Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns Read online

  WHERE ROBOT MICE AND ROBOT MEN

  RUN ROUND IN ROBOT TOWNS

  Ray Bradbury

  Copyright

  HarperVoyager

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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  Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB

  www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977

  Cover design by Mike Topping.

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

  Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539956

  Version: 2014–07–18

  Dedication

  Again for Marguerite/Maggie—because of thirty-two years

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Byzantium I Come Not From

  What I Do Is Me—For That I Came

  I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives

  We March Back to Olympus

  Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth

  Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See!

  I Have a Brother, Mostly Dead

  Why Viking Lander, Why the Planet Mars?

  We Have Our Arts so We Won’t Die of Truth

  I Die, so Dies the World

  My Love, She Weeps at Many Things

  Death as a Conversation Piece

  Remembrance II

  J.C.—Summer '28

  The Young Galileo Speaks

  The Beast Atop the Building, the Tiger on the Stairs

  Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me About Crying in the Shower?

  Somewhere a Band Is Playing

  The Nefertiti – Tut Express

  Telephone Friends, in Far Places

  Death for Dinner, Doom for Lunch

  Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar

  Lo, the Ghost of Our Least Favorite Uncle

  That Son of Richard III

  A Poem with a Note: All England Empty, the People Flown

  The Syncopated Hunchbacked Man

  If Man Is Dead, Then God Is Slain

  Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral for the First Time

  Their Names in Dust, Their Dates in Grass

  Long Thoughts on Best-Sellers by Worst People

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  * * *

  They asked me where I’d choose to run, which favored? Ups? or Downs?

  Where robot mice and men, I said, run round in robot towns.

  But is that wise? for tin’s a fool and iron has no thought!

  Computer mice can find me facts and teach me what I’m not.

  But robot all inhuman is, all’s sin with cog and mesh.

  Not if we teach the good stuff in, so it can teach our flesh.

  There’s nothing wrong with metal-men that better dreams can’t chalk.

  I’d find me robot-Plato’s cave if he lived on my block;

  And though his eyes electric were, computerized his tongue,

  Is that more wrong than Berlioz on LPs harped and sung?

  So much electric fills our lives, some bad, some good, some ill.

  But look! there Shaw and Shakespeare dance on Channel 7’s sill:

  A gift of hearts and minds and eyes to see our dark/light face,

  To weigh and balance halos/blights that half-destroy our race;

  To midget make our rocket-ships, and squeeze grand Kong down small

  Then Giants grow from Shavian seed to taunt, provoke us all.

  As man himself a mixture is, rambunctious paradox,

  So we must teach our mad machines: stand tall, pull up your socks!

  Come run with me, wild children/men, half dires and dooms, half clowns.

  Pace robot mice, race robot men, win-lose in robot towns.

  Byzantium I Come Not From

  * * *

  Byzantium

  I come not from

  But from another time and place

  Whose race is simple, tried and true;

  As boy

  I dropped me forth in Illinois,

  A name with neither love nor grace

  Was Waukegan. There I came from

  And not, good friends, Byzantium.

  And yet in looking back I see

  From topmost part of farthest tree

  A land as bright, beloved and blue

  As any Yeats found to be true.

  The house I lived in, hewn of gold

  And on the highest market sold

  Was dandelion-minted, made

  By spendthrift bees in bee-loud glade.

  And then of course our finest wine

  Came forth from that same dandelion,

  While dandelion was my hair

  As bright as all the summer air;

  I dipped in rainbarrels for my eyes

  And cherries stained my lips, my cries,

  My shouts of purest exaltation:

  Byzantium? No. That Indian nation

  Which made of Indian girls and boys

  Spelled forth itself as Illinois.

  Yet all the Indian bees did hum:

  Byzantium.

  Byzantium.

  So we grew up with mythic dead

  To spoon upon midwestern bread

  And spread old gods’ bright marmalade

  To slake in peanut-butter shade.

  Pretending there beneath our sky

  That it was Aphrodite’s thigh;

  Pretending, too, that Zeus was ours

  And Thor fell down in thundershowers.

  While by the porch-rail calm and bold

  His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold

  My grandfather a myth indeed

  Did all of Plato supersede;

  While Grandmama in rocking-chair

  Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care,

  Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright

  To winter us on summer night.

  And uncles gathered with their smokes

  Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,

  And aunts as wise as Delphic maids

  Dispensed prophetic lemonades

  To boys knelt there as acolytes

  On Grecian porch on s
ummer nights.

  Then went to bed there to repent

  The evils of the innocent

  The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears

  Said, through the nights and through the years

  Not Illinois nor Waukegan

  But blither sky and blither sun;

  Though mediocre all our Fates

  And Mayor not as bright as Yeats

  Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?

  Byzantium.

  Byzantium.

  What I Do Is Me—For That I Came

  for Gerard Manley Hopkins

  * * *

  What I do is me—for that I came.

  What I do is me!

  For that I came into the world!

  So said Gerard;

  So said that gentle Manley Hopkins.

  In his poetry and prose he saw the Fates that chose

  Him in genetics, then set him free to find his way

  Among the sly electric printings in his blood.

  God thumbprints thee! he said.

  Within your hour of birth

  He touches hand to brow, He whorls and softly stamps

  The ridges and the symbols of His soul above your eyes!

  But in that selfsame hour, full born and shouting

  Shocked pronouncements of one’s birth,

  In mirrored gaze of midwife, mother, doctor

  See that Thumbprint fade and fall away in flesh

  So, lost, erased, you seek a lifetime’s days for it

  And dig deep to find the sweet instructions there

  Put by when God first circuited and printed thee to life:

  “Go hence! do this! do that! do yet another thing!

  This self is yours! Be it!”

  And what is that?! you cry at hearthing breast,

  Is there no rest? No, only journeying to be yourself.

  And even as the Birthmark vanishes, in seashell ear

  Now fading to a sigh, His last words send you in the world:

  “Not mother, father, grandfather are you.

  Be not another. Be the self I signed you in your blood.

  I swarm your flesh with you. Seek that.

  And, finding, be what no one else can be.

  I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other’s Fate,

  For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair

  No country far enough to hide your loss.

  I circumnavigate each cell in you

  Your merest molecule is right and true.

  Look there for destinies indelible and fine

  And rare.

  Ten thousand futures share your blood each instant;

  Each drop of blood a cloned electric twin of you.

  In merest wound on hand read replicas of what I planned and knew

  Before your birth, then hid it in your heart.

  No part of you that does not snug and hold and hide

  The self that you will be if faith abide.

  What you do is thee. For that I gave you birth.

  Be that. So be the only you that’s truly you on Earth.”

  Dear Hopkins. Gentle Manley. Rare Gerard. Fine name.

  What we do is us. Because of you. For that we came.

  I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives

  * * *

  Though Queen be gone, the drones come back to hives;

  I am the residue of all my daughters’ lives.

  I keep their old loves here, I am the friend

  Of all the lost, the sad, discarded, gone, made end.

  Their husbands are now mine, their lovers keep

  In touch with me, they telephone to weep

  On loves that, soon as lost, now are my kin.

  Somehow the old sins, shunted off, wind up my sin.

  I take those loves to lunch. I buy them wine;

  Although these boys-grown-men were never mine.

  What is this thing in me which, dumb, demands

  The keeping up of face, outstretch of hands?

  Why must I tend their graveyard with chill stones,

  Why say hello to those young bags of bones?

  Those scuttled marriages gone sour or dead

  Whose ruin runs my blood and cramps my head—

  Why should I dine this mortuary gang,

  Why not pay out Time’s rope and let them hang?

  Because, because, well now, again because—

  Mayhap I drown in male’s dread menopause,

  And tend to see my face in these I dine

  To drink too much of sad lust’s mortal wine.

  Oh, women often cry they were sore used

  But these boy/men were much the same abused;

  If men shunt off the fainter sex with guile

  Why, women, daggerless, slay with a smile.

  What do these lovers hope to gain from me?

  An echo of her flesh now found at tea,

  The sounding of her voice but dimly heard

  Her beauty ricocheted and drowned, absurd

  In maze of old genetics yet there kept,

  Some wakening of love that now is slept?

  An echo of her voice in some mere phrase,

  A flicker of her glance in old beast’s gaze?

  They come to find the lamb in lion’s paws,

  But something in my laugh now gives them cause

  To order more and more and deeply drink,

  Though Lovely’s not my name, I clearly think.

  Ah, well, to stand for her is not a shame,

  And if the echo pleases them, what blame?

  Years back I saw an old love’s sire one day,

  And round about his smile I saw the fey

  Sad, far, lost echoing of one mad year

  Which ravened me to frenzies and wild fear.

  So if a father’s teeth can cage a cat,

  Why here behind my eyes, beneath my hat,

  A girl before her time waits to commence—

  Young men, I have no heart to cry: Go hence!

  So stay awhile and hear her voice in me;

  But, please, no tears, no funeral salt at tea!

  We March Back to Olympus

  * * *

  Thrown out of Eden

  Now we headlong humans

  Sinners sinned against

  Return.

  Tossed from the central sun

  We with our own concentric fires

  Blaze and burn.

  Once at the hub of wakening

  And vast starwheel,

  For centuries long-lost, and made to feel

  Unwanted, orphaned, mindless,

  Driven forth to grassless gardens,

  Dead and desert sea,

  We were shut out by comet grooms like Kepler

  Galileo Galilei

  Whose short-sight probing light-years

  Upped and said:

  The Hub’s not here!

  So shot man through the head

  And worse, each starblind prophet killed a part,

  Snugged shut our souls,

  Chopped short our reach,

  Entombed our living heart.

  But now we bastard sons of time

  Pronounce ourselves anew

  And strike fire-hammer blows

  To change tomorrow’s clime, its meteor snows.

  Our rocket selfhood grows

  To give dull facts a shake, break data down

  To climb the Empire State and thundercry the town;

  But more! reach up and strike

  And claim from Heaven

  The Garden we were shunted from,

  For now, space-driven

  We fit, fix, force and fuse,

  Re-hub the systems vast

  Respoke starwheel

  And at the spiraled core

  Plant foot, full fire-shod

  And thus saints feel

  Or yeast like flesh of God.

  We march back to Olympus,

  Our plain-bread flesh burns gold!

 
; We clothe ourselves in flame

  And trade new myths for old.

  The Greek gods christen us

  With ghosts of comet swords;

  God smiles and names us thus:

  “Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!”

  Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth

  * * *

  It was a smother of Time, a crumbling of white;

  The night gave way in hysterias trembling to cold,

  Grown old and falling apart, let its white heart go

  And slow and slow in a withering slide from the dark

  The snow fell down and down with no lantern nor spark

  Nor star nor moon to show its fracture and fall

  Appalling in all its shivering shaken chill dusts

  In soft clamors and tremors of panic it touched my sill

  Like an old woman begging the storm to keep warm with mere crusts

  And make do on my cat-couching hearth

  Where a teakettle cinnamon puss kneels and folds

  And beholds a soft inner contentment, a bumblebee simmer kept there

  Like a hive on the hearth in a honeycomb color of cat

  While nibbling the windows and gnawing raw rainspout toes

  And flaking the rainbarrel frost there the smothering goes;

  A funeral quell passes by in a pageant of lost

  And cataracts windowpane eyes with a filming of frost

  And sugars the dogs as they yellow-write sums in the snow—

  Strange Orient alphabets sprinkled where smiling dogs go.

  And the winter’s old bones fall apart in a shatter of white

  And I bed with my bumblebee honeycomb cat for the night

  And the sound of the snow grows in heart-murmur patterns yet dimmer

  And the one thing I hear in deep sleep is the motor of cat:

  What sound’s that?

  Long-lost summer.

  Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See!

  * * *

  Oh, pantry Deeps’ miscellany

  Bestirs boy’s victual villainy,

  Unwaters mouth of innocence,

  Unshucks the soul of reticence;

  For in the deeps of snowbin sweets

  And hung-banana jungle treats

  We wandered as a jump-squirrel boy

  To amble, maunder, ponder, toy

  With jellies, jams and other pelf

  From apple-cherry-berry shelf,