Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 9: The Opera Singer
This chapter is one of my favorites in the whole book. Rick Deckard walks into the War Memorial Opera House, sits down in a dress circle seat, and listens to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. And for a few minutes, he just enjoys the music. He’s a bounty hunter on a kill list, but right now he’s an audience member, and the singing is beautiful.
The singer playing Pamina is Luba Luft. She’s the third Nexus-6 android on his list. And she’s genuinely good. Rick admits her voice ranks with the best recordings he owns. That fact bothers him, and he knows it should.
Rick the Entropy Machine
Here’s the thing that makes this chapter so rich. Rick starts thinking about mortality. Mozart wrote The Magic Flute, then died young from kidney disease, then got buried in an unmarked grave. The rehearsal will end. The performance will end. The singers will die. Eventually the last copy of the score will be destroyed. The name “Mozart” will vanish. Dust wins.
And Rick realizes he’s part of that process. The Rosen Association creates androids. He destroys them. He’s an agent of entropy, the form-destroying force of the universe. That’s a heavy thought for a guy who just wants to buy a real sheep.
But there’s no time to sit with that feeling. The rehearsal ends. Rick goes backstage, finds Luba’s dressing room, and knocks.
The Test That Goes Sideways
Rick sets up the Voigt-Kampff equipment and starts asking questions. And Luba Luft immediately starts deflecting. Not in a panicky way. In a smart, methodical, almost playful way.
“What’s a wasp?” she asks. Rick explains. She asks for the German word. He gives her the wrong test question about a movie showing boiled dog. She starts debating whether the movie was set in the Philippines, because they used to eat dog there. He tries the mountain cabin scenario. She doesn’t know what “Currier and Ives” means, or “verdant,” or “decor.” She confuses “Currier” with “curry,” like in curry rice.
Is she genuinely confused by English vocabulary, or is she playing him? Rick can’t tell. And that’s the genius of this scene. Dick writes it so we can’t tell either. Luba is either a very sheltered opera singer with limited English vocabulary, or an android running circles around the bounty hunter. Both readings work perfectly.
Then she flips the script completely.
“Maybe You’re the Android”
Before Rick can finish, Luba hits him with a question that stops him cold. “Do you think I’m an android? Is that it?” And when Rick doesn’t deny it convincingly, she fires back: “Then you must be an android.”
Her logic is simple. Rick’s job is to kill androids. He doesn’t care what happens to them. But isn’t that exactly the lack of empathy that the test is supposed to detect? If an android is defined by not caring about the fate of other beings, then what is a bounty hunter?
She asks if he’s ever taken the test himself. He says yes, a long time ago. She suggests maybe that memory is false. Maybe a real Rick Deckard existed once, and an android replaced him. His superiors would never know.
It’s the same unsettling question that keeps coming up in this book. How would you know? How would anyone know? And the fact that Luba asks it with such calm intelligence makes it hit harder.
The Laser Tube
Rick tries to push through, but Luba is done cooperating. When the adhesive sensor disk falls off her cheek and Rick bends down to pick it up, he stands back up and finds himself staring into the barrel of a laser tube.
She accuses him of being a sexual deviant. The test questions, she points out, kept drifting toward sex. A nude girl, a pregnancy, a date at a man’s apartment. From her perspective, some stranger walked into her dressing room, stuck a sensor on her face, and started asking uncomfortable questions about her body and relationships. So she does the reasonable thing. She calls the police.
And Rick is actually relieved. A real cop will sort this out. He’ll show his ID, explain the situation, and get back to work.
Officer Crams
A uniformed officer named Crams arrives. He examines Rick’s identification. And then says he has never heard of Rick Deckard. He says he knows all the bounty hunters in the department. He also says there is no Inspector Bryant.
Rick calls the department himself. He gets Bryant on the vidphone. Bryant’s face appears on screen. But when Rick hands the phone to Officer Crams, the line goes dead. No one there. No image. He tries dialing again. The phone rings and rings. No answer.
Something is very wrong.
Officer Crams confiscates Rick’s weapons, finds Polokov’s body in Rick’s car on the roof, and announces they’re going to the Hall of Justice for booking. But when they take off, the patrol car heads south. Rick’s Hall of Justice is on Lombard Street, to the north. Crams says the old building on Lombard has been abandoned for years. The new Hall of Justice is on Mission Street.
Rick asks him to detour past Lombard. Just three minutes to see the building. Crams refuses and keeps driving south. Then he grins and says, “Maybe you’re an android. With a false memory.”
My Take
This chapter is Philip K. Dick at his most disorienting. In the span of maybe twenty minutes, Rick goes from confident bounty hunter to arrested suspect being driven to a police station he has never heard of by a cop who doesn’t recognize him. The ground has completely shifted under his feet.
But the real star here is Luba Luft. She is the most interesting android Rick has encountered so far. She sings Mozart beautifully. She argues intelligently. She asks philosophical questions that Rick cannot answer. And she does something no other android has done: she makes Rick question whether he might be the machine.
The chapter also sets up a genuinely scary situation. Rick is now weaponless, in custody, heading to an unknown location. His phone call to Bryant mysteriously died. Officer Crams either is an android or works for a parallel system Rick knows nothing about. Either way, Rick is in deep trouble.
One small detail I love. When Rick tells Luba he’ll be back to finish testing her, she tells Officer Crams, “He’s a deviant. He gives me the creeps.” She’s performing fear so convincingly that you wonder if she actually feels it. Or if the difference even matters.