The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  He smiled.

  “I won’t harm you,” he said, “I want to be your friend.”

  The words didn’t matter much of course. After all this time these fisher-people had evolved a completely new language. It was salty as seaweed, full of the sound of water.

  “Iglop!” they said. “Waarsha sleesh!”

  Clancy smiled again. They were pleasant looking people, healthy-looking and well fed. Men and women alike went bare from the waist up, and wore kilts made of some seal-like skin.

  “Sky!” said Clancy pointing upwards.

  “Sea!” (he pointed) “Man!”

  It took them a while to grasp the game, but then they did so with gusto, drawing closer to the strange man in his rainbow clothes, and to his strange silvery globe.

  “Eyes,” said Clancy. “Nose. Mouth.”

  “Erlash,” they called out. “Memaarsha. Vroom.”

  Hidden in Clancy’s pocket, Com took all this in, comparing every utterance with its database of the language of the settlers before they set out a thousand years ago.

  Com knew that there are regularities in the way that languages change. Sounds migrate together across the palate like flocks of birds. Meanings shift over the spectrum from particular to general, concrete to abstract, in orderly and measurable ways. Com formed fifty thousand hypotheses a second, tested each one, discarded most, elaborated a few. By the time the fisher king arrived with his warriors and his long robe, Com was already able to have a go at translating.

  It was as the king approached that Clancy first became really aware of the massive presence of the moon.

  *

  “I was on a rocky promontory of the island. Beyond the excited faces, beyond the approaching king, was a glittering blue sea dotted with dozens of other islands. But all this was dwarfed by the immense pink cratered sphere above, filling up a tenth part of the entire sky.

  “What is our moon in Metropolis? A faint smudge in the orange gloom above a ventilation shaft? A pale blotch behind the rooftop holograms? We glance up and notice it for a moment, briefly entertained perhaps by the thought that there is a world of sorts outside our own, and then turn our attention back to our more engrossing surroundings.

  “But this was truly a celestial sphere, a gigantic ball of rock, hanging above us, dominating the sky. I had known of its size before I landed, of course, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of it.

  “I had yet to experience the titanic ocean tides, the palpable gravity shifts, the daily solar eclipses, but I knew this was a world ruled over by its moon.”

  Clancy paused and took a sip of red wine, seated comfortably in his impregnable sphere where he had retired, as was his custom, for the night. He had declined an invitation to dine with the King, saying that he would do the feast more justice the following evening. The truth was the first encounter was always extremely tiring and he needed rest. And alien food always played havoc with his digestion the first time round, guaranteeing a sleepless night.

  “Com,” he said, “prepare me a database of lunar myths.”

  He considered.

  “And one on lunar poetry, and one on references to unusual moons round other inhabited worlds.”

  “Done. Do you want me to…?”

  “No, carry on with dictation.”

  *

  “The King is a genuinely impressive individual. His voice, his posture, his sharp grey eyes, everything about him speaks of his supreme self-assurance. He has absolutely no doubt at all about either his right or his ability to rule. And why should he? As he himself calmly told us, he is the descendant of an ancient union between sky and sea. He greeted me as a long-lost cousin…”

  Clancy hesitated. A shadow crossed his mind.

  “I pin them out like fucking butterflies!” he exclaimed. “I dissect them and pin them out! Why can’t I let anything just live?”

  Com was sensitive to emotional fluctuations and recognised this one, not from the inside of course but from the outside, as a pattern it had observed before.

  “The first day is always extremely tiring,” Com suggested gently. “In the past we’ve found that a cortical relaxant, a warm drink and sleep…”

  “Yes, whatever we do, let’s not face the emptiness,” growled Clancy, but he seemed to acquiesce at first, collecting the pill and the drink dispensed by Sphere, and preparing to settle into the bed that unfolded from the floor…

  Then “No!” he exclaimed, tossing the pill aside. “If I can’t feel anything at least I can fucking think. Come on Com, let’s do some work on the theme. Listen, I have an idea…”

  *

  Lying with two of his concubines in his bed of animal skins, the fisher king was also kept awake by a hectic stream of thoughts. His mind was no less quick than Clancy’s but it worked in a very different way. Clancy thought like an acrobat, a tightrope walker, nimbly balancing above the void. But the king moved between large solid chunks of certainty. Annihilation was an external threat to be fought off, not an existential hole inside.

  He thought of the power of the strange prince in his sphere. He thought about his own sacred bloodline and the kingdom which sustained it. All his life he had deftly managed threats from other island powers, defeating some in war, making allies of others through exchanges of gifts or slaves, or bonds of marriage. But how to play a visitor who came not from across the sea in the longboat but down from the sky in a kind of silver moon?

  He woke one of the concubines. (He was a widower and had never remarried).

  “Fetch me my chamberlain. I want to take his advice!”

  *

  “There are three kinds of knowledge,” Clancy said, “let’s call them Deep Knowledge, Slow Knowledge and Quick Knowledge. Deep Knowledge is the stuff which has been hardwired into our brains by evolution itself; the stuff we are born with, the stuff that animals have. It changes in the light of experience, like other knowledge, but only over millions of years. Slow Knowledge is the accumulation of traditions and traditional techniques passed down from generation to generation. It too changes, evolving gradually as some traditions fade and others are slowly elaborated. But, at the conscious level, those who transmit Slow Knowledge see themselves not as innovators but as preservers of wisdom from the past. Quick knowledge is the short cut we have latterly acquired in the form of science, a way of speeding up the trial and error process by making it systematic and self-conscious. It is a thousand, a million times quicker than Slow Knowledge, and a billion, billion times speedier than Deep Knowledge. But unlike them it works by objectivity, by stepping outside a thing.

  “Deep, Slow and Quick: we could equate them to rock and sea and air. Rock doesn’t move perceptibly at all. Sea moves but stays within its bounds…”

  He laughed, “More wine, Com, this is guys here are literally so. So here’s the book title: good. Get this: Metropolitans are creatures of air, analytical, empirical, technological; lost worlders are typically creatures of the sea. They all are, but these The Meeting of Sky and Sea. See? It ties in with the king’s origin myth!”

  “That was a marriage of sky and sea,” observed Com.

  *

  Clancy had retired for the night on a headland overlooking a wide bay, with a coastal village of wattle huts squatted near the water’s edge. But when he woke in the morning there was no sea in sight. A plain of mud and rocks and pools stretched as far as the horizon and groups of tiny figures could be seen wandering all over it with baskets on their backs.

  The moon was on the far side of the planet, taking the ocean with it. The sky was open and blue. And when he climbed down the steps of Sphere (watched by a small crowd which had been waiting there since dawn) Clancy found that he was appreciably heavier than he had been the previous day.

  Followed closely by the fascinated crowd – made up mainly of children and old people – Clancy went down from the headland to what had been the bay. A group of women were just coming off the mud flats with their baskets laden with shellfish. He
smiled at them and started to walk out himself onto the mud.

  Behind him came gasps and stifled incredulous laughs.

  Clancy stopped.

  “Is there a problem?” Clancy had Com ask. (Everyone was diverted for a while by the wondrous talking egg). “Is there some danger that I should be aware of?”

  “No, no danger,” they answered.

  But why then the amazement? Why the laughter? They stared, incredulous.

  “Because you are a man!” someone burst out at length.

  Clancy was momentarily nonplussed, then he gave a little laugh of recognition.

  “I’ve got it Com. Their reaction is exactly the one I would get if I headed into the women’s toilets in some shopping mall and didn’t seem to realise I was doing anything wrong.”

  He addressed the crowd.

  “So men don’t go on the mud when the tide is out?”

  People laughed more easily now, certain that he was merely teasing them.

  “These things are different where I come from,” said Clancy. “You’re telling me that only women here go out on the mud?”

  A very old woman came forward.

  “Only women of course. That is a woman’s realm. Surely that is obvious?”

  “And a man’s realm is where?”

  The woman was irritated, feeling he was making a fool of her.

  “To men belongs the sea under the moon,” she snapped, withdrawing back into the crowd.

  “Sky and sea, sky and sea,” muttered Clancy to Com, “it’s coming together nicely.”

  The book was the thing for him. Reality was simply the raw material.

  *

  That night the king piled the choicest pieces of meat on Clancy’s plate and filled his mug again and again with a thick brew of fermented seaweed. Clancy’s stomach groaned in anticipation of a night struggling to unlock the unfamiliar proteins of an alien biological line, but he acted the appreciative guest, telling tales of Metropolis and other worlds, and listening politely as the king’s poets sang in praise of their mighty lord, the ‘moon-tall whale-slayer, gatherer of islands, favoured son of sky and sea.’

  *

  As he lay inside Sphere in the early hours, trying to get rest if not actual sleep, Clancy became aware of a new sound coming from outside – a creaking, snapping sound – and he got up to investigate.

  He emerged to an astonishing sight. Over at the eastern horizon, the enormous moon was rising over a returning sea. Brilliant turbulent water, luminous with pink moonlight, was sweeping towards him across the vast dark space where the women had yesterday hunted for crabs.

  But the creaking, snapping sound was much nearer to hand.

  “What is that?” Clancy asked.

  The king had posted a warrior as guard-of-honour to Clancy’s sphere and the man was now sleepily scrambling to his feet.

  “What is that sound?” Clancy asked him, holding out Com, his yellow egg.

  The sound was so ordinary to the man that he could not immediately understand what it was that Clancy meant. Then he shrugged.

  “It’s the moon tugging at the rocks.”

  “Of course,” exclaimed Clancy, “of course. With a moon that size, even the rocks have tides that can be felt.”

  He walked to the edge of the headland. He heard another creaking below him and a little stone dislodged itself and rattled down the precipice.

  “Lunar erosion,” he observed with a smile.

  The warrior had come up beside him.

  “It tugs at your soul too,” he volunteered. “Makes you long for things which you don’t even know what they are. No wonder the women stay indoors under the moon. It tugs and tugs at you and if you’re not careful, it’ll pull your soul right out of you and you’ll be another ghost up there in that dead dry place and never again know the sea and the solid land.”

  Having made this speech, the young man nodded firmly and wandered back to his post at the foot of Clancy’s steps.

  “Wow,” breathed Clancy, “good stuff! Did you record all that?”

  Of course Com had.

  The moon had nearly cleared the horizon now. It towered above the world. The wattle huts below were bathed in its soft pink light and the water once more filled up the bay.

  “Take a note, Com. I said we in Metropolis had forgotten our moon, but actually I think our moon has gobbled us up. After so many centuries of asking for the moon, we have…”

  “…we have…?”

  “Forget it. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  *

  “I visited a quarry,” Clancy dictated, a week into his stay, “a little dry dusty hollow at the island’s heart, where half a dozen men were facing and stacking stone. It was the middle of the day but quite dark, due to one of the innumerable eclipses, so they were working by the light of whale-oil flares. The chief quarryman was a short, leathery fellow in a leather apron, his hands white with rock dust. I asked him why he worked there rather than on the sea like most of the other men. He had some difficulty understanding what I was asking him at first, then shrugged and said his father had worked there, and his grandfather and great-grandfather. It was his family’s allotted role. (A slow knowledge approach to life, you see, a sea knowledge approach. Any Metropolitan would want to demonstrate that his job was chosen by himself.)

  “But I realised that my question had left the man with some anxiety about how he was perceived. He stood there, this funny, leathery human mole, and stared intently at my face for a full minute as if there was writing there which he was trying to read.

  “‘It isn’t on the sea,’ he said at length, ‘but it’s real moon work! No women are ever allowed here.’ And he told me that there were some rocks they only attempted to shift when the moon was overhead. The strain of the tide going through the rock made the strata more brittle. Hit the rock in the right place under the moon and it would suddenly snap. Hit it any other time and it remained stubbornly hard. With some rocks, he said, it was enough to heat the rocks with fire when the moon was up, and they flew apart into blocks. It was real moon work all right.

  “So I told him that I had no doubts whatever about his manhood.”

  Clancy paused.

  “You know Com, I think we’ve got nearly enough material already. We just need one more episode, one more event to somehow bring the themes alive. Whatever ‘alive’ is.”

  He got up, paced around the tiny space of Sphere’s leisure room.

  “What is the point of all this? Back and forth across empty space, belonging nowhere, an outsider in the lost worlds, an outsider in Metropolis, no one for company but a plastic egg. What are my books anyway but mental wall-paper?”

  Com conferred with Sphere by ultrasound, then suggested a glass of wine.

  Clancy snorted. “You and Sphere always want to pour chemicals down me, don’t you? Come on, back to work. Resume dictation.”

  *

  Next day when the tide was out, Clancy got into conversation with a harpooneer, a sly, sinuous, thin-faced man, with two fingers missing from an encounter with one of the big whale-like creatures which he hunted under every moon.

  As with the quarryman, Clancy asked the man why he did the work he did, and received exactly the same answer: his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had done the same. Then Clancy asked him would he not like to have a choice of profession?

  When Com translated, the man did not seem to understand.

  “I know the word for choice in the context, say, of selecting a fish from a pile,” Com explained to Clancy, “But it does not seem to be meaningful to use this word in the context of a person’s occupation.”

  “Okay,” said Clancy, “ask him like this. Ask him does he prefer his ale salty or sweet? Ask him whether he prefers whale meat fresh or dried? Ask him does he prefer to fish when the sun is hot or when it is cloudy? Then ask him, how would it be if someone had said to him when he was a child, would he rather be a quarryman, a harpooneer or a fisherman with nets?”
<
br />   Com tried this. The old man replied to each question until the last. Then he burst out laughing.

  *

  “They simply have no concept of choosing their own way in life,” Clancy recorded later. “They follow the role allotted to them by birth and don’t resent it because it has not occurred to any of them that anything else could be a possibility. How would they react if they could come to the city, and see people who have chosen even their own gender, changed their size, their skin, the colour of their eyes?”

  He considered.

  “There is something idyllic about their position. In some respects they are spared the burden of Free Will. Even marriage partners, I gather, are allocated according to complicated rules to do with clan and status, with no reference whatever to individual choice. I see no evidence that people here are less happy than in our city. In fact a certain kind of fretfulness, found everywhere in the city, is totally missing here, even though life is certainly not easy for those allocated the roles of slave, say, or concubine or witch…”

  He considered this. Com waited.

  “It is this idyll of an ordered, simple life (isn’t it?) which the city pays me so well to seek out. Not that anyone wants it for themself. This life would bore any Metropolitan to death in a week. But they like to know it is there, like childhood…

  “By the way, one new thing the harpooneer told me. He asked me when I would meet the king’s daughters. I told him I didn’t know the king had daughters and he laughed and said there were three, and no-one could agree which was the most beautiful.”

  *

  Clancy dined that evening on the high table in the hall of the king, with all the king’s warriors ranged on benches below. In the middle of the room the carcass of an entire whale was being turned on a spit by household slaves. The whole space was full of the great beast’s meaty, fatty heat.

  “Wahita wahiteh zloosh,” chanted the king’s poets on and on, “wamineh weyopla droosh!…”

  Clancy leant towards the king.

  “Your majesty, I am told that you have three very beautiful daughters. I hope I will have the pleasure of meeting them.”