As expected, the colonel had become angry, and they had quarreled. From then on, Corsellis did Burton every disservice that he could.
“Which I should have anticipated. Perhaps I did.”
Burton had come into disfavor with Outram, then a general in the Indian army, when Sir Charles Napier, whom Burton greatly admired, got into a long and bitter feud with Outram. Burton had defended Napier with articles and letters for the Karachee Advertiser, a private publication devoted to Napier’s defense. Outram had resented these and marked Burton down for attack if he ever had an opportunity. Years later, when Burton, then a captain in the Indian army, had requested permission to explore Somalia in Africa, Outram had refused his request. Though overridden by his superiors, Outram had then limited Burton’s plans for exploration.
Now the androids, whom he called Corsellis and Outram, stood before him. The former was in the uniform of a colonel; the latter, in civilian clothes. Their faces were expressionless; they would smile only at request and then only if they had been programmed to do so.
“You two arseholes will, as required, paint the rooms with the materials you’ll find in that converter there,” he said, pointing.
The androids did not follow his gesture, so he said, “Look over there. Where my finger is pointing. That cabinet is the converter I mean. The paint’s in sprayers. You know how to use those. The ladders are also in there. You know how to put the sections together and how to use them.”
Burton had thought of programming them to kiss his ass before they started the job, but he had rejected the childish and essentially meaningless act. If he resurrected the real Outram and Corsellis and got them to kiss his ass, that would be different. But they would refuse, of course. Besides, he could not just bring them to life for a while, even if he would have liked them to do menial labor for him. They were human beings, and he could not have them disintegrated when he was through with them.
Nevertheless, he did get some satisfaction, even chuckled, when he saw the two walk to the converter. If only he could arrange it so that the real men, the models, could at least see his androids. They would be outraged, furiously indignant.
He sighed. That form of revenge was petty, and he knew it. If Nur could see this, he would say, “It is beneath you. You have become no better than they.”
“I should turn the other cheek?” Burton muttered, continuing aloud the imaginary conversation. “I am not a Christian. Moreover, I never met a Christian who turned the other cheek when slapped.”
He would have to keep the identity of the simulacra to himself and that deprived him of the pleasure he had in this. Alice could get away with giving her androids the faces of Gladstone and Disraeli because she had no animus toward them. It was, to her, merely amusing to be waited on by two prime ministers.
He left his apartment for a while, though he was not sure that he should leave the androids unattended. If they had a problem that a sentient painter could have solved, they would either ignore it and go on or stop and wait for orders. He, however, was angered by the events on the past-display screen, not yet covered over. Its sequence was not in proper chronology; it had jumped to when he was three years old and being whipped savagely by his tutor. “All I did was tell him that he had a breath like a sick dog’s,” Burton said. “And that he farted overmuch. That’s all.”
Burton could not read at that age, but the tutor had started to teach him to speak Latin. At the age of ten, Burton would know far more Latin than his tutor and speak it fluently.
“But that was in spite of him, not because of him. I had a natal love for languages that no brutal pedant could scourge from me. Unfortunately, most boys hated the subject as much as they hated their teachers’ rods. In their minds, one was the other.”
The screen displaying his past appeared on the wall beside the door after it had been shut. Burton sat down in the flying chair parked by the door and turned it so that his back was to the wall. Immediately, the screen appeared on the wall opposite him. Burton put soundproof devices over his ears and a long eyeshade on his head. While he kept his eyes lowered, he could not see the screen. Apparently, the Computer had not had orders to shift the screen to the floor. Thus, Burton could read the book he held close to his chest without seeing or hearing the display.
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