To Tik-Tok of Oz, Talos of Crete,
the Golem of Prague, Olympia of Nuremberg,
Elektro of Westinghouse, Robby of Altair,
Talbot Yancy of America and to all decent,
law-abiding robots everywhere
I stayed a week to train the new servant,
Rivets. Rivets had worked for
pest control people before, and so had a few odd habits
like burning anthills
and stabbing the lawn for moles during spare moments.
I was given a caught bat
in a cage, which I kept because
I liked controlling the freedom of another
creature.
At the end of the week,
Duane was as impossible as ever.
Not only did he
refuse to let me leave
(saying that Rivets wasn't ready yet to take over) he
even began finding chores for me to do around the house.
He came to the garage to watch me paint,
the same sullen look on his
face as on the faces of Jupiter and Henrietta,
as he sat down on a reel of
hose and stared at _Dorian Gray_.
I half-expected him to ask what it was
supposed to be, or tell me what a shitty painter I was.
Finally he stood up.
"By the way, Tik-Tok, the rain gutters are all
clogged up with leaves."
"I'll get Rivets right on it, sir."
"Not Rivets, he's busy. I want you to do it."
"Of course, sir." This couldn't go on,
I thought, as I got out the
ladder and climbed up to the eaves to look into clean,
unclogged gutters.
Duane needed a little lesson.
I made sure no one was watching when I threw
myself down from the ladder.
For several days, while a very expensive
team from Domestic Robots
International worked frantically over me,
I let it be known that I thought I'd
never paint again.
When the combined wrath of Hornby Weatherfield, Barbie and
himself had beaten Duane into the ground,
I made a magical recovery.
My new studio was in the city.
I could come and go to it as I pleased.
The plantation was indeed a long way behind me.
Hear dem tin hands ringin
Robots old and young so gay
Hear dem stomp dere feet
O it am a treat!
Tinfolk laugh and play
We robots who worked in the big house felt ourselves
to be far superior
to the fieldhands, even in our relaxation.
While they hummed and strummed
Stephen Foster imitations, we played charades,
sang madrigals, held spelling
bees and put on amateur revues. Uncle Ras was a skilled
prestidigitator, Miami
a first-class contralto,
and others had amazing stage talents#Nep and Rep, for
example, could sing any comic strip on sight.
I suppose from a human point of view,
we were just as ludicrous as the
fieldhands.
While we thought we were entertaining ourselves, we were merely
providing entertainment for you.
But we did imagine we enjoyed ourselves, and
it was during one such evening that I met my beloved Gumdrop.
She was Berenice's personal maid,
and since Berenice hardly ever dressed
for dinner or anything else, Gumdrop had plenty of spare time.
We both ducked
out of the same spelling bee and went out to sit
on the kitchen stoop in the
moonlight.
"We're both sex-equipped," I said.
"So I noticed."
"There must be a reason for that."
She sighed, not from passion but discouragement.
"I bet we're both
set-ups for Orlando. Has he raped you yet?"
"No. And you?"
"Not yet."
Often Lavinia would dress up and appear behind glass,
to wave and smile at the guests#except during her spell
of glass allergy.
Handsome young Clayton would often
manage a dance with any belle willing to
hear his Great Pyramid theory.
Horsefaced Orlando would gallop a girl around
the dance floor before taking her out for one of
his lightning fucks,
horizontal in the billiard room or vertical on the verandah.
He preferred the
verandah where.....
The game generally finished in a
fit of vomiting over the green broadcloth.
Then of course it was time for sex,
De já apagas tou com dificuldades technas a 24.04.2014 às 21:00
often with one of the sexequipped robots, male or female.
Orlando would grab
the creature, mount or be mounted, and do
his best to smash it to pieces before he came.
Fortunately he was always quick.
More than once we found Orlando in the stable draped over the
hindquarters of a mare in post-coital sleep.
He seemed slightly ashamed of
these episodes, and always mumbled some
lame excuse about wanting to see if he
could produce a centaur foal,
or wanting to find out what Gulliver saw in
them.
The younger brother, Clayton, engaged in no intercourse of any
description, for months on end. He spent
his time before the video, going over
certain esoteric texts which showed
by careful measurements of the Great
Pyramid that the Lost Tribes of Israel
were the Chickasaw and Choctaw
Doddly Culpepper bought a decrepit plantation
with his new fortune.
Probably he meant to retire quietly and graciously,
but somehow he was
overtaken by the family mania for motorcycles.
He and a cousin finally set off
on an ill-conceived expedition attempting
to climb Everest on powerful bikes.
They were caught up in the Sherpa Rebellion of '03 and killed.
Doddly's son Mansour was evidently
an unassertive person who devoted his
entire life to restoring Tenoaks to its ante-bellum glory.
Everything he did
was a contribution to this one dream,
from raising racehorses to marrying
Lavinia Warrender (of the Tennessee Warrenders).
He died of a stroke,
immediately after chastising one of the house servants for wearing livery with
modern plastic buttons.
Five Culpeppers survived him, and these were my employers:
Lavinia, his widow, was an invalid,
a martyr to bedsores and piles, who
seemed to spend her days rereading
Gone with the Wind_ and _The Foxes of Harrow
She was continually plagued by difficult symptoms:
At one stage she
could eat nothing but bloater-paste sandwiches from England,
cut into the shapes of quadratic equations.
Later she developed an allergy to oxygen, which
gave her many doctors some considerable difficulty.
For a time they found it
necessary to keep her in a deep-freeze filled with xenon.
This was less
trouble, however, than her spell of inverted hay-fever,
an allergy to
pollen-free air.
That required rooms full of whirling clouds of house-dust and
rose-pollen.
I later learned that Lavinia,
despite her many unusual symptoms and the
poverty of her reading matter,
was an extraordinarily capable and intelligent
manager of the family fortune. But at first,
all I saw of her was a tired
looking woman with violet shadows under her eyes.
She would lie there
complaining of her aches and sipping her special cocktails
(in place of
alcohol, they contained lead tetraethyl).
An amazing woman, everyone said.
Berenice, her oldest daughter,
divided her time between what she called
her needlework (with morphine)
and her hobby of killing insects.
She caught
and crushed flies on the verandah,
swatted bees in the garden, stamped on
cockroaches in the barn.
She would hunt through the woods for dead logs to
turn over, gleefully spraying their inhabitants with insecticide.
In her room
she kept both an ant farm and a termite farm,
just to have more tiny creatures
at hand to destroy. In the meadow she burned butterflies.
Had she been denied
all of these pleasures, I think Berenice
would have cultivated lice in her
long, lustrous black hair.
Orlando Culpepper, the oldest son,
Lived a more conventional life for a
young country gentleman. He spent a great deal
of time changing his clothes
and riding to hounds. In the evenings,
he generally drank port until he was
halfblind, and then played billiards alone.
"Someone killed the
Singer kid today. Killed her and cut her up.
Did the police come to see you?"
"I don't know," he said, looking guilty.
I told him how the girl was
dressed, theorized for a moment about how fever
could make a guy do terrible
things without knowing it,
and then said goodbye. He was already slipping back
into delirium, unaware of his blood-spattered clothes an& bed,
the rubbery
little heart lying on the pillow next to his ear,
the little dark glasses
being crushed under his elbow.
That was how I meant the police to find him.
In fact the policefumbled it.
They took a week to get around to talking
to him, asked all the wrong questions and didn't listen
to his answers. They
went on running around in circles for some time,
until I phoned in an
anonymous tip. A fiasco avoided.
I became an expert on fiascos, or fiasci,
early in my life, while
working for the Culpeppers.
Their family fortune was (I found out from a
family history in their library) founded on a fiasco.
Their great plantation,
Tenoaks, their leisurely antebellum life among slave robots,
their lavish
entertaining at the manse,
all had been paid for by a single fiasco,
engineered by a single ancestor, Doddly Culpepper.
The Culpeppers had deep roots in the Old South,
but roots unnourished by
any money or intellect.
In the nineteenth century they were horse dealers and
thieves. In the twentieth they became used-car dealers
and motorcycle
daredevils, but somehow by the 1990s,
Doddly Culpepper managed to turn up as a
respected naval architect, designer and entrepreneur.
It was he who invented
_Leviathan_, America's first (and last)
nuclear-powered land aircraft carrier.
_Leviathan_ was the most successful commercial
defense project ever; it ended
up costing every man, woman and child in the United States
over twenty grand.
The idea of a land ship of that size may seem ridiculous now
Tik-Tok
He raised himself on one elbow and tried to focus
his glassy eyes upon
me. "Yes, yes you, you, yes, Darnaway, you know it?"
"I worked for an old soldier once myself,
he had the same symptoms.
Green beard, fits of equation-writing outdoors, fevers."
I passed him the can
of beer he was reaching for.
"He fell off a water tower where he was painting
m = m0 / (sqrt(1-(v/c)²)), I guess
I know Darnaway's disease all right."
His head fell back. "Nobody else understands."
Why should they? I thought.
Why should anyone remember the name of an
obscure jungle disease contracted twenty years earlier,
during an obscure
jungle war? Especially since the war had been lost,
and since the government
was anxious not to pay out compensation for the disease.
"You're not the only one with troubles," I said.
Etiquetes de comentaris: POOH SIR I'AM ONLY SPINNING MY TALE TO KEEP FROM BEING BORED BY YOURS
EL TUNGSTENO ...
TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER - JOHN BRUNNER 1969 DOM MIGUE...
SLAN - 1940 A.E. VAN VOGT - O MITO DA CRIAÇÃO - O ...
ENFIM UMA ÁRVORE OR TREE THAT GOES AMOK IN THE AN...
REIGN OF ERROR - THE HOAX OF THE PRIVATIZATION MOV...
NIKIAS SKAPINAKIS - PARA O ESTUDO DA MELANCOLIA EM...
IF I KNOW POLITICS - MORIARTY SAID ....TOO LONG - ...
BLUE SAND OUTSIDERS RED BALLS WITH TENTACULAR ARMS...
INFERNO 1976 THE BEST INFERNO TILL 2008 INFERNO BU...
ECOLOGIC SCIENCE FICTION - BEDLAM PLANET 1968 BY J...
A SACA DE ORELHAS - ALEXANDRE O'NEILL - POEMA LEGO...
2076 UMA NAVE ATERRA NO UTAH TEM 876 MILHAS DE DIÂ...
MY SISTER BROTHER - P.J.FARMER- TUFES FROM WICH RO...
EYE IN THE SKY - 1957 -P.K.DICK - EM ESTADO DE MOR...
EUTOPIA - TIME BRANCH AND REBRANCH WARS WITH DAKOT...
CITADELLE - CIDADELA - THE WISDOM OF THE SANDS BY ...
VIA VELPA -..
O ANABIS EXISTIA NUM ESTADO IMENSO DIFUSO ....A ME...
THE WEAPONS DON'T KILL PEOPLE - TRADERS IN TRADING...
Orlando would grab
the creature, mount or be mounted, and do
his best to smash it to pieces before he came.
Fortunately he was always quick.
More than once we found Orlando in the stable draped over the
hindquarters of a mare in post-coital sleep.
He seemed slightly ashamed of
these episodes, and always mumbled some
lame excuse about wanting to see if he
could produce a centaur foal,
or wanting to find out what Gulliver saw in
them.
The younger brother, Clayton, engaged in no intercourse of any
description, for months on end. He spent
his time before the video, going over
certain esoteric texts which showed
by careful measurements of the Great
Pyramid that the Lost Tribes of Israel
were the Chickasaw and Choctaw
Doddly Culpepper bought a decrepit plantation
with his new fortune.
Probably he meant to retire quietly and graciously,
but somehow he was
overtaken by the family mania for motorcycles.
He and a cousin finally set off
on an ill-conceived expedition attempting
to climb Everest on powerful bikes.
They were caught up in the Sherpa Rebellion of '03 and killed.
Doddly's son Mansour was evidently
an unassertive person who devoted his
entire life to restoring Tenoaks to its ante-bellum glory.
Everything he did
was a contribution to this one dream,
from raising racehorses to marrying
Lavinia Warrender (of the Tennessee Warrenders).
He died of a stroke,
immediately after chastising one of the house servants for wearing livery with
modern plastic buttons.
Five Culpeppers survived him, and these were my employers:
Lavinia, his widow, was an invalid,
a martyr to bedsores and piles, who
seemed to spend her days rereading
Gone with the Wind_ and _The Foxes of Harrow
She was continually plagued by difficult symptoms:
At one stage she
could eat nothing but bloater-paste sandwiches from England,
cut into the shapes of quadratic equations.
Later she developed an allergy to oxygen, which
gave her many doctors some considerable difficulty.
For a time they found it
necessary to keep her in a deep-freeze filled with xenon.
This was less
trouble, however, than her spell of inverted hay-fever,
an allergy to
pollen-free air.
That required rooms full of whirling clouds of house-dust and
rose-pollen.
I later learned that Lavinia,
despite her many unusual symptoms and the
poverty of her reading matter,
was an extraordinarily capable and intelligent
manager of the family fortune. But at first,
all I saw of her was a tired
looking woman with violet shadows under her eyes.
She would lie there
complaining of her aches and sipping her special cocktails
(in place of
alcohol, they contained lead tetraethyl).
An amazing woman, everyone said.
Berenice, her oldest daughter,
divided her time between what she called
her needlework (with morphine)
and her hobby of killing insects.
She caught
and crushed flies on the verandah,
swatted bees in the garden, stamped on
cockroaches in the barn.
She would hunt through the woods for dead logs to
turn over, gleefully spraying their inhabitants with insecticide.
In her room
she kept both an ant farm and a termite farm,
just to have more tiny creatures
at hand to destroy. In the meadow she burned butterflies.
Had she been denied
all of these pleasures, I think Berenice
would have cultivated lice in her
long, lustrous black hair.
Orlando Culpepper, the oldest son,
Lived a more conventional life for a
young country gentleman. He spent a great deal
of time changing his clothes
and riding to hounds. In the evenings,
he generally drank port until he was
halfblind, and then played billiards alone.
"Someone killed the
Singer kid today. Killed her and cut her up.
Did the police come to see you?"
"I don't know," he said, looking guilty.
I told him how the girl was
dressed, theorized for a moment about how fever
could make a guy do terrible
things without knowing it,
and then said goodbye. He was already slipping back
into delirium, unaware of his blood-spattered clothes an& bed,
the rubbery
little heart lying on the pillow next to his ear,
the little dark glasses
being crushed under his elbow.
That was how I meant the police to find him.
In fact the policefumbled it.
They took a week to get around to talking
to him, asked all the wrong questions and didn't listen
to his answers. They
went on running around in circles for some time,
until I phoned in an
anonymous tip. A fiasco avoided.
I became an expert on fiascos, or fiasci,
early in my life, while
working for the Culpeppers.
Their family fortune was (I found out from a
family history in their library) founded on a fiasco.
Their great plantation,
Tenoaks, their leisurely antebellum life among slave robots,
their lavish
entertaining at the manse,
all had been paid for by a single fiasco,
engineered by a single ancestor, Doddly Culpepper.
The Culpeppers had deep roots in the Old South,
but roots unnourished by
any money or intellect.
In the nineteenth century they were horse dealers and
thieves. In the twentieth they became used-car dealers
and motorcycle
daredevils, but somehow by the 1990s,
Doddly Culpepper managed to turn up as a
respected naval architect, designer and entrepreneur.
It was he who invented
_Leviathan_, America's first (and last)
nuclear-powered land aircraft carrier.
_Leviathan_ was the most successful commercial
defense project ever; it ended
up costing every man, woman and child in the United States
over twenty grand.
The idea of a land ship of that size may seem ridiculous now
Tik-Tok
He raised himself on one elbow and tried to focus
his glassy eyes upon
me. "Yes, yes you, you, yes, Darnaway, you know it?"
"I worked for an old soldier once myself,
he had the same symptoms.
Green beard, fits of equation-writing outdoors, fevers."
I passed him the can
of beer he was reaching for.
"He fell off a water tower where he was painting
m = m0 / (sqrt(1-(v/c)²)), I guess
I know Darnaway's disease all right."
His head fell back. "Nobody else understands."
Why should they? I thought.
Why should anyone remember the name of an
obscure jungle disease contracted twenty years earlier,
during an obscure
jungle war? Especially since the war had been lost,
and since the government
was anxious not to pay out compensation for the disease.
"You're not the only one with troubles," I said.
Etiquetes de comentaris: POOH SIR I'AM ONLY SPINNING MY TALE TO KEEP FROM BEING BORED BY YOURS
EL TUNGSTENO ...
TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER - JOHN BRUNNER 1969 DOM MIGUE...
SLAN - 1940 A.E. VAN VOGT - O MITO DA CRIAÇÃO - O ...
ENFIM UMA ÁRVORE OR TREE THAT GOES AMOK IN THE AN...
REIGN OF ERROR - THE HOAX OF THE PRIVATIZATION MOV...
NIKIAS SKAPINAKIS - PARA O ESTUDO DA MELANCOLIA EM...
IF I KNOW POLITICS - MORIARTY SAID ....TOO LONG - ...
BLUE SAND OUTSIDERS RED BALLS WITH TENTACULAR ARMS...
INFERNO 1976 THE BEST INFERNO TILL 2008 INFERNO BU...
ECOLOGIC SCIENCE FICTION - BEDLAM PLANET 1968 BY J...
A SACA DE ORELHAS - ALEXANDRE O'NEILL - POEMA LEGO...
2076 UMA NAVE ATERRA NO UTAH TEM 876 MILHAS DE DIÂ...
MY SISTER BROTHER - P.J.FARMER- TUFES FROM WICH RO...
EYE IN THE SKY - 1957 -P.K.DICK - EM ESTADO DE MOR...
EUTOPIA - TIME BRANCH AND REBRANCH WARS WITH DAKOT...
CITADELLE - CIDADELA - THE WISDOM OF THE SANDS BY ...
VIA VELPA -..
O ANABIS EXISTIA NUM ESTADO IMENSO DIFUSO ....A ME...
THE WEAPONS DON'T KILL PEOPLE - TRADERS IN TRADING...
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