The Complete Roderick (37 page)

‘Be nice to have a new doctor in town,’ Pa said. ‘Welby never has time to see me – not that I really need a doctor. My body is as fit today as it was when I was a young – a young –’

‘Pa, speaking of bodies, could I ask you something?’

‘Fire away.’

Instead of firing away, Roderick began fidgeting with the quilt. It was a strange patchwork design, each patch being a little human figure with upraised arms. ‘Gee Pa, I don’t know where to begin.’

‘At the end, son. Either end.’

‘Yes Pa.’

‘And go on till you run out of it, then stop.’

‘Yes Pa.’

‘What is it, is it your new body you wanted to ask about?’

‘Yes Pa.’

‘Trouble getting used to it?’

‘No, heck – well I mean clothes itch a lot but no, it’s fine.’ Roderick traced a figure on the quilt. ‘Only, I mean, heck, well I mean, gee whiz, but heck, I mean gosh darn, I m –’

Pa reached out and slapped the stainless-steel face.

‘Thanks Pa, I needed that. Well maybe I didn’t need it, but – about my body, okay what I wondered was, is this it? Is this my body? All of it?’

The face was a crude blank, hardly more character in it than in a fencing mask. Pa said, ‘You worried about the head, is that it? But it’s like we told you, your Ma sculpted up a swell new head, and we got this painter working on it now, he should be shipping it to us any day now –’

‘Well no, Pa. I meant – well what about sex?’

Pa raised himself up on one elbow. ‘Sex? What in the world has sex got to do with your body?’

Roderick wasn’t entirely sure. ‘Well I mean, don’t I need an extra part or two? Or three?’

‘Son, you got all the parts they had in the factory.’

‘No but I meant like male parts. Or female parts.’

Pa scratched his head. ‘Pipe fittings, you mean? Electricals? Maybe you better spell this out for me, son.’

‘I mean for making babies, Pa.’

The old man sank back and laughed. ‘Babies! So
that’s
what’s worrying you! Well listen, I know I should of had a man-to-man talk with you some time back, only I just kept putting it off … But
now listen. To have a baby, all you do is find a nice girl – or if you are a nice girl, a nice boy – takes one of each.’

‘Heck, I know that, Pa. I seen these pictures where –’

‘One of each. Then the two of you settle down together, next thing you know the babies start coming along, about one a year just like clockwork. Course you have to kiss a lot. That’s why we’re giving you a nice face, for kissing. But you don’t need no extra pipe fittings or electrical sockets – do you?’

‘I don’t know. Pa, how come you and Ma never had any kids of your own.’

‘Just plain unlucky, son.’ Pa rattled his newspaper. ‘Plain unlucky. You, uh, you don’t think there could be any other reason, do you?’

‘Yep.’ Roderick told him the story he’d pieced together from Chauncey and the other kids, from dirty pitchers, and from a glance into a book at Joradsen’s Drug,
Tantric without Tears.
All his sources, though disagreeing on details, seemed to tell more or less the same story.

Pa listened, looking astonished but remaining silent, until Roderick finished. ‘… well then I guess about nine months later the baby comes out of the same place the stuff went in.’

Pa laughed so hard he nearly fell out of bed. ‘Aw come on! That’s just ridiculous – I mean them things are to pee with, everybody knows that! You expect me to believe that people go around peeing on each other to get babies inside that they can pee out – come on, now! That ain’t even common sense if people had to go through all that every time they wanted a baby, there wouldn’t be any people at all! Mary! Come up here listen to what this boy just told me – tell your Ma, son.’

Ma listened without laughing. ‘Huh! That’s what happens when you pick up stuff from other kids, cheap reproduction books and places like that. You should have come to Pa and me in the first place, we’d set you straight.’

‘But – but – but they talk about making it, screwing and making love –’

‘Making love,’ said Ma, ‘is just a question of matching up your souls.’

Pa finished coughing. ‘What she means, son, is your minds.’ He
tapped his head. ‘Love, sex, whatever you want to call it, it all happens up here. And don’t let anybody ever tell you different.’

Ma smiled. ‘There! All cleared up? You know, I feel like – like really cooking something. See, all this talk about sex put me in mind of Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare,
and that made me think of nutmeg graters, and that made me think of – of –’ Her gaze fell on the quilt. ‘Of gingerbread boys! For my invalid – though I suppose Duchamp would call him a
vain lia
?’

‘Roderick can give you a hand,’ said Pa. ‘Soon as I get him to try out this new cipher I’ve been working on.’ He dug down in the bedclothes and came up with a scrap of paper. ‘Here son, just you try cracking that one.’

ANN NÉE ANNA, NOD TO ANTS’ ADS (HE HAD TO AX 7).
CZAR INKS ODD IDS (OHMS) FOR NUT LADDER OF VHF STAR.

Roderick saw the answer at once, but pretended to puzzle over it. His thoughts kept straying to sex. It just had to be more than Ma and Pa thought. Only yesterday he’d been reading about Ramon Lull, the thirteenth-century Franciscan who’d invented a feeble kind of logic machine. Even Lull had pursued other things than truth. Lusting after a woman, he had written poems in praise of the imagined beauty of her breasts, and finally chased her on horseback into the cathedral. The woman then opened her bodice to reveal a breast partially eaten by cancer … but why had Lull imagined otherwise? There had to be more to the cipher of love than to any of Ramon Lull’s little cipher-wheel gadgets, or even to this substitution, in which A stood for B, B for C, … Was Lull converted because the breast disgusted him? Or because, God help him, it did not?

Ping, poop, peep. Ping-peep.
‘I’m outa … practice …’

‘… wish they’d just stop referring to it as plague, that’s all.
Plague, plague, plague,
like to see what they’d print if they really had plague here … my point, that’s frak 13 … because it’s just mercury contamination, simple …’

Roderick sat in the dark hall beneath the picture of Saint Whatsername and her magical piano. From somewhere he could hear the voices of Father O’Bride and his guest, and the sounds of some electronic game.

‘Ha!’
Ping-poop.
‘Oh.’

‘Gotta anticipate, Father.’

‘Mercury poisoning, eh? Sounds serious …’

‘… prefer to call it contamination, what’s in a nomenclature I always say, either way it spells trouble, we got a problem running down the contaminant … my guess is some fun food, problem is there’s … thirteen thousand … narrow it down with questionnaires but … what kid remembers … six months ago? Is that mine?’

‘Yeah, that’s two men on, three up and four to play, love-fifteen, fifteen-two, fifteen-four – Doc, you’re a natural. A natural!’

‘… theory of my own, these talking gingerbread men, all the cases since they came on the market … tried to run one through the lab but they keep delaying … figure maybe certain commercial interests trying to hold things up … maybe pressurizating the Governor …’

‘Heck. Guess I’m real outa practice there … yeah I know what ya mean, big business … little guy ain’t got a chance any more … lay everything you got on the line, pick up the ball and run with it only … darn referee keeps tryina get in the game, know what I mean? Speakina games, howsabout we mosey out to the
club and get in nine holes? Forget the lab, they can page you if they …’

Father Warren called Roderick into his study. He looked even more pinched and tired than usual, and one of his hands was wrapped in gauze.

‘Lent,’ he said, and after a moment sighed it: ‘Le-ent. A time of self-denial. Humiliation of the flesh. Renunciation of the world. Repudiation of the devil … what does self-denial mean to you, Roderick?’

‘Gee Father, I don’t know, is it like the cretin who says all cretins are liars?’

‘Ooff!’ Father Warren applied fingers to his blue jaw as though he’d been slugged. ‘Well. Tch. Let’s drop that for the moment. Did you manage to read that book I gave you?
Logic Machines
?’

‘Yeah, Father. I was wondering about this Ramon Lull and this woman with breast cancer –’

‘Forget it. You’re too young to worry about that, put it out of your thoughts. The point was to get you to see how logic can be put to the service of theology, did you get that?’

‘Well yeah, Father, he made up all these wheels with letters around them so you could turn the inside wheel and bring different letters together, like all the combinations. Like ciphers.’

‘Very good, yes. And what did the letters stand for?’

‘Well things like the seven deadly sins, so you can see how lust makes you angry, or anger makes you envious –’

‘Fine, fine. And there were other wheels with the divine attributes, to show us how God’s mercy is wise, his wisdom is powerful and … and so on. Do you see the point?’

‘Well sure, Father, only I mean it gets kinda silly, don’t you think? I mean where he says, here listen:

‘“If in Thy three properties there were no difference … the demonstration would give the D to the H of the A with the F and the G as it does with the E, and yet the K would not give significance to the H of any defect in the F or the G; but since diversity is shown in the demonstration that the D makes of the E and the F and the G with the I and the K, therefore the H has certain scientific knowledge of Thy holy and glorious Trinity.” Heck, I mean I don’t even think he knew himself what he was
talking about, all his circles with lines all over them looking like, like maybe breast cancers –’

‘Didn’t I just say forget that part? The flesh is too much with us …’ Father Warren’s voice became throaty with sarcasm: ‘Except in your case, of course. It’s all nuts and bolts to you, isn’t it? People, emotions, dreams, the sense of sin, the hope of salvation – all just hardware. You’re so superior, aren’t you? Sitting there, not even a hint of humanity in that, that welding mask you use for a face – damn you!’

The wax-coloured hands writhed, pinching and scratching at one another like two scorpions in a bottle. After a moment, one of them calmed itself enough to rise and make the sign of the cross, blessing the robot. ‘Forgive me, my child, I … haven’t been well lately, not that that’s any excuse for an outburst like that … now where were we? I have a book, a book here somewhere …’

The hands began to rummage blindly through the books and papers on his desk, picked up
Malleus Maleficarum
and put it down, finally seized upon a volume of
Mind.
‘Ah yes. Now. I’m going to put a hard question to you, Roderick. Little test, you might say, just now SUPPOSE … suppose you and I are in a lab, performing an experiment. And suppose that your, your brain is hooked up to a very special kind of machine. Now since you
say
you are a robot, all we really have here is two machines hooked up to one another, right?’

‘Right, Father.’

‘Okey-dokey. Now this special machine can read your mind and show what you’re thinking on a big screen. So by looking at the screen, I can see what you’re thinking, okay?’

‘Okay Father, only –’

‘Never mind technical problems, let’s just say we’ve solved them. I can read your mind. But since you are a machine, it follows that I can do better than that. Because whatever a machine is doing depends entirely upon what it did in the past – along with any new inputs –’

‘I think input is plural and singular, Father.’

‘Any new input, you understand? If this special mind-reading machine knows what thought you’re having this minute, it also knows what thought you’ll have next. So I can look at the big screen and see your thoughts
before you have them.’

‘Okay, but –’

‘No buts.’ Father Warren took a handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped the palm of his good hand. ‘I am absolutely and scientifically certain of your thoughts before you are. If I ask you a question, I
know
the answer you’ll give
before
you give it. Are you with me so far?’

‘I think so, Father. Do I get to see the big screen too?’

‘We’ll come to that.’

‘Because if I do, I could see I have a thought before I have it, and isn’t that imposs –’

‘I said we’ll come to that! Okay no, you can’t see the screen. But you’re hooked up to this machine, and I ask you, “Do you believe this machine can correctly predict that you will answer ‘No’ to this question?”’

Roderick thought it over for a moment. ‘Heck Father that’s just a plain old paradox, if I answer “No” the machine has to perdick I’ll say “No” so I’m wrong not to believe it. But if I say “Yes” the machine perdicks that, so I’m wrong again.’

‘Hmm, maybe I’ve got that wrong somewhere.’ Father Warren studied the book, cracking his knuckles. ‘Suppose we put “Yes” in place of “No”, yes that’s it, suppose –’

‘Well then I’m right all the time, Father. If I say “Yes” the machine knows I’ll say “Yes” so it’s right and I’m right. And if I say “No” –’

‘Okay then let me try it this way: “Would you be right to answer ‘No’ if I asked you whether you believed this machine can correctly predict your answer to this question?” Answer yes or no.’

‘But heck Father it doesn’t matter what I answer, the machine has to say
No
–’

‘Exactly!
It
has no choice. But
you
do. You, Roderick, have
free will. Ergo
you are not a robot after all, but a human being, made in God’s –’

‘Yeah, but Father holy Osiris it’s just words, I only get a choice because the machine doesn’t have any, it’s like a – you don’t even need a big screen there, just a sign saying NO, what kinda free will is that? I mean, sure I can choose which NO I mean, just like I can choose with a two-headed coin …’

An hour later the priestly hands were still clawing through
books and piles of notes. ‘Okay then, suppose I ask you: “If I asked you whether you
dis
believed that you would be right to answer ‘No’ if I
didn’t
ask you –” No wait a minute, almost got it now. “If I asked –” No, “If I didn’t ask, yes, if I
didn’t …
”’