The Complete Roderick (47 page)

‘Got to catch the bus.’

‘Too bad you can’t stick around. In a minute they got
The Big Break,
then
Mr and Mrs Jackpot,
then
Beautiful Winners –
no wait, that’s on the other network – they got
Boom or Bust, For Richer or Poorer, Hit a Gusher, Winning Streak, Crazy-stakes, Cash In, Read the Will, Slush Fun, Crapout
…’

But the young man with the symmetrical face – Benson had no idea who he might be – was gone, faster than the time limit for one of them questions on
Take the Cash.
One of them real hard questions.

*

‘… Course we’re protected, but we ain’t exactly gonna make a pile on that deal,’ said Mr Kratt’s voice. ‘Not unless we buy this Bangfield out of Welby’s company … anyway you get your ass back here, next time don’t go telling the damn chauffeur how to drive the damn car.’

‘Yes sir.’ Ben hung up just as the bus was pulling in. Even so, by the time he’d gulped the tepid coffee, paid and tipped, counted his change twice and gathered up his notebook and
God is Good Business,
he was the last one aboard.

He found an empty seat behind a pair of nuns. Across the aisle was a young man Ben thought he recognized, until he saw him full-face (without a birthmark).

‘Reading about God, are you?’

‘Yes.’ Ben turned away quickly to the window. For all you knew, this guy could be one of the executioners last night.

The thought sent Ben back to his notebook:

‘In 1791 William Godwin wrote: “A servant who has been taught to write and read ceases to be any longer a passive machine.” In this he expressed the fading hope that any distinction could still be made between the common man and the common gadget. For by the time Godwin’s daughter had completed her
New Prometheus
(and while in the next room her husband echoed her creation in
Prometheus Unbound:
“And human hands first mimicked and then mocked,/With moulded limbs more lovely than its own,/The human form, till marble grew divine …”), by that time the French had already celebrated their revolution by creating a new automatic headsman, while in England the law declared that men who smash an automatic knitting machine must be hanged – as though they had committed murder.’

The man across the aisle was writing, too. Ben looked away, saw an ambulance go by, and heard one of the nuns:

‘Poor Father Warren! Imagine, getting malaria right here in the middle of Nebraska!’

‘On top of everything else, Sister!’

‘Yes, Sister. No wonder Mrs Feeney thinks he’s a saint.’

‘Ah, who knows, Sister?’

‘Ah, who indeed?’

*

It was late afternoon in New York, where they were changing one of the flags in front of the UN building. The peacock-blue-and-gold of the Shah of Ruritania came down to be replaced by the tricolour of a new People’s Republic. There was no ceremony, nothing to disturb the normal rise and fall of pigeons, flapping up to invisible ledges somewhere above, swooping down to join the sea of columbine grey through which waded a few tourists, among them Mr Goun.

Mr Goun and his camera had come to see the UN building, not to see if it was really (as its architect claimed) a ‘Cartesian skyscraper’ (Cartesian it was, as any sheet of graph-paper) or ‘a passion in glass’, but merely to finish a roll of film and the last afternoon of his vacation. He was passionately aware how much his feet hurt, how tired he was of standing like this in groups of tourists, all snapping away at some sight, all complaining about their feet, all anxious to get back to their homes (that is, to the machines in which they lived).

He was lonely. The only person he had spoken to (aside from foot complaints) was a policeman yesterday, who said:

‘Watch the way ya carry that camera, buddy. Lotsa cameras snatched like that, see?’

‘Thanks, offic –’

He thought of that conversation now, as he reached for his camera and came up with nothing but two ends of the strap, each neatly razored.

‘I’ve been robbed!’ he said. No one looked at him.

‘Hey I’ve been robbed!’ he said to a man in a Hawaiian shirt (matching the band of his straw hat).

‘Yeah? Tough.’ The man turned away to continue his conversation with someone else: ‘Okay so the Shah was a puppet, but I say, whose puppet? Whose puppet?’

Goun turned and bumped into someone.

‘Oh I’m sorry – hey! Professor Rogers, holy –’

‘Mistake!’ said the other, in an oddly hoarse voice. Indeed, his glittering gold hair did not look much like that of Rogers (except at the roots, where Goun was now looking), and some of his pock-marks seemed to have been filled in with putty.

‘But sure you must be, holy, hey it’s great to see you Prof –’

‘Mistake! Mistake! My name Felix Culpa!’

Goun watched, amazed, as the stranger ran off to jump into a yellow taxi. There was something like blood on the door.

Dear Dan,

The picture on the other side of this card is the post office in Newer where I won’t be mailing it. I hope you’re feeling better. Ma & Pa send their love. I’m fine.

Your pal,
Roderick

Nothing to add, so he stared out of the window as familiar places flickered past: Virgil’s Hardware, Joradsen’s Drug, Fellstus Motors, the sort of new Simple Simon Supermart,
HAIR TODAY
, the Legion Hall, the Idle Hour, Violetta’s shoppe (now it was to be called
VI & I NOTIONS
), the pool hall, the library, Buttses Dairy, Bangfield Realty, Welby Investments, the site of the proposed Bangwel Building, Newer Produce, Cliff’s junkyard, the motel and chapel, and finally the office recently vacated by Dr Smith the dentist – men were carrying in a new mechanical receptionist, other men were putting gold lettering on the windows:

LOUIE HONK-HONK’S DETECTIVE AGENCY, INC.

Stuff Found Out

The murderer must be Dr Coué, using the billiard cue, between 8:00 and 8:15, and dropping the clue of the hair. Reasoning is as follows:

1. If the billiard cue was
not
the weapon, then either Drumm embezzled or Coué was blackmailed, or both. If Drumm embezzled, then the daughter was compromised. Since she was not, Drumm did not embezzle. If Coué was blackmailed, then the butler was an addict; if the butler was an addict, then the billiard cue was the weapon. In short, if the cue
was not
the weapon, then the cue
was
the weapon. This contradiction resolves only if:

The billiard cue was the weapon.

2. Since Adam used the polo-stick, and Brett the poker, only Coué or Drumm could have used the billiard cue. (Each suspect had access to only one weapon.)

3. If Coué touched the statuette (weapon) then there was a message under it. If so, then Adam was the thief. If so, then Brett stayed in her room all evening reading. If so, then the bloody handkerchief was used to wipe the statuette. In short, if Coué touched the statuette, he also left the clue of the bloody handkerchief. But we know that Drumm left that clue, not Coué.

Therefore, Coué did not touch the statuette. Therefore he touched the only remaining weapon, the cue:

Coué alone had access to the billiard cue.

From the sentences, a table can be constructed:

Dead or dreaming? It seemed to Leo Bunsky that he had come out of retirement. Somehow he was back in his old office, working on Project Roderick again. And somehow the old heart condition had decided to stop tormenting him: gone was the breathlessness, the tiredness, the draining of fluid down into his feet until they doubled in size and burst his shoes. Without any medication or surgery, he was now cured. Everything was back to normal now, if that word could be used in these miraculous circumstances. Calloo, and also Calais! But what was the explanation?

He was dreaming. He was dead. Dreaming but dead. Neither. He had slipped through a ‘time-warp’ into a ‘parallel universe’ (Dr Bunsky was a reader of science fiction), probably through a ‘white hole’.

It didn’t matter; in any case there was plenty of work to do. He could live an unexamined life, until Project Roderick demanded less of his time, okay? Okay, and great to be part of this real-life science-fiction dream, a project to build a ‘viable’ robot. Roderick would be a learning machine. It would learn to think and behave as a human. All the team had to do was solve dozens of enormous problems in artificial intelligence that had defeated everyone else; from there on, it was science fiction.

Bunsky’s job at the moment was teaching simple computer programs to talk. So far he’d got a program to say
Mama am a maam,
but not with feeling. If Roderick the Robot was ever going to think as a human, it would of course need to learn and use language as a human:
Mama am a maam
was not exactly Miltonic, but it was a start.

How did people learn to talk? No one really knew. There were those who thought it might be a matter of training, like learning to ride a bike. Others seemed to imagine a kind of grammar-machine built into the human head. Still others tried teaching
chimpanzees to talk while riding bikes. Chimps, so far, had articulated no theories of their own.

Bunsky found it easier to scrap general theories and consider the brain as a black box: language stuff went in and different language stuff came out. In between, some sort of processing took place. What Roderick the Robot would have to do, then, was to mimic the hidden processing. The robot would have to learn as human children learn, and that meant making the same kinds of childish mistakes. And
only
those kinds of mistakes. It was okay for Roderick to say
Me finded two mouses on stair.
It was not okay to say
I found two invisible green guesses on the stair.

Leo Bunsky lifted his gaze to a file card tacked to the wall above his desk:

TO ERR (APPROPRIATELY) IS HUMAN

There was something he couldn’t remember, that made his head ache.

The door opened and one of the younger men in the project came slouching in. It was that interdisciplinary disciple with the unfortunate name, Ben Franklin. Bunsky didn’t know him well.

‘Leo, how’s tricks?’ He slumped into a chair and started flicking cigarette ash on the floor.

‘Fine, uh, Ben. Fine. Wish you’d use the ashtray, I know the place is untidy but –’

‘Yes, I found two invisible green guesses on the stair. Yours?’

‘Very amusing. Now if you’ll excuse me …’

Franklin stood up. ‘Busy, sure. Sure. I don’t suppose you need any help with anything?’

‘Sorry, no.’ No one ever wanted Franklin’s help. No one really trusted him, with his strange background: a hybrid degree in Computer Science and Humanities. A little too eclectic for serious research work. Dr Fong had hired him as project librarian and historian, but so far there weren’t many books and no history. Ben Franklin just sort of hung around dropping ash on the floor. ‘Sorry, Ben.’

‘Sure.’ After a pause, he sat down again. ‘Leo, you ever have any doubts about this project? About Roderick?’

‘Doubts?’

‘Kind of an ethical grey area, isn’t it?’

Bunsky felt the headache settling in, deepening its hold on him. ‘What grey area, for Christ’s sake? Building a robot, is that grey? Is that ethically suspect, to build a sophisticated machine? Is cybernetics morally in bad taste?’

‘Well, no, if you put it like –’

Bunsky was shouting now. ‘We’re not violating anybody’s rights. We’re not polluting any imaginable environment. We’re not cutting up animals and we’re not even screwing around with genetic materials!’

Franklin flicked ash. ‘Come on, Leo, what about long-term consequences? Don’t tell me it never crossed your mind that Roderick might be dangerous. First of a new species, of a very high order, has to be some danger in that.’

‘A mechanical species, Ben.’

‘But on a par with our own. And what if robots evolve faster and further? Where does that leave us? Extinct!’

Bunsky made his voice calm. ‘Let’s not be too simplistic there. Humans wouldn’t be in direct competition with robots, would they? Both species would use, let’s see, metal and energy. But robots wouldn’t need much of either resource. Should be enough to go around, eh?’

‘Eh yourself, what about intangible resources? What about things like
meaning?’
Franklin put out his cigarette on the floor. ‘I mean look, it could be that humans feed on meaning. It could be that we only survive by making sense out of the world around us. It could be that this is all that keeps us going. So if we turn over that function to some other species, we’re finished.’

The headache began to throb, roaring waves of pain breaking over him, trying to drag him under. There were moments of dizziness and deafness, moments when Bunsky could hardly make out the empty smirking face before him. Franklin looked a little like a ventriloquist’s dummy sometimes.

‘You have a point, Ben. Too bad you’re such a goddamned jerk.’

‘What?’ Franklin paused, a fresh cigarette halfway to his smirk.

‘I said you have a point. Yes. I believe we do have a need to make sense out of the world. We see by making pictures, no? By sorting out the “blooming, buzzing confusion”. And of course we
hear speech by making sentences out of it. I believe that the essence of human intelligence is that kind of hypothesis-building. Life is making intelligent guesses, you agree?’