We Can Build You by Philip K. Dick

her eyes shut. It was like leading a very tiny girl.
    “We never see daylight, Louis. No matter how many grains of sand we haul away. We work and we wait, but it never comes. Never.” In a despairing, strangled voice she said, “We die, Louis, down there.”
    I wound my fingers through hers. “What about the cup of coffee now?”
    “No,” she said. “I just want to walk.” We went on for a distance.
    “Louis,” Pris said, “those insects like wasps and ants … they do so much down in their nests; it’s very complicated.”
    “Yes. Also spiders.”
    “Spiders in particular. Like the trap-door spider. I wonder how a spider feels when someone breaks its web to pieces.”
    “It probably says ‘drat,’” I said.
    “No,” Pris said solemnly. “It gets furious, and then it abandons hope. First it’s sore—it would sting you to death if it could get hold of you. And then this slow, awful blind despair creeps over it. It knows that even if it rebuilds, the same thing is going to happen again.”
    “But spiders get right out there and rebuild.”
    “They have to. It’s inherited in them. That’s why their lives are worse than ours; they can’t give up and die—they have to go on.”
    “You ought to look on the bright side once in a while. You do fine creative work, like those tiles, like your work on the simulacra; think about that. Doesn’t that cheer you? Don’t you feel inspired by the sight of your own creativity?”
    “No,” Pris said. “Because what I do doesn’t matter. It isn’t enough.”
    “What would be enough?”
    Pris considered. She had opened her eyes, now, and all at once she disengaged her fingers from mine. It seemed automatic; she showed no awareness of doing it. A reflex, I thought. Such as spiders have.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “But I know that no matter how hard I work or how long or what I achieve—
it won’t be enough.”
    “Who judges?”
    “I do.”
    “You don’t think that when you see the Lincoln come to life you’ll feel pride?”
    “I know what I’ll feel. Greater despair than ever.”
    I glanced at her. Why that? I wondered. Despair at success … it makes no sense. What would failure bring for you, then? Elation?
    “I’ll tell you one, out of the world of nature,” I said. “See what you make of it.”
    “Okay.” She listened intently.
    “One day I was starting into a post office in some town down in California and there were birds’ nests up in the eaves of the building. And a young bird had flown or dropped out and was sitting on the pavement. And its parents were flying around anxiously. I walked up to it with the idea of picking it up and putting it back up in the nest, if I could reach the nest.” I paused. “Do you know what it did as I came near?”
    “What?”
    I said, “It opened its mouth. Expecting that I would feed it.”
    Wrinkling her brow, Pris pondered.
    “See,” I explained, “that shows that it had known only life forms which fed and protected it and when it saw me even though I didn’t look like any living thing it had ever known it assumed I would feed it.”
    “What does that mean to you?”
    “It shows that there’s benevolence and kindness and mutual love and selfless assistance in nature as well as cold awful things.”
    Pris said, “No, Louis; it was ignorance on the bird’s part. You weren’t going to feed it.”
    “But I was going to help it. It was right to trust me.”
    “I wish I could see that side of life, Louis, like you do. But to me—it’s just ignorance.”
    “Innocence,” I corrected.
    “That’s the same; innocence of reality. It would be great if you could keep that, I wish I had kept it. But you lose that by living, because living means to experience, and that means—”
    “You’re cynical,” I told her.
    “No, Louis. Just realistic.”
    “I can see it’s hopeless,” I said. “Nobody can break through and reach you. And you know why? Because you want to be the way you