by John Sladek
Father Warren chewed a hangnail. ‘I wish I could believe that. “Speak only the word and my computer will be healed.” I wish I could believe these computers were something like good servants, good but sick.’
The cartoon face looked sympathetic. ‘Hard to have faith in them, I know. Hard to believe they’re not just as petty and vicious and despicable as our own species can be. I just hope that when the time comes, Father, they have a little faith in us.’
‘When they take over? No, I can’t believe –’ The priest cleared his throat. ‘But I didn’t come here to discuss what I believe, eh? Suppose we get down to business.’
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was, well, some time ago …’
When he had heard the confession, Father Warren crossed the room to Leo’s tank. An attendant rose to greet him.
‘You know you have to crumble it, Father?’
‘If it’s the only way.’ He held the white wafer over the tank and crumbled it into the water. The white crumbs floated for a minute and then sank like little snowflakes, there being no goldfish to snap them up.
Moxon’s amplified voice reached some of the crowd, though the cold north wind was doing its best to sweep away words and people, to clear the terrace of all signs of life.
‘It was just a month ago, right here in the KUR Tower, that I found myself watching a peculiar sight on TV: two broken-down robots getting married!’
Some people laughed, others wondered who was getting married, or buried.
‘Crazy stunts aside, what can you do with broken-down robots? Well, if you happen to be a genius like Jough Braun here, you can turn them into great sculpture. Jough was poking around in one of our storerooms or offices or somewhere, and he found a broken-down robot we didn’t even know we owned. Jough says he used it exactly as he found it, just covered it with white epoxy and – well, without further ado, here it is – Man Confronting the Universe.’
The applause was blown away, as he pulled the cord. Drapery fell to show a white figure with arms upraised in Pharisaical prayer. Under the layers of epoxy a face could be discerned, but no expression. Those watching might have been reminded of the ghost-white figures of George Segal (each containing air in the exact shape of a living human, surrounded by plaster), or of the ivory statue Pygmalion warmed to life, or of the albino puppets drowned annually in Rome by the Vestal Virgins. A few might have thought of white clown makeup, first worn by Joe Grimaldi playing a comic automaton in La Statue Blanche. It is possible that someone thought of white marble Victorian tombs or white-faced mimes pretending to be marionettes, or of Frosty and Snowman, or of white-faced Japanese puppets writhing in mock death.
The north wind blew all such thoughts from the terrace.
Notes
p. 352 All of the italicized lines in Chapter Two are taken from other books: Eric Corder, Slave; Charles Dickens, Life of Our Lord; G.A. Henty, The Dash for Khartoum; Albert Camus, The Stranger, Mickey Spillane, I, Fury; Harry Mathews, The Conversions; James Hadley Chase, I’ll Get You for This; Jorge Luis Borges, The Night of the Gifts; Nathaniel West, Cool Million; Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key; Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth; Paul Chadburn, ‘Murder on the High Seas’ in Fifty Most Amazing Crimes; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, F. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment; Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely; Robin Moore, The Green Berets; A. Durnas, The Three Musketeers; Carole Keene, The Message in the Hollow Oak; E.R. Burroughs, The Warlord of Mars; Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body?: Graham Greene, Brighton Rock; Joseph Conrad, Nostromo; The Book of Judges; Warren Miller, The Cool World; A. Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; John le Carré, A Murder of Quality; E.A. Poe, Masque of The Red Death; James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice; A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Red-Headed League’; Zane Grey, Nevada; E.C. Bentley, Trent’s Last Case; The Gordons, The FBI Story; F.P. Wenseley, ‘Under Fire at Sidney Street’ in Fifty Famous Hairbreadth Escapes; Ken Jones, The FBI in Action; D.W. Stevens, The James Boys in Minnesota; Raymond Chandler, Smart Aleck Kill; Thomas Pynchon, V.
p. 366 Sue Ellen’s third husband was Vern. Roderick deduced this by assuming that two of the six people in question are brother and sister (hence the six can only be married in eight different ways). The marriages took place in this order: 1. Clarence m. Sue Ellen; Vern m. Sue Jane. 2. Clarence m. Sue Jane; Vern m. Mary Sue. 3. Ronnie m. Mary Sue. 4. Clarence m. Mary Sue; Ronnie m. Sue Ellen. 5. Vern m. Sue Ellen.
The siblings, Ronnie and Sue Jane, did not marry.
p. 454 Not all of these are imaginary books. Of the fifteen named or mentioned here, the imaginary ones are Nos. 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 only.
p. 552 A.L. Samuel, ‘Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation – A Refutation’, Science 132 (Sept 16, 1960), pp. 741–2. Cited in Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
p. 566 Lewis Carroll, ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’, Mind (1895), pp. 278–80.
p. 585 See A. Rapoport and A.M. Chammah, Prisoner’s Dilemma (Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan Press, 1965).
About the Author
Born in Waverly, Iowa in 1937, Sladek was in England in the 1960s for the New Wave movement and published his first story in New Worlds. His first science fiction novel, published in London by Gollancz as The Reproductive System and in the United States as Mechasm, dealt with a project to build machines that build copies of themselves, a process that gets out of hand and threatens to destroy humanity. In The Müller-Fokker Effect, an attempt to preserve human personality on tape likewise goes awry, giving the author a chance to satirize big business, big religion, superpatriotism, and men's magazines, among other things. Roderick and Roderick at Random offer the traditional satirical approach of looking at the world through the eyes of an innocent, in this case a robot. Sladek revisited robots from a darker point of view in the BSFA Award winning novel Tik-Tok, featuring a sociopathic robot who lacks any moral "asimov circuits", and Bugs, a wide-ranging satire in which a hapless technical writer (a job Sladek held for many years) helps to create a robot who quickly goes insane.
Sladek was also known for his parodies of other science fiction writers, such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Cordwainer Smith. These were collected in The Steam-Driven Boy and other Strangers (1973).
A strict materialist, Sladek subjected dubious science and the occult to merciless scrutiny in The New Apocrypha. Under the name of James Vogh, Sladek wrote Arachne Rising, which purports to be a nonfiction account of a thirteenth sign of the zodiac suppressed by the scientific establishment, in an attempt to demonstrate that people will believe anything. In the 1960s he also co-wrote two pseudonymous novels with his friend Thomas M. Disch, the Gothic The House that Fear Built (1966; as Cassandra Knye) and the satirical thriller Black Alice (1968; as Thom Demijohn).
Another of Sladek's notable parodies is of the anti-Stratfordian citation of the hapax legomenon in Love's Labour's Lost "honorificabilitudinitatibus" as an anagram of hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, Latin for "these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world, "proving" that Francis Bacon wrote the play. Sladek noted that "honorificabilitudinitatibus" was also an anagram for I, B. Ionsonii, uurit [writ] a lift'd batch, thus "proving" that Shakespeare's works were written by Ben Jonson.
Sladek returned from England to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1986, where he lived until his death in 2000 from pulmonary fibrosis.
