The Complete Roderick (69 page)

Father Warren awoke from a brief and terrifying dream in which he’d been playing ping-pong with the Holy Ghost. The Paraclete had taken the form of a pigeon; standing on the table, it pecked the ball back at him. There had been some question about the stakes. Either damnation awaited him if he won, or else if he lost. But the terrifying part was that, in his dream, he knew he was dreaming. He knew that if he succeeded in avoiding damnation, his pleasure would be supreme and lasting into wakefulness - thus damning him anyway.

All nonsense of course. Here he was in the lounge of the Newman Club, having dozed over his own article on Lewis, nothing worse. He set about exorcizing the dream: ping-pong sounds came from the next room, no mystery about that. As for the pigeon, hadn’t someone the other day said something about Skinner and pigeons? Training them to be superstitious? Yes, something about pigeons understanding how faith could be exactly like a mustard seed.

Cheap epigram like that, funny it should stick in his craw mind. He turned his attention to the printed words (his own):

… a fearful symmetry by which the master finds that it is really the slave who is in control of things. The magician who believes he can hold demons in thrall makes the same mistake as the cybernetician who thinks he can order his machine to deliver power or ‘success’ for free. In such a context we find Lewis using a demon name made up of
screw
(a word rife with both bawdy and mechanistic vulgarity) and
tape
(symbol of the binding contract). It would be hard to imagine a name more prophetically descriptive of the cybernetic demons that were to come into being.
The Screwtape Letters
appeared in 1942, the year ENIAC was built. And it is of ENIAC’s descendants that Lewis might have written:

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them.

Our own ‘computer generation’ has managed to fall into both errors …

A fearful symmetry, yes, he ought to have added a word or two about binary numbers, two errors, the Yes/No character of … of …

His head jerked up. No one else in the lounge seemed to have noticed him. Two students were talking quietly in the corner, near the statue of the Infant of Prague. Two others, flushed from their ping-pong game, were heading for the coke machine.

The boy with the sparse beard stood in the doorway, looking at him. ‘All right if I come in, Father?’

‘Hector, of course. Were you looking for me?’

‘Yeah, I tried your office, they said you might be here. Only when I looked in you seemed to be praying.’

Father Warren remembered to grin. ‘What, at the Newman Club? With all this racket, I’m lucky I can even read. What’s on your mind? Not still worried about your paper?’

‘No, it’s going okay. Only I still remember the movie a lot better than the book. And I still don’t see what a clockwork orange is supposed to do, he might as well say an electric banana - I mean, an orange you wind up and then what?’

‘Ah well you see it’s - something the English, something musical as I recall, musical references galore there - a kind of music box, perhaps. But was there something else?’

‘Yeah, Father, just that the Science Fiction Club is having this panel discussion on artificial intelligence, we thought you might want to, um –’

‘Chair the discussion?’

‘Well no, just be a panellist, we’ve got a chair, um, person, already.’

‘Be on the panel? Sure. See my secretary about the date, but I’ll be glad to.’

The two of them rose, and the priest put a hand on the other’s
shoulder, seemingly controlling him as they strolled towards the door.

‘… work orange, difficulty lies in deciding not merely its function, but whether its membership in the class of oranges or the class of clockwork things takes precedence in determining that function. The two classes are thought to be mutually exclusive and indeed they are, for we know intuitively that we are not dealing with a real orange, but rather a token of the type orange. That is, it has some properties that make us call it an orange, properties shared by all oranges and by the type itself, which – I wonder who that was?’

He had nodded and smiled at a familiar face lurking by the coke machine, it had nodded back: a plain, symmetrical face of no particular age, or sex, or race. It was gone from his thoughts before he had passed out of the Newman Club beneath the motto:
Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem,
from shadows and types to the reality.

The little knot of people by the coke machine were talkative and thirsty; only one said nothing, drank nothing.

‘Well sure it applies to religion, we had all about that last week in Computer Appreciation, they said in 1963 a computer proved that not all of St Paul’s epistles were by the same hand.’

‘Big deal, so he was ambidextrous.’

‘Or maybe it proved they
were
all by the same hand, I forget which. Anyway the computer proved it, whatever it was.’

‘Hey, and Pascal, right after he invented the first adding machine, he got “born again” as a Jansenist.’

‘I thought Pascal was a language – but what about the big Mormon computer storing up the names of all the dead people in the whole world?’

‘What about Leibniz, he built the first four-function calculator, and he proved the existence of God. And he invented binary numbers. On the other hand, he must not have been too religious, his treatise on ethics turned out to be plagiarized.’

‘What about the rosary? Wasn’t that the first religious calculating device? The Catholic abacus, somebody called it …’

‘Well I still say cybernetics doesn’t apply to religion, I mean they haven’t even got computer-generated music in the liturgy have they.?’

‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be happy even if they had a robot pope, like in that Robert Silverberg story. You’d want a robot canonized too.’

‘Ask Robbie here what he thinks, does he want to be a saint?’

‘Leave Robbie alone,’ said the boy in the sweatshirt marked FYN. ‘He don’t have to think about nothing, he’s our mascot. Our own personal robot mascot. Right, Robbie?’

The silent, unthirsty one, who wore an identical sweatshirt, nodded. ‘Right, master.’

‘He’s no robot,’ said somebody else. ‘He was playing ping-pong a minute ago, he’s just one of your pledges helping you pull a stunt. Robots can’t play ping-pong.’

‘That’s all you know, look in his mouth. Robbie, open wide.’

The mascot opened his mouth for inspection.

‘Hey, he ain’t got no tongue! No throat! Just a, what is that, a speaker?’

‘Okay, I’m impressed. Only where did you get Robbie? He must be worth millions, a robot that good. I mean I work over at the bio-engineering lab, I know how hard it is to get a robot to walk around normally in the real world, let alone play ping-pong. So how come it’s your mascot?’

‘Fraternity secret. Robbie, go wait for me in the lounge. Just sit down in there and wait for me.’

‘Yes, master.’

‘I’m impressed, I’m impressed. There he goes, sits down you didn’t even tell him to sit in a chair, but he’s doing it. Boy, he is worth millions.’

The mascot sat down in the lounge, rested one hand on each arm of the chair, and stared straight ahead of him. He took no notice of the couple sitting nearby, nor they of him; they were engrossed in the little statue in the corner.

‘… and that’s what’s so peculiar, it’s a copy of a copy, an effigy representing a doll. I mean the original Infant of Prague was a statue of Baby Jesus that they clothed in real finery, brocade and jewels and a gold crown – but this, this is just plaster painted to look like finery: a statue not of Jesus but of a robed doll. There’s something uncanny about it, it’s like making a waxwork model of a robot,’ said the boy.

The girl replied, ‘The word comes from Prague too. Prague

keeps getting associated with effigies, one way or another. There was the famous
golem
of Rabbi Löw of Prague, back in the sixteenth century. It was made of clay, and he brought it to life by putting this amulet under its tongue a paper with the secret name of God or something like that. The golem works for him, runs errands and so on, but on the Sabbath he has to remove the amulet and put it to rest. One Sabbath he forgets; the golem gets out of control and goes rampaging around Prague. Finally he gets it deprogrammed and puts it away in the attic of the synagogue, never to be brought to life again.’

‘A legend with a moral?’

‘Yes but Rabbi Low was a real man, he died in 1609. About thirty years later, Descartes was suddenly talking and writing about automata.’

He looked at her. ‘Descartes? What’s the connection?’

‘Descartes fought in the Battle of Prague! His side won, and he marched into the city in 1620. Did he hear of the golem? Did he buy it? Did he loot the synagogue? We know he was interested in all sciences; had he heard of the golem, he would almost certainly have tried to see it, if not acquire it. Anyway, in 1637 he wrote about automata, saying that automaton monkeys could not be distinguished from real ones.’

‘An experimental observation?’

‘Why not? Three years later, he was making a sea voyage, taking along an automaton girl, whom he called “ma fille Francine”.’

‘Too good to be true! What happened to her?’

‘Destroyed by superstition. He brought her aboard the ship in a box. The captain peeked inside, saw her move, and, thinking her the work of the Devil, threw her overboard.’

‘Another mystery of Prague down the drain,’ he said.

‘Three centuries later Karel Čapek put on his play
R.U.R.
in Prague, and added the word
robot
to the world’s vocabulary. Čapek was born in Prague, too.’

‘It’s always Prague – the Infant, the golem, Rossum’s Universal Robots – you begin to wonder what was really going on there?’

Outside it was spring, warm enough for students to lie on the lawn with bag lunches and define their terms in arguments, if they
were not better occupied cuddling or daydreaming or dozing or throwing frisbees.

‘… a surrealist musical, he calls it
Hello Dali …’

‘But hey listen, the Golden Section …’

‘Basically I guess I must be a Manichee, I always see two sides to everything …’

‘… this Golden Section, this computer worked it out to thousands of decimal places, I still don’t know what it is exactly …’

‘… to match up these thousands of potsherds, only the program went wrong. That or else the Beaker people made a beaker without a mouth, so much for Keats …’

‘La vie électrique,
by Albert Robida.’

‘Br’er Robbie …?’

‘Ah ah ah!’

Someone sneezed, someone spoke of spring the sweet spring. A frisbee player stepped on a tuna salad sandwich. Someone looking quickly through a book on Rodin remarked that some of his stuff wouldn’t be bad when it was finished.

A few heads turned as a woman in white passed. Her long hair, in sunlight the colour of clean copper, hung long over her shoulders and back, all but obscuring the legend on the back of her white coveralls: SANDRO’S SHELL SERVICE.

Down the line, heads were turning for a different reason as Lyle Tate passed, coming the other way. The birthmark down his cheek was darker than usual because he was angry; it rendered one side of his face a mask of infinite fury, its eye weeping ink. He and the woman in white met by the frisbee players.

‘What is it? Weren’t we meeting at the Faculty Club bar?’

‘Nothing, I just can’t – we’ll have to go have lunch somewhere else, Shirl.’

‘Lyle, what’s wrong?’

‘I met that sonofabitch Gary Indiana, that’s all. I just can’t stay in the room with him, not after what he did to my one-man show, did you see his review?’

‘No. Look let’s skip lunch, we can just sit down here on the grass and talk this out, can’t we?’

He sat down but continued to wave a clipping from a slick art
magazine. ‘After this I’ll be lucky if the department doesn’t drop me, that’s all.’

‘It looks like a long review for a bad one.’

His face twisted more. ‘That’s the worst of it, he pretends to
like
my work, then tears it apart – I mean for instance getting the titles of the paintings wrong!
Cigar Tragic
he changes to
Cigarette Tragedy,
the palindrome was the whole point of the title, the whole painting is a visual palindrome with Castro’s exploding Havana mirroring the vaudeville gag, was trying to show the comic-book minds behind it, but no not only does he change the name he spends half the review talking about America’s position on puppet governments, turns out to be some fucking speech he ghosted for General Fleischman – you see what I’m up against? And he claims it’s all some problem with his word processor, a page of speech got slipped in by mistake. Can that happen?’

She shrugged. ‘If he’s an idiot.’

‘He’s – I don’t know what he is, talks about me handling my faeces and then says the word processor put in an e, it was faces I don’t know what to believe. And it keeps getting worse, listen to this: “Tate, handling his faeces with a skill that betokens a savouring of every movement and at the same time reminds us of his personal affliction, piles on de tail.” Can a word processor really do this? Wreck my whole future like this?’

She nudged him. ‘Hey look, one of those fraternity boys going by – he looks just like you in profile.’

Lyle did not look. ‘My good side, no doubt. But just tell me, you’re the expert, can a word processor make all those mistakes?’

‘Yes and no, Lyle. In any case, why didn’t this Indiana character read his copy over before transmitting it? Why didn’t his editor catch anything? Even with direct setting somebody’s supposed to read the stuff.’

‘Then somebody’s out to get me.’

‘With a reamer, Lyle.’

Someone spoke of spring training. A frisbee player stepped on a Rodin book, while someone opened a tuna sandwich to study it. Someone sneezed, unblessed.

‘Brother Robbie, come on.’