If a Pieta of a thousand years ago, shaped by a medieval artisan, anticipated in his — shall we say — psionic? hands, our future world, what, today, might be the analogue of that inspired, precognitive artifact? What do we have with us now, as homely and familiar to us in our twentieth-century world, as were those everyday Pietas to the citizens of thirteenth-century Christendom, that might be a microcosm of the far distant future? Let us first start by imagining a pious peasant of thirteenth-century France gazing up at a rustic Pieta and foreseeing in it the twenty-first-century society about which we science fiction writers speculate. Then, as in a Bergman film, we segue to — what now? One of us is gazing at — what?
Cycle — and recycle. The Pieta of our modern world: ugly, commonplace, and ubiquitous. Not the dead Christ in the arms of his grieving, eternal mother, but a heap of aluminum Budweiser beer cans, eighty feet high, thousands of them, being scooped up noisily, rattling and spilling and crashing and raining down as a giant automated, computer-controlled, homeostatic Budweiser beer factory — an autofac, as I called it once in a story [“Autofac” (1955)] — hugs the discarded empties back into herself to recycle them over again into new life, with new, living contents. Exactly as before. . . or, if the chemists in the Budweiser lab are fulfilling God’s divine plan for eternal progress, with better beer than before.
“We see as through a glass darkly,” Paul in 1 Corinthians — will this someday be rewritten as, “We see as into a passive infrared scanner darkly?” A scanner that as in Orwell’s 1984, is watching us all the time? Our TV tube watching back at us as we watch it, as amused, or bored, or anyhow somewhat as entertained by what we do as we are by what we see on its implacable face?
This, for me, is too pessimistic, too paranoid. I believe 1 Corinthians will be rewritten this way: “The passive infrared scanner sees into us darkly” — that is, not well enough really to figure us out. Not that we ourselves can really figure each other out, or even our own selves. Which, perhaps, too, is good; it means we are still in for sudden surprises, and, unlike the authorities, who don’t like that sort of thing, we may find these chance happenings acting on our behalf, to our favor.
Sudden surprises, by the way — and this thought may be in itself a sudden surprise to you — are a sort of antidote to the paranoid. . . or, to be accurate about it, to live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems — that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about — are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving — total so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust and make guesses toward. Not being what you thought, not doing right by you, not being just, but then sustaining you as by momentary caprice, but then abandoning you, or at least seeming to. What it is actually up to we may never know. But at least this is better, is it not, than to possess the self-defeating, life-defeating spurious certitude of the paranoid — expressed, by a friend of mine, humorously, I guess, like this: “Doctor, someone is putting something in my food it [sic; likely “to” intended] make me paranoid.” The doctor should have asked, was that person putting it in his food free, or charging him for it?
To refer back a final time to an early science fiction work with which we are all familiar, the Bible: A number of stories in our field have been written in which computers print out portions of that august book. I now herewith suggest this idea for a future society; that a computer print out a man.
Or, if it can’t get that together, then, as a second choice, a very poor one in comparison, a condensed version of the Bible, “In the beginning was the end.” Or should it go the other way? “In the end was the beginning.” Whichever. Randomness, in time, will sort out which it is to be. Fortunately, I am not required to make that choice.
Perhaps, when a computer is ready to churn forth one or the other of these two statements, an android, operating the computer, will make the decision — although, if I am correct about the android mentality, it will be unable to decide and will print out both at once, creating a self-canceling nothing, which will not even serve as a primordial chaos. An android might, however, be able to handle this; capable of some sort of decision-making power, it might conceivably pick one statement or the other as quote “correct.” But no android — and you will recall and realize that by this term I am summing up that which is not human — no android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me truly human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:
One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free — and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.
To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola Company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passing infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike — may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread did never live. But she and her friends — they, our human future, are our little song. “Who knows if the spirit of man travels up, and the breath of beasts travels down under the Earth?” the Bible asks. Someday it, in a later revision, may wonder, “Who knows if the spirit of men travels up, and the breath of androids travels down?” Where do the souls of androids go after their death? But — if they do not live, then they cannot die. And if they cannot die, then they will always be with us. Do they have souls at all? Or, for that matter, do we?
I think, as the Bible says, we all go to a common place. But it is not the grave; it is into life beyond. The world of the future.
Thank you.
“Man, Android, and Machine” (1976)
Within the universe there exists fierce cold things, which I have given the name “machines” to. Their behavior frightens me, especially when it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them “androids,” which is my own way of using that word. By “android” I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being (as we saw in the excellent TV film The Questor Tapes). I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory — that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities that smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.
These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachael Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids — the Abraham Lincoln one in that book — and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity “schizoid,” which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word “thing.” A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate that his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that “No man is an island,” but giving the theorem a twist: That which is a mental and moral island is not a man.