The Complete Roderick

‘Rickwood, do you suppose you could really be the new Messiah? I could use a new religion.’

‘Oh sure, yesterday a New Luddite, today a follower of Dodo, tomorrow something else Luke, why don’t you just settle down and found your own religion and your own political party?’

‘That’s what Ida said. Maybe I will.’ Luke stopped and looked at the sky, as though expecting a sign. ‘Maybe I will! Sure, I’ll start a religion that’ll set the world on fire! This is America, Rickwood, America! Anything can happen here!’

‘That,’ Roderick said, ‘is just what I’m afraid of.’

XX

Mister O’Smith rolled and re-rolled the brim of his Stetson between his genuine and his mechanical hand. ‘Are you sure he can’t see me? ’Cause Mr Frankelin and me was old buddies — up until he sent me this telegram saying I was fired.’

The receptionist’s smile was fixed. ‘He’s very busy, Mr — Smith is it? Smythe?’

‘It’s O’Smith, O’Smith, goldurn it, one week I am doing important work for this company, top secret work under the personal supervision of KUR’s highest durn executives — next week nobody even remembers my name! What the Sam Hill is going on here?’

The fixed smile remained trained on him. ‘If you’ve been fired from a position here, you’ll have to take it up with Personnel, Mr O’Smith.’

‘I am not a KUR employee, I am — I was a private consultant hired personally by Mr Kratt. Mr Kratt himself, the big boss!’ The hat-brim was being rolled very tight. ‘And if I don’t get some kinda explanation from somebody, I’m gonna get mean.’

The smile faltered a little. ‘I’ll see if — if someone can talk to you, Mr O’Smith.’ She pushed buttons and spoke urgently, and in a minute he was shown into the office of Ben Franklin.

At first he thought someone else had taken over the office. The heat and smell were overpowering. With the outside temperature in the nineties, the air conditioning was turned off and the figure behind the desk was cowled in layers of heavy knitted wool, as grey as his face. The figure was a shrunken, aged version of Ben Franklin. A grey stubble of beard blurred the regularity of his usual face; only the glacial eyes remained.

The room too had undergone some terrible upheaval. There were papers and books scattered over every surface including the carpet, which also showed cigarette burns and coffee stains. There was a tray of dirty cups full of ash on the desk and another on the file cabinet; a forgotten peanut butter sandwich lay curling on a plate where a fresh cigarette smouldered.

‘O’Smith, come in, great to see you,’ the apparition croaked. ‘Grab a chair just put those anywhere.’

The fat cowboy took a chair. ‘Mr Frankelin, what I wanted to know was why—’

‘Baxendall, Baxendall, see it anywhere? Baxendall’s 1926 catalogue of calculating machines and instruments, must be here somewhere. Ah, here. O’Smith, these are great days, great days! I feel as though the universe is about to crack its great bronze hinges and pour forth the ecstasy of the New Age as pure music!’

‘Yes sir, well what I was wonderin’ was, if—’

‘And to think I worried for so long that we might be bringing forth the wrong quality, negation instead of affirmation, death instead of life.’ Franklin’s chuckle ended in a terrible dry cough. As though to staunch it, he reached for the cigarette with fingers the colour of old peanut butter. ‘Of course death is really there all the time, Jeremiah knew that.’

‘Jeremiah? Look if you’re not feeling so well, I—’

‘The prophet Jeremiah. He and his son created a golem, and they wrote in the wet clay of its forehead ’emeth, TRUTH, so it came to life. But all it wanted to do was die it begged them to kill it before it could fall into sin. So they erased one letter of the inscription to make meth, DEAD, and the golem died.’

‘Uh, yes sir.’

‘So you see? The program for life contains death. The affirmation contains the negation. Yes means no!’

‘Uh, sir.’

‘You don’t understand, do you? Well, neither did Aquinas, neither did Aquinas. He said, if it did already exist, the statue could not come into being. Aquinas said that. But did he say it before or after he smashed the effigy? That is the question. Hamlet’s binary. And did the effigy already exist before he smashed it? Albertus Magnus worked on the thing, you know, for thirty damned years. That wonderful automaton, thirty years abuilding and Aquinas smashing it in an instant. They called him the Swine of Sicily, and there he was, ready to destroy whatever he could not understand. First Luddite, Aquinas. Showed the way for all Luddites: the common man’s revenge on common objects. What thou canst not understand, smite! And what Aquinas couldn’t understand was the statue that already existed before it came into being, right? The original created from memory, right?’

‘Well if you ain’t feeling so good, maybe I—’

‘I mean, have you ever asked yourself why people make statues at all? Why puppets, dolls, effigies, mannequins, automata? Why were the Chinese building jade men who walked, the Arabs refining clockwork figures, why did Roger Bacon spend seven years making a bronze talking head? What is the motive behind all of our search for self-mockery? What is the secret clockwork within us, that makes us keep building replicas of ourselves? Not just physiological replicas, but functional replicas: machines that seem to talk or write or paint or think — why are we driven to building them?’

O’Smith seemed about to try an answer, but Franklin cut him off.

‘The answer has to be genetic. Our genes are pushing so hard for self-replication that we can no longer satisfy them as other species do, by simple procreation. They demand also that we find a way to build artificial replicas, proof against starvation and pain and disease and death, to carry the human face on into eternity. Don’t you see? We’re only templates, intermediaries between our genes and the immortal image of our genes.

‘Yes, that has to be it. I remember once Dan telling me how his creation had no body, just content- addressable memory. Only now do I know what he meant: Roderick was no body, no machine. Roderick was and is a proportion. A measurement. A template.’

‘Speakin’ of Roderick, Mr Frank—’

‘The creature has always been there, within each of us, don’t you see? God damn it, O’Smith, we each contain the complete instructions for building a robot because we each contain the complete instructions for building a human being! The whole program is within, “For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.” The creature has to create itself, out of its own memory!

‘Once I understood that, the rest was easy. No need to design a program piece by piece, it was all there, complete, inside me. Gnosis, holy wisdom was there all the time, like death-in-life. Paradise was never lost at all, it lies within.’ Again the terrible dry cough. Franklin lit another cigarette. ‘And I have done it, O’Smith, I have done it! I have created the New Adam. Poor Victor may have been blasted in these hopes, yet I have succeeded.’

‘You, uh, built a robot?’

‘I designed a soul. The lab people are taking care of the, the hardware. Dr Hare’s team will be running tests any day now. When the tests are over, so is my work, my, my worldly, my… work.’

‘You been working pretty hard, Mr Frankelin?’

‘Day and night, day and night. This fever keeps me awake anyway. It’s, sometimes it’s as though God was firing me in the divine forge, that I might glow with holy—’

‘Well, now you mention firing people, I just want to get squared away with you about this here telegram you sent me, cancelling this whole search for Roderick and no explanation or nothing. I mean just because you go and build your own robot I don’t see why you have to leave me high and dry there, Mr Frankelin.’

‘I, well yes, sure, yes. But did you find Baxendall — did you find Roderick?’

‘Course I did, I told you all about it in my weekly report, I came within an inch of grabbing this here robot for you. I even had the danged cuffs on it, only a car hit us. That was last winter, and I spent every minute since tryin’