Duplex by Kathryn Davis Read Free Book Online

generation of girls.
    That’s not the way the story goes, someone else said. There should be twelve.
    But Janice wasn’t telling “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” That was make-believe. This was history.
    The girls got to the mansion just as it was getting dark. Like now, Janice said, only night was sadder then. The wind was blowing and it was starting to rain, real rain, not what came later. O western wind when wilt thou blow that the small rain down can rain. Poets used to write things like that. The mansion windows were ablaze and the girls could hear music, very sweet and exciting, strings and horns and woodwinds and maybe, just maybe, if only they’d been listening more closely, if only they’d stopped their endless chatter and paid attention for a change, they also might have heard the tap-a-tap-tap of the peardrum.
    A peardrum, in case you don’t know, Janice said, is shaped like a guitar and has three strings, but only two pegs to tune them with, and a little square box attached to the side for keeping fairies. They’re the most beautiful fairies of all; their faces are like crystal but alive, with real eyes that can see and the sweetest little tongues! You never want to let them out, though. They have no regard for human life.
    Of course there were enough dance partners to go around—one of the beauties of the operational apparatus was that it could be reproduced infinitely and at the drop of a hat. Every girl thought her partner was the handsomest and that she was the loveliest girl in the room. The later it got the harder it was to hear a thing over the noise of the orchestra and the dancers’ feet and the wind and the rain and the gray-brown birds. The girls were never able to compare notes to figure out what was happening—dictators gather crowds for the same reason. The rain swept in through the broken windows. The wind blew away the girls’ dresses. They were too busy thinking how ugly all the other girls looked to look at themselves in the mirror.
    No one noticed when the first girl got taken up.
    Taken up where? someone asked.
    I would have noticed, said someone else.
    Janice whirled around. You don’t notice anything, she said. None of you do! She pointed at the cigar box in my lap. It was empty. Did you see her stealing your cards? she asked. They’re your ticket out of here! Don’t you know anything? Where are your mothers and fathers? Shouldn’t they be calling you in right about now?
    It is true, the full moon had risen so high in the sky it didn’t look any bigger than the baseball one of the boys had left lying on the grass verge below the stoop. The boys had gone home long ago; the street was perfectly quiet except for the sound of piano music coming from down the block. Whatever it was it was being played at the correct tempo, so it couldn’t be Mary.
    If I could only begin to be a queen, Janice said, talking to herself, I could go wherever I pleased. She sighed and patted her hair, adjusting her hairdo the way the mothers did.
    They were taken up in the scow, she said. One after another. The operator got there first and was treating his girl to a cocktail in a crystal goblet. From above, the mansion looked like a snack cake, with shadows sticking out at angles that didn’t make any sense unless you took into account the blue light cast by the scow.
    Inside the scow everyone was busy drinking cocktails and trading cards. The robots thought of this as foreplay, having no understanding of physical intimacy. According to the prophecy a child was going to come along that would be part human and part robot and this child was going to change everything. Of course it was way too soon—both sides were totally unprepared, not to mention the fact that they had their parts mixed up. The girls were only interested in romance, and the robots in completing a transaction. Oddly enough, both sides were hoping for the same pair of cards, Blue Boy and Pinkie. The cards originally came from a deck