The Love Machine & Other Contraptions

by Nir Yaniv

  “What’s more, a story—every story, whether it’s short or whether it takes a whole book—must have this quality: it must make the reader want to continue reading. If it fails in that respect, it’s a bad story.”

  “But when did you manage to—”

  “I haven’t read the story,” Katzenberg said. “Are you saying that there’s a good reason to read it?”

  “I... yes... no... just a moment. If you haven’t read the rest, how did you know what’s going on there?”

  Katzenberg smiled. I didn’t get any other answer.

  ~

  The second story dealt with bacteria developing a life of their own, making use of physical attributes which are peculiar to life forms of their size in order to survive, multiply and eventually take over the human civilization.

  “The science is a bit shaky,” Katzenberg said after reading a few sentences. “The author must have heard of several of the concepts of modern particle physics, but unfortunately he fails to grasp their actual meaning.”

  “Like, which?”

  “The strong force and the weak force, for instance, cannot be directly manipulated in the scale of a single cell. And anyway, the strong force applies only to quarks and anti-quarks, and definitely cannot be used to draw nerve-cells toward each other.”

  That, alas, was the part of the story which impressed me the most, which is why I distinctly remembered that it appeared only in the fourth and last page, which—like the two previous pages and most of the one before them—Katzenberg hadn’t bothered to read.

  “Come on, you must explain to me how you’re doing it,” I said.

  A smile, nothing more.

  ~

  The third story was a bold choice and, in retrospect, horrible from beginning to end. Katzenberg’s silence, after reading the opening paragraph, was horrible as well.

  “So, eh, you didn’t like it?” I said when the silence became unbearable.

  “Have you ever heard the word ‘Stalag’?” Katzenberg said.

  “No.”

  “It’s a form of pulp fiction which deals with the sexual activities of female guards in Nazi prison camps or concentration camps.”

  “I...”

  “I assume you thought this was a funny story,” he said. “A Stalag on the moon. I dare say it isn’t. Please spare me such specimens in the future.”

  His angry eyebrows made it clear that questions, at that moment, weren’t an option. So I couldn’t ask him how he knew all of that after reading only the opening paragraph, which merely described two characters walking on the dark side of the moon, with no hint of what’s about to happen to them in the prison under the crater’s floor.

  ~

  The fourth story described a future Israel which had given up all of the occupied territories and gained nothing by it. The protagonist lived in a ruined neighborhood on the western edge of a bombed-out Jerusalem, and was trying to find a way to travel to Tel Aviv, which had become a closed-off and protected area in which only the rich were allowed to live. Katzenberg read it in its entirety, and then accepted it for publication.

  “Why did you accept it?” I said. I was astonished.

  “It’s somewhat less predictable than the others, the point of view is relatively original, despite the familiar ideas, but mostly—it’s easy to read and is not too bad.”

  “Not too bad?” I said. “We’re supposed to publish the best of the best! How can you...”

  “Out of all the stories that you’ve read so far, is this not the best one?”

  “Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean that—”

  “It means that the magazine needs stories. Without the stories there’s no magazine. Had we had enough truly brilliant stories, there would be no problem. But you know that there aren’t too many of those to be found. That is why, alas, we have to accept stories which are just plain good.”

  That almost broke my heart. Until then I had believed—quite fiercely—in making difficult decisions, in keeping the quality high at all cost, even if it meant closing the magazine. I found Katzenberg’s attitude very hard to accept.

  “I suggest that you buy a subscription to an American magazine,” he said. “Maybe Asimov’s or Analog. You’ll soon find out that even their editors sometimes have to make such decisions.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Also,” he said, “it may be a good time to broaden your mind.”

  ~

  That last comment of Katzenberg’s, which was almost carelessly thrown at me, led to what appeared to me to be the first real breakthrough in the writing software project.

  “Broaden your mind,” he said, and I, bitterly contemplating that conversation most of the following day, suddenly remembered and said it aloud. “Broaden your mind.” That’s it! And I added, “Eureka!”

  At this point it was already clear to me that I would not be able to analyze the amazing complexity of language in particular and literature in general. That would require an entire lifetime, at least, and probably a measure of genius that—no way to avoid this conclusion—was not my lot in this life. But if one approached it in a statistical way, why wouldn’t a computer be able to do it?

  I started writing code right then and there. The software which slowly took shape beneath my clicking fingers consisted of two parts: the first, the reader, would receive any text file and analyze its contents on many levels, starting with common words and repeating expressions, continuing with sentence structure and general patterns of paragraphs, and ending with all sorts of relationships between the words, the punctuation marks, the sentences and whatnot.

  The second part was the writer.

  After several more days of concentrated coding, during which I also downloaded a considerable number of Hebrew stories from the internet, it was time to try the thing. I executed the reader program. After an hour, in which it digested almost three stories, it got stuck in a loop. It took me two more days to patch it up enough to enable it to process all of them. The writing part didn’t behave any better. Eventually—this took a few more days—it issued a simple file which contained my first computerized story:

  In a hole in the ground there lived a king. A sea of grass moves in the wind. A baby paints his mother on a big canvas. I haven’t asked nor shall I ask who is Eshta’ol. Call him Leviathan.

  Et cetera.

  Damn it.

  ~

  I tried feeding the reading software with the Bible, too. That didn’t help one bit.

  ~

  One day Katzenberg brought a bottle of wine to our daily meeting in the basement—by that time I considered it to be “our” basement—and so I found out that I had been working for him for half a year.

  “There’s a question I must ask you,” I said, after a glass or two of wine. “How do you do it?”

  “How do I do what?”

  “How do you know what’s going on in all those stories without reading them?”

  “Ah,” Katzenberg said. “That.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “You must have thought of several possible explanations by yourself,” he said.

  “Well, yeah. They’re a bit stupid, though.”

  “Really?” Katzenberg said, and looked—the expression was already familiar to me—amused.

  “Telepathy,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “What, you’re telepathic?” I said. “Come on, really...”

  “Indeed, it’s stupid,” he said. “Any more ideas?”

  “Eh... a time machine?”

  “And how would a time machine, which is itself quite an illogical contraption, help you answer the question?”

  “Well,” I said—in fact, I had spent a great deal of time playing with these theories— “if, for instance, you came from the future, then would you already know—”

  “Or maybe you could have come from the past,” Katzenberg said. “Maybe I am in fact an older version of yourself, and I know what
I know because I’ve already experienced all this, from your point of view.”

  “Eh,” I said, “I didn’t think of that. I—”

  “Or maybe,” he continued, “This idea is even more ridiculous than the previous one. Is that it?” He smiled at my gaping mouth. “Have you run out of ideas yet?”

  “I, eh...” I said, “You... you read them when they first arrive in the mail, then you return them to the original envelopes so that I can open them.”

  “Why would I do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know. To drive me mad?”

  “I don’t recommend paranoia,” Katzenberg said. “While a person’s paranoia has no bearing on the actual fact of his persecution, or lack thereof, it is best—excluding certain special cases—not to be aware of the terrible truth.”

  “What?” I said. “I’m not paranoid. I don’t really think that...”

  “I know,” he said. “So far, your best idea is telepathy.”

  “But—”

  “And it’s a bad idea.”

  “So how, then?” I said.

  “There’s one more possible explanation,” Katzenberg said. “A logical explanation. One which you haven’t considered yet.”

  “It being...”

  “Think about it.”

  “What can it be? Did you put a camera on the ceiling above my chair?”

  “Ah,” Katzenberg said. “Excellent idea. Still paranoid, but not bad.”

  “So you did put a camera above my chair?”

  “No, but it’s a nice explanation.”

  “So how do you explain it?”

  “It’s rather simple, really,” said Katzenberg. “All of those stories, the endings of which are so clear to me, were written by myself.”

  He smiled at my dumbfounded face. It took me some moments to regain the ability to speak.

  “You?” I said. “It’s impossible. There’s no way you could’ve known which stories I would select.”

  “No,” he said. “Of course I couldn’t. But that wouldn’t matter, if I’m the one who wrote all of the stories.”

  “All of them? Impossible! I’ve read almost three hundred stories! How can—”

  “How many stories have you written during the last twelve months?”

  “Eh,” I said, “Six, I think. Six good ones.”

  “Not bad,” Katzenberg said. “And how many stories that weren’t so good?”

  I didn’t answer. It’s difficult to admit that one of your stories isn’t perfect, or even isn’t as good as the others. It’s especially difficult for a beginning writer. I had written eighteen other stories that year, some with a few problems, the others simply horrible.

  “I’ve been dealing with science fiction and fantasy for more than thirty years now,” Katzenberg said, as if reading my thoughts. “That’s more than enough time.”

  He’s serious, I thought. It’s not a joke. But...

  “But why? Why would you do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What? Just like that, for no reason at all?”

  “Could very well be.”

  “Were you just bored?”

  “No reason to doubt it.”

  “Stop! Stop laughing at me and tell me—why did you do it?”

  “What have I done?”

  Huh? “Why did you write all those... why did you submit them to your own magazine, like a... why...?”

  “Ah,” Katzenberg said. “I see.”

  “So why did you do it?”

  “Who told you that I did such a thing?”

  “What?! You just said...”

  “It’s quite possible for me to do so, but I did not tell you that I did so.”

  “But you said that this was an explanation...”

  “It’s a possible explanation that doesn’t contain any impossible or supernatural element,” Katzenberg said. “Logic, my friend, logic.”

  “So did you do it or didn’t you?”

  “What’s your conclusion? I’ve had quite a few years in which to write the stories, and there’s no other logical way, in your opinion, to explain how I know the ending of every story.”

  “What about the camera above my chair?”

  “You’re most welcome to look for it. It isn’t there.”

  “So you really wrote all those stories?”

  “In fact,” Katzenberg said, “I did not.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “So how... so how do you know how those stories end?”

  “After more than thirty years of reading this genre,” Katzenberg said, “I’d be surprised if I didn’t know how all the stories end.”

  ~

  It took me way too long to dare to do the obvious. And when I had steeled my nerve enough to actually do it, I regretted it even before I heard the sound of the paper hitting the desk. Katzenberg glanced briefly at the first page, blinked, raised his head, gave me a look, then read a bit more, this time aloud:

  The wizard materialized, to his regret, in the passenger seat of a small, creaking Fiat. The car’s owner did not appear to be of the quality human material he had hoped for, but such trifles were never a problem in the place from which he came. It was late at night.

  I didn’t dare utter a sound.

  “Nice one,” Katzenberg said after a second or two. “When did you manage to write it?”

  “Last week,” I said. “I thought about what you’ve told me—”

  “About which of my pieces of good advice, in particular?”

  “The one about a story having to be interesting, so that the reader wants to continue reading it,” I said. “It seemed like a good idea.”

  “It is a good idea,” Katzenberg said. “I’m quite astonished that it wasn’t brought to your attention earlier.”

  My face probably showed my reaction to this, and Katzenberg hurriedly softened the blow. “The ending isn’t bad,” he said.

  Never has a man moved so fast between desperation and hope as I did at that moment. And then he added, “Almost,” and I broke the record on the way back. “You’re getting closer to the acceptance line,” Katzenberg said, “But I believe you could do better.”

  “But how do you know how it ends?” I wanted to ask, but then I had an idea.

  ~

  Every writer knows about this: an excellent idea pops into your head and you run to your desk and start writing, only to discover that all that you have are two or three scenes, or a character, or a background, and you haven’t got a single clue as to where to go from there. The story gets stuck and finds its way into the drawer or that special forgotten directory in your hard drive which you visit very rarely, usually late at night, and usually just after you’ve written another stalled short story opening; a directory that will probably get deleted by mistake next time you buy a new computer, but may survive only to be forgotten by whomever inherits it. It’s an unavoidable frustration of the writing process.

  But then—I found a solution!

  There was a man who could not fall in love.

  Or so, at least, he thought. Galileo—that was the name his parents had given him in a fit of creativity, his mother having adamantly refused such names as “Tycho” or “Nicholaus” (Copernicus, of course), which just goes to show you what happens to people who let their hobbies influence the naming of their children—Galileo Cohen, then, would spend whole nights pondering this issue. Not his name—he had long since gotten used to that. He had even grown fond of it, in a deep conviction that it is better to be called Galileo than Moses or Jerachmiel (he was an atheist anyhow). It was not his name that troubled his sleep and turned his life into a morass of useless meditation and pointless self-reflection. No—it was the aforementioned problem. Namely: Galileo was unable to fall in love.

  Or so he thought.

  “You’re getting better,” Katzenberg said. He didn’t know that all the pages except for the first one contained random text, so as to avoid looking suspicious. The story i
tself, what little I had written of it, lasted exactly half a page.

  I did my best to prevent myself from glowing with pride.

  “The world-building is excellent,” Katzenberg said. “The literary, seemingly arbitrary replacement of its science and history—Schrödinger’s dogs and Pavlov’s cats, very nice!—and the love story that obeys the laws of physics, and the machine that allows one to love—or so one thinks. It’s all very intriguing. And the electric psychiatrist—I assume this is a reference to David Avidan? That is indeed very clever. Let me read the rest and we’ll see.”

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “Now that you mention it, I see that I still need to fix the story. Can I get it back to you later? Say, next week?”

  He gave me a suspicious look as I grabbed the pages, but said nothing. I had the story finished several days later.

  Excellent idea, Schrödinger’s dogs. And the machine. And the electric psychiatrist. Why didn’t I think of all that myself?

  ~

  Only someone who has experienced the thrill of being published will understand how it was that my excitement at having the story accepted for publication was far stronger than that of my discovery of Katzenberg’s supernatural ability. In fact, I almost completely forgot about said ability during the editing of the story, a process which Katzenberg was quite notorious for, and which, in retrospect, was much more rigorous than actually writing the thing. He argued with me about every little thing, replaced verbs, grumbled at the punctuation, changed the spelling, erased no less than fourteen paragraphs, including one which I was particularly proud of (and vowed to find a place for in another story, somehow), and sent one marginal character into oblivion. During all of this I was frantically shuttling between an intense gratitude and the wish to commit suicide and afterwards shoot Katzenberg.

  Equipped with that kind of logic, I had no ability to properly evaluate my discovery. Or anything, for that matter, including new stories submitted to us. Katzenberg was quite forgiving, even after some truly ludicrous stories found their way to his desk, but I think it made him accelerate the editing a bit, toward the end. Eventually the story reached a state which was satisfactory even to Katzenberg, was published (“The Love Machine,” Starlight, issue 16, July-August 1996), and we both relaxed.