Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (4 page)

“I hope I don’t derange you,” she might say in her odd English, meanwhile brushing her bosom and buttocks against Alan’s muscular frame.

“I hope so too,” Alan would reply, leaning over his bench of malfunctioning radios. “Dodgy work, this.”

And then Marie would return to her kitchen, where she seemed to be continually boiling stews with garlic. To some extent the smell hid the advancing fetor of Alan’s face.

Prudhomme took in all manner of appliances, but radios were Alan’s specialty. He liked the heft of the electronic valves—the vacuum tubes. He was quite familiar with these devices from working on the Manchester computer.

Time passed, today and tomorrow, today and tomorrow. Alan’s nerves were on edge from his continuing lack of success in programming the skug. In an impatient bid to halt the advances of the ruttish Marie Prudhomme, Alan told her that he was homosexual. It wasn’t clear if she properly understood the word. She lifted her skirt and displayed her vulva. At this point Alan took to bringing the radios home to work on.

Fixing wireless sets in a rented room might be called a demotion from designing electro-mechanical circuits to search out astronomically large prime numbers. But Alan processed life’s inputs as they came, scanning the days one by one. Given that universal computation lies within the humblest things, nothing was really more important than anything else.

In his notebooks, Alan worked out the precise changes that he needed to make to the skug’s morphonic fields. Chemical tweaks weren’t quite enough to get the job done. He was doing more than nudging an existing system into some predetermined state. He was, rather, driving the skug through a process of biological evolution—into the unknown.

Alan was struck by a sudden insight on how to speed things up. He’d use radio waves to reach into the lowest levels of the skug! Humming with excitement, he disassembled the two wireless sets on his workbench and repurposed the parts, creating an inductor-capacitor oscillator circuit with a feedback loop keyed to the inputs from a microphone that he’d abstracted from Prudhomme’s cluttered work area. The radios’ loudspeakers would come into play as well. Alan’s resulting system was not unlike a voice-encryption system that he’d cobbled together after the War—it was a crude analog computer. They’d called it Delilah.

Confident that this new jury-rigged maze of electronic valves could open a channel into the putative mind of his little skug, Alan equipped his transmitter with a dish antenna. This item was fashioned from a hammered-tin tray that he’d picked up for a few francs at the market. A faded label on the tray’s underside indicated that the metal had been salvaged from a gallon-sized olive oil can. Crimped and bent into a roughly parabolic shape, the antenna would focus radio waves upon the skug.

“Hullo,” said Alan, beaming his output directly at the skug. “Cheers, bumpsadaisy, gadzooks.” As he talked, he rotated a pair of control knobs, adjusting his broadcast’s phase shift and frequency, searching out a resonant node, listening to a response from his radios’ speakers.

And then, bravo! The crackle took on a filigreed quality. Delicately tweaking the knobs, Alan teased the sound towards a semblance of stuttering music. “I’m your mate,” Alan intoned. “Goodie, hallelujah, prithee.”

The skug-culture rippled and formed sprouts like snail-antennae, like the horns of tiny pink cows—dozens of tiny purple-tipped tendrils feeling the air. Guided by feedback, the musical tones from the radio sweetened into a warbling skirl, as of distant bagpipes heard across a heath.

“The horns of elfland,” muttered Alan. “Sweetly blowing.”

He set the microphone near the speaker, so as to intensify the feedback loop. The sounds thickened, as if groping their way towards speech.

Wondering if the skug were perhaps already talking, but in code, Alan set to work with pencil and paper, feeding test inputs into the skug and recording the responses. Unsatisfied with the results, he ran over to Prudhomme’s shop and gathered in two more radios to cannibalize for his bio-analog computer.

Two days passed. It was the week before Christmas. Around suppertime, Driss appeared.

“Where’s my money?” asked Turing sharply. “You stole it all. Ungrateful boy.”

“I spent it,” said Driss with a shrug. “I meant to buy a sack of flour and a goat to trade for a bride. But first I spent a little on a party. The stork waits a long time for the locusts to come. And then he eats. Dinner and kief and whores for me and two friends. It was wonderful.”

“You spent it all? That’s impossible. You saved no bride-money?”

“The police came. They beat me and took everything. They asked about you as well.” Driss studied Turing. “Poor old man. Your disease grows.”

“I’m close to a cure,” Alan assured him. “Now apologize for your crime.”

“The world is as Allah wills it. We do what is written. Do you have food?”

Alan offered Driss some of the dates and nuts that he’d been living on. And then he led Driss over to the corner of his stone room where the skug sat amid its chemicals and radio equipment. Ever since last night, Alan seemed to be hearing the skug directly in his mind rather than merely through his ears. And this wasn’t impossible. The human brain was, after all, sensitive to electromagnetic fields.

“It has wrinkles now?” said Driss, leaning over the large, geometrically patterned bowl.

The culture of undifferentiated tissue was alive with slowly migrating ridges in the shapes of paired spirals, large and small. Nested scrolls. These were, Alan believed, the skug’s biochemical memory storage system—brought into visibility by the electromagnetic stimulation of his radio waves. The culture had gone a bit luminous—the edges of the shifting furrows glowed in shades of curry and sand.

Responding to the harmonics of Driss’s voice or perhaps to the spice of his breath, the culture rippled and formed a carpet of tiny snouts, writhing towards the dust motes that jittered in the slanting rays of the evening sun. A low jabber came from the radio, even more like a language than before.

“The skug
knows
you!” exclaimed Alan. “Think well of me, Driss. The skug needs to love me before it repairs my face. Let it feel your affection.”

Driss held the bowl in both hands, crooning over it, intrigued by this new game. The kilogram of undifferentiated tissue rippled, as if enjoying the proximity of Driss’s taut, tan face.

“Grow,” said a wobbly thin voice from the radio speaker. Or that’s what it sounded like.

Driss chanted back, and the phenomenon shifted to a higher level. The radio speakers themselves were silent, but Alan was hearing the skug’s high little voice in his head. The skug was saying that it was hungry. It was sending out images and sensations to go with his verbalized thoughts—blobby geometric shapes and feelings of confinement. As the spell grew stronger, Alan seemed to sense Driss’s thoughts as well.

Thoroughly aroused, Alan undid his pants and sidled closer to the youth—

A volley of knocks sounded. Alan and Driss stood in silence—the knocks turned to pounding. Alan’s door shook in its frame, on the point of giving way.

“Calm yourself!” called Alan. He zipped up his fly and opened the door.

“I’m Pratt,” said the man standing there. He looked athletic but soft, like a dissipated rugby player gone to seed. His skin was sandy with freckles, his eyes were colorless and bleached. He flashed what appeared to be a British passport, without actually opening it. “My credentials. I understand you’re registered with the locals as Zeno Metakides.” He cocked his head to one side, and peered past Alan at the lovely Driss.

“I no Brit,” grated Alan, mounting his Greek accent. “You go.”

Pratt sniffed the air. In his heightened mental state, Alan imagined that he could see the man stretch and flare his nostrils—cataloguing the odors like an inquisitive dog.

“You’re in poor health, sir,” said Pratt. “I’ll make this short. I’m here to make you a proposition. It has to do with—Alan Turing?”

“No Turing,” said Alan, feeling weak in the knees.

“Zeno Metakides was with Professor Turing when he died,” said the rough intruder, wedging his foot into Alan’s doorway. “Intriguing bit of data, isn’t it.” Pratt stared hard into Alan’s eyes.

Silently Alan shook his head, wanting to refuse this entire conversation. It felt like being back at school, cornered by some bullying, unsavory older boy.

“The higher circles have a problem with the dental records. There was a secret autopsy, you understand. The face on the body—it was a flat tumor. A meat mask.” Pratt’s face split in a stark grin. “What say ye?”

“No know,” said Alan hoarsely.

Pratt leaned closer, touching the tip of his tongue to his lips. “The higher circles are thinking Professor Turing is very clever. They tracked down his last paper. ‘The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.’ The boffins would be wanting some help from the man who wrote that. Especially if he’d perfected his techniques to the point of growing a face, eh? They’d offer Turing a clean slate, set him up in a lab, and pay him a good stipend.”

“I see this Pratt with the police last night!” warned Driss. “He behave very raucous.”

Alan tried again to close the door. Growing impatient, Pratt reached under his loose shirt, and produced a shiny revolver. “You help me, or I’ll arrest you.”

“Don’t be an ass,” burst out Alan, dropping his Greek accent. “You’ve no legal standing here.”

“I can kill you right now,” said Pratt, stolidly keeping the door half open. “Nobody cares. Either I kill you, or you accompany me to my employers. They’re greatly chuffed on debriefing you—Professor Turing.”

“Oh, very well, do come in,” said Alan, moving to a new branch of his choice tree. His mind had cleared, he was thinking logically again. A conversation was really a kind of chess game. He stood to one side and made an inviting gesture.

As the sweaty Pratt pressed into Alan’s room, Driss stepped forward and made a flipping gesture with the tessellated pottery bowl. The skug thinned itself, gliding through the air—and alit upon the intruder’s face.

“Eat well, little brother!” sang Driss.

Pratt staggered and hoarsely bellowed, clutching his face with his free hand. Driss wrested the shiny revolver from Pratt’s other hand and danced across the room, watching to see what would happen.

“Turing!” croaked Pratt, ineffectually clawing at the writhing leech of undifferentiated tissue. Tendrils of the pale yellow stuff were growing from his face onto his hands. “It’s covering me, Alan! Oh god how it burns! Please don’t—” Pratt broke off in a gurgle. The skug had occluded his mouth.

Moments later, Pratt’s entire head was covered with the glowing slime, crazily bedecked with spinning saffron spirals. The undifferentiated tissue was spreading across Pratt’s skin as rapidly as the water in an ocean wave. Pratt’s flesh was an unexpectedly fecund incubation medium for the skug.

As a final act of aggression, Pratt lurched towards Alan—but it was no use. His soft legs buckled backward. He fell onto his side, utterly helpless. With the last firings of his nervous system, he bucked his pelvis, finding a liquid, sexual rhythm.

Driss giggled, standing over the felled intruder, aping the motions of the man’s hips. He waved Pratt’s gun, making macho, overbearing gestures.

A glistening bubble formed where Pratt’s mouth had been—and slowly the gas leaked from the bubble. Pratt’s contours smoothed over, taking on the shape of a snail’s body. He was a mound of muscle, his hide stippled with delicate grooves and filigrees, an archetypal mollusk, a giant slug. A pair of eyestalks poked forth from one end. The skug twitched, excreting the wadded rags of the agent’s clothes and shoes.

Probing carefully with a table knife, Alan extracted Pratt’s wallet from the damp bolus that had been the man’s pants. The billfold held about two hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes. Wordlessly Driss stretched out his hand.

“You’ve stolen enough,” Alan told the boy, handing over a single bill. “I’ll need these funds. I think it’s best I leave the country now. This may be the last time I see you.”

He would have liked to hug Driss, but already the youth had turned away. And then he was gone, insouciant as a dream, insubstantial as a shadow.

On his own now, Alan studied the slug-shaped thing that Pratt had become. A skug. Sensing Alan’s desire to communicate, the skug once again set a forest of tendrils to waving upon its surface. A chorus of tiny whistles emanated directly from the mound. Listening to the wavering rhythms, Alan again imagined thoughts taking shape in his sensitive mind. The skug was keying on Alan’s brainwaves and his morphonic vibrations.

Mouth open in a lopsided grin, Alan did a slow-motion Indian dance around the skug, raising and lowering his legs, patting his hand against the mouth in a war whoop. He felt awed by the strange beauty of the room as sensed through the morphonic circuits of the human-sized skug. But he was careful to maintain a distance of at least two meters between himself and the beast.

Despite Alan’s sense of mental contact, the skug didn’t have much to say. Certainly it was grateful for the big meal. It seemed as if Pratt’s personality was no more. Alan concluded that the skug’s still rather rudimentary biocomputation was irreversible. For him to put a piece of the skug on his face at this time would be to suffer annihilation.