The Complete Roderick

Roderick saw the answer at once, but pretended to puzzle over it. His thoughts kept straying to sex. It just had to be more than Ma and Pa thought. Only yesterday he’d been reading about Ramon Lull, the thirteenth-century Franciscan who’d invented a feeble kind of logic machine. Even Lull had pursued other things than truth. Lusting after a woman, he had written poems in praise of the imagined beauty of her breasts, and finally chased her on horseback into the cathedral. The woman then opened her bodice to reveal a breast partially eaten by cancer… but why had Lull imagined otherwise? There had to be more to the cipher of love than to any of Ramon Lull’s little cipher-wheel gadgets, or even to this substitution, in which A stood for B, B for C,… Was Lull converted because the breast disgusted him? Or because, God help him, it did not?

XIX

Ping, poop, peep. Ping-peep. ‘I’m outa… practice…’

‘…wish they’d just stop referring to it as plague, that’s all. Plague, plague, plague, like to see what they’d print if they really had plague here… my point, that’s frak 13… because it’s just mercury contamination, simple…’

Roderick sat in the dark hall beneath the picture of Saint Whatsername and her magical piano. From somewhere he could hear the voices of Father O’Bride and his guest, and the sounds of some electronic game.

‘Ha!’ Ping-poop. ‘Oh.’

‘Gotta anticipate, Father.’

‘Mercury poisoning, eh? Sounds serious…’

‘…prefer to call it contamination, what’s in a nomenclature I always say, either way it spells trouble, we got a problem running down the contaminant… my guess is some fun food, problem is there’s… thirteen thousand… narrow it down with questionnaires but… what kid remembers… six months ago? Is that mine?’

‘Yeah, that’s two men on, three up and four to play, love-fifteen, fifteen-two, fifteen-four — Doc, you’re a natural. A natural!’

‘…theory of my own, these talking gingerbread men, all the cases since they came on the market… tried to run one through the lab but they keep delaying… figure maybe certain commercial interests trying to hold things up… maybe pressurizating the Governor…’

‘Heck. Guess I’m real outa practice there… yeah I know what ya mean, big business… little guy ain’t got a chance any more… lay everything you got on the line, pick up the ball and run with it only… darn referee keeps tryina get in the game, know what I mean? Speakina games, howsabout we mosey out to the club and get in nine holes? Forget the lab, they can page you if they…’

Father Warren called Roderick into his study. He looked even more pinched and tired than usual, and one of his hands was wrapped in gauze.

‘Lent,’ he said, and after a moment sighed it: ‘Le-ent. A time of self-denial. Humiliation of the flesh. Renunciation of the world. Repudiation of the devil… what does self-denial mean to you, Roderick?’

‘Gee Father, I don’t know, is it like the cretin who says all cretins are liars?’

‘Ooff!’ Father Warren applied fingers to his blue jaw as though he’d been slugged. ‘Well. Tch. Let’s drop that for the moment. Did you manage to read that book I gave you? Logic Machines?’

‘Yeah, Father. I was wondering about this Ramon Lull and this woman with breast cancer—’

‘Forget it. You’re too young to worry about that, put it out of your thoughts. The point was to get you to see how logic can be put to the service of theology, did you get that?’

‘Well yeah, Father, he made up all these wheels with letters around them so you could turn the inside wheel and bring different letters together, like all the combinations. Like ciphers.’

‘Very good, yes. And what did the letters stand for?’

‘Well things like the seven deadly sins, so you can see how lust makes you angry, or anger makes you envious—’

‘Fine, fine. And there were other wheels with the divine attributes, to show us how God’s mercy is wise, his wisdom is powerful and… and so on. Do you see the point?’

‘Well sure, Father, only I mean it gets kinda silly, don’t you think? I mean where he says, here listen:

‘“If in Thy three properties there were no difference… the demonstration would give the D to the H of the A with the F and the G as it does with the E, and yet the K would not give significance to the H of any defect in the F or the G; but since diversity is shown in the demonstration that the D makes of the E and the F and the G with the I and the K, therefore the H has certain scientific knowledge of Thy holy and glorious Trinity.” Heck, I mean I don’t even think he knew himself what he was talking about, all his circles with lines all over them looking like, like maybe breast cancers—’

‘Didn’t I just say forget that part? The flesh is too much with us…’ Father Warren’s voice became throaty with sarcasm: ‘Except in your case, of course. It’s all nuts and bolts to you, isn’t it? People, emotions, dreams, the sense of sin, the hope of salvation — all just hardware. You’re so superior, aren’t you? Sitting there, not even a hint of humanity in that, that welding mask you use for a face — damn you!’

The wax-coloured hands writhed, pinching and scratching at one another like two scorpions in a bottle. After a moment, one of them calmed itself enough to rise and make the sign of the cross, blessing the robot. ‘Forgive me, my child, I… haven’t been well lately, not that that’s any excuse for an outburst like that… now where were we? I have a book, a book here somewhere…’

The hands began to rummage blindly through the books and papers on his desk, picked up Malleus Maleficarum and put it down, finally seized upon a volume of Mind. ‘Ah yes. Now. I’m going to put a hard question to you, Roderick. Little test, you might say, just now SUPPOSE… suppose you and I are in a lab, performing an experiment. And suppose that your, your brain is hooked up to a very special kind of machine. Now since you say you are a robot, all we really have here is two machines hooked up to one another, right?’

‘Right, Father.’

‘Okey-dokey. Now this special machine can read your mind and show what you’re thinking on a big screen. So by looking at the screen, I can see what you’re thinking, okay?’

‘Okay Father, only—’

‘Never mind technical problems, let’s just say we’ve solved them. I can read your mind. But since you are a machine, it follows that I can do better than that. Because whatever a machine is doing depends entirely upon what it did in the past — along with any new inputs—’

‘I think input is plural and singular, Father.’

‘Any new input, you understand? If this special mind-reading machine knows what thought you’re having this minute, it also knows what thought you’ll have next. So I can look at the big screen and see your thoughts before you have them.’

‘Okay, but—’

‘No buts.’ Father Warren took a handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped the palm of his good hand. ‘I am absolutely and scientifically certain of your thoughts before you are. If I ask you a question, I know the answer you’ll give before you give it. Are you with me so far?’

‘I think so, Father. Do I get to see the big screen too?’

‘We’ll come to that.’

‘Because if I do, I could see I have a thought before I have it, and isn’t that imposs—’

‘I said we’ll come to that! Okay no, you can’t see the screen. But you’re hooked up to this machine, and I ask you, “Do you believe this machine can correctly predict that you will answer ‘No’ to this question?”’

Roderick thought it over for a moment. ‘Heck Father that’s just a plain old paradox, if I answer “No” the machine has to perdick I’ll say “No” so I’m wrong not to believe it. But if I say “Yes” the machine perdicks that, so I’m wrong again.’

‘Hmm, maybe I’ve got that wrong somewhere.’ Father Warren studied the book, cracking his knuckles. ‘Suppose we put “Yes” in place of “No”, yes that’s it, suppose—’

‘Well then I’m right all the time, Father. If I say “Yes” the machine knows I’ll say “Yes” so it’s right and I’m