The Complete Roderick

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 Low 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 Capek put on his play R.U.R. in Prague, and added the word robot to the world’s vocabulary. Capek was born in Prague, too.’