Antres 906 had returned. “I have nothing to add,” it said. Maybe we should have turned around and gone home. Begin to rebuild from what we had. Both the sheriff and the Tauran would have been in favor of that, I think, but we didn’t ask them.
“Guess we ought to try a city,” Marygay said.
“We’re right next door to what used to be the biggest one in the country,” Cat said, “at least in terms of acreage.” Marygay cocked her head. “Spaceport?”
“No, I mean big. Disney!”
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Chapter twenty-nine
Marygay and I had been to Disneyworld, as it was still called, in the early twenty-first, and it had been large then. The one we’d gone to was now just one element in a patchwork of “lands”–Waltland, where you visited in groups, and a simulacrum of the place’s founder took you around and explained the wonders.
The carrier had amiably agreed to produce wheels, and it got us to the outskirts of Disney in about twenty minutes. The perimeter of Disney was a huge ring, where parking lots for the patrons alternated with clustered living areas for the people who worked there.
You were supposed to park, evidently, and wait for a Disney bus to take you inside. When we tried to drive through an entrance, a big jolly cartoon robot blocked it off, explaining in a loud kiddy voice that we had to be nice and park like everyone else. It alternated Standard and English. I told it to fuck off, and after that all the machines spoke to us in English.
Goofy was the robot on the third one we tried. I got out in my fighting suit. It said, “Ah-hyuh-what have we here?” and I kicked it over and pulled off its arms and legs and tossed them in four directions. It started repeating “Hyuh…that’s a good ‘un…Hyuh…that’s a good ‘un,” and I pulled off the meter-wide head and threw it as high and far as I could.
The living areas for the staff were blocked off by holograms that were only partly successful now. On one side we had a jungle where cute baby monkeys played; on the other, a sea of Dalmatian puppies running through a giant’s house. But you could see dimly through them, and sometimes they would disappear for a fraction of a second, revealing identical rows of warren housing.
We came out in Westernland, a big dusty old town from a pre-mechanized West that once existed in movies and novels. It wasn’t like the spaceport, with clothing scattered all around. It was very neat, and had a sort of dreamlike ordinariness, with people walking about in period costume. They were robots, of course, and their costumes showed unusual fading and wear, plastic knees and elbows showing through frayed holes.
“Maybe the park was closed when it happened,” I said, though it would be hard to reconcile that with the thousands of vehicles in ranks and files outside.
“The local time was 13:10 on April 1,” the sheriff said. “It was a Wednesday. Is that significant?”
“April Fool’s Day,” I said. “What a trick.”
“Maybe everybody came naked,” Marygay suggested.
“I know what happened to the clothes,” Cat said. “Watch this.” She opened the door and threw out a crumpled piece of paper.
A knee-high Mickey Mouse came rolling out of a trap door in the side of a saloon. It speared the paper with a stick and addressed us, finger wagging, in a scolding squeaky voice: “Less mess! Don’t be a pest!”
“We used to throw stuff all around it and get it confused,” she said.
The carrier was up on its toes again, to maneuver more easily through the narrow streets, and it tiptoed through this strange land of saloons, dance halls, general stores, and quaint Victorian houses, each with its retinue of shabby busy robots. Where there were wooden boardwalks, the robots had worn a light-colored trail a couple of centimeters deep.
There were broken robots frozen in mid-gesture, and twice we came upon piles of several helpless robots, their legs sawing air, where evidently one had stopped and the others tripped over it. So they weren’t true robots, but just mechanical models. Marygay remembered the term “audio-animatronic,” and Cat confirmed that two hundred years after we’d been there, the old-fashioned technology had been re-introduced for nostalgia and humor.