Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

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?”

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.”

The effect of this on the king was unexpectedly electrifying. He jolted instantaneously into his most formal mode – and, seeing this, the entire hall full of warriors fell suddenly silent.

“Prince from the sky, I am most honoured that you should ask. They will be made ready at once.”

He called to a servant, gave urgent orders and dismissed him with an imperious wave. The warriors began their talking and their shouting once again.

“An hour passed,” Clancy dictated later, “and then a second. The warriors grew restless, wriggling on their benches like naughty children. The whale carcass, what was left of it, grew cold. The king and I, whose relationship consisted entirely of exchanging information, ran out of things to say to each other, and he eventually gave up all attempt at conversation, sinking into his thoughts, turning a gold ring round and round on his finger, and from time to time jolting himself awake and pressing more sea-weed ale on me.

“I began to wonder whether there had been some mistake. Surely it could not take that long for the princesses to be made ready? Had they been summoned from some other island? Had I perhaps completely misunderstood what was going on? But Com assured me that, yes, the king had said his daughters were being got ready.