mind, “but they ain’t allowed to be reckless. Gettin’ on our tail is one thing—catchin’ us is somethin’ else!” Again the car began to zigzag from lane to lane. Conor recklessly hurled the vehicle at the wheels of mammoth robotrucks, which dutifully swerved and altered pace with lumbering grace. The juggernauts always managed to avoid the car, if only by a seeming thumb’s-width. Jake remembered, though, that nearly one in ten of the vehicles that had passed him on the sliproad had had human drivers. He wondered how many of those drivers had failed to switch to automatic after filtering into the highway traffic, and how many had been messing around with their own circuit boards.

  “Do you do this often?” he inquired, astonished by the mildness of his tone. He was afraid, but the fear didn’t seem to hurt. Thus far, it was just a kind of excitement.

  “Not as often as I’d like,” Conor confessed.

  “Do you always pick up hitchhikers when you do?”

  “Don’t usually see any. Wouldn’t pick up a Third Worlder, of course, or anyone under the age of irresponsi-bility, but I figured you might be grateful. Am I wrong?”

  Jake wasn’t sure what the answer to that question was, but he was saved from the necessity of offering one by the nervous tamarin, which leapt down onto the dashboard to stare through the windshield with evident alarm.

  “Central Traffic Control is slowing the traffic down,” the monkey said, in a decidedly officious tone. “It would be dangerous in the extreme to maintain our present speed.”

  “Naw,” said the driver. “It gets even more exciting when they turn the road into an obstacle course!”

  Jake saw that the rest of the traffic was indeed being brought to a gradual standstill. Soon theirs would be the only vehicle on the move, except for the pursuing police vehicles. The robotrucks were drawing inward by careful degrees, leaving the outermost lanes of the highway empty, but Conor didn’t immediately move out there; he continued weaving in and out of the middle lanes, cutting across other vehicles with reckless abandon. They continued to avoid him with marvelous agility and patience.

 

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