The Cunningham Equations

by G. C. Edmondson

  “Gregorio did not want the land. He sold it. Every month I get enough to live better than before . . . without work. I should be grateful, should I not?”

  “I might have stopped him. But the new owners told me Gregorio would die if I did not go along. It was not for him that I gave my blessing. I think maybe Gregorio sent the threat. But I could not take that chance while his mother lived.

  “Rosanna died without grandchildren. It was all for nothing. For Rosanna I have willed II Resto to the nuns for a children’s home.”

  The old man’s cough was, like himself, brittle.

  “I do not have the gift of faith. I do not know if it is worse to die without issue or to despise what I leave behind.”

  Gregory West’s father stood and led them from the winery to the VW. Blaise was surprised by the darkness.

  “You should not have come,” the old man said. “Gregorio has me watched. He may think it filial duty. Maybe he spies. Whichever, it is not safe for you. One other thing.” Giovanni hesitated. “It shames me, but Gregorio has been in jail. He makes money by cheating people. He even stole a great winery in Mendocino County. He wanted me to live there like a great landowner. He does not love the land.” Giovanni fumbled in his pocket and gave Blaise a virgin label with the vineyard’s name.

  Blaise was not drunk but he felt close to tears. “I am sorry for the pain I have caused you,” he said.

  “Buon cane” the old man said, patting Dobie’s head. “Dogs never did like Gregorio.” He sighed and pressed Blaise’s hand. “Have great care, for God is too lazy to guide me.” He looked closely at Blaise and lapsed into dialect. “You must beware, too, of the fruit of the vineyard. You have drunk too much, but not enough. For some, Christ’s blood is a curse.”

  Saying good night to Linda, the old man was swallowed by shadows.

  “What did he tell you just then?” Linda stood beside the bug, not getting in.

  “He said Dobie was a good dog.”

  “He said more than that.”

  “The meaning of II Resto,” Blaise lied.

  “I wouldn’t think there’d be much rest around a place like this.”

  “Resto is remainder—what’s left after his son stole it all. Are you going to get in?”

  As Blaise drove out to the main road a sudden flare of headlights blinded them, then blinked out. No one followed as they rolled back to the highway under an almost full moon. It was no comfort to Blaise. Whoever was parked across the road had their faces and license number.

  There is every reason to suppose as many brilliant people exist in institutions of the mentally incompetent as are members of the learned societies. It is a happy accident when intelligence and brilliance occur in the same entity.

  FROM A SEMINAR ON

  THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS

  CHAPTER 7

  Blaise unlocked his classroom ahead of the hot blast of morning sun. After their talk with Giovanni Oesti, Linda decided to return to San Francisco. Blaise had not objected. Driving in darkness, digesting the old man’s information, Blaise kept an eye on the mirror during the unsatisfactory discussion with Linda.

  “Of course I’m English. My branch of Cunningham just didn’t see eye to eye with Henry the Eighth.”

  “I’m Catholic, too,” Linda protested, “but I don’t speak Sicilian.”

  “I don’t know why not.”

  Linda’s attention riveted on him in a way that suggested her surprise was not just talk.

  “I learned in school.” The road narrowed and started winding. A pair of headlights dogged his tail. Then the road straightened, the car passed, and nothing happened. Some of the tension left him. The old paisan had invoked in Blaise a memory of bleak Sicilian hills, the aura of blood and dread that made up that unhappy island’s history.

  “I’ve never heard of a school teaching Sicilian. Not even in Italy.”

  “My school was different.”

  His parents had taken a villa above Taormina, a backwater that mainland Italians left to tourists and the natives. The villa was cheap and picturesque. Blaise’s chores included hand-pumping water at dawn’s first glimmer. The housekeeper heated it over charcoal for before-breakfast washups.

  The other few tourists hired a boy to draw water, but Alfred had seen a way to engrave a sense of duty in his son’s psyche.

  They were on a working holiday, polishing their Latin with the down-at-the-heels Neapolitan tutor they provided Blaise, competing as usual with a ten-year-old boy, convinced that cutthroat competition molds character and stretches a man’s ability. Later each day they worked on the problem the government had hired them to solve.

  The tutor fared miserably. Acceptable to Caesar’s soldiers two thousand years earlier, his priest-taught Latin was a far cry from Boston. Ottilie and Alfred’s Latin School pronunciation excluded him from most of the conversation.

  That the poor man’s mainland dialect was too citified for the locals never occurred to either of them, so he was reduced to the most minimal of contacts with natives, whose mistrust of mainlanders stemmed from millennia of invasion and occupation.

  From the tutor, made lonely enough to befriend a ten-year-old, Blaise picked up napolitano, which he learned to pronounce nobly done, and also the Esperanto of Italy— Formal Roman.

  The brown hills had been dry, with withered weeds and an all-pervasive dust. During the heat, while his parents Worked inside the villa’s cool walls, Blaise went unchaperoned into the village, where he was less welcome even than his tutor. Blaise had seen cobblestones before. His parents traveled and took him with them. Squat mud huts held together by whitewash were no surprise. The children were.

  They watched with hard, black eyes, parading after him in xenophobic packs, always there, always uncommunicative. They did not answer Roman, nor Napolitano, nor Latin. They talked among themselves, staring at him as if deaf.

  They became bold and his days turned into desperate one-on-one battles. Each day with a different boy. He never won or lost. It was like fighting physically with his parents, and each new morning he rose sick with fear and anticipation, and each day he went anyway into the village to a spot on the bluff where the distant blue of the straits glinted and he fought again. Nights he spent mentally designing death machines, dreaming ways to acquire the materials. He learned to hate. Days on that bluff set in him the mold of that black distrust that was Sicily. Giovanni Oesti had brought those feelings back to life.

  One morning Blaise entered the village and no boy stepped forward to spit at his feet. He had fought them all. There was nobody left. That was the day one boy spoke in halting Roman: “My name is Cesco.”

  Blaise’s parents continued Boston Latin at dinner. Mornings, the tutor told him glowing tales in Church Latin of the ancient glories of Rome. Evenings, after a half liter of Marsala, the tutor would lapse into Neapolitan and Blaise came to know that “See Naples and die” could be taken literally.

  By day, he listened to the outrage that beat in the soul and blood of Sicily. He learned that pumping water took coins and bread from one of the boys and he got his mother to hire a cook’s helper. Ottilie did it despite Alfred’s insistence that she was spoiling the boy. Blaise was grateful though he never told his mother the favor she had done. For now he not only spoke siciliano, he understood the driving force of omerta.

  The boy who grew up to become Dr. Cunningham said little, yet gained power among the younger children and even some of the older ones. Power came with stealth and force, and was earned.

  Before he left, he sold his Swiss Army pocket knife for a coin so small that in America it would not even be money. He had learned that something so important to a man’s dignity as a knife will take insult at the imputation of worthlessness and cut a friendship in two if it be given instead of sold. Cesco had the honor to buy the knife, for honor may be conferred on both buyer and seller.

  On the way back to America, his father asked what Blaise had done with his birthday present. Blaise said he l
ost it. The lie had hurt his father and now it weighed on Blaise’s soul.

  Linda grumped over his cryptic answers, then curled up like an oversize kitten and went to sleep. At the end of the ride she gave Blaise a chaste pat on the cheek and got into an Italian-body car that looked as durable as Taiwan designer jeans.

  She was angry because Giovanni excluded her from the conversation, Blaise thought on his way to the university, or because Blaise had cooperated by slipping into the arcane dialect of Sicily. Blaise wasn’t sure which.

  Mind on automatic, he fed Alfie the data on West’s name change, the winery six hundred miles north, the hint of Mafia involvement, the connection to the SEC through Tenro. All vague . . . But the sort of thing at which Alfie excelled.

  Alfie’s core intelligence rested in a series of programmable microprocessors in a module as big as Blaise’s thumb, all operating as a servo unit to one VLS integrated chip. The prime chip maintained its integrity always. Its principal duty was internal reprogramming of slave chips for a variety of interactions not possible with conventional microprocessors. After storing the working program, Blaise opened Alfie’s “subconscious” and instructed the master chip to reprogram.

  Alfie checked the routines for error, but working directly against the reconfigurtion of the slave chips produced strange forms that Alfie did not recognize, which had to be approved by Blaise. Intuitive decision making, which Alfie seemed incapable of learning, was the reason he remained only a smart machine.

  “Can I help?”

  “Fa’n’gu’!” Blaise had not heard Helen enter. Now he had inverted a sequence. Alfie implemented the error, freezing half the circuits into a catatonic loop: a command from one unit tied up circuitry and triggered a similar operation in another chip which commanded a repeat in the first. A psychologist had suggested the comparison to a nervous breakdown.

  “But it’s not the computer’s brain,” Blaise had protested.

  “No. The brain’s perceptions are at fault.” The psychologist has considered comparing computer lockup to the failure of a brain disturbed by alcohol. But if he’d wanted to face unpleasant reactions he wouldn’t be teaching; he’d be raking in a hundred an hour in private practice.

  Blaise took the comment to heart, installing a routine that monitored Alfie’s output and, when proving that the output had no natural acceptable termination, began cutting input data lines to wall off the errant input. But self-healing takes time.

  “Did I mess you up?”

  Blaise restrained his irritation. “Alfie will fix it. We just have to wait.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You didn’t do anything.”

  Alfie whirred and clucked, scanning disks, comparing and evaluating to isolate the cause of the loop.

  “Blaise?” Helen’s hand on his arm was warm and tentative. “Don’t be mad at me.”

  Blaise smiled and covered her hand with his. “I can’t afford to. You may be the only friend I still have.”

  “How about Miss m and m?”

  “We’re not exactly friends.”

  “Something else?”

  “Probably.” He squeezed Helen’s fingers.

  “Why is Alfie clicking and grunting so much? He doesn’t work that hard when I punch in stock market data.”

  “That, little darling, is the fly in the maslanka.”

  Helen seemed pleased, either by the darling or the little. She had her small weaknesses.

  “You only ask him to do something he’s already programmed to do. I’m asking Alfie to do the closest he can to thinking.”

  “I don’t see the difference. Predictions are difficult.”

  “Difficult? Or just tedious?”

  Helen hesitated. “Sometimes I can’t tell the difference.” Blaise tapped the keyboard but the circuits were still frozen. “Alfie is memory and concentration. All the hardware running now is just stored memory. Alfie reads millions of words a second. That’s the computer’s advantage.

  “Alfie has fast memory access. Not perfect, but fast. And he has perfect recall on demand. Suppose I was doing stock market computations and got to thinking about pretty blond ladies. Alfie can’t do that.”

  “Do you think about pretty blond ladies?”

  Helen’s hand stroked Blaise’s arm and started a tingle in his skin. Gently Blaise stopped her hand. “You’ll get Alfie in my will. He’s dependable and doesn’t make mistakes. The sort of tin man every lady should have around the house.”

  “I know the sort of man I want around the house.” When Blaise did not respond Helen’s face reddened. Her lips trembled slightly. “What have you done with Dobie?”

  “He’s at the house.”

  “With that . . . woman?”

  “She’s gone. I’m having trouble with the dean about bringing Dobie on campus. Insurance.” Blaise made a rude noise he’d learned in Portugal. “Dobie is smarter than the students.”

  “You think so?” Helen’s voice changed slightly. As if she thought the same thing and wanted confirmation.

  “A joke.” Blaise smiled at her. “Dobie’s pretty smart, I guess. I never had a dog before. He has a heck of a memory.”

  Alfie’s beep signaled that the keyboard was open again. Blaise began correcting the botched entry. Alfie hummed and clucked and occasionally blinked a circuit telltale. Helen watched in silence for a while, then slipped out of the room as quietly as she had come in.

  Finally Blaise sat back in triumph. “All right, can-opener, go get ’em.” He listened to Alfie’s smooth sound leafing through procedures. He fished a half-empty vodka bottle from the supply closet. He didn’t like to drink in front of Helen. It seemed to disturb her.

  The monitor began outlining a program to access the most easily entered public records and then progressively more difficult and protected files. Alfie flagged the harder targets for Blaise to help with later.

  Tilting the bottle, he realized for the first time since Hemmett shrugged him off that he had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Except wait for Alfie to tell him if he had a problem. Even before he finished the bottle Blaise knew he was going to miss Hemmett’s acid attitude. That he was a pompous fraud did not stop Blaise from liking the poor SOB. “Dr. Hemmett,” he murmured, “life is unfair to both of us.”

  Later, when Blaise had mellowed, the door opened and Helen came in with her arms full of papers.

  “Oh!” she said. “You startled me, so quiet in the shadows.”

  Blaise sensed her embarrassment at being seen as she saw herself. Tall, big, wishing herself some small and graceful animal to fit in his hand. “You’re a beautiful woman,” he said.

  “Do you mean it, Blaise?”

  “I do.” He kissed her cheek. “I have to go. Alfie is doing some other things so he may run slower than usual. Don’t pay any attention if he complains.”

  Blaise started to the door. Then remembered the bottle. Leaving more empties for the janitors was not going to improve his situation. As he closed the door, he was surprised to see tears in Helen’s eyes.

  “Lock the door on your way out.” The words were wet and her mascara had started to run.

  Clutching the bottle inside its disguise of printout, Blaise put distance between himself and the classroom. There being nowhere else to go, he went home.

  “Good afternoon, Dr. Cunningham.”

  A priest filled Blaise’s front-door alcove. He seemed somehow misplaced in the line of Italian cedars that stood sentry at each side of the entrance.

  Just what I needed! Blaise’s antipathy to the clergy was both inherent and Sicilian. He resented intellectual authoritarianism. And in Sicily he had known the loathing that venal carpetbaggers from Rome inspired with their habitual pipelining of confessions to carabinieri.

  “I gave at the office,” he growled. It felt stupid talking to a priest while swinging an empty bottle. Dobie padded up, nails clicking rhythmically on the wood. He smelled the priest and stood a moment storing, sorting, compari
ng. Then he sniffed again at the tall man’s black suit.

  “Could I have a word with you?”

  Blaise unlocked the door. He had seen this man before. “You’re from the picket line,” he guessed.

  “I thought you might remember. Robert Argyle.” Following Blaise, Father Argyle patted Dobie on the head. “Fine animal.”

  Automatically Blaise asked, “Would you like a drink?”

  “No, thank you. The Chorch can barely find shelter now for priests with drinking problems. But, by all means, have one yourself.” The hint of Blarney in Father Argyle’s voice overlayed a basic Scots rhythm. Blaise suggested he had done his boot came in Ireland.

  Blaise crashed the empty bottle in the kitchen trash and found a cold beer. He was annoyed with himself—reacting to the priest like a sinner caught in the act.

  “I cannot accept any form of Christian or Islamic submission to the will of something outside myself,” he said. “Nor do I know any life form that outlives its organic support.”

  “Relax, Doctor. Your condition is not contagious.”

  Blaise sucked his beer wishing he’d kept the priest outside and retained the option of walking in and slamming the door.

  “I’m not recruiting souls, Doctor. Just information if you can spare it.”

  “Quid petis?” Blaise quoted from the De Baptismo Adultdrum rite, making a pretty challenge of scholarship.

  “The Gift of Faith,” Argyle said without blinking, “for which we must all constantly pray. But at the moment I’m trying to learn what GENRECT is doing. And where Dr. Gordon Hill is.”

  Dobie’s ears suddenly hardened. He turned his head to stare at the priest’s lips with his soft eyes. Blaise noticed. Obviously the dog recognized the name.

  Blaise finished his beer. “GENRECT does research. And if Dr. Hill wants to talk to you, I’m sure he will.”

  “If he knows I want to speak with him. You will tell him, won’t you, Doctor?”

  “Just as soon as I see him.”