Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“Neo romantic style?”

“Neo romantic with a small twist of hard-boiled. Oh and include three poetic sharp edge sentences. Just three. Low adjective count.”

“Okay. Shall I read it through to you?” said Com, having composed a chapter of two thousand words without causing a gap in the conversation.

“Not now,” said Clancy. “I’m not in the mood. Get me a dinner fixed will you, and something to watch on screen. How long will it be till we reach the Complex?”

“The distance is about five parsecs. It’ll take three days.”

It was not the first voyage of this kind that Clancy had made. This was his career. He travelled alone to the ‘lost worlds’, he got to know them – their way of life, their myths, their beliefs – and then he returned with a book.

Returning with the book was his particular trademark. The completed book went on sale, in electronic form, at the exact same moment that he stepped out of his sphere. It had become a publishing event. He sold a million within an hour and became for a while the city’s most talked-about celebrity: the literary spaceman: brave, elegant, utterly alone. He attended all the most fashionable parties. He invariably embarked on a love affair with at least one beautiful and brilliant woman.

And when the love affair grew cold – as it always did, for there was a certain emptiness where his heart should be – and when he sensed that he had reached the end of the city’s fickle concentration span, he would go off once more into space.

He had a fear of being trapped, of being tied down, of becoming ordinary.

“The first approach to a settled planet,” said Clancy, “is a uniquely humbling experience. Here are human beings whose ancestors have gone about their lives without any reference to the universe outside for thirty generations. Invariably, in the absence of the vast pyramid of infrastructure on which modern society rests, their technology has become very basic. Invariably the story of their origins has been compacted into some legend. They have had more practical things to worry about for the last thousand years. My arrival, however it is managed, is inevitably a cultural bombshell. Their lives will never be the same again.”

He considered. They had reached the Aristotle Complex an hour ago. Sphere was now using the shortcut of non-Euclidean space to leap from star to star and planet to planet, looking for inhabited worlds, very quickly but mechanically, like Com searching the Metropolitan Encyclopaedia for a single word.

“Some say that for this reason I should not disturb them. This is surely poppycock. On that argument no human being would ever visit another’s home, no one would talk to another, let alone take the risk of love. Not that I ever do take that risk of course.”

He frowned. “Delete that last sentence.”

“Deleted. Sphere has found an inhabited planet.”

A fisher king was fishing in his watery world when the sphere came through the sky. Standing in the prow of his fine longboat, the tall, bearded upright king watched a silver ball, like a tiny, immaculate moon, descending towards his island home. And his household warriors, sitting at their oars, groaned and muttered, watching the sphere and then turning to look at him to see what he would do.

Aware of their gaze and never once faltering as he played his hereditary role, he ordered them in a calm and confident voice to cut away the nets and row at once for the shore.

When Clancy emerged, his sphere perched on its tripod legs on the top of a tall headland, it was mainly women and children who were standing round him. Most of the men were out at sea.

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.