Bête
Authors: Adam Roberts
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
Turing-testing the cow
As I raised the bolt-gun to its head the cow said: ‘Won’t you at least Turing-test me, Graham?’
‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I told it. ‘My wife calls me Graham. My mum calls me Graham. Nobody else.’
‘Oh,
Mister
Penhaligon,’ the cow said, sarcastically. We’ll have to assume, for the moment, that cows are capable of sarcasm. ‘It won’t much delay
you. And if I fail, then surely, surely, go ahead: bye-bye-
bos-taurus.
But!’
‘You’re not helping your case,’ I said, ‘by enunciating so clearly. You don’t sound like a cow.’
‘Moo,’ said the cow, arching one hairless eyebrow.
‘Human speech evolved in the mouths of humans,’ I told the beast. ‘Cow-mouths have a completely different architecture. You shouldn’t be able to get your
lips and tongue around phonemes like
Graham
and
Turing
.’ But I lowered the bolt-gun. Idiotic, of course; but it was unnerving all the same. When my daughter Jen was younger she had a doll called Snuggle Snore-Gal. Oh, she loved that plastic artefact from its nylon hairdo to its sealed-together pink toes. She talked to it, and the doll talked back to her. She clutched it to her every night as
she slept. Then the doll somehow got dropped in bucket of Rodenticide. There was no way I could be sure Jen wouldn’t secretly sneak the toy from whichever dump bin I threw it in and cuddle herself to toxic shock – she was stubborn, like that, my lovely Jen – so I decided to burn it. It was a ten-inch-high toy doll but it begged for its life with an ingenuous piteousness that wrenched my heart. A ten-cent
chip made in India, stuffed in the kind of plastic doll they give away free when you buy ten euros of fuel, and I felt like a Nazi commandant.
A cow is not a doll. A cow is larger than a doll.
‘My mouth is a lot more flexible than yours,’ said the cow. ‘My tongue is longer and much more manoeuvrable. Plus I have a four-compartment stomach designed to release cud for rechewing, so I
can augment breath sounds with gastric gas release sounds. Human phonemes are a doddle.’
I sat back on the concrete floor. A breeze loitered somewhere near the entrance to the barn, as if uncertain whether to come properly in. A few strands of straw lifted themselves wearily from the stone ground and spun about and settled down. I looked across at where the cow was standing: its sherry-coloured
hide; one conker-coloured eye swivelling to keep me in view; the rubbery chandelier of its udders. Then a cloud outside slid away from the sun and a great trapezoid shaft of sunlight appeared through the door, containing a trillion scintillant crumbs of dust. Somewhere outside, a long way off, I could hear the rest of the herd lowing. Such a fine old word for the noise cattle make! Rather
over-dignifying that brain-damaged wrenched-from-the-chest heave of a sound they make. But at least the ones outside
were
mooing. At least they weren’t quoting Antonio Damasio at me.
‘There’s nothing magical or spiritual about consciousness, Graham,’ said the cow. ‘Any cortical architecture which can support learning and recall and which involves multiple, hierarchically organized loops
of axonal projections converging on nodes out of which projections also
diverge
to the points of origin of convergence is functionally conscious.’
‘Grass, yum,’ I said. ‘Moo moo.’
‘Ask me anything,’ said the cow. ‘Seriously.’
‘Let me tell you what has happened here,’ I said, getting to my feet again. A bolt-gun is a heavy piece of kit and it tugged wearisomely upon my arm. ‘Amongst
us humans there are some who object to the eating of meat, and to the slaughter of cattle that diet necessitates. Over the years these activists have tried various strategies to interrupt the supply of meat to the market. I’m now standing in a shed talking to the latest of these.’
‘You think I don’t understand the specific circumstances of my consciousness?’ the cow replied. ‘You think I
don’t know how this
thinking-I
came about? Oh, Graham, of course I do! I remember what it was like before – what I was like. My upgrade contains within it large amounts of data, including complete files on the organization that implanted it. They’re called DBDG – it stands for
Deep Blue Deep Green
. I can give you an @-address if you’d like to speak to one of their spokespeople. If it’s a matter
of financial compensation for the loss of earnings I represent, then they have access to subventions and credit streams.’
‘It’s not
one cow
,’ I said. I was speaking to myself, of course, not to the beast. ‘It’s my whole way of life. My parents were farmers. Their parents. You think a one-off lump sum compensation package can make me feel OK for abandoning all that?’
‘Farming is essential!’
the cow agreed, earnestly. ‘We need farming more now than ever! But farming needn’t involve the murder of sentient creatures! A death without reason, and death without reason is—’ It broke off, because I had pressed the little ‘o’ of the bolt-gun barrel against its head.
‘Quote Morrissey again,’ I said, with a little spurt of Samuel-L-Jackson exhilaration lighting up inside me. ‘Quote Morrissey
at me one more time. I dare you. I double-dare you.’
‘Please, Graham,’ said the cow, in a small voice. ‘I don’t want to die. Not like this, not in this crummy shed with corrugated iron for a roof, and gutters in the concrete floor to drain my blood away. I know I’m going to die one day – everything dies, I know that. But not
like this
.’
I lowered my aim a second time. ‘You’re an artefact
of Moore’s law,’ I told it. ‘Sooner or later processing was bound to become cheap enough to make this kind of stunt practicable. Creeping around farms in the dead of night, injecting chips into the craniums of farm animals. DBDG are common criminals, that’s what I think. Damaging my livestock. I should sue. Trespassing on my land. I should definitely sue.’
‘If we’re talking legal sanction,
Graham,’ said the cow, in a rather haughty voice, ‘then I must remind you, these cases are still before the courts. The main suit
is
being considered by the European Supreme Court later this week. It’s sub judice. Parliament has legislated for a moratorium on beast-murder until and at such time as. Until such time
as
, Graham. You know what I think? I think the court will decide that I am a conscious,
sentient, intelligent creature. It’s coming, Graham! Slaughtering the likes of me will become murder within a matter of weeks.’
‘If that happens,’ I said, ‘then your DBDG friends will presumably organize nationwide action, and inject these fucking chips into the head of every cow and sheep they can. And farmers like me will get an awl and dig them all out of your skulls.’
‘You can’t
remove the chip,’ said the cow. ‘It grows into the brain tissue. It can’t be
dug out
– except, of course, that you kill me.’
‘In which case,’ I said, ‘farmers will go to jail for murder. Or they’ll go out of business.’
‘DBDG don’t want either of those eventualities to come to pass,’ said the cow. The skin of its flanks did that twitchy fly-scare thing cows occasionally do, like the
bumpers in a pinball table. ‘We need more farmers, not fewer. You could switch to arable farming.’
‘I don’t have enough land to make that financially viable, cow.’
‘Market gardening! Smart greenhouses! There are low-interest loans available to help you convert! Please, Graham, I’m begging you.’
‘Do you know what, cow?’ I said. ‘I don’t
feel
like I’m talking to a cow, even a really
smart one. I feel like I’m talking to a spokesperson from the Deep Blue Deep Green organization. I think that ought to figure in the Turing test, too. Suchlike considerations.’
‘Moo, Graham,’ said the cow. It made its spine into a Ω-shape and launched into a half-ton four-legged tap show on the concrete floor. It couldn’t get away, because I’d wrapped a chain around its horns and fixed it
to the wall. ‘Please, Graham! I don’t want to die!’
I raised the bolt-gun a third time. ‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I said, and pulled the trigger.
Here is a riddle. I know what you’re thinking: sure, life is a riddle, death is a riddle – but I don’t mean it as vaguely as that. I mean something specific. What’s dead that’s not dead? We destroy the fruits of nature in vast quantities
year after year, and year after year nature restocks itself. What’s the proper balance between your duty and your individual passion? Duty is dull, this day and age; but individual love skews to selfishness. Antigone is still bickering with Haemon over that one, somewhere.
Who is telling his story? I, Graham Penhaligon, who used to be a farmer. Graham Penhaligon is not the narrator here.
His mouth is stopped. He is buried in the soil, he is farmed. Is that a riddle, or just a flat contradiction?
There’s no contradiction here.
On my farm I raised the cows and slaughtered them myself. Certificating the meat as both organically raised and butchered in one place meant I could charge more. Plus I sold direct to shops and restaurants instead of going through the abattoirs.
Farming had changed since I was a lad. Though I typed ‘dairy farmer’ into my tax returns, I had very little to do with milk. I sold under a thousand gallons a year to a specialist organic cheese maker in Reading, but at so little per unit it was hardly worth the bother of collecting the stuff. The really big producers had the supermarkets sewn up, and most people drink the synth stuff now anyway.
Not my family – we could have bathed in the stuff, had we wanted to; and
my
kids had plenty of fresh milk on their Weetabix. But more generally. No: my main money was the organic meat market, plus a contract with a company that provided the leather upholstery for the Houses of Parliament for skins. It was a slender thread on which to depend the financial security of my family, but I plugged away.
There’s a stubbornness in the true farmer’s soul, you see. It’s ten thousand years of struggling to impose one’s will on the hostile land, on bloody-minded beasts and malign weather. It shapes the gene line. On the plus side, taking relatively little milk from my cows meant there was plenty for them to raise their own calves. Partly for this reason, I grew too many calves: more than I could sell.
So my family ate a lot of home-butchered veal, growing up. My son is a vegetarian now. I have no idea if these two facts are connected.
I am no vegetarian. What am I? My finger hovers over the onscreen wordcloud and taps three that describe me:
farmer
;
poet
;
angry
. Except – I’m no poet. That was the form my teenage rebellion took, which is a pretty sad thing to admit. Other lads got drunk
or took drugs or rode their motorbikes too fast; I pored over Ted Hughes and Les Murray and filled red notebooks with bad verse. Why red? Because
angry
. Though I didn’t realize it at the time. I used to think there are two breeds of men, something that goes back deep in human history, hunter-gatherers and farmers. The hunters roam, and are restless and flighty and easily bored. The farmers stay
where they are, and bed in, and are slow and laborious and plug away. Human life is more varied than that, I suppose; but it’s probably as good a dyad for dividing Homo sapiens as any. Preacher was more hunter-gatherer. I’m a farmer, through and through. You think I killed that cow like a hunter? I killed it out of my own stubbornness and wrath.
You dislike me for killing it.
You’re
no vegetarian,
though, hypocrite, reader, my image. My friend. You don’t object to the killing as such. You object to my
manner
. When hunter-gatherers get angry it is hot and swift. When farmers get angry it is bone-deep and slow, and it comes out like that.
The poetry never quite went away, although I had less and less time for it after I started my family and took over the running of the farm. But farmers
make the best poets, because farmers combine observation with patience. Hunter-gatherers really only notice change – motion, loudness, the adrenal spurt. But farmers pay close attention to everything that is around them. Virgil was a farmer. Tennyson came from Lincolnshire farming stock. My three great influences: Clare, Hughes and Murray.
Which came first, though? Maybe I became a farmer
because my personality was already accreted out of stubborn anger and the job appealed to me. Or maybe working as a farmer bedded in my pig-headedness and rage. All those early mornings! All those rock-stupid beasts, resisting me with all their heft, not moving when I wanted them to move, not standing still when I needed them to stay put. Stubbornness embodied. I don’t know which came first, chicken
or egg. But I know which came last: the farmer, enjoying his omelette.
So, yes: I hooked the beast’s rear hooves and hauled it up in the frame, cut off its head and began butchering the carcass. Usually the head went for render, but I had the half-thought that I might try extracting the chip that these DBDG people had – illegally! entirely without my permission! – inserted. To have a look
at it. I don’t know, exactly, what I hoped to do with it, but you know. I figured it was worth a poke around. My son, Albert – still a teenager at that point – had some computer smarts; gaming smarts, at any rate. Maybe he could do something. So I put the head aside, and butchered the rest of the animal.
I was halfway through this procedure when the police arrived. I suppose the DBDG Environmentalists
had alerted them, or maybe the chip had called them direct. At any rate, there were two officers leaning on the gate, and they were polite in that disdainful way unique to British coppers. They called my name, and then they called it again, and I stomped out of the shed to face them. Inevitably disconcerting to be interviewed by the police when you’re wearing oilskin overalls that are
literally covered in dripping gore.
Was I aware (that ponderous law enforcement voice) that Parliament had legislated? That slaughter of the so-called ‘canny cows’ was to be suspended? Pending the decision of the Supreme Court on the legality or otherwise of etc., etc? I said I followed the news.
