Humanity and Empathy Theme Analysis

“I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.” Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her.

In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats. This plague, however, had descended from above.

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.

“Harry still wants the Nexus-6 brain unit withdrawn from the market?” He felt no surprise. Since the initial release of its specifications and performance charts back in August of 1991 most police agencies which dealt with escaped andys had been protesting. “The Soviet police can’t do any more than we can,” he said. Legally, the manufacturers of the Nexus-6 brain unit operated under colonial law, their parent auto-factory being on Mars. “We had better just accept the new unit as a fact of life,” he said. “It’s always been this way, with every improved brain unit that’s come along. I remember the howls of pain when the Sudermann people showed their old T-14 back in ‘89. Every police agency in the Western Hemisphere clamored that no test would detect its presence, in an instance of illegal entry here. As a matter of fact, for a while they were right.”

He had wondered as had most people at one time or another precisely why an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnids. For one thing, the emphatic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve.

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an andy. The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered a subform of the other, a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both viewpoints repelled him.

He could not make out, even now, how the Rosen Association had managed to snare him, and so easily. Experts, he realized. A mammoth corporation like this—it embodies too much experience. It possesses in fact a sort of group mind. And Eldon and Rachael Rosen consisted of spokesmen for that corporate entity. His mistake, evidently, had been in viewing them as individuals. It was a mistake he would not make again.

“No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.” He added, “Except of course for the upward climb of Wilbur Mercer.”

“Because Wilbur Mercer is always renewed. He’s eternal. At the top of the hill he’s struck down; he sinks into the tomb world but then he rises inevitably. And us with him. So we’re eternal, too.”

Thinking this he wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have, too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates and I unmake. Or anyhow so it must seem to them.

Garland said, “It’s a chance anyway, breaking free and coming here to Earth, where we’re not even considered animals. Where every worm and wood louse is considered more desirable than all of us put together.”

“It’s not just false memory structures,” Phil Resch said. “I own an animal; not a false one but the real thing. A squirrel. I love the squirrel, Deckard; every goddamn morning I feed it and change its papers—you know, clean up its cage—and then in the evening when I get off work I let it loose in my apt and it runs all over the place. It has a wheel in its cage; ever seen a squirrel running inside a wheel? It runs and runs, the wheel spins, but the squirrel stays in the same spot. Buffy seems to like it, though.”

The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation.

“Listen,” she said to Rick. Some of the color had returned to her face; once more she looked—at least briefly—alive. “Buy me a reproduction of that picture I was looking at when you found me. The one of the girl sitting on the bed.”

The salesman, undaunted, continued, “A goat is loyal. And it has a free, natural soul which no cage can chain up. And there is one exceptional additional feature about goats, one which you may not be aware of. Often times when you invest in an animal and take it home you find, some morning, that it’s eaten something radioactive and died. A goat isn’t bothered by contaminated quasi-foodstuffs; it can eat eclectically, even items that would fell a cow or a horse or most especially a cat. As a long term investment we feel that the goat—especially the female—offers unbeatable advantages to the serious animal-owner.”

“Mercer,” Rick said.

“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.

“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”

“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.”

“Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”

“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”

Roy Baty […] has an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority. Given to mystical preoccupations, this android proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android “life.” In addition, this android stole, and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids.

Tonight sometime, he thought as he clicked off the bedside light, I will retire a Nexus-6 which looks exactly like this naked girl. My good god, he thought; I’ve wound up where Phil Resch said. Go to bed with her first, he remembered. Then kill her. “I can’t do it,” he said, and backed away from the bed.

“But you really look down on me,” Rachael said. “For what I did.” Assurance had returned to her; the litany of her voice picked up pace. “You’ve gone the way of the others. The bounty hunters before you. Each time they get furious and talk wildly about killing me, but when the time comes they can’t do it. Just like you, just now.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled with relish. “You realize what this means, don’t you? It means I was right; you won’t be able to retire any more androids; it won’t be just me, it’ll be the Batys and Stratton, too. So go on home to your goat. And get some rest.” Suddenly she brushed at her coat, violently. “Yife! I got a burning ash from my cigarette—there, it’s gone.” She sank back against the seat, relaxing.

Carrying the medicine bottle into the kitchen Pris seated herself at J. R. Isidore’s breakfast table. She removed the lid from the bottle and dumped the spider out. “It probably won’t be able to run as fast,” she said, “but there’s nothing for it to catch around here anyhow. It’ll die anyway.” She reached for the scissors.

“Please,” Isidore said.

Pris glanced up inquiringly. “Is it worth something?”

“Don’t mutilate it,” he said wheezingly. Imploringly.

With the scissors Pris snipped off one of the spider’s legs.

“It has often been said by adherents of the experience of Mercerism that Wilbur Mercer is not a human being, that he is in fact an archetypal superior entity perhaps from another star. Well, in a sense this contention has proven correct. Wilbur Mercer is not human, does not in fact exist. The world in which he climbs is a cheap, Hollywood, commonplace sound stage which vanished into kipple years ago. And who, then, has spawned this hoax on the Sol System? Think about that for a time, folks.”

What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I’ve done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow now it’s time to go home. Maybe, after I’ve been there awhile with Iran I’ll forget.

“Mercer isn’t a fake,” he said. “Unless reality is a fake.” This hill, he thought. This dust and these many stones, each one different from all the others. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I can’t stop being Mercer. Once you start it’s too late to back off.” Will I have to climb the hill again? he wondered. Forever, as Mercer does. . .trapped by eternity. “Good-bye,” he said, and started to ring off.

“Oh.” His face fell by degrees. “Yeah, so I see; you’re right.” Crestfallen, he gazed mutely at the false animal; he took it back from her, fiddled with the legs as if baffled—he did not seem quite to understand. He then carefully replaced it in its box. “I wonder how it got out there in the desolate part of California like that. Somebody must have put it there. No way to tell what for.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you—about it being electrical.” She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.

“No,” Rick said. “I’m glad to know. Or rather—” He became silent. “I’d prefer to know.”

“God, what a marathon assignment,” Rick said. “Once I began on it there wasn’t any way for me to stop; it kept carrying me along, until finally I got to the Batys, and then suddenly I didn’t have anything to do. And that—” He hesitated, evidently amazed at what he had begun to say. “That part was worse,” he said. “After I finished. I couldn’t stop because there would be nothing left after I stopped. You were right this morning when you said I’m nothing but a crude cop with crude cop hands.”

“I don’t feel that any more,” she said. “I’m just damn glad to have you come back home where you ought to be.” She kissed him and that seemed to please him; his face lit up, almost as much as before—before she had shown him that the toad was electric.