The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  ‘Love ’em, but just listen … listen, it’s, the Rockettes!’

  ‘The whatettes?’

  ‘Before your time, precision high-kicking chorus line. I got to see ’em once, wonderful female robots, never forget ’em. A technological triumph of the flesh. In the flesh. See, they used to build up each movement all along the line, the way Ford built cars.’

  ‘Did you see The Nutcracker?’

  ‘Did I –? No, no, I never liked ballet. It’s too, the figures are like little separate clockwork toys, spinning by themselves, you can see it’s an for the Nineteenth Century. But this, but the Rockettes at Radio City, Christ! Even the name gives you the idea, it’s power, see? Power. Imagine a radio city anyhow, and female rockets, it’s a … a … a 1930s science fiction power dream.’

  ‘Like Metropolis?’

  ‘Exactly. A radio metropolis, female robot, it’s all there, even the big power wheels. And that’s the Rockettes, too, all that muscle moving in unison like pistons on one big crankshaft, no wonder people thought Henry Ford was God – he could make people work like that, this one does it and the next one does it and kick and turn, kick, turn, kick-and-turn –’

  ‘Modern Times?’ she said. ‘Though they say Chaplin was overrated –’

  ‘… the basic machine, the basic human machine, there you are, it’s nothing but a knee-jerk reflex, no need to be alive even, sheep in the slaughter-house, they lay them all out on a long table and start cutting their throats and they kick! They kick, this one kicks and the next one kicks, and pretty soon they’re all kicking up, kicking up, I don’t feel so good.’

  He jumped up and walked quickly out of the cafeteria, leaving her alone, a small spot of orange among hundreds of spots of colour clustering around white tables that marched out to distant walls whose colour no one ever seemed to notice. She sat listening to the conversations rising through cigarette smoke above the clatter of styrene on melamine, melamine on nybro, nybro on formica:

  ‘Basically I’m a Manichean, only …’

  ‘… basic Libran personality …’

  ‘A basically Jungian interpretation of economics …’

  A drama student in black contemplated his Danish roll while his companion said, ‘… with Tom and Sam Beckett, get it? Get it? An Evening with …’ At the next table someone opened a paperback of Kierkegaard and bit into an apple; at the next, two future engineers stopped arguing about butterfly catastrophes to peer into their sandwiches.

  The boy in the yellow sweatshirt looked up at the door, then down at his melamine plate of goulash, saying:

  ‘Maybe we’re all tokens of a type, if you can dig that.’

  ‘I can dig it, sure, but what type?’

  ‘The tokens never find out … Hey, isn’t that Sandy?’

  The view was obscured by a fat figure with a full beard, who thumped down his tray with the declaration: ‘Ruritania! Don’t tell me about Ruritania, man …’

  Beyond him a face bright with acne emitted a groan: ‘My father? My father wanted me to be a goddamn cetologist, how do you like that?’

  The drama student hoisted his Danish roll as though it really were a prop skull (and as though anyone were watching him) unaware that behind him the girl in the ski sweater was stealing his scene:

  ‘Go ahead and sign it,’ she said to someone grovelling before her plaster-coated leg. ‘Oney just your name, nothing dirty. I awready had some smartass put “Ben Franklin”, I hadda scratch it out.’

  A shrill voice at her elbow cried: ‘Jungian economics? Hahahaha, what the hell did Jung ever know about money?’

  ‘Well he was Swiss …’

  The Manichee glanced over, ready to dispute it, while at his own table the full beard reported on Ruritania:

  ‘Yeah, they’re burning books, actually burning books. Anything to do with communism. They burned Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.’

  The Manichee looked at him. ‘Yeah? But isn’t that anarchism?’

  From somewhere, at intervals, a deep voice would say, ‘True, true as I’m sitting here. God’s truth.’ From somewhere else a whining voice would wonder was there any point in fighting entropy?

  A nybro tray clattered on the vinyl chloride floor.

  ‘A goddamn cetologist. For my fifth birthday he gave me a comic book of Moby Dick, how do you like that?’

  ‘Skinner.’ said someone at another table, ‘did some very interesting things with pigeons …’

  The yellow sweatshirt swivelled its shoulders towards the door. ‘Okay, maybe it’s not Sandy, but it sure looks like Sandy.’

  ‘Go ahead, sign it, oney nothing dirty. I had everybody sign it, even Professor …’

  ‘No but listen, they actually burned this book called Cubism, see, they thought it was about Castro …’

  ‘… hell’s the point, anyway? I mean it’s all entropy or do I mean enthalpy …’ A styrene spoon dug into green jello.

  ‘Sandy! Over here, Sandy!’

  ‘… yeah, and a wind-up Jonah. Yeah, and he took me to Pinocchio just to see Monstro, how do you like …’

  The person who wasn’t Sandy went to sign the skier’s leg cast, while the drama student took a sudden Falstaffian interest in his Danish roll, while the Manichee said:

  ‘Basically I guess you could call me an anarchist. Only …’

  ‘… basic Libran, with maybe a touch of Cancer …’

  ‘God’s truth. Well, maybe it’s not true exactly, but …’

  ‘I never said it was Sandy, I only said it looked like …’

  The voices went on, scudding sound and smoke across the empty table where two empty styrofoam cups stood like vigil lights beside the coffee-soaked newspaper, until Ben Franklin, balancing a tray in his other hand, swept the whole mess to the floor.

  ‘Jesus, they never clean the tables here or anything, sit down, will you? Standing there like a damn wooden Indian – Dan, sit down and eat something.’ With a paper napkin he expunged the pencilled word ASS.

  ‘I’m not really …’ Dan Sonnenschein sat down, resting his hands on a spiral-bound notebook. The long fingers showed bitten nails.

  ‘Sure you are. Hot roast beef sandwich, salad with thousand island, banana cream pie. There.’ He showed no interest in the food Franklin was setting before him. ‘Look, it’s not a problem in anything. Just eat it. Christ, Fong tells me you’ve been living on stale peanut butter sandwiches over there, acting like a goddamned penitent or something.’

  ‘Penitent? No, I just, I have to be there, that’s all.’

  ‘For the tests, sure.’

  ‘Not just the tests.’ He picked up a styrene fork and looked at it. ‘I can’t explain it but – Roderick’s there, his mind is right there and I – have to be inside it. I mean, I have to make up his thoughts, and at the same time – I am a thought.’

  ‘Think for him, you can’t even think for yourself, sitting there starving in front of a hot meal – how much do you weigh now, hundred and twenty? Hundred and fifteen? Take that fork in your hand and use it, how’s that for thinking?’

  Dan’s hand obeyed, scooping up a forkful of mashed potato. ‘See, it’s just that it’s gone too far to stop now. They can’t stop us now, can they? No, because it would be, it’s almost murder.’

  ‘Just eat, will you?’

  ‘No, but it’s gone too far. He’s alive, Ben. Roderick’s alive. I know he’s nothing, not even a body, just content-addressable memory. I could erase him in a minute – but he’s alive. He’s as real as I am, Ben. He’s realer. I’m just one of his thoughts.’

  ‘You said that.’

  ‘I did? A thought repeating itself.’ Dan’s hands finally seized the knife and fork and started feeding him with regular automatic motions. Franklin watched him eat, the tendons moving in his cheeks, one hand pausing now and then to flick back the hair from his eyes. The grubby spiral notebook remained pinned down under his left elbow.

  ‘Oh, happy birthday, by the way. What are you, twenty-three?’


  ‘Yem.’

  ‘Ha ha, have to watch it, getting almost too old there Dan – I mean, it’s a young man’s game: Turing was only twenty-four when he –’

  ‘Yem.’ The dot of mashed potato on Dan’s chin stopped moving for a moment. ‘Twenty-four, huh?’

  ‘Of course I’m, I’m thirty-six myself …’ And from this bleak perspective, Ben Franklin looked over the field (to which he had as yet made no contribution): there was A. M. Turing, twenty-four when he conceived of mechanizing states of mind. There was Claude Shannon, twenty-two when he discovered the spirit of Aristotle in a handful of switches and wiring. There was – hell, there was Frankenstein, completing his creation at nineteen (the age at which Mary Shelley completed hers). And there was Pascal, inventing the first calculating machine at the age of eighteen – time is, time was, and death approaches, intruding on our calculations.

  If the Buddhists have it right, the world is completely destroyed 75,231 times per second, and each time completely restored. In all the worlds of Ben’s 38 years, there was nothing worth saving; he could die now, saying with the dying Frankenstein: ‘Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this! I myself have been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.’ The other being Dan, damn him! Caught in the invisible flicker at Buddhist worlds (in the VHF band), Ben stared at his future.

  ‘Turing took cyanide,’ he almost said, but changed it to: ‘See? You were hungry.’

  ‘Yes, I guess I – thanks.’ Dan wiped his narrow chin, belched, flicked back the lock of hair that fell again over his eyes. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Least I can do. Fong thinks you’re Roderick’s guiding genius, and he should know. The dark figure of Sidonia behind the –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. What I want to know is, how can I help?’

  ‘But you are helping. You’re writing program –’

  ‘Sure, pieces of test crap, you call that help, anybody could do that. I don’t even know what’s being tested, you won’t let me handle anything in the lab. Christ, what good is my degree? A master’s in Cybernetic Humanities, my whole thesis on learning systems and what do I get to do? Piddly little pieces of test program, any kid could handle that.’

  ‘No, your stuffs good, really good. Once I rewrite it, it goes –’

  Franklin sat up. ‘You what?’

  ‘Rewrite it. Listen, I have to, it’s good stuff but it’s not inside his head, it’s – I have to rewrite it from the inside.’

  ‘You sonofabitch, I don’t believe you.’

  ‘No, really. Look, right here.’ Dan’s clawless fingers clawed open the notebook. ‘Look, right here where you set up this Bayesian strategy for generalizing from past experience, that’s fine for poker-playing machines but look here, I had to simplify – I mean, not simplify exactly, but Roderickify, see?’

  Ben Franklin stared at the page of diagrams. ‘But you – I don’t even recognize this, it’s not my work. Wait, let’s see where you go with this, I don’t – let me see that. Goddamnit, let go of the goddamned thing!’

  One or two heads turned to watch them, two grown men struggling for possession of a grubby notebook. The girl in the ski sweater nudged her companion, who was bending over to peer at a signature on the white plaster: Felix Culpa.

  ‘Damn you, let go! I’ve got a right – see my own damn work, let go!’ Ben ripped out the page and spread it on the table, holding it with both hands while he studied the symbols cramped into little boxes. His cheeks and ears turned a deeper red.

  ‘Jesus! And this – it works?’

  ‘Yes. Give it back.’

  ‘Just a minute, I’ve never seen anything like this. Dan, this is – it’s beautiful. You took that half-baked idea of mine and you just – you redeemed it, that’s what. You redeemed it.’

  ‘Give it back.’

  Ben passed over the ragged page and watched him trying to press it back on the spiral. ‘I’m sorry, Dan. Had no idea, Fong always said you were good but I mean I never see any of your work, you’re always so goddamned secretive. I mean, you never even publish, for Christ’s sake, work like this and you never even publish. What about the Journal of Machine Learning Studies, or any of the AI –’

  ‘Publish?’ Dan hunched forward, protecting the notebook with his knobby wrist. ‘No, I don’t publish. It’s not the point. It’s not what I’m working for, my name in some AI journal, I don’t have time, see?’

  ‘But that’s how you buy the time, publishing. How do you think somebody like Czernski got the Norbert Wiener Chair of Cybernetics at –’

  ‘Anyway, why should I? Roderick’s mine, think I want to stick him in some AI journal for everybody to rip-off? He’s private, he’s not another toy for some toy company, I don’t want to see him crammed inside some plastic Snoopy doll. I don’t want him grabbed up by some Pentagon asshole to make smart tanks.’

  ‘Don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ Ben lit a cigarette. ‘Applications, what the hell do you care about applications? Feel like I’m sitting here with Alexander Graham Bell, he’s invented this swell gadget only he’s afraid to tell anybody about it, in case some loony uses it to make dirty phone calls. Point is, you can’t keep something like this to yourself, you just can’t, that’s all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s important, that’s why not. It’s too important to be left to one person. At least – at least let me help, I mean really help.’ The fibreglass chair creaked as he sat back. ‘Look, I know I’m not good enough to follow you all the way, just give me a glimpse, a Pisgah perspective, okay? This is, I feel like it’s the fifth day of Creation or something, the foreman tells me to collect a couple of wheelbarrows of mud and wheel it over to Eden, no one bothers telling me what it’s for. Only I’ve got to know. I’ve got to be in on it, even in some little way, Jesus, it’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. Why I went into machine intelligence in the first place, all those damned boring years playing with language translators and information retrieval systems and even poker players all I ever wanted was to create something, all right, help create something. Okay, okay don’t say it. I know my limitations. I’m intelligent but not creative, fine, only – at least I could help?’

  The lock of hair fell forward. ‘What is it? You want to see him, or what? Because there’s nothing much to see, not yet. And help, I don’t need any help, right now it’s a one-man job. All I need is some time, a little more time.’

  ‘Sure.’ Ben studied the coal on his cigarette. ‘Maybe you don’t trust me because I’m not Jewish or something, that it?’

  ‘Not – what the hell? Jewish? What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, but, no offence but –’

  ‘Look, I’m not hardly Jewish myself, my old man was reformed I guess but I wasn’t even raised –’

  ‘Yeah, okay, but it’s a, like a holy work to you all the same. Secret and holy. Like the prophet Jeremiah and his son, making the first golem, you know? They made him out of clay, and they wrote the program on his forehead, and he came to life.’

  Dan shrugged. ‘Yeah, well I’ve got to get back to the lab.’

  ‘Yeah, but you know what they wrote? TRUTH, ’emeth, they wrote, and he came to life. And the first thing he asked them was couldn’t they kill him, before he fell into sin like Adam.’

  ‘Look, it’s just something I’ve got to do, alone.’ The lock of hair was brushed back, and fell again as he stood up.

  ‘But listen a minute, will you? All he wanted to do was die. They wrote the program on his forehead, ’emeth, he came to life and all he wanted was to die.’

  ‘Really gotta be going, Ben. I mean, these parables or whatever they are, maybe they mean a lot to you but, uh –’

  ‘The point is, maybe that’s all we can create, death. Even when we try to make life it comes
out death, death is there all the time. See – wait a minute! – see, Jeremiah and Son, all they had to do was erase one letter from the program, see? So ’emeth became meth. DEAD. It was there all the time.’

  ‘Yep. Hebrew, huh? Never learned any myself. Oh, uh, thanks again for the lunch. See you.’

  Ben watched him go, a gawky Jiminy Cricket figure blundering among the white tables, stepping over the plaster leg, squeezing past the Manichee, slipping through gaps between formica and nybro, melamine and fibreglass, fleeing from the animated faces, only one of which turned to look, saw that he too was not Sandy, and dismissed him like an untidy, irrelevant thought.

  III

  There was dust on Mister O’Smith’s hand-tooled boots from sitting in the departure lounge. He noticed it when he was looking down, getting set for another fast draw against Brazos Billy. Brazos was not the kind of man to mind if a feller stopped a minute to dust off his Gallen Kamps. In fact Brazos was no kind of man at all, just a fibreglass figure at the end of an abbreviated fibreglass street, ready to go up against anybody for a quarter in the slot. If you shot him, Brazos would look surprised, crumple and collapse, even bleed a little; if not, he’d just smirk. Mister O’Smith always drew blood, and he did so now. They were calling his plane, but he lingered, watching the blood ooze out on the little cowtown street, watching it ooze back in, as Brazos uncrumpled and stood tall again. Well, back to work.

  On the plane he read his gun catalogue. Nothing much else to do, since the Agency didn’t trust a freelancer like Mister O’Smith enough to tell him anything in advance so he could get his mind set for it. The Agency was a pain in the behind, with all their need-to-know stuff and their limited-personal-contacts stuff – hell, they even gave him a code book and a radio martini olive! As if he’d be fool enough to drink martinis anyhow, and shoot, radio olives went out with, with the Walther PP8!

  In Minnetonka the snow was melting; his sheepskin was too warm; the taxis were all covered with crap; Mister O’Smith felt low. Well they can kill you but they can’t eat you! He dumped his gear at the hotel and hit the slushy street. Within minutes he found an amusement arcade and settled down to feed quarters into Randy the Robot. When zapped, Randy would look surprised, crumple and emit sparks.