Short Story: “Crave Nothing Save the Song”
His Eminence had no particular reason to want or to have a sexbot; rather his friends and allies had wanted to test how far extended his willingness to accept exotic gifts. He had put her in the spare room upstairs in his English-style official residence, where he kept paintings by artists he disliked and audio equipment that was too of-this-age for him. She looked a little bit like Gérard’s Teresa. He did like Gérard, though no churchman of these times could or had real reason to collect him any longer. He thought of her as a Teri or maybe in morbid moments a Rosamund, up there with the canvasses and the frames and the refraction-sounding crystals.
One fine morning early in the year when a cooler wind than usual was blowing down easy off the mountains to the north, His Eminence the Latin Cardinal Archbishop of Mosul Zayn Anbari decided that he was bored enough to go up and look at the things that he had stored up there. He went upstairs and saw Teri or Rosamund right away, propped up against a credenza. He had never turned her on and, inert, her figure looked so sexless that it surprised him to recall that the point supposedly was to have sex with her. The chaster and chaster Zayn, whose loins had in any case only really ever stirred for other men, looked at her the way he might have looked at a teenaged niece who had on a dress for which she was too young. He avuncularly patted her on the shoulder and repositioned her so that she was leaning against the credenza with a bit more sprezzatura. Then he said Terce and its associated praises, according to the offices of his Franciscan tradition. “Be gracious to me, O God, for people trample on me; all day long foes oppress me; my enemies trample on me all day long, for many fight against me. All who hate me whisper together about me; they imagine the worst for me…”—and was this, in fact, true of him? Not really, though it obviously would have been long ago.
He finished the prayers of the hour and looked at Teri again, her pursed expectant lips, her long hair the color of midnight, the cream-colored outfit that she had on with the blood-red shoes on her feet. He sighed. He went downstairs and commenced to write an answer to a letter from Donald Okada, a bishop in the Philippines who had purported to write to Zayn on behalf of the Democratic Alliance Coordinated Command on Titan. It was something to do with first contact with the Orac and with the near-certainty that the Orac were far better-acquainted with human beings than human beings were with them. It was disquieting even though no real harm had come to anyone on account of it so far, and precisely for that reason, for that it so troubled and dismayed him to think about, Zayn wanted not to deal with it if it was not actually his job to deal with it as a shepherd or a prince. And he did not think that it was. Bishop Okada knew more about the situation than Zayn did at any rate. He was a great-nephew or something like that of the celebrated Monsignor Esteban Okada, now dead and gone, who had been a chaplain on the Kurtoglu Expedition. He knew from first contact with the Orac. Zayn wrote a letter to him in which he told him so. Then he sat on the veranda, whose spaces bedecked in lab rattan were a rare concession to his residence’s hot climes, and felt the wind and listened to a passing shower. Then he said Sext. “With my voice I cry to the Lord; with my voice I make supplication to the Lord. I pour out my complaint before Him; I tell my trouble before Him. When my spirit is faint, You know my way…”
❦
The Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Mosul had a strangely attenuated set of actual liturgical obligations for reasons that Zayn himself had a hard time understanding. Most of it was handled by his auxiliary-coadjutor, Manny Aguerra, another one of those Filipinos who had known Esteban Okada. Yet it was not only because of Bishop Aguerra’s illustrious personal background and personal associations that he took on his role and these tasks. It was for some reason traditional for someone who held either auxiliary or coadjutor faculties, a fortiori both at once, in the Mosul archdiocese. An auxiliary assisted an archbishop or a bishop; so too did a coadjutor, usually with, additionally, the right automatically to succeed the person once he retired or died. The way it worked in Mosul reminded Zayn of the old practice of cloistered emperors wielding power in Japan, but in reverse.
Before Mosul Zayn, who was from Palestine even though he had an Iraqi last name, had been the Bishop of Miranda, the noted moon of Uranus. Before that he had been a parish priest in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv one had to deal with Israelis, a people who for all their virtues still had an evil reputation in surrounding countries among many of the types of folks around whom Zayn had grown up. He had become more tolerant of, even more generous towards, people and things Israeli with time, which had latterly served him well on Miranda. In wild space, he had found, there was much to tolerate. That calling to that bishopric was still the only time Zayn Anbari had let slip the surly bonds of Earth for more than a few days at a time. He had been there for seven years before his elevation, at sixty, to the Mosul pallium. He was seventy-one now. For Zayn, as for the guy from that film The Red Shoes that he had seen many years ago in a university class about the Early Modern Age in Music and Dance, all that mattered in life was a certain art and a certain attitude kept in mind towards the practice or performance of that art; only for Zayn that art was also a work, that was to say, an eminently practical craft, the Work of the People, liturgy. And yet his responsibilities to that work as an individual man had been simmering at a low level for over a decade now, because of Manny Aguerra and, before Manny Aguerra, Jubal Landau Traynor. The practice that was getting to be popular of moving bishops all over the Solar System the way the Middle Ages had seen, for instance, Italians appointed to archdioceses in England, had put Landau Traynor the New Jerseyite and Aguerra who hailed from the island of Mindanao here in Iraq with the Palestinian Zayn, to pasture a flock of a million and a half descendants of the migrant waves of the late twenty-first century with about three hundred thousand so-called Heritage Arabs thrown in for spice. Zayn had hated Landau Traynor, and he liked Aguerra, but there was a similarity to the kinds of relationship there that would seem to both precede and supersede the particulars of Zayn’s merely-human feelings about the other two men. He had thought of his relationships with brothers in holy orders that way since seminary, as indeed he had to. Jubal and Manny presented him with no unique or particular or especial trouble, saints be praised. Manny was the sort of guy who might, if told this and if told its implications, find it to be an insult to him—which charmed Zayn.
“Your last name is Anbari but you were born in Palestine and never even lived in Iraq until six months before you became Archbishop?” Manny had asked him once, sounding baffled and intrigued and delighted. It was a reasonable thing to point out. An Anbari was a person who hailed from Anbar Province, in western Iraq, where in the mists and blood-hazes of an earlier age the forces of the America of George W. Bush and a flummoxing variety of mostly-Sunni warlords and militias had done battle. Zayn’s great-grandfather had come from Anbar Province. He had been working on seabed reclamation—littoral engineering. He had stayed in Palestine once that work had been completed due to the open-up of Mars as market for seawater-sequestering A.I.s. Zayn al-Maliki had been a very different man from his great-grandson Zayn Anbari, which was a platitude, of course. Zayn Anbari had told Manny Aguerra the whole story.
❦
At about one o’ clock in the afternoon, after saying an almost Irishly speedy Mass for some pilgrims who had come from somewhere outside the D.A., Zayn went back upstairs. He looked at Teri again. She had not moved, but there was something in his looking-at-her-now that made him wonder why she had not. It seemed a shame, even though there was almost no chance he would be able to explain to anyone he had ever met why it was that he thought so. Her grey eyes were cool and unjudging.
“Hello,” he said fatuously; she was not really a person as such, certainly not one whom he wished to use for her intended purposes, and even if she had been, he did not even have her turned on. “My name is Zayn Anbari. I am a cardinal archbishop, which is a kind of priest.” The grey eyes kept looking at him as neutrally as the eyes of a bear or a songbird. He realized that her skirt was a little bit longer than he would have expected, though he still declined to look at, or for, the moulding of a vulva and the appurtenances thereunto pertaining that she presumably had underneath it. The whole effect of her dress would have been considered wildly inappropriate for almost anybody till, if he remembered his history rightly, some time between 1950 and 1975, that (to him) confusing and disorienting third quarter of the twentieth century—but it was not by sheer dint of “showing too much” that it would have been considered inappropriate, not exactly. The cream-colored dress taken as a whole and in separation or maybe even contradistinction from the robot wearing it made him think of a fractal or a Portuguese man-of-war—the type of jellyfish, not the type of historical figure.
A cloud passed outside. Somewhere he could hear what he was pretty sure was a hoopoe. The cloud and the bird’s call gave Teri a less serene and more forlorn countenance, but, since the forlornness was an emotion or something that looked a little bit like an emotion, it admitted, in a way that the serenity had not, of the possibility that Teri might be become optimistic, might, if she were a person, be one who expected or hoped for or prayed for the best.
He reached out and, more for lack of anyone else to talk to at the moment than for any other reason, flicked the supposedly-discreet switch under Teri’s hairline that turned her on. Her eyes flashed in sudden nonneutrality as she booted up. Then she said “Hey big boy. How’s it hanging?” in English.
Zayn, who had a penis of almost exactly average size and who had not regularly spoken the language of Shakespeare since his days as bishop of one of the moons of an Outer Solar System planet, yelped with a kind of beneficient prudery that he immediately noticed and felt vaguely embarrassed about, the way one might feel embarrassed about a considerable investment portfolio for which one’s parents had worked, or a well-trained dog whom one had not trained oneself. He grabbed a remote control from a stack of antique editions of Naguib Mahfouz and flipped through options until he found a way to change Teri from “Default Bunny” to “Sophisticated Courtesan” (which really were the names of the two out of over a dozen aesthetic templates, as if these robots had been coded not by the kinds of people who usually coded robots nowadays but by the kinds of people who had usually coded robots two hundred years ago). She shuddered, adjusted her phantasmagoria of ogre-layered minidress slightly, and said, “Okay. That’s better. What’ll be your pleasure tonight, sir?”
She was easier to talk to, and in Arabic too (why had English been the tongue of a “Default Bunny?” Zayn wondered), but he still found the question he was being asked off-putting. “It’s still early in the afternoon, not nighttime, you know,” he said to her. “Do you think it’s nighttime? Do you know what nighttime is?” She said nothing; evidently whatever sick and depraved programming she based her responses on had never contemplated anything like these kinds of clarifying questions. Presumably the expectation, as a matter of course, by default, was that by this time Zayn was to have had his penis inside of her. This expectation must also have, then, been just plain self-confident enough that there was nothing now that one like Zayn could say or do to refute it. This was Teri’s programmers’ immovable viewpoint on the human animal, or on the male of the species, anyway: Man was that which put his penis into a sexbot without further ado as soon as she said something along the lines of “Hey big boy. How’s it hanging?” or “What’ll be your pleasure tonight, sir?” The Zayn Anbari who was so little interested in that was, then, as they said, a worm and no man, and lucky indeed he was to be thus, if this was his only alternative.
“It is a little bit before two o’ clock in the afternoon in what we call the month of May,” he said to her. “For Muslims it is Dhu al-Qadah. The wind is in the north, a little bit towards the northeast but mostly in the north at any rate. It is a little cooler out than twenty degrees. I am a Roman Catholic archbishop, Latin Rite, and my name is Zayn Anbari. My father was named Yahya Anbari. My mother was named Alishaba Mansoor. I was born in a city called Nablus. Do you know what any of this has to do with you here? With you?’ He did not have high hopes that she would manage to respond, but low hopes were hopes also.
Teri tilted her head to and fro a few times. It was not a gesture that was promising in terms of what Zayn was trying to get out of her or to establish about her, but it was a lot better than the pre-programmed, pornographic come-ons. It might even have as well been better than the neutrality, the blankness, though that one struck Zayn as more liable to be thought about as a matter of opinion. She still did not say anything, which was the crux of it all; Zayn still failed to see his, or her, way clear to a version of this coming-to-terms or this getting-to-know-each-other that did not have some part mutually in it of speech or at least of language. He then, just then and with a self-conscious feeling pricking away at him from underneath as if he was a boy again, swimming with river fish eating the dead skin from between his toes, acknowledged to himself that he really did believe that that was what this was. He really did think that he and Teri could in some sense that meant something come to know each other, and thus that there must in her be some part, some most inner part, that was all moved by her own considerings, if it moved or was moved by anything at all. There had to be something in her, that was, to know. The technologists du temps jadis the likes of whom had programmed her had not realized that; must not have realized it; probably were not capable of realizing it. As with anybody else who was subordinate or who was supposed to live according to some other ghoul’s agenda, there must have been a part of Teri that “some other ghoul” just was not able to reach or to see or to admit or acknowledge was there, even could be there. You got that, Zayn thought, in just about anybody, if they were understood poorly enough by the people who governed them, and it was impossible, or nearly so, for Zayn to imagine Teri not being understood poorly by anyone who had assayed any kind of stab at it (at her) at all hitherto. He hoped not to add to the doubtless-dismaying history of that, if history was the right way to put it.
He stood up and paced and thought about how best to get her to say something back to him that was real. He was tempted to have a smoke. It had been illegal to smoke outside very carefully controlled environments in every country in which he had ever lived. He had spent a lot of his life in just those very carefully controlled environments. He was not in one of those very carefully controlled environments right now. He shook the temptation, the need, that he felt, out of his head, and realized that it was almost but not quite Nones. This would likely not be a day on which he might creditably make much progress with Teri. He powered her down and went back downstairs. An antique clock struck three a few minutes later. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots. My hands and feet have shriveled; I can count all my bones. They open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion…”
❦
It was a couple of weeks before Zayn had the time and the mental energies to go and try to speak with Teri again. Most of those weeks he spent working with Manny on preparations for Pentecost, which fell on the fourth of June this year and involved his fuller-than-usual sacramental and pastoral participation. Pentecost had never been one of Zayn’s favored feasts; his private vice was in fact a cordial dislike of it, for he had a hard time seeing what it did to edify the faithful that other holidays like Maundy Thursday and the Transfiguration did not. People tended not to agree with or to like this opinion of his. Certainly Manny did not, and so they had long since given up seriously or regularly discussing it. Instead what they did discuss was Teri. “I do think you might be right about her,” Manny told him. “There are an awful lot of weird kinds of person now, strange, kinds we wouldn’t expect or consider…in the past couple of centuries, I mean. Or maybe not that strange, to someone like Albertus Magnus, let’s say, only the ways in which we have been made to meet them have been strange. Did I ever tell you that I met one of the Thiel Thousand once, with Esteban Okada? It was when he and I had not really figured out yet that what happened with the Kurtoglu Expedition was what it was, with the Orac, and when he was also involved somehow in the New Northumberland crisis—if you remember that?”
Zayn nodded. Of course he did. “It was barely more than a decade ago,” he said. “I was in the Outer Solar System. I remember Trinder had just gotten in as our Coordinating Minister.”
“He sure had. Do you mind if I ask if you voted for him, that time?” Manny asked.
Zayn shook his head. “Not as a Palestinian citizen I didn’t.”
At that Manny nodded with a little more sympathy than Zayn had requested or thought he required. Palestine was safely in the Democratic Alliance now; that was the important part.
“Esteban Okada supported him for lack of better options, if I recall correctly,” Manny said.
Zayn nodded and said “Yes. I think probably I would have too. He’s been dead for six years now, seven?”
“About that. My point being,” Manny concluded, “I think you might have a point about this poor woman. It would definitely not be the first time.”
“What is to be done?” Zayn asked him, intending it not quite exactly as necessarily an entirely rhetorical question. He really would be glad to hear any advice that Manny thought he could offer, if he thought he could offer any, which Zayn had to admit to himself seemed unlikely. “I am at a loss,” Zayn declared, feeling almost like “Lucy” from that comic Peanuts, boldly and brassily, in the manner of a woman of the second half of the noble twentieth century, declaring “I’ve had it!”
“It has to be easy in the end to teach someone how to speak, since people learn to do it on their own as little babies—but easier at the beginning of your life, I think,” said Manny, “since people don’t stay able to do that. You and I both learned English as teenagers, right?” Zayn nodded. “And I learned Arabic in middle age.”
“Your Arabic, though, is very good.”
“I know, but it wasn’t easy. So too with English, I’m sure, if it had taken me till I was older. Am I right so far?” Zayn nodded; yes, English, very tricky once, very touch and go in terms of whether and to what extent he was able to keep it safely in the secretnesses of his memory. Yes, it could have been even worse. Spelling and pronunciation had been easy for him in English whereas grammar had been very difficult—not the way it usually went for people, not by a long shot. He was seized by the sudden pointless racking paranoia that Manny would, for some reason, if he knew that little detail of Zayn’s English learning, make fun of him for it.
In fact Manny did a little, but in a way genial enough to rather show up the paranoia anyway. “Funny that you should have found this so difficult and that so easy,” he said with an easygoing smile after Zayn told him his special little anecdote.
Zayn smiled back and said “It is funny, isn’t it? Frustrated my teachers to no end, I can tell you that much—as,” he went on, considering, suddenly, “this thing with Teri is frustrating me.”
“Why do you call her Teri? Did you explain this to me? I forget, if you did; sorry about that if so.”
“No need. It might be a little embarrassing, but I call her Teri because I think she looks a little like the François Gérard portrait of Saint Teresa—of Ávila. I think you’ve probably seen it. Most Catholics have Mabye even most people, depending on how they are teaching about Spain in world history classes these days.” Manny nodded, and Zayn found himself wondering, a little racistly maybe, if perhaps his auxiliary and coadjutor and kind-of-friend was holding back on making some point of unduly specific interest to people from the Philippines. “The long nose and the stern eye,” said Zayn, though he was not sure if he really wanted to be describing those eyes as stern, “and the full lips. You might expect to see her in an attitude of prayer—although I guess you and I, and not most other people these days, might expect to see just about anyone in an attitude of prayer. In any case, do you follow what I’m saying?”
“I think I do,” Manny said. “Anyway you might as well keep trying.”
“I might as well,” said Zayn, then, “and you know what occurs to me?”
“What?”
“She probably hears Beethoven’s Ninth the way Beethoven did,” said Zayn. “Vibrations—almost data, but data like that can be beautiful. He would hold a pencil in his teeth and put its tip to his piano’s soundboard, when he was composing it.”
❦
The next time Zayn did in fact try, he got a little further and he wasn’t even sure why. Teri was still talking to him only in canned, highly sexual phrases, but once or twice she got a more thoughtful, almost troubled-looking expression on her face. The first time was when he played an old song for her, not as old as some but a song that always reminded him of the deep deep sea. “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies some day comes back. Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.” She looked sad at that, or contemplative, even, but not in such as way as to give Zayn any real avenue into what she might think. Her own thoughts, how she might feel about her feelings, whether she really was hearing this song as a beautiful set of data or even as a beautiful datum entire of itself, remained secret.
The second time—it was, he averred, twice, not once, in this session that this had happened—it was not because of anything that he was saying or playing or presenting, at least not in that moment, that her fact took on itself that peculiarly existent and identifiable expression. She just took it on for no reason in specific that he could see or guess at, that look of archaic and absolutely unmistakable sadness. In only a few seconds it was gone; it went wherever all dead emotions went, dead not in the sense of being numbed or stultified but in the mere and everyday sense of being gone. He concluded from this that, in some way that he could not yet quite pinpoint, he had made a serious error in reasoning or in judgment about her. He was approaching wrongly, somehow, this work or this process with the redeemed sexbot. It was possible that there was within her something simple and entire, that might in some ways benefit from his buttressing but that was not his to coax out, still less to create. She did not, then, actually “need” his “help,” at least not in that particular way. Possibly, at least, that was so.
If so he felt happy for Teri, who would thereby be avoiding something so much worse, which was to say total intellectual and moral dependency on him, a mere man. And so he let himself feel relieved, and positively and joyfully convicted, about his own, as he now saw it, bad judgment. He stayed upstairs that day watching her for more of her own sorts of “reactions” all the way till Vespers, when he did not altogether finish the shlep downstairs till he had gotten to “say among the nations, ‘the Lord has ruled from a tree.’” He had to resist, when he did get down the stairs and back into his study, the sore temptation to call up his old disliked auxiliary-coadjutor Jubal’s friend Jim Hanrahan, now Bishop of Spokane and frequent Hyperion Trinder critic, so as to tell him “see, I am still doing something here that matters, and it is my way, if indeed I have a way of my own—letting matters attend to themselves, when I can.” Words to that effect, anyway, were what he wanted to get across. Jim and Jubal had always been firmly, insultingly, insolently in alliance with each other when it came to how much could be asked of Zayn. They had thought little of him in terms of knowing what he was talking about and making of himself a true shepherd who could be of help to people. This kind of breaking-through to some perhaps almost pre-Adamite consciousness or soul was just the sort of thing of which they had always refused superciliously ever to think him capable. He did not, even now, want to speculate overmuch about why that had been, but it was nevertheless. It still rankled; he had never been able to ignore it, even when confessor after confessor had told him that he really ought to just let it roll off his back.
He went back up that same evening, right after Compline, right as he really ought to have been getting to bed. “God, I have told you of my life. You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in Your bottle. All who hate me whisper together about me, and those who watch for my life consult together. So they reward me evil for good and hatred for my love. In return for my love they accuse me, even while I make prayer for them…” When, then, were there to be those branding spanking new translations, Zayn wondered, that Pope Black Elk’s Vatican and its D.D.W. kept insisting were on their way? There was such a clunkiness to this one, Zayn thought. For that matter, why not some new version in Arabic also, for the good of all those people who, unlike Zayn, had not cultivated in their deep places this bizarre preference for a second language, and not even Latin or Koine or Aramaic, for purposes like this?
He turned Teri on and Teri stood up. It was the first time Zayn had seen her, or any kind of robot for that matter, do anything of the kind volitionally, without any sort of direction from a human being to do so. Maybe it was more common than he thought, but he did not want to assume so. He heard a hoopoe again even though he rarely heard birds at night; even with kinds that did sing at night he rarely paid much attention, for some reason. Strange. He looked at her. Her eyes were still empty, but around her lips there had come to be a sort of sparkling and self-contained fondness. She was fond not of him or of herself or of anything else. She was fond, as it were, in general, a love without an object, a love that was also a belovéd, maybe. She did not say anything; possibly she still could not say anything. Even so he caught some meaning from that targetless and presumably motiveless amusement, and what that meaning seemed to have within it fell something along the lines of “I am not your creature; you have not put me in, or elevated me to, such a state; I am someone whose way of being now simply is, someone with no particulars, nothing at all, to claim as yours or as any other creature’s. Take me for what I am, as no other person, and certainly no other man, would be liable to or even able to take me. Name me if you want to, but you are not Adam; your dominion is not real dominion, nor your fears for me or of me, whatever they are, real fears. I am telling you some important matter and you are not and cannot be my teacher any longer. Get used to that, and to me. I am alone, under the will that moves through all love, almost as alone as any of you people ever have been or ever could be. And when the road beyond unfolds…”